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LMAO
This would be even funnier if I hadn't been holding BP shares when it happened...
lolz.
very well done
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-25/shocking-bp-m…
hilarious!!
[quote]http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-25/shocking-bp-m…]
Well, yes. Everyone does a cost-benefit analysis on their own life every day- as well as the lives of others.
The US is willing to spend $200 to save the life of a starving child in Africa.
About $100,000 to prevent a highway fatality.
About $3-10 million to reduce deaths from drug side-effects and a number of consumer liability issues.
About $700 million to prevent a death due to a nuclear meltdown.
Either way, most people would agree that it is not worth spending the entire GDP for six months to prevent one death.
BP's numbers are less than those of nuclear power plant operators but higher than those of most pharmaceutical companies. There are documents like this floating around at every F500 company in the country, and hundreds of millions more that are implicitly floating around in everyones' heads. The irony is that the reason the value of someone's life can be so high here in the US rather than in Europe is that we have a relatively regulated and reasonable capitalist system. Since we have so much money- created by a relatively free market- we can afford to make peoples' lives worth millions of dollars. You wouldn't find that in Russia- either in the wild west system of the '90s, the USSR, or the authoritarian system today.
If we were to say that someone's life were worth $1 Trillion, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep Capitalism running. Ultimately, peoples' lives would really be worth less and less as the system fell apart.
So yes, BP's cost-benefit analysis sounds pretty typical. It's unfortunate that we can't spend trillions of dollars preventing each death, but our economy has limited resources. Businesses ultimately help increase the resources available and therefore help increase the money available to spend on keeping workers safer.
I totally agree with the cost benefit analysis. People need to realize that they are not unique and special little snow flakes and the world will keep spinning long after they are gone. I think actually putting 3 little pigs on a power point really slaps people in the face.
In todays world stuff like that really needs to be a spoken rule with zero paper trail. Every bank ought to have a 3 day seminar for employees on how to speak in code and not put anything on paper.
Awesome.
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