Fun with Thermite, Re: Willy Ley Thoughts
Peter D. Tillman
Par Leijonhufvud <use...@hunter-gatherer.org> wrote:
> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com>:
> > I could probably put my hands on magnesium, too. Never
> > lit a bonfire with magnesium but I bet it would be neat.
>
> I have. Works fine if you do it right. A small thermite charge inside a
> well laid up fire, and an electrical ignition system is better (now you
> now what Gandalf *really* did on that mountainside).
About a pound of thermite, set off at the main air intake for Stillwater
(OK) High School's ventilation system, did a wonderful job of clearing
out the school really quickly.
One of the culprits had a test he wished to avoid, ims. No, the culprits
were never found, but the lock on the door of the chem-lab storeroom was
changed.
>
> I once tested to verify that the nitrocellulose we where using in the
> lab[1] actually was nitrated cellulose. Did you know that nitrocellulose
> will tend to sick to your fingers, even when it is burning (but that
> picking it off quickly with a pair of tweasers will work)?
>
Hmm. Definitely a Nicoll Event...
Did I ever mention the time I demonstrated the Trampoline Effect of
walkng out on the thickened crust of an inactive sewage-treatment pond?
Alas, the tensile strength of the crust was insufficient to support one
bouncing-boyweight, for more than a few bounces.
ObSF: Waldo Burmeister's adventures in the sewers of Chryse City, as
related by Chas Sheffield in "The Dalmation of Faust".
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Peter D. Tillman
Par Leijonhufvud <use...@hunter-gatherer.org> wrote:
> Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org>:
> > : And one with a 10% full tank even more so.
> >
> > Doesn't that depend on how long you want the subsequent fire to burn?
> > Or rather "how inconvenient it would be for for the resulting fire
> > to burn a longer time" I suppose.
>
> Back then I had a pickup truck with the fuel tank inside the cab[1] I
> spent some time thinking about that. The "best" version I could think of
> what to add spark-plug in the top half of the fuel tank. On a hot day.
> [1] No, I have no idea what Ford was thinking about, but they must have
> a good dealer for the drugs.
I have similar thoughts, when I see a Jeep/SUV with 5-gal gas can(s)
mounted on the back. Makes a rear-end collision *much* more interesting!
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity, followed by death."
--Dave Barry
Keith Soltys
wrote:
>In article <slrncvbocc...@absaroka.eryn-lasgalen.org>,
> Par Leijonhufvud <use...@hunter-gatherer.org> wrote:
>
>> James Nicoll <jdni...@panix.com>:
>> > I could probably put my hands on magnesium, too. Never
>> > lit a bonfire with magnesium but I bet it would be neat.
>>
>> I have. Works fine if you do it right. A small thermite charge inside a
>> well laid up fire, and an electrical ignition system is better (now you
>> now what Gandalf *really* did on that mountainside).
>
>About a pound of thermite, set off at the main air intake for Stillwater
>(OK) High School's ventilation system, did a wonderful job of clearing
>out the school really quickly.
>
>One of the culprits had a test he wished to avoid, ims. No, the culprits
>were never found, but the lock on the door of the chem-lab storeroom was
>changed.
>
>Cheers -- Pete Tillman
I burnt a hole in the top of the lab desk at when I was in high school (St.
Mary's College in the Soo). My chem teacher let me demo the thermite
experiment to the science club. Those lab desk tops are designed to stand up
to acid spills - but they weren't much good against themite ....
Keith
Martha H Adams
campus. I've heard MIT students would sometimes run out with some
thermite and weld the trolley's wheels to the rail while it stopped
there. In easier times than now. (But the trolley and its rails are
long gone now.)
Cheers -- Martha Adams
Trei Family
Peter D. Tillman wrote:
> In article <slrncvboku...@absaroka.eryn-lasgalen.org>,
> Par Leijonhufvud <use...@hunter-gatherer.org> wrote:
>
>>Wayne Throop <thr...@sheol.org>:
>>
>>>: And one with a 10% full tank even more so.
>>>
>>> Doesn't that depend on how long you want the subsequent fire to burn?
>>> Or rather "how inconvenient it would be for for the resulting fire
>>> to burn a longer time" I suppose.
>>
>>Back then I had a pickup truck with the fuel tank inside the cab[1] I
>>spent some time thinking about that. The "best" version I could think of
>>what to add spark-plug in the top half of the fuel tank. On a hot day.
>
>
>>[1] No, I have no idea what Ford was thinking about, but they must have
>>a good dealer for the drugs.
What year was truck? Pre- or post-Pinto scandal?
With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
issue.
The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
to make the design safer.
So no change was made.
Peter Trei
Peter D. Tillman
Trei Family <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote:
>
> With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
> documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
> least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
> issue.
>
> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
> be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
> to make the design safer.
>
> So no change was made.
This is not so heartless as it sounds. In fact, this is how people (and
organizations) make reasoned tradeoffs [1] between safety and costs of
safety measures.
Ford's mistake was leaving a paper trail for the decision, which is
invariably *very* expensive if the case ever goes to trial. Juries
really, really don't like hearing hard evidence of Big Biz screwing with
their lives for profit. You'd think that NOT LEAVING A PAPER TRAIL would
be the first lesson for this topic in MBA programs...
Because the alternative, of NOT thinking about the costs and benefits of
a safety measure, is worse. You end up with such absurdities as the
USA's current "Homeland Security" airport procedures, like
strip-searching grandmothers and confiscating nail-clippers, at a cost
of *billions* of dollars. Dollars that could be intelligently spent on
something that might really help protect Americans, but are, instead,
being totally wasted. Gah.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
[1] --though my recollection is, Ford's Pinto gas-tank decision seemed
to be bad one, as the cost to improve the gas-tank was trivial.
Mike Schilling
"Trei Family" <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote in message
news:41F82FD4...@ziplink.net...
>
> With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
> documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
> least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
> issue.
>
> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
> be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
> to make the design safer.
>
> So no change was made.
Which, from strict capitalist theory, makes perfect sense. The market
placed a certain value on human life; why should Ford have disbelieved it?
Mike Schilling
"Peter D. Tillman" <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote in message
news:tillman-ED018E...@individual.net...
I don't know if it applies to the Pinto specifcally, but it does happen
sometimes that even cheap, valuable safety upgrades aren't made because
doing so would both bring attention to the situation in a way that invites
lawsuits and demonstrate that they were aware of the problem.
Danny Low
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
>> be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
>> to make the design safer.
>> So no change was made.
>Which, from strict capitalist theory, makes perfect sense. The market
>placed a certain value on human life; why should Ford have disbelieved it?
It is actually a very stupid decision from the capitalistic viewpoint.
The judge used that cost analysis to set the amount awarded to the
plaintiffs so Ford ended up losing all that money they saved and more.
The bean counters who did the analysis failed to take into account the
cost of being sued and having the analysis revealed. It was then a
slam dunk that Ford would lose and pay through the nose.
Two men can keep a secret when one kills the other. In a big
corporation, too many people know the secrets for them to remain
secret for long. Just ask all those Enron executives serving prison
time and being sued for damages. And when the secret comes out, the
corporation can forget about defeating any suits brought against them
and can count on getting hit with the maximum awards and penalties the
law allows.
The problem is the cost of being caught in a crime is not a Financial
Accounting Standards Board standard so most bean counters do not know
the first thing about how to count those beans.
Danny
Don't question authority. What makes you think they
know anything? (Remove the first dot for a valid e-mail
address)
Keith F. Lynch
> "Trei Family" <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote:
>> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would be
>> cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than to make
>> the design safer.
> Which, from strict capitalist theory, makes perfect sense. The
> market placed a certain value on human life; why should Ford have
> disbelieved it?
It was fraud unless the buyers were given the information so that they
could make an informed choice. The only person who can put a value on
human life is the person whose life it is.
And no court should have been involved. When a court orders Ford to
pay someone, they're ruling that Ford did something wrong. If the
driver consented to the risk, Ford didn't do anything wrong, and
should not be sued.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
Keith F. Lynch
I visited the MIT campus last year at the end of Noreascon. There are
still railroad tracks going through the campus. I don't know what, if
anything, they're used for.
Daniel Silevitch
> Martha H Adams <m...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>> Used to be, a trolley ran up Massachusetts Avenue through the MIT
>> campus. I've heard MIT students would sometimes run out with some
>> thermite and weld the trolley's wheels to the rail while it stopped
>> there. In easier times than now. (But the trolley and its rails
>> are long gone now.)
>
> I visited the MIT campus last year at the end of Noreascon. There are
> still railroad tracks going through the campus. I don't know what, if
> anything, they're used for.
That's an interchange between the tracks emmanating from North Station
and those that go from South Station. The MBTA uses it to transfer
rolling stock between the two networks; the occasional freight uses it as
well. The line crosses the river at the BU bridge; the tracks go
underneath the road bridge. Local lore has it that this is the only point
in the US where a boat can pass under a train passing under a car passing
under an airplane.
-dms
Paul Ciszek
In article <xpXJd.16138$5R.1...@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>,
Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I don't know if it applies to the Pinto specifcally, but it does happen
>sometimes that even cheap, valuable safety upgrades aren't made because
>doing so would both bring attention to the situation in a way that invites
>lawsuits and demonstrate that they were aware of the problem.
I seem to recall that at one point, even though all of the EU countries
had stockpiles of Hoof and Mouth vaccine, none were willing to start
vaccinating cattle because that would mean admiting the problem existed,
which would have been disasterous.
And of course, the American rationale for denying teenagers access to
birth control...
--
Please reply to: | "When the press is free and every man
pciszek at panix dot com | able to read, all is safe."
Autoreply has been disabled | --Thomas Jefferson
Gerry Quinn
mscotts...@hotmail.com says...
Presumably all road and building planners follow strict capitalist
theory so, given that they decide on safety measures based on the number
of expected lives saved versus the cost. Which, by implication, means
they have a formula based on the money value of a life saved.
