NYT: Pilot was locked out

[Imran Siddiqui]

If this was an agency relationship maybe that common law theory would apply in the balancing act.

[Hauldren Collider]

Here an argument you may understand. Companies should enact a policy of the pilot and co-pilot not leaving the cockpit on a short hop flight. Going to the toilet costs the company money as they aren't doing their jobs whilst they are taking a piss, and it raises the risk of mass murder by a negligible but quantifiable amount.

Going to the toilet on an aircraft doesn't cost the company money because pilots don't really do that much while the plane isn't taking off or landing. That being said, regulations tend to take the form of these "free" things that cost "nothing", and lead to hugely expensive compliance costs through a death of a thousand cuts. Regulations just like these are responsible for huge amounts of waste. This would save, to a first order approximation, zero lives, and have nonzero cost (no regulation has zero cost. period.) and I think it's important to push back against the notion that we should just continue expanding the scope of regulations. It's like the story of the guy that keeps buying $5 stuff because "it's less than I spend on coffee" and then soon he doesn't have enough money to buy coffee. It adds up. And it has a real cost--it raises the price of goods, pushing things out of reach of the poor.

[rah]

Asking a flight attendant to step in the cockpit when a pilot needs to piss costs the company ZERO. It's not going to warrant an extra flight crew to handle. The exact same as it doesn't cost the company money for the pilot to go to the toilet, by your own admission. So where is this cost that you speak of? Explain the hugely expensive compliance involved here.
IT"S ZERO and 100 times 0=0.

And if you can spend zero to save lives, you'd have to be heartless not to demand it.

[DinoDoc]

And if you can spend zero to save lives, you'd have to be heartless stupid not to demand it.

FTFY

[rah]

I was thinking something even worse but decided to be reasonable.

[DinoDoc]

Even *******s can figure out when something is cost free. Stupid people might have trouble grasping the concept though.

[Dauphin]

Going to the toilet on an aircraft doesn't cost the company money because pilots don't really do that much while the plane isn't taking off or landing. That being said, regulations tend to take the form of these "free" things that cost "nothing", and lead to hugely expensive compliance costs through a death of a thousand cuts. Regulations just like these are responsible for huge amounts of waste. This would save, to a first order approximation, zero lives, and have nonzero cost (no regulation has zero cost. period.) and I think it's important to push back against the notion that we should just continue expanding the scope of regulations. It's like the story of the guy that keeps buying $5 stuff because "it's less than I spend on coffee" and then soon he doesn't have enough money to buy coffee. It adds up. And it has a real cost--it raises the price of goods, pushing things out of reach of the poor.

An aeroplane of the type downed costs around a minimum of $70m. If one were downed like this every 50 years, that is well over $1m dollars a year. How much do you think this regulation will cost in comparison?

[Imran Siddiqui]

But a corporation is going to have to do something it wasn't doing prior to this, guys! Don't you see how unfair it is, even if the costs are virtually zero?

[Hauldren Collider]

An aeroplane of the type downed costs around a minimum of $70m. If one were downed like this every 50 years, that is well over $1m dollars a year. How much do you think this regulation will cost in comparison?

That is actually a much sounder argument than the one regarding safety, since any additional amount of money spent in airline safety is pretty much inherently wasted.

Imran, it's not about corporate fairness, it's about spending money efficiently. There's only so much money on safety and life expectancy to go around, and I think it's important to prioritize based on needs rather than sensationalism.

I have absolutely no objections to regulations that have a meaningful impact on safety. Regarding cars for example, I think seatbelt laws are good. I am in favor of requiring airbags. I'm not in favor of requiring back-up cameras, because the indication is that the increase in safety doesn't justify the cost. Cost-effectiveness is important to consider. There are lots of things that can kill you, but the ones that people are most afraid of are somewhat paradoxically often the ones least likely to actually occur.

EDIT: I realize you all have some good fun painting me as some Uncle Scrooge who only cares about his bottom line--nevermind that I don't even have a bottom line, I am a college student who will in a few months be a junior employee at a medium-size bank (despite "senior" being in my title) and nowhere near the top tax bracket. But I actually have the opinions I do out of a sincere belief that they are ultimately what is best for people who are disadvantaged. I can see that it is fun to assert that my relatively privileged background disqualifies me from honestly arguing conservative positions but I am finding that attitude somewhat tiresome.

