Hacker News Reader

You could also conclude that nuclear weapons are extremely safe to have around since they haven't killed anyone for 65 years.

Indeed some people have come to this conclusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction

View on HN

I don't disagree in principle, I'm just saying that putting up aggregated statistics for something that lends itself to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events doesn't tell us a whole lot. I think even the biggest MAD proponents would agree that the risk of nuclear war is greater than zero.

Risk of something being greater than 0 is an equally uselss measurement. Otherwise we would have multi-trillion dollar asteroid defense networks, alien invasion detectors in the oort cloud, personal lightning shields, lottery backed retirement funds and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III#Greatest_threats

I can play linky too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_as...

There have been many more asteroids passing really close to earth in recent history than "almost nuclear wars". My point still stands -- nonzero chance is a terrible reason to do anything.

I was hit by lighting, and I was vary happy that my personal lighting shield worked.

PS: Car

I agree with your main point, but I would probably consider being shot with an AK-47 to be a pretty "once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic event".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com