[HN Gopher] How factories were made safe
___________________________________________________________________
How factories were made safe
Author : jasoncrawford
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-09-12 19:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| sanxiyn wrote:
| We really do need liability for software.
| brianwawok wrote:
| To who? The company? The developer?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| That needs to be figured out, but probably copyright holders.
| bserge wrote:
| Which software? Drone target acquisition or TikTok?
| Cilvic wrote:
| Both. All?
| bserge wrote:
| Granted, Hacker News is banned for causing depression in
| too many people :D
|
| Mozilla went bankrupt because too many ~~idiots~~
| outstanding citizens tripped and fell while using Firefox.
|
| YouTube was banned for causing deaths with their
| irresponsible use of information.
|
| Who knew fixing a car, building a high powered laser or
| eating a Tide pod is dangerous?
|
| Not the users' fault.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Hacker News causes depression in me.
|
| I learnt to code believing it would let me live a
| meaningful and productive life. I was wrong.
|
| I see all these wonderful innovations happening and I
| miss out on their benefits.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Web browsers, to start. Why are Apple and Google not liable
| for zero days of Safari and Chrome? How is it sane?
|
| Grace period may be necessary, but it needs to happen.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| You don't pay for these products though, which removes most
| of your options to seek monetary damages for <anything>.
| The same argument applies to nearly all [free] software -
| whether it's Chromium or curl.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I do pay for iPhone and Safari comes preinstalled on
| iPhone. Maybe either Apple should be liable for Safari or
| Safari should not be preinstalled on iPhone. You can't
| have it both ways.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Argh, it would allow another stupid round of "But the
| browser is built into the OS".
| gruez wrote:
| > Web browsers, to start. Why are Apple and Google not
| liable for zero days of Safari and Chrome? How is it sane?
|
| Is is even possible to make a browser without 0days?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Is it even possible to make an airplane that does not
| crash?
| gruez wrote:
| No. They crash all the time. You're suggesting that we
| hold airplane makers responsible for any and all crashes.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I didn't? I opined web browser "manufacturers" should be
| liable, like airplane manufacturers. That seems certain
| to me.
|
| Whether _automatic_ liability makes sense, as argued in
| OP about workplace safety, is less certain, but probably
| yes. Many zero days are triggered by just clicking a
| link. For such cases, it is hard to argue one is
| operating it wrong.
| gruez wrote:
| Computers can't be compared to airplanes because
| computers operate in an adversarial environment whereas
| airplanes don't. A computer crashing because of a
| specially crafted malicious request isn't really
| comparable to a plane dropping out of the sky. Consider
| another product that operate in an adversarial
| environment: locks. Should lock manufacturers be liable
| if their locks were pickable?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The audacity of that tangent at the end. "Natural and
| inevitable"? People fought and died for your 40 hour work week.
| You know May Day? The Labor Day for the rest of the world?
| Commemorates the Haymarket Massacre, which was fighting for the 8
| hour work day.
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| It is an essentially inevitable result of technological
| development. If the 40 hour workweek people had protested 30
| years earlier, nothing would have happened, and if they hadn't
| protested at all it probably would have been achieved with less
| effort a few years down the line. You need occasional shocks to
| remove entrenched procedural traditions like work schedules,
| but the magnitude of the shock required decreases as the change
| becomes more obviously beneficial.
| noselasd wrote:
| There are plenty of countries where this is not achieved, and
| it's unlikely to change without some kind of pressure, either
| from the workers or from the government
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah there's a lot of people who don't know the history of
| labor at all and have been convinced that companies without
| outside regulation would totally treat their employees well and
| not abuse, over work, injure, or flatly refuse to pay owed
| wages. It's a real success story for the pro-business groups in
| the US and around the world.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| You see the same misconception with environmental
| regulations, it makes for some interesting (though
| frustrating) discussions though.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You see the same misconceptions in the other direction as
| well.
|
| It's like some people think a work stoppage from cleaning
| up a dead worker or hazardous material spill don't result
| in lost productivity that workplaces would rather not
| incur.
