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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • While I agree hours probably shouldn’t be going up, I think there’s a bit of a ratcheting effect at play.

    If you take the classic “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, you end up with the question of how you define ‘needs’.

    As tech gets better, the standard of care goes up in healthcare - treatments that were ‘impractical’ 20 years ago are now expected standard of care. Same goes for safety and for standard of living. Electric lighting, aircon, floor space, your own bedroom not shared with 3 other kids, TV/telephone/internet. It’s now basically standard in first world countries to fully treat sewage and have aircon on buses - that wasn’t the case 50 years ago.

    Every time automation displaces some drudge work, we’ll be able to find something new that technically could be done and would be nice to have. 30 years later people will be screaming bloody murder if that former nice-to-have breaks down.

    That’s certainly not to say we’re efficiently using the labour we have.














  • And there we have the difference between advocating and enforcing. Plenty of people now have the time to focus on safety issues; doesn’t mean they get any more effect than the people advocating for veganism or environmentalism.

    In a functioning system (and bear in mind that sometimes the US doesn’t have that, and I’m certainly not taking the US situation as a goal), a regulator is often going to step in and make you stop.

    People only caring once it affects them personally means that the people who haven’t been affected yet are going to keep vibe-coding dams and drag-racing on public roads.


  • Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman’s agreement that if you help me build a house, I’ll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.

    The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it’s quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that’s where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.

    Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others’ safety more than their own.


  • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nztoFlippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.comInnovation
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    14 days ago

    This can be a critical mass thing, though. Some projects are pointless unless you get enough people involved, but then have worthwhile results.

    I would also put ‘safety’ in the “valuable, but no one wants to use it” category (note - not create safety systems, but convincing the truck driver or forge worker or backyard chemist to implement and use them).