Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

> I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.

My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.

View on HN

I make a similar argument for train travel: since the death rate is ~10% that of other forms of transport, if trains could be made cheaper by compromising safety to say 50% of other modes, that would be a net positive as cheaper trains would move people off other, still more dangerous forms of transport.

Safety Assurance is a big part of rail transit design but I wouldn't say it is a significant cost. Building and operating rail wouldn't cost half as much if we stripped some of the safety assurance process out of it. Maybe a couple of percentage points of cost for orders of magnitude more fatal accidents. The systems would mostly all still be there, unless you wanted to do something as drastic as removing all interlocking/train protection and rely entirely on drivers and timed signals - basically treat it like a road network - but that would have huge operational impacts - train headways have to be much larger if you can't know what sections have trains in them - as well as being extremely unsafe.

Frankly, these precautions exist for a reason, and it is because many many people died in the early days of rail. Many people who work in rail, particularly in ops/sigs/assurance are proud of how safe rail transport now is.

(I work in Engineering Assurance on rail infrastructure projects).

Fair enough, thanks for sharing. It's not really serious proposal but interesting to learn it wouldn't work. I guess the ongoing cost of rails and rolling stock are killer.

Much of the infrastructure cost is boring stuff like earthworks and retaining walls and moving existing services that are in the way. The shift to in-cab signalling saves/will save a bunch of money on lineside equipment maintenance (because you don't need it).

I was thinking about your comment and one way to save considerable infrastructure costs is more level crossing and less overpasses/bridges, but train vs pedestrian or train vs car are common and messy. Plus level crossings wreck traffic flow on the surrounding road network.

And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).

But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.

The Safety cost and even the hull cost is simply not a major contributor to the cost of your ticket. It’s mostly fuel gate fees maintenance and overhead

Where do you think the maintenance fees come from? That's in part a safety cost.

Keep in mind, if you compromise maintenance for costs, you'll make up the costs in crew wages as they obviously have 1-2 orders of magnitude more risk exposure than the average passenger and won't be willing to fly for anything less than massive hazard pay.

Scheduled maintenance is done with semi slave labor in the 3rd world. Routine is more expense local labor but the routine stuff can’t be deferred anyway

Fuel as well!

"this isn't enough fuel to get more than 80% of the way there!"

"you don't need fuel for the descent though"

> And you could certainly make the same argument about airliners, which have a death rate <10% that of trains (and <1% that of cars).

You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians.

If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year.

Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.

I mean, not _zero_[0]... but close enough, really.

0: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...

Wow.. And if you asked me to predict the outcome of that incident, I'd have said the fatalities would have been the other way around... go figure!

Haha, ok, I stand corrected.

Interesting stat.

Airliners are much safer than other modes of transportation per mile traveled. The difference vanishes (mostly, or reverses) when interpreted per mile on the vehicle or per trip.

If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).

It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.

People who currently are forced to commute daily with cars could be much safer doing so on a more robust train system. You wouldn’t get the same benefit from cheaper flights.

Did we both interpret the MCAS incident with Boeing differently? Because I saw this as regulatory capture putting it's metaphorical testicles where it felt comfortable.

Does that actually work as a party conversation starter? I can’t imagine being at a party and choosing to engage with someone about a topic like that.

On the contrary, I’d love to talk about a spicy topic. Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though. E.g they can disagree gracefully and can entertain all angles

>Only if the person isn’t too invested/serious about it though

. Wow, I'm the opposite. I don't mind discussing a spicy topic, but only if the person actually gives a shit about it. I have no desire to be trolled IRL by someone wanting to be edgy. If someone is serious and polite about it, I'll discuss any topic.

I agree that talking to people who don’t give a shit at all aren’t fun talking to.

I wanted to say I don’t like discussing spicy topics with people who give too much shit and are inflexible because at that point discussion can turn personal or can feel like them venting.

Oh, yeah. We seem to agree.

Although I allow friends to vent inflexibly. But that's a different type of conversation done for their benefit.

It very much does. I have actually offensive party conversation starters that work even better. You don't have to enjoy talking with everyone.

edit: shouldn't party conversation be a little spicy? At least I'm not talking about party politics, sports events, or television shows. Or the weather, or how we all individually got to the party.

To each their own of course, but given the binary choice between a boring topic and a topic that will inevitably cause me to think about my own kids dying in an accident, bring on the boredom.

A chicken may relish breakfast jokes that a pig would find distasteful.

But anyone who knows the topic well will explain to you that bike helmets and seat belts are the only things that really move the needle. The rest are on the order of measurement error.

(And I assume you’re not advocating dropping either of those.)

I don't think there is a correlation between being allowed to run around without supervision and deaths of children. For example, if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.

> if you build dangerous roads everywhere and lots of kids die in car accidents, maybe something could be done about the roads, not the free roaming kids.

That is accepted that pedestrians need to behave so that cars can drive around at relatively high speeds in very public and shared spaces is an unbelievable accomplishment by the automobile industry.

Just yesterday, we were standing 30m downwind of somebody idling their mangy Vespa, and we could smell the stink from their partial combustion. As you do. At the same time, it's totally unacceptable for somebody themselves to stink like that.

I guess it's similar with car noise. People would go nuts if everybody was, I don't know, humming all the time outside. But car noises are normal.

As has become popular to say on Twitter lately: cities aren't loud, cars are

People seem to tolerate birds and crickets

> I don't think there is a correlation between being allowed to run around without supervision and deaths of children.

That sounds like a good case against supervising children at all, but I don't believe it's true.

So, like an error budget that would exist in the SRE world?

Heh :) that's similar to the subject of a Mitchell and Webb sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYyxvM85zU

Same goes for bullying. If you get a generation that is so different from the previous generation that they are unable to live/work with one another, then not enough was done to reinforce some shared cultural values. Change can and should happen, but it should be gradual enough that one generation recognizes, respects, and can empathize with the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com