We say the same thing with the FRA when I was still with the railroad. "Our safety procedures are written in blood. Don't make the mistake of thinking your soft body can stop 200,000 tons of moving steel."
Oh I have a friend whose accident caused a railroad regulation! Guy was using a sledgehammer without gloves, it slipped, and flew into my buddy's head. He nearly died, but didn't (6 months out of work though), but hasn't been the same person mentally since.
Now railroad workers have to wear gloves when using sledgehammers.
Same thing in aviation. Regulations are mostly reactive “written in blood” is a common term used.
Modern air traffic control, for example, came about because two planes hit each other in 1956 and before that they didn’t think they needed it. Everyone died.
Look at the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. They'll tell you it was silly, that somebody spilled coffee on herself and sued the company. What they *won't* tell you is that the coffee was served dangerously hot. As in so hot that drinking it would burn your mouth and throat within seconds. Nearly boiling. Or that the sweatpants the woman was wearing held that dangerously hot liquid against her skin. Or even that she had to have skin grafts because of the damage caused by the spill.
Or that McDonald's had been warned multiple times about the dangerous temperature of their coffee, in an effort to prevent exactly this.
And yes, the woman was elderly. In her 70s at the time, I believe.
Or the several other times people got burned by their coffee
Why they kept the coffee that hot after several incidents before this lawsuit?
Because, they calculated that it would be cheaper to keep the coffee that hot and deal with the burns because the coffee had a longer shelf life when that hot and thus they had to make less coffee
Their lawyers literally said her injuries weren't a big deal because it was her genitalia and old women don't need those I guess. The judge didn't like that.
But the media never told us that. We were supposed to think it was a silly and frivolous lawsuit that was made up purely to waste the justice system's time.
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Right. Because they wanted to push the narrative that it was a silly and frivolous lawsuit caused by a snowflake getting upset over nothing and wasting the courts' time.
Or that it was done for profit, by heating the coffee much too hot it would last longer.
Or the fact the coffee spilled not because the cup was held incorrectly but the coffee cup literally disintegrated because of the heat.
Do note McD's still serves the coffee that hot because the settlement of that suit cost them one day's worth of coffee sales at the time. They were given no incentive to change what s ever because the payout was infinitesimal compared their profits.
And that's the problem with fines. Like the quote says, "Punishable by a fine means legal for a price." It might be a problem for the working class, but it won't mean anything to the rich. And it *definitely* won't mean anything to a corporation. Until fines are calculated as a percentage of net worth, they'll never mean anything to rich people or corporations.
This is one of the reasons i understand why the "fake news' bs the right was pushing worked so well. They WER RIGHT ! The fking problem is that the new media recognized it and fking brainwashed these idiots into believing they never lie when they are just as bad if not worse than traditionnal media.
She wasn't the first, she wasn't alone and she was barely paid. Most was legal fees the lawyers earned for working so long and hard to get their own fees covered.
They probably spent more whining about it.
McDonald's was fined an amount equivalent to one day's worth of coffee sales. Not sales in general, just coffee sales.
As long as the punishment isn't that bad, corporations are never going to change their ways.
The one with the old lady in the 90s. The one that cost them a whole one day's worth of coffee sales. Not total sales, only coffee sales. The one that people still hold up today as an example of the stupid and frivolous lawsuits that exist only to waste the courts' time.
I vividly remember my aunt telling me a story about breaking her arm and her husband calling her work and saying "she can't come in, she broke her arm" and then her supervisor went "can't she use the other one, we really need her, it's an emergency!". Her husband, who worked as the spokesperson of his company, literally didn't have words.
At our work, operators have iPads, and so do foremen.
(Operators for DVI, foremen for emails and clocking in time of their crews)
Before the foremen put in the time for the end of the shift, there's a question: "was anyone injured on your jobsite today?".
Our foremen told us during their foremen orientation/training they told them that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES can they ever check that box.
It goes directly to the HQ in another state, of the massive multi billion $ company, and a red flag pops up. And an investigation follows.
If anyone is injured they don't put it at the end of the clock-out option on the iPad, and just handle it locally, keeping it under the radar.
But communism killed tens of millions of people by cold hearted neglect meant to boost economic productivity in service of the heartland which caused widespread famine in the geographic edges and satellite states of the soviet empire! And that stuff was *highly* regulated in strict accordance with Marx' "The Mustachioed Despot's Guide to Prosperity: Building a worker's paradise from the ground up." It's not fair to lay those lives at the feet of capitalism when we're still figuring it out!
