The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Two comments based on that quote alone:
1) These numbers are ridiculously low. You can find 50 people dying worldwide every year from X-related fatalities where X is just about anything.
2) They acknowledge a crucial fact in their second sentence, that they aren't bothering to correct for population or selfie-frequency in any of the demographics they compare (across countries in this case). Of what use are the numbers, then? May as well compare non-price-level-adjusted prices of goods across countries.
Shorter: GIGO. That chart had no business in the article.
Which is done on a regular basis and nobody seems to have a problem with it. "Oh my god, someone in India is earning only $10 a day!"
Over 1 million selfies are taken a day[0], so your death rate of dying while taking a selfie is 28deaths (in 2015) / 360million (seflies taken in 2015). Each selfie has a 1 in 12,857,142 chance of causing you death.
I'm pretty meh about it. These are people chasing glory and fame. Taking extreme selfies is probably safer than going to war or becoming a kingpin.
That's assuming every selfie has an equally likely chance of causing death, which I think we can all agree is not the case.
But yeah, it's extremely difficult for me to muster any compassion for people that befall the horrible consequences of their own stupid decisions. To paraphrase the late, great Bill Hicks: "They were assholes. I'm glad they're dead."
That's sloppy writing. 18-24–year-olds might be taking the most selfies, but that statistics doesn't support that.
> "In march of 2014, a young man posed for a selfie atop a boxcar. Diverted, he was unaware of the 35,000-volt livewire just beside him."
These articles always quote high Voltage numbers as being dangerous. It is not the Volts that are particularly dangerous, but the amps. A static shock you get from a carpet or doorknob etc can be as much as 25,000 Volts and you barely notice it. A 100 Volt shock with 50 amps behind it can kill you very easily.
Now a very low current through the heart might kill you, so with a little bit of bad luck or stupidity you'll die from a 100 V source. Like you are replacing a lightbulb in an old fixture with one wet hand resting the other one on the kitchen sink.
25000 V will almost certainly kill you. The moisture outside you rubber boots probably has low enough resistance to let a deadly current through your body.
The exception is of course the static shocks. Here you are saved by the extremely low total charge.
To summarize, yes it is the current that kills you, but it is the voltage that matters.
> In general, India has a very high drowning fatality rate.
> Each year, 86,000 people drown in the country, roughly 20%
> of all drowning deaths worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injurie...
Priceonomics is usually higher quality than this. This feels more like a quick college term paper.
Commercial properties prune their palm trees regularly to avoid falling coconuts.
Though I worry more about jacktrees. Their melons can weigh over 100 pounds!
How were car accidents not at the top of the accidental death list?
You are stupid.
Natural selection is random processes that weed out certain traits (biological, physical, social) before those have been passed on to the next generation. This typically means before the entity has had time to reproduce. If you have deaths after reproduction then the traits can still be passed down genetically. Though the longer post birth maturation period can still have an effect.
The deaths reported in the original article were all removing stupid people from the world; thanks to their actions the average level of the stupidity of humans has decreased slightly.
Their deaths should act as a warning to try and reduce further stupidity in the world; though some humans are especially bad at learning from other's mistakes.
A person's reproduction isn't just whether they did or not, but how much they did.
when people use language like "thanks to" when talking about evolution, I think it attaches too much of a value thing, such that people sort of smuggle in the idea that a thing that happens is good, by hiding it in the description saying that it happens.
Natural selection is, in its respectable form, about what is, not about what ought.
That's not to say one can't say related things about what ought, but I think one should be sure to clearly express when one is doing one versus when one is doing the other.
Genes don't care about the old. They care about reproduction.
> In fact, most of them aren't since the majority of deaths worldwide are either age related or age related illnesses.
Have you ever heard of the grandmother hypothesis? Just because an organism is done directly reproducing its genes doesn't mean that it can't help its descendants successfully reproduce their genes.
Please do some reading on a topic before pontificating on it.