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.
I love those USCSB videos!
The biggest thing we have done is managed to protect the general public, which IMO is what should be done.
Yeah my point was more we probably don't really need more stringent industrial safety standards if we have gotten deaths due to industrial accidents down so low. The cost/benefit tradeoff isn't there anymore.
Re:The Conquest of Hell Gate [pdf]
by AlotOfReading on Monday May 19, 2025 @09:25AM
(#44029633)
CSB videos (deliberately) aren't trying to show the full human cost of incidents. The US is full of communities that have been poisoned for decades from these sorts of things, and workers have a lot more to worry about than dying.
I've watched plenty of youtube videos that say something like 'But management needed dem profits so they took the risk'
So... let us not pretend we don't cut corners and take risk. There are plenty of modern deaths and environmental destruction because people take risk.
What I think should be more acceptable, is that people take personal risks. Nothing wrong with accepting risk being the first person in an unregulated prototype space ship or taking unverified medicine.