9 ms·

The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as yo

The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way

dragonwriter 3y ago
> The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms, and trusting the host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service. Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a couple benches at the front of their property. If someone gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts like this.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service. A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway. You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see anything you've said that would make it an exception. But I think the logical outcome of that is ridiculous. Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a place, and that place should not have to pay damages. And providing value, as an argument to keep existing, should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or drastically increase monetization)
      - dotandgtfo 3y ago
        I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild. > There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451 I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities. IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
        sleepybrett 3y ago
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    The owner would probably need city approval to extend their reach onto municipal property (the sidewalk). The store owner might also be required by the city and/or landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the extended liability. But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner would be held liable.
    - terryf 3y ago
      The store owner wants to do something nice for people and in your world the best way to handle that is making them jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit? Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
      - geraldwhen 3y ago
        If anyone is injured on your property, you’re liable. Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
        krsrhe 3y ago
        [dead]
        terryf 3y ago
        Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement, then it's an idiotic and short sighted law. I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury? Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
        pertymcpert 3y ago
        One of the many things that's wrong with the US.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - krsrhe 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in the products the store sells and the bench out front is in public. But the catastrophic events in question are somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on their hands (often children) and predators (among others, but specifically predators in a way a shop bench doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two aren’t comparable. A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      >to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups. So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        Not at all contradicted by evidence in this thread. Look at the linked musicians videos in this thread, the strangers they are playing for are mostly (not entirely) 20, +/- 5 years. Like video games are mostly played by young people, even though they are popular with many age groups. Most adults who have work and families and homes and chores and hobbies don't have the time for internet hangouts which sink a lot of time for a low reward, and if they do they're likely to spend their time and money on things like NetFlix because they can afford content, compared to younger people who can't afford much. Lots of technical people hang on IRC/Slack/StackOverflow/HN/Reddit/Discord during work hours in a way they wouldn't hang on Omegle or Chatroulette during work hours - because text is easy and non-realtime, wheras Omegle requires the people hanging out on it to pay full attention if they're going to make good contacts. No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers. There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around. So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in. It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
- mrighele 3y ago
  In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing, and only the people that actually caused the accident are to blame. If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory insurance for people using the Internet, like many countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the website is not actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be legally required for operation on public roads in most US jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc., are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as general fund taxes which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I think you are missing the point intentionally. I have seen you make many cogent points over the years, but this is just low effort failure to engage. Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true. They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage. Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
- terryf 3y ago
  individual responsibility is the way things need to be handled. Make it clear that if you do X, then there exists a risk of Y, and Z. If you still want to do the thing, and for you the risk is realized, then ... well, sucks to be you I guess. But you knew what you were getting into. And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what? Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam and nothing can be done because there is always some element of risk, is a terrible idea. "You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)
- concordDance 3y ago
  The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough to cover liability.
terryf 3y ago
Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that's bullshit. So many things that are enormous amounts of fun can get shut down because maybe someone gets slightly hurt some time or whatever. Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own personal responsibility to take that into account when doing something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.
- concordDance 3y ago
  The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are hundreds of millions. There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  This is one of the root causes of many of the issues in modern society. The creeping safety is taking the fun out of everything, especially kids. Kids nowadays rarely have any play time anymore, which has an immense cost to their later growth and well being. If you want to read a book about this with some related topics, I recommend "The Coddling of the American Mind"
- MrGilbert 3y ago
  I'm honestly surprised that I'm still allowed to put myself on two wheels with an engine in between, and ride down the autobahn at an insane amount of speed.
- lambdatronics 3y ago
  > But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no" I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc). IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
varispeed 3y ago
> isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way Had a friend who started a social network website at his parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death threats, competition uploading illegal content and then reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out, paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends helped him close the site and he "recovered". But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> The question in my mind is, 74 million monthly users have a good time (or not bad enough to not come back, whatever) vs the inevitable catastrophic event as you say, isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? Assuming the 74 million are really getting lots of value from it, compensating the victims of the catastrophic event is more than worth it. Holding the host liable for the harms, and trusting the host to charge an appropriate amount warranted by the value received to the users is one way to do this.

