Safety, how much

[MikeFerrara]

shakeybrainsurgeon, that healthcare system your worried about--I paid for it-- since I have always actually had a job and pay huge sums of taxes and SS, if I cost them some of MY money--to freak'n bad.

I'll go along with that.

Live dangeous and die free.

N

We still get to live dangerously because legeslation completelyu fails to address safety. However, there is very little chance that you will die free unless you have a revolution planned. Big brother is going to tell you how to wear your shorts and then he's going to insist on climbing in them with you.

 

[muddiver]

Consider the climbers this past winter whose behavior wound up jeopardizing rescue workers who were forced to go after them.

Oh I always love this one! I enjoyed about ten years of work on a number of firefighting and mountain rescue teams in the San Gabrial Mountains. We were never forced to go rescue someone, the duty to respond was always used as a good reason to use the toys we were given by tax payer money or donations. Ant time the weather, location or lack of resources would limit a safe and effective rescue, we would call off the operation and hope for a recovery at a later time. You usually know the majority of the dangers going in and you take percautions aginst them so the majority of rescues are much safer than the general news media portrays.

 

[Ana]

Maybe my additude comes from the fact that I lived at a time when there were no seat belts not just no seat belt laws, helmets were for race car drivers and there was no diving instruction other than the book that came with the tank and regulator. For me they are the good old days.

I believe that is one of the main reasson behind your prespective.

To me it is evident when I compare my views with one of my sons' views. My diving ways could be seen as unsafe depending on the observer. My son is into sport bikes, once every other month I sacrifice my diving to go to a track and check him out, he also rides on the streets but even going a couple of blocks he'll put on ALL the stuff, helmet, gloves, maybe not boots but never flip-flops or sandals.

He grew up in a different world than I did. He was part of many "organized" group sports that required the use of what appeared to me: an endless list of protective gear.
As the cherry on top, a few months after he bought his first real sport-bike, a car crash into his bike throwing him up in the air for several feet. It was a run to a store nearby but he was all geared up, the result was a totally destroyed bike and one small bruise on his chest caused by the bike's miniwindshielf as he flew thru it. This event obviously embeded even deeper on him the need for protective gear. His closet has almost more helmets than T-shirts.

I like to see his face when he takes off the helmet after a great run in the track, there is pure joy underneath. My husband claims that's what he sees when I take my mask off after a dive.

No one forced my son to use all the gear he uses, and so far no one has forced me to use more gear than what I use.
The key is the freedom to choose. Living as you choose is becoming harder in the US, we are willing to sacrifice liberties in order to be "safe". Some call it being responsible, others call it patriotism, I don't know.... I get mental images of american patriots blindly goose-stepping without questioning authority because "it is safer".

 

[MikeFerrara]

Maybe my additude comes from the fact that I lived at a time when there were no seat belts not just no seat belt laws, helmets were for race car drivers and there was no diving instruction other than the book that came with the tank and regulator. For me they are the good old days.

I believe that is one of the main reasson behind your prespective.

No doubt.

I too remember when cars didn't have seat belts and my driving started before there were any laws requireing their use. We used to wear them when we were doing things that we weren't supposed to be doing to keep from sliding across the bench seats in those big cars. Trying to drive from the passengers side was tough. Of course, those useful, adjustable lap belts have been replaced by these uncomfortable shoulder harnesses that have a mind of their own.

I think I had kids of my own long before I ever saw, or even heard of, a kid wearing a helmet to ride a bicycle. I'm not saying that a helmet is a bad idea but I'm glad no one made me wear one when I was a kid. LOL, we wouldn't have worn them anyway...we would have gotten around the corner and stashed it in the bushes someplace to be picked up on the way home.

 

[Rockhound76]

Ana,

Great post...I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a libertarian at heart, but wear a helmet and seatbelts, make my kids wear helmets and seatbelts (I'm in charge until they move out) but that is MY choice. I (or the gov't) has no right to impose that view on the rest of the world.

As for insurance....anyone who carries no insurance is foolish. If they carry private insurance that covers them if they fall and bust their heads or if they get hurt diving solo or jumping out of planes, then I say 'have fun'.

