Vistex CEO Sanjay Shah dies on stage after freak accident

It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".

My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.

It was actually around World War I that these kind of safety issues became well known to the public. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the books of Upton Sinclair, and the muckrakers started to bring awareness to a lot of formerly ignored problems like this.

the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.

I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:

(ODS file: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65143a89b1bad...)

And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.

So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).

Even though this mindset is incongruous and inefficient for my present circumstances -- and I'm aware of it -- overcoming childhood programming about it is difficult.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

now let's imagine what might happen when genetic engineering comes into play. how can you argue about equality when there would be none, not biologically.

i find insects fascinating but I don't want humans to mimic the caste thing. we are though. and we will.

Confused by the downvotes. Are you in favour of caste systems?

To earn a $200/month salary is to earn 16 600 INR/month. As somebody who has lived in Rajasthan (Udaipur for those who are interested), that is an actually reasonable estimate, albeit on the higher side.

But no security guard in Jaipur is earning 10 000 INR/month. Even in Mumbai, one of the most expensive to-live-in cities in India, the security guard would earn less than 25 000 INR/month (unless they happen to work in an especially posh neighbourhood).

And where did you get that 60x number? That would work out to be roughly 1.2 CR INR/month, which would put you in the top 0.08% of all Indians [1]. I can assure you that no "mid career middle management professional" is earning that.

Even if I take your lowest guess, 30x, that is still more money than what almost all mid career professionals would earn in 10 years. I am convinced that you've never set foot in India.

[1]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/calculator.cms

Are you sure about that? That would work out to be nearly 10 LPA, which is a good 2-4 lakhs more than what a good electrician would earn in Mumbai, which is a city that is far more expensive to live in than Delhi

You would see people working under a flood light at night, with burlap sacks as you said, as well as manual tools that were sorely inequipped for the work they were doing.

It was almost like it was cheaper to just hire someone to beat concrete for 14 hrs/day with a household hammer, for the duration of their life, than to pay $5,000 for a jackhammer and progress 5X as fast.

so during the Mangalore flight landing attempt, the first officer asked to divert to another airport (twice) but the captain refused. doesn't that show the lack of safety concern for captain or lack of repercussions if they made it safely? i bet the first officer would be laughed at if they landed safely and s/he wouldn't even bother complaining about it.

if they don't have the space to install the arresting mechanism, how about installing them and limit the size of the aircraft that land at that airport (if expanding the runway is out of question). i mean any nation that care about human lives would do that.

> Of course, it's also important to avoid criticizing poor people for being poor. What were the alternatives? It would be much safer for each kid to be in their own family SUV, as is common in the US, but this increase in child safety is due to increased wealth, not increased virtue.

the alternative would be to find another rickshaw driver who limits the number of kids to 5. sure, it will be expensive but human lives should have more value than a 100-200Rs/month savings.

> "sacrifices are required in order to industrialize."

No, I’m making a different point. I’m not saying it ought to be that way (to industrialize) — only why it’s so naturally, and therefore what changes are needed to improve.

Safety margins in construction, and proper regulation/inspection are “overheads” which can only be paid once you have surplus (economic productivity). In some cases, the extra cost is minimal (just preventing corruption/carelessness in an already sufficient process/design), but in other cases it requires being willing to pay extra “for safety”, so it becomes a question of affordability & access eg: traveling in a well built car rather than an auto rickshaw, or discarding food past the "sell by" date.

To use another example from a sibling comment: a dozen children being crammed into an auto rickshaw on school commutes. Suppose the society starts enforcing a law mandating that no more than 3 humans (incl children) can travel in an auto rickshaw at once. The consequence is that the cost of commute has now increased manifold — does that take it beyond the regime of affordability for some fraction of the population — Will the kids now have to walk/cycle to school instead? What tradeoffs would those kids/families prefer?

So investing in safety requires not just that the business under consideration be profitable, but also that all customers have enough economic productivity which manifests in their willingness to spend larger amounts and demand safety and/or raise the floor forbidding unsafe products.

Reasoning in analogy with a minimum wage — if you raise the level too high, you just rule out a whole bunch of low-surplus economic activity. To make the trade off worthwhile, and not forbid essential economic activity, the wage floor can only be raised in tandem with economic productivity.

Consumer goods at least segment markets with price discrimination, so richer people can buy Eg. larger+safer cars. But they might have to drive on the same roads as everyone else (potholes and all), or use the same cable cars (to borrow an example from a sibling comment), or use the same medication — because "infrastructure" that needs to serve a larger population can only match the average (cumulative, in some cases) productivity. It’s an example where inequality hurts — however rich a single consumer might be, they only have access to are what the rest of the market is willing to buy (made viable with economies of scale).

Finally, what I'm trying to point out is that these are not "sacrifices in order to grow" (i.e. investments) to some rosy future -- these are tradeoffs necessary for functioning today. Growth is a separate story -- if and when it does happen, the prosperity helps bootstrap the system into safer operating modes, for which we may be thankful.

The question seems to be what’s an acceptable threshold, why, and who. These aren’t easy questions. They’ve been with us since humans first started forming tribes.

(I said much the same thing as you in an adjacent comment, but it’s worth framing the sentiment in a way that’s not mistaken. Otherwise it’s little more than dogma, whether on one side or the other.)

We now all complain about the same issues; lack of care, pride of work or worksmanship.

They now manage offshore and treat them with alot more humanity. Sometimes will resort to 'ill speech' because they say 'it's how things work there as a boss otherwise they climb ontop of your head' which always makes me laugh when they say it.

This is just a small observation that I remember and I wonder if it what you are talking about.

Of course America has its unique videos too. Every place has its problems, that's what I find interesting about it. I like the unfiltered view into the underlying culture and psychology in these places that only "gore" videos can provide.