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I wonder if all these "shit happens" commenters would be saying the same thing if this happened on a plane to the guy sitting next to you.
by dave_sullivan 5y ago
I wonder if all these "shit happens" commenters would be saying the same thing if this happened on a plane to the guy sitting next to you.
- PawBer 5y agoThere is an inherent risk of loss of life whatever you do. We as a society just agreed that there's an acceptable level of it. Lithium-Ion batteries are on the higher level of it but their usefulness outweights it completely. To answer your question, there's a lot of things that have much higher chance of happening on an airplane e.g. a bird flying into the engine or a terrorist attack.
- m-s 5y agoI think there have been more in-flight battery fires than (attempted) terrorist attacks.
- Macha 5y agoWhat is the rate of escalation from a battery fire to multiple deaths? Especially when you move away from the flashy cases like plane highjacking to smaller scale incidents like school/nightclub shootings it's not at all clear to me that LiIon batteries cause comparable deaths to terrorism. But also on the subject of risk vs reward, I think its pretty clear that cars cause more deaths than terrorism, if you want a clearer example of society deciding risks are worth the rewards
- Macha 5y agoAnd of course inactivity has its own risks (blood clots, heart disease, etc)
- bittercynic 5y agoI think the core of the disagreement between the "shit happens" camp and the "you're an insensitive clod" camp is differing understandings of the context of the conversation. I'm pretty sure we all, in a personal conversation with someone who just went through this, would be somewhere close to "That sucks. Are you OK?" In a public discussion about whether it is appropriate to continue using Li-ion powered portable electronics, it seems natural that it's an entirely different discussion.