This was clearly under specced, and that's why we have spec for such things, to prevent this.
The UK has so much good design in all the systems where humans are concerned, from clear signage to walking surfaces, plus checks and balances to provide for redundancy, that you start taking it all for granted.
India on the other hand - I'm of Indian heritage - is a chaotic hellscape where life is cheap. I have an apartment there and recently smooke started pouring out a water pump, somebody mentioned it on the Whatsapp group and eventually someone went to investigate and found it burnt out. You can see so many problems here:
1) Response time slow 2) Problem not treated urgently 3) No electrical cut out 4) No temperature cut out
Basically the sort of thing that you would find sixty years ago in the UK, a malfunctioning device can simply carry on malfunctioning to the extent that it could cause a fire in an entire apartment block. The UK is not immune from this - see Grenfell fire where bad cladding caused many deaths - but we have a full-scale public inquiry and legislation and a lot of very pissed-off people in comparison.
The person I was visiting lived in a student dorm / residence hall at the time. They had special fire doors in the middle of most long hallways, they were wired up to the fire alarm system and would magnetically shut down if an alarm was raised. When shut, they separated different parts of the hallway from each other and prevented the fire from spreading, and you had to hold them open if you wanted to pass through. There were also some extremely strict rules around what electric devices you were allowed to have, with staff being authorized to enter people's rooms with notice and do compliance checks.
Here in Poland (which is an EU country presumably following all EU-mandated safety rules), the regulations in such buildings are usually along the lines of "do whatever as long as you don't cause property damage and/or permanent changes, we might do a check if you do something really egregious and other residents complain." No fire doors of course, although smoke detectors and PA systems for alarms do exist.
I’ve seen, heard, and experienced people doing their job just barely enough to reach a stage of “it works,” popularly known in the colloquial term as, “Chalta Hain.” This is more prominent in works such as the ad-hoc stage creation, pop-up kitchens, and the like.
This incident is sad, and I hope people learn from it and will prevent the other 100 such accidents.
My Condolences.
Reading all the comments about India, low pay and the value of life makes one wonder.
The Post Office Scandal in the UK that's popular in HN shows the value of life and justice in UK. Pretty sure that everyone involved was well paid - the Post Office Heads, the Software company etc No one bothered to do the right thing. Is it the British culture ?
The Engineers at Boeing surely are well paid and should have a 'culture of safety' and 'value human life'. But Boeing seems to be in news for safety issues that don't fit the American Engineering culture. Software issues that killed 346 people in 2 crashes in 2019 - Source Verge Boeing planes are still flying. Doors flying off now.
Tesla - Keep reading comments about Tesla crashes and the lack of responsibility. Tesla keeps selling in record numbers. Other day read about Tesla employees spying on camera of customer's car. American love for Voyeurism.
Can you call this lack of concern for safety a part of American culture ? Tesla and Boeing are Big Listed American companies.
What's the issue here - lack of decent pay ? Or that Americans obviously don't value life considering how easily Americans take lives as per all the news that one reads.
Point being blaming an accident like this on a certain people and their culture is easy. It's quite common to see this subtle racism on HN.
Why are bigger incidents in other countries not a failure of their culture when these are done by bigger institutions and companies.
I guess more people should start making these out of band requests to catch poorly managed events before a tragedy happens.
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...
In big cities, like the one this is in, the population / ambulances ratio if woefully inadequate.
As an engineer, I can say with full conviction that Indians don't give a damn about maintenance and maintainability.
Be it software or hardware or services or what not. We tend to focus on completing the work for that moment.
Also, in this particular case, the location is a studio, and more likely than not, you would not even find any records of maintenance / guidelines / qualified personnel.
Apparently money does make people do stupid things.
enjoy that "get back to the office"
I might be tempted to perform elaborate stunts, but at what cost?
We should remember that we're human during these strange economic times.
You love to see it
You can make an impact without having to make an impact.
i can think of two aircraft accidents in the past 15yrs that could have been avoided (at least the second one if they learned from the first incident and if safety was a priority). I'm talking about the Mangalore airport accident in 2010 and the Calicut airport accident in 2020. Both have tabletop runways and i believe both planes skidded off the runway under poor weather conditions. if they learned something from the first accident, they would have deployed countermeasures (something like an arresting mechanism to stop the planes from skidding off. i forgot the technical term for it).
when i was a kid, i remember hearing about rickshaw accidents frequently. most of the time, these rickshaws pack 10-15 children when 5 kids could barely sit comfortably.
i'm sure i can think of many more examples showing lack of value for human life.
