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by jiveturkey 1045 days ago
Yup. It especially rubs the wrong way for the last point, #45.

> If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies

So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then? Coal-fired power plants maybe? Nursing home care??? Spaceflight deaths, even on a log scale graph, don't even make it on the chart vs any of those others.

It's far more about the perceptional impact to the program as a whole, if someone dies, many billions will have been wasted and many thousands will lose their jobs.

Still, it's fun and I've used it for a decade now. I really like #41.

> 41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.

Never mind that it's in direct contradiction to some of the other laws. I still love it.

1 comments

>So, shouldn't something like cars get this level of diligence then?

They do. At least the, "engineering of the vehicle itself and then manufacturing it" part.

A lot of Aerospace designing, testing, and manufacturing is built off the foundation the automotive world laid down. Heck, one of the key standards, the SAE standard, is called such because it literally stands for Society of Automotive Engineers.

Cars may be involved in a lot of deaths every year. But rarely do people die because their car spontaneously combusted/fell apart while someone drove it.

There was a joke running round the European car manufacturers a couple of decades ago that the European Space Agency literally couldn't hire rocket scientists because they'd all been poached to work on drive-by-wire systems. I don't know how true it actually was, but the point is that in a lot of cases it's not just going to be the same standards, it's literally the same individuals.