Stuff like this seems a bit... selfish? to me. Why risk falling, and people having to see that/having to clean that up? For a bit of adrenaline and publicity? Meh.
The Taipei tourism bureau disagrees. Many here as well. The more eyes on Taiwan, the better. I'm grateful Alex was willing to risk his life for this spectacle, now potentially millions will have at least some concept of Taipei and Taiwan in their minds.
> Statistically more danger than a free solo climber.
While I don't have statistics on free solo death rate per climb compared to death per car trip, this is most likely very, very wrong. You should really stop throwing such strange wild claims..
This is in contradiction to the experience of driving, where any number of people on the road with you are untrained, undertrained, drunk, or suffering diseases that affect their ability to drive. Or just doing crimes like speeding or dangerous driving. So when climbing, your fate is entirely in your hands and that of nature's. When driving, it's in the hands of many strangers.
False equivalence. It's by no means required to free climb a skyscraper. While you might say it's also not required to get behind the wheel of a car, the difficulty in getting places (like a job, for example) without doing so in many locations makes it more or less required.
Well then rather than criticize a guy for doing an extreme sport, perhaps we can direct our energy inwards towards why we allowed ourselves to design such a fatal society.
That a government would be willing to risk this for publicity isn't really changing my mind.
"Come to Taiwan; you may or may not watch someone plummet to their death while here" doesn't appeal to me, personally anyway. Anyway that guy that did it with safety equipment a few years back made the rounds in the news too, so not sure this was necessary in that regard.
C'mon, didn't some guy do a skydive from nearly outer space? Do you criticize the country he landed in? Or red bull for sponsoring it or the many other extreme sports?
Injury and death happens in rock climbing even when tethered. Not often but it does happen, that's the nature of the sport and it's the same as BMX, skateboarding, motocross, any kind of racing.
It's also the same as just living - go look up Taiwan traffic deaths. There's so much more dangerous things happening here and wherever you live, it just seems silly to criticize someone for doing an extreme sport publicly.
If Baumgartner - or any athlete/governing body for a sport - forewent safety measures to make it a better spectacle, then yes, I would be criticizing them!
They all forgo the safety measures of "don't smash into each other's heads" despite repeated studies showing NFL players frequently have long term brain damage from the sport.
It's an extreme sport and a thrilling thing to watch. The danger is exciting and makes his accomplishment all the more stunning. I think it's really cool that there are humans willing to push the limits of the human experience like this.
I don't believe GP meant it like they're physically forcing their friend to change - just that there's a big difference when someone recognizes their problem and is trying to solve it; and them not doing so, where you can still encourage them to fix the problem regardless.
Indeed. Don't think anything is being "concealed"! The rediscovered memoir has been transcribed and made available at the link posted above, while the full research seems to be available without a paywall here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-s...
Reading any encyclopedia, for that matters. The job of an encyclopedist is literally to distill “generally useful” information, it has never been about being exhaustive.
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