As far as whether trading $100M is an appropriate tradeoff for 8 lives, well.... let's hope you never are in a position to make a choice between $10M and a person's life.

I suspect I could be any civil engineer, assuming that I didn't remember the wrong order of magnitude. Decisions have to be made about how safe to make things. It is quite difficult to do that without putting a dollar figure on human life, and AFAIK it is order of magnitude 10 million.

Otherwise when do you stop bubble wrapping infrastructure?

The numbers are close enough that they probably were skimping, but we can't tell that from the outcome of 8 people dying.

For 2012 it was 9.1 million. So 8 people doesn't quite get us to 100 million, but it isn't far off.

Also PG&E absolutely doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on their safety culture.

I doubt Boeing is happy with the tradeoff of counting lives in millions of dollars right now.

It is applied in hospital care though, they have the same problem that they also have to cap spending somewhere. A bunch of people could technically survive but die because they can't afford care. Since care is rationed by more direct economics than design that means it would be capping out at figures far lower than 10 million/person in practice.

> I doubt Boeing is happy with the tradeoff of counting lives in millions of dollars right now.

The public reaction to Boeing is a bit hypocritical though, because of the road transport example. No-one would bat an eye at a delivery driver on a motorcycle but that seems to be a comparable level of risk to these Boeing planes. Consistent standards should be applied between different modes of transport.

This is not an engineering tradeoff decision. That's not even relevant, and it's weird that you would invent such a situation.