There's a part of me that hears that airlines are the safest form of transportation and thinks "oh the government should stop...
There's a part of me that hears that airlines are the safest form of transportation and thinks "oh the government should stop overregulating them then"
damn think of how much money they’re wasting on all that useless overhead like “checking for cracks in vital bulkheads” and “trying to understand the causes of fatal accidents” and “engine servicing”.
I’m just saying if, say, cutting safety regulations by a third made planes no safer than cars, then that should still be acceptable to consumers, who after all are perfectly willing to take the risk of driving everyday, and airlines could pass some of the savings on, resulting in cheaper fares
better yet, allow half of the airlines to evade regulations, so customers have the choice between flying Safe But Pricey or Budget Crash-A-Lot, that’ll spice up the discourse nicely.
If customers want the extra safety enough to pay for it, the airlines will provide it on their own. No need for Big Government to step in!
actually I’d be interested to see an analysis of this and related issues like car safety that attempts to calculate the benefits of government regulation preventing manufacturers from engaging in a race to the bottom on safety that undermines the whole industry vs. the cost of measures that turn out not to boost safety at all or are actively counterproductive or simply increase opportunity cost to the point that they are no longer worth it.
because what we see in the software industry – a much harder field to regulate, admittedly – is that customers don’t give a fuck about safety or security compared with price and features, and network effects and economies of scale can result in unsafe options becoming the industry standard, with costs that may not affect any individual customer that much but are significant for society as a whole.
if malware could make your computer explode and kill you then we might see government taking a more active hand here.
Notice how American small aircraft manufacturers are shielded from liability under the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, basically as a precondition of maintaining a private flight capacity at all.
The Beechcraft Bonanza was known as “The Doctor Killer”, cause they’d have the professional-class income to buy them and the professional-class arrogance to assume they could fly them, but then they’d have the professional-class families and lawyer friends to deal with.