I don't think arresting mechanisms are common, and they require extra space to install them. The crew having the training and authority to divert to an alternate airport when it is wet and they are overweight is probably a better focus.
> most of the time, these rickshaws pack 10-15 children when 5 kids could barely sit comfortably.
Of course, it's also important to avoid criticizing poor people for being poor. What were the alternatives? It would be much safer for each kid to be in their own family SUV, as is common in the US, but this increase in child safety is due to increased wealth, not increased virtue.
My experience in seeing how electrical and gas lines are handled casually in Pakistan is the same. For instance, there was a huge transformer enclosure with no doors on it and bare bus bars anyone could easily reach in and grab, a transformer for high-voltage AC to low voltage step down, serving a 300 unit apartment building, with children playing football in the parking area right next to it.
It's not really an India specific problem but really more widespread throughout many south asian developing nations.
In cities like Delhi, good electricians, plumbers, welders can make $1k+ a month - most of it tax free since they usually work in cash.
Yet, they will never buy any safety equipment for themselves. I’ve seen welders use cheap $5 sunglasses instead of buying protective visors.
There are new apartments coming up in my area, each of which is priced north of $500,000. Yet the laborers working on them don’t have even good quality plastic buckets or wheelbarrows to haul stuff around - they make do with burlap sacks and weave baskets.
It probably explains why I've seen offshore teams verbally abused and oppressively micro-managed by their managers, to extents that treatment would be illegal in the West.
I'd feel anxious if any life critical sector or even piece of software was developed from any of the large Indian consultancies I've had the displeasure of working with. As this attitude manifests itself almost every time sometime is delivered.
There's a shrew of threads on HN about poor, contaminated pharmaceuticals from India e.g. eye drops. The UK governments website on drug recalls have a large number of Indian manufactured products.
A qualified technician, to handle the rig, would cost X.
A stage help would cost 0.1 X
Indians are cheap and many in job roles are not qualified or care about their job.
I am 100% sure that this sort of accident happens all the time, and some temporary workaround is used to repair the issue.
Also, no one has any idea about anything close to a "safety margin".
If I were on the job, as an engineer, I would make sure that the ropes and slings are atleast 100% more than calculated values.
A trained bus driver carrying school kids in Jaipur, a state capital city of over 6M, gets paid $200/month.
A security guard in the same school would get paid $125/month.
The income for a mid career middle management professional in a good job would be 30-60x higher.
Imagine getting paid 50x higher than your maid or bus driver or grocery store worker. Now imagine how that would rot your social structure
Do you think the business generates enough surplus to be able to afford the safety margins & additional expenses you’re talking about?
> If I were on the job, as an engineer, I would make sure that the ropes and slings are atleast 100% more than calculated values.
Let’s pause and reflect for a minute — why is it that you (or someone similarly qualified) are not employed designing stage rigs, and instead doing whatever it is that you do? Chances are the answer comes down to economic productivity (and lack thereof).
I'm not saying this is universal and of course everyone gets the bias free opportunity to execute on their own merit, but this has been my observation.
It’s wild I went this long thinking there was something inherent to Chinese culture that gave rise to this. I don’t think it’s Indian, Chinese or Asian culture. I think this is what happens when people aren’t paid enough to care.
Then there’s Japan, where caring too much even though you are paid too little is kind of a cultural thing.
This is what happens when economic development selects quantity over quality. And IMO it's the right choice, especially for large countries. Nevermind not being able to pay for for quality in the first place (lack of qualified skill), when you're at the bottom of the ladder it's long term better to trade safety/lives for more/faster progress. The aggregate societal and human gains that can be afforded from growing income almost always trumps loss from chabuduo. Especially for large countries like India and PRC with so much (bluntly) disposable bodies, you want to throw everyone into the mixer because with that many bodies, it's important to seperate wheat from chaff in terms of human capita as soon as possible and harness them - otherwise potential gets squandered on massive scale. It's not just construction. It's important to manufacture lots of things because even if you make lots of shit, you'll also discover the great makers who makes things that are internationally competitive. Or spam lots of academic papers, because even if most of is hack fraud, it's also maximizing for gems that raise ceiling on top end. Countries grow by learning and improving via doing a lot, even if most of it is not good.
