I’m going to horribly oversimply this. For example. Say I am wearing a shirt a cheap one for Wal-Mart.
This shirt was produced in a sweat shop. That sweat shop has .0005 deaths per day. Thus by wearing this shirt and supporting the mechanisms that brought it to me. I have a killcount for today a number substantially smaller then .0005 and obviously there’s a tonne of subjectivity on what that number might be.
Now include the dye factory that made the shirt green, the shoes I am wearing, the bus I am riding in, the coffee I drink. All these luxuries and that number may go up a little.
I am wondering if this is somthing that is being considered anywhere is somone building a calculation to determine our daily kill counts.
I’m sure most of us probably don’t what to know what ours might be, but knowing what parts of our daily lives have the highest values we might work harder to change for the better.
I belive so, though it isn’t to be trusted. You know the whole thing about coconuts kill more that sharks? That’s a lie and was actually and experiment to see how far a lie could spread.
What about taxes?
Yhea thatd probably increase the score a bit. I whouldnt consider any kind if offsetting either. Even if your taxes go to Healthcare and support systems it doesn’t subtract from the amount going to military spending, wars, weapons, ect. Even smaller things like road expansions, and law enforcement count. Depending on the area these can cause more death.
Depends on the country at that point tbh
Depends on the country for much of this I’d imagine. If your dependent on imports of common needs then you’d be creating a need for a massive transit network to supply it.
Though the study should focus on the number and not how people use it. I could speculate that if all your neighbours have the same number as you you’d be tolerant of that.
Can’t wait until we can make a supercomputer that can calculate this. Tbh the algorithm might be the hardest bit
Agreed. I suspect we are nearly there.
We probably could calculate it. But we’d need the algorithm.
I understood the title totally the opposite way :D
Like, how many people die because of a every day objects for example a spoon or a bar of soap or an office chair etc.After reading the whole post it reminded me so much of the points system from the series “The Good Place”
It’s not far off from that. Though I don’t really belive in any kind if afterlife I belive we need to do our best while we in the boring place.
But I also belive the consequences of our daily actions, purchases ect. are obscured from us. Shirt conpanies are not exactlly going to willing advertise that by purchusing ther product your resonsbile for .0005 deaths. So it can be a bit difficult to know where we actually stand morally.
I hope you’re not doing this for chasing a high KillToDeath-ratio, like we do in FPS games. 😅
No. It’s just a terrible thought that plagues my mind from time to time. My goal whould be to keep that number as low as possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Micromorts is an adjacent topic and has the data you’re looking for, just not the grouping. Somewhere to start if you’re curious.
This could be used. Though the examples here here are more oriented to risk of death for doing X. Micromorts could probably be used in determining values I am thinking of.
I am terrible at math so excuse the terrible example.
Let’s say working in a sweatshop in Vietnam has a micromort of .6 and the resouce you are calculating uses up to one third of these shops. Then you’d be adding .3 to your count.
We can say 1000 micromorts is one probable death.
It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I’ve not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.
They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.
I believe the UK’s NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It’s caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn’t pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.
In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.
Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. “Going Postal” I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he’s killed, despite never raising a sword.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702
This seems exactly like what you want.
Ha! I remember this one.I think that exact quote from may be what caused me ponder this over many years.
I will try to get into those studies when I have better time to digest that knowledge but I thank you for sharing them.
