[time-nuts] Man killed in quartz crystal accident

[Brian Lloyd]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Bill Dailey <docdailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> So throw caution to the wind because other things kill people?  100% of
> people die from something.  So we shouldn't try to keep from killing
> bystanders because they are going to die anyway?  Sounds a bit sociopathic
> to me.
>

Or, to some extent, rational. Life *IS* a series of risks. When we walk out
the door (or even if we just stay in bed) we are taking more or less risk.
Reducing risk has a cost. Some risks are cheap to reduce and others not so
much.

And perceived risk is not the same thing as real risk. Take terrorism for
example. The perceived risk is high. The actual risk is low. (How many
people actually die from terrorist attacks world wide compared to other
forms of risk?) Yet we spend inordinate amounts of money to mitigate the
perceived risk.

So just considering and accepting that some people are going to die in the
world from various threats that might be considered abnormal is not
sociopathic, it is realistic. It really does come down to threat, risk
analysis, and the cost to mitigate the risk. The problem comes when you
have idiots who do not take the risk seriously. Hey, they got away with it
100 times before so they think nothing of doing it again.

BTW, an interesting analysis of risk assessment within a bureaucratic
organizational structure was Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster.
The working engineers had a good handle on the threats and overall risk.
However, management was clueless by intention. (One might even say
criminally clueless.) I suspect something like that may have been
operational in this case as well.

-- 
Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN/J79BPL
706 Flightline Drive
Spring Branch, TX 78070
brian at lloyd.com
+1.916.877.5067