This reminds me of an old joke about a free-fall parachute contest, in which the guy who dares open his chute closest to the ground gets the prize.
One guy, more ambitious and more sure of himself than most (and I am not naming anyone), was coming down fast and trying to refine his ultimate decision about when to pull the handle and open the chute. He was watching the needle of his altimeter, rapidly winding down, not overly concerned because he had already noticed long ago that his thinking was even faster…
At 2000 feet above ground, he knew that pulling the handle would be foolish, because everyone else so far had opened below 1000 feet. At 800 feet above ground, he thought “that’s still too early because some other dude after me will open another 100 feet lower”. Proud of this eco-friendly line of reasoning, he recycled it all the way down to 100 feet above ground, where the argument loses some of its force, regardles of gravity’s unwillingness to do the same…
So, he said to himself “Ha Ha, now, this is getting really serious”. A few milliseconds later, 30 feet above ground he suddenly realized that would be about the same as falling from the roof of my barn. No sweat, do you really need a parachute for that? There would not even be any time for the parachute to open! Sorry, I can offer no further speculation about whatever the next thought might have been, it’s up to you from this point on.
If the human power of denial (or power of abstraction, I can’t tell) was not capable of reaching such stratospheric heights in the mind of people with legs too short to reach the ground, every single train wreck might have been recognized, and acted upon before turning into a tragic catastrophe.
In the meantine, don’t waste your money on parachutes, you don’t need them, unless perhaps you are an Israeli citizen, and you care about your children and grand-children.
But that does not apply to you if you are not an Israeli?
