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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Your proposal is basically that on the event of a rich person's death, several poor people should risk their own lives to commemorate the way that he died. Is anyone surprised that isn't how it works?

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Poor people are already "required" (i.e. paid enough money to do it willingly) to risk their lives helping rich people get up and down the mountain. This doesn't seem substantially different.

Hauling a heavy dead body down the mountain is a lot tougher and more dangerous than carrying some extra oxygen bottles and food. In the death zone the porters are already working at the outer limit of human performance.

This. Never actually been in the death zone - my highest has been just under 7km, but it was hard enough carrying my own stuff up and down.

That's a neat trick, quoting a word that would have made the parent comment unreasonable, as if the parent comment had actually used that word...

I don't think the grandparent poster is suggesting that the sherpas be forced to recover the body. If you read the article, it makes it clear that in practice, several poor people already are cleaning up after the rich people who have climbed the mountain.

It is already possible to buy repatriation insurance, according to the article. I don't think gp's suggestion that climbers be required to buy that insurance is unreasonable.

Should the Sherpas be forced to buy insurance as well? What about the ones going on these dangerous recovery runs?

I don't know. It's kind of beside the point of rich foreigners coming and littering up the mountain.

Probably it should be required that their employers buy insurance on their behalf. In fact, they went on strike for something like this after the avalanche in 2014.

But, yeah, fundamentally it's probably best for anyone who is going up to make or have made for them provisions to ensure they come down again, one way or the other.

Employer insurance. This cost would be passed to the customer necessarily.

If a sherpa detects a foreigner wont make it to the top, shoots him and returns with the equpiment- would the church of economics and the great magus consider that a blessed act?

Can we be civil, please?

The church of economics considers it holy when negative externalities are factored into prices.

He's proposing that they put up the money for there to be an offer that is sufficiently attractive that the market will solve the problem. No one needs to be forced. They can take the offer to remove the body if they think offer is attractive.

Yeah the market solves the problem by sending poor people to risk their own lives to commemorate the way the first person died.

Just because The Market is making it happen doesn't make it any less detestable.

I guess that depends on whether you think a choice between poverty and dangerous work is worse or better than poverty without a choice. Personally, I'm not a fan of slavery or poverty, so I tend to prefer market-based solutions to problems.

Ah yes, The Market. Everything is okay if it's dictated by The Market, right?

Child slavery in the coffee industry? That's cool, working exactly as The Market should be, quite efficient even. Sex trafficking? The Market. Fucking up the planetary environment to the point where it may no longer be hospitable to human life in a few hundred years? Don't worry, that's The Market.

No one needs to be forced, you just apply huge wealth differentials and get poor people to submit to slavery and life threatening circumstances like recovering rich people bodies from mountains willingly.

I don't know why people are so reflexively bitter when anyone mentions the market. No one in this conversation is claiming that the market solves all problems. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than the alternatives, and we can admit as much without committing ourselves to any ideological platform.

Because people reflexively rationalize and justify immoral behaviors and atrocities with that's just how the market works. It's a cop out, it's a perpetuation of the status quo and a barrier to improving it.

Your argument is basically equivalent to 'trump isn't perfect, but he's a whole lot better than hitler'. While true, it's merely a distraction from the conversation at hand.

Are you trying to say offering people money to remove bodies and trash is immoral? How odd.

>Your argument is basically equivalent to 'trump isn't perfect, but he's a whole lot better than hitler'. While true, it's merely a distraction from the conversation at hand.

Is Trump climbing Everest?

He never rationalized immoral behavior, unless you consider climbing Mt Everest immoral.

A lot of people risk their lives every day in their jobs. It's not typically seen as immoral to do this.

I agree markets have failures, and they also shouldn't justify immoral behavior--I really sincerely agree with you on that--but in those cases, that happens because of externalities. In this case the externality is the dead bodies and litter, so a market solution isn't typically bad in this context.

> Because people reflexively rationalize and justify immoral behaviors and atrocities with that's just how the market works.

Maybe this happens, but it hasn't happened in this thread and it frequently doesn't happen in other threads before someone makes a big fuss about the market. And no, there's nothing immoral about compensating someone fairly to solve a dangerous problem; yes the opportunity will always be more appealing to the poor in a capitalist society, but there are no viable alternatives so I don't understand all of the complaining.

> Your argument is basically equivalent to...

No it's not; you simply misunderstood. My argument is that capitalism doesn't solve all problems, but no one has better ideas. Even the so-called socialist eutopias of northern Europe have a market-based economy. Again, I don't understand complaining about a problem with no candidate solutions.

The alternatives are around for thousand of years (religions, etc.). Capitalism for 200 years and might be on its way out in a lot of run down places.

Religions are categorically different than economic systems, and capitalism is as old as the idea of private property (prehistoric), not simply 200 years old.

There are a lot of unexamined assumptions here. Why would we assume that a prehistoric society had any particular system of economic interactions? It's not as if they wrote something we can read. In those cases in which tombs or whatever were left behind that we can examine, it typically seems that relatively rare "kings" were buried with all of the gold and other shiny rocks, and sometimes with some servants or wives for the afterlife who seem to have been ritualisticly killed for that purpose. Was that "capitalism"? Maybe!

We know that there were merchants and people bartered to exchange goods and services. The first written records in many societies are often ledgers of royal wealth transactions. Every prominent historian believes that capitalism is the original economic system.

"Royal wealth transactions", the foundation of capitalism! They must have competed for serfs and slaves in a voluntary market!

So you're upset that the Assyrian peasantry didn't invent accounting?

This whole thread was kicked off by a greenbean HN commenter's capricious tastes. There is nothing more ideological than taste, because it can motivate any injustice.

I do find it ridiculous that... their bodies are allowed to litter the landscape forever.

Yes, others' opinions can result in actions you don't like. I don't see how that is pertinent here.

Uhhh, I'm not complaining about dead bodies in some out-of-the-way spot that I'll never see, and suggesting that something "should be required". That was the other person. I'm fine with the bodies remaining in place. I like all the actions we're seeing in this context.

No one suggested otherwise.

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