6 Statistically Full of S#!t Dangers The Media Loves to Hype
If there's one thing we've learned from our elders it's that death is a big shit sandwich, and we've all gotta scarf it down one day. Assuming you're not a robot who can simply transfer your consciousness into a new body when the Reaper comes a-knocking, you've probably spent a little time pondering what is going to take you out in the end.
Chances are you're worrying about the wrong sandwich. Statistics show that the bogeymen behind some of the most widespread fears and phobias are downright toothless. At least when compared to the seemingly innocent stuff you didn't know could take you out at any moment. For instance ...
#6.
What's More Dangerous than Sharks? Cows.
Jaws, Deep Blue Sea and countless Syfy originals all tell us that sharks are killing dudes left and right. They're practically the Grim Reapers of the ocean. Sure, we know that sharks don't really attack a whole lot of people, but we see one shadow swimming back and forth beneath the waves at the beach and we don't give even the smallest shit about what's realistic -- our asses are headed back to shore.
And then we call this guy.
The media love to get in on the shark action, too. Like in 2001, when a young boy was attacked by a bull shark at Langdon Beach in Florida, then another attack occurred in the Bahamas. Before you knew it, we were dealing with a full-on shark invasion, the coverage of which was later dubbed "The Summer of the Shark." Everyone was so freaked out by the attacks that legislators were actually pushed to pass legislation to deal with sharks, which they totally did.
It actually turned out later that shark attacks were down when compared with previous years. The fact is, on average, only one, single, solitary person in the United States dies from a shark attack each year, a 1 in 3,748,067 chance in your lifetime. For every year that several people are killed by sharks, there are plenty of other years in which no one is.
Lazy-ass sharks.
What You Should be Afraid of:
You want to know what blood thirsty, murderous beast kills about 20 times as many people?
Cows. Cows killed 108 people between 2003 and 2008, an average of about 22 deaths a year, or a 1 in 173,871 chance. Like we said above, sharks just don't really attack that many people. Most of the time, they don't even attack people on purpose. They just think you kinda look like their food.
Cows, on the other hand, are pretty big and hella strong. They're easily able to crush a fully grown adult, and people are around them far more than they're around sharks. A charging bull or stampede can still take you by surprise and kill you dead before you can yell "Land Shark!" In other words, you're more likely to die by cow hoof than by shark bite ... and that's not even touching mad cow disease or E. coli.
#5.
What's More Dangerous Than Terrorists? Fireworks.
If you've watched television for more than 35 seconds in the last nine years, you might be aware that there are these people called terrorists, and they're going to destroy everything you love about America and capitalism. They could strike anywhere, and at any time.
While it's true that some of this fear has abated a bit in the years since 2001, one doesn't need to look far to find people who are horrified of getting caught in the middle of a terrorist attack. After all, terrorist plots are still ongoing, as evidenced by the Times Square car bomb attempt in May 2010 or Barack Obama's recent announcement about a foiled plot involving UPS and FedEx planes.. The fear has so permeated our consciousness that NPR contributor Juan Williams thought he was just echoing everyone else's sentiments when he expressed fear over seeing traditionally dressed Muslims on airplanes.
But Williams wasn't wrong to think others might share his headscarf vigilance. America has terrorism on the brain. And what do terrorists do? They kill people, that's what. Surely, by this point we all know at least one person who was killed by a terrorist, right?
Heart disease is not a terrorist.
Actually, chances are, you don't. In the years since 9/11, the statistical chance of being killed in a terror attack in the Western world has fallen to basically zero.
What You Should be Afraid of:
Patriotic holidays.
Fireworks kill about a dozen people a year, giving you 1 in 479,992 chance of being killed by them. And about 66 percent of those occur on the Fourth of July.
Double danger!
If you think we're cheating by only counting deaths since 9/11, then how about this: In the last decade -- including the 9/11 attacks -- you've been about 10 times more likely to die from a fire you accidentally set in your home than from a terrorist attack. Somebody should make a show about a Jack Bauer type who runs around reminding people to put out the goddamned cigarette before they pass out on the sofa.
"Ashtrays people, Jesus."
#3.
What's More Dangerous Than Elevators? Stairs.
What's the perfect torture contraption for a person who is afraid of heights, tight spaces and free-falling to his death? Besides a mechanism that stuffs that person into a coffin and catapults him off a canyon, obviously? An elevator. An elevator is the correct answer.
