Can I have examples of these calculated risks?
There are just so many, it would fill pages and pages. Every de-rated take-off reduces the margin of safety, by turning excess runway length into something close to balanced field length. Similarly intersection take-off's forfeit available runway length for expediency and economy. Carrying minimum legal fuel, reduces margins of time and available options when a problem develops at destination. Selecting flap, power settings, runway for departure, headings after take off, with bad weather near an airport. etc. etc. etc.
There are no end of risk calculations made every day by every pilot around the world, where margins of safety are compromised for economy and therefore a managed level of risk is calculated and assumed.
Sometimes it works, sometimes you end up upside down on fire with 6 killed.
No. Managing risk is about ensuring it
always works (one way or another) and that such disasters don't happen.
Getting you're parents to take out a massive loan secured against their property without a guarantee of a job is akin to descending past minimums while not visual.
Again, no it isn't. One is unlawful, and the other isn't. However staying with your analogy, the parents have the control and authority for the debt, and will make whatever decisions they think are best whatever their offspring may actually think. They are the ones who say "go around" and will initiate that action if they decide it is necessary. There is never a
guarantee of a job. Such things cannot exist due to the many variables encountered along the way.
This article and thread has unfortunately become an advert for paying. Someone somewhere reading this has realised their money will give them advantage and they'll will sign up for flight school tomorrow. Previously like every other "profession" they assumed they would have to compete on merit alone and wouldn't have bothered.
Money almost always gives you an advantage. That is just another hard fact of life. Flight training is expensive, and many of the "tagged" programmes (to which you refer) are very expensive. "Merit" is just as applicable to successful graduates of these programmes. Airlines with these "tagged" programmes usually restrict their cadet training to a handful of schools (three really.) In fact, the one in question actually doesn't, although it is a significant customer apparently.