itsdevlin

I really hope that part of their use of funds is to hire a design team.

Additionally, it removes a large liability on the balance sheet and makes accounting a fair bit easier.

I also do those. I also climb, slackline, paraglide, ride motorcycles, surf, ride bikes, and read on the beach.

To clarify, it was one landing where I broke two bones. Made a bad decision at the bridge on my 9th jump and broke both sides of my ankle smoking into the side of the canal. I tell everyone I know exactly how I ended up in that situation, what my decision making process was, and how I assess jumps now in order to not put myself in the same situation again.

Also, I work at a large dropzone and with a well-organized group to help coach new jumpers along the way. Me breaking myself on my first weekend is a pretty strong coaching moment that I've watched shift people's view on the sport.

Happy to let you know who I am in real life if you feel this strongly that I'm part of the problem.

In short, no.

To bring a strawman into this: Would you die for your commute? What about a burger? A beer? All of these things kill people, and all of them can be avoided. People don't, because they like them. They accept the given level of risk by mitigating it as best they can, and going on about their lives. Risk is omnipresent.

The real killer is when you don't understand the risk. If you think something has a 1:1mm risk of serious physical harm, you'll probably be alright with it. If something has a 1:100 risk of the same level of physical harm, you'll probably think twice (or you'll prepare yourself differently).

Risk management takes two forms in our world: Unknown Unknowns, and Normalization of Risk. For newbies, unknown unknowns kill them. Thinking something is a 1:1m risk when it's 1:100 provides a real easy way to put yourself in a situation you're unprepared to handle. For experienced jumpers, normalization of risk is what seems to be killing us. If you take a shortcut that increases risk 10x, but you've taken it 1k times, in your brain it just becomes 'the way' and you forget that you're actually multiplying your risk. Do that enough different times and what in your brain is just 'the way' is actually the summation of a complex web of risk-multiplying shortcuts.

Remember both of those things, and you might make to your next birthday. Maybe. Maybe you'll get killed sitting at a stoplight by being rear-ended by a drunk driver, like my first base jumping mentor was.

It does, and most BASE jumpers that I know / have met / have taught are in their earlY 30's.

About half are American, mostly from middle-class backgrounds.

Doesn't it address this in the intro paragraph?

"The production of energy can be attributed to both mortality (deaths) and morbidity (severe illness) cases as a consequence of each stage of the energy production process: this includes accidents in the mining of the raw material, the processing and production phases, and pollution-related impacts."

Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.

As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.

For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows: - Exit safely - Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight - Deploy

These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.

After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:

- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds

In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.

Teaching's hard.

So as some people further in the thread have brought up, you start flying wingsuits out of airplanes, and you start in suits that are far more forgiving than the ones you'll end up flying. It's similar to how a pilot first learns how to land a Cessna before you try to land an F-18 on a carrier at night in a storm.

We do often (as instructors) talk about how nervous we get when we're with a student that we're pretty sure is just going to flatspin uncontrollably for like 8k ft and it's just like 'Okay heres everything you need to really have a bad afternoon. Dont? Please?'

Off of a rooftop would be practically suicidal. Wingsuits need time to inflate and start flying, which for the best guys on the planet is around 300 feet. Normal humans require about 400. 'Margin' is a word that has a bunch of different contexts, most of which still put wingsuit base in a reasonably safe range. Terrain flying, which is the sub-discipline of wingsuit base where you're goalposting trees, is indisputably the most dangerous sport on the planet, and I've lost six friends to it in the last year.

I don't know that i'd describe it as 'controversial' but would rather describe it as 'that thing a bunch of people with nowhere near enough experience or currency to be doing it keep doing and fucking killing themselves.'