I would guess that if you broke it down, being in space is quite safe, but getting to space is extremely dangerous. This matches intuition, since in the former case you are just floating in freefall, but in the latter case you are seated atop a metal tube filled with explosive chemicals travelling at absurd speeds through an atmosphere.
Very true. Of course, passenger aviation is really pretty similar... you're inside a pressurized metal tube (with relatively small factors of safety) surrounded by explosive chemicals traveling nearly the speed of sound (absurd by ordinary standards), yet it's far safer than any mode of transport, even per hour. Engineering is pretty crazy. If there's strong enough incentive to make an activity absurdly safe, we can do so, even if the performance requirements are also very stringent.
Hrm, I don't really agree. There are a lot of very interesting things that are not very risky. Most productive activities are not very risky (art, woodworking, home improvement, etc.), and are very interesting to some of us. Sex is another example of something a lot of people like which carries little risk of harm.
I don't think there is good evidence beyond anecdata that the retired die early or that trust fund kids are depressed.
Sex carries 'little risk of harm'? Do we live in the same world?
I think your definition of risk is rather narrow.
Going out, finding a wife, grinding at a job, taking a mortgage, starting a company, not starting a company - all risk.
You might be able to claim that physical risks are harsher and less expected, but getting a mortgage, having children, getting married, a lot of the good stuff in life entails risk because you're making commitments that are extremely difficult or impossible to walk back if you don't want them any more.
I think you're focusing a little too much on that one example, but let me engage with you on this regardless. Even after a person has taken all those risks and they are sunk costs, the activity itself is still enjoyable, interesting, etc., even though it entails minimal marginal or excess risk. Similarly, hugging your kids is an enjoyable thing to do, and not at all risky. Having kids is risky, but once you have them, hugging them is risk free and still fun.
I also don't really find these things to be all that risky above the baseline. They certainly don't pose much risk of physical harm. To your point, they do pose some risk of psychological or financial harm, but the same can be said of the choice to not have a child or not take out a mortgage. There are plenty of happy childless people, but also a not inconsiderable number that wish they could have had children and regret that they did not. Same can be said for people who rented rather than bought. Either way, the choice is risky, and you can't opt out of the choice.
The same cannot be said for climbing a steep rock wall or riding a motorcycle. These choices impose excess risk above and beyond the baseline that comes from living in a material world. It was my understanding that this excess risk is what you were referring to when you claimed that enjoyment requires risk. If that's not what you meant, then I apologize, but I'm also not sure what you are actually trying to convey, since this article is mostly about excess risk.
----
I can't reply to you, so I'm editing this comment instead.
> I disagree with your characterization of physical risk as being 'excess risk'
Ah, it is understandable for you to disagree, considering that is not what I meant. :) Excess risk is risk you take above and beyond a baseline required for a particular context. If I need to get from the bottom of a tower to the top, the risk imposed by taking the elevator might be considered the baseline risk. Suppose I decide to scale the exterior surface instead. To the extent that activity is riskier than the baseline, that is excess risk.
This does not only apply to physical situations. Social, economic, etc. risk can also be analyzed in terms of excess risk. For example, you earlier mentioned the decision to marry or not. There is social risk in either choice. Probably, which choice is riskier depends on your own psychological makeup and your social context. But there are probably choices that are absolutely riskier in your given society. For example, in most modern societies, entering into multiple social marriages at the same time would impose excess social risk. For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_difference
I disagree with your characterization of physical risk as being 'excess risk' (where other forms of risk are not), but I can't/won't elaborate on why, because I think it's just a personal opinion formed through experience.
I think the parent had this key part - "risk - whether it be to limb, financial, social, mental, or whatever else". Going by your example of art, it carries some of the other types of risks - mental (not being appreciated), financial (not making enough for a decent life), societal (getting too engulfed and being lonely). I'm not saying the parent was well backed by data and statistics, I just think there's some truth to it - interesting things are frequently interesting, because you can also fail at them. If you can't fail, the reward is much smaller / non-existent.
Doing art (or anything else) as a profession certainly has those risks, but art as an activity in general does not have any significant excess risks associated with it. (I would not consider "getting engulfed" as an excess risk since that can happen with anything.)
You may be right that there is some truth to what the top poster said. I did not mean to imply I thought it was absolutely and categorically untrue. I just think it's broadly untrue. "Things that are unrisky are unfun" is a not a generally true statement, for most people. It could certainly be true for some people. But, I suspect most people who say such things are rationalizing their choice of activity, exactly as the linked article suggests.
