[rwl]

There was also a cost in human life.

I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.

When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.

We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.

[1]: https://museumca.org/exhibit/peter-stackpole-bridging-bay

[secretsatan]

Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

[hourago]

> by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

It may be even worse. Quite often people that suffers from dangerous jobs will also support the situation as they fear the uncertainty of what change may mean. That a worker in a dangerous environment is willing to accept it to get food on the table does not mean that it is the right work environment.

But, of course, the main proposers of unsafe working environments is the people that gets the profit but does not share the risk.

[njarboe]

Some people (mostly men) actually enjoy dangerous situations. Especially if there is a purpose for the danger. Look at all the people doing extreme sports. The military, police, and fire fighters are the main jobs left for people like that. There used to be a lot more.

[cardiffspaceman]

Apropos of building suspension bridges, different people apprehend the danger of situations differently. I recognized this when I read that Alex Honnold doesn't like to be on ledges. When I climb, I love ledges and given about 12 inches of ledge I would host a party. But I never could climb without a belay the way Honnold does. I could never jam my fist into a crack in granite and just hang from it. ETA I don't have Honnold's talent.

Also I think when people are in a hard-core feed-my-family situation, they dig deep into their resolve, follow the safety rules, and avoid looking down.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Yeah classic corporate doublespeak. Workers that accept unsafe conditions are "brave", workers that don't unionize are "loyal", etc.

[throwaway0a5e]

> views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

Have you ever been on a construction site, shipyard, pit mine, etc.?

They're stuck in the mud doing "everybody stand back" shit that isn't technically against the rules with a port-a-power because it's the least worst option and your ilk has the gall to come along and lecture that a 5-gal bucket isn't for standing on. It should come as no surprise that there's push-back.

More generally, the people who are actually subject to workplace injury are the ones complaining and they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about you and your misguided attempts to "help" them. They are complaining that people like you saddle them with asinine policy that lacks nuance thereby making their jobs more difficult and less fulfilling than they were previously albeit marginally safer. Such policy routinely optimizes for reducing some trivially measurable source of danger while completely ignoring the fundamental dangers of the job. Policies like "no more box cutters", "no more step stools, step ladders for everything", "PPE all the time, even when everything is off and people are eating lunch" routinely come down the pipe from corporate HR or OH&S but you ask these types for a second truck crane or whatever to save everyone's back or a plasma cutter so gas cylinders don't need to be carted around as much and they act like you just threw a puppy into a wood chipper. No wonder these policies and their purveyors are held in low regard by the people on the ground.

Unfortunately, the people getting screwed are not necessarily the best versed in the ins and outs of organizational policy, management theory and whatnot so their complaints are not very well articulated. This brings us right back to the titular complaint of the article...

[antifa]

> they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about [not having extra equipment]

This is a strange dichotomy. Of course they are complaining about corner cutting on both safety and tools.

[ivarru]

I'm sure many workers with dangerous jobs hate rules that only seem to make their work more difficult, especially if this seems to affect their income. Many of them presumably support Trump and others who want to dismantle these regulations, but this is unlikely to improve their situation. There's no reason why corporate HR would then suddenly decide to pay them more or prioritize a second truck crane.

Perhaps the workers themselves ought to be more involved in the processes for deciding new safety regulations, but the intuitions and common sense people have w.r.t. risk and safety can be quite inaccurate.

[luma]

This has never not been true, capitalists or politicians have always been happy to send someone else to be injured or die to make themselves rich. The article in the OP is shockingly ignorant of how regulations come to be, which makes sense as the author is just another hopeful capitalist willing to throw us all in the fire if he can make a buck.

[altruios]

It's amazing how vapid their thinking can be when they do nothing but chase their goddamn money.

[kortilla]

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers.

You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

[throwawayacc2]

Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.

The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.

Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.

All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.

I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .

[svnt]

Probably there was a long history of people proposing fixes to this particular problem. While a specific technical issue was obvious to him, the problem was not understood at that level by those in charge. Those in charge also had far more to lose than he did by accepting the input of yet another expert on faith.

