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Comment by greenshackle2 | Hacker News Reader

Your "personal choice" may end up risking the lives of search and rescue personnel, and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You get the benefits of your risky fun but a large part of the costs are externalized.

I don't want to live in a risk-less, fun-less society either but there are limits. As long as society is footing the bill, society has an interest in imposing limits.

I'm perfectly happy letting you do whatever you want, as long as you are not endangering the public, and you bear the costs. I'd be all for a system where you can opt out of health and safety restrictions, with the caveat that it also opts you out of health and safety programs, like publicly-funded search and rescue.

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> Your "personal choice" may end up risking the lives of search and rescue personnel,

This is the standard answer everyone gives, and it makes no logical sense. I worked search and rescue, and have plenty of friends that have it as their full-time occupation.

Search and rescue personal are trained professionals, who willingly signed up for that career, and who love being in the back-country. They know full and well what they're getting into, and going out and rescuing people is the definition of their chosen career. If there was nobody to rescue, they wouldn't be able to support themselves doing what they love.

In fact when there are no rescues for a while they go out in their helicopters and practice all the "dangerous" stuff putting their "lives in danger". So even if there was nobody to rescue, they'd still be out there.

Following on from your logic, it only makes sense we should ban open fireplaces and cigarettes in houses because that's the leading cause of house fires, which then put fireman's lives in danger.

> and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars

Please don't exaggerate, it detracts from the discussion.

The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

> Following on from your logic, it only makes sense we should ban open fireplaces and cigarettes in houses because that's the leading cause of house fires,

That's an amusing example to me, because indoor and outdoor fireplaces of any kind are in fact banned in my city, since it's densely built with lots of wood buildings, and because of air quality concerns, my city has deemed they are not worth the risk.

> which then put fireman's lives in danger.

And yes, the firemen will be the first to give you an earful if you don't respect the fire safety code.

> following from your logic [...], we should ban [...] cigarettes

Nice strawman though. I said it was in society's interest to set limits, I made no argument as to what exactly the limits should be. That's not my decision or yours, as long as it's public resources that are at stake, it should be a democratic process.

> The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

In that case, as I said, if they are footing the bill, I really have no problem with it.

Here in Vancouver, we're really close (15 minute drive for a lot of people) to dangerous mountainous terrain that is really popular with inexperienced hikers and so generate a high volume of search and rescue calls.

The S&R folks are really adamant that they do not want to charge end-users for rescues, because that means that people will wait longer before calling them, resulting in more deaths and even higher overall costs because the rescues become more complicated.

That's a decent point, and I expect they know better than me since I'm no S&R specialist.

Also worth pointing out that as frequent as things like avalanches and outdoor rescues may seem — the higher risk is often driving the highway to the trailhead. It's a risk that we've come to accept as a society. We don't even think about it anymore.

Many who spend their lives in the mountains say that with proper training they'd rather do the risky activity (where there are many known ways in which risk can be mitigated) than die in some random / tragic car accident (where you can do everything right but still die).

BTW, fellow Canadian (Calgary) here, "hey" from the other side of the Rockies :-)

> and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

“Are liable to the public to reimburse” rather than “foot”; the distinction is critical because the rescued individual may not have the resources to actually pay or may be impossible to collect from. The more expensive the rescue is, naturally, the more likely this is to be the case.

FWIW search and rescue in most of the US (and, I think, Canada) is volunteer-based and funded mostly by donations from the community. Some areas have laws that allow for them to recover rescue costs from people found to be in some way negligent. Even the most notorious of these areas (New Hampshire) doesn't tend to charge exorbitant amounts of money.

This is overall a really good system and the volunteers love doing it and are happy to do it. It struggles a little bit in areas with communities that can't afford to donate much to a SAR team.

Public safety costs are a sunk cost (staff are on call, vehicles are paid for), they will exist regardless. Society should bear the cost of reasonable exploration efforts by citizens, even by those who are unknowingly underprepared. That is a muscle we should be expected to flex as humans. The best way to learn is to do.

I would agree that after your second or third rescue though, you're becoming a nuisance and should bear some of the cost.

> Public safety costs are a sunk cost, they will exist regardless.

No. Overtime, helicopter flight hours aren't a sunk cost.

> Society should bear the cost of reasonable exploration efforts by citizens, even by those who are unknowingly underprepared.

The issue here is in that one important word: reasonable. Exploring your neighborhood? Certainly. Exploring a mine shaft without a rope? Maybe a bit less so?

> The best way to learn is to do.

Or ask people that know stuff. Or read a book, or a pamphlet. There's plenty of options other than "whatever, the other will take care of me, I don't want to think and prepare, preparation is boring".

> Or ask people that know stuff. Or read a book, or a pamphlet. There's plenty of options other than "whatever, the other will take care of me, I don't want to think and prepare, preparation is boring".

These are all valid forms of education, but all suboptimal to going through the motions. You should strive to be prepared, but also assume you don't know everything you need to know and de-risk accordingly.

Of course, but the original comment was about the guys doing virtually nothing to be prepared, that is "I'm going to live in the remote wilderness. I have a sleeping bag and a pound of rice, what else could I possibly need".

There's always some risk in everything, it cannot be avoided, but we really don't need people to learn by doing it from zero understanding of that risk, we have plenty of things they can learn from the comfort of their bed. If they then still want to go do the real thing, they'll be much less likely to require rescuing, because they will not just walk into the woods without a map going "I'll just use Google Maps if I get lost".

You posit two examples at pretty far poles of the risk equation. How about doing winter hiking up high peaks in the Northeast US? Or whitewater kayaking? Or rock climbing?

I'd say that also depends on how you're prepared. If you don't want to prepare or think safety is boring and you want that extra kick of adrenaline, sure, go for it, but I'd also prefer if you make sure that you're not going to be requiring a rescue operation and a life time of support for that little extra kick.

Or we could just tax it accordingly so it gets pretty expensive to do, but the risk is priced in. Want to remove the helmet and swimming vest or go winter hiking naked? Sure, just pay here and off you go.

I'm assuming people are at least reasonably well prepared (while understanding that many aren't). But there is a level of danger in any case.

You should read the linked PDF about the people the comments were about. It's not about the reasonably well prepared people. Reasonably well prepared people don't go into the woods unprepared to live off the land with no tools, no shelter, no knowledge what is edible and what is not, and no way to deal with bears.

What's reasonable about it? Those places have been explored. There's far less dangerous ways to experience nature and the wilderness too.

I also don't see how the cost is sunk, it's proportional to the number of rescues they have to carry out, plus you risk the rescuers lives.

To me, the logical compromise would be to require upfront payment of a bond that is (a) forfeited if you need rescue, and (b) doubled if you don't follow basic precautions before heading out.

Liberty can't be unconditional when your actions affect others. I see no philosophical objection to saying "you're free to do X, but you're the one paying the cost if it backfires."

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