More than a year after a 33-year-old woman froze to death on Austria’s highest mountain, her boyfriend goes on trial on Thursday accused of gross negligent manslaughter.

Kerstin G died of hypothermia on a mountain climbing trip to the Grossglockner that went horribly wrong. Her boyfriend is accused of leaving her unprotected and exhausted close to the summit in stormy conditions in the early hours of 19 January 2025, while he went to get help.

The trial has sparked interest and debate, not just in Austria but in mountain climbing communities far beyond its borders.

  • rushmonke@ttrpg.network
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    7 hours ago

    Mountaineering is dangerous and expensive.

    I don’t have much sympathy for the people that use their excess wealth for thrills while children go without food and education.

    • Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      This is honestly something that you should speak to a therapist about.

      You are posting this from a computer or smart phone, a device that costs a significant amount of money. You are wasting your leisure time that you have because of your comfortable wealth and status in society to post to an online platform which doesn’t contribute anything to the world. You are richer than most people on the planet. You are wasting the opportunities given to you as a rich person. You could sell your electronic devices and give the money to the poor. You could be volunteering right now helping less fortunate people. Instead you comment on social media that people who are slightly richer than you don’t deserve sympathy for their deaths. People who are actually out in the world living their lives exploring the world and enriching themselves.

      Is it really right to be judging someone in this way? In the way that I have just judged you?

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      4 hours ago

      Someone enjoying the outdoors, even if they paid money to do it, is not the cause of poverty. The rich stealing from us is. In a million ways, but the biggest way, viturally unreported, is that since the 1970s the US led the way in changing the way the CPI was calculated, several times, to understate it. It’s averaged 2-3% a year just by 2008 under the new metrics, while the old metric it was 5-8%. The changes were obviously not in good faith, although you all mostly assume it is still.

      Giving the benefit of the doubt to these people, seeing where following their lead has brought us, just astounds me, truly an indictment of the population in trusting the wrong people and never admitting they made a mistake in doing so. Tribal loyalties may play a part, even as your tribal leaders have nothing but contempt for you and are turning you into a slave.

      But that’s neither here nor there, the inflation understated by some 5% for half a century is compounded, just by 2008 social security checks would’ve been worth 1,300 more a month on average under the old standard.

      Our buying power has never been higher, on paper, the economists tell us. As rent, healthcare, energy, drugs, are all obscenely overpriced. Often the costs hidden under employer based systems as with drugs and healthcare, making people think it’s just a problem of the others even as their employers, and themselves, pay more for less to profit parasites that add no value.

      We meekly trust the authorities as they’ve for 50 years given us a real pay cut in value, and now even good college requiring jobs don’t pay for what a single minimum wage job could provide back in the 1950s to the 1970s, while the ivy league that runs business and government in all the top positions puts on their suits as the representative of your tribe and blows smoke up your ass about it.

    • someoneelse@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      ??? Austrians on an Austrian mountain, why would that be out of reach to working people and involve excess wealth at all? Also, those problems are for the state to solve and Austria has a decent welfare system, improvable, like all of them, but not something to be fixed by two random citizens.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      I can sort of see your point, but it also sounds a little like “oh you enjoy any hobby or activity not strictly relared to your survival? Well fuck you then, there are people starving”.

      • rushmonke@ttrpg.network
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        7 hours ago

        Nah. The amount of money being spent coupled with it being dangerous is what leads to my apathy.

        It would be different if the money wasted on this venture couldn’t drastically change the life of someone living in poverty, especially children.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      There is value in exploring hobbies and building skills. For example, during natural disasters in remote areas, people with experience are better suited to go in and help. People with climbing experience might be going down into a collapsed mine to rescue survivors.

      • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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        5 hours ago

        Thanks for this. I now feel less guilty about buying a guitar because I could one day use it to sooth the minds of trapped miners.