- Gerry Quinn
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
>documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
>least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
>issue.
>
>The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
>be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
>to make the design safer.
>
>So no change was made.
You don't recall correctly, or at least you're making a common error.
When the Ford Pinto came out, it was initially a very popular vehicle,
and it appeared reasonably safe, for a small car of that era.
However, after it had been out for a while, people began to notice
that the Pinto had a propensity to explode when hit from behind.
Initially, nobody really knew why, but that didn't stop the
plaintiff's lawyers from suing. During the course of discovery, they
found out that Ford had considered installing a valve (of a sort now
mandatory) which would theoretically keep gas from leaking out if the
gas cap were lost or knocked off. Ford did a study of the sort you
describe, and it determined that the valve, which cost a few bucks per
vehicle, wouldn't be cost-efffective. For this they were pilloried in
the press, and there was some talk of criminal prosecution, though I'm
not sure if that went anywhere. And of course this was the theory
that the plaintiff's lawyers used with some success.
Alas, this explanation turned out to be false. In fact, the Pinto
wasn't exploding because it lacked this valve. What actually happened
in rear-end collisions was that the gas tank was pushed forward, and
it tended to rub up against a metal screw, which would slice open the
tank, resulting in gas leakage and, sometimes, an explosion or fire.
The fix was a small rubber gasket, placed over the screw, which
prevented it from cutting into the gas tank. This fix cost almost
nothing -- a few pennies for the rubber gasket, and two minutes to
install. But Ford didn't refrain from installing the gasket because
they'd done a cost-benefit analysis -- any such analysis would have
told them to install it. They didn't do it because they didn't know
it was necessary. Once they found out the problem, it was fixed
easily.
In remembering the whole Ford Pinto story, many people tend to
conflate matters a bit, which is what you seem to do. In fact, Ford
never considered the fix that ended up working, because it didn't know
of the problem.
I'll add that the Ford Pinto also had a design issue. In the Long Ago
Days of truly enormous vehicles, the rear end of a car was several
feet long. Gas tanks were placed behind the passenger seat, under the
forward part of the trunk. Because of the massive size of the
then-standard trunks, the gas tank was also a couple of feet away from
the rear of the car. Alas, with smaller vehicles, there isn't as much
space. Which means that the designers have a choice -- either put the
gas tank away from the passengers, almost right up against the rear
bumper, or put the gas tank, well, underneath the back seat. It turns
out, with smaller car design, that the best place to put the gas tank
is underneath the back seat, where the tank is less likely to be
punctured. The Pinto's tank happened to be pushed about as far away
from passengers as possible, right up the rear bumper. Which turned
out to be a terrible choice. However, it was a terrible choice that
was reasonable in light of what people knew in the early seventies.
The engineers who built the Pinto thought that they were being safer
by putting the gas tank as far away from the rear passengers as
possible.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
One problem with Ford's calculation is that they picked a number that
was too low. However, part of the revulsion that many people feel for
what Ford supposedly did (although the oft-accepted view is somewhat
distorted -- see my other post) springs from a rejection of the whole
cost-benefit concept.
However, I'm curious. Do you think that auto manufacturers should
install *every* possible safety device? That no price is ever too
high to save even one life? Because if we did that, no car would ever
be affordable. There's always a little more something that could add
some more marginal safety.
--
Pete McCutchen
David G. Bell
nos...@nospam.com "Paul Ciszek" wrote:
> In article <xpXJd.16138$5R.1...@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>,
> Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >I don't know if it applies to the Pinto specifcally, but it does happen
> >sometimes that even cheap, valuable safety upgrades aren't made because
> >doing so would both bring attention to the situation in a way that invites
> >lawsuits and demonstrate that they were aware of the problem.
>
> I seem to recall that at one point, even though all of the EU countries
> had stockpiles of Hoof and Mouth vaccine, none were willing to start
> vaccinating cattle because that would mean admiting the problem existed,
> which would have been disasterous.
The nature of the disease and vaccines is that the protection doesn't
last, and the vaccines, at least in the past, had the risk of causing
infection. Also, there are international rules which do make
vaccination a bad idea for a routine measure.
In the UK outbreak of a few years ago, the actual source of the disease
has never been identified. We know where the first infection occurred,
and part of the why, but not where the virus came from (except in a
general sense associated with identifying the virus strain). It's
infectious enough that were live virus around in Europe, there would be
outbreaks.
UK policy was for containment by slaughter, which had worked well in
previous outbreaks. The system. for various reasons, didn't work well
this last time. In other European countries, slaughter of infected
stock, and vaccination of surrounding herds, was the main tactic. This
has problem -- the vaccine needs time to be effective -- but fast
detection and response meant that the live infections didn't have
significant time to spread.
MAFF (now DEFRA), the government department responsible, have been
severely criticised for how they ran things, and some EU payments have
been withheld because of their maladministration. There were major
problems because of their failure to keep emergency plans up to date.
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
"I am Number Two," said Penfold. "You are Number Six."
Mike Schilling
"Pete McCutchen" <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:k04hv05m9hv8m13qk...@4ax.com...
Of course not. That's the "Freeway speed limits should be set at 20 MPH"
argument, which is silly.
It does bother me that the calculation isn't "How many lives could be
saved?" but "Of the lives lost, how many will sue us, and how much will that
cost?" This leads to conclusions like "This design is so unsafe that we
can only sell it in Third World countries." Again, by strict market logic,
there's nothing wrong with that. The person you've sold the car to bought
it voluntarily and the transaction results in both producer and consumer
surplus, and if you can't stop yourself from calculating the number of
deaths you've caused selling the damned things, you can always change jobs.
Steinn Sigurdsson
> In the UK outbreak of a few years ago, the actual source of the disease
> has never been identified. We know where the first infection occurred,
> and part of the why, but not where the virus came from (except in a
> general sense associated with identifying the virus strain). It's
> infectious enough that were live virus around in Europe, there would be
> outbreaks.
I thought I'd heard they'd traced it to illegally imported
Chinese food; maybe a protein food additive or some such,
IIRC the Beeb did a medium length feature on it
David Johnston
<ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>In article <1lXJd.16134$5R....@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>,
>mscotts...@hotmail.com says...
>> "Trei Family" <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote in message
>> news:41F82FD4...@ziplink.net...
>> >
>> > With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
>> > documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
>> > least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
>> > issue.
>> >
>> > The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
>> > be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
>> > to make the design safer.
>> >
>> > So no change was made.
>>
>> Which, from strict capitalist theory, makes perfect sense. The market
>> placed a certain value on human life; why should Ford have disbelieved it?
>
>Presumably all road and building planners follow strict capitalist
>theory so,
Since when? Road planners generally work for the government and build
their roads to government specifications. Building planners are
highly regulated.
Peter Trei
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:56 GMT, Trei Family <tr...@ziplink.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>>With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
>>documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
>>least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
>>issue.
>>
>>The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
>>be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
>>to make the design safer.
>>
>>So no change was made.
>
>
> You don't recall correctly, or at least you're making a common error.
[long detailed explanation of what really happened deleted]
Interesting - I knew I hadn't heard from an authoritative
source, which is why I qualified my response.
As they say, AKICIF,
Peter Trei
Danny Low
<ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>theory so, given that they decide on safety measures based on the number
>of expected lives saved versus the cost. Which, by implication, means
>they have a formula based on the money value of a life saved.
Civil engineers are accountable to an older standard of safety. In
ancient Babylon, if a bridge or building fell down and killed someone,
the builder was executed as punishment. That set a standard for civil
engineers that still persists today. Civil engineers have to put their
signature on the design specs and are held personally legally
responsible if their road, bridge or building ever falls down. Only
certified civil engineers can sign the specs. In the USA when a
structure falls down, there are various government agencies who have
the job of finding out exactly why and who was responsible. So that
signature is not a formality.
The main influence of capitalism is whether the safety factor should
be 10 times or 20 times the minimum. That is why structure failures
are rare although the ones that happen tend to be very spectacular.
Seth Breidbart
Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
>In article <41F82FD4...@ziplink.net>,
> Trei Family <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote:
>
>> With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
>> documents which came out during that scandal showed that at
>> least one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an
>> issue.
>>
>> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would
>> be cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than
>> to make the design safer.
>>
>> So no change was made.
>
>This is not so heartless as it sounds. In fact, this is how people (and
>organizations) make reasoned tradeoffs [1] between safety and costs of
>safety measures.
>
>Ford's mistake was leaving a paper trail for the decision, which is
>invariably *very* expensive if the case ever goes to trial.
In this case, due to the numbers. IIRC, Ford used $500,000 as the
value of a human life. Had they used $1,000,000, they would have
chosen the safer design.
Seth
how...@brazee.net
On 27-Jan-2005, "Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Of course not. That's the "Freeway speed limits should be set at 20 MPH"
> argument, which is silly.
>
> It does bother me that the calculation isn't "How many lives could be
> saved?" but "Of the lives lost, how many will sue us, and how much will
> that cost?"
Trouble is, I don't know what argument *should* be made.
Mike Schilling
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:8niKd.7492$YD5....@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
Nor do I, but "Poor, helpless people are fair prey" disturbs me.
Keith F. Lynch
> "Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> It does bother me that the calculation isn't "How many lives could
>> be saved?" but "Of the lives lost, how many will sue us, and how
>> much will that cost?"
> Trouble is, I don't know what argument *should* be made.
The only person who can set a value on a human life is the person
whose life it is. Would you be willing to spend an extra $10 on a car
to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash by one in a million?
Different people will answer that differently.
Current OSHA and NTSB regulations implicitly assume wildly varying
values for a human life, from a few hundred dollars to well over a
billion.
Judging by the US government's spending on the "war on terror" in the
US and abroad, each 9/11 victim's life was worth about 200 million
dollars.
