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Hacker News response: "They knew the risks they were taking. They were all expert electricians who fully knew that their pay of almost $10,000/year would comp

Hacker News response: "They knew the risks they were taking. They were all expert electricians who fully knew that their pay of almost $10,000/year would compensate them for the risk they were taking. If we started regulating companies like this, pretty soon there wouldn't be any companies and the entire world economy would collapse, people eating people, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and you don't want that, do you? Besides we all know government is bad. These people preferred their life of liberty and horrific, agonizing electrocution to a life lived under repressive workplace regulations like putting insulation on high-voltage wires." Does that about sum it up?

hackerboos 13y ago
Hacker News certainly seems to lean toward the Libertarian-right. Some of the comments I read regarding regulation (or abolishment of it) is frightening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5647898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5647898
- makomk 13y ago
  Slashdot was very similar back when it was still popular. I think it's something to do with hacker culture in general...
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Hacker News certainly seems to lean toward the Libertarian-right. That's funny, I feel like HN drifts further and further to the (American style) Left with every passing month. It's like a flood of refugees from /r/politics have stormed into the place and set up shop. I sometimes feel like I'm the only Libertarian left standing. Probably many of the others have just been browbeaten so much lately that they are commenting less. shrug
  - davidw 13y ago
    What if we just canned the politics so that people don't feel the need to defend a point of view for approximately the 13873878972616th time on the internet, in full knowledge that no one is going to change their mind? That means flagging articles like this.
api 13y ago
Yeah. A lot of smart folks on HN, but also a lot of naive sheltered upper-class youngsters who have never even seen genuine adversity or human suffering. This elite naivete blew me away when I spent years in the rough orbit of the Ivy League. They're not bad people... they just really genuinely have no idea. They have no frame of reference for the difficulty of growing up poor in the American interior, let alone for the difficulties faced by people in the third world or in dictatorships-of-GDP like China.
eksith 13y ago
Pretty much. I find it amusing that people who've visited these countries and lived in a select few, politically manipulated bubbles, can discern what's really happening. I.E. The fellow who worked for BRAC. We know all about their work in Sri Lanka and how well they funneled cash to special interests after the 2004 tsunami who (in the interest of humanitarian relief, of course) managed to lose a lot of it in "administrative fees". Amazingly, in some places, some of the first structures to go up again were new garment factories; not public housing.
smoyer 13y ago
While the human suffering, abhorrent work conditions, slave wages and environmental issues related to Chinese industry may indeed be everything the article states, I don't think this video proves anything (as I noted in my other comment here). If you want to make a point regarding any or all of these subjects, the proper way would be to cite statistics to show how working conditions, safety, pay (and cost of living) etc compare in the various countries. Yes ... it was a horrific way to die. They may or may not have known the dangers (though it doesn't seem that any of them were looking up which leads me to think they had no idea they even needed to be careful) but regardless of the facts of this incident, one accident doesn't show a trend.
irremediable 13y ago
Thanks for writing that. I was dispirited by how blithely and blindly callous some of the comments are.
gwern 13y ago
Yes. Well-meaning regulation and a licensing raj come at the cost of economic growth, which is what will enable China to eventually afford the safeguards richer countries can take for granted. For unrelated reasons, I've been reading for the past few days through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations - there are some really fascinating entries, but what's equally fascinating is how the most awful revolting horrifying British or American occupations like gong farmer or breaker boy or hurrier (and even some of the not-so-bad occupations like Herb Strewer or linkboy or ice man or leech collector or knocker-up) were made 'obsolete' by increased economic growth, even in cases like knocker-up where one might naively think it was actually technology we can thank (because mechanical clocks certainly existed and could've been used to replace the knocker-up, it's just the knocker-up was cheaper).

hackerboos 13y ago

Hacker News certainly seems to lean toward the Libertarian-right. Some of the comments I read regarding regulation (or abolishment of it) is frightening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5647898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5647898

makomk 13y ago
Slashdot was very similar back when it was still popular. I think it's something to do with hacker culture in general...
mindcrime 13y ago
Hacker News certainly seems to lean toward the Libertarian-right. That's funny, I feel like HN drifts further and further to the (American style) Left with every passing month. It's like a flood of refugees from /r/politics have stormed into the place and set up shop. I sometimes feel like I'm the only Libertarian left standing. Probably many of the others have just been browbeaten so much lately that they are commenting less. shrug
- davidw 13y ago
  What if we just canned the politics so that people don't feel the need to defend a point of view for approximately the 13873878972616th time on the internet, in full knowledge that no one is going to change their mind? That means flagging articles like this.

api 13y ago

Yeah. A lot of smart folks on HN, but also a lot of naive sheltered upper-class youngsters who have never even seen genuine adversity or human suffering. This elite naivete blew me away when I spent years in the rough orbit of the Ivy League. They're not bad people... they just really genuinely have no idea. They have no frame of reference for the difficulty of growing up poor in the American interior, let alone for the difficulties faced by people in the third world or in dictatorships-of-GDP like China.

eksith 13y ago

Pretty much. I find it amusing that people who've visited these countries and lived in a select few, politically manipulated bubbles, can discern what's really happening. I.E. The fellow who worked for BRAC. We know all about their work in Sri Lanka and how well they funneled cash to special interests after the 2004 tsunami who (in the interest of humanitarian relief, of course) managed to lose a lot of it in "administrative fees". Amazingly, in some places, some of the first structures to go up again were new garment factories; not public housing.

smoyer 13y ago

While the human suffering, abhorrent work conditions, slave wages and environmental issues related to Chinese industry may indeed be everything the article states, I don't think this video proves anything (as I noted in my other comment here). If you want to make a point regarding any or all of these subjects, the proper way would be to cite statistics to show how working conditions, safety, pay (and cost of living) etc compare in the various countries. Yes ... it was a horrific way to die. They may or may not have known the dangers (though it doesn't seem that any of them were looking up which leads me to think they had no idea they even needed to be careful) but regardless of the facts of this incident, one accident doesn't show a trend.

irremediable 13y ago

Thanks for writing that. I was dispirited by how blithely and blindly callous some of the comments are.

gwern 13y ago

Yes. Well-meaning regulation and a licensing raj come at the cost of economic growth, which is what will enable China to eventually afford the safeguards richer countries can take for granted. For unrelated reasons, I've been reading for the past few days through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations - there are some really fascinating entries, but what's equally fascinating is how the most awful revolting horrifying British or American occupations like gong farmer or breaker boy or hurrier (and even some of the not-so-bad occupations like Herb Strewer or linkboy or ice man or leech collector or knocker-up) were made 'obsolete' by increased economic growth, even in cases like knocker-up where one might naively think it was actually technology we can thank (because mechanical clocks certainly existed and could've been used to replace the knocker-up, it's just the knocker-up was cheaper).