Dylan16807 3y ago
If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service. Imagine a store owner downtown adding a flowerbed and a couple benches at the front of their property. If someone gets hurt via rare catastrophic event, it seems bad to make the owner pay, and even worse to suggest they're supposed to be charging bench users 20 cents each to fund payouts like this.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > If it's actually very rare, that doesn't seem like an appropriate way to handle a free service. A service you pay for via the presence of ads isn’t free in a way that makes that really true, and even if the service was free, if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > if the benefits to the people that aren't being victimized aren't worth charging a sufficient amount to cover the harms to those who are, I would argue the service is almost certainly a net social loss, anyway. You didn't directly address my bench scenario, but this sounds like it fits the bench scenario. I don't see anything you've said that would make it an exception. But I think the logical outcome of that is ridiculous. Sometimes there are bad things that can happen in a place, and that place should not have to pay damages. And providing value, as an argument to keep existing, should not mean you have to monetize that value. (or drastically increase monetization)
    - dotandgtfo 3y ago
      I don't disagree fully, but I don't believe that Omegle is comparable to the bench scenario entirely either. The numbers are pretty wild. > There is evidence that Omegle has improved its moderation practices. In 2019, Omegle made 3,470 reports to NCEMC, which increased to 20,265 in 2020 and 46,924 in 2021 (NCMEC, 2020, 2021, 2022). In 2022, Omegle filed 608,601 reports of child sexual exploitation to NCMEC (NCMEC, 2023), a 1197% increase on the previous year. This figure is higher than the reports made by very popular social media applications including TikTok (288,125) and Snapchat (551,086) (NCMEC, 2023). When queried by a journalist about this increase, an Omegle spokesperson reiterated the website's ethos of personal responsibility but indicated that their moderation efforts had been augmented. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26338076231194451 I don't support the business model of scaling up social networks while skimping on moderation to make it profitable. The user LTVs are so low that moderation costs are probably prohibitive for a service like this. While I deeply respect Omegle and their increase in moderation, maybe some business models are just unsustainable and not worth the externalities. IMO the real life analog is more akin to organising a festival with hundreds of thousands of visitors while only having a guy at the gate making sure you've signed a release agreement. This doesn't fly in meatspace, and it seems more likely it won't fly in the digital sphere either in the future.
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
- otteromkram 3y ago
  The owner would probably need city approval to extend their reach onto municipal property (the sidewalk). The store owner might also be required by the city and/or landlord to update their insurance policy to cover the extended liability. But, in general, your proposed scenario never specified what the catastrophic event is and why the store owner would be held liable.
  - terryf 3y ago
    The store owner wants to do something nice for people and in your world the best way to handle that is making them jump through months of bureaucracy and probably paying a lot of money to their insurance and for permits and shit? Yeah, this attitude is why we can't have nice things and building anything costs a billion dollars.
    - geraldwhen 3y ago
      If anyone is injured on your property, you’re liable. Insurance is meant to handle this risk.
      - krsrhe 3y ago
        [dead]
      - terryf 3y ago
        Right, if that is really true as a blanket statement, then it's an idiotic and short sighted law. I have a yard, plant a rose bush. You walk in the yard, bend down to smell the rose but lose balance, fall on the rose bush and the rose pokes your eye. According to the rule, I'm not liable for your injury? Besides being unfair and stupid, this sort of thing is actually costing society enormous amounts of lost effort, goodwill and actual money. How much time has been spent on bs court cases for things like I described? How much of a tax is liability insurance on everyone? How much fun things will never happen because of fear?
      - pertymcpert 3y ago
        One of the many things that's wrong with the US.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- krsrhe 3y ago
  [dead]
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  A store attracts people with money (adults) interested in the products the store sells and the bench out front is in public. But the catastrophic events in question are somewhere that attracts easily amused people with time on their hands (often children) and predators (among others, but specifically predators in a way a shop bench doesn't), and the catastrophe is deliberate targeted harm and not natural disaster or innocent accident. The two aren’t comparable. A comparable service would be something which ended up attracting teens hanging out at the mall, or which parents decided would be a free babysitter, whether or not that was the original intent, and to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on, and with those who did could hide the fact that they are an adult, and all the interactions take place outside the public eye, and then see six hundred thousand cases of abuse reported in a year and then say “rare event it would be unreasonable to ask for this service to be designed any other way”. I’m not sure if anything offline could be comparable but whatever it was - the free secret dark funfair - would be shutdown and made the subject of a horror documentary after the first small few incidents.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    >to which most adults wouldn’t have time or interest to go on Directly contradicted by abundant evidence in this very thread. It was popular with different age groups. So the mall is a good analogy. It attracts teens, and therefore predators. Should the mall be responsible if someone gets groped? It seems that you would say yes, they are. I disagree, because I think we need things like malls, and they will always attract people and therefore predators.