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There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point

• secretsatan 4y ago
  Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous
  • hourago 4y ago
    > by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous It may be even worse. Quite often people that suffers from dangerous jobs will also support the situation as they fear the uncertainty of what change may mean. That a worker in a dangerous environment is willing to accept it to get food on the table does not mean that it is the right work environment. But, of course, the main proposers of unsafe working environments is the people that gets the profit but does not share the risk.
    • njarboe 4y ago
      Some people (mostly men) actually enjoy dangerous situations. Especially if there is a purpose for the danger. Look at all the people doing extreme sports. The military, police, and fire fighters are the main jobs left for people like that. There used to be a lot more.
      • cardiffspaceman 4y ago
        Apropos of building suspension bridges, different people apprehend the danger of situations differently. I recognized this when I read that Alex Honnold doesn't like to be on ledges. When I climb, I love ledges and given about 12 inches of ledge I would host a party. But I never could climb without a belay the way Honnold does. I could never jam my fist into a crack in granite and just hang from it. ETA I don't have Honnold's talent. Also I think when people are in a hard-core feed-my-family situation, they dig deep into their resolve, follow the safety rules, and avoid looking down.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Yeah classic corporate doublespeak. Workers that accept unsafe conditions are "brave", workers that don't unionize are "loyal", etc.
  • luma 4y ago
    This has never not been true, capitalists or politicians have always been happy to send someone else to be injured or die to make themselves rich. The article in the OP is shockingly ignorant of how regulations come to be, which makes sense as the author is just another hopeful capitalist willing to throw us all in the fire if he can make a buck.
    • altruios 4y ago
      It's amazing how vapid their thinking can be when they do nothing but chase their goddamn money.
  • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    > views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous Have you ever been on a construction site, shipyard, pit mine, etc.? They're stuck in the mud doing "everybody stand back" shit that isn't technically against the rules with a port-a-power because it's the least worst option and your ilk has the gall to come along and lecture that a 5-gal bucket isn't for standing on. It should come as no surprise that there's push-back. More generally, the people who are actually subject to workplace injury are the ones complaining and they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about you and your misguided attempts to "help" them. They are complaining that people like you saddle them with asinine policy that lacks nuance thereby making their jobs more difficult and less fulfilling than they were previously albeit marginally safer. Such policy routinely optimizes for reducing some trivially measurable source of danger while completely ignoring the fundamental dangers of the job. Policies like "no more box cutters", "no more step stools, step ladders for everything", "PPE all the time, even when everything is off and people are eating lunch" routinely come down the pipe from corporate HR or OH&S but you ask these types for a second truck crane or whatever to save everyone's back or a plasma cutter so gas cylinders don't need to be carted around as much and they act like you just threw a puppy into a wood chipper. No wonder these policies and their purveyors are held in low regard by the people on the ground. Unfortunately, the people getting screwed are not necessarily the best versed in the ins and outs of organizational policy, management theory and whatnot so their complaints are not very well articulated. This brings us right back to the titular complaint of the article...
    • ivarru 4y ago
      I'm sure many workers with dangerous jobs hate rules that only seem to make their work more difficult, especially if this seems to affect their income. Many of them presumably support Trump and others who want to dismantle these regulations, but this is unlikely to improve their situation. There's no reason why corporate HR would then suddenly decide to pay them more or prioritize a second truck crane. Perhaps the workers themselves ought to be more involved in the processes for deciding new safety regulations, but the intuitions and common sense people have w.r.t. risk and safety can be quite inaccurate.
    • antifa 4y ago
• hourago 4y ago
  > We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. It drives cost up for the building company, it drives cost way down for the community. Economy is not just one company but a complex interconnected system including all participants. It is the same case for dumping pollution into a river, it would be cheaper for the company to dump everything the closest possible but then other people is paying off for the loss of the river.
• spoonjim 4y ago
  Only 11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge which is fewer than the number of people who jump off of it every year.
