grahamsz

That’s right in the range for subfloor heating, obviously a question of whether or not you can get it somewhere that you need it

I suppose that’s very true. But it could be done - if a data center needs megawatts of cooling and is in an area where buildings need to be heated in the winter, then there should be a legal obligation to not just dump that heat.

There’s probably some alternate uses for the heat if these things were well designed. There’s some building in denver that is near a major sewer and in the winter they use a heat exchanger to extract that energy and use it to heat the building.

Lagunitas IPNA

Realistically they were almost certainly from a list of 69 remedies that spacex proposed to the FAA. I don’t think the FAA is coming up with those items on their own.

Yes, that’s obviously taking the lifetime K2 deaths and dividing by the summit attempts - though actually I get 19% in that situation. However we really dont have enough data to form a good confidence interval there - it’s possible we’ve had a lucky few years or maybe we’ve got better at deciding when to make the summit attempts.

But it doesn’t really change my point. There’s some threshold where it seems fundamentally immoral to hire someone for a job that has a good chance of killing them. Mountain porter on k2 or everest is a higher risk job than “astronaut” without the same glory that comes with the space faring job title. Even if the chance of death is 1 in 200, I still think its immoral to take advantage of someone who’s so desperate for work that they’ll overlook it.

Looking at it more, there seems to be an entire field of Risk Ethics associated with this.

Still the most dangerous job in the US is a Commercial Fisherman with a risk of death of 132 per 100,000. That’s a very long way from the risk of dying on Everest or K2.

I think I take more exception with the uneven make-up of the expedition team. If 4 americans want to form a expedition to summit K2 then I applaud that, all of them are committed to what they are doing and are choosing to take an extreme risk with no coercion. But when half the team makers are living in literal poverty and are only choosing to take the risk because they have few other options, that seems kinda messed up.

I have no idea, but hiring someone for a job that has a 1 in 20 chance of killing them seems fundamentally immoral - especially given the massive financial imbalance.

It’s certainly a good philosophical question though

Thanks for the terminology - that makes it easier!

Only very few people have accomplished climbing one of the 14 peaks “alpine style”.

I’m quite ok with that.

If the rockies were 28k instead of 14k then I still don’t think there’d be a situation where we hire poor villagers from the outskirts of Denver to put their lives on the line. I really believe the high peaks are summited expedition-style because the poverty makes that practical, which in turn allows many more people to reach the top

But most mountaineers get by without having to hire people to carry their shit for them. Certainly people here in Colorado use guides from time to time, but i’ve never heard of anyone using a porter. Maybe i’m ignorant, but it seems like mountaineers only use porters in the himalayas because they are cheap and disposable.

Perhaps if you can’t summit a mountain without another human to carry your equipment then it should be ok to not summit that mountain.

Sure - and i’m sure I could find people who’d play a game of russian roulette for $1M but it’d be massively unethical to hire people to do that.

So there’s obviously some line - as a society we consider it ethical to hire forestry workers or deep sea fishermen even though they have a significantly higher risk of death that most other professions. I think a 25% death rate is just unethical in the extreme, even Everest is something like 1%.

Also I can understand taking that risk for yourself. Certainly it’s way outside my comfort zone, but I’m not going to tell someone else they can’t do something dangerous. But how can you go out and hire people to help you knowing there’s a 25% chance they’ll be giving their lives for you?

Yeah, though some of that’s genetics too. I’m a couple years younger than him and honestly think I look at least a couple of years younger than him. I eat fairly well, but definitely have occasional donuts and frequent pizza.

Plus even if you could get an exact number of USDA calories (which you probably could do with hyper-processed foods) there’s no guarantee that your body would extract that exact number of usable calories because that’s a function of your individual digestive system and how it responds to certain inputs.