India certainly has a long way to go on this front. It feels very reminiscent of the US circa the gilded age roughly a century ago (Eg: look up worker safety in manufacturing, or fire safety scandals in NYC from back then). I’m sure Europe had a similar story. A society that is experiencing real and somewhat sustained growth for the first time is going to learn some hard lessons through the process, and then be forced into improvements to prevent the ugly side-effects. But the growth engine must first get going, before what seems like “overheads” can be paid from the surplus — and it likely will take a few decades. But you’d be surprised at the extent to which culture can change in a couple of generations (and how many bedrock cultural behaviors are relatively young).
[fn] This is crucial for learning the right lessons, and inspiring the right response. It is certainly a solvable problem, it’s important to look at history to understand how other societies solved the problem after similar growth pangs.
I might even agree with that argument, if it was true. I’m not above saying that it’s worthwhile for a society to sacrifice slaves in order to grow. Empirically, that was an effective strategy. But I wouldn’t want to live in a society with slaves. And that’s the level at which this argument must be reduced to, because someone who dies with no recourse due to their society’s goals is little more than a slave.
The question is, are you absolutely certain that the suffering you’re referring to is a requirement of industrialization? I’m not qualified to answer that, but it would be interesting to hear whether you feel it’s true.
Developing nations like India need their own time to move through similar processes. There still needs to be people lobbying, doing the work of organizing, and changing the way things work. But it's going to take decades, and maybe even centuries, like it did for other nations.
One of my relative killed 2 girls drunk and driving in a village and got away with it. Every time I think of that, it traumatises me :'(
I have no idea to reconcile that as a whole, and generally understand how lucky I am. But it just feels like things will never get better when the most basic (to me) of values is missing.
like whatever you predict the moral of the story would be, its the opposite toxic thing
There definitely needs to be a culture change wrt safety, but a massive increase in economic productivity is necessary to drive investment in safety.
I am never ever in my life going to those places. Death lurks in every corner of their infrastructure.
And you'll have to pardon me for drawing a connection between the plummeting standards in Western construction and the foreign workers - predominantly Indian - flooding this sector. It's not a coincidence.
the lack of speed limits on many highways, or only two lanes on others, which leads to many more lane-changing manouevres between high- and low-speed lanes; or very short-throw entry and exit lanes with extremely sharp curves and abrupt changes of speed; lack of organization and coordination around road-works to provide safe alternatives; the multitude of badly-designed junctions; terrible signage blocking traffic lights and visibility of oncoming traffic; the lack of ice and snow clearance on roads and pavements and cycle lanes; And I say this as someone who rides my bicycle every weekday to get to class. It's been a nightmare and I've just fitted studded tyres which has massively helped. In the UK, these routes would have been cleared.
I mean, both countries are pretty safe on the global scale of things, so we're complaining about things of a high standard to start with, but the figures kind of bear this out:
(ODS file: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65143a89b1bad...)
And the UK (or Great Britain which is just the mainland) had 706 car user deaths in 2021 compared with 1118 in Germany which is quite considerable. Injuries are harder to compare because of the variation in severity and the scale by which they are measured, but a dead body is a dead body. Fatalities means deaths occurring within 30 days of an RTA.
So when you get to Road Deaths, as opposed to car users, Germany jumps to 2562 deaths in 2021 vs 1608 for the UK, and that is 31/million pop vs 24/million pop to normalize things (no normalized figures on the sheet for car users).
It's step-by-step, building on top of the previous thing, slowly inculating into the population the respect for life and how it's the responsibility of every person, company and government. You belt up, cars add airbags, the government improves roads and traffic management. If all of those things are in place, things get better. In India, it's very much "god will protect me".
My own attitude changes so bizarrely when I'm in India. In Europe it's belt up, put your helmet on, and in India, let's all get into this Autorickshaw and hurtle through traffic. I must be mad.
It was actually around World War I that these kind of safety issues became well known to the public. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the books of Upton Sinclair, and the muckrakers started to bring awareness to a lot of formerly ignored problems like this.
We now all complain about the same issues; lack of care, pride of work or worksmanship.
They now manage offshore and treat them with alot more humanity. Sometimes will resort to 'ill speech' because they say 'it's how things work there as a boss otherwise they climb ontop of your head' which always makes me laugh when they say it.
> "sacrifices are required in order to industrialize."
No, I’m making a different point. I’m not saying it ought to be that way (to industrialize) — only why it’s so naturally, and therefore what changes are needed to improve.
