In Ben Franklin's autobiography, he described his journey from Philadelphia to Boston. It took two weeks by boat, traveling down the Delaware River and up the Atlantic coast. The shipped wrecked off the coast of Massachusetts, and he had to swim to shore. I guess the TSA lines don't seem so bad in comparison.
The distance from Philadelphia to Boston is not much greater than Paris to Lyon which takes two hours by train today.
If the US had reasonable train service, you’d get from central Philly to central Boston in the time it today takes just to get to the airport, go through security and board the plane.
Any particular reason why the country which prides itself as the world's largest economy, largest democracy, and a technological leader shouldn't reasonably have a world-class transportation system?
Because everybody has a world class vehicle of their own? It's a different and reasonable system of transportation.
I'm sure others may disagree. They can cry all they want. Reality has demonstrated that this is a reasonable system, even if it isn't rational by their standards.
I’ve been ill for about a month now, so I’ve been reading a lot. I’m going to add the danger of wolves.
There is a French account of how packs used to raid villages and this one knight in full armor fought a wolf for hours, and they wound up killing each other in combat.
I don’t know if that’s true but apparently it was quite commonplace
Wolves fight in packs too, for hunting prey.. a single wolf sticking and fighting to death, and a knight with a sword in armor not managing to seriously wound it earlier? Tbh doesn't sound realistic at all, given also todays knowledge about the behaviour of wolves. They had also plenty of food and other opportunities back then. Given how fatal any injury can be any predator is taking on any unnecessary fight very carefully.
I don't think so either but I thought it was cool. But wolves were an ever-present danger in Europe, that's why they hunted them to extinction. Especially during plague times, plenty of carrion to scavenge and habituation makes them lose their fear of humans.
Let me see if I can find the story, I was feverish yesterday so I didn't, but I can today.
The behavior of wolves as we currently think of it has been influenced a lot by politically correct thought forms. "In France, historical records compiled by rural historian Jean-Marc Moriceau indicate that during the period 1362–1918, nearly 7,600 people were killed by wolves, of whom 4,600 were killed by nonrabid wolves."
I also strongly recommend reading up on the Beast of Gévaudan for a uniquely bloody and strange case of a supposed 18th century village terrorized by a wolf, or at least some large beast. I say supposedly because there were also historical rumors that the real butcher of at least some of the victims in the region was the very man who killed the supposed culprit wolf for a reward from the French king, and as a way to cover up his crimes.
It might have been a rabid wolf, which would explain the aggression. And the duration was probably exaggerated. If the fight lasted a while, like 10 minutes, then the knight could've died from exhaustion or heat stroke afterwards. If we assume "died in the fight" was also exaggerated, we could include blood loss that went untreated (everyone else was busy fleeing). If he died that night or the next day, then infections are possible killers.
There’s very little a wolf can do to a person in armor. A fight between an armored knight armed with any kind of sword and a single wolf would probably only last a minute and would end very badly for the wolf. Wolves are extremely careful, cowardly and their only fighting move is to approach you and bite you. Source: have spent a lot of time with various wolfdogs, wolf hybrids and actual wolves.
I was struck while recently reading David Grann's "The Wager" by how little people understood scurvy at the time. Grann writes about how some doctors believed it to be a reaction of the body to being away from solid land for too long, and attempted a treatment by burying patients up to their necks in soil.
Travel is still risky. Automobile accidents are, by a substantial margin, the leading cause of death in young people.
It may have been somewhat more risky back then -- in terms of fatalities per mile traveled, if not fatalities per hour traveled -- but I don't think that's perfectly clear. A fall from a horse, which has happened to me more than once, is a lot less injurious than an automobile accident. It would be interesting to see a comparison table.
Besides, the risks didn't stop every enterprising English and Protestant German youth from embarking upon the Grand Tour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
> According to the research (2002) on horseback riding danger statistics, the rate of hospital admissions for equestrians is 11.8/1000 riders or, assuming one hour per day riding on average, 0.49/1000 hours of riding. (1)
> 7. 81% of equestrians get injured at some point in their riding career.
>In 2020, Americans had a 1 in 63 chance of getting in a car accident.
> At least one driver or passenger is injured in 43% of car crashes. There were 2,282,015 injuries reported in 2020 — that's 6,252 per day, or four per minute.
So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses? And that's without accounting for the difference in distance travelled. The number of injuries for the car are staggeringly high because of how common they are. I bet if we enacted policies that made owning a horse as likely as owning a car, we would also find that every minutes a several horse riders get injured.
