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Your argument is so ridiculous I have trouble believing you're serious. As a society the doctors can focus on diabetes, the aerospace engineers can focus on pl

Your argument is so ridiculous I have trouble believing you're serious. As a society the doctors can focus on diabetes, the aerospace engineers can focus on planes, and the city planners can focus on traffic safety, simultaneously. The reason people are focused on airline safety (to the extent they are), is because there was a huge scandal. It's entirely rational to investigate.

dash2 6y ago
> As a society the doctors can focus on diabetes, the aerospace engineers can focus on planes, and the city planners can focus on traffic safety, simultaneously. Unfortunately, when budgets are finite, we cannot prioritize everything. OP's argument was that we spend too much money responding to visible, spectacular disasters, and too little on ongoing small harms which add up. There is some good evidence for this - for example Healy et al "Myopic voters and natural disaster policy", which shows that politicians overspend greatly on disaster response and underspend greatly on disaster preparedness. Another example would be the response to the 2000 Hatfield rail crash, which killed four people. The expensive safety systems then fit on trains cost so much, and added so much to the price of a ticket, that they probably killed more people than they saved, because people moved to on the road - which is a much more dangerous mode of transport.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nix23 6y ago
  But the Argument is from ground up wrong. >we spend too much money responding to visible I that case the Aircraft producer has to invests that money, NOT the public. I'm not saying you are wrong, not OP, not you. But the argument is just plane wrong. Again, nearly every commercial plane-crash goes with 100% loss of life, in a vehicle where you can not break or stop, if something important goes wrong you will crash and loose 300 life's. But i think we all know that a plane crash or a train accident with 3 death's is much more Frontpage'able than toxic amount's of sugar in drinks, or pesticides, but that's a People and Press problem and not a technical one.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    All money is fungible. If the aircraft manufacturers, or government, or consumers spend money, it is, ultimately the same money, as a matter for the effects of society-wide investment. I should not need to trace the path from one spend to the next for this to be clear. We choose, as a society, to spend a very great deal on making air travel much, much safer than car travel, and car travel less unsafe than it once was. Meanwhile, people are dropping by the tens and hundreds of thousands from sugar poisoning that we permit because the sugar producers have good lobbyists and a truly massive and extremely effective propagada operation convincing people sugar poisoning is what they actually want because it will make them feel young and sporty, not fat and sick as we know to be true. There used to be an equally effective operation for tobacco. We didn't get tobacco deaths under control until we kneecapped the propaganda. We spend far, far more than on airline safety and auto safety for medical care for the people made sick by sugar poisoning.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >If the aircraft manufacturers, or government, or consumers spend money, it is, ultimately the same money, as a matter for the effects of society-wide investment. Emm NO, best case it flows back to the society who pay for the product. Public spending and money from private company's is definitely not the same (with the exception that apple forces you in the future to buy a iPhone).
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        I see that you have not studied macroeconomics. Money is a mechanism to track and manage resource allocation in a society. Collectively, we make choices as a society, and the money is manipulated to effect those choices. We make poor choices when we confuse choices about money with choices about society.
        nix23 6y ago
        >Money is a mechanism to track and manage resource allocation in a society Yeah you turn around my words, if Boeing invest in the security of the airplane at the end of the day they have less money. >Collectively, we make choices as a society Again Boeing is NOT a society.

dash2 6y ago

> As a society the doctors can focus on diabetes, the aerospace engineers can focus on planes, and the city planners can focus on traffic safety, simultaneously. Unfortunately, when budgets are finite, we cannot prioritize everything. OP's argument was that we spend too much money responding to visible, spectacular disasters, and too little on ongoing small harms which add up. There is some good evidence for this - for example Healy et al "Myopic voters and natural disaster policy", which shows that politicians overspend greatly on disaster response and underspend greatly on disaster preparedness. Another example would be the response to the 2000 Hatfield rail crash, which killed four people. The expensive safety systems then fit on trains cost so much, and added so much to the price of a ticket, that they probably killed more people than they saved, because people moved to on the road - which is a much more dangerous mode of transport.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nix23 6y ago
But the Argument is from ground up wrong. >we spend too much money responding to visible I that case the Aircraft producer has to invests that money, NOT the public. I'm not saying you are wrong, not OP, not you. But the argument is just plane wrong. Again, nearly every commercial plane-crash goes with 100% loss of life, in a vehicle where you can not break or stop, if something important goes wrong you will crash and loose 300 life's. But i think we all know that a plane crash or a train accident with 3 death's is much more Frontpage'able than toxic amount's of sugar in drinks, or pesticides, but that's a People and Press problem and not a technical one.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  All money is fungible. If the aircraft manufacturers, or government, or consumers spend money, it is, ultimately the same money, as a matter for the effects of society-wide investment. I should not need to trace the path from one spend to the next for this to be clear. We choose, as a society, to spend a very great deal on making air travel much, much safer than car travel, and car travel less unsafe than it once was. Meanwhile, people are dropping by the tens and hundreds of thousands from sugar poisoning that we permit because the sugar producers have good lobbyists and a truly massive and extremely effective propagada operation convincing people sugar poisoning is what they actually want because it will make them feel young and sporty, not fat and sick as we know to be true. There used to be an equally effective operation for tobacco. We didn't get tobacco deaths under control until we kneecapped the propaganda. We spend far, far more than on airline safety and auto safety for medical care for the people made sick by sugar poisoning.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >If the aircraft manufacturers, or government, or consumers spend money, it is, ultimately the same money, as a matter for the effects of society-wide investment. Emm NO, best case it flows back to the society who pay for the product. Public spending and money from private company's is definitely not the same (with the exception that apple forces you in the future to buy a iPhone).
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      I see that you have not studied macroeconomics. Money is a mechanism to track and manage resource allocation in a society. Collectively, we make choices as a society, and the money is manipulated to effect those choices. We make poor choices when we confuse choices about money with choices about society.
      - nix23 6y ago
        >Money is a mechanism to track and manage resource allocation in a society Yeah you turn around my words, if Boeing invest in the security of the airplane at the end of the day they have less money. >Collectively, we make choices as a society Again Boeing is NOT a society.