I hope you're right but this reminds me of the very sad saying, "Bike lanes are painted in blood". Why can't we properly value safety over convenience and profits before there is a huge accident?
That's the smell of 300 souls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
Pretty much all safety measures are written in blood.
We have culturally evolved to care more about physical safety today; a good sign that our State worked by being held accountable to people. The stuff that is happening with Boeing is a total regression, and it will be interesting to see how regressions like this can be prevented in the future.
I understand that ensuring the safety of new airplane designs is more complicated than adding odor to natural gas. But this is not a product where society wants producers to "move fast and break things". We expect a minimum level of safety i.e the plane not falling out of the sky.
I very highly recommend Charles Perrow's work, particulary Normal Accidents and The Next Disaster. Perrow himself died just this past November.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3APerrow%2C+Charles%2C&...
I've been clipping similar stories, under a set of themes which I find related:
- Risk
- Accidents
- Technological Debt
- Techology as Debt
- Manifestation -- this is the notion of manifest vs. latent phenomena, perceptibility, and awareness. See Robert K. Merton among others.
- Denial. Itself one of the stages of grief, which seems more generally a response to a change in worldview and/or an invalidation of previously reliable models.
- Motivated asset inflation. The desire to sustain high levels of valuation of extant assets (real property, IP, technological mechansism, rents), often through activities which decrease net social welfare. Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937, is fascinating reading in this regard. Stern doesn't quite fully make the case, but he sets the board for the final mate. NIMBYism, Merchants of Doubt, "fake news", and numerous other phenomena can be tied to this.
In whole, the narrative, if it is valid and holds, undermines many of the sacred cows of technological optimism and property-based market economics.
I'd mentioned it on G+ on the date, in comments (I've a full archive on my own systems, but at least the post survives at the Internet Archive):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115030822/https://plus.goog...
Brought up as well on this post (also not in a captured comment):
https://web.archive.org/web/20190115024757/https://plus.goog...
Because consumers will choose the cheaper product. If a politician tries to "value" safety over convenience for a potential problem, voters will vote for the other politician that promises lower taxes and claims there is no safety issue.
Of course, there is a balance that needs to be met, taking all of the risk out of life is also excessive and may impede progress or waste resources.