Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Plant safety cuts into profits, left to itself management will not encourage safe working practice - there must be meaningful oversight by an outside agency.

Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high, destroying the entire surrounding neighborhood and killing most of your employees. If I were a plant manager, I'd make sure to put doing all that right at the top of my TODO list.

Or, maybe, just maybe, not everybody who owns/runs a business in a capitalist system is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard, and maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable. And maybe we can't regulate our way to a society where nothing bad ever happens to anybody, ever?

View on HN

> Yes, because it's obviously good for business to have your plant blow sky high

You know how this is - most often poor working practice has no immediate consequence. Perhaps a critical patch is installed a few days late, and the website does not get hacked, no adverse consequences most of the time. At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.

> maybe, just maybe, accidents happen, some of which are damn near unpredictable and unavoidable.

That's the issue of fault-tolerant design. In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.

At some point someone will run the numbers, and conclude that good safety practice isn't that necessary. That's a recipe for disaster. Most everyone here should be familiar with the Challenger explosion and the runup to it.

That's a fair point in a sense, and I'm not arguing that it isn't beneficial to have some independent eyes looking at things and helping avoid bias. I would argue that it's not necessarily required to regulate that sort of thing and make it the job of government to try and prevent every possible contingency though. I think working to develop a voluntary certification process, something akin to ISO9001, where being certified would be a "badge of honor" and - eventually - all but a prerequisite to doing business, would be preferred.

In an ammonium nitrate plant there is a risk of explosion; they quite simply do not belong anywhere near a town.

That was definitely a sub-optimal design, for sure. I'd be curious to know the history of how that setup happened, actually.

OTOH, to play devil's advocate a little bit... how often do ammonium nitrate plants explode? One could probably argue that the industry actually is very safe if you look at it over the long-run. Or not... I don't actually have those statistics. Just a point of discussion.

Nobody ever said that we will regulate our way to a perfect society. Nobody said that every business owner is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard.

But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.

But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners

Nobody ever said that we will regulate our way to a perfect society. Nobody said that every business owner is a greedy, evil, soul-sucking bastard

Not overtly, but it seems implied by a lot of the verbiage you hear from people arguing for more regulation and blaming business owners for pretty much everything. (Note: I don't mean just here, now, in this very discussion. I'm generalizing based on other experiences)

But maybe, just maybe, added regulation doesn't need to hurt the honest business owners, and can be used to keep those whose ethics may be a little more sketchy in check.

I would argue that that is an awfully big maybe. Government regulation, however well-meaning, is notorious for having unintended consequences... sometimes even to the point of having an effect totally counter to the original intent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com