Staying in hostels when traveling overseas. The amount of people who tell me I’m crazy and going to get murdered if I stay in a hostel is ridiculous.
Hostels are great, and not any more dangerous than hotels are, you just have to look at reviews and go for the type you want. You can also rent private rooms at a lot of them. I always stay at one’s with a kitchen so I can save a bunch on food, too.
That fear is what happens when the only exposure people have to hostels in the US comes from horror movies. I didn’t know that you can rent private rooms and get a kitchen - sounds like a nice setup.
Who thinks hostels are dangerous? lol I’ve stayed at hostels all over the world including places like La Paz and had a fucking awesome time every time. I could understand a single female not wanting to stay in a mixed dorm but other than that, they’re fine.
Video games. There’s absolutely no evidence that they make people more violent.
Climbing, the gear is all rated to lift 2 tonnes, so a medium sized car. It won’t snap with you on it.
Edit: sorry this is misleading, climbing is not harmless, and a lot can go wrong even with good equipment. The point I wanted to convey was that equipment failure is an unlikely cause of problems for climbing
I don’t think it’s the ropes that are used that make climbing dangerous…
what is it in your opinion?
Using the equipment incorrectly.
Agreed
And sometimes bad luck. RIP my uncle, who has been climbing for decades until one day he fell to his death.
Or other forms of inexperience. If you were climbing a rock face and didn’t realize the part you were trusting your life to wasn’t as stable as you thought it would be and your attachments give out.
I’m a climber and while yes, the gear is very well made and over engineered climbing is still quite dangerous. That rope could be rated for 500KN but if you repel off the end of it you’re still going for a fall.
You’re right, my first post was a bit over reaching
I had a huge carabiner holding a free climbing rope fail on me at my local climbing gym. Dumped me at least 15’ and I broke my foot. Definitely a weird one off but it’s not always the rope that fails.
ah that is unfortunate, they probably hadn’t inspected it in a while
Cellphones in a gas station. Also double dipping in a sauce or dip.
Also double dipping in a sauce or dip.
Perhaps, but still gross.
And here I’m paying for gas using phone near distributor. Well it can be dangerous when someone try to stop you because they think you didn’t pay for gas.
George likes to double dip
Was this a technological change, or did gas stations just not want people loitering on their phones?
IIRC, the rate of explosions at gas stations started going up around the time that cell phones were becoming popular. The investigation teams would review camera footage and see people on their phones. So the government changed the mandatory warning stickers on the pumps to include a “do not use your phone while pumping” warning.
Turns out it wasn’t because people were using their phones near the gas pump, but that they were getting back in their cars to play on their phone while the pump was running. They’d build up a static charge by getting in and out of the car, which would arc to the pump handle when they went to hang it up.
It took a while before they realized what the actual problem was.
Interesting. Any sauce? Just curious why this is no longer a problem.
NPR interview with an NTSB guy I heard a few years back with a bit of googling around (again, years ago). Hence the “IIRC.” Snopes has details on why phones themselves aren’t dangerous around pumps.
And it’s still a problem - it’s just that it’s not the phones themselves that cause it. You’ll notice that pumps now tell you to stay by the handle and not get back into your car.
In the UK you have to stand there and hold the pump. They don’t fit the catch that allows the pump to keep going while you don’t hold it. The pumps in the US are very convenient but petrol streaming out potentially while no-one is paying attention always feels like a bad idea.
I’m not sure exactly how it’s done (I’m guessing some sort of pressure or seal mechanism), but the pumps are also designed so that if the pump isn’t fit properly into the car’s gas tank, the catch will automatically drop and the fuel will stop streaming. So if you start to pull the handle out of the tank while it’s still pumping fuel, it’ll automatically turn off
I’ve had fuel pour out once - but not from the pump. We had someone replace the fuel pump and they forgot to put the gasket on.
I agree it sounds like a crazy idea, but it works. The automatic cutoff on those fuel dispensers works really, really well. I’ve been driving for over 30 years and have never seen it fail.
It’s probably just a precaution measurement or for liability reasons (like don’t put your hamster in the microwave).
Here’s more to read: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fuelish-pleasures/ The rumour of cellphones not to be allowed at gas stations has proven to be false.
I mean, I’ve personally seen a sign on a gas station that tells you to leave your phone in your car, so no.
