Dodging lions

Prester Scott brings up an interesting point in the light of the Mumbai attacks about the nonsense being propagated by the TSA et al:

Buying insurance against very specific, very rare, but catastrophic threats is not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but when it costs a lot of money and time and effort that could be better spent elsewhere, it becomes a bad idea. No one wants to be attacked by a lion. I might be able to convince you to buy some lion repellent. But (unless you’re an individual who walks around in the veldt in sub-saharan Africa every day) you’d have to be pretty dumb to spend a large portion of your income on it.

He has a point. It seems much more likely that we’d end up dealing with a Mumbai or Beslan-style attack than that someone might sneak onto an airplane with a ziploc full of anthrax – but which have you heard about more? And where do the funds go?

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