Sorry man, I have to disagree. We’ve done corporate scumbaggery for a long time and it comes from ol’ blighty as much as the US. Guys like Alan Bond have been around a while.
On the other point, it’s got nothing to do with helmets… helmets save lives, despite some guy’s opinion on a TED talk. Australia’s obesity has more to do with laziness, drinking culture, widespread car use and a general presumption that everything should have meat in it, always.
The one thing we have started to import from America is privatised prisons. Serco, while a British company, not American, runs all of our “detention centres” (read: refugee punishment camps) and some of our prisons. Their business mimics that of US privatised prisons where the goal is to cut costs everywhere possible to maximise profits for shareholders.
If you can be assed I’d read it, but I don’t think the conclusions of the article reflect what you’re saying. The article doesn’t say that helmet legislation is neutral or has negative outcomes. According to this article based on the link you posted it says:
“Goldacre and Spiegelhalter single out one recent study, led by Jessica Dennis at the University of Toronto, which held that compulsory helmet laws in various Canadian provinces had achieved only a “minimal” effect on hospital admissions for head injuries related to cycling.”
Minimal is not zero. Minimal is something.
I also don’t think it’s an easy thing to measure considering there is much more participation in high-risk cycling activity like mountain biking today than there was 30 years ago. Furthermore don’t you think it’s telling that all professional cyclists wear helmets? I’ve read into this before and it seems that, from my perspective, most if not all the research says that helmets have a positive or neutral effect. This is contrasted by the volume of discussion on the matter, a lot of which is people saying that helmets have no effect or even a negative effect on safety.
Some people are killed by sharks, so perhaps sharks should be culled. How about acknowledging a downside to hamfisted meddling?
But then since you don’t live in a place where utility cycling has been dead for 23 years, maybe you find it a little hard to appreciate how fucking epically moronic public policy that discourages cycling is. I defy you to even to begin wrapping your head around cycling’s far-reaching benefits to a society; certainly the legislators never did.
Nope, one death every million hours is too dangerous, let’s marginalise it.
I guess the right thing to do is to anonymously publish your findings on the web, along with a note explaining why you are taking such actions, and letting the authoritarians authorities take the heat and the responsibility for the results.