Chalking this up to pointless bureaucracy is in a sense the inverse of the “build it like that but six inches to the left” class of requests from non-technical stakeholders.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

If it's not understood then those are the wrong people to be making decisions wrt to the problem.

[yodelshady]

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out.

The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.

[treis]

That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA.

In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.

[stonemetal12]

My understanding is what you are suggesting is how it works. The only question is how to measure "slightly different". FAA thought the differences were bigger than slightly and needed more than a little training. So Boeing tried to use software to paper over the differences.

[jhugo]

This requirement was actually pushed on Boeing by Southwest. They insisted that the MAX not require training for their pilots, and with Southwest being a large 737 customer with other good options (A320), Boeing found a way.

[coldtea]

>Airlines do well

Isn't airlines one of the worst performing industries, with companies which often require subsidies, and are always on the verge of collapsing?

And that has been this way, way before Covid...

[zaphar]

Sure, but the article did not make this argument at all. It made zero effort to examine the current state of things and the various reasons and purposes behind it. It merely advocated for blowing it all up. If you want to make a convincing argument then you need to do more than ask for a return to a previous state totally ignoring the reasons we got to the current state.

It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.

[prox]

I think NASA vs SpaceX is a good example. The Artemis costs about 4 billion dollars each flight

The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director.

Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.

[bumby]

Both these numbers are somewhat speculative at this point, since neither has seen a successful orbital flight.

But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NASA. They needed a customer willing to take a risk with big contracts on non-profitable ventures to initially fund their infrastructure and R&D. Their existence is symbiotic.

[prox]

Well it’s interesting to see the comparison between risk averse / risk embracing which is kind of the topic here. Are there other areas where companies can be disruptive because of the foundation other “end game/risk averse/bound by laws” companies have laid?

It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?

[bumby]

I'll admit there is an argument about risk aversion of civil servants, but I don't think that's necessarily the issue at hand here.

NASA's implementation of different Center's actually addresses a risk that SpaceX doesn't have to necessarily consider (or at least to the same magnitude). Namely, it's meant to address political risk. NASA's missions almost always span multiple administrations, meaning they risk being defunded each election cycle. This is mitigated by spreading the political reward across multiple districts, who then have politicians with a vested interest in keeping those programs going. The downside of this is a lack of efficiency. Unlike SpaceX, NASA can't build up a single location to build and test rockets. If they did, there would be two Senators who want to keep it and likely 48 others who want it defunded in order to fund their own pet programs. So we have programs managed out of Ohio, tested in New Mexico, Mississippi, and California, funded out of Texas, and launched out of Florida.

I'd argue they aren't "risk adverse", but they mitigate a different set of risks. In any event, SpaceX can't be "disruptive" without the complicit help of the organization they are disrupting. It isn't really disruption, but a symbiotic relationship as intended. SpaceX actually gets to outsource a lot of their risk to the American taxpayer because their early (and major) customer (NASA) is self-insured. It's much easier to take on a lot of risk if somebody else is footing the bill.

I think a major risk to SpaceX that people don't really talk about is the bureaucratic quality risk. Right now, SpaceX doesn't have to meet the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. That allows them to streamline their efforts, but also implies an increase in risk. (Most requirements are a response to some risk). However, if any bad event happens like god-forbid they lose astronauts, you can bet additional requirements will be levied. This may really impact their "disruptive" advantage. Look at the example of their F9 strut failing in 2015. For some reason, SpaceX didn't levy supplier quality checks prior to the accident even though it's common practice in industry. Now, they do. The real question is if they were making risk informed decisions previously or just naïve.

[hourago]

> We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs.

It drives cost up for the building company, it drives cost way down for the community. Economy is not just one company but a complex interconnected system including all participants. It is the same case for dumping pollution into a river, it would be cheaper for the company to dump everything the closest possible but then other people is paying off for the loss of the river.

