Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
See:http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/297420/Japan%27s-Future-%22It%27s-Going-to-Be-Scary%22?tickers=ewj,^jpn,sne,tm,jpy=xsec=topStoriespos=8asset=ccode= Japan's coming collapse is becoming quietly accepted by strategic investors. After 20 years of little or no growth, despite massive Keynes-style stimulus, they may run out of any ability to borrow. You can't borrow from future generations and then fail to give birth to future generations to pay it off. A Thelma and Louise ending is rushing towards them. I believe Japan is showing us that demographics are much more important than most economists are admitting. It makes me sick to hear an endless parade of pundits talk about economies as if they were a set of financial metrics to be adjusted for success, without talking about technology (yes, robots! and much more) and social science. Much as I like Asimo, I think stem cell regeneration therapies are a more efficient solution. The social trend of childlessness is manifest across Europe and Russia and even a few Muslim countries, not just Japan. The US economy hasn't created any net jobs in 9 years and globally, there is a dangerous assumption that more money creation will stimulate growth. Without dramatic technological change and with slipping demographics, I say there may be nothing to stimulate into stable prosperity. And energy? How many people are even aware that a return to robust growth is simply impossible, regardless of stimulus because it would trigger a rise in oil prices that would cut off said expansion. And alternatives? Not if they use lots of rare earth metals, because China controls 97% of rare earth supply, doesn't have enough for themselves and mines take years to open. Am I hoping for a miracle? Heck, yes!
Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
Well written, here is a link on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injury_prevention I also come to think of dependent origination. Something dependes on something else. There is no randomness, accidents or lucks. David David Jonsson, Sweden, phone callto:+46703000370 On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: In 2009, traffic accidents in Japan killed 4,914 people, a 5% decrease over last year. This is the lowest annual toll since 1952. Here is a brief news article: http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/traffic-accident-deaths-hit-57-year-low-below-5000-in-2009 Traffic deaths peaked in 1970 at 16,765. They have declined at a steady pace since then. Experts give several reasons: seat belts, laws mandating seat belt use, air bags, and in recent years, a crackdown on drunken driving. To that I would add improved roads in many rural districts. The number of cars increased tremendously from 1952 to the 1980s, but it has probably not increased much since then. I don't have any statistics on that, but that is my guess based on population and economic trends. The NHK reported that the largest increase in accidents in recent years has been caused by elderly drivers, because the Japanese population is aging, and it has actually declined slightly in the last few years. The NHK showed an interesting graph of the decline that I am trying to find. The point of this is that problems such as automobile accidents are not really accidental and not unavoidable. They are predictable, in a statistical sense. They can be avoided, or at least greatly reduced using improved engineering, technology, laws, and law enforcement. Any technical problem can be ameliorated with technical solutions. We should never passively accept as inevitable some level of carnage on the roads, or air pollution from electric power generation, or global warming, or any other technical problem. We cannot eliminate traffic deaths but we can reduce them year by year, until the number asymptotically approaches zero. Eventually, decades or centuries from now, all deaths from traffic accidents will be eliminated, if we choose to eliminate them. Technical problems can be fixed. Naturally occurring problems such as cancer or beach erosion may not be amenable to any technical solution. Social problems such as war or race prejudice cannot be fixed with technology, although if we find social solutions, technology can be used as a backup to enforce them. For example, a complete ban on nuclear testing, including underground tests, can be monitored with the tools of seismology. A traffic engineer or an automobile designer can stop people from killing themselves in cars. They have the power to intervene directly in the course of events. Seismologists cannot stop nations from conducting underground tests, but if political leaders agree to stop testing, the seismologists can then step in and verify that the agreement is being honored. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
Okay, I found the graph. The article is in Japanese but the graph has Western dates, from 1950 to 2009 (as opposed to the Japanese date system): http://mainichi.jp/select/jiken/news/20100103km040014000c.htmlhttp://mainichi.jp/select/jiken/news/20100103km040014000c.html There was a slight increase in the late 1980s. The decline after 1992 is attributed to increased severity and enforcement of the drunken driving laws and reckless driving laws, which seems likely to me. The total number of accidents was 736,160 (29,987 fewer than 2008), with 908,874 people injured. Drunken driving caused 264 fatalities, compared the peak of 1,161 in 2000. (They only began recording this category separately around 1992.) In 1970 they launched the first war against traffic accidents mainly with improvements to roads and traffic signals (it says here) but also with seat belt laws. The second war to reduce accidents began in 1988. Other news articles on this subject say that roughly half of the fatalities in 2009 were attributed to elderly drivers. The minimum age for a driver's license in Japan is 18, and most people do not drive before age 20, so accidents by young drivers and teenagers are rarer than in the U.S. Driver education courses and the test you have to pass to get a license are much more strict, and expensive, than in the U.S. The fatality rate is lower per capita than the U.S. I expect because people drive less, and speeds are lower. Pedestrian fatalities used to be higher per capita than the U.S., because urban roads are crowded and many do not have sidewalks. - Jed