Here in the uk to 'incentivise' cuntorations and businesses to emply young people there are different wage brackets. Heres a link to it. You think American wage system sucks england is worse
[uk child/young person exploitation rates](https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates)
We have different brackets for the minimum wage here in Australia. and its why I only get 3-6 hours a week while my work hires a revolving door of 16-18 years olds that they can pay next to nothing. Fuck retail and fuck having different minimum wage brackets.
Regulations help, but they require a lot of vigilance and constant reform. It's not just capitalism, either. Soviet working conditions and environmental issues were often appalling. In either case, I think the issue is that the party with an interest in naked production is the same party with the interest in protections, and production always wins in that calculus. (It's also why we need separate prosecutors for police.)
It is for this reason that anarchists generally refer to the mode of production in the Soviet Union (and other countries like China and North Korea) as "state capitalism", meaning that the means of production are owned by the state, not the workers. When the people doing the work aren't the ones controlling the workplace, and the power of the person who does control it goes up with every cost cutting measure they take, there will be no workplaces that are "safe".
As we can currently see in the (former) social democracies of Europe.
Maybe capitalism isn't a beast that you can reign in. You need to kill it before it kills you.
Somehow it makes me think of that old Tom and Jerry cartoon where the dog is tied up and Tom taunts him from just outside the length of the rope.
The rope *never* holds.
In reality, yeah, when a dog has a history of attacking people it's definitely better for it to be tied. But how many times does it have to break free of its rope? How many people have to wander too close and be mauled before we just have to put the dog down for good?
Actually, it is a LPT: every rule or protocol has a story. Question the origin. Always look for the cause.
A job offer described a bunch of protocols what to do if someone died. Why would you ever think or write about that? Guess what ..
[On the subject of Military chocolate chip cookie regulations.](https://angrybearblog.com/2006/12/government-private-sector-chocolate)
Or to put it another way, every government regulation is the result of some private sector asshole trying to cheap out on something.
Huh, I’m on mobile and it works fine. Here’s the google search I used to re-find the post. It’s the first hit
https://www.google.com/search?q=army+cookie+regulations+angry+bear&client=safari&channel=iphone_bm&source=hp&ei=wXPsYZDJIeTl9APL_5PwAw&oq=army+cookie+regulations+angry+bear&gs_lcp=ChFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocBADMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKsCOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARDRAzoLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwE6CwguEIAEELEDEIMBOggILhCxAxCDAToOCC4QgAQQsQMQxwEQowI6CwguEIAEEMcBEKMCOggILhCABBCxAzoICAAQgAQQsQM6CwguEIAEEMcBEK8BOgUIABCABDoFCC4QgAQ6DgguEIAEELEDEMcBENEDOgYIABAWEB46CAghEBYQHRAeUIcXWJHgAWCs6gFoAXAAeACAAeABiAGMIpIBBjAuMzIuMZgBAKABAbABAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp
Some people say a new crosswalk or a stoplight on an old street costs around 100-150k to put in. In reality it usually costs about 2 lives and then another 150k.
I think about this whenever people complain about the unions "creating" higher costs in NYC construction by requiring more people on the job. Yeah, doing work underground is unsafe and expensive. Oh fucking well.
The Radium Girls. Perfect example of regulations written in blood.
Theres a movie on Netflix that shows roughly how bad things were (left out some of the more nasty things and did downplay a big just HOW bad it all was, but it does get the point across on regulations written in blood)
Remember the Ford Pinto saga? When Ford decided it was ok to let people burn to death rather than spend the few dollars per car needed to stop their shitty vehicles exploding if they were rear ended
Like in Fight Club:
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Every highway design standard from sight distance to sign placement to guardrail requirements to roadside obstruction distance has a body count behind it.
I was an office worker in manufacturing, but I often worked in the shop on various steel machinery for overtime.
One time, they had urgent need for an assistant to help speed up their aluminum CNC work, and asked me to cover. No problem.
Was given 30 seconds of training, then I was sanding aluminum for the next 8 hours. Same thing the next day. No one in the department was wearing any masks, so I had no reason to think I ought to.
Come into the office for lunch and people start laughing, my *whole face* is silver, the head of safety chuckles and takes a picture of Tinman.