[api]

That's total misattribution of cause and effect. We could build that bridge today just as fast with no loss of life. We have tie offs, sensors, harnesses, automation, power tools, helicopters, better cranes, etc.

Look at the California high speed rail debacle. The reason for its lack of progress has zero to do with worker safety. They've barely even tried to do anything. It hasn't even gotten that far.

Our unwillingness to build housing has zero to do with worker safety. Few workers die or are seriously injured building houses in places where we still build houses.

The article here is right about the disease but wrong about the causes or the cure.

[prox]

This. The article is a good start for a debate, but is rather superficial (it kind of has to be since it’s so general in tone)

[midoridensha]

Other highly-developed countries manage to construct things with at least as much safety as the US, at a far lower cost.

[krferriter]

And with more unions and stronger unions than the US! Some people want to say unionization of some sectors is what makes US construction costs so high, but it really isn't because we can compare to other countries and see that it is possible to do things more cheaply while still maintaining a good level of worker benefits, and perhaps even more worker benefits.

[njarboe]

Public construction is more expensive. I think private US construction cost are not nearly as out of alignment with other countries (once past the permitting phase of course).

[kansface]

> But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing

I'd buy this argument so long as you actually sit down to do the math at hand. Did you add up the man years we now spend waiting on safety? How does that compare to the lives we saved waiting, or the money we spent doing so? I'm personally guessing a very large amount of the required waiting exists chiefly for bureaucratic needs, not human. How much of that extra 6T$ and 7 years went to saving lives in the first place? How many other lives could we have saved with it if we had it in hand?

[drewbeck]

In your mind how many man years of savings do you think is worth one human life? Let's say we can save half the time on a big project but periodically one random person is killed. Worth it?

I'm being glib here and/but/also we need to be talking about this directly. There's a spectrum of possible responses to the question and we need a language to discuss risk intelligently.

[ysavir]

I think their point is that we can accomplish all the safety needs while only increasing costs and time so much, and that some portion (maybe big, maybe small) of that time is needless bureaucracy. They aren't advocating for more risk.

[ImPostingOnHN]

how?

which specific federal safety regulations should we eliminate that seem to blocking any significant progress?

[ysavir]

I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept.

What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how they stall process without any consideration of its purpose.

We're looking at every opportunity for a person or party to distract from the project for their own gain. If those can be removed or mitigated, we could potentially see faster and cheaper projects.

[ImPostingOnHN]

the people saying "how can I get my hands on more money" are usually (NB: not ALWAYS) the same ones seeking to eliminate regulations so that they can get their hands on more money

the regulations exist because everyone else thought that more safety was more important than those people getting richer

if you're talking about other regulations that "stall process", which ones specifically?

[bumby]

What's missing in this utilitarian perspective is the idea that a safe workplace isn't an economic good but a right within the US codified by law.

We can go through the list of the Bill of Rights and probably point out how they don't make economic sense. But they make an abundance of moral sense.

[kansface]

What is a safe workplace? Is it one in which we expect a workplace accident every year, decade, century, or millennium? The costs in terms of time, labor, and budget are not linear - that is money and man years that would be better spent elsewhere. The thing is that I think me mostly agree here as a society but most of these decisions are never actually decided in the first place.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

This is a perfect example of the bourgeoisie complaining that worrying about Proletariat lives is harming their ability to optimize profit.

One wonders how they feel when the proletariat decide to optimize their own lives and rise up against the bourgeoisie.

[kansface]

Why do you think this is a bourgeois sentiment? Do you think the Proletariate never have their lives wasted, waiting endlessly because of safetyism or that the budgets that we devote to enforcing kafkaesque requirements wouldn’t better serve them put to productive use. If life is sacred, then it is just as immoral to waste it to no end as it is to end it via other means.

[thrown_22]

I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths.

What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass.

We live in a world that is both too conservative and not anywhere near conservative enough.

[Tsiklon]

That’s a very callous and detached way to consider human life.

