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Analogy time: Which cigarette gives you cancer?

If they didn’t kill you by cancer and heart disease, but instead one in 1.4 million exploded and blew your head off, you’d know. Everyone would. The most explody brand would be punished.

The constant bit-by-bit risk of 1.4 cigarettes per micromort makes it ignorable, even though the risk is identical.

The only website I punish for their JavaScript content at the moment is forbes.com, and that’s because they have a combination of an adblock-blocker and (whenever I tried turning it off to read a story someone linked me to) ads which redirect me to scams.

That’s dynamite.

On my laptop I disable JavaScript everywhere unless it’s important to enable. I would do the same on my phone except the UI makes switching it in and off on a per-site basis much more annoying. The result is my phone battery, which can trivially record GPS traces all day while also managing day-to-day use of augmented reality translation all with negligible battery use, runs out of battery in a few hours of browsing.

That’s cigarettes.

Which site(s) killed the battery?




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