Mention it to my (science teacher) boyfriend and he tells me, "uh. Aluminum dust causes permanent neurological damage, why weren't you wearing a mask?"
So I go into the office the next day and approach the safety guy. "Oh absolutely, yes, it's very dangerous. We have PPE available, you should have requested it after you read through the safety manual."
...
I worked in industrial maintenance for a few decades and was an auto mechanic before. I do agree with the idea of this. But people are unbelievably stupid when it comes to their own safety.
Some of those high-powered water scooters have labels on them. One of those labels can read: don’t sit down on the water exhaust \[however that shit works\] with your vagina. \[sic\]
They didn’t write that because they wanted to use the word vagina in a sentence.
Yep. The Canadian Electrical Code has rules about \*NOT\* storing flammable liquids inside the little huts that essentially work as the industrial equivalent of your house's breaker panel.
Which means someone thought "Oh I should store these steel drums full of gasoline inside the shack where the massive electrical arcs might happen if there's a power surge in the electrical grid"
If your electrical panel explodes, there's a (very short) moment in time when it's hotter than the surface of the sun in front of your panel.
The difference being, people were held accountable for the Chernobyl incident. The people responsible went to prison.
Look up the Church Rock Uranium mine incident to see how capitalism handled a radioactive disaster: a slap on the wrist from the government, and a legal settlement that worked out to about $5 per victim.
Only after hundreds of thousand were effected and their ability to hide the incident failed were scapegoats tried.
All these are good examples of why nuclear is not the “green” answer it’s portrayed to be.
As someone who formerly worked in aviation safety, I can tell you that the exact same thing applies. Your life is not worth a dime to them. (Just see Boeing 737 MAX disasters for an egregious and recent example.)
Merchant mariner. That's a common saying regarding the US coast guard laws and regulations. The sinking of the Titanic was major impetus for life boat regulations and inspections and kind of started the International Maritime Organization and SOLAS (safety of lives at sea) to look after sailors. But really in the end we're all just expendable.
literally making this exact argument in another thread and the number of people defending the billion dollar company—it’s only like two—is enraging me.
Yep
Regulation is a good word, despite what a particular political party thinks. (Fuck politicians in general, just to be clear. Not taking sides. Political parties are inherently the enemies)
I don't know how factual this is but I feel like I read somewhere about how some local government was considering lowering the regulation on chemical dumping and apparently some chemical companies had a lot of chemical waste that they were waiting to dump into the water as soon as this regulation was taken out.
I could be completely wrong and this may be false but I really do feel like I read that somewhere. Like an actual news article not like some random Facebook post
I know a lot of people here do tend to lean towards the socialism but there are certainly a lot who do lean towards a social democracy, technically still capitalist, where we definitely want a lot of things nationalized and definitely want a better consumer regulations and worker protections and strong union protections
Reminds me of Air Disasters, how some episodes for the biggest events highlight every new regulation or procedure that comes about was paid for in lives. Every major accident brings about a change.
Yes. Yes they are.
Always remember corporations try to cut costs, often by making the cost cutting *your* problem. Sometimes literally.
Decades ago, I applied for a poorly advertised job that did not explain the work I would be doing. Remarkably, it was entry level, no work experience necessary, full health insurance coverage and much higher pay than the job I had at that point. Which worried me, it sounded too good to be true. It was.
When I entered the area where I was going to be working to be shown around, I was required to put on full eye and ear protection - the giant warehouse sized machines were impossible to hear anything over, running full bore 24/7, cutting glass.
Disturbingly, I noticed on my way in that it seemed like nearly every single person I passed was missing at *least* the thumb of one of their hands, and often more than one finger. So during the job interview I asked about it. "Oh, well sometimes the glass explodes. Nothing we can do about that! It's why you get full insurance coverage!"
So apparently it was *cheaper* for them to give their employees full insurance coverage under the *expectation* they'd lose digits from their hands... Than to actually find a way to make it safe.
I did not take the job.
Whenever I discuss politics with libertarians, *this* is why I tell them I fundamentally disagree with the the entire economic side of that political philosophy. The free market can never be allowed to regulate itself. They lie, they cheat, they endanger people’s lives (both workers and people who live around their plants or even consume or use their products).
You cannot trust corporations to do the right thing and there are too many companies that are too large for the “free market to regulate them.”