[Dauphin]

That is actually a much sounder argument than the one regarding safety, since any additional amount of money spent in airline safety is pretty much inherently wasted.

Imran, it's not about corporate fairness, it's about spending money efficiently. There's only so much money on safety and life expectancy to go around, and I think it's important to prioritize based on needs rather than sensationalism.

I have absolutely no objections to regulations that have a meaningful impact on safety. Regarding cars for example, I think seatbelt laws are good. I am in favor of requiring airbags. I'm not in favor of requiring back-up cameras, because the indication is that the increase in safety doesn't justify the cost. Cost-effectiveness is important to consider. There are lots of things that can kill you, but the ones that people are most afraid of are somewhat paradoxically often the ones least likely to actually occur.

EDIT: I realize you all have some good fun painting me as some Uncle Scrooge who only cares about his bottom line--nevermind that I don't even have a bottom line, I am a college student who will in a few months be a junior employee at a medium-size bank (despite "senior" being in my title) and nowhere near the top tax bracket. But I actually have the opinions I do out of a sincere belief that they are ultimately what is best for people who are disadvantaged. I can see that it is fun to assert that my relatively privileged background disqualifies me from honestly arguing conservative positions but I am finding that attitude somewhat tiresome.

I find it interesting you accept the policy is a reasonable idea against the cost of a $70m aeroplane, but not the lives of over a 150 people. Do you value the average human life at under half a million dollars?

[Hauldren Collider]

I find it interesting you accept the policy is a reasonable idea against the cost of a $70m aeroplane, but not the lives of over a 150 people. Do you value the average human life at under half a million dollars?

That would be a valid objection if people who fly on airplanes couldn't die of anything else, or weren't astronomically more likely to die of something else. I don't value a human life at under half a million dollars. But you aren't saving half a million dollars. You're saving a fraction of whatever the value of an entire human life is, proportional to the increase in their life expectancy, and it is that latter factor that is truly miniscule.

[Imran Siddiqui]

HC seem to be the living reminder of the need for the phrase: check your privilege.

It's far more tiresome to read heartless BS based on a privileged upbringing, FWIW.

[Hauldren Collider]

What privilege? The privilege of not having died in a freak airplane crash?

Your check-privilege counter in a thread about welfare or food stamps or whatever would already be childish and irrelevant in such a thread, but here it's also a non-sequitur.

[Dauphin]

That would be a valid objection if people who fly on airplanes couldn't die of anything else, or weren't astronomically more likely to die of something else. I don't value a human life at under half a million dollars. But you aren't saving half a million dollars. You're saving a fraction of whatever the value of an entire human life is, proportional to the increase in their life expectancy, and it is that latter factor that is truly miniscule.

If you are 30, and have a life expectancy of 70, you are losing 40 years of life expectancy. That is not truly minuscule.

[Hauldren Collider]

If you are 30, and have a life expectancy of 70, you are losing 40 years of life expectancy. That is not truly minuscule.

Now that I think about it actually, you are correct. I am undervaluing human life by saying that the argument works when applied to the cost of the airplane but not human lives. Sorry.

However, the argument is still wrong, because it isn't worth the money even if it is to save money on the cost of losing an airplane. Going back to life expectancy, you see, you aren't losing 40 years. You're losing much less.

Let's say the new rule costs a penny per flight. This is a per-flight expense. Without the rule, every bajillion flights some co-pilot crashes a plane into a mountain, taking 150 people and a $70 million airplane with him. The cost here is: 1) the cost of losing the airplane multiplied by the probability of losing the airplane in such an incident over its lifetime, and 2), the total increase in mortality associated with these incidents amortized over the total number of flights.

What I suspect and what I am arguing is that the cost in mortality and the cost of the risk to the airplane, amortized per flight, is less than a penny. Or whatever the cost of implementing this regulation is. Furthermore, (2) is quite a bit less than 40 years, or whatever number.