Warning: coarse language! 

I just finished struggling with a triply-sealed container for the umpteenth time.  This time I was wise enough to get out my needle-nosed pliers before I broke a fingernail.  It made me wonder how many person-years of frustrating effort are wasted on this nonsense every minute.  (See below for my estimate.)

“Wasted?  Nonsense?” I hear the self-righteous Safety Nut crying, “Don’t you care about people being poisoned by domestic terrorists?”

No.

“No?  No??  NO??!  What kind of monster are you?”

The kind who thinks.  Every policy, if enforced, has consequences — some good (benefits) and some bad (costs).   Ignoring either one is a fool’s errand.  Many (if not most) people don’t want to think; they want to spout homilies.

“No price is too great to pay to save even one human life,” recites the idiot.

Of course it is!  You are SO full of shit!  If you really gave a damn about saving lives, you’d be giving all your money to the Food Bank, or (to save a lot more lives) to some Relief Fund for Refugees, or (to save the most lives) to medical or agricultural research.  Maybe you’d even be doing something yourself.

I reckon I spend an average of about a minute a day cursing at jars and bottles with child-proof seals.  (Some children must be very resourceful.)  That means Americans are investing about 16 person-years per day in preventing poisoning by sick fucks.  That’s just under 6,000 person-years per year.  Assuming the putative poisoned would have an average of 60 years subtracted from their lives, we would need to be preventing at least 100 poisonings per year just to break even.  There must be a lot of sick fucks out there.

We could quibble over the difference between living under frustration and being dead, but if you are sure being dead is so much worse, I’d be interested in hearing all about your experience of being dead.

If you lower the bus fare in a major city, some people will die as a result who would otherwise have lived.  The question is not, “Will this save even one human life?”  It is, “Will this do more good than harm?”

See also Price of Life.