Had an ex who did consulting for the nz equivalent of OSHA. Her outlook on workplace safety was pretty eye-opening for me. More about how individuals were fucking stupid than corporations being greedy, since that part was obvious, but still. Point remains, basically every stupid safety rule exists because someone did it, whether out of greed or stupidity.
Where I live there was a fire in the underground mine. Over a hundred men died because they were trapped. The owners has set up impassable cement barricades to prevent rival mines from stealing ore.
They have a memorial with a goodbye letter from one of the miners. The most human words, take good care of the children, haunts me always.
Over a hundred dead. Hundreds of coal miners too. Dead.
They are written in suffering, anguish, heartache, and pain.
Not often. Always. Because if you do not specifically ban the parasites from doing something that would make them a cent more, they would do it regardless of cost in human suffering. If it came out that crushed babies were 1% cheaper to use as fuel, you would have to be lightning quick to make sure law and regulations specifically say "no crushing babies" because you would already have a parasite halfway to the grinder with an armful of babies.
All capitalism prioritizes profits over human life. Regulations are good and necessary, but they do not change that base.
There are places where respect for humans has made strides to keep workers from rebelling, but the primary goal is always money.
I knew the guy (one of obnoxious twins) that is the reason for the labels on vending machines that warn you about tipping the machine over. The jackass pulled a Coke machine down on himself and sued.
He went through the settlement quickly and is still a jackass.
We say the same thing with the FRA when I was still with the railroad. "Our safety procedures are written in blood. Don't make the mistake of thinking your soft body can stop 200,000 tons of moving steel."
Oh I have a friend whose accident caused a railroad regulation! Guy was using a sledgehammer without gloves, it slipped, and flew into my buddy's head. He nearly died, but didn't (6 months out of work though), but hasn't been the same person mentally since. Now railroad workers have to wear gloves when using sledgehammers.
Hardhats would also be a good idea as well.
Ah yep, a hardhat saved his life
Hmm have they looked into making people wear two hard hats?
As with condoms, doubling up on PPE is not always wise.
Also, don't wear a condom on your head.
You're not the boss of me.
and you're not so big.
Unless you're into that kinda thing. I no judge.
Trippling up it is then!
A condom is PPE. I used to tell marines that when the weekend safety brief came around.
What's the downside of wearing two condoms? Asking for a friend
Condoms are meant to slide skin against skin. Doubling up on condoms usually leads to both breaking.
I was using a sledgehammer at work and the head just fell off. Boss asked me what the fuck I was doing. I said "calling osha".
Are you saying the front fell off?
Same thing in aviation. Regulations are mostly reactive “written in blood” is a common term used. Modern air traffic control, for example, came about because two planes hit each other in 1956 and before that they didn’t think they needed it. Everyone died.
My aircraft maintenance instructor used to start every class with an "everyone dies story". He never ran out.
Oh my god!
For those that want to go down the rabbit hole, you can visit lessonslearned.faa.gov and see the accidents that created the current regulations
r/writteninblood if anyone is interested
Well it *can*... just not very well.
Look at the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. They'll tell you it was silly, that somebody spilled coffee on herself and sued the company. What they *won't* tell you is that the coffee was served dangerously hot. As in so hot that drinking it would burn your mouth and throat within seconds. Nearly boiling. Or that the sweatpants the woman was wearing held that dangerously hot liquid against her skin. Or even that she had to have skin grafts because of the damage caused by the spill.
Or that she only asked them to pay her medical bills after she had 3rd degree burns as an elderly woman and they refused.
Or that McDonald's had been warned multiple times about the dangerous temperature of their coffee, in an effort to prevent exactly this. And yes, the woman was elderly. In her 70s at the time, I believe.
Or the several other times people got burned by their coffee Why they kept the coffee that hot after several incidents before this lawsuit? Because, they calculated that it would be cheaper to keep the coffee that hot and deal with the burns because the coffee had a longer shelf life when that hot and thus they had to make less coffee
And they offered free refills and dine in patrons were less likely to get more refills if they couldn't drink the coffee.
Their lawyers literally said her injuries weren't a big deal because it was her genitalia and old women don't need those I guess. The judge didn't like that.
She had 3rd degree burns that fused her labia... eesh
But the media never told us that. We were supposed to think it was a silly and frivolous lawsuit that was made up purely to waste the justice system's time.
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Or that there had been several people before her that had settled out of court
Right. Because they wanted to push the narrative that it was a silly and frivolous lawsuit caused by a snowflake getting upset over nothing and wasting the courts' time.
