5 ms·

We read about similar disasters happening today in third world countries and we think "It's all due to the corruption in those places; such things could never h

We read about similar disasters happening today in third world countries and we think "It's all due to the corruption in those places; such things could never happen in developed places". It is really thought-provoking to think about how not very long ago they did.

PJDK 10y ago
I always think that the sign of a good system (be it a country or a company or whatever) is not that mistakes don't happen. But that the same mistakes don't happen twice.
- ttyltrful 10y ago
  It's not as simple as don't have a school gathering under a landslide risk after heavy rain. The tips were a known danger. The mistake was in preventing their removal. This mistake happened because those at risk didn't have the power to act in their own interest. Preventing such mistakes in the future would require empowerment of the proletariat.
mcv 10y ago
There had also been warnings about Fukushima, and they were ignored. Profit-driven corporations will always cut corners if they can.
- hueving 10y ago
  Unless they have management that cares about the future of the company.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Management can always find another job, and cutting corners can be crucial in keeping your current one.
    - hueving 10y ago
      That's not how business works. If you wrecklessly drove a company into the ground, you're going to have a hard time finding another leadership position at another company.
      - dotancohen 10y ago
        That's not how business works. If you can show that you saved the corporation massive amounts of money, and that "the incident" was a one-in-a-million that would _never_ happen to the new corporation, then of course they will hire you for management. See: HP, Yahoo, etc.
        hueving 10y ago
        Oh really? Why hasn't this guy found another job yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling He made the company tons of money. I'm sure he would claim it "would never happen" to the new company as well. Yet he's not exactly leading up another energy company, is he?
        astrange 10y ago
        Because he's in jail?
    - mcv 10y ago
      That's exactly it. Too often, management is judged on short term performance. Risks are often ensured, or taken by daughter company that can be dropped. And even when not, they may believe the risk is so small that it's worth taking. Especially when margins are low, cutting some corners for a small drop in costs can lead to a large increase in profits. And when the damage done to society as a whole, the lives lost, the radiation released, and the animals drowned in your oil, are not on your balance sheet, they don't directly factor into the decision. Only the money they have to pay as a result does, and that's never enough to undo the damage, and often not even enough to scare other companies from cutting similar corners, because letting those companies really pay, would bankrupt it and costs jobs. It's perverse incentives all over the place.
maxerickson 10y ago
I think there are some similarities with the lead poisoning in Flint. Poor alignment of interests, a disinterested external regulator, economic malaise, etc.
Gravityloss 10y ago
We still buy the gold and cobalt lined products. We have externalized the disasters. Everybody just wants a successful social life and career. Countercultures are small outliers seen as unrelatable.
jameshart 10y ago
Had a conversation with a Chinese colleague after the huge explosion in Tianjin; they were worried that this sort of thing - industrial accidents, spillages, etc. - was happening in China all the time and they wondered why it didn't happen in the west. Of course these things all happened in western countries in the past - My feeling was that china is going through a hundred and fifty years of growth in a couple of decades. It takes an Aberfan, or a Boston molasses flood, or a Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, to get a country to fix the liability and legal frameworks it needs. And China is going through all those learning events in a much compressed timeframe. Open question whether it's actually learning from these events, too.
- xxr 10y ago
  But why should they even need to make the mistakes to learn from themselves? The lessons are already there from decades of other countries' disasters and solutions.
  - iSnow 10y ago
    Greed. There is always someone who profits from lax standards and will weild political influence to hinder change. Mostly, it takes a massive disaster that hits home to overcome this.
  - arjie 10y ago
    Because distance reduces disaster's cost, and in every industry the guys who operate on luck can deliver cheaper and faster than the guys who do it right. One of those groups will kill someone eventually, but until they do they'll out compete everyone. Everything that can go wrong will go right, and you'll take more risks every time, winning every time, until you experience catastrophic failure.
    - Someone 10y ago
      I know it is cynical, but a part of it also is because it isn't worthwhile for them yet. If large numbers of people cannot afford to say "I won't work/live there because it is too dangerous", a capitalist doesn't need to work on safety. That's why, for example, clothes factories can get away with counteracting the "employees may steal stuff" risk by locking down windows and emergency exits or why coal mining companies can ignore all kinds of warnings of upcoming disasters, even if similar warnings have been followed by deadly 'accidents' recently and in the same company.
smacktoward 10y ago
Indeed, and by pushing the production of goods far away from the people who consume them, modern industrial capitalism makes it easier for the consumer to ignore things like this when they do happen. After all, they're happening to foreign people far away, not to people next door, people Like Us™. You can see that logic in action in this infamous 2013 essay by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, arguing that "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK": http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international...
- wyager 10y ago
  Exporting production to less developed countries inarguably raises the standard of living in those countries. There is a cost in the form of increased risk from some sources; manufacturing accidents, pollution, etc. However, this is more than offset by the increase in food production, lifespan, medical care, and everything else that comes with being a production economy. The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" just indicates that you are from a culture that's forgotten what it takes to modernize and improve. You can't build an industrial base off nostalgic dreams of agrarianism.
  - hilop 10y ago
    It's not inarguable at all. There is a third option besides agrarian subsistence and modern industrial subsistence: global partnership an fair trade, instead of Westerners profiting from Eastern misery.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    > The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" Where did I say that, exactly? I welcome the opening up of economic opportunities to these populations. I just think that they deserve the same protections and pay for doing those jobs that Westerners would receive if they were the ones doing them, rather than just being pawns in a global system of labor arbitrage. It's a bit rich to get up on a moral high horse and then declare from that elevated position that the life of a Bangladeshi worker is worth less than that of an American one. Companies aren't setting up in these countries because they are benevolent actors looking to help them develop their economies. They're setting up there because they can exploit the workers there in ways that they can't get away with doing back home anymore. Workers in developed economies had to endure a century of bloody struggle to claw those protections into place; I would rather we construct an economy that allows this new class of workers to get them for themselves without having to suffer through that.
hilop 10y ago
Aberfan was 1960s. Fukushima was 2000s Flint was 2010s It wasn't "ago", it is an ongoing battle. The greed and evil reappear whenever we get complacent.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  As Faulkner famously put it: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
- WalterSear 10y ago
  The problem isn't individual greed that keeps reappearing, it's the collective and cultural greed that makes the individual greed short-term attractive.

