Fellow hoverboards near edge of skyscraper

boing
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[Read the post]

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I hate this shit.
It’s such a nasty example youth’s hubris, and it’s knowing that he’s going to end up dead if he caries on- not as in “if” but rather "when."
And I hate that we (as a society) are willing to gawk at this shit.

How is it better than the Romans watching men fight tigers and shit?

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Since the oxygen is thinner that high up, there’s less chance of a fire?

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No tigers get killed? (presumably)

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I get what you’re saying, and part of me agrees with you.

On the other hand, I doubt most of these guys are motivated by the attention. There are far less lethal and more effective ways of getting that. It may be that they live longer for having people paying attention, if it means they have someone who will pay for the high-end squirrel suit or the circus-grade tightrope.

As for our gawking, I bet that says more about our neurological wiring than our societal failings. The sense of being unable to look away from a train wreck is probably species-wide for some deep evolutionary reason.

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Does not hover

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*cough* republicans primaries *cough*

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Romans didn’t have youtube, obviously.

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I see one of these in his future.

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I get an huge adrenaline rush watching these. I wonder if these videos can be used as some sort of psychopath test.

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Well, we didn’t enslave him and chain him to the ‘hoverboard’ to risk death for our amusement, so there is that?

I realize that bounded rationality is a bit of a mess, and ‘voluntary’ is such a tricky concept; but there’s still a fair distance between ‘people doing dumb things because of judgement quite possibly clouded by youth and peer pressure’ and ‘almost literally feeding slaves into the meatgrinder as the crowd goes wild’.

Our taste may be no better; but our methods would be hard pressed to be as bad.

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Of course they didn’t. They wasted all their time and effort building the aqueducts; which are a series of tubes. Since a series of tubes is what the internet is not, they clearly lacked internet access.

QED by Stevens’ syllogism.

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Typical Roman IT practices.

“… one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.”

  • Robert Firth
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Are there in fact stories of people plummeting to their deaths after trying stunts like these? The videos crop up with sufficient frequency that you’d think, statistically, horrible things must be happening somewhere. And what might be the consequences for whoever is on the ground and experiences the collision at terminal velocity?

On that note, I’m also curious about how many thousands of hours of training people put in before they decide it’s time to make a very insane-looking video.

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Do a Google News search on [fall stunt] and you’ll find a wide variety of such stunts gone wrong just over the last month.

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Too decadent to expect their programs to return with their shields or on them; too archaic for zero. It must have been rough.

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Who else was rooting for him to fall?

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There have, in fact, been a number of deaths associated with this sort of stuff.
As far as hours of training before doing stuff like this? Close to zero.

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I don’t think I’m hitting on the right keywords, as I seem to be finding everything from Top Gear to Bernie Sanders except accident reports (with maybe the exception of this one and this one).

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