I’m going to horribly oversimply this. For example. Say I am wearing a shirt a cheap one for Wal-Mart.
This shirt was produced in a sweat shop. That sweat shop has .0005 deaths per day. Thus by wearing this shirt and supporting the mechanisms that brought it to me. I have a killcount for today a number substantially smaller then .0005 and obviously there’s a tonne of subjectivity on what that number might be.
Now include the dye factory that made the shirt green, the shoes I am wearing, the bus I am riding in, the coffee I drink. All these luxuries and that number may go up a little.
I am wondering if this is somthing that is being considered anywhere is somone building a calculation to determine our daily kill counts.
I’m sure most of us probably don’t what to know what ours might be, but knowing what parts of our daily lives have the highest values we might work harder to change for the better.
You would share your shirt kill count with everyone else who’s wearing a shirt that was made that day, so you’re really responsible for many less deaths if you spread it out. If you wanted to narrow it in, you could just blame the one guy who’s wearing the shirt that was actually being made when the assembly line malfunctioned, but they probably threw that one away. What do you think is the highest death product that’s relatively common? Farming is pretty dangerous.
Slight tangent, but the kill count wouldn’t stay the same, would it? Just because 1 person died for my shirt (adding up the cotton farmer, the sweatshop worker, the merchant mariners, the truckers, etc, etc) - well, my one theoretical dead-shirt-person isn’t going to die again the second time I wear it. And in fact, my theoretical dead-shirt-person has still died even if I never wear the shirt at all. Wouldn’t it be better to (cough) amortize the entire dead-shirt-person cost at the time of purchase?
Yeah, purchasewise, the shirt manufacturer counts on the number of sales being great enough that the dead shirt guy doesn’t matter. If one guy dies making one shirt, that’s really bad. If one guy dies making a thousand shirts, a million shirts, 10 million shirts? Where’s the ok line on the shirt:dead guy ratio?
I whould disagree with shared accountability. At least for the purposes of this metric. Regardless of number of people other participating in the mechanisms causing these deaths, this is about an individual choice to participate.
Think of it like the classic button button of death. You press the button some random person you dont know but dies and you get $10k. It is 100% certain regardless of how many people have previously pressed the button that you will kill somone of you also the button.
In regards to the most dangerous I agree with farming and some foods are much worse then others. My doctor tells me to eat a banana every day to raise my potassium. I suspect the death number on those is huge compared to apples from my local apple orchard.