We do have these signs (crossed cellphone) also at gas pumps where I live (Germany). As I stated above, I think these signs were introduced with the beginning popularity of cellphones and serve mostly as a precaution measurement because nobody knew 25 years ago if cellphones pose a harm to gas pumps when both are in use simultaneusly. In the same fashion that cellphones had to be shut off during the entire flight in an airplane. Gas pumps were there before cellphones. I personally witnessed people pumping gas and use cellphones at the same time and nobody cared. Depending on where you are from, your experience may differ.
Edit: typo, spelling
Signs don’t mean danger
The rumour of cellphones not to be allowed at gas stations has proven to be false.
I was replying to this. The comment doesn’t claim it’s not dangerous, it claims it’s not forbidden to use them on gas pumps.
People used to be paranoid about it. I was using my cell phone at a gas station once (15+ years ago) and the cashier remotely shut off the pump until I put my phone back in the car.
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It is a softdrug, not a harddrug, but it’s a drug nonetheless. It has the potential to destroy your life, but the potentiol is just very low. You should always treat it with respect. Saying “weed is harmless” is respectless. Think of the bullied nerd in highschool who is regarded as a harmless loser. He get’s bullied every day, because he never fights back. Until he snaps some day and becomes a top ranking highschool shooter. If you abuse weed long enough, it will change you and it will ruin you.
Weed does not agree with me at all, it sends me into truly horrifying attacks of paranoia. It effects people differently so yeah it’s definitely not “completely harmless.”
To be fair, a lot of research had been held up by it being federally illegal.
I think enough people have used it for long enough that we can assume it’s relatively harmless but we can’t say it’s completely harmless just because the studies haven’t been done.
It isn’t harmless. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it. In all likelihood, it’s less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but we shouldn’t pretend it’s completely harmless.
Nothing is completely harmless… aspirin and paracetamol is far more dangerous than marijuana.
I’d love to see the data on this if you have it. Isn’t weed more long term impact than the others you listed?
According to people like you even a water is more dangerous than weed. Weed is dangerous, that’s a fact. Not more than alcohol, but it’s dangerous.
Water is far more dangerous than weed - you can literally kill yourself by drinking too much of it.
What people always forget is that it’s the dosage that makes the poison. Weed might very well be harmless for recreational use, but recreational use does not mean trying to out smoke Snoop Dog.
Give a 50mg gummy to a weed newbie and everybody’s having a bad night.
Snoop dog doesn’t even smoke that much lol, dab smokers probably injest way more THC per day than snoop dog.
That’s a very good point, along with usage. Weed might have practically no effect if you consume it non-regularly but might have significant effect when you do every day.
I mean with the CSU/CDU out of the way, they might finally get around to doing it.
Weed doobies
Sharks.
More people die due to things like selfies, falling out of your bed, tipped vending machines and heck, even balloons, then to a shark.
Just because something can kill you doesnt mean it will, more often than not, it actually wont.
I’d be interested in the death numbers relative to exposure. What percentage of people who tip vending machines die compared to those who swim among sharks at the beach? How about compared to those who sleep in a bed?
Wolves are similar, but for more understandable reasons. They may leave us alone, but they really love our livestock.
A shark killed my brother a few years back. He was just standing there minding his own business and this shark came out of nowhere and toppled a vending machine on top of him. Poor bastard never knew what hit him.
That’s because people rarely are where sharks can kill them. If they were, sharks would quite often kill them. Much more often than vending machines, though I’d watch for those too.
Here there might be a confusion between danger, and statistics.
all those examples are about events or things that are far more frequent than be near a shark
if the average person could be close to a shark as many time in life than leaving a bed, be close to something that can flip, or to people taking selfies, statistics might be very different
Most of the fear of sharks is due to media. Like the vast majority of sharks will not attack a human even when in close proximity. There are like 1 or 2 species of sharks that have any danger to humans: bull and tiger sharks if I remember correctly. And even those 2 will most likely not attack, it’s just that other species are no danger at all.
My favorite has always been that falling coconuts kill more people than sharks
Eating mushrooms you find wherever
Many people think sharks are dangerous, but shark attacks are accidents in which sharks mistake humans for seals. Sharks are actually in more danger from us.