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
<in re bad product designs that cause, among other things, flamey death in
motor vehicles>
When I was a very tiny infant (summer 1976), my parents (and my
dad's folks and some assorted other family on that side) made a trip to
Kansas in an RV to show off the First Grandchild to all the family there.
This RV had its propane tank (for cooking, etc) permanently
mounted beside the entry/exit door. The ONLY entry/exit door. No window in
the RV opened far enough to get a person out of. The only one that opened
at all was the driver's side corner-shaped one, and that only far enough
to fling change at tollbooths.
Through circumstances that have not survived in family oral
history, the propane tank suddenly (a) sprang a leak and (b) the leak
ignited, causing a flamethrower effect blocking the only working exit from
the interior. The family managed to escape by wrapping themselves in
bedsheets and drenching themselves in water from the shower's tank (though
my grandmother lost the remainder of her already-thinning hair after some
mild burns). The RV, and its inanimate contents, were a total loss. The
incredibly long-haired lapdog managed somehow to escape dry, though nobody
knows how; it was returned by passersby who found it running flat-out away
down the highway several miles away.
Due to my family's lawsuit, and those of others who encountered
the defect, they don't make RVs like that anymore. Thank all powers that
be.
--
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
My personal theory is that the vast majority of drive-by shootings
by the kids with the wings and the arrows are unaimed area fire, and it's
anybody's guess where the shots are going to land.
- Tom Holt, on love, in _Little People_
Keith F. Lynch
> This RV had its propane tank (for cooking, etc) permanently mounted
> beside the entry/exit door. The ONLY entry/exit door. No window in
> the RV opened far enough to get a person out of.
That's what a fire axe is for.
Joe Pfeiffer
>
> In this case, due to the numbers. IIRC, Ford used $500,000 as the
> value of a human life. Had they used $1,000,000, they would have
> chosen the safer design.
So what, historically, had been the average settlement in a case where
life was lost? That's the number they should have used...
(I drive a 1978 Chrysler Newport to work every day. A car with no
frame, gas tank behind the rear axle, and filler tube in the back.
And no rubber bladder inside the fuel tank. But not one to have
inexplicably come to the media's attention the way the Pinto did).
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
> Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker) <elo...@ripco.com> wrote:
> > This RV had its propane tank (for cooking, etc) permanently mounted
> > beside the entry/exit door. The ONLY entry/exit door. No window in
> > the RV opened far enough to get a person out of.
>
> That's what a fire axe is for.
They had neglected to pack one. And trying to smash out a window
with a chair didn't work, as they were all that fancy neat new 'safety'
material, lexan.
Like I said, they don't make RVs like that anymore.
Ted Nolan <tednolan>
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>values for a human life, from a few hundred dollars to well over a
>billion.
>
>Judging by the US government's spending on the "war on terror" in the
>US and abroad, each 9/11 victim's life was worth about 200 million
>dollars.
>--
>Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
That's kind of like dividing the cost of WWII by the number of lives lost
at Pearl Harbor.
There were monies paid to 9/11 families, but the spending on the
WOT is not for them, but for prevention. I desperately don't want
to see another thread arguing whether the WOT will acheive these ends or not.
I'm just saying that's the _theory_.
Ted
Jasper Janssen
<p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>However, I'm curious. Do you think that auto manufacturers should
>install *every* possible safety device? That no price is ever too
>high to save even one life? Because if we did that, no car would ever
>be affordable. There's always a little more something that could add
>some more marginal safety.
This wasn't a case of not having a "safety device", it was a case of
making the car *less safe*, for no real reason at all. The cost involved
was the cost of *changing* the platform from what it already was, rather
than that the design was saving significant amounts of money by itself.
In spite of Hollywood, collisions between cars simply don't cause cars to
blow up. At worst, a fire might start somewhere, and when it gets to the
fuel tank you might have a problem in that area. Changing that equation
*severely* impacts your chances in a collision.
Jasper
Jasper Janssen
wrote:
>I seem to recall that at one point, even though all of the EU countries
>had stockpiles of Hoof and Mouth vaccine, none were willing to start
>vaccinating cattle because that would mean admiting the problem existed,
>which would have been disasterous.
The problem there is that vaccinated beef is indistinguishable from
infected beef. It would have meant an end to export, and possibly even
consumption, for *years*.
And that was mostly US pressure, too.
Jasper
Paul Ciszek
In article <u1kgv0166g3qbabge...@4ax.com>,
Danny Low <dann...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>Two men can keep a secret when one kills the other. In a big
>corporation, too many people know the secrets for them to remain
>secret for long. Just ask all those Enron executives serving prison
>time and being sued for damages. And when the secret comes out, the
Are they serving actual time? I think Ken Lay is out.
Peter Meilinger
>In article <u1kgv0166g3qbabge...@4ax.com>,
>Danny Low <dann...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>Two men can keep a secret when one kills the other. In a big
>>corporation, too many people know the secrets for them to remain
>>secret for long. Just ask all those Enron executives serving prison
>>time and being sued for damages. And when the secret comes out, the
>Are they serving actual time? I think Ken Lay is out.
And probably likely to stay that way, if he can convince the
jury that he's a complete idiot who had no idea what was going
on.
On the other hand, I believe he and his wife had to sell one
of their homes, so it's obvious that he's suffered enough.
Pete
Gerry Quinn
dann...@earthlink.net says...
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 13:19:30 -0000, Gerry Quinn
> <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> >Presumably all road and building planners follow strict capitalist
> >theory so, given that they decide on safety measures based on the number
> >of expected lives saved versus the cost. Which, by implication, means
> >they have a formula based on the money value of a life saved.
>
> Civil engineers are accountable to an older standard of safety. In
> ancient Babylon, if a bridge or building fell down and killed someone,
> the builder was executed as punishment. That set a standard for civil
> engineers that still persists today.
Uh... clearly it doesn't! In recent times, there have been moves to
assign a greater degree of responsibility to directors and managers of
public companies, but it has not thus far come close to the stringency
of the Babylonian approach.
> Civil engineers have to put their
> signature on the design specs and are held personally legally
> responsible if their road, bridge or building ever falls down. Only
> certified civil engineers can sign the specs. In the USA when a
> structure falls down, there are various government agencies who have
> the job of finding out exactly why and who was responsible. So that
> signature is not a formality.
Nobody said it was.
> The main influence of capitalism is whether the safety factor should
> be 10 times or 20 times the minimum. That is why structure failures
> are rare although the ones that happen tend to be very spectacular.
Deaths on roads and in buildings are not always due to structural
collapse (in the case of roads, it would be unusual for them to be).
When a road system is designed, debate takes place within the planning
administration that in effect, makes decisions such as "An extra foot of
width will save on average one life per annum, but the cost is X which
is greater than the guideline value for such cases, so it will not be
incorporated".
Not so different from the Pinto decision, is it?
- Gerry Quinn
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
>Mike Schilling <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> "Trei Family" <tr...@ziplink.net> wrote:
>>> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would be
>>> cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than to make
>>> the design safer.
>
>> Which, from strict capitalist theory, makes perfect sense. The
>> market placed a certain value on human life; why should Ford have
>> disbelieved it?
>
>It was fraud unless the buyers were given the information so that they
>could make an informed choice. The only person who can put a value on
>human life is the person whose life it is.
>
For another interesting look at trying to figure out what human life
is worth, take a look at the Circulatory devices panel meetings some
time. They are the FDA advisory boards, and give their opinions on
approvals. You can find the summary minutes on-line, but listening to
the entire 8 hours can be even more enlightening. What decision do
you make when asked to give your opinion on approving a product that
may extend a life one year, doesn't have a good record at two years,
has a high incidence of complications, and costs a lot? (The actual
answer was a very reluctant yes, mainly because of the one year
survival rate, and with a lot of requirements for patients to be
informed and the company to gather more data.) For the interests of
completeness, I will admit that I had a vested interest in the
proceedings of this particular panel.
www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/02/minutes/3843m1.pdf
Rebecca
Scott Robinson
wrote:
><how...@brazee.net> wrote:
>> "Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> It does bother me that the calculation isn't "How many lives could
>>> be saved?" but "Of the lives lost, how many will sue us, and how
>>> much will that cost?"
>
>> Trouble is, I don't know what argument *should* be made.
>
>The only person who can set a value on a human life is the person
>whose life it is. Would you be willing to spend an extra $10 on a car
>to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash by one in a million?
>Different people will answer that differently.
>
>Current OSHA and NTSB regulations implicitly assume wildly varying
>values for a human life, from a few hundred dollars to well over a
>billion.
>
>Judging by the US government's spending on the "war on terror" in the
>US and abroad, each 9/11 victim's life was worth about 200 million
>dollars.
This is the falicy behind at least part of the SUV craze. Driving
such a beast (and by the numbers Ford pickup trucks are worse)
increases everyone else's chance of dying due to your decision.
There is a partial bit of cost added to dangerous vehicles in the
extra insurance cost, but as far as I know, this does not cover the
value of human life. To "let the market decide", a wereguild *must*
be paid, either by insurance, as a death tax (presumably by the
manufacturer as the numbers roll in), or by individually suing the
manufacturers for each death.
I suspect that the US uses the last due to a combination of distaste
for setting a value on human life, and the fact that lawsuits will
happen in very few cases (setting the value of human life at a few
bucks a pop is certainly favorable to politically favored
manufacturers)..
Scott
David G. Bell
<Pine.GSO.4.58.0501272311140.16341@shell2> elo...@ripco.com
"Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)" wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> > Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker) <elo...@ripco.com> wrote:
> > > This RV had its propane tank (for cooking, etc) permanently mounted
> > > beside the entry/exit door. The ONLY entry/exit door. No window in
> > > the RV opened far enough to get a person out of.
> >
> > That's what a fire axe is for.
>
> They had neglected to pack one. And trying to smash out a window
> with a chair didn't work, as they were all that fancy neat new 'safety'
> material, lexan.
>
> Like I said, they don't make RVs like that anymore.
It's a forseeable problem in the design.