An important and oft-ignored aspect of participating in certain activities! Even this doesn't capture everything. I am also very concerned about the possibility of being maimed by my chosen activities.
For example, open water swimming seems pretty dangerous, but the outcomes are (I would suppose) pretty binary. At the end you're either alive or you're drowned. I suppose that, rarely, someone almost drowns and is left partly brain damaged. But I think most of the time it's on or it's off. Motorcycling, on the other hand, probably maims far more people than it kills. So that makes it relatively more dangerous per hour!
But then you have to adjust by your risk factors. I am an extremely cautious driver. I stay in the right lane, I follow the speed limit, I try to avoid merging, and I check my mirrors. I do these things because, although I have spent a lot of time behind the wheel, I don't trust my fallible human perception and reflexes to take on riskier habits. I suspect, just based on the frequency with which I get into collisions compared to other people I know, that I'm safer than average. If I brought my driving attitude to motorcycling, it seems reasonable to believe that I'd be at much lower risk than the typical, weaving-in-and-out-of-traffic sport-bike rider. But how much so? Nobody has done any study that will help me guess. So, for now, I avoid it, and find fun in things that are less likely to leave me paralyzed.
Anyway, just some things that bumble through my head when I think about activity risk.
"For example, open water swimming seems pretty dangerous, but the outcomes are (I would suppose) pretty binary. At the end you're either alive or you're drowned."
Don't forget the brain-eating amoebas...
As far as motorcycles, in my opinion, the key is to remember that while motorcycles commonly have much higher power-to-weight ratios than cars, the simple fact they have only two tires means they are handicapped compared to cars when braking and cornering. So weaving and speeding is one thing, but don't tailgate, especially because something can go between the wheels of the car in front of you and surprise you.
I sold my motorcycle without ever having an accident and then I had two incidents in my car in the next few years where I would have been dead on a motorcycle because of other drivers' stupidity. So I'm probably not going back to riding.
> If I brought my driving attitude to motorcycling, it seems reasonable to believe that I'd be at much lower risk than the typical, weaving-in-and-out-of-traffic sport-bike rider.
With motorcycling, there are a number of factors that significantly reduce the risk of a significant injury or fatality:
- overall experience as a rider
- high-visibility clothing
- professional training (ie a safety course)
- age
When I started riding someone told me that most accidents happen in the first six months of riding. I don't know if that particular number is accurate, but that idea made me hyper-vigilant those first months of riding, and I sure learned a lot in that time.
I moved to Alaska in my 30s and sold my motorcycle, but I sure do miss it at times.
I was watching a video by Trent Palmer talking about his friend who had crashed his plane. It really opened my eyes when he answered one question about who the most dangerous pilot was, complacent experienced pilots or low hours pilots. Pretty much he said "I am always the most dangerous pilot."
We try to rationalize why we are the "Safe" ones because we can't imagine getting hurt because we are different. The thing is, we aren't different. We can all make the mistakes or be sleepy and we can't relax our vigilance when we're engaging in these high risk activities. (Flying a plane, riding a motorcycle, driving a car, riding a bike...)
We always have to look for better training, equipment, infrastructure, and technology.
I would think driving in the right lane is more dangerous on the freeway at least, because of onramps and offramps. I only drive in the left lane on a motorcycle.
Not to get too into the weeds, but depending on the stretch of road (frequency of onramps, and also the style), I might be one step to the left of the rightmost lane. Being in the leftward lanes isn't really an option at the speed limit, since I'd be blocking traffic, which has risks of its own.
It certainly feels safer. But I could imagine how it would be MUCH more dangerous. It's amazing how much difference even 10 MPH can make in an accident. Stopping distance increases by 25% between 60-70 mph. Keep in mind that the kinetic energy of your vehicle goes up with the square of the velocity. This makes braking much harder at high velocities. Not to mention the damage of a collision is increased accordingly. Surviving an accident at 70 is a lot less than 60.
Also risk to pedestrians goes up REALLY fast. At 30MPH a car has a 10% chance of killing a pedestrian. At 40MPH it's close to 50%.
If by serious injury, you include things like ACLs, certainly.
If you mean broken legs, spinal injuries, etc. that's going to vary a huge amount by what kind of skiing you do. If you're a racer in Downhill events, that's one thing. (How many times did Lindsey Vonn seriously injure herself?) Add in high speed tree skiing much less more extreme off-piste skiing of various kinds.
