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comment by Kawoomba · 2014-09-07T17:01:25.540Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Try /r/MMFB or /r/anxiety over on Reddit? If you must have this community's input specifically, spend some effort (including line breaks) and post this on the open thread?

Also, don't fear the transportation system. And don't spend all your money to "go to New York" (and make it big). This isn't the 1850s anymore.

Replies from: CAE_Jones
comment by CAE_Jones · 2014-09-07T17:33:55.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

And don't spend all your money to "go to New York" (and make it big). This isn't the 1850s anymore.

Is it bad that I want to react to this with "in 2014, it's the SF Bay Area"?

comment by gjm · 2014-09-07T15:51:33.186Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's right to be shocked at the number of people killed by cars and the amount of police corruption and the overpricing of US university education.

I don't think it's right to be viscerally terrified by any of them. (Of course you don't necessarily get to choose what you feel terrified of. But in so far as you can influence it, I think you would do well to try to be less scared.)

In the US, about 36k people die in road accidents every year. If you are an average person in the US (in the relevant sense) then your chance of getting killed in a road accident this year is about 36k/300M or about 1/8000. I don't know how much of that risk is avoidable (without staying completely away from roads) but there's some reason to think quite a lot of it is. 1/8000 is surely too much, but actually the US has ~4M 20-year-olds of whom ~4k will die this year, so most of those deaths aren't on the road. (I am guessing rather randomly at your age.) You should be just afraid enough of death on the road to make you a careful road user; panic isn't called for.

By all accounts a lot of the police in the US are brutal, unjust and generally terrible. But how dangerous are they to you? The official statistics say that the police consistently kill about 400 people per year. It's likely that the real figure is somewhat larger: coroners' reports can't be relied on to say whether the police were involved in a death. But I'd be astonished if the figure were as large as 1000/year. A lot of those will be cases where the person killed was actually involved in committing a serious crime. A lot more will be basically down to racism, and since you mentioned you have the good fortune not to be black you're probably relatively safe there. I bet your chance of being killed by the cops in any given year is much, much less than that 1/8000 chance of being killed on the road. I understand that you're worried about riots and the like -- but although riots make a lot of noise and sometimes have drastic consequences, again they're terribly unlikely to kill you. The total number of people killed in any sort of political disputes in the US in the 20th century appears to be less than 5000.

A lot of higher education in the US is grossly overpriced and useful mostly as a means of signalling that you're smart enough and wealthy enough to get in. But many, many people in the US do just fine without going to overpriced private universities.

So: please, do be offended and angry about those things. They're very bad. But if they're stopping you sleeping at night, you're probably worrying way too much about them.

comment by Mati_Roy (MathieuRoy) · 2014-09-08T02:13:32.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Maybe taking online courses could be a solution: you would need to be less often on the road and you could (IMO) get a better and cheaper education.

comment by Mati_Roy (MathieuRoy) · 2014-09-08T01:48:48.150Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Maybe taking online courses could be a solution: you would need to be less often on the road and you could (IMO) get a better and cheaper education.

comment by Dustin · 2014-09-07T16:40:51.130Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Wall of text, cannot read!

(I realize this is "only" Discussion, but if you want people to read what you write, and you must, or you could have just wrote this in Notepad, please insert some line breaks!)