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.

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?

In my (old) field, this was not really true, but maybe it’s true in some other fields.

But it is true that if all these grants are cut, it will have a big effect on research output due to killing off early career researchers. It’s clear that the US Government doesn’t give a shit that it’s going to ruin the country’s research credentials.

As far as I can work out about this USA, this is not true. It is certainly not true where I am from. It may be true in the case of postdoctoral researchers (but not always), i.e. relatively junior researchers who don’t yet have a permanent position. But a permanent position is just that - it’s like a permanent job, and you’re paid a salary by the university that gave you that position. You will typically also need to apply for grants in order to pay for things like:

• travel to conferences
• travel to collaborate in person with colleagues at other institutions
• make papers open access
• hire postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.

I did two postdocs during my time in academia and both were grant funded (one awarded to me, one awarded to a more senior researcher who then took me on as a postdoc). I also applied to one postdoc position I remember which although fixed term, not permanent, was paid for by the university. I worked with many permanent staff who had salaries from the university as well as grants for other things.

As far as I can tell in the USA the only real difference is that your salary may only be for the 9 teaching months, not the full academic year, and you’re expected to top up those 3 months if you want to be paid a proper wage.

This is not really “mildly infuriating” and you should make the link point to the article, not to a screenshot from it.