While they're the perfect cinematic devices for sexual tension and surprise character deaths, in reality elevators are hardly dangerous at all: Only about six people a year die in elevator accidents.
What You Should be Afraid of:
The stairs.
You're more likely to meet your death taking the stairs than riding an elevator. A little less than 2,000 people a year are killed by falling down stairs, giving you a lifetime chance of 1 in 1,818 and making stairs officially the deadliest thing in this article.
Don't run. That just provokes them.
It's a pretty simple equation, and probably the only thing Die Hard got right about building safety. Elevators are built to very high standards. There's not just one cable holding you up, there are six to eight, and each one is capable of holding up the entire listed capacity of the car, plus another 25 percent. One of those cables is also connected to a governor that determines when the car is falling too fast. If that happens, it kicks on a set of copper shoes on the sides of the elevator car that act like emergency brakes, bringing it to a halt within a few feet. There's even a big hydraulic spring at the bottom of the elevator shaft that will cushion the blow, just in case all that other shit fails.
Stairs, on the other hand, are fucking stairs. You're lucky to have a handrail, and if there's something spilled on them, you're not paying attention, you're trying to run down them too fast or you're moronically trying to slide down the banister, you're gonna fall all the way to the bottom, and it'll probably hurt pretty bad. And God help you if Bruce Willis rides you down a set of stair like you're a sled. He's going to murder you, make fun of the size of your feet and draw all over you with a marker.
So remember kids: Climbing around in elevator shafts = witty one liners.
Wrestling near stairs = 'Oh my God, what have I done to deserve this?'
No one has built any new nuclear plants in Japan, either, which is why the Fukujima plant was still running and hadn't been upgraded with hydrogen getters, which were invented a couple years after it went online and would have prevented the explosion. Not letting people build new plants and forcing them to keep the old ones running is actually causes problems, but people are retarded and too busy being scared of radiation.
Reply#5 The whole point of Terrorism is to strike terror into the hearts of sheeple. Plenty of people know the risks of blowing yourslef up in fireworks, but for the most part it's something that we do to ourselves. Terrorism is supposed to come out of nowhere, with a hard-to-fathom reason (not really), that takes out a decent number of people in one chunk, so that everyday life no longer looks safe to the people. People assume that they have a lot of control over their lives when really there's a lot of random moment in your life that could kill you, that has nothing to do with the choices you make in life.
Reply# 3: Compound the issue with stairs, each step you take can kill you. You don't need a whole flight to die.
Conclusion: It goes back to why Terrorists are so scary. Certain things we cannot even remotely protect ourselves from. You can keep far enough away from a wind turbine to be safe, but when certain types of nuclear failure occurs, the only safe thing to do is to leave your home and never come back to it. The deaths that result form it give you a strong feeling of helplessness. Death by something that we cause ourselves through stupidity, or could be avoided by not playing under the dangerous object, becomes the fault of the person dead, in those cases.
So, the only one I actually agree with is comparing the bikes to the airplanes. They are both self-chosen forms of transportation, and the deaths resulted therein are usually not your fault, and both types of deaths are horrific. So why do we trust bikes more?
Regardless of how valid or not your points are, you lost all credibility in the first sentence when you used "sheeple" unironically.
"people are around them far more than they're around sharks."
ReplyThat doesn't make them more dangerous, just more ubiquitous.
I say a hearty "fuck you" to heights every time I do a skydive. Well, not out aloud.
ReplyAnyway, this article is not only very interesting but paramount, especially point #1. Nuclear is non-renewable but there is still a fuckton of that stuff around. Admittedly, nuclear power stations and the maintenance required is damn expensive, but still. Nuclear power is one of the ways forward.
I am NOT afraid of anything on this list, except heights, what? That shit's scary.
ReplyOh, man, I sure do care about the statistical inaccuracies of a humor article. On Cracked.
ReplyI liked all but #3 because I've never heard the media hyping the dangers of height.
Reply"And then the money is all yours."
ReplyAverage number of people killed by sharks in a year: 5
ReplyAverage number of people killed by pop machines a year: 9
just want to point out while terrorists have not killed that many people they tend to go for populated areas all at one so if you go ohh sure not threat here then boom you could lose half a state
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesalso the radiation from 3 mile island may have been fine
but go to Russia and visit Chernobyl
"also the radiation from 3 mile island may have been fine
but go to Russia and visit Chernobyl"
Chernobyl is covered IN the article, learn to read.
