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I live in Minneapolis. Back in 2007 the I-35W bridge collapsed, killing 13 people. Engineers had previously reported that the bridge had structural problems. An

I live in Minneapolis. Back in 2007 the I-35W bridge collapsed, killing 13 people. Engineers had previously reported that the bridge had structural problems. And once the collapse became national headlines news, bridges nationwide were given special attention. It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety.

netsec_burn 5y ago
Similarly, it shouldn't take a security breach for companies to care about security. Poor budgets are what is eliminating the safety nets.
- underwater 5y ago
  Isn't this a predictable failure mode of capitalism and free markets? Entities are disincentivised from preparing for rare and catastrophic events.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    No. The building was communally owned by its residents, and they squabbled for years about allocating money for the repairs. All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      I think the idea is that the market is supposed to work by the principals having good information about their situation and thus being to choose the best decisions. That's at least my one line summary. In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals. And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves. No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here. Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves. I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security. For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light. I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage. Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
      - scoopertrooper 5y ago
        Maybe no system results in the best possible outcome every time? Government owned bridges have collapsed because warnings were ignored. Privately owned apartments collapsed because warnings were ignored. The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa. Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
    - underwater 5y ago
      I think a free market tends to work better with predictable events, transparency, and large market sizes. None of those applied in this case. In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent. The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't. If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    It's a predictable failure for human organizations in general, I'd say. There are plenty of instances where the government fucks up similarly, no profit motive required.
    - underwater 5y ago
      Generally government fuck ups are different though. Like creeping bureaucracy, corruption, failure to innovate, etc.
- cudgy 5y ago
  A big problem with motivation to prevent security breaches is the lack of a significant penalty when they occur.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
The problem is the same as it is in IT. Risk management and disaster prevention requires money, which people rarely want to spend. Boards for condos are elected, and they try to keep costs low. No one is going to elect someone who says the building should spend millions to prevent a collapse that they feel is theoretical.
- dheera 5y ago
  And in healthcare. Doctors always shoo me away when I show warning signs. They're not interested in getting to the bottom of warning signs. They'd rather wait until shit happens before they're interested in taking my money and solving it. Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.
  - nickff 5y ago
    The problem with paying for gym memberships is that the marginal gym member won’t actually attend.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      I would be interested in that question. Would free gym actually change the amount of exercise being done? I suspect not.
      - annamargot 5y ago
        My bet is that it would decrease the amount done. If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Hah, nowadays there are mask mandates (more in Europe rather than in the Land of the Free). Makes me wonder what the world would be like with gym attendance mandates, or 10000 steps-a-day mandates.
megablast 5y ago
So you want to pay higher taxes? You are in the minority.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Actually, I want the people that make more than me to pay their fair share. That alone would pay for pretty much everything the U.S. needs.
  - mcny 5y ago
    I am ok with it as long as the people with more money than me cannot simply create/find loopholes that allows them not to pay. The main argument against higher taxes to me is it becomes very easy for "them" to allocate a small portion of their vast wealths into creating more loopholes. I can't believe we don't have any successful politicians who campaign on the promise of higher taxes and an end to all credits, deductions, and exclusions for everyone. It feels like it isn't sellable at all.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    And by “fair share” you mean even proportionally more of their income than yours. Because aside from some people living purely off of cap gains, the doctors/lawyers/engineers/small business owners already pay more absolute values and more percentage values than the lower and middle class.
- abakker 5y ago
  I think the costs of taking it seriously before the disaster and after the disaster would be similar. The difference is that before the disaster, the budget seems discretionary and afterwords feels mandatory. Also, after the disaster, many people are dead. I'd say we could trade away the feeling that we could spend the money elsewhere for the lives of all the people who were killed.
- NtochkaNzvanova 5y ago
  You seem to be assuming that in order to have reliable infrastructure, we have to pay for all the things we pay for now, plus reliable infrastructure. I'd like to pay lower taxes, and have them spent on different things. Such as reliable infrastructure instead of 20-year wars. (And a pony.)
paul_f 5y ago
This is a bit of a strawman. People do care about structural safety. There is an entire industry of professional engineers and building inspectors. You don't know what you don't know. And disasters happen. After Hurricane Andrew, we learned from studying what broke, and made major improvements to building codes. Same thing will happen here.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Sounds like you missed the news from last week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_... That building was reported under the same safety industry and regulations, and nothing was done. We know intellectually, just as before, what happens to buildings with structural failures: they collapse. The difference is that we quickly forget the emotional or cultural awareness of the problem, and only care about these issues for as long as that news cycle lasts.
eyesee 5y ago
> It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety. Building codes are written in blood, as they have always been.
fastaguy88 5y ago
But sometimes inspections work - the I40 bridge crack/shutdown in Memphis, for example (though apparently there are questions about why the problem was not discovered earlier).

