That was the reasoning behind the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, in South Africa.

It was difficult, seeing admitted thugs, walking free, but I think most folks think it actually worked out well.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_commission

I suspect he is talking about fining the company for a safety lapse, not individuals.

The same incentives apply.

It is still good to place (organizational) blame and fines on such a thing, otherwise it's financially the most attractive option to take inappropriate risks.

A lot of corporations actually budget for fines.

People can really suck. It may be a corporation, doing the crime, but an individual made the decision to do it.

I remember a DJ, in Washington DC, talking about parking fines.

Parking in DC is expensive, with monthly passes, costing hundreds of dollars a month.

His reasoning was that he parked illegally in lots around the studio, and occasionally got tickets, that he paid without issue, and it cost him far less than getting a pass.

I assume these were not “tow away” lots.

In college, a resident parking violation in Cambridge was $10, while garage parking in Harvard Sq was $12 or more.

Going out to dinner in the area, using the stochastic parking “garage” was the obvious choice.

I mean, obviously that just means the fine isn't high enough. If it's within fine budget range rather than fine insurance, that's your problem right there.

Not to mention that higher fines and prosecution could easily lead to the opposite effect in such a case, namely hiding the fact that they lost the capsule.

It was extremely likely no one would have found it for years anyway.

- "lead to the opposite effect in such a case, namely hiding the fact that they lost the capsule."

If you think about it, the impact's more pervasive and serious than that. Even simply saying, "hey, isn't there a potential issue with this bolt" shifts the appearance of blame on the person who's asking. When something does go wrong, the lawyer-attitude types can point to your words, and say "look: they were aware of possibility X at time Y, and they failed to stop it. They were negligent". "If you raised issue A, why then did you fail to take actions B, C, and D, and document them appropriately? You were negligent". To discuss Issue A is high-friction and risky -- for all values of A.

That's at the core of legal culture: "don't put it in writing"; "don't talk to the opposing counsel"; "don't make public statements unless we vetted them (to be as vague as possible)". Opacity. What aspect of human nature underlies this? It's this: blame is nebulous, and it attaches to whatever's most visible. Guileless honesty is a *hazard* in a culture of suspicion.

Obviously that's the exact opposite of you want from an engineering culture! You want anyone to be able to raise issues freely, fearlessly. Else it's not effective.

That's the true cost of a blaming-people culture. You're not merely disincentivizing communication the very final stage ("cover up the disaster"); you disincentivize all communication about risk, at any time. Anything that places you visibly closer to responsibility is a peril.

The part that really drives me up the wall is when people complain about this kind of "don't ask don't tell" ass covering behavior and then turn right around and confirm it was the right course of action by calling for the book to be thrown left and right in every case of wrongdoing.

Naturally HN often has me doing laps on the ceiling.

I suspect the extend and target of postmortem blame varies considerably from culture to culture. An anecdote from the railroad traffic between Germany and Denmark:

"[In 2019, a DB Cargo freight train in Denmark caused an accident with a passenger train on its way to Copenhagen after a truck trailer flew off the freight train due to high winds. The German side was keen to find out who was responsible at the lowest level, i.e. the wagon inspector who had not adequately secured the freight on the freight train. The Danish side didn't care, the local authorities were concerned with structural responsibility. Not who caused the accident, but why could it happen! So in Denmark, the motto is: the process is the cause.]"

- https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/dienstleister/zugunglueck-be... (German source)

> keen to find out who was responsible at the lowest level

It's funny how profit flows up, but legal responsibility trickles down.

There are some old stereotypes of detail-obsessed Germans - far too busy measuring the growth rings of a tree with micrometers, and wondering why those are so close together - but never noticing that the tree is small, and growing in a well-shaded part of a large forest.

The absolute worse case of "not seeing the forest for the tree".

Both are important.

Matt Parker of Youtube fame also wrote a book called Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World which covers several post-mortems from the engineering space.

I found it interesting that he compared and contrasted the airline industry where failures are seen as systemic (don't blame the pilot, blame the system) and the medical industry where failures are typically seen as having personal liability (blame the surgeon).

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610964/humble-pi-by...

Not that surprising. The wagon inspector was a dane in denmark. The organizational responsibility was on german leaders in a german company. In the end nothing happened.

I think the response is pretty reasonable. Fines/punishments from regulators internalise externalities and disincentivise antisocial behaviour.

If Rio just writes off the fine without improving its processes in tandem then it could make sense for the regulator to intervene further, but in either case Rio should be on the hook for damages rather than WA taxpayers.

Yeah, exactly.

What an engineer thinks: "Why not attach this thing to a beacon so that it can't be lost?"

What everybody else thinks: "Why not persecute everybody responsible to the fullest possible extent?" Which is just our reptilian brain looking for somebody to blame but isn't actually helping anything.