If it comes to that, it's a forseeable problem even without the propane
tank there. Even a minor collision could block that door.
David G. Bell
ste...@tomcat.astro.psu.edu "Steinn Sigurdsson" wrote:
I've not heard anything definite. uk.business.agriculture was keeping
very up-to-date on the situation. The "chinese food" story did fly
around, but the evidence of the virus strain involved pointed in other
directions.
The most likely route is via catering waste and the badly-managed pig-
swill feeding. The virus strain points towards South America, and
Argentinian beef was being used by the Army, and in NHS hospitals at the
time -- the government may have imported the infection.
Mike Schilling
> I'll add that the Ford Pinto also had a design issue. In the Long Ago
> Days of Truly Enormous Vehicles, the rear end of a car was several
> feet long. Gas tanks were placed behind the passenger seat, under the
> forward part of the trunk. Because of the massive size of the
> then-standard trunks, the gas tank was also a couple of feet away from
> the rear of the car. Alas, with smaller vehicles, there isn't as much
> space. Which means that the designers have a choice -- either put the
> gas tank away from the passengers, almost right up against the rear
> bumper, or put the gas tank, well, underneath the back seat. It turns
> out, with smaller car design, that the best place to put the gas tank
> is underneath the back seat, where the tank is less likely to be
> punctured. The Pinto's tank happened to be pushed about as far away
> from passengers as possible, right up the rear bumper. Which turned
> out to be a terrible choice. However, it was a terrible choice that
> was reasonable in light of what people knew in the early seventies.
> The engineers who built the Pinto thought that they were being safer
> by putting the gas tank as far away from the rear passengers as
> possible.
That's letting them off a bit easy. The LADoTEV were an American phenomenon
based on wie-open spaces and cheap gas. Europe and Japan had long
experience building cars both Pinto-sized and smaller. [1] When you say
"What people knew in the early seventies" you apparently mean Americans
incapable of doing reasearch, hiring consultants, or in any other way
learning from people who knew more than they did.
1. The Pinto was introduced in 1970; the British Mini, to pick just one
example, goes back to 1959. That's from one minute of googling; I'm sure a
car aficianado could greatly expand on this point.
Jasper Janssen
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>1. The Pinto was introduced in 1970; the British Mini, to pick just one
>example, goes back to 1959. That's from one minute of googling; I'm sure a
>car aficianado could greatly expand on this point.
2CV, Fiat 500 & 600, hell, even the VW Beetle (designed by order of
Hitler) are pretty small and extremely light cars. The original 2CV was
just post-war, had a 2 cylinder engine with 375 cubic centimeters, not
inches -- that's about 23 cubic inch -- which developed 9 horsepower, and
the whole car weighed somewhere in the 500-600 kilogram range. Even a
Pinto weighed over a ton. That's a small-medium-size car in Europe, not a
truly small one.
Jasper
Danny Low
Ben Glisan started doing 5 years last year. Lea Fastow did one year.
Her husband as a 10 year sentence pending. 12 others are awaiting
sentencing. 8 including Ken Lay are awaiting trial. There was one
acquittal. You can find this out with a simple "enron prison" web
search. So a total of 24 Enron executives faced or are facing trials
or prison.
Keith F. Lynch
> This is the falicy behind at least part of the SUV craze. Driving
> such a beast (and by the numbers Ford pickup trucks are worse)
> increases everyone else's chance of dying due to your decision.
Not just SUVs. Seatbelts, brighter headlights, crumple zones, and
airbags don't so much create safety as they move it from those outside
the car to those inside, making the latter safer and the former
less safe.
> ... (setting the value of human life at a few bucks a pop is
> certainly favorable to politically favored manufacturers)..
Until someone who is pissed off by this kills them, then willingly
pays the fine for doing so, while asking if bulk discounts are
available.
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
> Scott Robinson <dsc...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> > This is the falicy behind at least part of the SUV craze. Driving
> > such a beast (and by the numbers Ford pickup trucks are worse)
> > increases everyone else's chance of dying due to your decision.
>
> Not just SUVs. Seatbelts, brighter headlights, crumple zones, and
> airbags don't so much create safety as they move it from those outside
> the car to those inside, making the latter safer and the former
> less safe.
Uhm. How does having airbags (or seatbelts) make a
car-into-something-else collision less safe for the object impacted by the
airbag (or seatbelt)-equipped car? Likewise crumple zones make it less
safe for the *structure* of the car itself, but cause said structure to
absorb the kinetic energy that would otherwise be transmitted to (a) the
interior, and to a lesser extent (b) the object impacted. Try tossing a
rubber ball at a dense-ish snowbank, and then a ball of very
loosely-compacted aluminum foil. The foil makes a shallower pit, because
it crumpled instead of ramming so much.
Keith F. Lynch
> something-else collision less safe for the object impacted by
> the airbag (or seatbelt)-equipped car?
Drivers will accept a certain amount of risk and no more. If you make
cars safer, most drivers will drive faster and more aggressively, to
trade the unwanted additional safety for time and convenience.
David Dyer-Bennet
> Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker) <elo...@ripco.com> wrote:
>> Uhm. How does having airbags (or seatbelts) make a car-into-
>> something-else collision less safe for the object impacted by
>> the airbag (or seatbelt)-equipped car?
>
> Drivers will accept a certain amount of risk and no more. If you make
> cars safer, most drivers will drive faster and more aggressively, to
> trade the unwanted additional safety for time and convenience.
Any evidence for drivers with seatbelts or crumple zones driving more
aggressively? I know there *is* some evidence for drivers with
anti-lock brakes; I strive to not be part of that group.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <mailto:dd...@dd-b.net>, <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <http://noguns-nomoney.com/> <http://www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Pics: <http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/> <http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <http://dragaera.info/>
Bernard Peek
<dd...@dd-b.net> writes
>"Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> writes:
>
>> Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker) <elo...@ripco.com> wrote:
>>> Uhm. How does having airbags (or seatbelts) make a car-into-
>>> something-else collision less safe for the object impacted by
>>> the airbag (or seatbelt)-equipped car?
>>
>> Drivers will accept a certain amount of risk and no more. If you make
>> cars safer, most drivers will drive faster and more aggressively, to
>> trade the unwanted additional safety for time and convenience.
>
>Any evidence for drivers with seatbelts or crumple zones driving more
>aggressively? I know there *is* some evidence for drivers with
>anti-lock brakes; I strive to not be part of that group.
In the UK they have started removing lane-markings and other "safety"
aids. Confused drivers are careful drivers and it is helping to reduce
the accident rates.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
Worosei
<snip>
> That's letting them off a bit easy. The LADoTEV were an American
> phenomenon based on wie-open spaces and cheap gas. Europe and Japan had
> long experience building cars both Pinto-sized and smaller. [1] When
> you say "What people knew in the early seventies" you apparently mean
> Americans incapable of doing reasearch, hiring consultants, or in any
> other way learning from people who knew more than they did.
>
> 1. The Pinto was introduced in 1970; the British Mini, to pick just one
> example, goes back to 1959. That's from one minute of googling; I'm
> sure a car aficianado could greatly expand on this point.
Funny you should pick the Mini as an example, it had a fuel filler pipe
which was partially external to the body. In the event of a rollover the
cap would be scraped off, resulting in an unpleasant amount of fuel being
sprayed around.
--
Worosei
frisbie...@yahoo.com
Danny Low wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 01:19:57 GMT, "Mike Schilling"
> Two men can keep a secret when one kills the other. In a big
> corporation, too many people know the secrets for them to remain
> secret for long. Just ask all those Enron executives serving prison
> time and being sued for damages.
>
Would that it were so. This stuff is done because it works. My
opinion is that most of the time--like 99.9%-- they get away with it.
But it would be hard to prove that, for obvious reasons.
how...@brazee.net
On 27-Jan-2005, "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
> The only person who can set a value on a human life is the person
> whose life it is. Would you be willing to spend an extra $10 on a car
> to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash by one in a million?
> Different people will answer that differently.
One argument against this is that it is expensive to create cars with
incremental safety features.
Another argument is that society often pays the costs of non-safety. If I
paid all the incremental costs of my motorcycle accident without wearing a
helmet, then it should be my right to not wear a helmet. If my failure to
wear a helmet increased costs for everybody else, then everybody else should
have a say.
So we compromise.
how...@brazee.net
On 29-Jan-2005, David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> Any evidence for drivers with seatbelts or crumple zones driving more
> aggressively? I know there *is* some evidence for drivers with
> anti-lock brakes; I strive to not be part of that group.
I doubt it. Before they invented the word "flammable", did people act
recklessly around gasoline trucks marked "inflammable"?
Keith F. Lynch
> "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net> wrote:
>> The only person who can set a value on a human life is the person
>> whose life it is. Would you be willing to spend an extra $10 on a car
>> to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash by one in a million?
>> Different people will answer that differently.
> One argument against this is that it is expensive to create cars
> with incremental safety features.
There are a wide variety of cars available with a wide variety of
safety features for a wide variety of prices. I'll grant that not
all possible combinations are available.
> Another argument is that society often pays the costs of non-safety.
> If I paid all the incremental costs of my motorcycle accident
> without wearing a helmet, then it should be my right to not wear
> a helmet. If my failure to wear a helmet increased costs for
> everybody else, then everybody else should have a say.
I agree. I don't believe taxpayers should be forced to pay for
the treatment of head injuries due to motorcyclists choosing not
to wear helmets.
A better argument is that the risks from cars (and motorcycles) aren't
just to their drivers, but to everyone else on or near the road.
Christopher J. Henrich
wrote:
I do hope that this is a "spaghetti harvest" posting. It is when I am
most confused that I carefully make my worst mistakes.
--
Chris Henrich
The total lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.
Simon Slavin
<ctam5j$pim$1...@reader1.panix.com>:
> I seem to recall that at one point, even though all of the EU countries
> had stockpiles of Hoof and Mouth vaccine, none were willing to start
> vaccinating cattle because that would mean admiting the problem existed,
> which would have been disasterous.
