27 June, 2012

Why the Bureaucrats Need You Dead!


The Sky Isn't Falling!

And regulators are worried.

By JAMES TARANTO



A corollary of the old man-bites-dog adage is that it's news when a plane crashes, but not when a plane lands safely. A recent Bloomberg dispatch challenges that assumption. The lead sentence: "More than a decade has passed since the last major-airline accident on U.S. soil."

Come to think of it, that is news of a sort, and precisely because safe flights usually aren't news. It's been so long since we thought about accidental plane crashes that it didn't occur to us until now that the last major one was in November 2001. (It was an American Airlines flight to the Dominican Republic, which crashed shortly after takeoff from New York. At first everyone thought it was terrorism.)
 
Now you might think that this is a pure good-news story, like if the Supreme Court strikes down ObamaCare in its entirety tomorrow. But no. It turns out that the lack of plane crashes is bad for airline safety. Here's the second sentence: "That's great news for aviation companies and their passengers--and a complication for rule makers trying to improve flight safety."

The second paragraph explains: "The benefits of aviation rules are calculated primarily on how many deaths they may prevent, so the safest decade in modern airline history is making it harder to justify the cost of new requirements."

Then comes one of the most wonderful quotes we've ever encountered, from William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation: "If anyone wants to advance safety through regulation, it can't be done without further loss of life."








4 comments:

  1. Seems to indicate to me that "regulation" is therefore harmful rather than helpful.

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    1. Or at least that bureaucrats think in strange ways. We have been safe for a decade, so that means we are unsafe?

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  2. It depends... on whetha you wanna wiseabove -OR- descend at the end. Lemme explain. If God doesn’t exist, why do you hate Him so much?? If God does exist, why don’t you follow us Home to Heaven Above if you‘re gonna croak as I am? How long do we have to enjoy this finite existence? 77ish, measly years? Compared to the length and breadth of eternity, 77ish years is like the micron of a nanometer in the whole, bloody, universe!! Why don’t we have a BIG-ol, roxx-our-holy-soxx, party-hardy celebrating our resurrection for many eons? Heaven TOTALLY kicks-ass for eternity. Thank you proFUSEly, for the wick is running out on U.S. _thewarningsecondcoming.com_

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  3. I can't speak for John, but I'll answer the questions for myself.

    "If God doesn’t exist, why do you hate Him so much??"

    Same reason I hate astrology and quack "doctors" who do more harm than good. Flawed beliefs cause harm. And, it isn't "god" so much as his idiotic fanclub(s).

    "If God does exist, why don’t you follow us Home to Heaven Above if you‘re gonna croak as I am?"

    If Zeus is the "real" god, he is going to cast you aside for worshiping a false god just as fast as he'd toss aside an atheist. Of the- I'm gonna say, thousands- of gods worshiped throughout human history, the chances that you have settled on the right one, even if any of them were ever real, is infinitesimal. You will be in the same boat as the non-believers, like it or not.

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