  • gentoo 4y ago
    what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction
    • spoonjim 4y ago
      If you set it at zero you will never build anything
      • gernb 4y ago
        And further there are trade offs. I don't know the trade offs of bridge building is but the example i've heard in the past is, it's possible we could make it so no one ever dies in a plane crash. To do that with today's tech might make flights cost 2x, 3x, 4x more. Flights cost more = more people choose to drive (say SF to LA or LA to Vegas or DC to NYC). More people drive = more deaths. That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all. I have no idea what the trade off is for bridges. The bridge arguably increase commerce which means its completion created jobs. Poverty is a top killer of people so more jobs = less death. That said, one thing I'm happy to see on construction sites, at least for buildings, they put up fences on every floor so it's harder to fall out. My guess is that really only became possible when they could create the fences out of plastic.
        • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
          I think plane crashes are not a good example of your point. Every time a crash happens, a massive post Mortem tends to occur to determine what needs to be done such that that specific failure mode will never happen again. Pilots have checklists on checklists on checklists that they must tick off during each procedure of the flight, with each point written in the blood of previous crashes. There isn’t discussion generally as to whether or not adding new checklists, the two pilot system, or other safety improvements as a result of this would make flights more expensive: hell, an entire new model of plane was taken completely out of the skies during a recent investigation as to a fucked up sensor.
• kortilla 4y ago
  False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers. You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.
  • yodelshady 4y ago
    Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out. The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.
    • coldtea 4y ago
      >Airlines do well Isn't airlines one of the worst performing industries, with companies which often require subsidies, and are always on the verge of collapsing? And that has been this way, way before Covid...
    • treis 4y ago
      That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA. In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.
      • stonemetal12 4y ago
        My understanding is what you are suggesting is how it works. The only question is how to measure "slightly different". FAA thought the differences were bigger than slightly and needed more than a little training. So Boeing tried to use software to paper over the differences.
• midoridensha 4y ago
  Other highly-developed countries manage to construct things with at least as much safety as the US, at a far lower cost.
  • krferriter 4y ago
    And with more unions and stronger unions than the US! Some people want to say unionization of some sectors is what makes US construction costs so high, but it really isn't because we can compare to other countries and see that it is possible to do things more cheaply while still maintaining a good level of worker benefits, and perhaps even more worker benefits.
    • njarboe 4y ago
      Public construction is more expensive. I think private US construction cost are not nearly as out of alignment with other countries (once past the permitting phase of course).
• ThePowerOfDirge 4y ago
  >We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US 3 years of coronavirus in the US seems to disagree with this statement
• ghastmaster 4y ago
  > There was also a cost in human life. The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build." Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t do in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to build." The direct premise of this article is that our failure to build in the past is costing lives now and in the future. Im my opinion, many many more lives. Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and powerfull circles, unfortunately. But after those lives risked now aren't the rich and powerful ones.
    • pas 4y ago
      Zoning regulations mostly hurt the poor, even if lifting them would directly make profit for real estate developers. That said there is a big difference between zoning and EPA regulations. The only interesting thing in this article/blogpost is the 30 day limit of prop H. It's a good thing. Every kind of bureaucracy should have cost-benefit analysis integrated into it. It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.
      • 4y ago
• thrown_22 4y ago
  I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths. What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass. We live in a world that is both too conservative and not anywhere near conservative enough.
  • Tsiklon 4y ago
    That’s a very callous and detached way to consider human life. It’s exactly the sort of thinking that led to the execution of the Ford Pinto. Wherein the bookkeepers determined that the number of deaths and cost of wrongful death settlements would be less than the cost of recalls to fix the fatal design error in the car.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      The most American thing in the world is to worry about the 4 deaths per year caused by the faults in that car while ignoring the other 40,000 deaths a year caused by cars in general.
