Fellow climbers say video footage shows Kristin Harila’s team walking over body of frostbitten man during record ascent

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2 points

Oh, come on now. In the worst year, Everest claimed 11 lives.

In the United States of America, on average, 22 people die from COWS.

Extreme sports, like mountain climbing, are dangerous, but not nearly as deadly as fishing (drownings).

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3 points
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It’s a bit misleading to compare total numbers instead of percentages. The most people to ever summit Everest in one year was 800 in 2018, and an average of 4.4 deaths occur per year to do it.

That’s 0.55% mortality for this one mountain.

If you apply the same odds to any other sport they would probably be banned. Could you imagine if 9 NFL players died every year? It’s roughly less than 1 per year at the moment I believe and that’s still pretty bad.

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-1 points

It’s a bit misleading to compare total numbers instead of percentages. The most people to ever summit Everest in one year was 800 in 2018, and an average of 4.4 deaths occur per year to do it.

That’s 0.55% mortality for this one mountain.

Of course, the more participants, the lower the percentage goes down. But we are still only talking about a handful of deaths vs hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of deaths from other ordinary activities.

If you apply the same odds to any other sport they would probably be banned. Could you imagine if 9 NFL players died every year? It’s roughly less than 1 per year at the moment I believe and that’s still pretty bad.

I’m sure it would, especially if the sport was accessible to everyone (which mountain climbing is not).

For us regular folks, I’m more concerned with how many people drown doing recreational activities, or die in car accidents doing non-important travelling, or die from legally accessible drugs and alcohol.

I think the outrage over “allowing” mountain climbing is misplaced. That’s my opinion.

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20 points

I don’t agree with op’s opinion or yours, but you are really misusing statistics.

Way more people are exposed to cows and fishing than to Mount Everest, orders of magnitude more.

Or do you think a fisherman should perform comparable preparation to someone climbing to 8k meters?

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-7 points

Fishermen, yes, should be trained and pass a swimming test before heading on the water. These are preventable deaths with very easy solutions to prevent them.

And yes, fair enough that there are more people fishing than mountain climbing, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it causes more deaths than any other sport. Nobody is asking for fishing to be banned because it’s too dangerous.

As for cow exposure, more people are exposed to dogs, like orders of magnitude more, yet cows still kill more people. So mere exposure doesn’t paint a full picture.

People climbing mountains know that they might not make it back. It’s a risk, just like scuba diving, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, or any other hundreds of things we do for sport, fitness, and entertainment.

Someone shouldn’t say that mounting climbing should be banned for only a few deaths here and there, when you have literally any other sport causing more harm.

Statistically speaking, mountain climbing is likely safer than driving to the mountain. 😂

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5 points

Someone shouldn’t say that mounting climbing should be banned for only a few deaths here and there, when you have literally any other sport causing more harm.

I’m all for keeping mountain climbing legal, but I don’t think the logic behind this holds up.

Russian Roulette has a far higher rate of death in participants than fishing, but probably results in less yearly deaths. By this logic, Russian Roulette should be legal because it causes less overall harm.

Applying the same logic to your animal example - I found a study saying tigers kill on average 1-2 people in the US per year, less than 1/10th the number killed by cows. Does that mean people should be allowed to own tigers?

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6 points

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if these hikers themselves died en masse trying to go up Everest or whichever mountain alone. Let them keep doing it. It’s like those people who jump or fall into the Grand Canyon—I don’t think there should be barriers, if they are dumb enough to get too close and fall in then, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, that’s a shame. My concern is their exploiting people who are far poorer than them to accompany them on this unnecessary journey, which they may not even want to do, only to sometimes perish.

If fishermen die while doing a hobby, that’s a tragedy but they chose to participate in it. But if they had paid some poor individual to help them in a dangerous fishing situation, at a lake or something, and this was a common practice because people with more resources wouldn’t take such an unnecessarily risky job, then I would also say fishing at that location should just be banned. Not because of the fishermen who do it willingly, but because of the poor they exploit in the process and who die for their enjoyment or enrichment. And even if the fishermen were doing it for their own job, that would also be tragic and maybe people shouldn’t fish in such a location if it were dangerous, but at least they didn’t die for an entirely and totally pointless job.

Getting fish for others to eat is a valuable and meaningful job, shepherding vainglorious Europeans and Americans with a deathwish for no real reason is not a job worth dying for, in my opinion. But it just shows how these expeditions exploit the global poor to death for just the simple pleasures of the relatively wealthy.

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