| mannykannot wrote:
| ...So they lobby for 'pro-business' laws to limit the
| downside of such events.
| content_sesh wrote:
| The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire happened on March
| 25, 1911. The owner kept the factory doors locked and as
| a result 146 people either died in the fire or jumped to
| their deaths. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter,
| but did have to pay $75 per person they killed. The
| owners made $60,000 profit due to the insurance payout.
|
| Two years later in 1913, the one of the owners was
| arrested for locking his factory doors, again, and fined
| $20.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory
| _fi...
| lostlogin wrote:
| But it's been shown again and again that the cheaper
| option will be taken and if the fix is more expensive
| than the pause to clean, guess which happens.
|
| Amazon seems to have (or had?) this issue with climate
| control in their warehouses. Was the fix done because of
| the need to protect workers and keep them working, or the
| PR disaster that they caused?
| rtkwe wrote:
| Well that assumes they actually stop work beyond the
| exact area to address the death/spill. Very few places
| run just one line after all you can keep running
| everywhere else. This also ignores the fact that we have
| contemporary and decades examples of factories continuing
| to operate as they continue to injure workers because
| even a death doesn't actually cause them to lose much
| without meaningful worker protections.
| sanp wrote:
| You are assuming businesses know precisely what level of
| overwork or negligence will lead to lower costs (higher
| profit) and what level will lead to needing to cleanup a
| dead worker.
| adventured wrote:
| I'm endlessly amused that the Richard Nixon years gave us
| OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act, Occupational Safety
| and Health Administration, and NIOSH - National Institute for
| Occupational Safety and Health), the EPA (Environmental
| Protection Agency), the Endangered Species Act, the Marine
| Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act (proposed
| by the Nixon Administration, passed by Ford), the 1969
| National Environmental Policy Act, and the excellent Clean
| Air Act amendments/extension of 1970.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's kind of crazy how fast American politics went off the
| rails. Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan
| but I'm not versed enough to be sure if he's the cause or
| just one of the symptoms (most likely both really in the
| end) but it's always wild to see just how many of the 'big
| government run amok' agencies came out of the Nixon admin.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I've seen the idea float around that in order for
| democracy to function, the people need to see the
| political leadership as a) competent and b) acting in
| good faith. For the group of people who were coming into
| political adulthood in the 70s-80s (mostly born circa
| 1945-1965), those sentiments were deeply undermined by
| the Iran-Contra affair/hostage crisis and Watergate
| respectively.
|
| That cohort have now been the modal force in politics,
| business and the electorate for a few decades, and we're
| seeing the results.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Really seems like it really kicks off with Reagan but
| I'm not versed enough to be sure if he's the cause or
| just one of the symptoms_
|
| It was a concerted effort that started in the 1970s, and
| when Reagan got in things kicked off:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaki
| ng_of...
|
| Given that Democrats controlled Congress during the
| 1980s, they were complicit, but most of the ideas
| originally came from right-wing think tanks funded by
| oligarchs like the Koch brothers:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)
|
| * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-
| brother...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_t
| he_Ko...
| pram wrote:
| Nixon was planning on redistributing money through a
| negative income tax as well. I'd say what you're
| describing really started with the ideology behind the
| Goldwater candidacy.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's easy to write "just-so" explanations about American
| political trends, but I agree that Goldwater is really
| the crux to understanding exactly the mess we're in
| today: you can draw a direct line of thought and
| political lineage (one politician fostering the next)
| from Goldwater to Reagan to the Contract with America[1]
| to our most recent ex-administration.
|
| Toss in America's (inevitable) deindustrialization and
| the violent, systematic oppression of worker's movements
| without any real pushback from the DNC, and it's hard to
| see how things could have ended up any differently.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America
| ljhsiung wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't fully understand the point of that tangent, and
| it sounds like to me this "debate" between the Progressive and
| Capitalist, was "won" by the Progressive. But I guess I'm just
| a radical?
