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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Actual cars are your exploding car though. Cars kill 40k people every year. An expected lifespan of 80 years times 40k people is 3.2 million, and the US population of around 350M people gives us a number not too far from 1%. And many of the people who die aren't even the person at fault in the car accident. So I think that part of the argument isn't quite right.

"Exploding" is a shorthand for unwarranted errors/catastrophic failure due to criminally negligent quality control.

Plenty of people die on car crashes, but it's much rarer for the death or accident to be due to manufacturer error. The cars? They're almost always fine.

This is in large part due to the fact that cars are highly regulated, and the mechanical failures that do occur being "acceptable" or maybe "expected." The government sets safety standards, the manufacturer meets them, any failure after that has reduced liability. If we think the death toll or damage is too high, then we have the option of swallowing the cost of stricter standards.

Your critique would stand if car crashes were overwhelmingly due to the car falling apart (or exploding) instead of humans being good but not infallible when it comes to operating multi-ton steel vehicles at speeds rarely seen in the ancestral environment.