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How factories were made safe

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Re: How factories were made safe

#21

Post by helen___keller »

maxwell wrote: post #15
helen___keller wrote: post #2

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the o…

Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s? I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s

I wasn't alive in the late 60s but most things I spend all day doing were literally not possible for consumers until the 90s-aughts

Re: How factories were made safe

#22

Post by mcguire »

pessimizer wrote: post #4

This is a summary of how the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of why the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers' Comp., which made injured workers a cost for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers' Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by G…

"P: Fine. There’s no need to get personal and blame “heartless management”. This isn’t the moral failing of any individual, but of a system...."

"I blame society."

Re: How factories were made safe

#23

Post by sanxiyn »

maxwell wrote: post #15
helen___keller wrote: post #2

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the o…

Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s? I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s

We went from thousands of transistors in chip in 1970 to billions of transistors in chip in 2020.

Re: How factories were made safe

#24

Post by OkayPhysicist »

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

Re: How factories were made safe

#25

Post by dataflow »

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I'm finding this incredibly fascinating. I can clearly see there's been so much ingenuity (and suffering) that's finally gotten us to where we are now.

Re: How factories were made safe

#26

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

flerchin wrote: post #5
kiba wrote: post #3

So, one lesson we might apply to is infosecurity would be automatic liability for information they collected and leaked. That would cause companies to fight for their user privacy and implement stronger security measure while also collecting less information. Well, maybe. We won't know if it work well until it's actually implemented.

Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.

Statutory damages exist precisely for this reason.

Re: How factories were made safe

#27

Post by madacol »

helen___keller wrote: post #2

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the o…

Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions (if any)

Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back

P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems

Re: How factories were made safe

#28

Post by rtkwe »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #24

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

Yeah there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of labor at all and have been convinced that companies without outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed wages. It’s a real success story for the pro-business groups in the US and around the world.

Re: How factories were made safe

#29

Post by Jtsummers »

rtkwe wrote: post #28
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #24

The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week. You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world? Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8 hour work day.

Yeah there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of labor at all and have been convinced that companies without outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed wages. It’s a real success story for the pro-business groups in the US and around the world.

You see the same misconception with environmental regulations, it makes for some interesting (though frustrating) discussions though.

Re: How factories were made safe

#30

Post by helen___keller »

madacol wrote: post #27
helen___keller wrote: post #2

I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the o…

Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions (if any) Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the past, would make that tradeoff and go back P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying problems

> Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the regressions

That's certainly how this outline played out for the industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the information revolution, but I do hope for the same.

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