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Imananimal

- 2 years ago

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Should our tax dollars be spent to bail out fools and thrill seekers?

A guy out surfing the big waves in front of Hurricane Earl got sucked out, and fire, police and ambulance people were called out. This twists my cork. Same with how big tax bucks are spent hauling fools off mountains who engage in extreme sports.

If they like risk so much, why not let them have what they're after? People do some dumb sh*t - maybe it's better to remove them from the gene pool (and nominate them for a Darwin award). Or if they live, send them a bill!

Public money should be spent on common good, not bailing out thrill-seekers.

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Yes, even if the people doing this are being "dumb," they should be rescued. Maybe some of them will be more careful when thrill seeking. And by the way, some of these people do a lot more living than the regulars anyway.

And by your logic, where do we draw the line? Who gets to decide who deserves to live or die?

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I think it's God way of minimizing the fool pool and we should simply let it take it's course

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Are you talking about Wall Street or Investment banking?

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It comes down to where you draw the line. The law of the sea is that if someone needs help and you're the closest, you go help, regardless of the inconvenience. Are you going to decide how to classify which people should live or die? What if it's a sinking cruise ship? Are you going to ban any rescue efforts on the grounds that they were all having too much fun and should have been in a nice safe hotel on land?

Besides which, whenever an adventurer is rescued at public expense, the media makes ludicrous speculations about the cost. For example, claiming that it cost $6 million to rescue Isabelle Autissier... these claims are always based on the pay of employees and maintenance of equipment that would have been incurred regardless of the advent of an emergency, and thus vastly inflated. The Australian Navy denied having even calculated the cost, let alone quoted anything to the media.

It's big media news every time an adventurer gets into trouble, but guess what? There are thousands of them out there on any given day, most of them won't get into trouble. For the ones that do, we have rescue services, the same rescue services that safeguard working vessels.

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By that same logic, we should terminate Down's Syndrome pregnancies...

@Imananimal pacific northwest

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