I have the money for the bike now. Insurance is covered. I'm just waiting for the guy to get back with me on a location to meet and I'm going up tomorrow morning to get it.
I tell all my friends who ride motorcycles (not a lot, but more than I thought) about an academic article my brother wrote -- he's an economics professor at Michigan State Univ. Here is the link to the article, which if you have read "Freakonomics," is along the same vein. I'll simply quote the abstract below. It's somewhat macabre, but rightly goes into the category of "food for thought":
Traffic safety mandates are typically designed to reduce the harmful externalities
of risky behaviors. We consider whether motorcycle helmet laws also reduce a beneficial
externality by decreasing the supply of viable organ donors. Our central estimates show
that organ donations resulting from fatal motor vehicle accidents increase by 10 percent
when states repeal helmet laws. Two features of this association suggest that it is causal:
first, nearly all of it is concentrated among men, who account for over 90 percent of all
motorcyclist deaths, and second, helmet mandates are unrelated to the supply of donors
who die in circumstances other than motor vehicle accidents. The estimates imply that
every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths
among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists.
“Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest-quality
source of organs, because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic
injuries to the body, except to the head…[a mandatory motorcycle helmet law] could put us out
of business – or at least the business of organ transplants.”
- Transplant surgeon quoted in “Brain Dead: Why Are There No Mandatory Helmet Laws?” by
Jerry Garrett, New York Times online, July 7, 2008.
I tell all my friends who ride motorcycles (not a lot, but more than I thought) about an academic article my brother wrote -- he's an economics professor at Michigan State Univ. Here is the link to the article, which if you have read "Freakonomics," is along the same vein. I'll simply quote the abstract below. It's somewhat macabre, but rightly goes into the category of "food for thought":
Traffic safety mandates are typically designed to reduce the harmful externalities
of risky behaviors. We consider whether motorcycle helmet laws also reduce a beneficial
externality by decreasing the supply of viable organ donors. Our central estimates show
that organ donations resulting from fatal motor vehicle accidents increase by 10 percent
when states repeal helmet laws. Two features of this association suggest that it is causal:
first, nearly all of it is concentrated among men, who account for over 90 percent of all
motorcyclist deaths, and second, helmet mandates are unrelated to the supply of donors
who die in circumstances other than motor vehicle accidents. The estimates imply that
every death of a helmetless motorcyclist prevents or delays as many as 0.33 deaths
among individuals on organ transplant waiting lists.
“Motorcycle fatalities are not only our No. 1 source of organs, they are also the highest-quality
source of organs, because donors are usually young, healthy people with no other traumatic
injuries to the body, except to the head…[a mandatory motorcycle helmet law] could put us out
of business – or at least the business of organ transplants.”
- Transplant surgeon quoted in “Brain Dead: Why Are There No Mandatory Helmet Laws?” by
Jerry Garrett, New York Times online, July 7, 2008.
I'd agree with that. I typically try to dissuade my kids from riding, because I wasn't good enough to not get killed or injured, just lucky enough to have ridden long enough to get good.
They aren't safe, and even very good and vigilant riders get hurt.
So, we were at the beach and it was the weirdest thing but everybody had matching towels! Then we saw somebody go under a dock and there they saw a rock. But wouldn't you know it, it wasn't a rock at all it was a.......
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