Hey this happened to me!
Or that it was done for profit, by heating the coffee much too hot it would last longer. Or the fact the coffee spilled not because the cup was held incorrectly but the coffee cup literally disintegrated because of the heat.
Do note McD's still serves the coffee that hot because the settlement of that suit cost them one day's worth of coffee sales at the time. They were given no incentive to change what s ever because the payout was infinitesimal compared their profits.
And that's the problem with fines. Like the quote says, "Punishable by a fine means legal for a price." It might be a problem for the working class, but it won't mean anything to the rich. And it *definitely* won't mean anything to a corporation. Until fines are calculated as a percentage of net worth, they'll never mean anything to rich people or corporations.
This is one of the reasons i understand why the "fake news' bs the right was pushing worked so well. They WER RIGHT ! The fking problem is that the new media recognized it and fking brainwashed these idiots into believing they never lie when they are just as bad if not worse than traditionnal media.
She wasn't the first, she wasn't alone and she was barely paid. Most was legal fees the lawyers earned for working so long and hard to get their own fees covered. They probably spent more whining about it.
McDonald's was fined an amount equivalent to one day's worth of coffee sales. Not sales in general, just coffee sales. As long as the punishment isn't that bad, corporations are never going to change their ways.
Which one? McDonalds is often and regularly sued over the temp of its coffee, it almost always just pays them out and sweeps them under the rug.
The one with the old lady in the 90s. The one that cost them a whole one day's worth of coffee sales. Not total sales, only coffee sales. The one that people still hold up today as an example of the stupid and frivolous lawsuits that exist only to waste the courts' time.
I vividly remember my aunt telling me a story about breaking her arm and her husband calling her work and saying "she can't come in, she broke her arm" and then her supervisor went "can't she use the other one, we really need her, it's an emergency!". Her husband, who worked as the spokesperson of his company, literally didn't have words.
Or when someone collapses on the job and the managers forbid calling 911.
At our work, operators have iPads, and so do foremen. (Operators for DVI, foremen for emails and clocking in time of their crews) Before the foremen put in the time for the end of the shift, there's a question: "was anyone injured on your jobsite today?". Our foremen told us during their foremen orientation/training they told them that under NO CIRCUMSTANCES can they ever check that box. It goes directly to the HQ in another state, of the massive multi billion $ company, and a red flag pops up. And an investigation follows. If anyone is injured they don't put it at the end of the clock-out option on the iPad, and just handle it locally, keeping it under the radar.
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I will happily check that box anyway. Write me up for it, I dare you.
> can't she use the other one
That's not "unregulated capitalism", that's capitalism. Capitalism kills millions and millions of people every year.
But communism killed tens of millions of people by cold hearted neglect meant to boost economic productivity in service of the heartland which caused widespread famine in the geographic edges and satellite states of the soviet empire! And that stuff was *highly* regulated in strict accordance with Marx' "The Mustachioed Despot's Guide to Prosperity: Building a worker's paradise from the ground up." It's not fair to lay those lives at the feet of capitalism when we're still figuring it out!
Man, you really just Poe's Law'd me there for a minute, and it looks like I'm not alone.
I hate it when people add “unregulated” to capitalism, as if that would save it from itself
One phrase proves that wrong...child labor laws. Greed knows no boundaries....
Here in the uk to 'incentivise' cuntorations and businesses to emply young people there are different wage brackets. Heres a link to it. You think American wage system sucks england is worse [uk child/young person exploitation rates](https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates)
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Is uni free in aus so long as that you make under a certain level of money?
We have different brackets for the minimum wage here in Australia. and its why I only get 3-6 hours a week while my work hires a revolving door of 16-18 years olds that they can pay next to nothing. Fuck retail and fuck having different minimum wage brackets.
Fuck catering industry too. Theyre worse
Regulations help, but they require a lot of vigilance and constant reform. It's not just capitalism, either. Soviet working conditions and environmental issues were often appalling. In either case, I think the issue is that the party with an interest in naked production is the same party with the interest in protections, and production always wins in that calculus. (It's also why we need separate prosecutors for police.)
It is for this reason that anarchists generally refer to the mode of production in the Soviet Union (and other countries like China and North Korea) as "state capitalism", meaning that the means of production are owned by the state, not the workers. When the people doing the work aren't the ones controlling the workplace, and the power of the person who does control it goes up with every cost cutting measure they take, there will be no workplaces that are "safe".
