Likewise, solar powered lights are mostly used for frivolous mood and accent lighting in gardens, rather than making any real difference in domestic electricity usage.

It isn’t just the media, either–If you were to actively try to draw attention to the low-order endemic violence in a city like Chicago, that would just lead to apathy as it blended into the environmental background noise.

I remember being shocked to hear about a convenience store armed robbery “down in the city” while I was living in Illinois. Someone went it, took two employees and three customers into the back of a White Hen, and shot them to death in the walk-in cooler. Now, if something like that happened in the Pacific Northwest, even in a big city like Seattle, Portland, or Spokane, that’d be a nine-day wonder, front-page news for a couple of weeks.

It was on page 6 of the Chicago Tribune. Only reason I knew about it was that one of the customers that was killed was the aunt of an acquaintance.

Now, you look at that, and you go “OK, so… What’s your point…?”, and I’m going to tell you to look at the difference that that endemic background violence makes to people’s ability to grasp the reality of things. You ask the average Chicagoan what the chances are that they will be a victim in something like that, and they’re just gonna shrug resignedly and say “Who knows? That’s just life…”, and then they don’t do a damn thing about it. The same politicians who negotiate with the gangs keep getting elected, the same prosecutors and judges that don’t do anything effective about the crime rate still have jobs, and the locals are just resigned to it all as being a “part of life in the big city”. You had that same sh*t happen out where I grew up, and you’d see people losing their minds over it, and a bunch of cops, prosecutors, judges, and all the rest would be looking for new jobs.

Which all goes to show that people make drastically different assessments of risk and safety. What Chicagoans routinely accept would be unacceptable anywhere else in the country, and cause for politicians and law enforcement administrators to fear for their jobs. Yet, the risk of falling prey to the criminal element is a hell of a lot higher in Chicago than elsewhere, and the local people don’t do sh*t about it…

Not unlike disease-tolerance. I’m young enough to have been vaccinated for measles, among other things, so I think it was nuts that people took something so potentially fatal relatively in stride, as a quasi-normal childhood experience, just a few years earlier. Whereas my generation took chicken pox that way, but younger people got a jab against that. I never thought shingles a good idea, but the pox itself was a routine thing most of us had as kids. Only latterly did I learn it could be dangerous in some cases and that some folks now regard my attitude as nuts. I mean, I support the use of a vaccine that has become available, but still find it hard to take chicken pox all that seriously. Go figure. Maybe I resent that I might get shingles. But there’s now a vaccine for that we can get at 50, so I’ll white knuckle it til then.

With cars, I was a kid when belts became mandatory in all seats in Ontario so I am used to them. My dad’s earliest cars may not have had them for every position. Oddly, I ride in cabs a lot and quite often neglect the belt even at highway speeds. Never forget when driving or passenger in a private car. I also find shoulder belts in rear seats poorly designed and the strap wants to cross my throat. One day in any minor accident I am going to be throttled by the seatbelt. So I guess I have mixed habits and view of them but they are certainly normal features.

Naturally, I marvel at the high ages at which kids now are expected to have specialized seats. No doubt of the science, or the improvements in them over time, just marveling. I think it’s up to 10 now. [I never had any.] I suppose I marvel that we never had them in the 70s, in an age when accidents were more common and the cars less structurally safe, and now kids are strapped in at 10 when accidents seem less likely and the cars safer overall. Maybe it’s the adult size belts that imperil the kids. That I believe.

One innovation tried in the Netherlands a while back demonstrated the same point made by Tullock- they removed all intersection controls in some town with the reported result that drivers were extremely careful.

I quite understand that, but I am not convinced that approach would ever have scaled, even with the most competent drivers.

Ontarian drivers are morons, for the most part. I’m no saint, but some basic stuff that’s been in the manual 30+ years is getting forgotten out there. We used to have ordinary two-lane residential streets divided into “through” and “cross” streets, with the former having right of way. My father insists it worked fine. Then in my time we increased the number of 4-way stops, presumably to make streets equal…, which is not that difficult a concept but I could see some transitional difficulty. It has in fact been a decades long problem for some. Now we are trying on roundabouts, even at some rather odd locations where they are more decorative and virtue-signaling [they're "European"] than useful. One, at which the pedestrian crossing points are poorly situated, has become my daily heart stressor despite being not that heavily trafficked. The same location, long ago before a couple of rounds of rebuilding and relandscaping, had involved just sprinting illegally across two sets of two-lane road and a grass median, and I thought it less stressful.

I suppose my only point is, when presented with three or more roughly equivalent solutions, keep the one already in place rather than experimenting for the sake of. That next tiny increment of safety or efficiency, still anyway short of perfection, is not worth my time and effort to habituate, and not worth my additional stress. Life where I am was sufficiently safe in all aspects, far above global or historical or even US average, in all ways when I was 25.