4 ms·

Well simple. I really do want the market to work, but I know in reality it very often does not work at all. Most often with big industries where the startup co

Well simple. I really do want the market to work, but I know in reality it very often does not work at all. Most often with big industries where the startup costs are high. Do you prefer to continue to fly in a needle's eye rather then have the government step in? Ideally at least one airline would offer the safer option as a way to gain customers, but what if no one does? Is your libertarianism that pure? If so, that's admirable, I guess my ideals are just not quite as strong.

anigbrowl 17y ago
Seems like a rather suicidal market strategy. So you invite people to pay 2x to fly with FlySafe (perhaps an existing airline with n outstanding safety record that rebrands itself), milk the resulting controversy to sell tickets for a while, only to later have every untoward incident, no matter how trivial, spun into a damning indictment of your business philosophy? No thanks. Furthermore, the first time such a company did have a fatal or obviously dangerous incident, they'd go insolvent immediately. I see the point you're trying to make but it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps. If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    And until that pilot landed in the Hudson, I'm betting you never thought too much about birds getting sucked into jet engines (I certainly didn't). Perhaps the conclusion from this is that there isn't really much utility in your being aware of it, since you're not a pilot. That is to say, the knowledge is of little benefit to you as a consumer because the weight of this particular factor in the overall safety of air travel is not that big. Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.
    - biohacker42 17y ago
      I have to disagree. For one, I think birds flying into plane engines was common knowledge. It's certainly something I've know for as long as I can remember. And when I got my CS degree we specifically studied accidents where bad software in medical devices killed people. I recall an X-ray machine where the hardware was upgraded and a bunch of software assumptions about when the fuses would blow became wrong. That ended up killing people. And as someone who has written software for medical instruments I can tell you unit test coverage is part of the contracts we sign. The coffin corner only played a small part in the accident but that's how accidents always happen. It's always several small things that go wrong together. A safe airline would not flaunt its safety record, but it's safety practice. Not flying the coffin corner would remove that one part that can go wrong from any future accident scenario. The safe airline having an accident would not automatically bankrupt it, every other airline has had accident and this one would continue with its safer then average practices. However, I agree with you this will never happen because as you say the airlines are a crap commodity business. Even Warren Buffet has mentioned how bad a business airlines are for investors. That's why even though I consider myself a libertarian I want a government mandate to stay out of the coffin corner. We already have much more complex and difficult to enforce regulations on airlines, this one is simple and would be easy to enforce as we already track all planes on rader closely all of the time.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Seems like a rather suicidal market strategy. So you invite people to pay 2x to fly with FlySafe (perhaps an existing airline with n outstanding safety record that rebrands itself), milk the resulting controversy to sell tickets for a while, only to later have every untoward incident, no matter how trivial, spun into a damning indictment of your business philosophy? No thanks. Furthermore, the first time such a company did have a fatal or obviously dangerous incident, they'd go insolvent immediately. I see the point you're trying to make but it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps.

stcredzero 17y ago
it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps. If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  And until that pilot landed in the Hudson, I'm betting you never thought too much about birds getting sucked into jet engines (I certainly didn't). Perhaps the conclusion from this is that there isn't really much utility in your being aware of it, since you're not a pilot. That is to say, the knowledge is of little benefit to you as a consumer because the weight of this particular factor in the overall safety of air travel is not that big. Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    I have to disagree. For one, I think birds flying into plane engines was common knowledge. It's certainly something I've know for as long as I can remember. And when I got my CS degree we specifically studied accidents where bad software in medical devices killed people. I recall an X-ray machine where the hardware was upgraded and a bunch of software assumptions about when the fuses would blow became wrong. That ended up killing people. And as someone who has written software for medical instruments I can tell you unit test coverage is part of the contracts we sign. The coffin corner only played a small part in the accident but that's how accidents always happen. It's always several small things that go wrong together. A safe airline would not flaunt its safety record, but it's safety practice. Not flying the coffin corner would remove that one part that can go wrong from any future accident scenario. The safe airline having an accident would not automatically bankrupt it, every other airline has had accident and this one would continue with its safer then average practices. However, I agree with you this will never happen because as you say the airlines are a crap commodity business. Even Warren Buffet has mentioned how bad a business airlines are for investors. That's why even though I consider myself a libertarian I want a government mandate to stay out of the coffin corner. We already have much more complex and difficult to enforce regulations on airlines, this one is simple and would be easy to enforce as we already track all planes on rader closely all of the time.