>
> birth control...
That's nothing to do with it. The reason no country would
admit that they had Foot & Mouth disease is that international
treaties require any country with Foot & Mouth to stop selling
their entire stock to other countries. So if a country
admitted one case of Foot & Mouth in one secluded farm, every
single farm in the country suddenly loses at least a third of
its income. In the UK this would mean that every one of those
farms would have made enough loss to wipe out its profits for
the previous five years.
Imagine you were the Minister responsible to the farming
community for that country. Would you have risked making that
decision too early ?
Simon.
--
Using pre-release version of newsreader.
Please tell me if it does weird things.
Chris Kuan
2005 10:23:20a
One example: <www.hants.gov.uk/press/2004/pr1669.html>
Wired magazine had a similar example for the USA:
<www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic_pr.html>
--
Chris
Concatenate for email: mrgazpacho @ hotmail . com
Del Cotter
Christopher J. Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> said:
>Bernard Peek <b...@shrdlu.com> wrote:
>> In the UK they have started removing lane-markings and other "safety"
>> aids. Confused drivers are careful drivers and it is helping to reduce
>> the accident rates.
>
>I do hope that this is a "spaghetti harvest" posting. It is when I am
>most confused that I carefully make my worst mistakes.
Unless Bernard can supply a cite, I think he must be missing critical
parts of the story. I believe I read last year that a Dutch researcher
claimed to have found that certain aids to driving safely tended to be
misused by drivers as "aids to speeding safely", and were thus
completely counterproductive. Not only did the drivers in question eat
up all the safety advantage the aids were supposed to provide, but in
the event of an accident the cars were moving faster than they legally
should be, so the accident was more likely to be fatal to the
pedestrian.
I know what you mean about confusion and mistakes. A few years ago I
scraped a parked car because I was hunting for a house number; crawling
at a low speed didn't save me at all. And a few years before that I
went the wrong way down a (thankfully extremely short) one way road
because I was completely lost and searching for direction signs: hazard
signs dropped out of my consciousness.
It could be argued that I was a new driver then and my rate of accidents
has dropped catastrophically as my experience has grown, but I still
suspect the phrase "confused drivers are careful drivers" is a
dreadfully over-simplified summary of a much more nuanced principle.
I would expect smart safety designers to leave in place all those
markings that were truly safe, take away all those markings that were
being used as guides for zooming through tricky situations, and put in
place new markings designed to fool the brain of a driver that the
situation was much more hazardous than it is. (hazardous to the
driver's paintwork would be best, if I know psychology)
Near where I live, there are trompe-l'oeil triangular markings on one
road designed to make the it look falsely narrower than it is. Drivers
slow down to avoid scraping parked cars on either side. In reality the
road is plenty wide enough, but there is a school there and the
designers want drivers to slow down.
I believe they're sadly right when they guess drivers care more about
the finish on their car than they do about the life of a stranger's
child, but it would still be a bad thing to do to remove the "caution:
school ahead" signs. And they don't, they just remove the "hey, if you
stick to between these lines you won't scrape parked cars!" cues, so the
driver takes more care.
--
Del Cotter
Thanks to the recent increase in UBE, I will soon be ignoring email
sent to d...@branta.demon.co.uk. Please send your email to del2 instead.
Bernard Peek
Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> writes
>> In the UK they have started removing lane-markings and other "safety"
>> aids. Confused drivers are careful drivers and it is helping to reduce
>> the accident rates.
>
>I do hope that this is a "spaghetti harvest" posting. It is when I am
>most confused that I carefully make my worst mistakes.
Nope. But I believe it is only being done in minor urban roads. The lack
of visual clues makes drivers more cautious and so they drive slower. It
may not reduce the number of incidents but I believe it reduces the
number and severity of injuries.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
Robert Shaw
>
> Unless Bernard can supply a cite, I think he must be missing critical
> parts of the story. I believe I read last year that a Dutch
> researcher claimed to have found that certain aids to driving safely
> tended to be misused by drivers as "aids to speeding safely", and
> were thus completely counterproductive.
>
> markings that were truly safe, take away all those markings that were
> being used as guides for zooming through tricky situations, and put in
> place new markings designed to fool the brain of a driver that the
> situation was much more hazardous than it is. (hazardous to the
> driver's paintwork would be best, if I know psychology)
>
The Dutch experiment includes removing the curb; no separate
road or pavement, just a single sheet of concrete.
It forces drivers to try reading each other's body language,
and the pedestrian's, to avoid accidents, which works
as long as speeds are low enough.
Instead of zooming through the traffic lights, or simply
waiting for green, they have to study all the other
cars edging forwards and the pedestrians staring
them down, and decide whether to risk the junction.
--
'It is a wise crow that knows which way the camel points' - Pratchett
Robert Shaw
r.r...@thevine.net
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Near where I live, there are trompe-l'oeil triangular markings on one
>road designed to make the it look falsely narrower than it is. Drivers
>slow down to avoid scraping parked cars on either side. In reality the
>road is plenty wide enough, but there is a school there and the
>designers want drivers to slow down.
Doesn't this at least raise the possibility that people will scoot
towards the middle to avoid the parked cars, thus increasing the risk
of scraping a car in the other traffic lane?
Rebecca
Del Cotter
I'm trying to remember how the chevrons work, but I think they scare you
into staying away from the moving vehicles too. In other words, they
make *the lane you're in* look narrow. Plus, drivers are pretty adept
at not driving into each other, and if you fool them into thinking
they're in danger of it, they slow down, so the purpose is again served.
Apropos of nothing: years ago, when I was learning to drive, I did the
classic learner thing of shying away from oncoming traffic and so
straying dangerously near parked cars. My instructor cured me of the
habit by asking me who I'd rather deal with in the event of an accident,
a driver who was present, or one I'd have to wait for possibly hours to
turn up.
I'm not as sure of the logic as I was then, but it cured me anyway: I
steeled myself and aimed for the oncoming traffic. His greater point
was one that has stayed with me: that we as drivers are frightened of
silly things while not being frightened enough of other, more serious
things, and the cure can sometimes be a psychological trick.
Peter D. Tillman
frisbie...@yahoo.com wrote:
> Peter D. Tillman wrote:
> >
> > Most impressive NF recently:
> >
> > Lee Harris's _Civilization and Its Enemies_, a fine, penetrating
> > look at how civilization developed, and why enemies will always,
> > always try to bring it down. An exceptionally lucid treatment of
> > fantasy ideologies -- Naziism, Communism, Islamic terrorism -- and
> > why ruthless, violent, totalitarian governments are all similarly
> > monstrous.
> >
> >
> Interesting and well-written, but for me it all boils down to "we're
> winners/right/sane, they're losers/wrong/nuts." He talks about
> Hitler's "fantasy." Well, it didn't seem like a fantasy to the world
> of 1939. It was pretty damn real.
>
No one's saying the *results* weren't real...
> [snip]
> I have a question: who said this, Harris or Goebbels? No peeking!
> "So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one
> that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease."
>
One judges people by *actions* rather than words. Goebbels was a monster.
> It's so simple: we're right, they're wrong. We're well, they're sick.
> We're sane, they're nuts. Get rid of the disease, cut out the cancer.
> Kill the bad and only good will remain. Why can't the world
> understand? It's so simple.
>
You've grasped the essence of Harris's argument: He is making a moral
judgement that ramming airliners into crowded office buildings; or
mass-murdering Jews, kulaks, Cambodians, Kurds or whoever, are not
morally-defensible actions. Yes, there is a real difference between "us"
and "them".
Nor is he saying that "it is so simple". He is saying that civilization
has always had enemies, and always will. Many of civilization's enemies
have similar characteristics: treating their enemies/victims as
non-persons to 'justify' monstrous behavior. Monstrous behavior is the
antithesis of liberal civilization.
Of course there are shades of gray, but the "moral equivalence" argument
between civilization and its enemies just doesn't wash. Plus, it's
hazardous to civil society's health <g>.
Are you seriously arguing for the moral equivalence of liberal Western
civilization vs. Islamist terrorism, Pol Pot barbarism, Stalinist
mass-murders, Maoist mass-starvation through obstinate stupidity, and on
and on through the long, dreary list? C'mon.
Pete Tillman
--
"Politicians don't understand technicians very well.
They understand technicians, basically, when technicians are giving
them guns." -- B. Sterling, http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/
Keith F. Lynch
> The Dutch experiment includes removing the curb; no separate road or
> pavement, just a single sheet of concrete.
I guess there must not be many blind people there. At least not after
the first week or two.
(For the UK-impaired: "pavement" means "sidewalk".)
Keith F. Lynch
> A few years ago I scraped a parked car because I was hunting for a
> house number; crawling at a low speed didn't save me at all.
That's one reason why rush hour is the *safest* time to be bicycling:
Most of the drivers are going to a familiar destination over a
familiar route.
> ... my rate of accidents has dropped catastrophically ...
An odd turn of phrase, albeit technically correct. Unlike, say,
"I almost missed...".
> I would expect smart safety designers to ... put in place new
> markings designed to fool the brain of a driver that the situation
> was much more hazardous than it is.
Bad idea, since it devalues warnings. When scary warnings are put on
containers of beach sand, what's left to put on containers of cyanide?
Around here, motorists blow through stop signs because they know most
of them aren't necessary.
> Near where I live, there are trompe-l'oeil triangular markings on
> one road designed to make the it look falsely narrower than it is.
> Drivers slow down to avoid scraping parked cars on either side. In
> reality the road is plenty wide enough, but there is a school there
> and the designers want drivers to slow down.
I doubt that would still work on anyone who had driven that route more
than two or three times.
> I believe they're sadly right when they guess drivers care more
> about the finish on their car than they do about the life of a
> stranger's child, ...
There does seem to be something that turns many otherwise normal
people into sociopaths when they get behind the wheel.