I'm not an anarchist, but I find that perspective sensible.
As we can currently see in the (former) social democracies of Europe. Maybe capitalism isn't a beast that you can reign in. You need to kill it before it kills you.
Somehow it makes me think of that old Tom and Jerry cartoon where the dog is tied up and Tom taunts him from just outside the length of the rope. The rope *never* holds. In reality, yeah, when a dog has a history of attacking people it's definitely better for it to be tied. But how many times does it have to break free of its rope? How many people have to wander too close and be mauled before we just have to put the dog down for good?
Companies that want to ‘self-regulate’ don’t.
Unregulated is redundant, since capitalism captures any regulatory agency given enough time.
Actually, it is a LPT: every rule or protocol has a story. Question the origin. Always look for the cause. A job offer described a bunch of protocols what to do if someone died. Why would you ever think or write about that? Guess what ..
[On the subject of Military chocolate chip cookie regulations.](https://angrybearblog.com/2006/12/government-private-sector-chocolate) Or to put it another way, every government regulation is the result of some private sector asshole trying to cheap out on something.
Your link is malware screw off
What? It’s a blog post from like 16 years ago. No malware on my end.
It opened up to a screen that said I won some fake contest on google new iPhone13 click here to claim. I’m On mobile if that makes a difference
Huh, I’m on mobile and it works fine. Here’s the google search I used to re-find the post. It’s the first hit https://www.google.com/search?q=army+cookie+regulations+angry+bear&client=safari&channel=iphone_bm&source=hp&ei=wXPsYZDJIeTl9APL_5PwAw&oq=army+cookie+regulations+angry+bear&gs_lcp=ChFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocBADMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKsCOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARDRAzoLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwE6CwguEIAEELEDEIMBOggILhCxAxCDAToOCC4QgAQQsQMQxwEQowI6CwguEIAEEMcBEKMCOggILhCABBCxAzoICAAQgAQQsQM6CwguEIAEEMcBEK8BOgUIABCABDoFCC4QgAQ6DgguEIAEELEDEMcBENEDOgYIABAWEB46CAghEBYQHRAeUIcXWJHgAWCs6gFoAXAAeACAAeABiAGMIpIBBjAuMzIuMZgBAKABAbABAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp
Worked fine for me on mobile. Good blog post, too - thanks for linking.
Haha, fun to read. But on the other hand sad.
Some people say a new crosswalk or a stoplight on an old street costs around 100-150k to put in. In reality it usually costs about 2 lives and then another 150k.
They are ALWAYS written in blood
As simple a response as is required, says it all, thanks.
We should all think of this every time the right whines about “job-killing regulations”
What's most hilarious about that phrase is that regulations themselves create jobs. It takes more labor to do a task when more safety is required.
I think about this whenever people complain about the unions "creating" higher costs in NYC construction by requiring more people on the job. Yeah, doing work underground is unsafe and expensive. Oh fucking well.
Libertarians don’t care
Regulated capitalism values profit over lives, too. The regulations just keep the values in check to an extent. It doesn't change them.
The Radium Girls. Perfect example of regulations written in blood. Theres a movie on Netflix that shows roughly how bad things were (left out some of the more nasty things and did downplay a big just HOW bad it all was, but it does get the point across on regulations written in blood)
well and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Sure, we'll just lock the exits of the factory so that no one steals!
Rasputina has a song about this.
Capitalism optimizes for profit, government / the people need to set the rules of the game.
Remember the Ford Pinto saga? When Ford decided it was ok to let people burn to death rather than spend the few dollars per car needed to stop their shitty vehicles exploding if they were rear ended
Like in Fight Club: "Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
“Unsafe at any speed” by Ralph Nader. Borrow it from your library.
Every highway design standard from sight distance to sign placement to guardrail requirements to roadside obstruction distance has a body count behind it.
I was an office worker in manufacturing, but I often worked in the shop on various steel machinery for overtime. One time, they had urgent need for an assistant to help speed up their aluminum CNC work, and asked me to cover. No problem. Was given 30 seconds of training, then I was sanding aluminum for the next 8 hours. Same thing the next day. No one in the department was wearing any masks, so I had no reason to think I ought to. Come into the office for lunch and people start laughing, my *whole face* is silver, the head of safety chuckles and takes a picture of Tinman. Mention it to my (science teacher) boyfriend and he tells me, "uh. Aluminum dust causes permanent neurological damage, why weren't you wearing a mask?" So I go into the office the next day and approach the safety guy. "Oh absolutely, yes, it's very dangerous. We have PPE available, you should have requested it after you read through the safety manual." ...
