You have less visibility when backing out of something than you do backing into it and leaving front first. It's not even debatable, unless you drive your car from the back. My friend is in the navy and he told me when they're driving the larger vehicles around they're prohibited from front parking for this very reason. It's just not as safe.
You have enough visibility unless you are driving a tank. What more do you need, a goddamn fishbowl on wheels?
I drove a 15-passenger van as part of my job (also government, woo). We were required to have a ground guide any time it needed to be backed up (exceptions being in emergencies where a ground guide is not available or by actual staff members who received additional training). This was primarily because of visibility issues resulting in the destruction of or damage to government and private property during the backing up of vehicles that are much larger than your typical car. Also the cargo vans, which were almost identical save for the fact that it had no windows in back.
Oy vey. Safety is an issue decided on the margins. The question at hand is a matter of weighing different factors - such as the reactions and expectations of other drivers and your own field of view - and the question of whether both are reasonably safe is different from the question of whether one is safer than the other. Airplanes are safe. Super goddamn safe. Air travel is ridiculously low risk for traveling. But buses are also safe! They're just not as safe; your risk is higher traveling across the country in a bus than in a plane. (The Injury Fact Book, pg 100; Deaths per 100 Million Person Miles of Travel. Buses: .06, planes: .03.) Assuming a dollar value of a human life equal to $5 million (approximately what risk analysts were using in 2008, iirc), the difference of .03 deaths per 100 million person miles of travel is negligible. But what about other forms of transport? At 1.23 deaths per 100 million person miles, your expected cost for driving is around 6 cents per mile, whereas with a motorcycle's 45 deaths per 100 million person miles, you're looking at a non-zero number of expected dollars per mile and a .1% chance of death in traveling across the United States, an order of magnitude less than the risk of complications from a CAT scan, which is treated as a routine scan by at least some medical professionals. The question of safety is vastly more complex than your binary assertion, and it fills me with genuine nerd rage when people make assertions like yours with regards to the apparent simplicity of the questions of risk and safety.
Congratulations, you guys, you have successfully found the most boring derail in the history of the internet.
Too boring, didn't read. If you are a good driver, then you know how to back out of a parking spot safely, even if everyone else in the parking lot is a rhesus monkey on methamphetamine driving a Zamboni. A good driver can drive safely in any situation, that's what "good driver" means. If you can't, then you're just an average driver.
I like actuarial tables, okay, I find them interesting. Stop judging me, I judge myself plenty without your help. >.<
So you're saying that you make broad and falsifiable assertions but then don't bother to actually read posts that try to engage them in disagreement? How... Republican of you.
Because humans have a very strong tendency to ignore the times when their priors turned out to make false predictions, and instead retain far more often the times when their priors don't. This, of course, is self-reinforcing behavior which leads to a lack of surprise no matter what happens. It's really quite interesting, you see. ... Did I make that one too obvious? I dunno.
Actuarial bayesian probabilistic safety dance analyses aside in favor of more nerd rage: it does my blood pressure fucking wonders when I, attempting to uncomplicate to the extent within my powers someone else's professional life, repeatedly advise them on the proper approach to take. I mean, losing count repeatedly. And then they ignore me, AGAIN, and once again wonder what went wrong. Wotan wept, some people fool you by having thumbs. I hope they get ran over by someone backing out of a fog-enshrouded parking space while a plane and bus simultaneously crash into them.
I cannot read an actuarial table to save my life, but I found your explanation of risk-based cost fairly interesting, actually. ...but. Uh. Nerd rage. Yes! Textbooks! I have been in massive NERD RAGE lately about textbooks. Not because they're expensive--I expect that--or rather poorly laid out--sadly, I also expect that--or even sometimes just photocopied and reprinted in slightly blurred skewed-margin new editions based on a text from 1898, because in classics I am even used to THAT--but because the university has so many "Beat the co-op's prices by buying your textbooks here!" stores surrounding it, the co-op never orders enough books for the whole class, but the god damn non-co-op bookstores DO NOT ORDER books I need. Because it's worth their time to compete on prices when it's for Biology 101 and a few hundred students buying the same $230 book, but why the hell should they bother when it's eight students taking junior-level ancient Greek and needing a single impossible-to-find $40 textbook? We need more socialism around here, dammit.
There's a commercial running on TV right now for a "brain training" web site. Totally forgot the name, because I was too busy being flabbergasted by the commercial's intro. A cute woman, around 25 or so, says "I try to keep my body in shape, but it's harder to exercise my mind." ::cue rage::
Forget it, it's Nutetown. Brain training is snake oil. It's why there's no hope for the Nutes of this world.
After having watched the commercial, it's not like that at all. She's just sort of standing there talking without any "teehee I'm a girl" stuff. Would it be different if she was ugly?
Dear People On Facebook and Other Social Media, We're all suitably impressed by your blasé attitude to the presence of horse meat in beef burgers. Yes, yes, we hear you: it's all meat, right? Who cares if you're chowing down on a bit of Shergar with your Daisy?! Like I said, impressively blasé. You clearly have the constitution of an ox (possibly from eating contaminated beef). The problem is, you're standing on the pier looking landward, blissfully unaware as the point slowly sails by behind you. The problem isn't what the beef was contaminated with, the problem is that it was contaminated at all. Love and kisses Dermo
People who post things in the Nerd Rage Thread that really should be in the Stupid Things...Online thread really get my goat.
It's not a derail, and I don't know how you can say it's more boring than any of the obscure/inane things people nerd rage about in this thread. My client wanted me to use Excel, but I don't like Excel. NERD RAGE!!!
Amazon.de shipping fees to Germany: free US: 3.00 euro UK: 3.25 euro Turkey: 4.50 euro Japan: 7.00 euro Slovakia: 9.50 euro Last time I checked, Slovakia is much closer to Germany than Turkey or Japan. GO DIE IN A FIRE, FUCKERS!
Distance has little to do with it. Shipping from the US to Canada is often cheaper than shipping within Canada.
Oh, forgot to reply to this. Even if the commercial hadn't been sexist, I would still have been raging, because "exercising my brain is hard" makes me want to yell PICK UP A MOTHERFUCKING BOOK YOU IDIOTS. adghsjkhsd;
Yeah. And it cost me less to have Amazon ship stuff across the country to Las Vegas than it did to have a guy from the casino bring the package from one end (Convention/business centre) to the other (reception). It's probably a matter of infrastructure, general service pricing... and people figuring out exactly how much they can gouge you (the latter being the main driver in my example),
Do daytime running lights not exist in this backwards part of the world? Or do parked cars somehow have right-of-way over moving vehicles?
Having to be polite to numbskull assholes who seem to be going out of their fucking way to not understand the explanations you are attempting to give them.
<Raylan Givens>You ever hear of the saying "you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole; you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole"?</Raylan Givens> My money's on the latter.
What if you run into an asshole in the morning, and then there's a break for like two hours, and then you run into three more assholes and a very polite schnauzer, and then there's about ninety minutes of non-assholes, and then you get hit with four assholes right between 4:00 and 6:00 PM?