Chernobyl is in the Ukraine.
Plus coal burning releases more radiation then nuclear as well. Coal is full of radioactive carbon isotopes and when burned they turn into radioactive carbon dioxide.
Replythe cows and sharks thing is useless information (and yes, also the other things):
Replyif you take as many people as there are near cows in a year,
and put them near sharks,
then cows would be, by far, the better choice - killing wise and all.
you can't compare rndm numbers and say that this is f*****g useful...
for an example:
if i have two groups of people,
a. consisting of 10 ppl
and b. consisting of 1000 ppl.
then it's pretty stat-fucking-istically clear that more people are dead from the second group after 30 years, than from the first group... useless.
But the point is that sharks AREN'T near you all the time. In fact, they're fairly uncommon encounters. The point is that if you put a million people in a cow pasture, and a million people in the waters near South Africa (known for Great Whites), you'd get more people killed by cows, if not simply because the cows would approach them more often.
Also, I tend not to look at a study put out by the people who spent their entire lives studying a mathematical science and call it bullshit because I "thought maybe they didn't think of this". That's like looking at Einstein's theory of general relativity and thinking, "Wait, but if you're on a train going 80 miles an hour and you turn on a flashlight, the light will totally be traveling 80 miles an hour faster than the 'supposed' speed of light! Hah, just disproved physics."
@targetbuddy i agree with everything you say until you get to the theory of relativity and how you quote the "supposed" speed of light like that. i just want to say, that within the last year or two, i heard that scientists were actually able to take neutrino particles and move them faster than light. i'm willing to bet i recall also seeing it even on this website sometime more recently.
Watching those wind turbines explode makes for one hell of an awesome youtube video.
Replyi know it seems silly to some but i have to ride an elevator once a day every day i can as self prescribed therapy to get over my fear (i still hate it). i just know that i will die in an elevator accident...or maybe i'll just fall down the stairs the day i'm too paranoid to get on the elevator...either way...i'll die in someway involving an elevator. lol.
ReplyI have a huge fear of stairs! I prefer elevators! So funny what people are afraid of!! I cant even think about escalators!
There are two #3
ReplyMy reaction: How are there not 20 comments about this? This is not something Cracked usually misses...
6, 5, 3, 3, 2, 1... writer might have a fear about a certain number
nuclear power plant mention seems a little sad after Japan
Reply Hide All See All 7 RepliesMaybe, but it doesn't make the point any less true. I think people making judgements based on emotion and not facts is more than a little sad
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't what happened in Japan a fact?
So AnaAsef is just making a comment based on a fact.
I think it's even more sad to misconstrue something that simple.
Exactly CJPG, Japan's power plant was old and in ill-repair. Therefore the original point still stands.
Fukushima Death Toll: 0
Just remember it took a 6m high tsunami and a 9.0 earthquake to damage the power plants in Japan and it's not like that happens all that often.
And they were old and poorly maintained
Also important to remember is the fact that the materials leaked from the Fukushima plant were weak radiation, short half-life things like iodine and a lot of it has naturally cleaned itself up.
"And then the money is all yours."
ReplyLol.
I think I just developed stairsphobia
ReplyActually, the word you're looking for is called climacophobia.
Yeah, it is...and you'll never guess where I learned it...
That first one is becoming especially pertinent here in Australia, esp now some redneck trash in suits have started agitating for shark culls after the death of a guy. Who was spearfishing. Alone. Off an unprotected beach. Where there are lots of sharks. He was also an American tourist. Oh and it might not have been sharks after all. They just assume because his body hasn't turned up and they only found his shorts. Even if it turned up now it wouldn't matter because it isn't like sharks occasionally scavenge large mammalian carcasses.
ReplyNo instead we get idiot bureaucrats, senators and MPs saying we'd be safer if we culled sharks (no), the environment would be better off cos they're increasing in population (just no) and that it might've been the same shark over the last few years killing everyone (WTF?). And Lordy don't the media here LOVE sucking down on that and coughing up the thick chunky sputum so we can all see it.
Yep, our politicians are idiots. I say we'd be better off culling them.
I think its awful that sharks get such a bad rap. They are one of my favorite animals and are so misunderstood. They are really one of the coolest species!
anyone else annoyed when they read "hella?"
Reply