netsec_burn 5y ago

Similarly, it shouldn't take a security breach for companies to care about security. Poor budgets are what is eliminating the safety nets.

underwater 5y ago
Isn't this a predictable failure mode of capitalism and free markets? Entities are disincentivised from preparing for rare and catastrophic events.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  No. The building was communally owned by its residents, and they squabbled for years about allocating money for the repairs. All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I think the idea is that the market is supposed to work by the principals having good information about their situation and thus being to choose the best decisions. That's at least my one line summary. In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals. And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves. No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here. Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves. I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security. For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light. I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage. Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      Maybe no system results in the best possible outcome every time? Government owned bridges have collapsed because warnings were ignored. Privately owned apartments collapsed because warnings were ignored. The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa. Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
  - underwater 5y ago
    I think a free market tends to work better with predictable events, transparency, and large market sizes. None of those applied in this case. In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent. The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't. If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  It's a predictable failure for human organizations in general, I'd say. There are plenty of instances where the government fucks up similarly, no profit motive required.
  - underwater 5y ago
    Generally government fuck ups are different though. Like creeping bureaucracy, corruption, failure to innovate, etc.
cudgy 5y ago
A big problem with motivation to prevent security breaches is the lack of a significant penalty when they occur.

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

The problem is the same as it is in IT. Risk management and disaster prevention requires money, which people rarely want to spend. Boards for condos are elected, and they try to keep costs low. No one is going to elect someone who says the building should spend millions to prevent a collapse that they feel is theoretical.

dheera 5y ago
And in healthcare. Doctors always shoo me away when I show warning signs. They're not interested in getting to the bottom of warning signs. They'd rather wait until shit happens before they're interested in taking my money and solving it. Oh and in a system where health insurance really cared about prevention, they'd pay for everyone's gym memberships.
- nickff 5y ago
  The problem with paying for gym memberships is that the marginal gym member won’t actually attend.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I would be interested in that question. Would free gym actually change the amount of exercise being done? I suspect not.
    - annamargot 5y ago
      My bet is that it would decrease the amount done. If it’s free why not sign up, maybe someday I’ll use it. Maybe not Edit: decrease the amount done as a percentage of signups. Perhaps the growth in signups would make up for the percentage drop in aggregate terms. Ie flood the gym with memberships and only find one more person actually working out
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Hah, nowadays there are mask mandates (more in Europe rather than in the Land of the Free). Makes me wonder what the world would be like with gym attendance mandates, or 10000 steps-a-day mandates.

megablast 5y ago

So you want to pay higher taxes? You are in the minority.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Actually, I want the people that make more than me to pay their fair share. That alone would pay for pretty much everything the U.S. needs.
- mcny 5y ago
  I am ok with it as long as the people with more money than me cannot simply create/find loopholes that allows them not to pay. The main argument against higher taxes to me is it becomes very easy for "them" to allocate a small portion of their vast wealths into creating more loopholes. I can't believe we don't have any successful politicians who campaign on the promise of higher taxes and an end to all credits, deductions, and exclusions for everyone. It feels like it isn't sellable at all.
- kortilla 5y ago
  And by “fair share” you mean even proportionally more of their income than yours. Because aside from some people living purely off of cap gains, the doctors/lawyers/engineers/small business owners already pay more absolute values and more percentage values than the lower and middle class.
abakker 5y ago
I think the costs of taking it seriously before the disaster and after the disaster would be similar. The difference is that before the disaster, the budget seems discretionary and afterwords feels mandatory. Also, after the disaster, many people are dead. I'd say we could trade away the feeling that we could spend the money elsewhere for the lives of all the people who were killed.
NtochkaNzvanova 5y ago
You seem to be assuming that in order to have reliable infrastructure, we have to pay for all the things we pay for now, plus reliable infrastructure. I'd like to pay lower taxes, and have them spent on different things. Such as reliable infrastructure instead of 20-year wars. (And a pony.)

paul_f 5y ago

This is a bit of a strawman. People do care about structural safety. There is an entire industry of professional engineers and building inspectors. You don't know what you don't know. And disasters happen. After Hurricane Andrew, we learned from studying what broke, and made major improvements to building codes. Same thing will happen here.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Sounds like you missed the news from last week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_building_... That building was reported under the same safety industry and regulations, and nothing was done. We know intellectually, just as before, what happens to buildings with structural failures: they collapse. The difference is that we quickly forget the emotional or cultural awareness of the problem, and only care about these issues for as long as that news cycle lasts.

eyesee 5y ago

> It shouldn't take horrific accidents for us to suddenly decide to care about structural safety. Building codes are written in blood, as they have always been.

fastaguy88 5y ago

But sometimes inspections work - the I40 bridge crack/shutdown in Memphis, for example (though apparently there are questions about why the problem was not discovered earlier).