[ExI] quiet growth

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Grigg
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 7:01 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] quiet growth

 

>>…Spike, I found your posting "quietly inspirational."  John  :  )

 

John you are too kind, sir.

 

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 3:30 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

 

>…Congratulations on successful DIY!  A good repair job does give a
great sense of achievement.  (As you know from motorbikes).

>…However, ladders and roofs are surprisingly dangerous. Check the
accident statistics…

 

Ja, here’s another spin on it.  When riding a motorcycle, a prole knows he is exposed as all hell, that it is an added dimension of risk, that it is unforgiving, so the level of concentration is raised a notch, or several notches, to compensate.  A biker isn’t fooling with a radio or texting, she is focusing on the next thing that could jump out and kill her.

 

Ladders: you know you are up high, that ladders can fall over and so forth, so when a homeowner is up there, she partially compensates and does things in a careful manner like the biker.  However…

 

When a smoke detector battery gives out it starts chirping and you can’t ignore it, so the usual reaction of the homeowner is to get a chair.  Under those conditions there is not really the perception that this is a dangerous activity, because it isn’t for most of your life: even I am still young enough to fall off a chair without injury, in my tragically late youth.  But the elderly can really thrash themselves that way.  It is something kind of unusual: feet in a restricted area, standing without the usual references to the sides, looking up and reaching overhead with both hands which can confuse the balance organs.  It is easy for me to envision a geezer falling off a chair trying to change a smoke detector battery.

 

So here’s my line of reasoning in reference to quiet growth.  Building codes were derived to require smoke detectors which have a battery backup in case power fails in a fire (that can happen of course, so we get the reasoning behind it.)  But the batteries drain over time, and when the battery gets low, it causes chirping, then proles damage or slay themselves in the attempt to remedy the situation in the middle of the night.  Perhaps the requirement for a battery backup damaged or slew more proles than it saved.  

 

Over the years, building codes have reduced electrical fires to practically nothing, so the advantage of a battery backup has declined while the number of drunken and/or stoned geezers has increased.  So we may have a rare case where building codes should go directly from requiring battery backup in smoke detectors to prohibiting battery backup in smoke detectors.

 

Back to your point BillK: your estimate suggested a kiloprole per month in Jolly Olde suffers from ladder accidents.  Without looking up anything, we can attempt a single digit mental calculation.  England is like the US (other than that odd way you guys talk American) and I think the colonies have about triple the population, so we can estimate 3k per month or about 40k per year colonists end up in the body shop or the morgue from ladder falls.  I can’t be sure of course, but my estimate for chair-falls from smoke detectors could easily be that high if not higher, because a typical home has about 8 smoke detectors, and they fail in the middle of the night when one doesn’t feel like going for a ladder, especially if one has been imbibing.

 

I live in an area where I estimate there are 100k people close enough to my abode such that if a house fire occurs, I can hear the siren.  I estimate that area has less than 5 house fires per year, so 5 in 100k, scale that to the nation, I get around 10k to 20k house fires per year.  A house might have an average of 3 residents, so one might be up around the 40 kiloproles per year impacted by house fires, but wait; my original notion was that the battery backup in the smoke detectors.  Only a fraction of these would fail because of the power being off in a house fire, the majority of which in our modern times are caused by the residents becoming stoned or drunk and forgetting something on the stove, in which case the power goes right on (kitchens are on a separate circuit protected by ground fault breakers.)

 

I would estimate that about four times as much damage or serious death is caused by battery-backups in smoke detectors than is prevented.

 

So what do we do? 

 

spike

 

 

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