Hacker News Reader

Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

So what value would you put on someone being killed or maimed to save some money? Because that is exactly the calculation you are proposing should happen.

View on HN

And that is the exact same calculation the local transportation agency makes every time their is a car accident with fatalities on a major undivided highway / road. Roads become known as dangerous (eg Blood Alley, officially the 126 is Southern California), and clearly the govt could step in and install some Jersey barriers. Yet they don't, because implicitly the cost of X lives per year is not worth it to society.

But I hope whoever does the calculations for you doesn't decide to sell safety barriers from roads because nobody died on them.

I was objecting to the idea that having nobody dying on a project being a bad thing because it implies overspending on safety.

A quite a bit less than $250million, which is how much is being paid.

In fact, people would even volunteer to die for "just" $100million. Just see this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4jqfka/what_woul...

This is EXACTLY what I mean by "risk management for large projects". For a small $10k project? A small percentage cost decrease for increased risk of death isn't worth it. For a multi-billion dollar project? All of the sudden, the incentives change drastically. How many people would be willing to work on a project that is a tiny amount more risky, but knowing that their families will be handsomely compensated in case anything happens? If you told me that my family will receive $100mil guaranteed if I die/get maimed, there's very little I'm not willing to do.

Also, to note: $100,000,000 is enough to save around 30,000 children from an excruciating death by malaria.

TL;DR 1 average human life generally isn't worth throwing away $250million. I will literally volunteer my own life on this fact.

> A quite a bit less than $250million, which is how much is being paid.

That idea was made up in this thread, it doesn't reflect reality.

The cost overrun was explained in the article as due to only scoping out 30% of the project as part of making the bid, and as such underestimating how much concrete they would need:

> Jeff Petersen, project manager for Kiewit, said that once construction workers got on the site they discovered they had to dig much deeper to get down to bedrock than they had expected. That meant they are having to pour almost twice as much concrete this year — 870,000 cubic yards — as the company and the Department of Water Resources had planned.

But how do you know that it is a simple trade off between money and safety standards? It's been noted on HN that the US seems particularly bad at large infrastructure projects compared to other developed countries and I'm struggling to believe that's because the US has wildly better safety standards.

I don't. That's moving the goalposts.

Who cares if Oroville Dam is in the USA or not. The same thing would still apply if it was in the UK. I'm merely saying the modern public should reconsider spending $250million extra, instead of applauding it simply because no injuries happened.

I agreed with some of your more abstract posts on this topic, but I really can't buy into that assumption that just being a little less fearful would reduce costs by half. You wave that second bid around as if they had actually done the same work, at the lower price, with a known quantity of bloodshed. But that is only a hypothetical, That second bid might have had even bigger cost overruns, we don't know. The winning bid might actually have terrible safety standards while being lucky, we don't know. There is no simple, isolated safety/cost tradeoff that you can dial in at will and get the expected results. On the contrary, a contractor that is sloppy with safety will often also be sloppy with other things, causing costs to increase, not to sink.

I agree, I'm only arguing the hypothetical.

I would highly doubt that $250mil went into slower progress for the sake of safety. Definitely, there were other costs.

You're supposed to only consider the abstract idea I presented. That's why I changed from $250mil numbers to $100mil halfway through, although I didn't make it fully clear to divorce the concrete numbers from the abstract cultural ideas.

I'm going to make a guess here and assume that you are not working construction. And if that's so I would highly recommend you join a construction crew for a couple of years and then come back here with your idiotic approach to workplace safety. It's all about preventable accidents, and your assumption that we could save 250M on a project by compromising workplace safety is both wrong and the beginning of a slippery slope that ends with maximum savings and no workplace safety at all. After all, it's not the life of you and your family that is at risk here.

Fuck those construction workers, fuck those miners and who cares about factory workers. After all they're disposable. /s

Workplace safety is there for a reason: to stop white collar criminals from putting a price on human lives and then to optimize for the lowest they can get away with.

I feel you're missing the point, I can't tell if it's deliberate.

Suppose you wanted to reduce risks for computer programmers - everyone gets a personal doctor who sits with them to monitor their vitals, state of the art monitoring device, daily blood tests, screenings for all sorts of diseases. Each person gets a fitness coach, dietician, sleep coach, whatever. Programmers with injuries get oxygen therapy and physios on hand. Basically you treat them like world class racehorses (!). Whatever, hopefully you see the point.

Would that be overkill? No? Well then you don't think programmers matter at all and want to see them all die in industrial accidents. /s

If we can accept at any point that we should, maybe not buy the most expensive chair/table/keyboard/screens, even if there's a chance of injury (eyesight, cardio problems from 20 years of sitting, cut from a sharp edge on a filling cabinet, etc.) then you're agreeing with the general concept of the OP IMO.

Now, in public procurement, should we pay $1000 per seat for a currently $100 app to ensure no programmer ever gets a thrombosis/carpal problem/etc.?

So you are saying you believe that if a project completes with no deaths or injuries then too much money was spent on it?

I'm saying that as size of project (lim -> $infinity), (probability death or injury) approaches 1.

To be willing to throw your own life away for $250M is one thing, but to impose that choice on others, so that the government or some large contractor company gets to save money, smells of an utilitarian view of society and is frankly immoral.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com