I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives.
There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many. And this is very common across so many industries, safety first as they always say.
But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.
It just irks me that so many industries preach about safety, but as soon as it has even the most minor impact on the bottom line, it becomes a hot topic. They should really be saying, "Safety first (but only after profits, shareholders, revenue, etc)"
I get that businesses need to make money to stay afloat, but with a profit margin of 14% [0], surely there is room to save some lives.
> There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many.
You see the same crap inside companies. All-hands rah-rah meetings or zoom calls or mass emails with this kind of stuff in it, then the next day, directives to the contrary. Or, the handbook says to do X, for safety reasons, but your supervisor says to do Y that will be impossible to accomplish if you do X, like you're supposed to.
In union shops the workers often have leverage to point at the handbook, laws, or contract, and tell their supervisor to get fucked, but others just have to deal with it or find another job. Ditto non-safety stuff like violating the company's own policies on shift scheduling, or overtime wage-theft, or any number of other things.
> But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.
There's a reasonable argument to not even bother with retrofitting. This has been a known issue for decades, just start building it into new trailers, and eventually the old trailers will age out and/or become uninsurable.
> I watched this last night, and it's always interesting to people in business talk about the cost of saving lives.
My favorite example of this is the "children under 2 don't need their own airline seat". The idea was that if you required a separate seat, more people would drive. That in turn would lead to more fatalities as the fatality/mile in cars is so much higher than in planes.
I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
> I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
This doesn't follow. It's not as if you're only allowed to purchase life insurance if it somehow accounts for the entire "cost of your life", whatever that is. I doubt most policies and policy-buyers attempt to achieve that, though some might.
[EDIT] To expand a bit, I'm pretty sure a lot of policies are purchased with goal-oriented thinking, and that goal's usually not "account for the cost of the life": for an older person, it might be "ensure end-of-life expenses are covered". For a younger one, it might be "make sure my family's OK until they can recover from the loss, which I guesstimate to require $X" or "make sure my family can afford to remain where they are at least until the kids are out of school"
Most planners would tell you that you that you need insurance to replace your expected income (or the cost of replacing a non-working spouse's childcare). That amount will often be much less than you'd pay not to die.
I have a term decreasing life insurance policy, which means that the amount my estate gets will drop to zero by the end of the policy. It's not the value of my life that it's covering but the value of my mortgage.
> I would also point out that if someone has purchased life insurance, they have explicitly made a decision about the cost of a life when they choose the amount of insurance they are willing to take on.
Isn't that the amount they can afford, rather than the value? Their wage is roughly irrelevant to their value
There was one point where the reporter was interviewing a guy from the ATA (American Trucking Associations) where the ATA person says that one lost life is too many. And this is very common across so many industries, safety first as they always say.
But then as soon as you put a cost associated with saving a life, the whole idea of safety first goes out the window. In this case, underrides are clearly avoidable and really don't cost that much to prevent. Retrofitted truck solutions are available, cheap, and easy to install.
It just irks me that so many industries preach about safety, but as soon as it has even the most minor impact on the bottom line, it becomes a hot topic. They should really be saying, "Safety first (but only after profits, shareholders, revenue, etc)"
I get that businesses need to make money to stay afloat, but with a profit margin of 14% [0], surely there is room to save some lives.
[0] https://www.projectionhub.com/post/10-trucking-industry-fina...