Keith Morrison
>>>Near where I live, there are trompe-l'oeil triangular markings on one
>>>road designed to make the it look falsely narrower than it is. Drivers
>>>slow down to avoid scraping parked cars on either side. In reality the
>>>road is plenty wide enough, but there is a school there and the
>>>designers want drivers to slow down.
>>
>>Doesn't this at least raise the possibility that people will scoot
>>towards the middle to avoid the parked cars, thus increasing the risk
>>of scraping a car in the other traffic lane?
>
>I'm trying to remember how the chevrons work, but I think they scare you
>into staying away from the moving vehicles too. In other words, they
>make *the lane you're in* look narrow. Plus, drivers are pretty adept
>at not driving into each other, and if you fool them into thinking
>they're in danger of it, they slow down, so the purpose is again served.
There's an opposite experiment going on where I grew up. Standard
issue two-lane road, but with really narrow shoulders and deep
ditches. Right now they're widening the road. The actual driving
lane between the centre stripes and the side stripe is exactly the
same, but the paved and unpaved portions of the shoulder will be wide
enough to park a car (mostly) out of traffic, and getting rid of the
canyon-sized ditches for much shallower ones.
The illusion is that the driving area is much greater. I expect
speeds (and the resulting accidents) to be greater.
--
Keith
Lee DeRaud
wrote:
>That's one reason why rush hour is the *safest* time to be bicycling:
>Most of the drivers are going to a familiar destination over a
>familiar route.
Offset quite a bit by the fact that, on the inbound drive, a lot of
them are going somewhere they really don't want to be, and on the
outbound drive, they're tired and pissed off by the day's events.
>There does seem to be something that turns many otherwise normal
>people into sociopaths when they get behind the wheel.
See above.
Lee
Alan Braggins
>On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, in rec.arts.sf.fandom,
>Christopher J. Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> said:
>
>>Bernard Peek <b...@shrdlu.com> wrote:
>>> In the UK they have started removing lane-markings and other "safety"
>>> aids. Confused drivers are careful drivers and it is helping to reduce
>>> the accident rates.
>>
>>I do hope that this is a "spaghetti harvest" posting. It is when I am
>>most confused that I carefully make my worst mistakes.
>
>Unless Bernard can supply a cite, I think he must be missing critical
>parts of the story.
Google cam.transport for Grange Road. Local councilors have explained
that poor signing of counter-intuitive priorities was deliberately
intended to confuse drivers, to slow them down.
Del Cotter
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> said:
>> I would expect smart safety designers to ... put in place new
>> markings designed to fool the brain of a driver that the situation
>> was much more hazardous than it is.
>
>Bad idea, since it devalues warnings. When scary warnings are put on
>containers of beach sand, what's left to put on containers of cyanide?
>Around here, motorists blow through stop signs because they know most
>of them aren't necessary.
You misunderstand: not fake signage, but optical illusions designed to
hit the backbrain where our understanding of space and time is. In
other words, you want to make the monkey brain think that *here* (a
situation where we know there is a hazard not accessible to our normal
way of thinking) looks as bad as *there* (a place with real obstacles).
That's not going to devalue the real obstacles, unless humans quickly
evolve a new brain to cope, and I don't think drivers evolve faster than
the rest of us.
Del Cotter
>Del Cotter wrote:
>>>> In the UK they have started removing lane-markings and other "safety"
>>>> aids. Confused drivers are careful drivers and it is helping to reduce
>>>> the accident rates.
>>Unless Bernard can supply a cite, I think he must be missing critical
>>parts of the story.
>
>Google cam.transport for Grange Road. Local councilors have explained
>that poor signing of counter-intuitive priorities was deliberately
>intended to confuse drivers, to slow them down.
I hate the sound of that. Like I said, I'm at my worst in analogous
situations. I hope they have very competent psychologists who've worked
out what they want to achieve and how to achieve it.
Keith F. Lynch
> You misunderstand: not fake signage, but optical illusions designed
> to hit the backbrain where our understanding of space and time is.
> In other words, you want to make the monkey brain think that *here*
> (a situation where we know there is a hazard not accessible to our
> normal way of thinking) looks as bad as *there* (a place with real
> obstacles).
> That's not going to devalue the real obstacles, unless humans
> quickly evolve a new brain to cope, and I don't think drivers evolve
> faster than the rest of us.
I think you underestimate the flexibility of human brains.
Haven't you ever gotten a new pair of glasses that made everything
look closer, or made off-center things look twisted? Only to find
everything looked normal again within a few days?
Robert Shaw
> Robert Shaw <Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>> The Dutch experiment includes removing the curb; no separate road or
>> pavement, just a single sheet of concrete.
>
> I guess there must not be many blind people there. At least not after
> the first week or two.
>
If the drivers are going slow enough to notice pedestrian
body language, they're going slow enough to notice white
sticks and guide dogs.
Any driver not going that slow will crash within a week,
when can't tell when they'll be able to safely drive through
a junction.
Christopher J. Henrich
<Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
Good heavens.
It may be that the Dutch are genuinely more civilised than we
Americans[1], or that, being a more homogeneous country, they all
understand one another's body language. I think that American traffic
engineers would be afraid to try such an experiment.
[1] Remember that we are a nation descended from immigrants, many of
whom were "transported" in lieu of a prison sentence, or skipped out of
the mother country with arrest warrants nipping at their heels.
--
Chris Henrich
God just doesn't fit inside a single religion.
Wayne Throop
:: not fake signage, but optical illusions designed to hit the backbrain
:: where our understanding of space and time is. In other words, you
:: want to make the monkey brain think that *here* (a situation where we
:: know there is a hazard not accessible to our normal way of thinking)
:: looks as bad as *there* (a place with real obstacles).
:: That's not going to devalue the real obstacles, unless humans quickly
:: evolve a new brain to cope, and I don't think drivers evolve faster
:: than the rest of us.
: "Keith F. Lynch" <k...@KeithLynch.net>
: I think you underestimate the flexibility of human brains.
: Haven't you ever gotten a new pair of glasses that made everything
: look closer, or made off-center things look twisted? Only to find
: everything looked normal again within a few days?
Or other more drastic alternations in perception.
But, SFnally, I always wondered whether the situation in "Needle" that
led to the Good Guy (well... Good Thing) to find the figurative needle,
was actually plausible. Whether the aquisition of an extra juiced-up
immune system would make you that sloppy that fast, especially if you
had built up good habits for years (as the host had done). Because in
that case, he wasn't getting constant feedback as you do for new glasses,
or the "inverted glasses" experiments that get trotted out for regular
airings when such topics come up.
Hm. I concluded it was a bit implausible.
Not horrid, but a bit much.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Del Cotter
Christopher J. Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> said:
>Robert Shaw <Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>> Instead of zooming through the traffic lights, or simply
>> waiting for green, they have to study all the other
>> cars edging forwards and the pedestrians staring
>> them down, and decide whether to risk the junction.
>It may be that the Dutch are genuinely more civilised than we
>Americans[1], or that, being a more homogeneous country, they all
>understand one another's body language. I think that American traffic
>engineers would be afraid to try such an experiment.
Actually, I think the incident I heard of once, where the (unplanned)
failure of traffic lights turned drivers co-operative, actually was in
America. So you shouldn't necessarily put your people down.
Del Cotter
Keith F. Lynch <k...@KeithLynch.net> said:
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> You misunderstand: not fake signage, but optical illusions designed
>> to hit the backbrain where our understanding of space and time is.
>> In other words, you want to make the monkey brain think that *here*
>> (a situation where we know there is a hazard not accessible to our
>> normal way of thinking) looks as bad as *there* (a place with real
>> obstacles).
>Haven't you ever gotten a new pair of glasses that made everything
>look closer, or made off-center things look twisted? Only to find
>everything looked normal again within a few days?
So what's your point? A road that goes past a schoolyard gate needs the
strongest "don't speed" cues going, and a place that just naturally
happens to have those cues doesn't necessarily need them. What's going
to... I mean, what's your *point*? I hardly even understand what it is
you're complaining about.
Let me try again. Suppose your theory is not just made up today, but
turns out real. What bad things do you expect to happen as a result,
that mean no one should put "slow down" cues near schools? And what's
your alternative? "Speed up" cues? No cues at all, and let Darwin take
the hindmost? I mean, *what*?
And shall we take those laws away that make killing cyclists an offence?
I'd be interested in your answer to that one. Since nothing ever
changes anything, and doing anything's bad, and, and... whatever the
hell is it is you're on about today...
Doug Wickstrom
<31kaAXIB2W$BF...@branta.demon.co.uk>
Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> caused electrons to dance
and photons to travel coherently in saying:
>Actually, I think the incident I heard of once, where the (unplanned)
>failure of traffic lights turned drivers co-operative, actually was in
>America. So you shouldn't necessarily put your people down.
Such a happenstance should, if everyone remembers what they
learned in driving school, result in every intersection with
failed traffic lights being treated as if it were a multi-way
stop, and everyone takes turns per the law as it was taught them.
It's a common enough occurrence at individual intersections that
I see it a couple of times a year. Having multiple failures
isn't that uncommon, either, especially during and after
electrical storms, when either the power is disrupted, or the
computer control is.
We see either no lights, or lights flashing red in all
directions, or lights flashing red in one direction and yellow in
another. Each instance has specific procedures to be followed.
Anyway, I find that drivers everywhere are pretty cooperative
with other drivers, especially in unusual circumstances, with
misunderstandings resulting only from not understanding the local
mode of cooperation, frex, in some places, you signal a lane
change and wait for an opportunity, which will soon be provided,
and in others, you signal and move, and other drivers expect you
to do this, and provide the opportunity only after you start your
move. The only exception I can think of is Korea, where bus and
truck drivers for the same company will often try to cut each
other off.
--
Doug Wickstrom <nims...@comcast.net>
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue.
