Can you elaborate less metaphorically? I'm not sure what coincidence you're pointing at.
Another part of the calculus here is that Brightline is faster than driving. Very roughly:
Wikipedia says it takes 3:25 and Google says driving takes 4:03. If we call it half an hour saved per long distance trip, that's ~1.5 million hours saved.
Long distance trips were about 60% of the passenger miles in your model, so if we assume they were also 60% of the fatalities, that's a statistical cost of $1.5 billion, or $1,000 per hour saved. (Minus some adjustment because cars also kill people, so we can call it $950 instead if we take the 20x number.) Compared to the $40/hr that a life seems to be valued at (assuming a fatality represents 40 years lost and we value the cost at $13.7 million).
...I didn't actually generate an advance prediction, but if I had I think it would have been at least an order of magnitude lower.
By contrast: if we assume a fatality represents 40 years of life lost, and we value the cost at $13.7 million, that's about $40/hr.
Some details that might be relevant (in that I can imagine you'd get different results if the answers changed):
(Or if you think some of these aren't relevant, I'm interested to hear that too.)
Semaglutide (aka Ozempic and Wegovy) activates only GLP1Receptor. We’ve covered why that helps, but often comes at the cost of fatigue.
Hm, I'm missing why it comes at the cost of fatigue?
Both Willy and Toni had been swept off. In the fall, the rope had tangled itself around Willy's neck and strangled him. Edi, still at the top of the cliff face and tied to both the fallen men, had been smashed against a rock at the top, fracturing his skull before freezing to death soon after. But his frozen body remained pressed against the rock, saving Toni from certain death.
Not important, just something I noticed: wikipedia has it that these causes of death were the other way around.
[Willy] Angerer also fell and was killed when his body hit the rock face, while [Edi] Rainer quickly asphyxiated from the weight of the rope around his diaphragm.
But it doesn't source that claim specifically and I didn't go hunting.
Incidentally, there's a film called the Eiger Sanction involving an attempt to scale the Eigerwand, in which
3/4 of the team die. (It sounds like the novel it's adapted from was partly based on this event.)
During filming:
While the team was preparing to be helicoptered off the north face, [climbing advisor Mike] Hoover remembered they had not taken any footage from the climbers' point of view of the boulders crashing down on them. With his handheld camera, Hoover and 26-year-old British climber David Knowles rappelled down to the ledge and took the needed footage. As they were gathering their gear, a huge rock broke free and smashed into the climbers, killing Knowles and leaving Hoover with a fractured pelvis and severely bruised muscles. Following an impromptu wake for Knowles, [director Clint] Eastwood considered cancelling the production, but the climbers persuaded him to continue, assuring him that they all knew the risks of their trade and did not want Knowles' death to be meaningless.
Did you update the post? By my read, Mis-Understandings' comment still disagrees with it, in particular with
The entire business of selling flight tickets is actually a loss leader for the airlines' real business of selling miles.
But I'm not sure if I'm reading right.
By contrast the lives of factory farmed animals are incredibly gentle and easy, with almost no suffering
I find this believable for cows, but not chickens.
We have been breeding domestic animals for millennia to thrive in captivity
As I understand it, factory farming conditions in the past 100-200 years are very different to what farmed animals experienced prior to that. If people in 1700 had tried raising chickens in conditions we raise them in today, the chickens would have died of disease and vitamin deficiencies.
So sure, farmed chickens are probably very different from the wild chickens they're descended from. But farmed chickens aren't raised in the conditions we've been breeding them in for millennia.
As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.
I rarely notice myself judging someone for not responding.
I do judge people for making mistakes, or for omitting important considerations. And when a person doesn't reply to criticism, I'm more likely to believe they've made a mistake or an important omission.
Not a proper reply, but on some of your specific points:
What examples are you thinking of here? I'm not aware of any other animals that deliberately sharpen rocks, or make any tools that I'd consider equally impressive to stone handaxes, let alone bows and arrows.
(Caveat that this article says monkeys have been seen making sharp rocks, but not using the sharp rocks they made.)
"One does not live through a turn of the galaxy by taking occasional small risks."