{"id":353,"date":"2016-06-24T15:05:21","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T22:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jick.net\/wordpress\/?p=353"},"modified":"2021-09-22T16:10:49","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T23:10:49","slug":"costs-and-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/?p=353","title":{"rendered":"Costs and Benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning: coarse language!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I just finished struggling with a triply-sealed container for the umpteenth time.\u00a0 This time I was wise enough to get out my needle-nosed pliers before I broke a fingernail.\u00a0 It made me wonder how many person-years of frustrating effort are wasted on this nonsense every minute.\u00a0 (See below for my estimate.)<\/p>\n

“Wasted?\u00a0 Nonsense<\/em>?” I hear the self-righteous Safety Nut crying, “Don’t you care<\/em> about people being poisoned by domestic terrorists?”<\/p>\n

No.<\/p>\n

“No?\u00a0 No<\/em>??\u00a0 NO?<\/strong><\/em>?!\u00a0 What kind of monster are<\/em> you?”<\/p>\n

The kind who thinks<\/em>.\u00a0 Every policy, if enforced, has consequences<\/em> — some good (benefits<\/em>) and some bad (costs<\/em>). \u00a0 Ignoring either one is a fool’s errand.\u00a0 Many (if not most) people don’t want to think; they want to spout homilies.<\/p>\n

“No price is too great to pay to save even one human life,” recites the idiot.<\/p>\n

Of course it is!\u00a0 You are SO<\/em><\/strong> full of shit!\u00a0 If you really gave a damn about saving lives<\/em>, you’d be giving all your money to the Food Bank, or (to save a lot more<\/em> lives) to some Relief Fund for Refugees, or (to save the most<\/em> lives) to medical or agricultural research.\u00a0 Maybe you’d even be doing something yourself.<\/p>\n

I reckon I spend an average of about a minute a day cursing at jars and bottles with child-proof seals.\u00a0 (Some children must be very<\/em> resourceful.)\u00a0 That means Americans are investing about 16 person-years per day<\/em> in preventing poisoning by sick fucks.\u00a0 That’s just under 6,000 person-years per year.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There must be a lot<\/em> of sick fucks out there.<\/p>\n

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

If you lower the bus fare in a major city, some people will die as a result who would otherwise have lived.\u00a0 The question is not, “Will this save even one human life?”\u00a0 It is, “Will this do more good than harm?”<\/p>\n

See also Price of Life<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warning: coarse language!\u00a0 I just finished struggling with a triply-sealed container for the umpteenth time.\u00a0 This time I was wise enough to get out my needle-nosed pliers before I broke a fingernail.\u00a0 It made me wonder how many person-years of frustrating effort are wasted on this nonsense every minute.\u00a0 (SeeRead More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants"],"gutentor_comment":1,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jick.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}