How factories were made safe
rootsofprogress.org
rootsofprogress.org
Well, maybe. We won't know if it work well until it's actually implemented.
As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during the Equifax incident, the statutory damages only for California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum. As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they agreed to with 48 states combines to about 1/3 of that amount.
This attitude survives, not only in the workplace (where safety laws are often fought as "needless red tape") but outside it too (your poverty is due to carelessness, and is nobody else's responsibility).
Baxter, A. J., Tweed, E. J., Katikireddi, S. V., & Thomson, H. (2019). Effects of Housing First approaches on health and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health, 73(5), 379-387.
For a homeless person who is not addicted, sharing the shelter with the addicted ones means constant worry that even the little stuff they own gets stolen the moment they stop paying attention, and also lack of sleep because of the constant screaming and fighting during the night.
My first mentor immediately took me to task when I called something I had done "a stupid bug." He stopped me and said "All bugs are stupid[1]." The point being that the overwhelming majority of the time, once you are looking at a bug, it looks like carelessness and stupidity, and yet very smart, careful programmers introduce such bugs with surprising regularity.
1: The motto is "All bugs are stupid" but he did admit later that there are such things as "smart bugs" though they be rare enough to be a rounding error.
It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not incur.
Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined $20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
Amazon seems to have (or had?) this issue with climate control in their warehouses. Was the fix done because of the need to protect workers and keep them working, or the PR disaster that they caused?
Toss in America's (inevitable) deindustrialization and the violent, systematic oppression of worker's movements without any real pushback from the DNC, and it's hard to see how things could have ended up any differently.
That cohort have now been the modal force in politics, business and the electorate for a few decades, and we're seeing the results.
It was a concerted effort that started in the 1970s, and when Reagan got in things kicked off:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of...
Given that Democrats controlled Congress during the 1980s, they were complicit, but most of the ideas originally came from right-wing think tanks funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-brother...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...
This was essentially due to Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights movement. This observation became strategy, to use the movement as a wedge issue to convince conservative southern democrats to switch allegiance. Before this, the distribution of conservative to progressive, while still slanted, was more even than afterwards. The trend continued through Nixon, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, GWB, and now Trump.
It's largely been the same cohort of voters driving this trend, and their views have been becoming more radical vs centrist. Among democrats you can see some attempts to cater to these voters as well like with Bill Clinton. Another big part of it is the rise of the evangelical right to top level influence in the republican party as well.
There's certainly a whole heck of a lot more to the story than this, but when you go digging through the dispassionate history and summaries, this realignment is clear. In some sense the republican leadership is now being hoisted by their own petard, as the more classical or centrist ones show in relation to how they respond to Trump's most extreme actions.
We're probably headed for another realignment, but I think anyone claiming to know what will trigger it or how it will shake it is far too confident of their own clairvoyance.
> P. ....But the safety movement was not inevitable—it was the result of progressive reformers. Capitalism would never have accomplished this on its own.
> C. Well… I have to admit, reformers like Eastman and Hard seem instrumental in this story. Their work helped bring about the legal reform, and the legal reform brought about the safety departments. So, I have to give them credit for that.
> P: Good.
Is this not a straight admission of the flaws of capitalism?
This bit was especially hilarious to me--
> C: No, you can’t sign away all your rights. You can’t sell yourself into slavery, for instance.
uh... yes, people did.
I somewhat think that's the point of the tangent though. Much of the blog goes into nitty-gritty detail on other ways society progresses-- by blood, sweat, and tears-- and so I think this tangent pushes that narrative, but it's weird that the opposite narrative is appeared to be given equal footing when previous posts seem to argue that it's not.
Or perhaps it was an attempt to push to reader into the mindset at the time, in which case, the counter-arguments still aren't that convincing to me, but again perhaps it's just the modernity bias.
So its been over a century, why are we still stuck at 40 hours?
Already, many white-collar jobs (especially in tech) have large numbers of people working fewer than 40 hours a week.
Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he missed a couple.
3..2..1 until someone blames or credits some President or the other or a famous worker strike. Models are particularly comforting when they are so simple as to be useless.
Now, back to some work on the lathe while wearing my necktie.
