[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.