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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

One of the many times they have killed: eight people in San Bruno in 2010 due to a gas pipeline explosion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

> On January 13, 2012, an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses.

This while charging unbelievably high rates for some of the worst reliability rates I have ever seen anywhere in the US.

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That isn't really on the same scale as 1.4 billion litres of hexavalent chromium. I'm not sure if they are meant to be the same incident, but at $10 million/life, $100 million in savings at cost of 8 lives would be an appropriate design choice. We have to draw a line somewhere. I don't think that is the comparison you're trying to draw, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say, so...

Life be risky. Perfect safety is not a reasonable goal.

It's not $100M savings, it's $100M paid to executives, illegally, instead of on the safety repairs.

As far as whether trading $100M is an appropriate tradeoff for 8 lives, well.... let's hope you never are in a position to make a choice between $10M and a person's life.

> well.... let's just say that I wouldn't be spending any more time around you if I could put a face to that statement. Come on.

I suspect I could be any civil engineer, assuming that I didn't remember the wrong order of magnitude. Decisions have to be made about how safe to make things. It is quite difficult to do that without putting a dollar figure on human life, and AFAIK it is order of magnitude 10 million.

Otherwise when do you stop bubble wrapping infrastructure?

The numbers are close enough that they probably were skimping, but we can't tell that from the outcome of 8 people dying.

You continue ignore that money was illegally taken from safety funds to pay executive bonuses.

This is not an engineering tradeoff decision. That's not even relevant, and it's weird that you would invent such a situation.

US DOT maintains a valuation of a statistical life specifically as a metric for this reason. (https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...)

For 2012 it was 9.1 million. So 8 people doesn't quite get us to 100 million, but it isn't far off.

Also PG&E absolutely doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on their safety culture.

Cars are one of the main causes of death in the US, and we just accept it. So perhaps DOT can get away with it. But we do not accept this tradeoff in, say, approval of medical devices or drugs.

I doubt Boeing is happy with the tradeoff of counting lives in millions of dollars right now.

> But we do not accept this tradeoff in, say, approval of medical devices or drugs.

It is applied in hospital care though, they have the same problem that they also have to cap spending somewhere. A bunch of people could technically survive but die because they can't afford care. Since care is rationed by more direct economics than design that means it would be capping out at figures far lower than 10 million/person in practice.

> I doubt Boeing is happy with the tradeoff of counting lives in millions of dollars right now.

The public reaction to Boeing is a bit hypocritical though, because of the road transport example. No-one would bat an eye at a delivery driver on a motorcycle but that seems to be a comparable level of risk to these Boeing planes. Consistent standards should be applied between different modes of transport.

When the wheel falls off of the motorbike, it has pretty limited crash damage compared to a plane.

Don't forget that incident also leveled 35+ houses; damaged more, and injured 58 people, some badly.

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