Comment by deaux
13 hours ago
A completely unremarkable day, more like it. Given stochasticity there's bound to be at least a dozen days per year with 50% more than the average, especially since car deaths depend a lot on weekday, holidays, weather and so on - much moreso than train deaths. No one would look up from it, wouldn't make the news.
You're assuming it was the only incident in America that day, rather than an exceptional outlier stacked on top of the usual day in America.
Yes, a single car crash killing 150 people would make the news. It would be among the worst, if not the single worst, car accident of all time [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-vehicle_collision
> And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.
This is now how I interpreted "bad day", think it would be clearer to remove "day" if that's what you meant. Of course you're right in that it would be awful as a car accident, they simply don't happen that many as a time. Which is why our monkey brain's lack of emotional response to "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are.
> "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are
Did anyone say that? This conversation was mostly about newsworthiness.