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      Not at all contradicted by evidence in this thread. Look at the linked musicians videos in this thread, the strangers they are playing for are mostly (not entirely) 20, +/- 5 years. Like video games are mostly played by young people, even though they are popular with many age groups. Most adults who have work and families and homes and chores and hobbies don't have the time for internet hangouts which sink a lot of time for a low reward, and if they do they're likely to spend their time and money on things like NetFlix because they can afford content, compared to younger people who can't afford much. Lots of technical people hang on IRC/Slack/StackOverflow/HN/Reddit/Discord during work hours in a way they wouldn't hang on Omegle or Chatroulette during work hours - because text is easy and non-realtime, wheras Omegle requires the people hanging out on it to pay full attention if they're going to make good contacts. No the mall isn't a good analogy, it has lights, mall cops, CCTV cameras, crowds of people wandering around, it's a well known public place and it's generally not known as a place to approach strangers unless you're selling something. Omegle happened one-to-one, private, and encouraged chatting directly to strangers. There is a concept, I forget the name of it (not the bystander effect) where if you are in a strange place in public and need help then you can call out to the bystanders for help, or you can point to one specific bystander and ask for help. Say you are a tipsy woman lost her bag, and you call out to anyone for help then the self-interested predator can step forwards, but if you point to one person and ask them to call you a cab then you are unlikely to randomly pick the self-interested predator. So even though most people who try to help a stranger in need are good people, calling out to the void leaves a big opportunity for any bad people to take advantage of. Both can be true - that most people are good and that one arrangement leaves more room for any predators who are present than another arrangement does. Omegle had a reputation for being risqué - like DickRoulette (ChatRoulette), so that means people wouldn't tend to use it in a library, or on a family PC in the living room with other people around. So people going on Omegle would be more likely younger because they have more free time and less money to spend on things and less ability / money to go out instead, are more likely to go on behind closed doors to avoid people seeing anything rude on their screens, then they'd get matched with a stranger, encouraged to chat with the stranger, and of course the reasonable adults matched with a young child who shouldn't be there would move on, leaving the effect above and the predators room be the ones who pretended to be friendly, and none of the protections of a crowd at a mall - well-meaning strangers ("it takes a village") could see something odd happening and interrupt or check-in. It's not that everyone on the site was in that situation, it's that the site design and social status left that to happen way way more often than a mall or a shop bench would.
mrighele 3y ago
In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing, and only the people that actually caused the accident are to blame. If you think that victims of a "catastrophic event" need compensation, why not propose to institute a mandatory insurance for people using the Internet, like many countries do for cars ? (I am assuming here that the website is not actively trying to help crime, but this doesn't look to be the case with Omegle)
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > In the US, about 40'000 people die every year in a traffic accident, yet using public roads for free is still a thing Its really not; user fees in the form of driver's license fees, vehicle license fees (both of which tend to be legally required for operation on public roads in most US jurisdictions), federal and state gasoline taxes, etc., are used to pay for use of public roads, as well as general fund taxes which are directed to roads (making even the indirect use of roads by ordering goods, etc., not really free.)
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    I think you are missing the point intentionally. I have seen you make many cogent points over the years, but this is just low effort failure to engage. Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Neither is the state because they built the roads.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Regular drivers aren't collectively paying for the damages of drunk drivers. Not, primarily, via payment to the state for using the road, true. They do, however, pay for liability of general road rules violations, instead, through mandatory insurance, also a general legal requirement for using public roads, though you can opt out from the risk pooling nature of insurance in most (all?) states by assuring (via a personal liability bond) that you will pay for the damages you cause up to the threshold amount of required coverage. Public road use simply isn't something that is cost free with the idea that “well, a bunch of people will be damaged, but there is no need to assure that those damages are reasonably covered because other people will benefit”, it has lots of costs associated with use, and a number of them (both the licensing regime and the insurance regime) are about limiting harms even at the expense of potential beneficial use and assuring compensation is available for those that are harmed. Yes, its an elaborate and different regime than paying to the supplier who pays for damages, but a regime exists, so its hardly an example of how no such regime is necessary for a service that has benefits for most users and acute harms for some.
terryf 3y ago
individual responsibility is the way things need to be handled. Make it clear that if you do X, then there exists a risk of Y, and Z. If you still want to do the thing, and for you the risk is realized, then ... well, sucks to be you I guess. But you knew what you were getting into. And saying, "oh, but people are bad at analyzing risk" or "some people are too stupid to understand". Well, so what? Building a world where everyone is wrapped in a soft foam and nothing can be done because there is always some element of risk, is a terrible idea. "You can get killed walking your doggie" - Heat (1993)
concordDance 3y ago
The issue here is that the host is capturing only a very small fraction of the value here, which may not be enough to cover liability.