      • Tsiklon 4y ago
        I’m not American, this is whataboutery and absurd to argue, everyone wants safer roads. The example of the Pinto is famous worldwide; famous for the disgusting disregard Ford had for it’s own customers. That it would rather send its own customers to a painful death than have the decency to pay to fix the fault it was aware of, is abhorrent. This behaviour resulted in a known unsafe product remaining on sale long after the fault was discovered - the people who died were not qualified to understand the additional risk the car had to it’s occupants.
        • thrown_22 4y ago
          A product which when it works as expected kills orders of magnitude more people than the faulty version. This is the definition of putting a band aid on a decapitation.
• wizofaus 4y ago
  I find it pretty hard to believe "just letting workers die" was at all economically cheaper than having regulations in place to minimize that likelihood. The costs might be subsidised more heavily, but to just waste the years of training and effort that's put into ensuring we have skilled qualified workers (of any sort) is surely enormously expensive.
  • mburee 4y ago
    I suppose the more experienced (and more valuable I guess) knew most dangers and pitfalls and were better able to navigate amongst them. Some people also seem to be inherently more clumsy/likely to misstep/hurt themselves and they'd get sorted out sooner. Not that that was any good, but I don't think enough builders died to make a difference in productivity.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      I'd argue you're not really considering the total $ cost of an adult human being. I'm guessing many of those who have died during poorly regulated construction projects were relatively young too, so having invested heavily in nurturing workers to that point, the potential to capitalise on decades of productivity is lost.
      • ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        I'd argue that they are, but that Rockefeller era capitalists were fine replacing workers that died, to whom they likely gave little training back then perhaps you value workers more than they did? not that there's anything wrong with that
        • wizofaus 4y ago
          That's the mismatch though - the costs of raising/ educating/training them and most of the opportunity costs due to their premature death weren't borne by those responsible for their safety.
• api 4y ago
  That's total misattribution of cause and effect. We could build that bridge today just as fast with no loss of life. We have tie offs, sensors, harnesses, automation, power tools, helicopters, better cranes, etc. Look at the California high speed rail debacle. The reason for its lack of progress has zero to do with worker safety. They've barely even tried to do anything. It hasn't even gotten that far. Our unwillingness to build housing has zero to do with worker safety. Few workers die or are seriously injured building houses in places where we still build houses. The article here is right about the disease but wrong about the causes or the cure.
  • prox 4y ago
    This. The article is a good start for a debate, but is rather superficial (it kind of has to be since it’s so general in tone)
• savanaly 4y ago
  I don't think construction workers today would put up with someone in their ranks (construction crew on some big building) routinely dying and not strike for better conditions.
  • jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    then how do you explain how our European counterparts are able to build just as safely at literally a fraction of the cost?
• kansface 4y ago
  > But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing I'd buy this argument so long as you actually sit down to do the math at hand. Did you add up the man years we now spend waiting on safety? How does that compare to the lives we saved waiting, or the money we spent doing so? I'm personally guessing a very large amount of the required waiting exists chiefly for bureaucratic needs, not human. How much of that extra 6T$ and 7 years went to saving lives in the first place? How many other lives could we have saved with it if we had it in hand?
  • drewbeck 4y ago
    In your mind how many man years of savings do you think is worth one human life? Let's say we can save half the time on a big project but periodically one random person is killed. Worth it? I'm being glib here and/but/also we need to be talking about this directly. There's a spectrum of possible responses to the question and we need a language to discuss risk intelligently.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ysavir 4y ago
      I think their point is that we can accomplish all the safety needs while only increasing costs and time so much, and that some portion (maybe big, maybe small) of that time is needless bureaucracy. They aren't advocating for more risk.
      • ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        how? which specific federal safety regulations should we eliminate that seem to blocking any significant progress?
        • ysavir 4y ago
          I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept. What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how they stall process without any consideration of its purpose. We're looking at every opportunity for a person or party to distract from the project for their own gain. If those can be removed or mitigated, we could potentially see faster and cheaper projects.
• 1auralynn 4y ago
  Even moreso with the Hoover Dam