It’s exactly the sort of thinking that led to the execution of the Ford Pinto. Wherein the bookkeepers determined that the number of deaths and cost of wrongful death settlements would be less than the cost of recalls to fix the fatal design error in the car.

[thrown_22]

The most American thing in the world is to worry about the 4 deaths per year caused by the faults in that car while ignoring the other 40,000 deaths a year caused by cars in general.

[Tsiklon]

I’m not American, this is whataboutery and absurd to argue, everyone wants safer roads.

The example of the Pinto is famous worldwide; famous for the disgusting disregard Ford had for it’s own customers. That it would rather send its own customers to a painful death than have the decency to pay to fix the fault it was aware of, is abhorrent.

This behaviour resulted in a known unsafe product remaining on sale long after the fault was discovered - the people who died were not qualified to understand the additional risk the car had to it’s occupants.

[thrown_22]

A product which when it works as expected kills orders of magnitude more people than the faulty version.

This is the definition of putting a band aid on a decapitation.

[Cipater]

>I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths.

Because that's other people dying.

>What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass.

Because this affects you.

[thrown_22]

>Because that's other people dying.

My first job out of high school was on an old school oil rig: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jn2BU4eyVHQ

What worried me about it wasn't the fact I could lose a hand, but that more than half the chemicals we were getting smeared in daily weren't properly tested for their long term effects on humans.

[fluoridation]

The distinction you're trying to draw seems unclear to me. Why is bodily harm from chemicals worse than bodily harm from mechanical forces?

[cactacea]

Worse isn't the distinction, clarity of danger is. If your hands didn't get crushed at work that day then you can stop worrying about your hands when you go home. Not the case with whatever he was swimming in.

[wizofaus]

I find it pretty hard to believe "just letting workers die" was at all economically cheaper than having regulations in place to minimize that likelihood. The costs might be subsidised more heavily, but to just waste the years of training and effort that's put into ensuring we have skilled qualified workers (of any sort) is surely enormously expensive.

[mburee]

I suppose the more experienced (and more valuable I guess) knew most dangers and pitfalls and were better able to navigate amongst them. Some people also seem to be inherently more clumsy/likely to misstep/hurt themselves and they'd get sorted out sooner.

Not that that was any good, but I don't think enough builders died to make a difference in productivity.

[wizofaus]

I'd argue you're not really considering the total $ cost of an adult human being. I'm guessing many of those who have died during poorly regulated construction projects were relatively young too, so having invested heavily in nurturing workers to that point, the potential to capitalise on decades of productivity is lost.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I'd argue that they are, but that Rockefeller era capitalists were fine replacing workers that died, to whom they likely gave little training back then

perhaps you value workers more than they did? not that there's anything wrong with that

[wizofaus]

That's the mismatch though - the costs of raising/ educating/training them and most of the opportunity costs due to their premature death weren't borne by those responsible for their safety.

[ThePowerOfDirge]

>We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US

3 years of coronavirus in the US seems to disagree with this statement

[savanaly]

I don't think construction workers today would put up with someone in their ranks (construction crew on some big building) routinely dying and not strike for better conditions.

[jobs_throwaway]

then how do you explain how our European counterparts are able to build just as safely at literally a fraction of the cost?

[ghastmaster]

> There was also a cost in human life.

The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build."

Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build."

The direct premise of this article is that our failure to build in the past is costing lives now and in the future. Im my opinion, many many more lives.

Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.

[hef19898]

That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and powerfull circles, unfortunately. But after those lives risked now aren't the rich and powerful ones.

[ghastmaster]

> Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

The point of regulation(in this context) is to preserve future lives. If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

> But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains.

There is a concept called "Regulatory Capture". The idea is that businesses argue for regulation of their own industry in order to increase the cost for their competitors. This ensures their own survival. Many regulations in fact, serve merely to increase the personal gains of corporate shareholders. I certainly am not arguing for my current personal gain, but for the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. I do not own any stock or business.

