Society has moved into a dangerous position of rewarding people for extreme risk taking, so long as it pans out. I'm not saying this guy wasn't responsible. He totally was, but things like this are going to keep happening the more we encourage disastrous risks.
They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards for cars. There's a great 99% Invisible episode about the shift from believing injury from car accidents was unavoidable/the fault of the driver to making cars safer in impacts:
Stories like this seem to be a step backwards. Regulation can sometimes hinder some industry (usually when one industry lobbies for it to keep competitors), but it also has an incredible track record of making things safer.
The solution is not stop encouraging people to take extreme risks, it's to stop encouraging them to take risk that put others, and not them, at risk (and punish them if they do so).
All of the great services and products we use today came from extreme risk taking, it's the corner stone of entrepreneurship.
> Society has moved into a dangerous position [...]
> They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards [...]
Maybe it's seen a bit of a resurgence recently, but history (and the attendant selection bias) has always rewarded risk-takers whose risks paid off, while letting the rest die off-screen.
At the most basic level you have the people doing risky stunts for YouTube, etc, and getting killed. Like the woman who shot her boyfriend in the chest with a Desert Eagle, at his insistence, because he thought an encyclopedia volume would protect him.
They use to happen all the time before we started focusing on safety standards for cars. There's a great 99% Invisible episode about the shift from believing injury from car accidents was unavoidable/the fault of the driver to making cars safer in impacts:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/
Stories like this seem to be a step backwards. Regulation can sometimes hinder some industry (usually when one industry lobbies for it to keep competitors), but it also has an incredible track record of making things safer.