Wild strawberries. As far as I know there are no wild strawberries that are poisonous. There are two types, wild strawberries that resemble normal strawberries but smaller, which taste delicious, and mock strawberries, which taste like water but are also safe to eat. Mock strawberries can be recognized as growing upward and having protruding red seeds.
The words “wild strawberries” never fail to bring to mind this Shel Silverstein poem:
Depending on where you live, you should be aware of the fox tapeworm. It’s really, really nasty for humans and can be fatal.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised to learn it, as I also thought they were toxic from a young age. My friends and family were also surprised when I told them. I’d rather not say my country.
People who are dependent on opiates and opioids.
Some people who are in a lot of pain legitimately need the medicine in order to have a normal life. It doesn’t make us high, it makes us ‘normal’ because we actually require the medicine to bring us to normal levels of activity.
Just because someone is physically dependent on the medicine, does not make them an addict too
Most of us would rather never take another pill in our lives if we were suddenly healed.
The Tor Browser, it’s just a normal Browser with some functionality to improve privacy.
It’s more than just privacy. It allows you to visit
.onionsites, which will not load in a traditional browser. As a harmless example, this is Duck Duck Go: https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmvfimaftt6twagswzczad.onion/. Trying to click that in a normal browser doesn’t work because they don’t support the onion network. But using the Tor browser unlocks that as well as all sorts of nefarious sites that you can’t access through a “normal browser”Like many tools, it can also be used for nefarious things, but that’s not its only use.
The use case for TOR is illegal activity. Some illegal activity is not immoral, like organising a protest against a dictatorship. But Tor is not a useful tool for simply browsing websites. The inconvenience isn’t worth it when a regular browser fulfills your needs better.
It’s like money laundering. It could be done recreationally, but that’s not the normal use case.
Tor isn’t explicitly developed to promote illegal activity. I’ts just another browser with some more layers, just like an Onion.
Those layers get in the way of casual browsing. Like you could use a bucket to fill a full size swimming pool, but a hose is better suitrd for the job.
I’ve encountered DNS poisoning (or similar?) multiple times. Wouldn’t call this completely harmless. I wouldn’t use it for online banking.
Use a cellphone under trees in rain.
Learned few days ago that it’s not actually dangerous, at least doesn’t make you have a higher change to be struck by thunder.
To be honest, I feel like I’d be more concerned with my phone getting water damaged, than getting struck by lightning.
It’s not a good idea to stand under a tree when it’s lightning, but if you really want to for some reason, then don’t stand next to a trunk.
… where in the world was/is this a thing? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard xD
Someone probably confused the effects of ionizing and non ionizing radiation and thought, a cellphone would create a less resistant path to ground by ionizing the air around it.
Can’t be struck by thunder unless you’re AC/DC
Are you going to make me log back into reddit to find the most upvotes comment to this question?
The dark. Everything seems more scary in the dark
I love the dark … especially pitch blackness.
As a kid I used to crave wanting to eliminate all light when I went to bed. As a teen, I would seal the edges of my door to stop the hall light in our house from coming and put up black out curtains even at night. It always bothered me if I woke up with a bit of light. For some reason I felt better waking up in the dark. I always know where my things are and I can wander around in the dark to f find my way.
I haven’t had that in years because my wife wants some night lights on somewhere. She thought I was nuts to want complete darkness at night.
I’m actually afraid of the dark. My mind makes me see shadowy figures and scary faces. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it even though it’s illogical.
Yeah I’m not as unafraid of the dark as you’d expect. I like being in the complete darkness in the comfort of my own space that I know very well … like my bedroom or my living room or any room in my house that I know very well. But when it comes to being in the dark in a strange and unfamiliar place … yeah, I’m not comfortable and I would also start seeing figures and faces too.
Maybe I’m not comfortable anywhere then …
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I tried that for a while and it never quite worked for me. I’d always end up with it falling off, over my mouth, around my neck or over my ear. It’s been so long now, it almost just feels like a relief when I can sleep alone in the dark.
I was the same as a kid, then I got used to sleeping with some light and haven’t needed to block out lights since. However, I recently bought a weighted mask and omg I seriously recommend that! I really feel like I sleep a lot better with it on, wake up more rested. Could be placebo of course, but I don’t think it is.
The key to feeling confident in the dark is feeling like the hunter, not the prey.
It’s not completely harmless, it’s much easier to stub your toes! 😧
