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Comment by rcurry | Hacker News Reader

No, you’re not. I was a mine buff for a long time and used to go out to desolate places and rappel down into old mines to explore them. Now days a lot of these old mines have been sealed off. My opinion is that if you really want to drive 30 miles off-road into the Mojave and fall down a mine shaft, well, knock yourself out. Hundreds of kids die in swimming pools each year, I don’t see the Corps of Engineers going around filling people’s pools with cement. The wild is the wild, leave it alone - let responsible people enjoy it, and let irresponsible people learn To respect it.

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That’s a ridiculous argument.

Hundreds of kids die in pools because millions of kids swim.

If there was an abandoned mine next to every pool, yeah... people would do something about that.

I have no problem with people doing risky activities (I do plenty myself), but you should be aware of the consequences, not only to you, but to your family, to SAR, etc and act accordingly.

He is actually right, some things are forbidden because they can cause death while others are allowed even if they cause lots of deaths. For example cars and knives are allowed, even if there are tens of thousands of deaths in car accidents or by stabbing, while the first argument for forbidding guns is that they kill people.

His point is that mine-shafts are closed, but pools are not and there are a lot more people drowning in pools than killed in accidents in mine-shafts. This is a classic case of double standards.

Unfortunately, we are not all Oliver Wendell Holmes who thinks kids walking into unfenced acidic quarries and dying is the kids' fault.

You’re missing my point.

More people die in pools because there are more pools and more people in them.

The percentage chance of dying in a pool is incredibly low, partly because it’s low risk and partly because we mitigate the actual risk (training, lifeguards, etc).

Mine shafts are an order of magnitude more dangerous. If pools were as dangerous as mine shafts, they wouldn’t be anywhere near as common.

I don't think there's a consensus to be reached. Part of why this story gets attention so frequently is because there's approximately two camps with points that aren't even contradictory logically, but are contradictory in spirit.

A. McCandless was negligent, his neglect was bordering mal-intent. He should be made an example of, not for his search of freedom, but for behaving stupidly as to put the lives of search and rescue workers in danger, or at the very least putting them to work and depleting funds from the state that could have gone elsewhere. He had an ill-effect on his family and friends, and should have put them foremost before venturing out with little preparation.

B. McCandless engaged in an act of personal liberation. Even if he ultimately died, he at least had the courage to embrace his own version of freedom.

I don't think the people in camp (A) are wrong, but ultimately it's not how I want to live my life - where I have to value the peripheral concerns of society above my most intrinsic desires.

I have to admit that I don't like how some people romanticize the poor kid's story. At the same time I don't want to make fun of him - he was just a naive kid who thought he was going on the adventure of his lifetime. It still took a lot of guts to do what he did, even if he didn't understand how dangerous it was actually going to be. If anything he might serve as a cautionary tale and thereby save a few lives over time.

Lives are hollow little things that end in death, you can make an example of him, but you can't do jack sh to him personally.

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