|
| > P. ....But the safety movement was not inevitable--it was the
| result of progressive reformers. Capitalism would never have
| accomplished this on its own.
|
| > C. Well... I have to admit, reformers like Eastman and Hard
| seem instrumental in this story. Their work helped bring about
| the legal reform, and the legal reform brought about the safety
| departments. So, I have to give them credit for that.
|
| > P: Good.
|
| Is this not a straight admission of the flaws of capitalism?
|
| This bit was especially hilarious to me--
|
| > C: No, you can't sign away all your rights. You can't sell
| yourself into slavery, for instance.
|
| uh... yes, people did.
|
| I somewhat think that's the point of the tangent though. Much
| of the blog goes into nitty-gritty detail on other ways society
| progresses-- by blood, sweat, and tears-- and so I think this
| tangent pushes that narrative, but it's weird that the opposite
| narrative is appeared to be given equal footing when previous
| posts seem to argue that it's not.
|
| Or perhaps it was an attempt to push to reader into the mindset
| at the time, in which case, the counter-arguments still aren't
| that convincing to me, but again perhaps it's just the
| modernity bias.
| kiba wrote:
| So, one lesson we might apply to is infosecurity would be
| automatic liability for information they collected and leaked.
| That would cause companies to fight for their user privacy and
| implement stronger security measure while also collecting less
| information.
|
| Well, maybe. We won't know if it work well until it's actually
| implemented.
| flerchin wrote:
| Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral
| hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly
| impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might
| be the solution to the problem.
| adolph wrote:
| If an info leak occurs in a data center and no one is
| harmed, does it make any liability?
| lmkg wrote:
| Well, CCPA started doing this in California. In the event
| of a data breach, the company can be sued for actual
| damages, or statutory damages of $100-750 per affected
| consumer.
|
| As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during
| the Equifax incident, the statutory damages _only_ for
| California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum.
| As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they
| agreed to with 48 states combines to about 1 /3 of that
| amount.
| adolph wrote:
| If a multistage class action lawsuit is settled for
| billions and people harmed receive only free credit
| monitoring gift cards, is our sense of justice served?
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't care so much about justice as nobody does it
| again. If the lawyers make a ton once and there isn't a
| next time I'm happy. Well better would be it doesn't
| happen again
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Statutory damages exist precisely for this reason.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a summary of _how_ the factories were made safe
| masquerading as a summary of _why_ the factories were made safe.
| It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe
| because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was
| Workers ' Comp., which made injured workers a _cost_ for
| employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers ' Comp was
| created by socialist union protests, and taken up by German
| politicians as a way to reduce the socialists' popular support.
|
| It concludes with some weird-ass hypothetical conversations
| between the author and a made-up socialist that ignores that
| fact. In between, it implies that socialists and anarchists
| weren't responsible for the 40 hour workweek, either, without
| offering any evidence (who would need evidence that time moves
| forward?)
|
| It's really an apologia for capitalism masquerading as a history
| of factory safety. Apparently it's because of attitudes and
| mindsets and lack of systems thinking _that everybody had,
| including the workers_. If the workers were universally fine with
| the situation, it 's really strange that they protested in the
| streets until the general populace backed them to the degree that
| government had to adopt the policy for fear of being voted out.
|
| edit: It's really telling that it starts with an anecdote blaming
| a child for his own death. You see, the child sat during his
| shift because one of the managers would let him. With proper
| systems-thinking mindset, he would have of course been forced to
| stand for 80 hours a week.
| Jochim wrote:
| See also the trend for offshoring production to countries that
| lack any safety standards or worker protections.
