Comment by Aloha

These types of arguments are always so easy when you present everything as insanely black and white.

A thought experiment: if we could install a device which increases the likelihood of everyone surviving a car crash by 0.001%, but it costs $100,000 should it be mandated in every car? After all, this involves a victim as well.

I don’t think anyone would agree to that particular law. There is inevitably going to be a cutoff where you say “the increased safety is no longer worth the cost”. That’s acceptable risk and it’s not only good, it’s absolutely necessary to a functioning society.

The biggest issue I have, is we allow large organizations to make decisions on difuse/abstract risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but roll many liabilities up for an individual choice to an organization - its perverse, and should be the other way around.

If I do something that earns me a darwin award at work, my company probably should not be liable for it.

Very much agreed - and actually the fact that people can poison the water table is the exact problem we have, abstract and diffuse risks (tragedy of the commons type stuff) is treated one way, but the chance of risk to an individual is treated another. We worry very much about individual lead or asbestos exposure, but yet there is no system plan to clean it up. An example - We've spent lots of effort on trying to eliminate Leaded AvGas (which primarily effects users of it), but not as much on environmental lead from batteries.

Part of this is driven by the social media discourse and polarization - We essentially had a whole bunch of ideas which were outside of the window of normal discourse that have now been adopted as ideology and dogma by their respective camps. Once an idea is dogma/key ideological tenant it's really hard to challenge it.

Vision Zero should be viewed for what it is.. as a dumb idea.

I think you're kind of looking at this the wrong way.

As I understand it 'vision zero' type programs are often an aspirational goal, and they implicitly recognize the near impossibility of reaching the goal, but that near impossibility doesn't make the goal undesirable or not worth striving for.

If you set such a goal you start to analyze the systems involved which cause accidents and deaths in a different way and you seek change them on a fundamental level to significantly reduce if not outright eliminate the possibility of certain categories of accidents entirely.

So instead of doing moderately effective but ultimately fleeting stuff like cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers through police action you redesign the infrastructure so that it becomes much harder for a car to physically strike pedestrians through traffic calming[0] measures, creating physically separate pedestrian and bike infrastructure so that cars just don't come in contact with people, or implement mass transit so that you simple decrease the number of drivers on the road and again physically separate them from automobiles to eliminate the possibility that they're involved in car accidents.

In doing so you not only reduce the number of accidents that injure and maim people but you induce them to be more physically active and therefore healthier so that they're able to better car accidents, slips and falls, and illnesses which ends up paying for the infrastructure improvements over the long run.

This is so much better than the alternative where speeders consistently speed and kill pedestrians in an unmarked cross walk so we decide to play whack-a-mole by increasing the police budget for photo radar for a while until the public forgets that this particular street is dangerous to cross on foot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

The regulatory and legal strangleholds we have put on modern society allows large organizations to roll the dice with abstract and diffuse risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but often preclude individuals from taking their own personal risk assessments and deciding to take part or not - because the liability rolls someplace else (aka, you can always sue).

I watch those USCSB videos too and the takeaway I have is that even with these sorts of fuckups there are a single digit or low double digit number of people killed in industrial accidents each year in a country of 350 million. That suggests that we are actually pretty good at chemical safety already.