But how do you know that it is a simple trade off between money and safety standards? It's been noted on HN that the US seems particularly bad at large infrastructure projects compared to other developed countries and I'm struggling to believe that's because the US has wildly better safety standards.
Who cares if Oroville Dam is in the USA or not. The same thing would still apply if it was in the UK. I'm merely saying the modern public should reconsider spending $250million extra, instead of applauding it simply because no injuries happened.
I'm going to make a guess here and assume that you are not working construction. And if that's so I would highly recommend you join a construction crew for a couple of years and then come back here with your idiotic approach to workplace safety. It's all about preventable accidents, and your assumption that we could save 250M on a project by compromising workplace safety is both wrong and the beginning of a slippery slope that ends with maximum savings and no workplace safety at all. After all, it's not the life of you and your family that is at risk here.
Fuck those construction workers, fuck those miners and who cares about factory workers. After all they're disposable. /s
Workplace safety is there for a reason: to stop white collar criminals from putting a price on human lives and then to optimize for the lowest they can get away with.
I feel you're missing the point, I can't tell if it's deliberate.
Suppose you wanted to reduce risks for computer programmers - everyone gets a personal doctor who sits with them to monitor their vitals, state of the art monitoring device, daily blood tests, screenings for all sorts of diseases. Each person gets a fitness coach, dietician, sleep coach, whatever. Programmers with injuries get oxygen therapy and physios on hand. Basically you treat them like world class racehorses (!). Whatever, hopefully you see the point.
Would that be overkill? No? Well then you don't think programmers matter at all and want to see them all die in industrial accidents. /s
If we can accept at any point that we should, maybe not buy the most expensive chair/table/keyboard/screens, even if there's a chance of injury (eyesight, cardio problems from 20 years of sitting, cut from a sharp edge on a filling cabinet, etc.) then you're agreeing with the general concept of the OP IMO.
Now, in public procurement, should we pay $1000 per seat for a currently $100 app to ensure no programmer ever gets a thrombosis/carpal problem/etc.?
I agreed with some of your more abstract posts on this topic, but I really can't buy into that assumption that just being a little less fearful would reduce costs by half. You wave that second bid around as if they had actually done the same work, at the lower price, with a known quantity of bloodshed. But that is only a hypothetical, That second bid might have had even bigger cost overruns, we don't know. The winning bid might actually have terrible safety standards while being lucky, we don't know. There is no simple, isolated safety/cost tradeoff that you can dial in at will and get the expected results. On the contrary, a contractor that is sloppy with safety will often also be sloppy with other things, causing costs to increase, not to sink.
I would highly doubt that $250mil went into slower progress for the sake of safety. Definitely, there were other costs.
You're supposed to only consider the abstract idea I presented. That's why I changed from $250mil numbers to $100mil halfway through, although I didn't make it fully clear to divorce the concrete numbers from the abstract cultural ideas.
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