But a recreational skier doing basic blue and black diamond runs with a fair bit of caution? It's pretty safe. Sure, you can wipe out on ice or someone can blindside you. Or you can hit your head--although many wear helmets these days. But, overall, I'm guessing the driving to the hill is more dangerous. (Often fairly long drives in winter conditions.)
I don't think that viewpoint (that Barcelona is played out and too mainstream) is at all the message of this Vox article. If anything, the article is a criticism of that viewpoint.
Barcelona is mainstream, sure. That is an objective fact. But the person I responded to seemed to imply that the Vox article was making some sort of normative judgment about Barcelona. I don't think that any such judgment actually exists in the article.
Just more evidence that everyone parents differently. My friends hardly hear about the good stuff that my kids do. I want to talk about the grime and the shit and the speech delays and the temper tantrums. That's the stuff I feel like I need to get off my chest, when I'm afraid for their future.
We and most of the parents we know probably spend more time talking about the crappy bits of parenting than how awesome our kids are. The single best part of doing anti-natal classes was meeting a small group of people who were all going through the same kinds of stuff we were. Knowing "It's not just me" is a really big help coping with some of the tougher stuff.
We do still talk about the good stuff, but we all know they are awesome.
Thankfully most of my FB friends are pretty light on the performative parent posting. The ones who go in for that also tend to be the one who overdo the posting generally.
> They aren't the literal product that Google sells to advertisers, the data is.
Google does not sell data. They sell attention, like all advertising companies. They make a lot of money because 1. they have a lot of attention to sell and 2. they do a better job than most advertisers at finding the particular bits of attention that will be most valuable to the buyers. The data is part of what allows them to do that, or so the story goes.
Also, although I agree with your conclusion, I think you've been slightly misled as to what matters in the antitrust investigation. It is not the colloquial understanding of the word "consumer" that matters, it's the legal one. I'm under the impression that, as it happens, the legal one here comports with the colloquial one. I.e., what matters is the impact of Google's policies and practices on individual private citizens and residents. The impact on other businesses does not matter except inasmuch as such impact transitively harms private consumers.
I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?
This law is only for grades 7-12, so most affected kids can get themselves to school, or don't need direct supervision between when parents leave for work and when the bus arrives.
I'd also point out I've never lived in a school district that started elementary school before 8a, so these parents must have had solutions for those years. The real problem is going to be if elementary schools get pushed forward to start at 7a and release at 1p or something crazy like that, but I know most districts don't want the liability of 8 year olds waiting for the bus in the dark along side a major road.
My 7 and 9yo kids start school at 8:50am, and don't get off the bus until 4:30pm. It's ridiculous. They're young and need time off but because the district moved everyone back to make room for the High Schools now elementary kids aren't home until half past 4.
Not enough time for them to play in the afternoons now.
Poor kids and parents are almost always penalised: Remove one and another comes up. These same folks are simply being penalised at a different time of day - morning instead of afternoon. This is solved in a number of ways - the most basic being providing before-school programs for the (especially!) the younger children. This can include things like breakfast too.
There will always be people for whom a school start time of X is inconvenient, will there not be? And, while middle- and upper-class people might be more likely to have the standard 9-to-5, there are still plenty that don't (nurses & doctors, for example).
I took the sentences as being not necessarily literal sentences. I thought it was smart that he left the words vague. Maybe they weren't even really words? In the same spirit as the basilisks from "BLIT" and "Different Kinds of Darkness".
Prepared statements are per-connection and a lot of time you want to use connections from a single pool that's used for all you different queries, so you can't really use them.
> Even with that, the SQL would be parsed once per connection?
In a webserver-like context it's once per query one way or another - the server process is stateless-ish between page loads, so each page load is either a from-scratch connection or a connection taken from a pool, but even if you're pooling you can't use prepared statements in practice (you can't leave a prepared statement on a connection that you return to the pool because you'll eventually exhaust the database server's memory that way, and you'd have to resubmit the prepared statement every time you took a connection out of the pool anyway because there's no way to know whether this connection has run this page already or not).
If you assume a page that's just displaying one database row, which is not the only use case but a common one, then each page load is one query and that query will have to be parsed for each page load, short of doing something like building a global set of all your application's queries and having your connection-pool logic initialise them for each connection.
In a database product I'm familiar with, the prepared statements are cached according to their content and those cached objects are shared between connections. Only if they fall out of the cache do they have to be re-parsed. I had assumed that's how all databases worked.
I'm somewhat surprised at the mechanism you're describing, but now I read the documentation it does seem to be the case. I wonder if a small piece of middle-ware might be sufficient to replicate the behavior I'm describing on a connection pool, and whether that would be desirable.