|
| The only real progress has been that some companies try to
| cover up that they're employing child labour by doing it
| through third parties rather than doing it openly.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I noticed that, install a guard was
| one of the last "if only" possibilities.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Really pathetic but unsurprising that people here are
| downvoting this comment. It's not often that you see an author
| constructing a _literal_ straw-man these days; the piece flatly
| ignores the importance of the _massively powerful_ labor
| movements of this period--so powerful that states were
| regularly resorting to armed struggle with them--instead
| pretending that "social reformers" existed in a vacuum.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Did we read the same article? The author addresses the labor
| movements and points out that they weren't very concerned
| with improving safety, sometimes worked against it and cites
| sources along the way.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "The author" has grossly cherry-picked sources and issues.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=BwvpAlvM-SA
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_f
| i...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Centralia_mine_disaster
| mcguire wrote:
| " _P: Fine. There's no need to get personal and blame
| "heartless management". This isn't the moral failing of any
| individual, but of a system...._ "
|
| "I blame society."
| dataflow wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks for posting this, I'm finding this
| incredibly fascinating. I can clearly see there's been so much
| ingenuity (and suffering) that's finally gotten us to where we
| are now.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and
| economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because
| you can draw so many parallels to the modern information
| revolution. The details of the story are different, but the
| outline is the same:
|
| We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency.
| The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a
| century ago. On the other hand, there's also serious regressions
| caused by the efficiency, with novel problems that our society is
| ill-equipped to solve. All the while, we have a wild west
| business environment and the founders, executives, and
| capitalists leading the way are getting unfathomably rich as they
| make a land grab for ownership over the infrastructure and
| technology that enables our modern efficiency.
| maxwell wrote:
| Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and
| improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s?
|
| I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has
| become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1]
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM&t=333s
| sanxiyn wrote:
| We went from thousands of transistors in chip in 1970 to
| billions of transistors in chip in 2020.
| maxwell wrote:
| Exactly. Transistors were invented in 1947, Engelbart
| presented on downscaling ICs to an audience including Moore
| in 1960, and he observed his law in 1965.
|
| It's mostly held, transistors have incrementally increased
| as predicted over 50 years ago. This is consistent with
| Stephenson's observation that there's been no meaningful
| innovation since the late '60s.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I wasn't alive in the late 60s but most things I spend all
| day doing were literally not possible for consumers until the
| 90s-aughts
| madacol wrote:
| Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates the
| regressions (if any)
|
| Very few people today, after knowing how people lived in the
| past, would make that tradeoff and go back
|
| P.S: "rich = bad" is an awful proxy for the real underlying
| problems
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Generally, the benefits of progress more than compensates
| the regressions
|
| That's certainly how this outline played out for the
| industrial revolution. The ending isn't written yet for the
| information revolution, but I do hope for the same.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It's tempting to use macro trends, like the advent of workplace
| safety, to confirm one's existing beliefs. Economy-wide changes
| like this are pretty much without exception driven by a bunch of
| different factors working together and you can pretty much always
| find some to cherry pick to back whatever your opinion is that
| minute.
|
| Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety
| seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at
| least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he
| missed a couple.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| I absolutely agree.
|
| 3..2..1 until someone blames or credits some President or the
| other or a famous worker strike. Models are particularly
| comforting when they are so simple as to be useless.
|
| Now, back to some work on the lathe while wearing my necktie.
| tpmx wrote:
| _Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker
| "carelessness." Even if partly true, this was a dead end in terms
| of understanding the causes and how to fix them. It would not
| survive a modern root-cause or "five whys" analysis. In modern
| parlance, "systems thinking" was lacking._
|
| This way of thinking still appears to be common in US road/street
| design.
| donjoe wrote:
| > The lack of systems thinking
|
| We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people/year in
| traffic instead [1]
|
| I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in
| traffic as well?
|
| [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-
| traffi...