I would also make a guess that cars operated at the same speed (with current safety equipment) that cars would be closer to 100 times safer than horses. The entire velocity squared multiples quickly.
I think so too. Motorcycles are the closest thing we have to a very fast horse and according to [1] they are 35 times more likely to result in a fatal crash than a car.
It's complicated the other way because we design our environment to be safe for cars; horses on the other hand tend to go everywhere, including jumping over stuff.
> So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses?
Well, all of that refers to injury -- which may be serious, but may also be very mild. A sprained ankle is an injury. Horseback riding is a lot like a contact sport; it's very easy to pick up musculoskeletal injuries from getting pulled or thrown (or kicked, which has also happened to me once,) but only a very small proportion of those lead to serious and lasting disability.
If we look solely at fatalities, a different picture might emerge. Automobile injuries are, I surmise, more likely to be very serious or fatal. And, of course, motorcycles are in a different plane of existence entirely.
We can also look at which is the most dangerous to pedestrians (probably the car by a wide margin), or even which is the most dangerous when not ridden/in use. For that last point I would expect the horse to be the most dangerous, while you have the occasional death due to being crushed by a car I bet stable accidents are more frequent.
Trains: 5 railway passengers killed in the EU in 2021, and around 20 seriously injured. 261 billion passenger-km travelled. 0.02 deaths per billion km.
Cars: the best EU country has 3.3 per billion-km, the worst 9.8.
(Not included: deaths from people not travelling, like trespassers on the railway, maintenance staff.)
A horse can also injure you when you're not riding it. A friend of mine was badly hurt by her horse when she tried to lead it into a trailer and it went nuts. Similar types of incidents can potentially happen with cars, but anecdotally seem quite rare. There probably aren't any good statistics on this, though.
I'm sure the modern equestrian statistics aren't comparable, as the people putting the most hours in tend to be doing sports, rather than daily work as in the past.
Modern horses are dramatically larger than what was available in the past, which means some injuries have more force involved.
Looking at pre-car city street scenes, not many people rode horses. Most horses pulled carts and coaches. Of course, a shying horse attached to one of those can still kill people.
I’m pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn’t like to cover it and the Government doesn’t like to talk about it.
I have no sense of its general coverage in the zeitgeist, but this month the White House announced Overdose Awareness Week "to focus the nation’s attention on the devastation caused by illicit fentanyl and other drugs" and also announced funding for a variety of things to attempt addressing it. Their recap links to media coverage in a variety of sources.
Of course, people and front pages quickly tire of 'boring' things like that and unfortunately get more excited about other events prone to popping up in a large country.
Among young people it is currently guns, until recently was cars, and drugs is about half of either, but rising. Drugs has recently risen to be about the same as cancer.
"Poisoning was the leading cause of preventable death for all ages, combined, for the ninth consecutive year and was the leading cause of preventable death for every age from 22 to 68. This is largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States."
The leading cause of death among young people is not guns. It's not even firearm-related injury, which is what your link talks about. The thing at the link (it's not a study) you point to has gotten a lot of press. It is deliberately deceptive.
It uses an age range of 1-19, excluding children 0-1 years old and including adults who are in their 18th and 19th years. So sure, when you do this bullshit maybe you can produce the answer your audience wants to see / which will play well in the press / which will lead to clicks. But it's not honest. The honest statistic for the U.S. is 0-18(exclusive) years old, and when you do the honest thing you see that death by firearm-related injury is not the leading cause of death for minors in the U.S.
The deliberately deceptive statistic is driven by including as many 15-35 year old males as possible. This is the age range when males in gangs are extra killy.
I'm unhappy with a doctor playing games with statistics by manipulating the data, under the guise of actual science, in order to advance a political agenda.
Everyone should be unhappy with that.
But interesting you didn't comment on the other statements in my reply.
The US has significantly higher rate of car fatalities than peer nations, which you're correct in this case shadows its (far more significantly higher than peer nations) rate of gun deaths.
Compared to who? Modern day, of course they weren't. 1500's Britain was quite poor, but not more so than many other places.
If you look at the general populace for basically anywhere before modern times, they all had bad hygiene nutrition and medial aptitude by modern standards. Looking at what the 0.1% could manage doesn't tell you much about a society.
Not compared to present day, no, but most of the folks who interacted with Europeans at that time (including the natives in the Americas) commented on how sickly they looked and how badly they smelled. Nobody was springtime fresh, but early modern Brits were apparently notable even then.