Fleas are interested in dogs." --P.J. O'Rourke
Dave Weingart
>I doubt that would still work on anyone who had driven that route more
>than two or three times.
You'd be surprised, undoubtedly.
But I'm only basing that opinion on 25 years of driving in the NY
metro area.
--
73 de Dave Weingart KA2ESK Loyalty oaths. Secret searches. No-fly
mailto:phyd...@liii.com lists. Detention without legal recourse.
http://www.weingart.net/ Who won the cold war, again?
ICQ 57055207 -- www.cafepress.com/Politicklers
Keith F. Lynch
>> look closer, or made off-center things look twisted? Only to find
>> everything looked normal again within a few days?
> So what's your point?
My point is that brains are flexible, and when someone sees the same
optical illusion lots of times, they'll soon stop being fooled by it.
> A road that goes past a schoolyard gate needs the strongest "don't
> speed" cues going, and a place that just naturally happens to have
> those cues doesn't necessarily need them. What's going to... I
> mean, what's your *point*? I hardly even understand what it is
> you're complaining about.
I'm complaining about the use of trickery in lieu of straightforward
speed limit and school zone signs.
Keith F. Lynch
> But, SFnally, I always wondered whether the situation in "Needle"
> that led to the Good Guy (well... Good Thing) to find the figurative
> needle, was actually plausible.
I think so. Except that I don't think that never getting sick, and
never being bitten by mosquitos, is all that rare.
Or maybe I have one of those creatures in me.
> Whether the aquisition of an extra juiced-up immune system would
> make you that sloppy that fast, especially if you had built up good
> habits for years (as the host had done).
It's possible.
Wayne Throop
: My point is that brains are flexible, and when someone sees the same
: optical illusion lots of times, they'll soon stop being fooled by it.
I'm not sure I fully agree. The optical illusions about length of lines
with chevrons, and height and width of rectangles, and that a concave
side of a mask quite often looks convex, are nigh-hardwired. You can
learn to consciously adjust, but that's not the same as the percept
itself being adjusted, like various visual distortions are adjusted.
If you *distort* the visual field so it no longer matches other
senses, or mismatches the mental spatial map you are using to
predict how objects will interact, and like that, it'll get adjusted.
Eg, if something stays absolutely still in the visual field, it'll get
subtracted out; that's why things like changes in blood vessels
and leakage in the vitreous humor and such tend to be invisible.
But if you misperceive line lengths because of context, you'll
tend to do it every time, it doesn't really get adjusted.
So I think *some* sorts of perceptual nudges can be persistent.
On the other hand in reverse the other way, I suspect measures such as
the central and/or raised brakelights that got mandated a while back are
largely futile. I have no idea if this change was based on anything, but
I have long suspected it was based on some study of accident rates in some
pilot program. And the reason it worked was that it was completely novel,
and the cars that had it stood out from the general sea of sameness.
When one of *them* put on their brakes, they had a statistically much
better chance of it being noticed, and their movements in general
paid attention to, and hence a better chance not to get in accidents.
But once EVERYbody had them I doubt they made a whit of difference.
It's not as if the older style brakelights were hard to see in the least;
it's just that brains do, indeed, start subtracting out things that are
always the same. Just like, if you issue a warning popup in a computer
program for some rare condition, it can be effective; if you issue a
warning for something that happens every time, people will click right
past it, even if it says something different that they should have paid
attention to one time in a hundred.
So. Bottom line, playing that sort of perceptual game can sometimes work,
but I suspect lots of the time, studies that purport to show such effects
working don't really show what they say they show. Which category the
herding marks on the pavement fall into is unclear; I think it could be
persistent, and it could be transient; which it is isn't cleanly deducable
and would require lots of actual measurements and experience, I expect.
Randolph Fritz
On 2005-01-30, Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
>
>> It's so simple: we're right, they're wrong. We're well, they're sick.
>> We're sane, they're nuts. Get rid of the disease, cut out the cancer.
>> Kill the bad and only good will remain. Why can't the world
>> understand? It's so simple.
>>
>
> You've grasped the essence of Harris's argument: He is making a moral
> judgement that ramming airliners into crowded office buildings; or
> mass-murdering Jews, kulaks, Cambodians, Kurds or whoever, are not
> morally-defensible actions. Yes, there is a real difference between "us"
> and "them".
>
And putting the Ba'ath party in power was what? Where does Abu Ghraib
fit?
Just curious...
Randolph
It's really a very simple strategy. Pick up gun. Shoot at foot.
Repeat.
Chris Malme
> On the other hand in reverse the other way, I suspect measures such as
> the central and/or raised brakelights that got mandated a while back
> are largely futile. I have no idea if this change was based on
> anything, but I have long suspected it was based on some study of
> accident rates in some pilot program. And the reason it worked was
> that it was completely novel, and the cars that had it stood out from
> the general sea of sameness. When one of *them* put on their brakes,
> they had a statistically much better chance of it being noticed, and
> their movements in general paid attention to, and hence a better
> chance not to get in accidents.
>
> But once EVERYbody had them I doubt they made a whit of difference.
> It's not as if the older style brakelights were hard to see in the
> least;
I thought the whole point of these central/raised brakelights is that,
unlike conventional brakelights, you can not only see the car in front of
you, but the car in front of that, and often the one in front of that - the
positioning of the brakelight is such that it is visible through the front
and rear windows of cars inbetween.
This means you can easier tell what the traffic ahead is doing, not just
the car in front of you.
--
Chris
Minstrel's Hall of Filk - http://www.filklore.com/
Filklore Music Store - http://www.filklore.co.uk/
To contact me, please use form at http://www.filklore.com/contact.phtml
David G. Bell
thr...@sheol.org "Wayne Throop" wrote:
> On the other hand in reverse the other way, I suspect measures such as
> the central and/or raised brakelights that got mandated a while back are
> largely futile. I have no idea if this change was based on anything, but
> I have long suspected it was based on some study of accident rates in some
> pilot program. And the reason it worked was that it was completely novel,
> and the cars that had it stood out from the general sea of sameness.
> When one of *them* put on their brakes, they had a statistically much
> better chance of it being noticed, and their movements in general
> paid attention to, and hence a better chance not to get in accidents.
They show up better in heavy traffic. Not every time, but the light as
a chance of being visible through the window glass of another car.
Also, three distinct lights is a different sort of difference to two
lights getting brighter.
I think those effects will persist. Certainly, more cues about distant
vehicles in heavy traffic can help, but I mostly drive a Land Rover at
the moment.
"I drive an 18-wheeler, and I look down at him. I look down even more
at her."
"I drive a Land Rover, and look up at him, but I still look down at
her."
"I drive and MG and have big tits."
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
"I am Number Two," said Penfold. "You are Number Six."
Alan Braggins
>
>I thought the whole point of these central/raised brakelights is that,
>unlike conventional brakelights, you can not only see the car in front of
>you, but the car in front of that, and often the one in front of that - the
>positioning of the brakelight is such that it is visible through the front
>and rear windows of cars inbetween.
Certainly there are times when that is possible. It's possible that some
drivers sometimes then rely on that to drive closer to the car ahead,
negating the advantages. (I certainly found it useful recently when I was
being towed (and so had no choice about being close to the towing car).)
Alan Braggins
>
>Actually, I think the incident I heard of once, where the (unplanned)
>failure of traffic lights turned drivers co-operative, actually was in
>America. So you shouldn't necessarily put your people down.
It's a common observation here in the UK when lights fail too.
how...@brazee.net
into the incoming lane in order to see whether it's safe to pass the truck
or van.
The van driver knows what the traffic is like ahead and anticipates when to
pass.
rksh...@rosettacondot.com
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, in rec.arts.sf.fandom,
> Christopher J. Henrich <chen...@monmouth.com> said:
>
>>Robert Shaw <Rob...@shavian.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Instead of zooming through the traffic lights, or simply
>>> waiting for green, they have to study all the other
>>> cars edging forwards and the pedestrians staring
>>> them down, and decide whether to risk the junction.
>
>>It may be that the Dutch are genuinely more civilised than we
>>Americans[1], or that, being a more homogeneous country, they all
>>understand one another's body language. I think that American traffic
>>engineers would be afraid to try such an experiment.
>
> Actually, I think the incident I heard of once, where the (unplanned)
> failure of traffic lights turned drivers co-operative, actually was in
> America. So you shouldn't necessarily put your people down.
Light failures are pretty common around here, especially during/after
thunderstorms, and four-way stop signs are common as well. They don't
seem to generate an unusual number of accidents, but they do have a
much, much lower rate of flow. Replacing four-way stops with lights is
the standard first response to increasing traffic.
Robert
--
Robert K. Shull Email: rkshull at rosettacon dot com
Wayne Throop
: I thought the whole point of these central/raised brakelights is that,
: unlike conventional brakelights, you can not only see the car in front
: of you, but the car in front of that, and often the one in front of
: that - the positioning of the brakelight is such that it is visible
: through the front and rear windows of cars inbetween.
Possibly. I've never seen any particular attempt to justify it,
except the vague "it's safer" for some rather unspecified reason.
Given that the normal placement doesn't seem to guarantee that
one can see them through intervening cars (since there's no matching
requirement about visibility through vehicles I know of), and the
other main issue is that it separates brakelights in the visual
field from rear running lights, the more immediate recognition
problem is what I'd been assuming was intended.
BTW, that points out something I discounted upthread, ie, that with
the new arrangement, you can tell if the brakes are applied even if
you didn't see the ch ange in brightness of a colocated running/brake
light source. But this seems a rather minor effect; though most any
of these conjecures, including visibility-through-traffic, seem to
be quite minor effects.
r.r...@thevine.net
<til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
>In article <1107010135....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>,
> frisbie...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> Peter D. Tillman wrote:
>> >
>> > Most impressive NF recently:
>> >
>> > Lee Harris's _Civilization and Its Enemies_, a fine, penetrating
>> > look at how civilization developed, and why enemies will always,
>> > always try to bring it down. An exceptionally lucid treatment of
>> > fantasy ideologies -- Naziism, Communism, Islamic terrorism -- and
>> > why ruthless, violent, totalitarian governments are all similarly
>> > monstrous.
