[Spooky23]

Easy to preach, harder to practice.

When I was an intern I got to help change the blinking red light on top of a 50 story building. It’s a big deal that was scheduled weeks in advance and probably involved two dozen people, a special lightbulb and a bunch of coordination.

Even among the team working it plenty of “how many X does it take to change a light bulb” jokes were told.

But consider than a pilot depends on certain things being there when things go wrong. If the weather is bad and there’s issues with instruments, seeing that red light is the difference between life and death. There are potentially dozens or hundreds of people on a plane and if I recall correctly up to 4,000 people in the building.

When life is at risk, the standard for engineering must be higher.

[mypalmike]

There are already crews at every major airport that inspect and replace runway lights every day. Maintaining more lights doesn't seem like a massive new undertaking in the way you are describing.

[CamperBob2]

What would be better for safety? One $10000 light bulb, or ten $10 light bulbs?

[icehawk]

How much more/less often do those ten $10 light bulbs go out?

How did you prove that?

If its more often, does an outage need to be detected? How do you detect that lightbulb went out?

How much does that cost?

[nerdponx]

The former, if the latter fails to satisfy some design constraint.

[labster]

Compared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error. You’d need an actuary to know for sure, but even small differences in safety margin can be worth the cost in aviation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Compared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error.

Doesn't matter; that's not a comparison that's relevant to any decision here.

How many additional crashes per year are prevented by the high-cost bulbs, and how many additional dollars per year does it cost to install them on every building?

Maybe the 10 $10 light bulbs need to be replaced once a year and they cost $150 / year. Maybe the one $10,000 bulb needs to be replaced every 15 years and costs $900 / year. Once you've gotten to that point, at least you know what the cost difference is.

Then you can either ask "how many planes would crash into the Chrysler building every year if it was using 10 bulbs from Home Depot, compared to the one bulb it's currently using?", and compare that to $750. In that case you'd get an answer that told you whether the Chrysler building should use a special bulb. Or you could ask "how many planes would crash into buildings anywhere in the world every year if they all used 10 bulbs from Home Depot instead of what they currently use?", compare that to $750 multiplied by the number of tall buildings in the world, and you'd get an answer that would tell you whether it'd be better for every building in the world to use commodity bulbs or for all of them to use the bespoke bulbs.

But you'd never ask "which costs more, one fancy lightbulb or one crashing plane?". That won't tell you anything.

[Spooky23]

What’s better for safety? Predicable reliability or whatever the subcontractor is putting out in a particular day