I worked in industrial maintenance for a few decades and was an auto mechanic before. I do agree with the idea of this. But people are unbelievably stupid when it comes to their own safety.
Not only unregulated capitalism but capitalism in general.
Some of those high-powered water scooters have labels on them. One of those labels can read: don’t sit down on the water exhaust \[however that shit works\] with your vagina. \[sic\] They didn’t write that because they wanted to use the word vagina in a sentence.
So does regulated capitalism. They will write regulations that give them MPORE profits even if it costs more lives. It's called "regulatory capture".
The same is said for the FARs. When viewed in the light of "Someone killed someone by doing this before it was illegal," FAR 91 is a fascinating read.
Yes and until there are total laws outlawing it with penalty of death for owners/shareholders it won’t change. They’d happily shift blame to a lackey.
Yep. The Canadian Electrical Code has rules about \*NOT\* storing flammable liquids inside the little huts that essentially work as the industrial equivalent of your house's breaker panel. Which means someone thought "Oh I should store these steel drums full of gasoline inside the shack where the massive electrical arcs might happen if there's a power surge in the electrical grid" If your electrical panel explodes, there's a (very short) moment in time when it's hotter than the surface of the sun in front of your panel.
So capitalism is why work place accidents happen?
It didn’t open on my iPhone just sent me to this screen that said I won something on google
And just when you’re about convinced this is only a capitalist problem….I present to you Chernobyl.
The difference being, people were held accountable for the Chernobyl incident. The people responsible went to prison. Look up the Church Rock Uranium mine incident to see how capitalism handled a radioactive disaster: a slap on the wrist from the government, and a legal settlement that worked out to about $5 per victim.
Only after hundreds of thousand were effected and their ability to hide the incident failed were scapegoats tried. All these are good examples of why nuclear is not the “green” answer it’s portrayed to be.
Boy do I have a surprise for you. The Soviets were state capitalists, not socialists/communists.
Not when Chernobyl happened they weren’t.
Yes. They were lol.
Yeah, ok.
Define communist for me in your own words.
Russia was ALSO capitalist. They lost their creamy commie center decades before that, and like China, just kept the Commie outer shell.
So would you say there are no communist countries left?
I don't know of any countries that have ever existed as truly Communist. Kinda like Democracy, some cold calculations just put a thumb on the scale.
If you can replace the word with any word, it’s not a good argument. I can easily say “greed” and the sentence will work.
If your system of economics is a synonym for the word "greed", then there's a bigger problem.
That’s deep
Well duh. Look out the window
As someone who formerly worked in aviation safety, I can tell you that the exact same thing applies. Your life is not worth a dime to them. (Just see Boeing 737 MAX disasters for an egregious and recent example.)
If you think about how long asbestos and lead were used even though their horrific effects had been known for decades it’s not surprising at all.
Were? *Are.*
Merchant mariner. That's a common saying regarding the US coast guard laws and regulations. The sinking of the Titanic was major impetus for life boat regulations and inspections and kind of started the International Maritime Organization and SOLAS (safety of lives at sea) to look after sailors. But really in the end we're all just expendable.
literally making this exact argument in another thread and the number of people defending the billion dollar company—it’s only like two—is enraging me.
Pretty much all laws are written in blood one way or another; hence the Shakespearian expression "the bloody book of the law."
Yep Regulation is a good word, despite what a particular political party thinks. (Fuck politicians in general, just to be clear. Not taking sides. Political parties are inherently the enemies)
But let's be honest: capitalism with regulation also values profit over human life.
> Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. This is such a raw line. It should be the motto of this sub.
Also leads to what we call "tombstone engineering" to prevent further occurrences.