Safety margins in construction, and proper regulation/inspection are “overheads” which can only be paid once you have surplus (economic productivity). In some cases, the extra cost is minimal (just preventing corruption/carelessness in an already sufficient process/design), but in other cases it requires being willing to pay extra “for safety”, so it becomes a question of affordability & access eg: traveling in a well built car rather than an auto rickshaw, or discarding food past the "sell by" date.
To use another example from a sibling comment: a dozen children being crammed into an auto rickshaw on school commutes. Suppose the society starts enforcing a law mandating that no more than 3 humans (incl children) can travel in an auto rickshaw at once. The consequence is that the cost of commute has now increased manifold — does that take it beyond the regime of affordability for some fraction of the population — Will the kids now have to walk/cycle to school instead? What tradeoffs would those kids/families prefer?
So investing in safety requires not just that the business under consideration be profitable, but also that all customers have enough economic productivity which manifests in their willingness to spend larger amounts and demand safety and/or raise the floor forbidding unsafe products.
Reasoning in analogy with a minimum wage — if you raise the level too high, you just rule out a whole bunch of low-surplus economic activity. To make the trade off worthwhile, and not forbid essential economic activity, the wage floor can only be raised in tandem with economic productivity.
Consumer goods at least segment markets with price discrimination, so richer people can buy Eg. larger+safer cars. But they might have to drive on the same roads as everyone else (potholes and all), or use the same cable cars (to borrow an example from a sibling comment), or use the same medication — because "infrastructure" that needs to serve a larger population can only match the average (cumulative, in some cases) productivity. It’s an example where inequality hurts — however rich a single consumer might be, they only have access to are what the rest of the market is willing to buy (made viable with economies of scale).
Finally, what I'm trying to point out is that these are not "sacrifices in order to grow" (i.e. investments) to some rosy future -- these are tradeoffs necessary for functioning today. Growth is a separate story -- if and when it does happen, the prosperity helps bootstrap the system into safer operating modes, for which we may be thankful.
Even though this mindset is incongruous and inefficient for my present circumstances -- and I'm aware of it -- overcoming childhood programming about it is difficult.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
Of course America has its unique videos too. Every place has its problems, that's what I find interesting about it. I like the unfiltered view into the underlying culture and psychology in these places that only "gore" videos can provide.
You would see people working under a flood light at night, with burlap sacks as you said, as well as manual tools that were sorely inequipped for the work they were doing.
It was almost like it was cheaper to just hire someone to beat concrete for 14 hrs/day with a household hammer, for the duration of their life, than to pay $5,000 for a jackhammer and progress 5X as fast.
Are you sure about that? That would work out to be nearly 10 LPA, which is a good 2-4 lakhs more than what a good electrician would earn in Mumbai, which is a city that is far more expensive to live in than Delhi
The plumber I use is so busy that I have to book him 2-3 days in advance - he’s working on projects all across the city.
There is also a construction boom happening in India right now which has increased demand even more
This is just a small observation that I remember and I wonder if it what you are talking about.
But as expat who lived in PRC and been to India, I know what you mean. Every country, especially larger ones will have enough elites and market for high quality services. Sometimes there's even premium vs west, i.e. PRC in the 90s, you want best western stuff, chances are there's big tariff or extra transaction fees from smuggling. Services especially, experts/expats who offer their rare skills in developing countries will charge premium if anything. And somethings you simply can't get, i.e. wealthy South East Asians going to Singapore for top tier private medical treatment because they don't have enough rich elites to support a tier1 private hospital at home. I know Canadian (with universal coverage) diasphora who wanted to retire like king in SEA but realized they need a few 100k sitting around in case of medical crisis. Then more country develops the more market for high quality goods/services and price start coming down due to more competition addressing the market. Like there's tier3 Chinese cities where you can live like king and still have decent access to high quality goods and services.
The question seems to be what’s an acceptable threshold, why, and who. These aren’t easy questions. They’ve been with us since humans first started forming tribes.
(I said much the same thing as you in an adjacent comment, but it’s worth framing the sentiment in a way that’s not mistaken. Otherwise it’s little more than dogma, whether on one side or the other.)
so during the Mangalore flight landing attempt, the first officer asked to divert to another airport (twice) but the captain refused. doesn't that show the lack of safety concern for captain or lack of repercussions if they made it safely? i bet the first officer would be laughed at if they landed safely and s/he wouldn't even bother complaining about it.
if they don't have the space to install the arresting mechanism, how about installing them and limit the size of the aircraft that land at that airport (if expanding the runway is out of question). i mean any nation that care about human lives would do that.