RE: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
The tech from the link below interests me. I'd like to see something like that tied to vehicle tax fees for pay as you drive efficiency. Eventually this could evolve into an aviation-style control system like a TCA for heavily used corridors during peak use for a more fair distribution of taxes and fees, an incentive to reduce congestion, reduce accidents, and perhaps the ability to fine tune traffic flow on the fly. I don't particularly care for the little fiberglass bubble cars, but the Minority Report freeway is an eventual must-have. An e-highway system might be able to pay for itself along the way, whereas these muni train fiascos are unaffordable, and inappropriate on many levels. They're ramming one down our throats here (Oahu) with a 6++ billion price tag, and we can't even pay to keep our kids in school now even though wealready pay some of the highest taxes in the country. http://insurancetech.com/business-intelligence/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2 22002974 R. From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 7:00 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low Okay, I found the graph. The article is in Japanese but the graph has Western dates, from 1950 to 2009 (as opposed to the Japanese date system): http://mainichi.jp/select/jiken/news/20100103km040014000c.html There was a slight increase in the late 1980s. The decline after 1992 is attributed to increased severity and enforcement of the drunken driving laws and reckless driving laws, which seems likely to me. The total number of accidents was 736,160 (29,987 fewer than 2008), with 908,874 people injured. Drunken driving caused 264 fatalities, compared the peak of 1,161 in 2000. (They only began recording this category separately around 1992.) In 1970 they launched the first war against traffic accidents mainly with improvements to roads and traffic signals (it says here) but also with seat belt laws. The second war to reduce accidents began in 1988. Other news articles on this subject say that roughly half of the fatalities in 2009 were attributed to elderly drivers. The minimum age for a driver's license in Japan is 18, and most people do not drive before age 20, so accidents by young drivers and teenagers are rarer than in the U.S. Driver education courses and the test you have to pass to get a license are much more strict, and expensive, than in the U.S. The fatality rate is lower per capita than the U.S. I expect because people drive less, and speeds are lower. Pedestrian fatalities used to be higher per capita than the U.S., because urban roads are crowded and many do not have sidewalks. - Jed
RE: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
From the article Rick Monteverde linked to: MyRate is designed for safe drivers, comments Richard Hutchinson, Progressive's MyRate general manager. It's for people who drive fewer miles than average, at low-risk times of day and keep alert for others on the road. They don't make fast lane changes or follow too closely behind other drivers so they don't have to over-react or slam on the brakes. Drivers who choose to sign up for MyRate receive a device that plugs into a port in their car and measures how, how much and when the car is being driven. . . . That's invasive, but I like it! I'd go for it, if it were available in Atlanta, and if it works with a 16-year-old Geo Metro. I'd like to see something like that tied to vehicle tax fees for pay as you drive efficiency. Eventually this could evolve into an aviation-style control system like a TCA for heavily used corridors during peak use for a more fair distribution of taxes and fees, an incentive to reduce congestion, reduce accidents, and perhaps the ability to fine tune traffic flow on the fly. Good ideas, all. In Japan they are pushing vigorously for more automated driving, with things like radar and accident warning systems, and intelligent computers that warn when pedestrians or other cars may be crossing ahead. This is often featured on the nightly news. I do not think they have any near-term plans for fully automated highways, but RD in that direction is proceeding in both the U.S. and Japan. On one hand, it looks to me as if these gadgets they intend to install soon will cost a fortune. On the other hand, they had 736,160 accidents and 908,874 people injured in Japan -- as noted in the second article I cited. That must have cost billions of dollars. Reducing that by even a modest percent would save a lot of money and anguish. It is like the cost of emergency RD for the H1N1 vaccine. Imagine how many millions of hours of misery and lost work-hours that prevented! The dollar cost of automobile accidents in the U.S. is roughly $230 billion in hospital bills alone. The cost in human lives is ~40,000 per year, or roughly as much as much as the Korean war, repeated every year, for the last 50 years. Throwing $100 billion per year at the problem to reduce this toll would be well worth it. U.S. automobile fatality rates (fatalities per passenger mile) have declined, but I do not think they have fallen as much as in Japan. Per 100 million vehicle miles, rates fell from 1.73 to 1.28 between 1994 and 2008 (14 years). See: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspxhttp://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year The absolute number of people killed per year has fallen from a peak at around 50,000 in 1979 to 40,000 today. Compared to population and total driving this is a 36% decline. That