[yamtaddle]

> No one here would want to finish a project faster if the cost would be measured in human lives.

People—including some here—choose risk to life for greater productivity, all the time. Every advocate of going back to the office, in places without excellent public transit or walkability, is proposing to trade some serious micromorts for extra productivity (driving's dangerous).

[majormajor]

I think there's a pretty clear line in many places in today's western world about the difference between "directly causing death" and "causes fractional death."

So comparing "directly dying from construction" to "commuting in a car" is a big reach.

Diet, stress, physically-taxing-if-not-directly-fatal jobs, cancer-linked chemicals, pollution, etc. Tradeoffs made at both the societal and individual level every day.

Even in cars, consider the difference in attention "death from direct failure of the vehicle or manufacturer" gets compared to the more-random "accident that could've happened to anyone" increased-death-probability cases.

And that ties us neatly back to construction! We have many more things in place for construction safety - from regulations to equipment to practices - but it doesn't prevent there from being any loss of life, still. We just don't want to go backward.

[gpcz]

All death is "fractional" if you make a fraction out of it. For example, dividing the number of people that died making the Empire State Building by the total number of workers. It seems subjective which fractions matter and which don't. It seems to be based on how much the responsibility can be laundered.

[kragen]

i don't understand why you think directly dying from having a steel i-beam fall on you is so different from directly dying from having a toyota hilux t-bone you in your civic, but you say it's 'a big reach'

aren't these both random 'accidents that could've happened to anyone'

do you maybe think that the foreman on a construction site sometimes picks one of the employees and orders him to get killed that day or something

[samstave]

Ill never forget;

I was a Title Runner when I was 18 in Reno. The Clarion had been purchased, and renamed Atlantis - and they were adding on/remodeling it...

I was driving by and there was a crane lifting a pile of I-Beams to the top of the tower... and as I was driving, I looked and thought "Damn, that would suck if they dropped that"

THE CABLE IMMEDIATELY BROKE and all the beams fell like 15 stories!!!

I got really freaked out and said "Ill never focus on disasters like that again."

Luckily nobody was injured, but I was mentally scarred.

[samstave]

"Pre-emptive Health Neutralization" was one of the names for the CIA's kill list eras (they always change the name for the kill list such that it compartmentalizes and rewrites the history of what is being said (narrative) - I believe that one was Reagan's name for it. I believe the kill-list name changes with each POTUS as stated by Annie Jacobson

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+rogan+annie...

[axus]

Apparently there was a historic increase in US road fatalities in 2020 and 2021 instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Maybe having more food delivery guys on the road is worse than more commuters, for public safety? Let's wait and see how 2022 did.

[hunter-gatherer]

So I work for a major insurance company, and though I'm not involved in the "insurance" aspect of it, it's been said during large corporate-like meetings that the reason is that vehicle during the pandemic were going a lot faster, probably because of less vehicles. My understanding from the people who sell auto insurance is that less cars yields more intensive accidents, albeit if fewer. Interestingly enough the numbers work out that car insurance payouts have been a lot less profitable during the pandemic because of it, because the crashes are more damaging.

That's hiw I understood it from the guys who's job it is to make money by selling auto insurance anyways.

[skedaddle]

Would you trade a dozen workmen's lives to get a development project done in under one year, rather than two? Are there actually many examples of tech businesses doing this right now? It doesn't seem to happen all the time. You're comparing multiple fatalities on a single year project to micromorts.

[eternityforest]

Yeah, and that's a big problem, that leads to people not really having the choice at all, because they are forced to keep up with people who value productivity over safety.