[msla]

I am disagreeing because this person doesn't understand the concept of defense in depth: Occasional problems will happen, will ye or nil ye, and the best you can do is to, as you say, prevent them from becoming worse. Thinking airliners don't have occasional problems is missing a lot of what the air industry does that we can implement in other realms.

[acdha]

He clearly does elsewhere, so I would suggest reading this more charitably with the assumption that you’re talking about the same idea from different perspectives. If I’m the passenger, I don’t even know about something which is caught by a checklist or redundant hardware before it progresses. If I’m the pilot or mechanic, the reverse is true. In both cases, what matters is the spirit of the point: saying something is too infrequent to prevent is defeatist.

[msla]

Maybe, but I interpreted that as him insisting we must eventually become perfect, which isn't going to happen.