is impressive, but not as impressive as the 70% decline in Japan since their peak in 1970. Their population has not increased significantly since 1980, so this 70% decline is also per capita and probably pretty close to the decline per passenger mile. To some extent, with modern automobiles, we trade off death in accidents for both injuries and for the destruction of the vehicle. That is to say, we have fewer deaths but more people are gravely injured, with multiple fractures of the legs and so on. Air bags save their lives but they end up in the hospital for long periods. Also, automobiles absorb the energy from the collision and are destroyed more often, I think. I believe I read that more automobile insurance is now paid to cover hospital bills than vehicle repairs. These are trade offs anyone would be pleased to make! Human life in general is given a much higher premium in modern times than it was 50 or 150 years ago. In 1861, the Pony Express supposedly advertised for riders as follows: Young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. This probably a myth, but the fact that people believed it tells you a lot about the times. Of course employment opportunities in 1861 were mainly in the U.S. Army, and did feature risking death often, if not daily. The national attitude toward casualties, and willingness to sustain them, changed completely from the Civil War to WWI, WWII and to present-day wars. Willingness to inflict casualties on the enemy has also declined since 1945. Even in WWII enemy casualties were a laughing matter (literally), at least among civilians, but not today. - Jed
RE: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
Jed wrote: That's invasive . As I understand it, privacy is currently the biggest knock so far against these kinds of schemes. Technically they are very doable now and for a small fraction of rail costs for a given urban path. They will supposedly know when and where you were if the data is personally identifiable, which in the end it must be for billing purposes. Then of course there's fears of hacking, etc. - the usual for life in the (computer) clouds. But these kinds of challenges can be met given serious motivation and effort. Health care, terrorism, transportation, taxes user fees - tech is taking us down the road to pervasive monitoring whether we like it or not. Libertarian/conservative though I am, yet I think trading some privacy in return for freedom, while intrinsically undesirable, is actually not too bad a trade these days where the benefits are significant. But trading freedom for security is still to be avoided if at all possible. I think some people confuse privacy with general freedom. For instance I couldn't care less about some doofus TSA employee seeing me in a highly detailed body scanner if it means I remain free travel by air while minimizing terror threats. Might bother some celebrities a bit. Let 'em go by boat then. It's not like their pictures aren't on the internet already. - R. From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 10:54 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: RE: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low From the article Rick Monteverde linked to: MyRate is designed for safe drivers, comments Richard Hutchinson, Progressive's MyRate general manager. It's for people who drive fewer miles than average, at low-risk times of day and keep alert for others on the road. They don't make fast lane changes or follow too closely behind other drivers so they don't have to over-react or slam on the brakes. Drivers who choose to sign up for MyRate receive a device that plugs into a port in their car and measures how, how much and when the car is being driven. . . . That's invasive, but I like it! I'd go for it, if it were available in Atlanta, and if it works with a 16-year-old Geo Metro. I'd like to see something like that tied to vehicle tax fees for pay as you drive efficiency. Eventually this could evolve into an aviation-style control system like a TCA for heavily used corridors during peak use for a more fair distribution of taxes and fees, an incentive to reduce congestion, reduce accidents, and perhaps the ability to fine tune traffic flow on the fly. Good ideas, all. In Japan they are pushing vigorously for more automated driving, with things like radar and accident warning systems, and intelligent computers that warn when pedestrians or other cars may be crossing ahead. This is often featured on the nightly news. I do not think they have any near-term plans for fully automated highways, but RD in that direction is proceeding in both the U.S. and Japan. On one hand, it looks to me as if these gadgets they intend to install soon will cost a fortune. On the other hand, they had 736,160 accidents and 908,874 people injured in Japan -- as noted in the second article I cited. That must have cost billions of dollars. Reducing that by even a modest percent would save a lot of money and anguish. It is like the cost of emergency RD for the H1N1 vaccine. Imagine how many millions of hours of misery and lost work-hours that prevented! The dollar cost of automobile accidents in the U.S. is roughly $230 billion in hospital bills alone. The cost in human lives is ~40,000 per year, or roughly as much as much as the Korean war, repeated every year, for the last 50 years. Throwing $100 billion per year at the problem to reduce this toll would be well worth it. U.S. automobile fatality rates (fatalities per passenger mile) have declined, but I do not think they have fallen as much as in Japan. Per 100 million vehicle miles, rates fell from 1.73 to 1.28 between 1994 and 2008 (14 years). See: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year The absolute number of people killed per year has fallen from a peak at around 50,000 in 1979 to 40,000 today. Compared to population and total driving this is a 36% decline. That is impressive, but not as impressive as the 70% decline in Japan since their peak in 1970. Their population has not increased significantly since 1980, so this 70% decline is also per capita and probably pretty close to the decline per passenger mile. To some extent, with modern automobiles, we trade off death in accidents for both injuries and for the destruction of the vehicle. That is to say, we have fewer deaths but more people are gravely injured, with multiple fractures of the legs and so on. Air bags save their lives but they end up in the hospital for long periods. Also, automobiles absorb
