[rwl]

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 of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wound. The photos are amazing and beautiful, but they show how dangerous the working conditions were.

When someone fell off and died, the workers would take the rest of the day off, but be back on the job the next day.

We don't accept that kind of risk anymore in the US, which obviously drives up construction costs. But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, and I bet that if you went and talked to the "builders" today, they'd prefer those costs to the ones we paid in the 1930s.

[1]: https://museumca.org/exhibit/peter-stackpole-bridging-bay

[secretsatan]

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]

> 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.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Yeah classic corporate doublespeak. Workers that accept unsafe conditions are "brave", workers that don't unionize are "loyal", etc.

[throwaway0a5e]

> 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...

[luma]

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.

[kortilla]

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.

[throwawayacc2]

Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.

The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.

Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.

All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.

I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .

[yodelshady]

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.

[zaphar]

Sure, but the article did not make this argument at all. It made zero effort to examine the current state of things and the various reasons and purposes behind it. It merely advocated for blowing it all up. If you want to make a convincing argument then you need to do more than ask for a return to a previous state totally ignoring the reasons we got to the current state.

It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.

[prox]

I think NASA vs SpaceX is a good example. The Artemis costs about 4 billion dollars each flight

The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director.

Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.

[hourago]

> 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.

[api]

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]

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)

[midoridensha]

Other highly-developed countries manage to construct things with at least as much safety as the US, at a far lower cost.

[krferriter]

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.

[kansface]

> 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]

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.

[bumby]

What's missing in this utilitarian perspective is the idea that a safe workplace isn't an economic good but a right within the US codified by law.

We can go through the list of the Bill of Rights and probably point out how they don't make economic sense. But they make an abundance of moral sense.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

This is a perfect example of the bourgeoisie complaining that worrying about Proletariat lives is harming their ability to optimize profit.

One wonders how they feel when the proletariat decide to optimize their own lives and rise up against the bourgeoisie.

[thrown_22]

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]

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.

[Cipater]

>I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths.

Because that's other people dying.

>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.

Because this affects you.

[wizofaus]

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]

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.

[ThePowerOfDirge]

>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

[savanaly]

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]

then how do you explain how our European counterparts are able to build just as safely at literally a fraction of the cost?

[ghastmaster]

> 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]

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.

[brazzy]

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

You couldn't be more wrong.

> 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.

Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossible for everyone to have full knowledge of all the risks that might be generated by people trying to make a buck by cutting corners on safety, and what you'd have to do to avoid those risks. And that's not even mentioning how risks can affect other people who never made a choice about them.

[bumby]

>Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term.

(I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechanisms the public exerts such demands, because there is a natural asymmetry in market power between a manufacturer and a collection of individuals)

[spoonjim]

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]

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

[1auralynn]

Even moreso with the Hoover Dam