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> incidents involving the police, isn't taken because somehow the people most affected are seen as somehow not really worth the time and effort

American police are significantly more dangerous than most European police forces because of this. The lives of those killed by police are deemed not to matter.

It's not something intrinsic to the nature of police, it's a set of local - often hyperlocal - policy choices.

> American police

> European police

> It's not something intrinsic to the nature of police

Perhaps it's something intrinsic to the nature of police inside a hegemonic or imperial regime where the stakes of meaningful political upheaval are much higher (and the price of a frightened populous lower).

edit: Curious about the downvotes: is it a controversial assertion that police act differently in the context of empire?

Once you go full cynic you start thinking govts are created to protect the wealthy and wars are instigated to generate more wealth.

Then they call you a conspiracy nut so society ostracizes you and ignores your observations

Airlines are accountable to the market. Cops are accountable to their ego.

Soon as you figure out someone's motivation their actions become obvious.

Edit: if precincts got paid based on customer satisfaction we'd see an overnight change making the police force unrecognizable. Crazy how money do that.

Regarding the money aspect: for someone living in western Europe, the police budget and income system in the USA seems crazy. How could they possibly do that they are supposed to do (uphold the law) with a system that forces them to select their actions based on the money it will generate for them.

What do you mean here? Fines?

Asset forfeiture is arguably more pernicious than fines.

Oh heck yeah - it just wasn't clear to me if that's what oneplane was talking about.

"Upholding the law" is such a subjective idea. An officer can uphold the law by running a speed traps and earning the department more money. They could alternatively do difficult investigatory work looking into violent crimes that would deliver more value to the community. If a community is the employer of officers it seems strange that officers would be held accountable to anything besides the needs of the community.

Developers live in a world of scrum, points, and delivering value. I think whoever pays for the officers salary should be the "product owner" of the police department.

"I think whoever pays for the officers salary should be the "product owner" of the police department"

Like what, the local governor/censor/consul/manor lord?

Look particularly at the system that Ferguson used to generate most of their revenues from traffic tickets and resulting fines from African-Americans: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-ti...

As an American, it is shocking and appalling to see that we have recreated a version of debtors prison.

> Once you go full cynic

I am not this - I am very optimistic about the human condition. However...

> govts are created to protect the wealthy and wars are instigated to generate more wealth

I think this is obvious at this point.

And I also think that our species is entering an age in which we'll be able to do without these lifeboats.

"In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." -- James Madison

> Then they call you a conspiracy nut so society ostracizes you and ignores your observations

And then the party in power tries to eliminate the thing that lets middle-aged startup founders/small business owners get health insurance so they can cut taxes on the top 0.5% of income earners.

I pay $2300/month as a small business owner for health insurance for a single employee + family. I was well into my 20's before my entire salary was that much. The cost was ~$1000/month in 2009 or so, which I considered bad at the time.

I fault both parties for the ridiculous situation we're in regarding health care. The ACA was doomed no matter who won the last election. Not because of how it was structured, but because it didn't address the core cost problems.

Not defending Trump's actions. But, at best, he's damaging an already dying system.

Broken in many ways? Absolutely. Fixable on a technical basis? Probably. Fixable in the real world? Not as long as it's a Democrat (regardless of race) getting credit for the Heritage Foundation's plan.

As for costs, I don't know your state or situation but that does seem high. In Illinois for an individual plan with BCBS (PPO, larger of their provider lists) I'm paying under 500 non subsidized though if the exchanges still exist next year I expect it to rise $50-100.

Edit: clarity

Employee + family is typically 3 to 4 times the cost of employee-only. I do have a high end plan.

Thanks, wasn't sure of the impact of family - for the couple years it was my wife and I on exchange plans the cost was basically just doubled.

Picketty ignored the effects of WWI and WWII because they were so destructive of capital they made his case look weaker.

Currently reading "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right". Similar stories when it comes to medicine.

Aviation has managed, through a great deal of hard work, to ingrain an overarching culture of safety first on all levels of the chain. Those involved on all levels are thoroughly trained, procedures are formulated and followed, and when something does go wrong a thorough, safety-focused investigation is conducted. Air safety investigations are quite different from the process we follow almost everywhere else, in that their one and only goal is improving safety, not assigning blame. That means you're not trying to find who fucked up (it is, almost invariably, the pilot), but rather to understand what went wrong, why, and what can be changed to make sure the same doesn't happen again; Punishing someone responsible isn't even on the radar for this. (And in some cases, the results and testimonies in an air safety investigation are actually precluded from being used for any kind of punitive action.) In aviation this attitude is to a large degree enabled and enforced by stringent government oversight.