Don't make me watch. Don't make me pay for it. Don't justify the public expense because it's a piece of your pre-piad "tax pie".. Gov't should be about more than just spending money. It should be about minimalist intervention and efficiency. Depending on the state to bail you out runs counter to the idea of being an individualist. If you want to play, you should be willing to pay.

Oh yea: When I raced my car, I wore a HANS device. No one made me do that either.

 

[TSandM]

It's a complex interplay among factors: enjoyment, responsibility, impact on self and others, "justifiability" of the activity. There isn't a clear cut answer, but I would say that it is most definitely true that, at some point, increased safety leads to decreased enjoyment.

Years ago, I made my first trip to Europe, and climbed up a memorial in central Germany. There's a catwalk around the top of the monument, and you can go out on it and lean on a simple railing and get a splendid view of the countryside. What struck me was that there wasn't any netting or chain-link to keep you from climbing up on the railing. There were no signs warning about the dangers of getting too close to the edge. We were being treated as adults who were capable of making rational decisions about what would be safe behavior and what wouldn't be. But, of course, most European countries do not have the litigation climate that the US has.

But the problem with that approach (which I like, as you can tell) is that, as a species, the human race (in my opinion) tends to be incredibly stupid with respect to assessing risk and adjusting behavior accordingly. I work in an ER, so I know this. In addition, when we DO try to assess risk and behave responsibly, we're often working off flawed data or assumptions. For example, many times, people on this board have said that your greatest risk of death related to diving is the drive to and from the dive site. This is quite probably true. But we get focused on the risks involved with the diving, in part because we're enured to the risks of driving, and in part because a lot of them involve matters over which we have no control whatsoever (eg. the guy who just left the bar after several hours of serious drinking).

I'm no better at this than anybody else. I ride my horse without a helmet a lot of the time. I don't do it on trails or in venues which are new to her, and I don't ride strange horses without a helmet (except in Botswana, where I rode for three weeks without one, on hard ground and where animals could have jumped up and spooked the horses at any time . . . go figure). But I practice emergency procedures related to diving on a very regular basis, dive double tanks for deeper dives, dive Nitrox . . . I work hard to mitigate risk where it's probably fairly low to begin with, and ignore higher risks in other places.

I think most of us are like that.

 

[Cacia]

the human race (in my opinion) tends to be incredibly stupid with respect to assessing risk and adjusting behavior accordingly.

This is on the rise as people become more and more dependent on rules and government regulations. Children don't learn to navigate in childhood anymore.

Oh, Nemrod will die free, I have no doubts about that.

 

[muddiver]

Cool pick on your lates avatar, what is it? I can see that it is a buoy off of a wrek, but what wreck? Where?

 

[shakeybrainsurgeon]

shakeybrainsurgeon, that healthcare system your worried about--I paid for it-- since I have always actually had a job and pay huge sums of taxes and SS, if I cost them some of MY money--to freak'n bad.


Live dangeous and die free.

N

Look, I'm not worried about the health care system. If you pay for it, you sure get to use it (in fact, many people who use it a lot don't pay anything for it at all, but that's another topic). My point was that we do not take personal risk in a vacuum. What we do impacts a lot of people besides ourselves.

I might point out that a bad motorcycle accident, however, in a young person can wind up costing in the seven figures for acute and chronic care, especially if a head injury is involved. Unless you are Bill Gates, you haven't paid that much into the system yet.

 

[captain]

Look, I'm not worried about the health care system. If you pay for it, you sure get to use it (in fact, many people who use it a lot don't pay anything for it at all, but that's another topic). My point was that we do not take personal risk in a vacuum. What we do impacts a lot of people besides ourselves.

I might point out that a bad motorcycle accident, however, in a young person can wind up costing in the seven figures for acute and chronic care, especially if a head injury is involved. Unless you are Bill Gates, you haven't paid that much into the system yet.

By the same token I paid house insurance for the last 35 years but if my house burns down today it will cost the insurance company about 8 times what I have paid them. If we had to pay into insurance what the insurance might potentially have to pay back to us there would be no point in having it. A few collect a lot, the majority collect very little from insurance.