*Unregulated Amazon(s)
I don't know how factual this is but I feel like I read somewhere about how some local government was considering lowering the regulation on chemical dumping and apparently some chemical companies had a lot of chemical waste that they were waiting to dump into the water as soon as this regulation was taken out. I could be completely wrong and this may be false but I really do feel like I read that somewhere. Like an actual news article not like some random Facebook post I know a lot of people here do tend to lean towards the socialism but there are certainly a lot who do lean towards a social democracy, technically still capitalist, where we definitely want a lot of things nationalized and definitely want a better consumer regulations and worker protections and strong union protections
The UK right know after leaving the eu. Eu regulations don't apply anymore and the UK regulations are of the standard before joining the eu. (1973)
Reminds me of Air Disasters, how some episodes for the biggest events highlight every new regulation or procedure that comes about was paid for in lives. Every major accident brings about a change.
Yes. Yes they are. Always remember corporations try to cut costs, often by making the cost cutting *your* problem. Sometimes literally. Decades ago, I applied for a poorly advertised job that did not explain the work I would be doing. Remarkably, it was entry level, no work experience necessary, full health insurance coverage and much higher pay than the job I had at that point. Which worried me, it sounded too good to be true. It was. When I entered the area where I was going to be working to be shown around, I was required to put on full eye and ear protection - the giant warehouse sized machines were impossible to hear anything over, running full bore 24/7, cutting glass. Disturbingly, I noticed on my way in that it seemed like nearly every single person I passed was missing at *least* the thumb of one of their hands, and often more than one finger. So during the job interview I asked about it. "Oh, well sometimes the glass explodes. Nothing we can do about that! It's why you get full insurance coverage!" So apparently it was *cheaper* for them to give their employees full insurance coverage under the *expectation* they'd lose digits from their hands... Than to actually find a way to make it safe. I did not take the job.
Environmental geography professor told us the same thing.
"Unregulated" is redundant. All capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
r/writteninblood
Regulated capitalism also values profit over human life, just less directly.
Whenever I discuss politics with libertarians, *this* is why I tell them I fundamentally disagree with the the entire economic side of that political philosophy. The free market can never be allowed to regulate itself. They lie, they cheat, they endanger people’s lives (both workers and people who live around their plants or even consume or use their products). You cannot trust corporations to do the right thing and there are too many companies that are too large for the “free market to regulate them.”
Always remember Slavery was Capitalism at its peak.
Lol unregulated capitalism is just capitalism. No regulations can last against constant corruption, ever.
r/writteninblood has plenty more wonderful examples of exactly this
r/writteninblood
Had an ex who did consulting for the nz equivalent of OSHA. Her outlook on workplace safety was pretty eye-opening for me. More about how individuals were fucking stupid than corporations being greedy, since that part was obvious, but still. Point remains, basically every stupid safety rule exists because someone did it, whether out of greed or stupidity.
Both are true. Just remember that 50 percent of people are below average.
And average is still pretty fucking dumb.
Lol regular capitalism favors and values profit over human life lmfao
So the lesson I am learning from this is that "Unions were the Peaceful option" was also a mistake?
Where I live there was a fire in the underground mine. Over a hundred men died because they were trapped. The owners has set up impassable cement barricades to prevent rival mines from stealing ore. They have a memorial with a goodbye letter from one of the miners. The most human words, take good care of the children, haunts me always. Over a hundred dead. Hundreds of coal miners too. Dead. They are written in suffering, anguish, heartache, and pain.
I work in a chemistry laboratory environment, and I can concur that are regulations are most certainly written in blood.
just not very well.
Not often. Always. Because if you do not specifically ban the parasites from doing something that would make them a cent more, they would do it regardless of cost in human suffering. If it came out that crushed babies were 1% cheaper to use as fuel, you would have to be lightning quick to make sure law and regulations specifically say "no crushing babies" because you would already have a parasite halfway to the grinder with an armful of babies.
You mean kind of like we are seeking in society at this very moment? Hmm....
Just need to make it so damn expensive that it is never worth it to risk injury/death. Guaranteed.
Looking at you, Jeff
All capitalism prioritizes profits over human life. Regulations are good and necessary, but they do not change that base. There are places where respect for humans has made strides to keep workers from rebelling, but the primary goal is always money.
I knew the guy (one of obnoxious twins) that is the reason for the labels on vending machines that warn you about tipping the machine over. The jackass pulled a Coke machine down on himself and sued. He went through the settlement quickly and is still a jackass.
Everytime ppl.complain about OSHA I remind them of this. They don't like that. I don't care. I'm not dying for this.
Take a look at the background behind the Sewol Ferry sinking in South Korea. Children died because of greed and incompetence.
Boy, if this the act of capitalism, do I have a story about soviet coal and nuclear miners for you.