3 ms·
>Profits collected, responsibility socialized. This happens literally any time someone makes a mistake somewhere that doesn’t get caught. It’s not some magic “
by kortilla 3y ago
>Profits collected, responsibility socialized.
This happens literally any time someone makes a mistake somewhere that doesn’t get caught. It’s not some magic “gotcha” that only applies to these types of industries and anecdotes are not evidence that an industry depends on it.
Here are other examples of people “privatizing the profits while socializing the losses”:
- a bad teacher who doesn’t lose their job for teaching children incorrect things.
- a cook that doesn’t get fired when you get food poisoning.
- a doctor that makes a negligent mistake and causes a permanent injury or death without getting caught.
The examples are endless and scale from individuals up through corporations and governments across every industry and mode of governance.
I recommend you don’t use the phrase if you don’t want to look dumb because it’s a pretty strong indicator of a lack of critical thinking skills.
- Retric 3y agoIn all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison. It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news.
- kortilla 3y ago>In all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison. No, these are all examples where the harm is significant when it’s scaled up to the larger population because they are so common. Bad education accumulates in one of the worst feedback loops of destruction you can get (dumb people vote for more dumb people supporting education focused on dumb things). >It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news. the vast majority is never traced back to a restaurant because it’s written off as “24 hour flu”. It only makes national news on the rare occasions where it can and is traced back. This is reserved for food poisoning bad enough to cause hospitalization and/or death.
- Retric 3y agoIndividual subpar teachers don’t make a huge difference in education due to the redundancy on our education system. Curriculum is designed so if students learn nothing in say 5th grade not much changes. A school system filled with bad teachers is a systemic failure. Again food poisoning without major consequences isn’t a big deal. Nationwide around 3,000 people in the US die from food poisoning, mostly from poor food safety at home. By comparison air pollution kills around 20-100 thousand people every year in the US, the scale of harm from all forms of pollution is vast but gets rolled up into cancer into a few other diseases so we don’t talk about it much. PS: Pollution death statistics are really difficult to quantify accurately. Non smoking related long cancers are significant which mean some people who smoke get lung cancer from non smoking related causes. Modeling it is however dependent on what assumptions you make.
- kortilla 3y agoYou’re talking about deaths and fixating on the wrong thing. Food poisoning causes massive economic harm in just sick days and that’s registered precisely nowhere.
- Retric 3y agoPollution doesn’t just instantly kill people, it’s again associated with vastly more sick days than food poisoning. Deaths is just a useful proxy here for all the harm caused by each.
- kortilla 3y agoNo it’s not. Pollution lands into a distribution of doing nothing or giving people cancer or serious diseases that absolutely do get counted.