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Comment by rootedbox | Hacker News Reader

I didn't wear cleats until I was almost 14 playing baseball.. I just used tennis shoes.. some of my friends gave me a hard time about it. I could hit dingers all day so no big deal.

But you know what. I wore a helmet at every at bat. Did I really need it for every at bat?? No; But I had it.

There's a long list of dead people who went into the wilderness or hiking under prepared. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't mean the same outcome for others.. I know this is supposed to be a metaphor for when to buy and upgrade the tools you have. But safety should always come first.

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Know how many 9 year olds I’ve seen hit in the head with a baseball, while at bat? (Many. One kid on my sons team was hit in the head for four consecutive tournaments last fall.)

Always wear a helmet when you’ve got a bat in your hand.

Obviously your idea of safety coming first is based on your exact specifications, which are unclear and known only by yourself, which isn’t actually very useful

> But safety should always come first.

No it shouldn’t.

Safety is almost always a trade off of real (or perceived) risk and reward.

If safety came first, you’d never swim, hike, or drive a car.

Used to raid 25 man World of Warcraft dungeons with a Death Knight tank. His slogan was: "Safety first, then teamwork." That really stuck with me.

From the pilot's world: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate

Safety first doesn't mean "don't do anything unsafe," it has a broad meaning. With your interpretation I suppose it could mean if you're going to do something, be sure to consider your safety tradeoffs first.

I think “safety first” generally means that you should put safety first when you’re doing something but that I should consider the safety trade offs first when I’m doing something.

I agree with you completely. My country has an out-of-control safety culture that has many unintended effects. For example we are one of only a handful of countries on earth with a cycling helmet law. As a result, fewer people cycle and drivers take less care around cyclists. Lots of studies have shown that at a population level it's quite possible helmet laws have a negative impact on health and safety. I am currently travelling Japan and I have seen thousands of cyclists and not a single helmet (and very little in the way of dedicated cycling infrastructure). To my knowledge Japan doesn't have an epidemic of head injuries.

Soccer players would benefit from wearing helmets though, but they don’t.

But how many people died even though they had the ‘right’ gear?

I too like to hold my safety gear to the standard of whether it grants invulnerability. That's a productive way to approach nuance.

I was more interested in the relative likelihood. Most people don’t die from good or bad gear, but from risky or stupid things, gear or no gear.

Sorry can you explain the situation where jeans lead to the death of a hiker? I don't buy it.

I've never experienced any deaths on hikes, but I have experienced folks suffering the initial stages of hypothermia (and not realizing it) when wearing jeans on a multi-day excursion when the weather went from dry and sunny to rainy, to icey-rain to sleet.

Unwaxed cotton absorbs water, stays wet, and shrinks when wet to make close contact with skin--three properties that one does not want when its wet and cold.

So taking your pants off would work? Seems superior to wet clingy cold pants anyway.

In the cold?

If you're wearing "wet ice", convective heat loss from air is preferable to conductive heat loss from water.

Water on skin is a really, really good mechanism for heat transfer (both ways)--hence why we sweat in the heat.

That depends on the specifics of the environment, trail, and your pants.

Indeed, going "pantsless" for short periods can be less risky if your pants are already soaked-through, it's very humid, there's ice build-up, and there's little to no risk of skin abrasion from terrain traversal.

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