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| One start would be to disable smartphones from operating when
| linked to a car system, massively increase enforcement of
| smartphone use while driving, and increase penalties.
|
| None of that would be popular, but it would be effective.
| bsder wrote:
| The key for workman's comp was no-fault--you pay for your own
| accidents. That had to be enshrined in law to work.
|
| Several US states _HAD_ No-Fault insurance laws--ie your own
| insurance company pays for your own accidents.
|
| The insurance companies lobbied like _crazy_ to get those
| removed. They 're all gone now.
|
| If you got those No-Fault insurance laws back, the required
| systems thinking would ensue.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>a simple and effective change to the law set in motion an
| entire apparatus of management and engineering decisions that
| resulted in the creation of a new safety culture. It's a case
| study of a classic attitude from economics: just put a price on
| the harm-- __internalize the externality__ --and let the market
| do the rest.
|
| There it is -- internalize the externality -- when someone is
| profiting via externalizing costs or harms, they are essentially
| stealing from others (either the commons or the specific people
| on whom the harm falls).
|
| Ensuring that external costs are borne by those who create them
| is simply requiring that people creating business are actually
| ADDING value to society, and not simply extracting or stealing
| value by creating greater external harm than their
| products/services create.
| gumby wrote:
| > Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker
| "carelessness."
|
| This attitude survives, not only in the workplace (where safety
| laws are often fought as "needless red tape") but outside it too
| (your poverty is due to carelessness, and is nobody else's
| responsibility).
| coding123 wrote:
| This is true, we have the ability to house every homeless
| person. There are more second vacation homes than homeless
| people. Why not just move them in? I'm not even talking about
| the ones available for rent - just the ones sitting there
| empty.
| big_curses wrote:
| As far as I understand, we do have the physical capability of
| housing that many people, but a significant number of the
| homeless are drug addicted, have mental illness, or both, and
| attempts to provide housing in mass like that leads to many
| of the houses becoming filthy and/or damaged. And who would
| want to give up a house for that? Homelessness can't just be
| solved with a housing band-aid, but needs to be addressed at
| the source with support for the drug addicted and mentally
| ill.
| [deleted]
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Having safe, stable shelter would seem to be a prerequisite
| to helping people deal with drug addiction and mental
| illness.
|
| Baxter, A. J., Tweed, E. J., Katikireddi, S. V., & Thomson,
| H. (2019). Effects of Housing First approaches on health
| and well-being of adults who are homeless or at risk of
| homelessness: systematic review and meta-analysis of
| randomised controlled trials. J Epidemiol Community Health,
| 73(5), 379-387.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is one factor, but it isn't everything, there are
| still other factors so don't overstate it
| cagenut wrote:
| downvoted because they clearly said 'pre-requisite' which
| is in no way an overstatement.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Same with software bugs it's always "careless" programming.
|
| My first mentor immediately took me to task when I called
| something I had done "a stupid bug." He stopped me and said
| "All bugs are stupid[1]." The point being that the overwhelming
| majority of the time, once you are _looking_ at a bug, it looks
| like carelessness and stupidity, and yet very smart, careful
| programmers introduce such bugs with surprising regularity.
|
| 1: The motto is "All bugs are stupid" but he did admit later
| that there are such things as "smart bugs" though they be rare
| enough to be a rounding error.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Roots of Progress explores a fascinating and critically vital
| question, but does so under ideological blinders and using
| manifestly obvious rhetorical techniques (strawman arguments,
| blame-the-victim, historical revisionism) which hugely impair the
| entire project.
|
| Tremendous potential. Miserable accomplishment.
| andjd wrote:
| This particular article is actually pretty informative ...
| until the dialog at the end. And in it, he's approving of a
| _strict liability_ scheme. I doubt most other pro-business
| ideologues would approve of a law that 'simplifies' legal
| disputes by mandating that the business always lose the case.
|
| (In fact, there's currently an effort to overturn New York's
| Scaffolding Law, and the arguments fall in line with that
| detailed in the article -- victims are being negligent or
| careless, so why should contractors pay?)
|
| The article is not without flaws ... Workers comp was a
| compromise that created strict liability, but also limited the
| compensation workers could receive for on-the-job injuries, so
| it can be argued that it was actually a windfall for owners at
| the expense of workers.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It is an exceedingly slanted narrative omitting much and
| painting a pointedly inaccurate history.
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(page generated 2021-09-14 23:01 UTC)