We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people/year in traffic instead [1]
I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in traffic as well?
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
None of that would be popular, but it would be effective.
Force cell phones to stop working when velocity is above 5 mph.
So never mind your phone, how would their business even operate if no phones were allowed?
Several US states HAD No-Fault insurance laws--ie your own insurance company pays for your own accidents.
The insurance companies lobbied like crazy to get those removed. They're all gone now.
If you got those No-Fault insurance laws back, the required systems thinking would ensue.
Also, "No Fault" doesn't cover vehicle damage. Apparently, this is what I was remembering. It changed when I lived in Pennsylvania (that was quite a while ago).
There it is — internalize the externality — when someone is profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people on whom the harm falls).
Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them is simply requiring that people creating business are actually ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing value by creating greater external harm than their products/services create.
This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road/street design.
It concludes with some weird-ass hypothetical conversations between the author and a made-up socialist that ignores that fact. In between, it implies that socialists and anarchists weren't responsible for the 40 hour workweek, either, without offering any evidence (who would need evidence that time moves forward?)
It's really an apologia for capitalism masquerading as a history of factory safety. Apparently it's because of attitudes and mindsets and lack of systems thinking that everybody had, including the workers. If the workers were universally fine with the situation, it's really strange that they protested in the streets until the general populace backed them to the degree that government had to adopt the policy for fear of being voted out.
edit: It's really telling that it starts with an anecdote blaming a child for his own death. You see, the child sat during his shift because one of the managers would let him. With proper systems-thinking mindset, he would have of course been forced to stand for 80 hours a week.
The only real progress has been that some companies try to cover up that they're employing child labour by doing it through third parties rather than doing it openly.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BwvpAlvM-SA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
"I blame society."
Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.
(In fact, there's currently an effort to overturn New York's Scaffolding Law, and the arguments fall in line with that detailed in the article -- victims are being negligent or careless, so why should contractors pay?)
The article is not without flaws ... Workers comp was a compromise that created strict liability, but also limited the compensation workers could receive for on-the-job injuries, so it can be argued that it was actually a windfall for owners at the expense of workers.
We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the other hand, there's also serious regressions caused by the efficiency, with novel problems that our society is ill-equipped to solve. All the while, we have a wild west business environment and the founders, executives, and capitalists leading the way are getting unfathomably rich as they make a land grab for ownership over the infrastructure and technology that enables our modern efficiency.
I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1]
While more expensive when adjusted for inflation, all were commercially available in the '60s. You could make video calls in Grand Central in 1964, even if you could only call DC or Chicago and it cost $5 a minute.
The future was already here, as Gibson observed. The internet seems like the last thing humanity invented. Every meaningful (commercially available) "invention" since then has been an internet application or appliance (or has by now been beaten in the marketplace by an internet application or appliance).
I smoked ribs for the first time in my life. Despite having 0 bbq experience and being a relatively new owner of a charcoal grill, I for free and on a whim tapped into the nearly infinite font of human knowledge available at my fingertips to learn about the 3-2-1 method of competition barbecue and made amazing hickory smoked ribs. Without the internet I wouldn't have even bothered, and acquiring that knowledge would have required a trip to a book store or a personal contact with a BBQ expert.
I gave a tour of my newly renovated home to my mother who lives in another state and is in quarantine, having recently tested positive for covid.
I navigated somewhere I've never been easily using a handheld GPS which can navigate any modality (ie, bus directions and train directions for us city folk)
I drove 70 minutes to another state for a small collectors sale in my niche hobby and found something to add to my collection. I wouldn't have known about the sale, or hell even adopted this hobby in the first place, if I didn't have an internet group with dozens of strangers in my city all interested in the same topic.
I made two sales of items in said niche hobby to other hobbyists in my city. Absolute strangers I've never met before. I listed the item in the weekly "deal or no deal" style thread, after striking a deal I sent my address, and when they said they were on the way I left the item on the doorstep for them.
I watched a significant amount of TV without a single commercial break and on my schedule. Not pay per view either.
I left a message for my downstairs neighbor that the contractors are scheduled to show up Monday to replace their basement windows. My neighbors were in another state and got the message anyways.
I continue to work a job with my boss who lives in a other state (and has been for years).
