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.

  • Juan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s interesting, but I would argue that suffering would be more importsnt than killing. And maybe if there was a way to measure a “suffering/price ratio” it would be definitely what I would look at before spending my money on something.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      You’re not wrong, but how would you measure that?

      Kill counts are at least in principle very easy to count. Work out how many people die, divide that by the number of items produced. That’s your death number.

      Also add in the death number for all the constituent parts. If a shirt contains 10 metres of cotton from a source where cotton is produced at 1 nanodeath per metre, you add on 10 nD to your shirt’s death count.

      Very hard to do in practice (because who’s sharing that data?), but it’s quite simple to do in principle.

      But how do you even begin to put a number on “suffering”?

      • Lemmylefty@vlemmy.net
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        1 year ago

        I can’t speak to what the original poster was imagining, but one option is years of life lost as compared to the average in that country. So if a sweatshop worker lives an average of 64 years of that country’s 68, that’s 4 years of life lost.

        • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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          1 year ago

          I agree with this. And if a study on this where to include this data thatd be really good.

          But I also thinks that’s too hard to quantify. Even achieving proper data on death caused specifically from labour operations is going to be extreamly tough as the places causing these deaths will deny all accountability.

    • FediFuckerFantastico@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      While you are correct that suffering is a better metric, there would be many in our society that would gravitate towards higher rated suffering items in the same way they want real fur coats and real leather in their Ferraris. That would backfire quickly.

      • andrewta@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        As someone that looks for real leather jackets (they last longer in my experience) which means less garbage in the landfill, it also means less money out of my pocket. I sadly wouldn’t care about the kill count when to my jacket.

        The jacket was just one example of many.

        • drewx0r@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Leather is an interesting case, though, because regardless of whether or not people buy it, the cows will still be killed for meat (unless there’s a drastic change in food consumption habits).

          You could make the argument that, at least in the current landscape, the purchase of leather doesn’t increase animal suffering or suffering due to the many deleterious effects of large scale beef production (deforestation for feed, the carbon output, etc.).

          The only way to reduce the suffering created by a cow economy is to hit the main product driving it: beef. There are three times more beef cows than dairy cows in the U.S., so dairy consumption has an effect but it’s dwarfed by beef consumption.

          Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

  • moon_raccoon@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I understood the title totally the opposite way :D
    Like, how many people die because of a every day objects for example a spoon or a bar of soap or an office chair etc.

    After reading the whole post it reminded me so much of the points system from the series “The Good Place”

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s not far off from that. Though I don’t really belive in any kind if afterlife I belive we need to do our best while we in the boring place.

      But I also belive the consequences of our daily actions, purchases ect. are obscured from us. Shirt conpanies are not exactlly going to willing advertise that by purchusing ther product your resonsbile for .0005 deaths. So it can be a bit difficult to know where we actually stand morally.

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      This could be used. Though the examples here here are more oriented to risk of death for doing X. Micromorts could probably be used in determining values I am thinking of.

      I am terrible at math so excuse the terrible example.

      Let’s say working in a sweatshop in Vietnam has a micromort of .6 and the resouce you are calculating uses up to one third of these shops. Then you’d be adding .3 to your count.

      We can say 1000 micromorts is one probable death.

  • adonis@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I hope you’re not doing this for chasing a high KillToDeath-ratio, like we do in FPS games. 😅

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      No. It’s just a terrible thought that plagues my mind from time to time. My goal whould be to keep that number as low as possible.

  • AgedashiTofu@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This reminds me of the point system used in The Good Place.
    Back in earlier times, buying flowers for your mom was a net positive in your “goodness” points. But nowadays, doing the same action, because of the different new levels of consumption - basically, were the flower farms practicing ethically? was the plastic processed in a safe manner? how much carbon emissions did the shipping and transport of the flowers produce? did you walk/bike to the shop or did you use a car? - results in a net negative.

    • neanderthal@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Perhaps we should create a new unit. Some options:

      • Chidi stomach ache seconds
      • Chidi indecision minutes
      • Shawn chuckle seconds
      • Trevor star rating
  • theTrainMan932@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    That’s an interesting idea, I suppose it’s possible if you have one or more databases with these statistics and then link them together and see. My instincts tell me that it’d be very impractical to implement though!

      • theTrainMan932@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        Presumably yeah, if everyone could see the death / suffering count of various big companies we probably wouldn’t be using them nearly as much.

  • cynar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I’ve not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.

    They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.

    I believe the UK’s NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It’s caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn’t pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.

    In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.

    Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. “Going Postal” I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he’s killed, despite never raising a sword.

    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702

    This seems exactly like what you want.

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      Ha! I remember this one.I think that exact quote from may be what caused me ponder this over many years.

      I will try to get into those studies when I have better time to digest that knowledge but I thank you for sharing them.

  • Today@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • athos77@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • Today@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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?

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Seigest@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      I’m just shocked this isn’t a field study. This seems like somthing we’d need in order to make ethical choices.

  • Dr. Coomer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I belive so, though it isn’t to be trusted. You know the whole thing about coconuts kill more that sharks? That’s a lie and was actually and experiment to see how far a lie could spread.