Hacker News Reader

Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

> Lo and behold, the airlines have started classifying almost every delay and cancellation as a safety issue

Then the regulators should be asking why there are so many safety issues? Seems like by the airlines' own admission, this is a perfect ground for a full investigation and penalties in case the issues are found to be misclassified under the category of safety.

View on HN

You need to be very very very careful not to disincentivize people declaring safety issues. They should really just unwind the wrong incentive and handle it differently.

Random spot checks of declared safety incidents + serious penalties for fraud (which this is if the companies are lying about safety incidents to avoid paying out compensation) is probably sufficient without changing any regulations in any meaningful way. No regulation is perfect but it’s quite surprising how effective regulations become when you start spot checking whether everyone is being honest.

Are you describing what food agencies do with their pseudorandom inspections? Because indeed those seem to work very well at a relatively low cost.

Sure that’s one example but I think there’s various things like this. You have to make sure that investigators can also be made undercover where makes sense (if it’s possible to obfuscate malfeasance) and rotate the inspector’s physical location (to avoid potential for corruption due to personal relationships). You always still have other corruption vectors (eg getting buddy buddy with the inspector’s boss and influencing them indirectly). It’s an unsolved problem but you can always do better than nothing.

Under what basis do you have to claim those "random" inspections "work very well"

Personally I believe they do almost nothing. Food born illness is pretty common and almost impossible to trace unless it is a wide spread outbreak.

Many cities only inspect a food establishment every 2-3 years and in some cases as long as 5 years.

I think reputation, and economics play a larger factor in safety then government inspections. Dirty places making their customers ill tend to close long before the government inspectors come around.

What country are you referring to?

Given we are in a topic thread about the US State of NY, about a Law in NY State. I am referring to the US, and Specifically NY which has been famous for their health dept in come cases not inspecting places for years

Gotcha. My only experience is with Ontario. Fair to assume we were sticking to NY. :)

Ok. But a state being disfunctional in a specific way surely means we should be looking externally for places where it’s not that disfunctional to figure out how to fix the disfunction. No? Am I taking crazy pills?

Penalties need to include individuals and not just companies.

Enforcement, transparency, and accountability are critical to regulations working correctly, which is why companies lobby against them at every opportunity. If they can get a toothless regulation on the books companies and politicians can all pretend something has been done to address the problems while the people can continue to be endangered/exploited.

They only care about safety issues during flight. Flights that dont happen are not a "flight safety" issue. The safest trip is always the one that doesnt try to leave the ground.

Is it a trip if it doesn't leave the ground?

That is an odd take - so any shit can happen to the customers as long as they don't get in the air? IMHO they should also care about customers being cheated out of compensation on account of misclassification of the reason for the flights being cancelled.

Most safety issues to planes happen on the ground...just saying.

I said try to leave the ground. Planes that never leave the gate are generally rather safe.

No...that was was my point they are not.

And regulators all the way down.. regulations seldom work without unintended consequences and people finding loopholes or blackmarkets. They do more harm than good.

They may do harm, significant harm, but it is unfair to categorically claim that the harm is greater than the good.

Personally I think aircraft safety regulations do plenty of good.

Note that the aircraft industry, although state-regulated, almost behaves as self-regulated since airlines are mostly demanding of excellent regulations and high safety standards to reassure passengers. Very different from, say, Dupont (chemicals), who is regulated for OSHA reasons, but who would always find workers even if they dived at Bophal levels of safety.

I'm inclined to agree, but I am somewhat curious about this. The Boeing 737 max crashes certainly demonstrate that the industry does not universally prioritize safety above all. At the same time, there are strong incentives for any airline to not have a catastrophic safety incident. I recently flew on a 737 max and was willing to do so not so much because the FAA cleared them to fly but because I assume the pilots are not suicidal. In the absence of strong government safety regulations would things just devolve to YOLO? I'm not sure either way. Having said that, Chesterton's fence applies to any existing regulations.

> The Boeing 737 max crashes certainly demonstrate that the industry does not universally prioritize safety above all

There is regulation and there are consequences of not following the spirit of the regulation (most focus seems to be on compliance to the letter of the law and avoiding to do anything beyond that ignoring the spirit of the law). Consequences don't seem to be particularly deterring in much cases; the offending company pays a penalty, no executive goes to jail and people forget about it soon. Unless these executives get jail time, there won't be any fear of consequences.

This might be more of a reflection on the governance where you are. The idea of an unregulated country sounds terrible to me, and I am unaware of examples of it working. Most countries regulate things like aircraft safety with good effect. Regulating certain professions to ensure minimum standards is another good example.

If you have any interest, check out the below link for a great piece of legislation. It protects NZ consumers and effectively puts a warranty on everything you buy here.

Another example which I appreciate every day is the regulation imposed on our telecommunications industry. We have gone from a trash copper network to an excellent fibre network that is fast and inexpensive to use - all via regulation, investment and legislation.

Regulation works just fine when done properly, and I’d like more of it here in NZ. I’d like the supermarket monopoly broken up via regulation. I’d also like the building supplies and fuels racket broken up.

https://www.consumerprotection.govt.nz/general-help/consumer...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com