Nobody should have to do a job that can lead to blindness.
I occasionally see code that makes me wish I had turned blind.
I agree. Yet in our society, where efficiency must often be balanced against safety, risk cannot be fully eliminated.
Council workers would surely be safer if the roads they repaired were closed for the duration, but we cannot stomach the roads being fully closed. Furniture movers would certainly suffer less chance of back injury if there were four men lifting that dresser instead of two, yet no-one would hire them if their prices doubled. And the aluminium smelter might well be able to significantly reduce its injury rate by investing billions in a new process, but the product would no longer be viable and the factory would close, simply moving the risk to a less caring jurisdiction.
One can continue like this all day. There's always a compromise, and most developed countries have settled upon a sweet spot. Workplace injury declines with advancing technology, and we should certainly do our best to minimise it, but while society values economic competitiveness over absolute personal safety, you can never eliminate risk, and maybe not even then.
I met a piano tuner with only one eye one day. He was tuning a grand piano, overstressed the string, it broke and the little loop at the end of it was shot off straight into his eye...
I'll bet you he never thought that piano tuning can lead to blindness either.
I hope that this is no longer the case, but it certainly still was when I was at school in the 80s.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2009/07/07/a-good-man-is-ha...
Sigh, I really hate the pointless deaths of good people.
Yeah, people who don't want to eat or have shelter can do that.