How dangerous is Santa's job, really?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish any stats on rooftop holiday gift delivery due to limited data, so this is a bit of an extrapolation.

First, travel between houses. The NTSB has never recorded a fatal accident involving a reindeer-powered flying sleigh. Someone better at stats than me could probably bound the accident rate based on this record, but it's quite low so we'll neglect it.

Next, rooftop delivery.

According to 2022 stats (latest I could find quickly) the USA has ~190K roofers, and had 124 workplace fatalities over the year, a rate of one in 1532 per year.

Assuming the average roofer spends 12 months * 20 work days * 6 hours, or 1440 hours, on roofs in a given year, and assuming accidents are uniformly distributed, this gives a mean time between accidents of roughly 2.2 million hours, or an accident rate of 4.54e-7 per hour.

Suppose 4 billion people globally celebrate Christmas, with 2.5 people per household gives 1.6e9 households. Allocating 2 minutes per household for landing, unloading, boarding, and takeoff gives 5.3e7 minutes of rooftop time every Christmas eve (making heavy use of relativistic time dilation).

Unfortunately, this is 26x the mean time between roofing accidents. So Santa has quite a high chance (>> 50%) of falling off a roof and dying any given Christmas.

When you add in the possibility of getting stuck in a chimney, the cancer risk from inhaling all that soot on the way down, the near-certain diabetes from eating billions of cookies in one night, and more, I'm glad I'm not the one wearing the red suit.

@foone But... if you are transitioning in the *other* direction...

Does that count as reballing?

@aud I'm just so used to startups called "foobar AI" that seemed the obvious reading.

That's marketing techbro speak for "this is not a place of honor".

@aud My reading is that "outlier AI" is the name of the company.

In other words, it's just saying "we'll pay you what we want to pay you" and doesn't necessarily mean that the ML model will set your salary.

Although I'm sure they're thinking about it.

Anybody have a source for really really small silnylon dry bag (less than 1 liter)?

I'm looking for something like the size of a soda can that's reasonably waterproof, maybe with a zipper, for organizing stuff in a #camping #backpack . Doesn't have to be submersible, just enough to keep rain mostly out of the contents.

Sea to Summit makes a 1 liter bag that's still way too big. I have some smaller pouches that are heavy military-style nylon but I'm looking for lighter material in the same size class. Bonus points if it's got velcro hook material on one side so I can slap it on something, but I'm expecting I'll have to sew that myself.

@lmorchard I have a zero tolerance policy for advertising at this point. It's distracting, annoying, and I don't like being manipulated.