Tag: safety_fetish

Free candy van

On his bucket list was to buy and a van to cruise around in, and go to Burning Man. His disgusting and/or funny van made local news headlines in Sacramento when he parked it on his way to Burning Man. Apparently the photo was taken by children too young to understand the ‘joke’, and has since gone somewhat viral.

this is great trolling, with people acting predictably dumb.

Exposing the War on Fun!

Kevin C Pyle and Scott Cunningham’s non-fiction, book-length comic Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun! is a marvelous and infuriating history of censorship, zero-tolerance, helicopter parenting, and the war on kids. Bad For You covers many other subjects, from the demolition of America’s playgrounds to the panic of Dungeons and Dragons; from fear mongering over Internet predators and cyberbullies to the demonization of gaming and gamers. The final section, on zero tolerance and the conversion of American schools into police-states where children are arrested by armed policemen for sassing, possessing over-the-counter medication, and having “disruptive” hair colors, is the most frustrating of all.

Dismantling fire departments

Fires have become much rarer, there are too many firefighters. Which is why you see them responding to medical emergencies. Like all organizations, they fight downsizing.

City records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90%. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become a much less vulnerable place.

The number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1600 in the 1980s to just over 1400 today

2014-06-27: Can Fire Stations do health duties?

A new firehouse clinic in California shows how an abundant but under-used public resource—fire stations—can be made even more useful for a community.

We have too many firefighters now due to improved building codes, but like any organization, they resist being shrunk to the correct size. That’s why you often see 3 trucks being dispatched to save a kitten.

2022-10-06: Why do Fire Departments still exist?

According to the 2021 statistics of the FDNY, they attended 1213750 incidents. That’s a lot of fires. But when you take those incidents apart, it emerges that ‘Fire Incidents’ make up less than 25% of calls. Even then, the 290643 ‘Fire Incidents’ cover things from actual fires to malicious false calls, with structural fires being 10639 – the vast majority are more medical incidents. In much of America, the fire departments often take up the role that ambulance services would in Europe. 65% of ambulances in New York are run by the fire department, with the remainder from hospitals.

Hyperloop

Because of this tiny little paragraph, the hyperloop is far less compelling:

Safety and security are paramount, and so security checks will still be made in a similar fashion as TSA does for the airport.

Security theater brings the 30min SF – LA back up to 90min, at which point you might as well fly.
2016-09-03: Some progress.

The first hyperloop could open as soon as 2018. The company has announced plans to build an 8km operational hyperloop in Quay Valley, a proposed new urban development in Kings County, California. “We start construction this year, We are not building a test track in the middle of nowhere. We are building a full-scale hyperloop in a city that will have 10M people riding on it.” The Quay Valley hyperloop is projected to cost between $100B and $150M. How will they pay for it? “The money is not really an issue. The moment we pull the trigger, the money will be there.” Gresta was similarly offhand, saying that HTT has “several offers on the table” from investors. In addition to their time, he pointed out, some volunteers have also invested money. 1 German company has committed $1.7M.

2017-08-28: Hyperloop reached 324km/h

2019-04-19 Progress:

The report lays out, often in meticulous detail, what Musk and his company plan for their East Coast mass transit system. If completed, the privately funded Loop would carry passengers between downtown Baltimore and Washington through twin 56 km tunnels 20m below the surface. Battery-powered “autonomous electric vehicles,” or AEVs, would shoot passengers at speeds up to 240 kmh, completing the trip in 15 minutes. 70 ventilation shafts, housed in nondescript brown huts built on the surface of the route, would help passengers breathe—and serve as emergency exits. Fares would be “comparable to public transportation”.

2019-09-11: report from a Hyperloop conference:

Shortly after arriving at the Global Hyperloop Conference, Brad Swartzwelter looked me in the eye and issued himself a challenge. “If I haven’t convinced you by the end of this conference that Hyperloop is the most glorious transportation opportunity of our time, then I’ve failed.” A vast network of pods traveling in reduced air pressure tubes at upwards of 1100km per hour. He holds court on the subject with self-assuredness, because he has been holding this court, and repeating these words, perhaps longer than any other living person.

Nation of the timid

this article gets it exactly right: unless the us overcomes its safety fetish, the decline will be terminal. people are confused about risk and falsely believe 0 risk is either desirable or achievable. the result is a nation of terrified babies who can’t get anything done.

Welcome to the generation of what I have come to call “securitarians.” No more calculation of risk, they. Risk itself is conclusive. They are the products of a post-9/11 mentality in which the practice of prudential judgment did not merely atrophy. It collapsed. A new rhetorical form emerged, a sort of reductio ad absurdum in reverse—a reductio ad extremis—epitomized by the warning that deliberation over the war in Iraq was risky since the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. In this era, risk has been escalated in such a way as not merely to reconfigure but to obliterate judgment.