This is a very effective system, but it requires real buy-in from everyone involved, for things that are very much counter-intuitive to us as people. It also has a great deal of overhead and extra cost that must be accepted globally, and cutting corners cannot be tolerated even for the occasional cases where you may be convinved something is reasonable and safe.

I think aviation has less a blame somebody culture. In notice especially in the US there is always the question whose fault something was instead of asking what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future.

Medicine could also benefit from an attitude that doesn't blame the individual but looks for ways to avoid problems later.

We have the same root cause analysis for train incidents, and rich people certainly don't take the train..

It's just our totally useless perception of risk along with some other unfortunate qualities of humans. Trains are very safe but when something happens it's usually lots of casualties, destruction and press coverage (same for planes). Many many more people die from car crashes but you'll never see root cause analysis there, instead you have police falling over each other trying to blame whichever party is dead.

Is more root cause analysis likely to be useful at preventing future car accidents? I think that accurate awareness of risk factors with cars probably already exists in a reasonably sophisticated form -- what is lacking compared to planes and trains is a way to turn that knowledge into effective preventive action.

(Not entirely lacking as I think safety regulations do take into account statistical models of accident risk in terms of regulatory requirements on things like frame impact absorption)

If a plane has a serious issue 10 000 feet off, every one in it will die. Fact of life: Humans don't fly.

Most issues have a reproducible reason, so it's likely that the same problem will happen on many many planes and kill a whole lot of people.

For the comparison, cars are risk free. What happens when your car is broken? You just can't go anywhere. It's not like people are falling off the sky in pack of a few hundreds at a time.

-- Ex aerospace engineer.

Let's not be absurd. Brakes failure in a car isn't going to stop you starting it and getting on the freeway. Wasn't it Toyota found that to be more than an inconvenience?

As a matter of fact, yes a brake failure will stop you from going on the freeway.

You will realize the problem the first time you try to brake, likely on the first turn or the first light.

For the comparison, imagine a brake failure on a plane.

A plane can already take a mile to stop with working brakes. How many buildings and trees do you think it will take to substitute to the brakes?

I'm not sure if you're being serious, but brakes can fail while driving, and have definitely failed on people who are driving on a freeway when they go.

Planes have multiple systems available (within the plane and without) that can stop the plane (relatively) safely even in the event of a brake failure.

Reverse thrust on your engines is one of them, spoilers are another (not only do they increase the effectiveness of the brakes by putting more of the aircraft weight on them, but they also increase drag), and even if the aircraft gets to the end of the runway, at most international airports they have an overrun area called a runway safety area which is essentially like driving your car into a sand bank.

EDIT: Picture: http://theinfrastructureshow.com/images/70.jpg

For someone who claims to be an aerospace engineer, you have a shocking lack of understanding of redundant systems.

That assumes that cars break while not in use. Tires can pop while being driven, for example. There are plenty of devastating and life-taking accidents that come from car failures.

And plenty of in-use car failures do not take lives. Tires popping during a drive don't often result in death of the occupants of the troubled car nor those around it. If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed. If your jet engines all stop, the chance that death will result is quite a bit higher.

"If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed."

You know, to even get your private pilot's license, you have to pass a simulated engine-out. Fixed-wing craft are perfectly capable of gliding without power.

Indeed. They're not required to crash with engines out. But on a passenger jet, the odds of crashing and causing deaths from several miles up when the engines fail is tremendously higher than death being caused by an engine failure at speed on the highway.

Actually, if engines fail at altitude there's much lower risk than you'd think. Even in the case where the damn engines fall off the plane (yes, this really did happen), there's surprisingly few if any fatalities.

Complete engine failure is mostly risky in two situations, over water and low altitude. Ask Sully about having both happen at once and still no deaths!

(Edit to add sources)

Commercial flights with engine failures in the past 30 years w/o fatalities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_855 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_Flight... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

Commercial flights with engine failures and fatalities (one fatality, a flight attendant): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda_Indonesia_Flight_421

> If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed

If your airplane engine stops working you're not going to be able to get off the ground in the first place.

I can only assume you are trolling given the factual inaccuracy of your first sentence (which you presumably know if your ex-job title is true) and the patent ridiculousness of saying "cars are risk free".

>If a plane has a serious issue 10 000 feet off, every one in it will die

Complete nonsense, unless you tautologically define "serious" to mean "fatal".

I think it's just because airplane incidents catch people's attention, make the news, etc. Combined with the idea that they know they would be powerless, as passengers, to do anything if it happened to them.

You can rationalize different ways you could help ensure your own survival in maritime or police incidents. Despite that you often can't.

So people are supportive of extraordinary measures, regulation, because of all that.