"My Most Costly Delusion" by Ihor Kendiukhov

Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of "rescuing" someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.

But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit am...