[ImPostingOnHN]

>If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

no, since the causality of regulation saving lives is more direct, obvious, and convincing than the causality of less regulation saving lives

the people holding the latter view would need to come up with a convincing argument explaining how less regulation saves more lives than more regulation, ideally specifying the regulation they wish to eliminate

[pas]

Zoning regulations mostly hurt the poor, even if lifting them would directly make profit for real estate developers.

That said there is a big difference between zoning and EPA regulations.

The only interesting thing in this article/blogpost is the 30 day limit of prop H.

It's a good thing. Every kind of bureaucracy should have cost-benefit analysis integrated into it. It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.

[wizofaus]

> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.

Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk of even more bureaucracy and effective regulation being repealed for ideological/partisan reasons rather than any sort of evidence based analysis.

[pas]

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation?

"urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

[wizofaus]

But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences and retail/industrial developments or PT facilities, or even regulation that prevents provision of ground-level parking etc.

[coldtea]

>That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify.

We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify the impact of a project in first (and sometimes second) order effects (e.g. "building this highway bypass means X less traffic and congestion in that populated area, and thus X man-years spared, plus X less pollution").

[zaphar]

They are in no way equivalent in relative ease to quantify. Safety Regulations exist to protect from "known" harms. It is the result of learning from our past and applying that knowledge to our present and future. But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable. We know there are unknown harms out there. But we don't know

1) What they are

2) When they can happen

3) How many they could affect

You can't make decisions that help you avoid harms in that category. But you can make decisions in the other category. There is an argument that failing to build is for example in a category of known harms now. But so are a whole host of harms that we encountered to get where we are now. The trick is to make it easier to build while not also engaging in the rest of the known harms out there.

[coldtea]

>But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable

The "unknown harms" exist in workplace deaths. In fact many of them come from such factors. It's not just things like "asbestos is bad to work with, you need a face mask and other protection" or "construction debris might fall, workers need to wear a hard hat" and such, but also things like materials breaking under unforseen circumstances, unforseen disasters like earthquakes and fires while on the job, and more...

[brazzy]

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

You couldn't be more wrong.

> I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.

Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossible for everyone to have full knowledge of all the risks that might be generated by people trying to make a buck by cutting corners on safety, and what you'd have to do to avoid those risks. And that's not even mentioning how risks can affect other people who never made a choice about them.

[ghastmaster]

Complexity increasing faster than general knowledge may be true, however, it is much easier for me to do assess safety with a search online for "death rate of copper vs coal miners" than it was in less complex times.

General knowledge has made people aware of complexities that warrant some investigation or questioning, before participating.

[ImPostingOnHN]

it is easier for you to assess safety with a search online than it was decades ago, it may be true, but complexity increases faster than general knowledge (much less specific knowledge), thus outweighing that

imagine having to become an absolute expert in cars and mechanics before buying a car, so you know of every possible corner that can be cut manufacturing a car and can check on it

or the same for construction when dealing with contractors you hired: now you need to know everything about construction to not get screwed

[bumby]

>Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term.

(I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechanisms the public exerts such demands, because there is a natural asymmetry in market power between a manufacturer and a collection of individuals)

[ImPostingOnHN]

yes, it's a very cynical argument along the lines of "abolish the FDA and people will learn how to deal with food and drugs that negligently cause death

we did find a way to deal with it, it's regulation. if the regulation is too slow, fund more people doing the work.

[ghastmaster]

There are non government regulatory bodies. Underwriters Laboratories comes to mind.

[spoonjim]

Only 11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge which is fewer than the number of people who jump off of it every year.

[gentoo]

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

[DocTomoe]

To give a few comparison numbers:

In Switzerland, arguably the world's experts in tunnel-boring, one death per tunnel kilometer is considered acceptable (and it is often less than that).

The much easier Channel tunnel has had around one death per five kilometer.

The Japanese Akashi Kaikyo Bridge prominently has had no construction deaths, which was considered extraordinary at the time. The Humber Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge before Akashi Kaikyo, did cost four lives.