> Of course, it's also important to avoid criticizing poor people for being poor. What were the alternatives? It would be much safer for each kid to be in their own family SUV, as is common in the US, but this increase in child safety is due to increased wealth, not increased virtue.
the alternative would be to find another rickshaw driver who limits the number of kids to 5. sure, it will be expensive but human lives should have more value than a 100-200Rs/month savings.
I didn't know this, but guessing that something like this happened is precisely why I brought it up. The fix for a broken safety culture in aviation isn't arresting mechanisms so that it's impossible to crash: it's addressing whatever series of events and incentives led to the captain making that decision, whether that means providing extra training, or finding the source of pressure from his superiors to avoid the diversion.
It is probably the case that Indian airline aviation has actually made these changes now. If so, it is a dramatically better intervention than your proposal for an arresting mechanism at one airport. India received the highest grade for airline safety last year.
> the alternative would be to find another rickshaw driver who limits the number of kids to 5. sure, it will be expensive but human lives should have more value than a 100-200Rs/month savings.
Why stop at only that 100-200Rs/month savings? There are probably many other sources of avoidable safety risk in India. What percentage of a poor person's income would you dedicate to more expensive safety improvements?
sure but at the end of the day the decision is mostly made by a single (or multiple) human being(s) who can make honest mistakes or be arrogant (this sounds like what happened in the Mangalore case). in any case, having an arresting mechanism would safe lives. no matter how many hours of additional training is given, they can still make mistakes. even if it doesn't get used in 100,000 uses but if it saves 10 lives on the 100,001th use, it's worth it.
> India received the highest grade for airline safety last year.
do you mind providing some sources for that? afaik there were no airlines accident last year anywhere that resulted in a loss of live.
> Why stop at only that 100-200Rs/month savings? There are probably many other sources of avoidable safety risk in India. What percentage of a poor person's income would you dedicate to more expensive safety improvements?
sure. i'm giving out examples of poor safety. nowhere did i say this is the leading cause of avoidable deaths. this is one of the many i have seen there.
As mentioned here, India's also moving up the ICAO ranking.
To earn a $200/month salary is to earn 16 600 INR/month. As somebody who has lived in Rajasthan (Udaipur for those who are interested), that is an actually reasonable estimate, albeit on the higher side.
But no security guard in Jaipur is earning 10 000 INR/month. Even in Mumbai, one of the most expensive to-live-in cities in India, the security guard would earn less than 25 000 INR/month (unless they happen to work in an especially posh neighbourhood).
And where did you get that 60x number? That would work out to be roughly 1.2 CR INR/month, which would put you in the top 0.08% of all Indians [1]. I can assure you that no "mid career middle management professional" is earning that.
Even if I take your lowest guess, 30x, that is still more money than what almost all mid career professionals would earn in 10 years. I am convinced that you've never set foot in India.
And my cohort didn’t even go to top institutes. My cousins who did go to IITs and IIMs are making that much and more in their 20s.
I’m convinced you haven’t stepped foot in India in years because you don’t know how much salaries for skilled white collar workers have increased in the last 3-4 years.
The numbers don't lie.
You can't be that confidently stupid about math
Do you people even live in India?
Because I do, and every single person in my cohort of 35 year olds is making excess of $60k/year, most doing close to $100k/year even when working at second tier companies.
The FAANG folks are easily making $120k+/year.
Try hiring a skilled developer with 7-10 years of experience and you’ll know what current salaries actually are.
The ones who did go to top institutes and have top companies on their resumes are doing $100k in their 20s.
You have no idea how much salaries have inflated in India, especially in Gurgaon and Bangalore.
Just look at rents to get an idea. Rents in Bangalore have gone up 100% or more in most placed.
That doesn’t happen without massive salary increases.
To give you some context, the median in-hand salary of IIM-A last batch was 33L. These are mostly freshers with at most 2-3 years of work experience, i.e. 25-27 year olds.
You think in 10 years these people wouldn’t have increased their salaries by 35%?
I don’t think people here realize how much salaries have gone up in India, especially in tech, after the pandemic.
now let's imagine what might happen when genetic engineering comes into play. how can you argue about equality when there would be none, not biologically.
i find insects fascinating but I don't want humans to mimic the caste thing. we are though. and we will.
Confused by the downvotes. Are you in favour of caste systems?
I’m talking about metro-specific numbers, especially in Gurgaon/Noida and Bengaluru. The income inequality across a specific narrow band of tech-literate white collar workers and the blue collar workers who serve them.
The numbers don’t lie here either