211–220 of 275 posts
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But it makes for awesome GoPro footage[1] so people keep doing it. When you see people flying so low that they have to weave between trees you know that they're going to make a mistake or hit an unexpected gust of wind and kill themselves sooner rather than later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTzwvyzzfjk
That guy will be dead soon, it's only luck that he isn't yet.
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How are there so many people willing to do something so insanely stupid? I looked at the BASE fatality list. Vast majority of the names and nationalities are of European descent and/or nationality. Are adventure sports (risk taking for thrill) a white European thing? Do you have to have a sort of arrogance and privilege to disrespect risks like this? I personally have no desire for any of this stuff, as I'm quite awa…
> How are there so many people willing to do something so insanely stupid? You're going to die anyways, probably from something a lot more terrifying and/or painful like cancer or Alzheimer's. I'm not convinced that hitting the ground really hard is a worse death than average.
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How many would die of other causes, such as .. car crashes.
Probably a much smaller numbers. Cars are engineered to protect all but the most reckless and negligent from death.
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> How are there so many people willing to do something so insanely stupid? You're going to die anyways, probably from something a lot more terrifying and/or painful like cancer or Alzheimer's. I'm not convinced that hitting the ground really hard is a worse death than average.
Really? Why would I want to die at 30 instead of 80? This is insane logic.
It's not insane to maximize your enjoyment while alive instead of compromising on quality to get more quantity. It's up to every individual to decide on that balance for themselves.
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Why should it be? It's not like poeple don't understand the risk - especially by the time they get to the point where they can actually do it. What about all the other 'extreme' sports where death and/or serious injury is a possible outcome?
> Why should it be? Because someone one has to clean up the mess . And it wastes the coroners time. I'm not saying I agree that it should be banned, but those seem like two obvious angles.
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> Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard I'm sorry, but you've heard wrong. Skydiving is super dangerous, relative to other sports. Less than wingsuit flying, but more death per participant than most other sports. There's an unfortunate infographic that's made the rounds that makes skydiving look relatively as dangerous as football, but they made a mistake with the…
How many skydiving deaths are a result of swooping - relative to normal, vanilla jumps, I wonder.
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I have a couple of friends, both white-water guides and accomplished outdoorsmen, and they both put whitewater in a different category of risk: you can do everything right, and still die just due to the unpredictability of it. One of them said he had an instructor who basically said "if you stick with this long enough, either you'll die or someone you know will". They were both in the latter category.
It depends on the class of rapids you navigate through. I have done couple in Himalayas below class 5 and in most of them the guide said the risks are pretty minimal.
Proximity flying is just inherently dangerous. Even with power, many people have died. Sparky Imeson, who wrote the "bible" of mountain flying, died from flying too close to terrain. The strange thing is that he was actually flying back to somewhere that he had had an accident in the past (the first time he just got seriously injured, the second time he died). If you look at the accident location, there is a valley a…
...which, of course, defeats the point "I did something insanely dangerous and did not die". Is there a way to increase safety while keeping the feeling of danger? That sounds like a contradiction to me.
What about kite surfing?
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It's language evolving. When the misspellings/misinterpretations of "a napron" and "an eekname" became common enough we got "an apron" and "a nickname". If anyone — especially native speakers and others with a high degree of mastery of English — claims to have difficulty understanding "I'd of stayed home" then they're most likely being deliberately obtuse or needlessly contrarian.
The reason English speakers understand it is because "I would have" when contracted to the maximum "I'd've" sounds like "I'd of". The fact that the two are effective homonyms doesn't make both spellings right. Rather, the "of" variant just looks a little bit ignorant. Not much, just a little.
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Are you willing to die for it?
In short, no. To bring a strawman into this: Would you die for your commute? What about a burger? A beer? All of these things kill people, and all of them can be avoided. People don't, because they like them. They accept the given level of risk by mitigating it as best they can, and going on about their lives. Risk is omnipresent. The real killer is when you don't understand the risk. If you think something has a 1:1…