>> >
>> >
>> Interesting and well-written, but for me it all boils down to "we're
>> winners/right/sane, they're losers/wrong/nuts." He talks about
>> Hitler's "fantasy." Well, it didn't seem like a fantasy to the world
>> of 1939. It was pretty damn real.
>>
>
>No one's saying the *results* weren't real...
>
>> [snip]
>> I have a question: who said this, Harris or Goebbels? No peeking!
>> "So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one
>> that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease."
>>
>
>One judges people by *actions* rather than words. Goebbels was a monster.
>
>> It's so simple: we're right, they're wrong. We're well, they're sick.
>> We're sane, they're nuts. Get rid of the disease, cut out the cancer.
>> Kill the bad and only good will remain. Why can't the world
>> understand? It's so simple.
>>
>
>You've grasped the essence of Harris's argument: He is making a moral
>judgement that ramming airliners into crowded office buildings; or
>mass-murdering Jews, kulaks, Cambodians, Kurds or whoever, are not
>morally-defensible actions. Yes, there is a real difference between "us"
>and "them".
>
>Nor is he saying that "it is so simple". He is saying that civilization
>has always had enemies, and always will. Many of civilization's enemies
>have similar characteristics: treating their enemies/victims as
>non-persons to 'justify' monstrous behavior. Monstrous behavior is the
>antithesis of liberal civilization.
>
>Of course there are shades of gray, but the "moral equivalence" argument
>between civilization and its enemies just doesn't wash. Plus, it's
>hazardous to civil society's health <g>.
>
>Are you seriously arguing for the moral equivalence of liberal Western
>civilization vs. Islamist terrorism, Pol Pot barbarism, Stalinist
>mass-murders, Maoist mass-starvation through obstinate stupidity, and on
>and on through the long, dreary list? C'mon.
>
I may be putting words in someone's mouth, but he may be arguing that
there is a moral equivalence between them if you look at certain
times. No one is going to argue that the US's history of slavery/Jim
Crow/lynching is morally good, and yet we can't ignore the fact that
that was a result of the history that led this country to become what
it is today. The Catholic church, as another example, also has a dark
and bloody past, but that is largely not held against it today. And
what about all the really bad evil governments that our beloved
government have helped put in and keep in power? What about the fact
that Osama had been one of our golden boys, trained and armed by us,
until he decided to use that against us?
So today there are very bad people in the world that do things that we
find wrong and objectionable. Will they always be that way? Can good
come from them? Would we have objected as strongly to the actions
that our ancestors took if we could go back in time and see them first
hand?
I guess what I am trying to say is that it is easy to look at a
snapshot of a particular time and say that these are the good people
and those are the evil ones, but who those people are depend entirely
on when the snapshot is taken.
Rebecca
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
>On the other hand in reverse the other way, I suspect measures such as
>the central and/or raised brakelights that got mandated a while back are
>largely futile. I have no idea if this change was based on anything, but
>I have long suspected it was based on some study of accident rates in some
>pilot program. And the reason it worked was that it was completely novel,
>and the cars that had it stood out from the general sea of sameness.
>When one of *them* put on their brakes, they had a statistically much
>better chance of it being noticed, and their movements in general
>paid attention to, and hence a better chance not to get in accidents.
>
>But once EVERYbody had them I doubt they made a whit of difference.
>It's not as if the older style brakelights were hard to see in the least;
>it's just that brains do, indeed, start subtracting out things that are
>always the same
As I understand it, they were actually made to distinguish between the
brake light and the running light, so that "car stopped on edge of
highway" doesn't look the same as "car traveling on highway at night".
It helps cut down on the rear-ending of cars in trouble on the side of
the road.
Rebecca
Peter D. Tillman
Randolph Fritz <rand...@panix.com> wrote:
> ["Followup-To:" header set to rec.arts.sf.fandom.]
> On 2005-01-30, Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> It's so simple: we're right, they're wrong. We're well, they're sick.
> >> We're sane, they're nuts. Get rid of the disease, cut out the cancer.
> >> Kill the bad and only good will remain. Why can't the world
> >> understand? It's so simple.
> >>
> >
> > You've grasped the essence of Harris's argument: He is making a moral
> > judgement that ramming airliners into crowded office buildings; or
> > mass-murdering Jews, kulaks, Cambodians, Kurds or whoever, are not
> > morally-defensible actions. Yes, there is a real difference between "us"
> > and "them".
> >
>
> And putting the Ba'ath party in power was what?
"It seemed like a good idea at the time"
> Where does Abu Ghraib fit?
>
Bad things happen in wartime, and there have been much, much worse than
this...
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Joe Ellis
r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>As I understand it, they were actually made to distinguish between the
>brake light and the running light, so that "car stopped on edge of
>highway" doesn't look the same as "car traveling on highway at night".
>It helps cut down on the rear-ending of cars in trouble on the side of
>the road.
I might buy that if the third light stayed on when the vehicle was
stopped and in "park", but it doesn't... It only works when your foot is
on the brake.
--
Joe Ellis
Peter D. Tillman
wrote:
> : Chris Malme <see_si...@filklore.co.uk>
> : I thought the whole point of these central/raised brakelights is that,
> : unlike conventional brakelights, you can not only see the car in front
> : of you, but the car in front of that, and often the one in front of
> : that - the positioning of the brakelight is such that it is visible
> : through the front and rear windows of cars inbetween.
>
> Possibly. I've never seen any particular attempt to justify it,
Pretty sure there were some controlled studies done (accident rates
with/without the third taillight). I like 'em, myself.
For sure there were studies showing daytime running lights lowered the
accident rate. My ins. co. even knocks off a few $$ for cars that have
them.
> except the vague "it's safer" for some rather unspecified reason.
> Given that the normal placement doesn't seem to guarantee that
> one can see them through intervening cars (since there's no matching
> requirement about visibility through vehicles I know of), and the
> other main issue is that it separates brakelights in the visual
> field from rear running lights, the more immediate recognition
> problem is what I'd been assuming was intended.
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Peter D. Tillman
db...@zhochaka.demon.co.uk ("David G. Bell") wrote:
> "I drive an 18-wheeler, and I look down at him. I look down even more
> at her."
>
> "I drive a Land Rover, and look up at him, but I still look down at
> her."
>
> "I drive and MG and have big tits."
"I like driving around with my two cats, especially on the freeway.
I make them wear little hats so that I can use the carpool lane.
Way too much time on your hands, too? Call me. SWF, 42, 5'10",
brown/blue." [from LA Freep]
Jasper Janssen
>But once EVERYbody had them I doubt they made a whit of difference.
>It's not as if the older style brakelights were hard to see in the least;
>it's just that brains do, indeed, start subtracting out things that are
>always the same.
The difference between brakelights and simple rear lights was minimal,
unless you actually saw the change between them (since they're almost
always the same lights with an extra bulb). The difference between three
lights and two lights is something that the hindbrain will notice. Also,
the third brakelight is mandated to be higher up -- that's useful for
everyone in a high-riding vehicle (trucks, SUVs, etc), as well as for
spotting the wave of brake lights that's moving towards you in the traffic
jam that we call a highway (Seriously. Semi-peak-hour highways in the
Netherlands vary from rush-hour-in-Manhattan and upwards in utilisation of
asphalt.).
Jasper
Del Cotter
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> caused
>>Actually, I think the incident I heard of once, where the (unplanned)
>>failure of traffic lights turned drivers co-operative, actually was in
>>America. So you shouldn't necessarily put your people down.
>
>Such a happenstance should, if everyone remembers what they
>learned in driving school, result in every intersection with
>failed traffic lights being treated as if it were a multi-way
>stop, and everyone takes turns per the law as it was taught them.
Yes, but as I heard the story, they were polite about it too :-)
William December Starr
"Peter D. Tillman" <til...@aztec.asu.edu> said:
>> With the Pinto, they were thinking about money. IIRC, one of the
>> documents which came out during that scandal showed that at least
>> one engineer had raised the safety of the gas tank as an issue.
>>
>> The bean counters got to work, and determined that it would be
>> cheaper to pay off the families of dead Pinto drivers than to
>> make the design safer.
>>
>> So no change was made. [Trei Family]
>
> This is not so heartless as it sounds. In fact, this is how people
> (and organizations) make reasoned tradeoffs [1] between safety and
> costs of safety measures.
In the Pinto case, _if_ I (feebly) recall correctly, there was also a
possibly less reasoned decision made at the very top (Lee Iacocca?)
that the car *would* sell for under a certain price ($2,000, I
believe[1]). This resulted in a bit of a "tail wagging the dog"
corner-cutting syndrome that was above and beyond what fell out of
standard costs/benefits analysis -- as you said, "the cost to improve
the gas-tank was trivial," but even trivial costs were being eschewed
in pursuit of meeting that arbitrary price limit.
1: The phrase "under two thousand dollars and two thousand pounds"
comes to mind, but I could be imagining that.
--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
William December Starr
dann...@earthlink.net said:
> Two men can keep a secret when one kills the other. In a big
> corporation, too many people know the secrets for them to remain
> secret for long. Just ask all those Enron executives serving
> prison time and being sued for damages.
The problem with any claim that boils down to "groups can't keep
secrets" or "cover-ups never work" is that the data set is suspect
due to the possibility of incompleteness -- if a group _does_ keep a
secret or a cover-up _does_ work then by definition we never learn
about those cases.
Chris Malme
news:20050131.09...@zhochaka.demon.co.uk:
> "I drive an 18-wheeler, and I look down at him. I look down even more
> at her."
>
> "I drive a Land Rover, and look up at him, but I still look down at
> her."
>
> "I drive and MG and have big tits."
"They all look down at me."
Heh - "Frost Report", or just 'in the style of'?