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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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