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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Hipsters: wash their food to get rid of nano particles that might raise cancer risk by 1/100,000, but live downtown where their risk of being murdered goes up by orders of magnitude more.

No seriously. Moving from the rest of Oregon to Portland (a relatively safe city) increases your lifetime chance of getting murdered by 1/1,000. If there was a food additive that did that, creating 100 extra cancer cases per 100,000, it would be plastered with warning labels.

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That's just dumb. You're way more likely to get murdered in rural areas, thanks to poverty and the opioid epidemic.

https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-c...

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/youre-more-likely-die...

also farm machinery, weather and flooding, animal attacks

Suburbs are worse too because of car culture. Public transit, walkability, urban speed limits > freeway-connected suburbs and dependency on cars.

This hypothetical hipster’s alternative to living in downtown Portland isn’t to live in some meth-overrun rural county in eastern Oregon. I’m thinking more like Beaverton.

Beaverton is a far worse place to live than a city. Car culture. (I lived in Portland for seven years, my sister has been in Beaverton for 20, so I'm well-acquainted with it.)

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killi...

As someone who lives in Beaverton I'd bet that the risk of my daily car commute heavily outweighs the risk of murder downtown. I tried running home a few times and it's remarkable how inconsistent sidewalks are.

I don't actually have numbers though.

Violent death rates are per-capita higher in rural areas: https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2013/july/ma...

Yes but violent deaths include things like accidents, etc. Not surprising since rural areas see more vehicle use.

From your article: Findings from the study support prior work showing that overall homicide rates are lower in rural areas than urban areas.

Only because people in rural areas tend to do more dangerous, outdoor work. Also, that study includes things like poisonings (i.e. drug overdoses) and suicides.

I don't think people are arguing that we need to wash our food, but that companies need to stop murdering 1 in every 100000 people by adding paint to food.

You need to move to a better city.

Almost every city has a higher homicide rate than the surrounding suburbs. (That didn’t stop us from raising our daughter in downtown Baltimore and Wilmington. The risks are negligible. For the same reason, we don’t care about nano particles either.)

source?

Hipsters can't afford it. Liberal arts degrees only pay rent in the worst parts of town.

Says the Linux communist.

What does Linux have to do with communism? In any case, I'm not a communist.

Seems like it would be a good idea to reduce other risk factors regardless.

Source for the 1/1,000 statistic?

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