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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

American propaganda likes to paint the nuclear scientists as heroes, but I think the younger generation likely views them much more as "evil scientists who worked to create apocalyptic weapons" and feel comfortable with a lack of empathy for them harming themselves in the process.

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I can't help but feel like this (completely overlooked) facet played a part in the humor for its original audience. From a certain point of view, he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.

>he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.

The Slotin incident happened in 1946, after WW2 had ended.

OP was referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total deaths from those two atomic bombs is estimated at 150-240k.

More important is that physically dangerous workplaces have mostly been written out of popular culture over the past half-century.

Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.

Yup, I was in one of those situations. Working for a building renovation contractor who I liked and respected, we'd done several jobs on roofs, but low flat porch roofs, maybe 10' up. No problem. This one project was on a barn where the low edge of the roof was probably 30' up (vertically) and the peak 50', and it was pretty steep. I felt this was not a good place to free-solo and try to work at the same time. I asked about getting some way to rope in, and he had nothing. I told him I regretfully had to quit at the morning break.

Despite having been in all kinds of alpine rock climbing and international downhill ski racing competition experience, or perhaps because of it, that was just a hard NOPE. I think it was just the intense awareness that, once a slip starts, there was no recovering or stopping before the ground. The weird thing is just how totally casual he was about it, even seeming to think my question about protection was a bit odd.

I'm just damn fortunate to have the option, especially considering the statistics for roofing work.

Traditional barns are damn dangerous. My family's old (1 1/2-ish centuries ago) wisdom about community barn-raisings is that you'll average one worker killed or permanently disabled per barn that is raised.

WOW, I did not know that.

It always seemed barn raising events were a very effective and efficient way to build community infrastructure. But a death or crippling per barn is a damn high cost in blood!

I wonder how much of that is all the WWII vets being gone and not being able to hear their thankfulness at not having to invade Japan the hard way (after what happened on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

Those bombs and the "Operation Meetinghouse" firebombing of Tokyo was mostly directed at civilian targets. The subsequent invasion and occupation is unlikely to have been harder to perform without it.

If one wants to ignore that German scientists were working on the bomb as well, and the American scientists just had more resources to pull it off first.

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