An Alaska Airlines plane made an emergency landing at the Portland, Ore., international airport on Friday after losing a chunk of its body, terrifying passengers.
The entire world around you that you take for granted is built down to a price. Barely anybody makes things to be good, most make things to make money, and when it comes to potentially dangerous things, the risk of harm or loss of life is factored into profit. “How many people can we kill before we are forced to shut this down or spend money to make it better?”
Beware when putting trust in human-created technology. I bet there’s more than one engineer in here who wanted to design something the right way, but was then forced to cut some corners by a bean counter. It’s everywhere.
Giving an example from my wheelhouse, there are stories of managers going around to engineer’s prototype PCBs and snipping off decoupling capacitors one by one until the device barely functions in a stable manner. The manager then declares that that is the appropriate amount of capacitors. Also, if you want a quick heart attack, just take apart any cheap Amazon phone charger and examine it.
The entire world around you that you take for granted is built down to a price. Barely anybody makes things to be good, most make things to make money, and when it comes to potentially dangerous things, the risk of harm or loss of life is factored into profit. “How many people can we kill before we are forced to shut this down or spend money to make it better?”
Beware when putting trust in human-created technology. I bet there’s more than one engineer in here who wanted to design something the right way, but was then forced to cut some corners by a bean counter. It’s everywhere.
Giving an example from my wheelhouse, there are stories of managers going around to engineer’s prototype PCBs and snipping off decoupling capacitors one by one until the device barely functions in a stable manner. The manager then declares that that is the appropriate amount of capacitors. Also, if you want a quick heart attack, just take apart any cheap Amazon phone charger and examine it.