terryf 3y ago

Yes, 100 times yes. This is one of the big issues with the modern world, that no risk at all is acceptable. And that's bullshit. So many things that are enormous amounts of fun can get shut down because maybe someone gets slightly hurt some time or whatever. Should we make things safe? yes, of course. But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no". It should be made clear that risk exists and it's everyone's own personal responsibility to take that into account when doing something. And if I happen to be the unlucky guy for whom the risk realizes, then well, guess life sucks for me. Let's move on. That shouldn't stop everyone else from having fun.

concordDance 3y ago
The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are hundreds of millions. There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
This is one of the root causes of many of the issues in modern society. The creeping safety is taking the fun out of everything, especially kids. Kids nowadays rarely have any play time anymore, which has an immense cost to their later growth and well being. If you want to read a book about this with some related topics, I recommend "The Coddling of the American Mind"
MrGilbert 3y ago
I'm honestly surprised that I'm still allowed to put myself on two wheels with an engine in between, and ride down the autobahn at an insane amount of speed.
lambdatronics 3y ago
> But the trade off should not be "if there is any risk at all, then no" I'm a kitesurfer and I'm with you 100%. I'm glad kiting is not banned in most places. Kiters die every year -- I knew someone who was killed, and I've had a couple close shaves. In fact, today I was kiting and witnessed a kiter get rescued by the Coast Guard. It's understandable that society would want to have some say due to the externalities (loss of productive members of society, cost of rescues, risk to bystanders, etc). IMO it's not the case that 'no risk is acceptable' -- it's just that the risk tolerance for various things seems really arbitrary & out of proportion to reward. For instance, if we didn't accept any risks as a society, we'd ban alcohol & tobacco along with kitesurfing, skydiving and motorcycles, but we don't.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

varispeed 3y ago

> isn’t it well worth it to accept the risk and continue? The world couldn’t possibly function any other way Had a friend who started a social network website at his parents house. Pushing 20 million monthly users. Death threats, competition uploading illegal content and then reporting it, whistleblowers and more threats, people having beef and looking for arbitration, more threats for getting banned etc. He become extremely stressed, stopped going out, paranoia kicked in and then suicide attempts. His friends helped him close the site and he "recovered". But lesson here is - if you don't have a deep wallet, right mindset and access to therapist, don't start a website today or keep it small and off the main internet.