site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Between 2008-21, 379 people were killed during the act of taking a selfie. The combined value of these selfies is not $3.79 billion. If you were to somehow to collect all of them and try to auction them off, I'd be impressed if you made a few hundred bucks.

If you read this story of a man who fell out of a moving train while trying to lean out to take a selfie and think "God, what a fucking idiot - what a stupid, pointless way to die", then try to understand that that is exactly how we all feel about you.

That's the wrong way to think about it. You'd have to instead multiply it by the risk they took, or consider the value of all such risky selfies.

According to Skookum's logic, if you die for something, that thing therefore has value equal to a human life. Following this logic, a selfie of some random nobody is worth nothing - unless they die in the act of taking it, in which case it's worth $10 million.