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Doing art (or anything else) as a profession certainly has those risks, but art as an activity in general does not have any significant excess risks associated with it. (I would not consider "getting engulfed" as an excess risk since that can happen with anything.)

You may be right that there is some truth to what the top poster said. I did not mean to imply I thought it was absolutely and categorically untrue. I just think it's broadly untrue. "Things that are unrisky are unfun" is a not a generally true statement, for most people. It could certainly be true for some people. But, I suspect most people who say such things are rationalizing their choice of activity, exactly as the linked article suggests.

I would guess that if you broke it down, being in space is quite safe, but getting to space is extremely dangerous. This matches intuition, since in the former case you are just floating in freefall, but in the latter case you are seated atop a metal tube filled with explosive chemicals travelling at absurd speeds through an atmosphere.

Not to get too into the weeds, but depending on the stretch of road (frequency of onramps, and also the style), I might be one step to the left of the rightmost lane. Being in the leftward lanes isn't really an option at the speed limit, since I'd be blocking traffic, which has risks of its own.

Hrm, I don't really agree. There are a lot of very interesting things that are not very risky. Most productive activities are not very risky (art, woodworking, home improvement, etc.), and are very interesting to some of us. Sex is another example of something a lot of people like which carries little risk of harm.

I don't think there is good evidence beyond anecdata that the retired die early or that trust fund kids are depressed.

An important and oft-ignored aspect of participating in certain activities! Even this doesn't capture everything. I am also very concerned about the possibility of being maimed by my chosen activities.

For example, open water swimming seems pretty dangerous, but the outcomes are (I would suppose) pretty binary. At the end you're either alive or you're drowned. I suppose that, rarely, someone almost drowns and is left partly brain damaged. But I think most of the time it's on or it's off. Motorcycling, on the other hand, probably maims far more people than it kills. So that makes it relatively more dangerous per hour!

But then you have to adjust by your risk factors. I am an extremely cautious driver. I stay in the right lane, I follow the speed limit, I try to avoid merging, and I check my mirrors. I do these things because, although I have spent a lot of time behind the wheel, I don't trust my fallible human perception and reflexes to take on riskier habits. I suspect, just based on the frequency with which I get into collisions compared to other people I know, that I'm safer than average. If I brought my driving attitude to motorcycling, it seems reasonable to believe that I'd be at much lower risk than the typical, weaving-in-and-out-of-traffic sport-bike rider. But how much so? Nobody has done any study that will help me guess. So, for now, I avoid it, and find fun in things that are less likely to leave me paralyzed.

Anyway, just some things that bumble through my head when I think about activity risk.

Barcelona is mainstream, sure. That is an objective fact. But the person I responded to seemed to imply that the Vox article was making some sort of normative judgment about Barcelona. I don't think that any such judgment actually exists in the article.

I don't think that viewpoint (that Barcelona is played out and too mainstream) is at all the message of this Vox article. If anything, the article is a criticism of that viewpoint.

Just more evidence that everyone parents differently. My friends hardly hear about the good stuff that my kids do. I want to talk about the grime and the shit and the speech delays and the temper tantrums. That's the stuff I feel like I need to get off my chest, when I'm afraid for their future.

> They aren't the literal product that Google sells to advertisers, the data is.

Google does not sell data. They sell attention, like all advertising companies. They make a lot of money because 1. they have a lot of attention to sell and 2. they do a better job than most advertisers at finding the particular bits of attention that will be most valuable to the buyers. The data is part of what allows them to do that, or so the story goes.

Also, although I agree with your conclusion, I think you've been slightly misled as to what matters in the antitrust investigation. It is not the colloquial understanding of the word "consumer" that matters, it's the legal one. I'm under the impression that, as it happens, the legal one here comports with the colloquial one. I.e., what matters is the impact of Google's policies and practices on individual private citizens and residents. The impact on other businesses does not matter except inasmuch as such impact transitively harms private consumers.

It sounds great to have to go in to the branch office to conduct banking business that can't be handled on the website?

I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?

In a database product I'm familiar with, the prepared statements are cached according to their content and those cached objects are shared between connections. Only if they fall out of the cache do they have to be re-parsed. I had assumed that's how all databases worked.

I'm somewhat surprised at the mechanism you're describing, but now I read the documentation it does seem to be the case. I wonder if a small piece of middle-ware might be sufficient to replicate the behavior I'm describing on a connection pool, and whether that would be desirable.

Even with that, the SQL would be parsed once per connection? So, the costs should be de minimis, unless the benchmark were short indeed?