PJDK 10y ago

I always think that the sign of a good system (be it a country or a company or whatever) is not that mistakes don't happen. But that the same mistakes don't happen twice.

ttyltrful 10y ago
It's not as simple as don't have a school gathering under a landslide risk after heavy rain. The tips were a known danger. The mistake was in preventing their removal. This mistake happened because those at risk didn't have the power to act in their own interest. Preventing such mistakes in the future would require empowerment of the proletariat.

mcv 10y ago

There had also been warnings about Fukushima, and they were ignored. Profit-driven corporations will always cut corners if they can.

hueving 10y ago
Unless they have management that cares about the future of the company.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Management can always find another job, and cutting corners can be crucial in keeping your current one.
  - hueving 10y ago
    That's not how business works. If you wrecklessly drove a company into the ground, you're going to have a hard time finding another leadership position at another company.
    - dotancohen 10y ago
      That's not how business works. If you can show that you saved the corporation massive amounts of money, and that "the incident" was a one-in-a-million that would _never_ happen to the new corporation, then of course they will hire you for management. See: HP, Yahoo, etc.
      - hueving 10y ago
        Oh really? Why hasn't this guy found another job yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling He made the company tons of money. I'm sure he would claim it "would never happen" to the new company as well. Yet he's not exactly leading up another energy company, is he?
        astrange 10y ago
        Because he's in jail?
  - mcv 10y ago
    That's exactly it. Too often, management is judged on short term performance. Risks are often ensured, or taken by daughter company that can be dropped. And even when not, they may believe the risk is so small that it's worth taking. Especially when margins are low, cutting some corners for a small drop in costs can lead to a large increase in profits. And when the damage done to society as a whole, the lives lost, the radiation released, and the animals drowned in your oil, are not on your balance sheet, they don't directly factor into the decision. Only the money they have to pay as a result does, and that's never enough to undo the damage, and often not even enough to scare other companies from cutting similar corners, because letting those companies really pay, would bankrupt it and costs jobs. It's perverse incentives all over the place.

maxerickson 10y ago

I think there are some similarities with the lead poisoning in Flint. Poor alignment of interests, a disinterested external regulator, economic malaise, etc.

