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Comment by johan_larson | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.

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At the same time if you get drunk, visit the roof of the empire state building and lean over the edge guess what? You’ll find you cant fall thanks to a tall safety fence.

Sure, your own residential roof is a different story, as is a dinghy.

The difference to me is the expectation of protection from obvious hazards in public and commercial spaces.

In addition to monitoring (a last ditch effort imo) it seems relatively trivial to install nets or fencing to prevent falls off cruise ships. Why that isn't alreay mandated given the statistics provided is beyond me.

It's not a safety fence, it's a suicide fence. That's not a big problem for cruise ships because the bodies just hit the ocean.

I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas.

Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.

She was a passenger, she wasn't drunk boating (which is illegal).

If someone sober took her out on a dingy and just left her there after she fell overboard, people would be pretty outraged.

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