These are all examples of "massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency" In particular with respect to information, hence why this is called the information revolution.
The idea of "timeshifting" TV has been around since at least the '60s, Jeannie paused live TV one time so they wouldn't miss the game. But yeah, there's been innovation in "TV," though I suspect you're actually talking about videos on the internet (as opposed to DTV), and most of the recent moves seem to be massively empowering rights holders over viewers by shifting permanent ownership of physical media to fleeting licenses and subscriptions with terms that could change tomorrow. And, with the removal of the Paramount Decrees and decline of feature films + cinemas, we seem to be heading back to the bad old days of a studio system.
Satellite-based navigation, first implemented with GPS between '73 and '93, is a good example of innovation, and real advancement, after the late '60s though.
But it wasn't, which is the whole point
Instead, analog technologies were strategically deprecated and phased out in favor of more easily surveillable digital alternatives, under the guise of "efficiency," in terms of energy and performance. Once a central network was put in place, innovation outside the network, in what we used to call the "real world," mostly stopped. It's all been fancier and fancier network protocols, applications, and appliances.
Everything is "smart," but under someone else's control. And the means of production are more centralized than ever.
It's mostly held, transistors have incrementally increased as predicted over 50 years ago. This is consistent with Stephenson's observation that there's been no meaningful innovation since the late '60s.
Between 1712 and 1870, interchangeable parts, bifocals, lightning rods, cotton gins, spinning jennys, carbonated water, thermometers, guillotines, parachutes, hot air balloons, sandwiches, mayonnaise, gas turbines, internal combustion engines, matches, electric batteries, microphones, typewriters, sewing machines, barbed wire, reflecting telescopes, stethoscopes, gyroscopes, mechanical reapers, corn planters, bicycles, telegraphs, postage stamps, photography, staplers, airships, gliders, light bulbs, traffic lights, Portland cement, the Bessemer process, and tin cans were invented. Watt's steam engine was an iteration, a few incremental improvements over Newcomen's design.
And then most of the inventions that shape contemporary life came between 1870 and 1970.
Do digital innovations not count as innovations? By that definition of course the digital revolution has not produced any meaningful innovation
Naturally, the industrial revolution has innovations that were related to industry while the information revolution has had innovations that are related to information.
Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back
P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems
That's certainly how this outline played out for the industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the information revolution, but I do hope for the same.
Mozilla went bankrupt because too many ~~idiots~~ outstanding citizens tripped and fell while using Firefox.
YouTube was banned for causing deaths with their irresponsible use of information.
Who knew fixing a car, building a high powered laser or eating a Tide pod is dangerous?
Not the users' fault.
I learnt to code believing it would let me live a meaningful and productive life. I was wrong.
I see all these wonderful innovations happening and I miss out on their benefits.
Grace period may be necessary, but it needs to happen.
Is is even possible to make a browser without 0days?
Whether automatic liability makes sense, as argued in OP about workplace safety, is less certain, but probably yes. Many zero days are triggered by just clicking a link. For such cases, it is hard to argue one is operating it wrong.
Meanwhile equifax and co just leave your data unprotected, no adversary required
Not really. lightning and hail behave predictably. Attackers don't. Adversarial hail would be a hailstorm where the hail magically heat-seeked to the engine.
>Meanwhile equifax and co just leave your data unprotected, no adversary required
The parent poster argued for a much stronger statement than this, which includes only negligence.
What's the metaphor for privilidge escalation - you dress like a pilot and they let you drive?
Most hacks in computing are preventable by not using languages that are know to be unsafe or testing software priperly. We prioritiae features over safety or reliability.
They are not comparable to someone attacking a plane with a missile.
I think it should be clear to that designers of aircraft and airlines themselves take much more care and responsebility than software designer do.
But none of the attacks you outlined can actually be prevented by the manufacturer? eg. for luggage the manufacturer just provides a maximum takeoff weight, but that's only verified by the pilots/ground crew. The buffer overflow equivalent would be an app with a buffer overflow vulnerability, but it asks very nicely not to overflow it.
The buffer overflow equivalent would be an app written in a managed language like C#, where buffer overflows are basically impossible.