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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#391

Post by refurb »

lesuorac wrote: post #298
refurb wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow. What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).

Why not? If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.

I don't follow, but just FYI, if 5 people die on a project it's usually shut down. This isn't 1930 anymore.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#392

Post by antifa »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #304
secretsatan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

> views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous Have you ever been on a construction site, shipyard, pit mine, etc.? They're stuck in the mud doing "everybody stand back" shit that isn't technically against the rules with a port-a-power because it's the least worst option and your ilk has the gall to come along and lecture that a 5-gal bucket isn't for standing on.…

> they are not complaining about safety. They are complaining about [not having extra equipment]

This is a strange dichotomy. Of course they are complaining about corner cutting on both safety and tools.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#393

Post by ysavir »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #383
ysavir wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their point is that we can accomplish all the safety needs while only increasing costs and time so much, and that some portion (maybe big, maybe small) of that time is needless bureaucracy. They aren't advocating for more risk.

how? which specific federal safety regulations should we eliminate that seem to blocking any significant progress?

I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept.

What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how they stall process without any consideration of its purpose.

We're looking at every opportunity for a person or party to distract from the project for their own gain. If those can be removed or mitigated, we could potentially see faster and cheaper projects.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#394

Post by zomglings »

obblekk wrote: post #26

After playing around with GPT-3 a bit, I've started to suspect a lot of humans are actually very good at manipulating semantic sentences, without necessarily understanding their content. It would explain why so many "smart" people will often speak long sentences that sound right, but have zero information content in them. Maybe it's just not that hard to construct grammatically and semantically correct, but zero info…

There is a very useful metric that helps to understand how to listen to different people:

"I have to listen carefully to out of every words they say."

I particularly admire people for whom n is small and m/n is close to 1.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#395

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

lesuorac wrote: post #298
refurb wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow. What's acceptable (i.e. It's ok if 1 person dies on this project) is different than what's the potential risk (i.e. There is a risk that 1 person might die on this project).

Why not? If you're working on a project and 5 people have died so far and you've still got a lot more to do I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that more people will die. So, if you're going to continue the project you're considering it acceptable that somebody else will die as well.

if 5 people have died the same way so far, modern workers would not find it acceptable that more of their friends will die from the same unaddressed cause before the building is done, and thus would not, in fact, continue the project until something is done about it.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#396

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ysavir wrote: post #393
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how? which specific federal safety regulations should we eliminate that seem to blocking any significant progress?

I think you're still missing the point. The goal isn't to eliminate any safety regulations. Those are needed and should be kept. What's being addressed is the situation where various parties in politics, construction, or otherwise related in any way, looking at the project and saying "how can I get my hands on some of that money?". We're looking at all the lobbying that goes into for and against decisions, and how th…

the people saying "how can I get my hands on more money" are usually (NB: not ALWAYS) the same ones seeking to eliminate regulations so that they can get their hands on more money

the regulations exist because everyone else thought that more safety was more important than those people getting richer

if you're talking about other regulations that "stall process", which ones specifically?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#397

Post by loxs »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #180
loxs wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?

As you talk about the affordability of healthcare, I assume that you're talking about the US system. Consider this: is US healthcare more or less regulated than that of the rest of the developed world?

A more suitable comparison would be whether the US's (or Germany's) healthcare system is more or less regulated compared to 50 years ago. Now also look at the pricing.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#398

Post by bumby »

prox wrote: post #375
bumby wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both these numbers are somewhat speculative at this point, since neither has seen a successful orbital flight. But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NA…

Well it’s interesting to see the comparison between risk averse / risk embracing which is kind of the topic here. Are there other areas where companies can be disruptive because of the foundation other “end game/risk averse/bound by laws” companies have laid? It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?

I'll admit there is an argument about risk aversion of civil servants, but I don't think that's necessarily the issue at hand here.

NASA's implementation of different Center's actually addresses a risk that SpaceX doesn't have to necessarily consider (or at least to the same magnitude). Namely, it's meant to address political risk. NASA's missions almost always span multiple administrations, meaning they risk being defunded each election cycle. This is mitigated by spreading the political reward across multiple districts, who then have politicians with a vested interest in keeping those programs going. The downside of this is a lack of efficiency. Unlike SpaceX, NASA can't build up a single location to build and test rockets. If they did, there would be two Senators who want to keep it and likely 48 others who want it defunded in order to fund their own pet programs. So we have programs managed out of Ohio, tested in New Mexico, Mississippi, and California, funded out of Texas, and launched out of Florida.

I'd argue they aren't "risk adverse", but they mitigate a different set of risks. In any event, SpaceX can't be "disruptive" without the complicit help of the organization they are disrupting. It isn't really disruption, but a symbiotic relationship as intended. SpaceX actually gets to outsource a lot of their risk to the American taxpayer because their early (and major) customer (NASA) is self-insured. It's much easier to take on a lot of risk if somebody else is footing the bill.

I think a major risk to SpaceX that people don't really talk about is the bureaucratic quality risk. Right now, SpaceX doesn't have to meet the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. That allows them to streamline their efforts, but also implies an increase in risk. (Most requirements are a response to some risk). However, if any bad event happens like god-forbid they lose astronauts, you can bet additional requirements will be levied. This may really impact their "disruptive" advantage. Look at the example of their F9 strut failing in 2015. For some reason, SpaceX didn't levy supplier quality checks prior to the accident even though it's common practice in industry. Now, they do. The real question is if they were making risk informed decisions previously or just naïve.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#399

Post by wizofaus »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #384
wizofaus wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue you're not really considering the total $ cost of an adult human being. I'm guessing many of those who have died during poorly regulated construction projects were relatively young too, so having invested heavily in nurturing workers to that point, the potential to capitalise on decades of productivity is lost.

I'd argue that they are, but that Rockefeller era capitalists were fine replacing workers that died, to whom they likely gave little training back then perhaps you value workers more than they did? not that there's anything wrong with that

That's the mismatch though - the costs of raising/ educating/training them and most of the opportunity costs due to their premature death weren't borne by those responsible for their safety.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#400

Post by novok »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #365
novok wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assertion doesn't stand up when relatively simple equivalent things like bridges and bus lanes are built slower and more expensively in certain regions compared to the 1930s, which is a main premise of the article.

This is because the author and many others make the trivial error of not measuring how many people it cost to build those bridges. And when I say cost, I don't mean headcount. 11 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Safety does cost more time. But it saves people.

There are many places in europe and asia that build faster, cheaper and safer or just as safe as modern standards today. There is specifically something very wrong with north american infrastructure capabilities.
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