I oncecancelled my purchase of a home when I found a sign nearby indicating an
underground high pressure gas transmission line. These days they're probably
removing the signs.

Let's hope the government doesn't decide that precise timekeeping is of
strategic value and not permitted amongst ordinary people.

On 11/25/2013 11:49 PM, Joe Leikhim wrote:

This quartz crystal accident is a canary in the coal mine that demonstrates how poor safety and regulations often work in the real world.  What I feel is a bigger concern is the similar risks we have with our aging Nuclear reactors. Many are over twenty-five years past their intended life.
The problem is today they are paid for, and the government insures them, so they are very profitable. The question is do any of the safety officials and inspectors really have the authority to close them when they become inherently unsafe? I don't think so. I think they will run until one catastrophically fails. I think government oversight is far to often an illusion.

Thomas Knox

Far more people are killed and injured every year by car crashes and
smoking than by all civilian incidents, or even atomic warfare, in
history.

-John

=======================

So throw caution to the wind because other things kill people?  100% of people die from something.  So we shouldn't try to keep from killing bystanders because they are going to die anyway?  Sounds a bit sociopathic to me.

Doc

Sent from mobile

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Bill Dailey docdailey@gmail.com wrote:

Or, to some extent, rational. Life IS a series of risks. When we walk out
the door (or even if we just stay in bed) we are taking more or less risk.
Reducing risk has a cost. Some risks are cheap to reduce and others not so
much.

And perceived risk is not the same thing as real risk. Take terrorism for
example. The perceived risk is high. The actual risk is low. (How many
people actually die from terrorist attacks world wide compared to other
forms of risk?) Yet we spend inordinate amounts of money to mitigate the
perceived risk.

So just considering and accepting that some people are going to die in the
world from various threats that might be considered abnormal is not
sociopathic, it is realistic. It really does come down to threat, risk
analysis, and the cost to mitigate the risk. The problem comes when you
have idiots who do not take the risk seriously. Hey, they got away with it
100 times before so they think nothing of doing it again.

BTW, an interesting analysis of risk assessment within a bureaucratic
organizational structure was Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster.
The working engineers had a good handle on the threats and overall risk.
However, management was clueless by intention. (One might even say
criminally clueless.) I suspect something like that may have been
operational in this case as well.

--
Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN/J79BPL
706 Flightline Drive
Spring Branch, TX 78070
brian@lloyd.com
+1.916.877.5067

It's a matter of perception of risk.

Opponents of nuclear power have successfully propagandized risks out of
all proportion compared to other risks.

There are many more rational things to worry about, including a rogue
state or terror group acquiring CW, BW. And, CW and BW are much easier to
make/get than nuclear stuff. If you can brew beer, you can make crude BW
agents. Furthermore BW spreads by itself.

The world has not really seen a serious BW incident AFAIK, but antibiotic
resistant strains are rampant in US healthcare. A serious BW attack would
make those issues seem trivial.

Furthermore, nuclear materials can be detected pretty easily. AFAIK, there
are no readily available detectors for virii or bacteria.

Scientists do nobody any favors by overblowing some risks to fit their
political agenda.

-John

===================

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Bob Stewart bob@evoria.net wrote:

Quartz crystals. Let's just say that it morphed from a discussion into a
meta-discussion. :-)

--
Brian Lloyd, WB6RQN/J79BPL
706 Flightline Drive
Spring Branch, TX 78070
brian@lloyd.com
+1.916.877.5067