safetyism..........................

 

If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.

. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities.  Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals.  I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence.  This is what social trust is built on.  Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

And we take safety for granted..............

      In our common speculations we do not enough remember that interest on money is a refined idea, and not a universal one.  So far indeed is it from being universal, that the majority of saving persons in most countries would reject it.  Most savings in most countries are held in hoarded specie.  In Asia, in Africa, in South America, largely even in Europe, they are thus held, and it would frighten most of the owners to let them out of their keeping.  An Englishman—a modern Englishman at least—assumes as a first principle that he out to be able to "put his money into something safe that will yield 3 per cent," but most saving persons in most countries are afraid to "put their money" into anything.  Nothing is safe in their minds, indeed, in most countries, owing to a bad Government and a backward industry, no investment, or hardly any, really is safe.

-Walter Bagehot, as excerpted from Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

Adulting.......................

 

via

It's the simple things.................

      About a decade ago, two Harvard professors, David Cutler and Grant Miller, set out to ascertain the impact of chlorination (and other water filtration techniques) between 1900 and 1930, the period when they were implemented across the United States.  Because extensive data existed for rates of disease and particularly infant mortality in different communities around the country, and because chlorination systems were rolled out in a staggered fashion, Cutler and Miller were able to get an extremely accurate portrait of chlorine's effect on public health.  They found  that clean drinking water led to a 43 percent reduction in total mortality in the average American city.  Even more impressive, chlorine and filtration systems reduced infant mortality by 74 percent, and child mortality by almost as much.
      It is important to pause for a second to reflect on the significance of those numbers, to take them out of the dry domain of public health statistics and into the realm of lived experience.  Until the twentieth century, one of the givens of being a parent was that you faced a very high likelihood that at least one of your children would die at an early age.  What may well be the most excruciating experience that we can confront - the loss of a child - was simply a routine fact of existence.  Today, in the developed world at least, that routine fact has been turned into a rarity.  One of the most fundamental challenges of being alive - keeping your  children safe from harm - was dramatically lessened, in part through massive engineering projects, and in part through the invisible collision between compounds of calcium hypochlorite and microscopic bacteria.  The people behind that revolution didn't become rich, and very few of them became famous.  But they left an imprint on our lives that is in many ways more profound than the legacy of Edison or Rockefeller or Ford.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made The Modern World

How are we doing..........................?

     The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers.  He must not feel automatically menaced by them.

-Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities

One hundred skills...............

...............................every man person should know.   15 on the list are beyond my experience and at this point in time they are likely to stay that way.

God, I wish this wasn't so true.......

    But these stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of material used to construct them.  "Images of the future are shaped by the experience of the past," they wrote, turning on its head Santayana's famous lines about the importance of history:  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future.  "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that would cause it to occur.  The defect, often, is in our imagination."

-Michael Lewis, quoting a paper by Kahneman and Tversky in The Undoing Project:  A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

My business partner and I started our investment real estate company in 1982.  Interest rates, for those who were not paying attention back then, were atmospheric between 1980 and 1982.  Making sense of a real estate investment when you are borrowing money at 16%, is a difficult (not impossible, but very difficult) proposition.  Anyway, that high rate environment is what we grew up with.  Not unlike our parents, who learned to fear debt during the depression, and lived with that fear for the rest of their lives, we learned to fear variable interest rates.

"What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future."

For the past twenty years, every time we were offered the choice between a variable rate or a fixed rate loan, we opted for the fixed rate.  Mind you the fixed rate variety carries the penalty of a higher interest rate, sometimes several percentage points higher.  In our minds, though, all we could do was see rates rising.  Nevermind that for the past twenty years they have, for the most part, steadily fallen.

While it is easy to rationalize and say we slept better at night having fixed rate financing, our inability to throw off our past cost us a significant number of dollars.  And we never even got a thank you note from our bankers.

A dance on the precipice...........

     Now, some might say it was easy to cede creative control when you have someone like John Lasseter on your team.  But in my experience it is never easy.  And it was certainly never easy for Pixar.  Every one of Pixar's films went through a series of hair-raising creative crises that repeatedly tested out decision.  Creative excellence is a dance on the precipice of failure, a battle against the allure of safety.  There are no shortcuts, no formulas, no well-worn paths to victory.  It tests you constantly.
     But I felt really proud of our decision.  We had chosen to truly empower talent, to send a signal to Pixar's creative leaders that we trusted them.  I cannot say this approach would be right for every company.  But I can say that whether you are making bottled water, mobile games, or computer chips, the decision of who has control over the creative elements is among the most important any team will make.  Fear and ego conspire to rein in creativity, and it is easy to allow creative inspiration to take a back seat to safety.  It is one thing to cite the adage "Story is king."  It is another thing entirely to live by it.

-Lawrence Levy, as extracted from To Pixar And Beyond:  My Unlikely Journey With Steve Jobs To Make Entertainment History

Extremes.............................

     "The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population;  not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better."

-Matt Ridley,  The Evolution of Everything

Crumple zones...............

................................the physics of car crashes.



thanks craig

On being skeptical about "safety".......

Arnold Kling reviews Greg Ip's Foolproof:  Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safer.  An excerpt:

One, which I call the engineers, seeks to use the maximum of our knowledge and ability to solve problems and make the world safer and more stable; the other, which I call the ecologists, regards such efforts with suspicion, because given the complexity and adaptability of people and the environment, they will always have unintended consequences that may be worse than the problem we are trying to solve.

As your faithful blogger loves to point out, the Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme.  It is unbreakable.

You want security....................................?

“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity” 
-Dag Hammarskjöld

On the safety of aviation..........................

John Kay suggests, recent headlines notwithstanding, that flying is one of the safest things we do.............................

 Tyler Brûlé has described the fear of flying that led him to abandon a flight to London after hearing about last week’s Germanwings Airbus crash in the French Alps. The chances of a man of Mr Brulé’s age, 46, dying in any two-hour interval is about one in 1m. There is an additional one in 5m chance of being killed during a two-hour flight. On the other hand, sitting in an aircraft protects you from many more common causes of death, such as a car crash or a fall down stairs.

Full essay here.

A dangerous situation...............................

..................................................................................averted.

Got a call this morning from Columbia Gas Company.  Apparently one of their gas mains buried in the road right of way developed a significant leak, and said escaping natural gas decided to migrate underground into this empty building of ours. A 30,000 square building can hold a scary amount of natural gas.  By the time we arrived on the scene, the Newark Fire Department was fully deployed.  Four hours or so later, the leak was repaired, building was aired out and the gas dispersed.  A potentially dangerous situation rendered safe.  Kudos to both Columbia Gas and the Newark Fire Department for their professionalism and commitment to community safely.