> "When your manufacturing plant is a smoldering rubble, someone is going to want to launch an expedition for those hard drives and try and figure out what caus

> "When your manufacturing plant is a smoldering rubble, someone is going to want to launch an expedition for those hard drives and try and figure out what caused millions (or potentially billions) of dollars in damages, so if you just wrote everything to standard output and washed your hands of the rest, you might have to find another job anyway." That's the normal state of life; when a building burns down, forensic investigators pick over the evidence trying to work out what started a fire. They don't ask everyone to record every time two bits of metal touch, every switch switched, every use of electricity, every flammable material entering the building, just in case there's a fire one day. Use a teaspoon in a metal cup? Log it. Post-it note? Flammable, log it. Don't know if your shoes are flammable? Log them anyway just in case. And yet the cause of the fire is not likely to be any of those things, it's likely to be the normalization-of-deviance fireworks next kept next to the open gas tank where the employees take smoke breaks which people were reporting for ages until they were told to shut up about it. Beverley Hills Supper Club was known to be overcrowded, badly designed and ignoring fire department reports for years before it burned down. Cocoanut Grove nightclub had flammable decorations and an employee using flames for light. Rana Plaza had big cracks appear in the building before it collapsed, employees were told to go back to work or be sacked. The World Trade Center collapsed because a plane hit it. Titanic sank because it was going too fast and ignoring reports of icebergs and chose nice looking corridors over high bulkheads. Grenfell Tower burned while "everyone" knew the building was coated in flammable coating and nobody in power wanted to pay to do anything about it. Station Nightclub burned because someone accidentally brought outdoor fireworks indoors, and the sound damping foam was flammable not fireproof and it killed people because the emergency exit doors were locked. We have a culture of log every order the captain makes, every response from the crew, every movement of the rudder, every radio signal sent and received, and at the same time "why did the front fall off?" "a wave hit it" "is that unusual?" "Yeah, at sea? Chance in a million." > "you can write logs that nobody will ever be able to read, but what's the point of that?" Cover your ass, cargo culting, habit, defaults are powerful, the cognitive bias effect like psychic powers where the one time people predict a bad thing happening and it happens is very memorable but the all the times people predict a bad happening and nothing happens are very forgettable, it's easy to remember one time logs helped and ignore all the times they didn't and the costs associated with them. For some possibilities.