* * *

Why not just put it in a bulky plastic blister pack, like we do for like, razors? Make the tiny thing larger and harder to lose?

But it already was larger; It was part of a “density gauge” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_densitometry). It’s not as if somebody but this in a trouser pocket (would be extremely foolish, of course) or laid it on the car’s dashboard (slightly less foolish, but still extremely so) and then lost it.

I wouldn’t know whether the pictures on that Wikipedia page resemble what this was on, but I expect it to have been of similar size.

The problem was that something (¿excessive car vibrations?, ¿a speed bump?, ¿bad packaging? ¿bad design of the gauge? That’s to be researched) dislodged it from that device and that it then dropped out of the car.

Now I wonder why wasn't it glued, packed or something in larger material. I think there should be something light and relatively non-opaque for radiation.

I haven’t read any indication that safety rules weren’t followed, so presumably because whatever it was packed in was deemed safe enough.

Well by all accounts (of people that seem competent on the internet...) the source is just fine as it's own beacon. Even detectable by a low flying helicopter with the right equipment.

Well, by the account of the article you are responding to the source has been lost.

Not very useful beacon if you don't detect when you lost it or you need to put an enormous search party to find it.

We have GPS devices with satellite comms that can periodically transmit information about where they are that anybody who plans to trek in the wilderness can buy and use to start a SAR operation.

> What an engineer thinks: "Why not attach this thing to a beacon so that it can't be lost?"

Or put cameras everywhere to deter crime.

I am not asking to limit anybody's freedom. A beacon would be attached to radiation source.

Unless you are an individual who walks around with a highly toxic, highly dangerous radiation source, requiring it to have a beacon will not limit your freedom.

As to putting cameras to deter crime, they are shown not to work. The crime just moves to where there are no cameras. Or stupid people will crime anyway. US is leading or close to leading in both crime rates and incarceration rates, at least in the western world. Suggesting the basic premise of what US is doing may be flawed, from engineering standpoint.

Right. but things they have in common are questionable cost/benefit, and, undoubtedly, unintended consequences.

It also is not a better way to solve the problem. Now someone has to replace the batteries of the "beacon" or remember to charge it? How are they going to remember? Why not just have that same person remember to check that the source is secured properly?

> Right. but things they have in common are questionable cost/benefit, and, undoubtedly, unintended consequences.

Attaching a beacon to highly dangerous radiation source is questionable, and has "undoubtedly" unintended consequences?

Looks like searching for a problem where there isn't one.

Why not just have that same person remember to check that the source is secured properly?

Because "Just do the right thing first" isn't actually a good harm reduction or problem prevention strategy? Shit goes wrong and you should have a system where lots of shit has to go wrong all at the same time before it causes a problem.

> "Why not attach this thing to a beacon so that it can't be lost?"

It’s literally radioactive. It is a beacon.

It was literally lost. A properly engineered beacon cannot be lost this way as long as it operates.

> He said a search vehicle was driving past at 70 kilometres per hour on the Great Northern Highway when a detection device revealed radiation.

They found it because it is literally a beacon.

I think the idea would be to have a gieger counter in the vehicle near the pellet that can detect the pellet radiation, and sound an alarm in the vehicle if the pellet radiation is no longer detected, so the driver knows immediately that the pellet has become unsecured.

They found it because they got incredibly lucky.

If it would have bounced just a few meters further off the road, landed in a ditch and get covered by something, or its emission beam angled away from the road/sky (for directional sources), it might never be found (or not before it causes some harm).

Visible light is electromagnetic radiation too. Does this mean that an LED is the same thing as an AirTag?

I'm not sure if this specific source is isotropic or directional, but it's very possible for it to be both extremely hard to detect from even a couple of meters away, yet still pose a great hazard.

AirTag it

Because the battery would be too heavy.

It's a 6x8mm cylinder, fingernail-sized. They're little pellets that get inserted into larger machines for medical imaging.

See also (or don't, it's a bit gruesome): the Goiânia accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

That's an especially prevalent attitude in Australia for some reason. Even the US usually leaves the aggressive prosecution tough guy threats to prosecutors/police instead of politicians.

At what point do you think punishment is warranted when companies or individuals break regulations resulting in people being placed at risk? This isn't software where the impacts are some user inconvenience and maybe a bit of lost revenue. If this incident had gone just a little differently it could easily have resulted in deaths, people receiving massive radiation doses, or even hundreds or thousands of people getting enough exposure to raise their risk of cancer. Regulations around handling radioactive material are a lot like aviation regulations, they tend to be written in blood.

This is a short list of major radiation exposure incidents in the past few decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_radioactive_material_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_acciden...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident