> (IDK about you, but 3 seconds of googling is easier for me than conducting my own personal polling of people I see out and about)

Information gathered from the Internet doesn't always match my personal spot-checked polls. I was able to call the BTC peak when I noticed that randoms I'd poll were talking about BTC for example, while the internet was damn sure that BTC would keep going up.

When my Bank-teller is able to talk about her Bitcoin "investments", I know we've reached the peak. Besides, people are excited to talk about their viewpoints and its always fascinating to me. (I do visit the banks on occasion still: gotta collects $5 bills and coins and ATMs don't always dispense those)

Its not a lot of effort and yet gets me tons of information. I don't really see any downsides in just doing it on occasion. I'm not like a newspaper reporter or anything (so this isn't my job), but having a quickie pulse on what other people are actually thinking is really helpful in making my own decisions about the world.

This is just the simple "what's the talk around town" sorta thing. Its not hard to start conversations and enjoy another person's point of view.

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Besides, when we start talking about innately political subjects (ex: is the current shortage due to unemployment checks vs the current shortage due to a lack of immigrants??), it helps to do some on-the-grounds fact-checking. Asking random strangers a quickie question every now and then results in far higher quality. Sure, the strangers remain biased according to their own viewpoints, but... there's still huge amounts of information from their perspectives.

And its not always politics. Asking about "hey, what's that food you're eating? Is it good?" is a good way to find new restaurants. Or "When is your next shipment of X coming in?" is a great one to ask in stores, so you know when some hot commodity is shipping (ex: GPUs at Microcenter or PS5 at Target). Its not like the internet knows when the specific Target at my street-corner is getting the next shipment of PS5s.

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What do you think of "X new product" (useful in determining my next stock purchase: is there on-the-ground buzz about the Ford Maverick? Should I buy the stock F??). Etc. etc. There's just always good information to be gained from helpful strangers. And more often than not, I think people are happy to have a bit of smalltalk in the day (as long as you keep it short).

What does this have to do with the number of dead cooks?

Well, I guess I haven't really asked around how many cooks have died. Long story short. That's just not a statistic I've personally gathered (and such a statistic would be socially awkward to discuss).

A lot of what I was talking about in the top comments were just the anecdotes that I could personally verify with these spot-checks.

Waiters / Barbers / etc. etc. _ARE_ afraid of dying. Not necessarily the ones serving you, but their former coworkers aren't coming back because of the fear. Maybe dead-cooks have something to do with it. But I can say for sure that front-line workers are willing to talk about their fears (or their viewpoint on the fears of their former coworkers).