Construction is a dangerous business. You operate heavy machinery. You move large amounts of heavy material. You deal with power tools. Death is always a possibility - and that's something we IT folks tend to forget in our clima-controlled environments with our cozy desks and expensive chairs.

[GauntletWizard]

The US Death Rate per Capita is about .8%, so let's start there.

How many is it acceptable to die on the job? Well, there's hard stats on that - About 1M people work in construction[1], and about 1000 of them died on the job last year[2]. That'd be about .1% death rate on the job. Is that good enough? Probably not, but it's where we're at and what society accepts.

If 2,000 people worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for five years, it'd be an average construction project. It was a massive undertaking, but apparently poorly documented - There's no record of worker counts[1], but we do know the number of deaths - 11, of which 10 were from a single failure of a gantry.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm [2] https://www.constructconnect.com/blog/construction-worker-de... [3] https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1987-05-21-2575677-story.h...

[coldtea]

Obviously more than zero, else we wouldn't attempt to build any bridge (or do anything else, like drive cars or fly planes) lest someone dies in the process...

[refurb]

That doesn't follow.

What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).

[lesuorac]

Why not?

If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.

[refurb]

I don't follow, but just FYI, if 5 people die on a project it's usually shut down. This isn't 1930 anymore.

[ImPostingOnHN]

if 5 people have died the same way so far, modern workers would not find it acceptable that more of their friends will die from the same unaddressed cause before the building is done, and thus would not, in fact, continue the project until something is done about it.

[spoonjim]

If you set it at zero you will never build anything

[gernb]

And further there are trade offs. I don't know the trade offs of bridge building is but the example i've heard in the past is, it's possible we could make it so no one ever dies in a plane crash. To do that with today's tech might make flights cost 2x, 3x, 4x more. Flights cost more = more people choose to drive (say SF to LA or LA to Vegas or DC to NYC). More people drive = more deaths.

That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all. I have no idea what the trade off is for bridges. The bridge arguably increase commerce which means its completion created jobs. Poverty is a top killer of people so more jobs = less death.

That said, one thing I'm happy to see on construction sites, at least for buildings, they put up fences on every floor so it's harder to fall out. My guess is that really only became possible when they could create the fences out of plastic.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think plane crashes are not a good example of your point. Every time a crash happens, a massive post Mortem tends to occur to determine what needs to be done such that that specific failure mode will never happen again. Pilots have checklists on checklists on checklists that they must tick off during each procedure of the flight, with each point written in the blood of previous crashes. There isn’t discussion generally as to whether or not adding new checklists, the two pilot system, or other safety improvements as a result of this would make flights more expensive: hell, an entire new model of plane was taken completely out of the skies during a recent investigation as to a fucked up sensor.

[thrown_22]

Plane crashes might have improved but plane flights have not. I'm old enough to remember flying in the 90s. I'd be willing to play Russian roulette if I could show up 15 minutes before an international flight today and still make it on the plane.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You could also make commuter driving (near) zero-death now. It would be a huge one-off payment for a national - possibly international - navigation and power grid. But once built it would be a huge cost saver, because automated traffic flows could be optimised across the entire system.

Although in fact remote work would be even better, for those jobs that support it.

Meanwhile jobs have become poverty traps, so they're not enough on their own to avoid poverty and death.

Ultimately it's not about building things or the cost of highly visible prestige projects. It's about systemic rather than fragmented thinking. Capitalism tends to the latter, because an airy wave of the invisible hand is supposed to somehow optimise everything.

This is magical fantasy. If you want intelligent culture-wide systems you have to get your best people to design and build them. And they have to consider long-term systemic outcomes as much as short-term goals and projects.

This culture is very, very bad at that. But it's also unrealistically convinced it's very good at it.

[throwaway0a5e]

>That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all.

This is hard to do in a world where people have fundamentally incompatible belief systems.

[throw_a_grenade]

I don't think death rate is a good OKR/KPI to be optimised for. If it becomes a metric, then we all know what will happen next.

[1auralynn]

Even moreso with the Hoover Dam