Gravityloss 10y ago

We still buy the gold and cobalt lined products. We have externalized the disasters. Everybody just wants a successful social life and career. Countercultures are small outliers seen as unrelatable.

jameshart 10y ago

Had a conversation with a Chinese colleague after the huge explosion in Tianjin; they were worried that this sort of thing - industrial accidents, spillages, etc. - was happening in China all the time and they wondered why it didn't happen in the west. Of course these things all happened in western countries in the past - My feeling was that china is going through a hundred and fifty years of growth in a couple of decades. It takes an Aberfan, or a Boston molasses flood, or a Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, to get a country to fix the liability and legal frameworks it needs. And China is going through all those learning events in a much compressed timeframe. Open question whether it's actually learning from these events, too.

xxr 10y ago
But why should they even need to make the mistakes to learn from themselves? The lessons are already there from decades of other countries' disasters and solutions.
- iSnow 10y ago
  Greed. There is always someone who profits from lax standards and will weild political influence to hinder change. Mostly, it takes a massive disaster that hits home to overcome this.
- arjie 10y ago
  Because distance reduces disaster's cost, and in every industry the guys who operate on luck can deliver cheaper and faster than the guys who do it right. One of those groups will kill someone eventually, but until they do they'll out compete everyone. Everything that can go wrong will go right, and you'll take more risks every time, winning every time, until you experience catastrophic failure.
  - Someone 10y ago
    I know it is cynical, but a part of it also is because it isn't worthwhile for them yet. If large numbers of people cannot afford to say "I won't work/live there because it is too dangerous", a capitalist doesn't need to work on safety. That's why, for example, clothes factories can get away with counteracting the "employees may steal stuff" risk by locking down windows and emergency exits or why coal mining companies can ignore all kinds of warnings of upcoming disasters, even if similar warnings have been followed by deadly 'accidents' recently and in the same company.

smacktoward 10y ago

Indeed, and by pushing the production of goods far away from the people who consume them, modern industrial capitalism makes it easier for the consumer to ignore things like this when they do happen. After all, they're happening to foreign people far away, not to people next door, people Like Us™. You can see that logic in action in this infamous 2013 essay by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, arguing that "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK": http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international...

wyager 10y ago
Exporting production to less developed countries inarguably raises the standard of living in those countries. There is a cost in the form of increased risk from some sources; manufacturing accidents, pollution, etc. However, this is more than offset by the increase in food production, lifespan, medical care, and everything else that comes with being a production economy. The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" just indicates that you are from a culture that's forgotten what it takes to modernize and improve. You can't build an industrial base off nostalgic dreams of agrarianism.
- hilop 10y ago
  It's not inarguable at all. There is a third option besides agrarian subsistence and modern industrial subsistence: global partnership an fair trade, instead of Westerners profiting from Eastern misery.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  > The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" Where did I say that, exactly? I welcome the opening up of economic opportunities to these populations. I just think that they deserve the same protections and pay for doing those jobs that Westerners would receive if they were the ones doing them, rather than just being pawns in a global system of labor arbitrage. It's a bit rich to get up on a moral high horse and then declare from that elevated position that the life of a Bangladeshi worker is worth less than that of an American one. Companies aren't setting up in these countries because they are benevolent actors looking to help them develop their economies. They're setting up there because they can exploit the workers there in ways that they can't get away with doing back home anymore. Workers in developed economies had to endure a century of bloody struggle to claw those protections into place; I would rather we construct an economy that allows this new class of workers to get them for themselves without having to suffer through that.

hilop 10y ago

Aberfan was 1960s. Fukushima was 2000s Flint was 2010s It wasn't "ago", it is an ongoing battle. The greed and evil reappear whenever we get complacent.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
As Faulkner famously put it: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
WalterSear 10y ago
The problem isn't individual greed that keeps reappearing, it's the collective and cultural greed that makes the individual greed short-term attractive.