Wednesday, December 16, 2009
quicko: on not turning a night out into a nightmare
This is one of the Australian government's favorite phrases to bandy about. Granted, it's a pretty catchy one as far as government phrases go, but what I actually wanted to mention was a statistic I heard from one of their television campaigns: every week, 4 Australians between the ages of 17 and 25 die in a drunk driving accident. Now, granted, this is horrible and I am most certainly opposed to it -- but 4?? A week?? My high school alone had practically that many! Okay, maybe not per week, but you get the idea. Americans would be jumping for joy if we had such statistics. On the other hand, Australia keeps a fatality count over holiday weekends -- which, again, is terribly tragic -- but it can keep such a tally. Maybe a single state could, but the whole country? We'd be to the next holiday by the time we got the numbers straight.
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2 comments:
Yeah, but you've got to look at these things per capita. 4 young people per week sucks for us, because there are so few of us to start with. The population of Australia is only around 22 million. I don't have the data to hand on how many of them fall into the age bracket you mentioned. I also have no idea whether America loses more or less than 4 twenty-two millionths of it's population to drink driving per week or not. You'll have to do the maths on that.
hush!!
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