RE: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
Rick Monteverde wrote: Health care, terrorism, transportation, taxes user fees tech is taking us down the road to pervasive monitoring whether we like it or not. Libertarian/conservative though I am, yet I think trading some privacy in return for freedom, while intrinsically undesirable, is actually not too bad a trade these days where the benefits are significant. I do not see why living a goldfish bowl is considered less free. It is less anonymous. For most of American history, most people lived in small towns where everyone knew all about you. It was highly invasive by modern standards. Europeans visiting American called us a nation of busybodies. Yet people felt themselves to be free. Personal reputation was also important, and it was predicated on widespread knowledge of who you were, how much money you had, how well you honored agreements and so on, which was known to other businessmen in the community in as much detail as you find on Google today. Around 1985, I went to New York City to get some goods worth about $50,000. The supplier, an old-school guy who had been in business for decades, said, Okay, I'll ship it today. I said don't you want to wait for the check to clear? He said nah, I knew your grandfather Sundel and your Uncle Danny, so I trust you completely. My grandfather had died 20 years earlier. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
I think it is difficult to consider Japan's considerable achievements, beautiful countryside and hard working people without also considering its bleak future. Japan is dying. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight/2009/09/is_japan_a_dying_nation.html Japan is stuck in a long term deflationary slump it can't get out of. It is continuing to pile up a national debt that is frightening - and all the more so since that debt will never be repaid by an elderly population. It's turning into a cautionary tale about too much reliance on Keynesian ideas. Having said all that, our nation is hardly much better. We in the developed nations desperately need a breakthrough in regenerative medicine and free energy. I am very fearful that anything less will condemn us to a modern day Dark Age,
Re: [Vo]:Traffic accident deaths in Japan hit 57-year low
Chris Zell wrote: I think it is difficult to consider Japan's considerable achievements, beautiful countryside and hard working people without also considering its bleak future. Japan is dying. This is getting off topic but . . . The countryside is blighted these days. However, to describe the present situation as dying is ridiculous. In 1866 the country was in a civil war and in danger of being taken over by Europe. From 1933 to 1945 it was run by militaristic who killed millions of people in China and elsewhere, and got themselve into hopeless wars that destroyed the whole country and killed millions. Compared to those situations the country is in a bed of roses. Yes, if present trends continue, the population will drop by half in 100 years. That is true in Italy as well. And as my late mother often said, if the trend in television sales in 1949 had continued the world would have been knee deep in televisions by 1970 but *no trend lasts forever*. That is the cardinal rule of social science! No trend lasts forever. A population decline in an otherwise healthy, secure and wealthy population is sure to correct itself and reverse sooner or later. For now, Japan would be a lot better off with fewer people and more space, in my opinion. The notion that it will take 17 million foreign workers to care for the elderly over the next 40 years is another example of a straight line extrapolation with the assumption that a trend will last forever. It reminds me of the Irish maid crisis in upper class U.S. circles circa 1905, in which people worried where the next generation of cheap labor would come from once Ireland's economy recovered. Wealthy people did not anticipate washing machines and vacuum cleaners, but they should have, because both had been invented and were starting to take off. The author of this article apparently has not imagined that Japanese industry will invent robots to take over much of burden of caring for elderly people. He should. Japanese industry is good at robots and they are bound to improve in 40 years. They are already making things like automated bathtubs that do away with the need for an attendant (which look a lot more inviting to me than conventional baths, by the way), along with many other handy automated gadgets and robots. Japan is stuck in a long term deflationary slump it can't get out of. It is continuing to pile up a national debt that is frightening - and all the more so since that debt will never be repaid by an elderly population. It's turning into a cautionary tale about too much reliance on Keynesian ideas. I don't know much about economics but I just happened to be reading a book about Keynes and I believe you have that backwards. Keynes' policies are good for getting out of a deflationary slump. They tend to cause inflation, which most people in Japan would welcome. However, the deflation is still moderate compared to the 1930s. Washing machines are down 27% compared to ten years ago, but food prices are hardly changed. It does not seem like a crisis. It is actually rather nice for elderly people living on a fixed income, of which there are many in Japan. The unemployment and growing homelessness *is* a crisis. - Jed
