You can just say “a group of X called a Y” about anything and people on the internet will believe it.

That doesn’t affect the ability of older drivers, only the number of them.

In fact, since one reason very old drivers might get more accident prone is because they stop driving as much and lose some of the skills, you would expect that, if older Americans really persist in driving more as they get older (you haven’t provided any evidence that they do) they would retain those skills and be less accident prone, not more, so would be safer, and less at need of re-tests, than their UK counterparts.

Focusing on the driving safety of the elderly is a classic example of Saliency Bias. A 20-year old kid wrecking his car is nothing unusual so you don’t remember it when thinking about safety. An 80 year old who can’t even remember which way to turn the wheel getting in a wreck is unusual and extreme, so it’s more salient. Getting stuck behind an elderly driver gives you the impression that they’re a bad and hence unsafe driver, which contributes to this.

The problem with “self-driving” tech punting you into the oncoming lane is that you may have no time to react. Reaction times are non-zero, also when reacting to your own car doing something unexpected.

Fact is that if you want to spend some money, time or political capital on improving road safety, targeting older drivers is not where you should focus your efforts. The fact that it frequently is, is due to ageism.

In the absence of forthcoming data (hint hint), what factors do you think differ between the UK and USA which affect the ability of very old/very young drivers?

This is your regular reminder that it’s generally not older people who are high-risk drivers: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/628ce5c7e90e071f68b19dfa/02-image-2.svg

Drivers get safer until about 70, and only get less safe than your average young driver when over 86.

There is a perception that older drivers are an absolute liability on the roads, which I can only assume stems from impatient people who get frustrated when stuck behind an older driver going more slowly than they’d like.

Really, you can’t think of any reason to be upset that you’re required to take an exam that you then pass?

So they established that language patterns measured by word frequency changed between 2022 and 2024. But did they also analyse frequencies across other 2-year time periods? How much difference is there for a typical word? It looks like they have a per-frequency significance threshold but then analysed all words at once, meaning that random noise would turn up a bunch of “significant” results. Maybe this is addressed in the original paper which is not linked.

How much sugar do you add?

How long do you boil it for? (You don’t know; you have to monitor the temperature)

How long does putting it all in jars take you? (ages)

It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming and not trivial.

Making jam is not trivial but it I think that makes it rewarding! My dad has made jam and marmalade for as long as I’ve known and it’s always an event. My parents have hundreds of jars (for some reason my dad calls them bottles? Only in a jam context though!) and every so often he cooks up a giant pot of jam with an old-fashioned sugar thermometer, testing the batch on a piece of baking paper, then bottling everything up. He often did it with my sister, who now also makes her own jam.

He labels all the jars, and we’ve opened jars that were… I dunno, a decade old I’m sure, and they were totally fine. So they will definitely keep for a long time!