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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Seems like nothing burger to me. You can probably get my identity by putting it into a LLM and tracing for linguistic patterns.

But IMO 100% never get in a helicopter. At a lesser certainty don’t get in a private plane. Some of the more corporate ones may be fine. If you have a private plane maybe just take IG photos and leave it on the ground. I’m probably going too far saying this but it’s definitely an area where you need to it the right way.

Unless you get into extreme sports, whatever activity you're going to do is pretty much guaranteed to be less dangerous than the drive to get there. Live a little when you get the opportunity to do so. You don't have forever.

Maybe I'm saying this from the viewpoint of someone who lives in the hyper-overregulated EU, but still.

I'm not sure about that.

To start with, a huge chunk of road fatalities are due to alcohol. And 'drive sober and not when the bars are closing' cuts the danger from drunk drivers down by, like, 90 something percent. There's a few other basic steps to minimize road danger- drive a car and not a motorbike, etc- but the median driver already does them. You know that thing where the vast majority of drivers claim to be 'above average'? That's statistically true because the average is dragged down by habitual drunk drivers, text and drivers, etc.

But there's also lots of common recreational activities, at least in the US, that are at least as dangerous as driving. Horseback riding, power sports, and waterskiing, for example, are very popular red tribe activities, which are also fairly dangerous.

Seems like nothing burger to me. You can probably get my identity by putting it into a LLM and tracing for linguistic patterns.

This seems to be completely orthogonal to the tech described here? This one is not about doxxing smut authors, it is about doxxing smut readers. Most website UIs do not feature enough navigation elements using natural language to make IDing individuals based on their language use feasible.

But IMO 100% never get in a helicopter

I thought this was a myth? Obviously less safe than passenger airlines but on the order of cars. When I ask ChatGPT that's what it tells me at least

Normalizing to miles or equivalent trips helps reduce the range and can put them around motorcycle risk, but helicopters as a full class remain a good bit more dangerous than cars. To be fair, that’s heavily driven by training flight and Robinson incidents, so fair-weather flight operations under Part 135 are a lot less concerning, but it’s still a risk-taking behavior.

Normalizing to miles or equivalent trips helps reduce the range and can put them around motorcycle risk, but helicopters as a full class remain a good bit more dangerous than cars. To be fair, that’s heavily driven by training flight and Robinson incidents, so fair-weather flight operations under Part 135 are a lot less concerning, but it’s still a risk-taking behavior.

Part 135 helicopters are only about 2x as dangerous as part 135 aeroplanes and 2-3x as dangerous as cars, and it isn't clear if this is driven by things like search-and-rescue work where you know you are taking a risk. My guess is that fair-weather part 135 helicopters are safer than cars.

But IMO 100% never get in a helicopter.

Yes you might die but the helicopter glacier tour is worth risking your life for. Put it on your bucket list.

I would expect the helicopter glacier tour to be hard on the less dangerous end, because if eg unfavorable weather comes up you just tell the tourists it's cancelled today for weather concerns, raincheck.

Definitely awesome. The tour around Denali in a small plane is pretty good too. And skipping the long bus trip from Queenstown to Milford Sound is worth it. But then, I think the epicureans had it right with their motto -- dum vivimus vivamus, or "while we live, let us LIVE"

Maybe. I might be more risks cautious. One-off vacation flights may be fine. Though personally I think I am fine watching drone footage etc.

Cumulative risk vs per-exposure risk. Once, vs every day for an entire career. It's fine.

Could, vs have, vs commoditized, everybody's already doing it, always has, and it's a good thing. This seems to me, I guess naively, like it would be a big jump in proliferation from what I'd assumed was the current state of things.