But if the Army has an official value for a soldier's life that is only $1m for a Private First Class (value is hypothetical here), and the EPA has a value of $6.9m, that matters. That means that it's financially better for a person's family for them to die in something the EPA is in charge of... and that a death in a chemical spill is "more valuable" than a death in Iraq.
While I don't know if the EPA uses the same meaning for the official value of a human life as I was taught, the value as I understand it has nothing to do with compensation after death.
What I was taught (industrial health and safety class, chemical engineering program) is that for every given safety feature there is an installation and maintenance cost, and there is the probable number of lives saved.
If a safety feature will cost $10,000 to install and has a probability of preventing 100 serious injuries or deaths each year, it is worth installing. $100/person in the first year.
If a safety feature will cost $10,000,000 to install and has a probability of preventing 1 serious injury or death - the EPA would not require it, because it is more than the $6.9M they have selected as the value of a human life. If that same feature has a probability of saving 5 lives ($2M/person), then an organization that values a human life at $6.9M would install it, but an organization that values a human life at $1M would not.
JESR @ 16:
The structure of the music industry is what's led concert tickets to three-figure prices; so few musicians realize much income through sale of recordings that concert income and sale of licensed objects
That would be exactly my point. It's profitable for the music publishers and distributors.
Is the music industry such a paragon of well-run profitability for all that publishing needs to emulate it?
Well, it's profitable for the music publishers and distributors...
illiterature? (courtesy of my husband)
Hi all,
Just taking a suggestion from the story's suggestions for spreading the word: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/5/25/02548/8796
Cheers
-janra
adamsj: Reason magazine (notoriously right-wing) has an excellent article about this and other disasters.
http://www.reason.com/links/links090705.shtml
I have been known to visit writer's forums on occasion (ok, I've been trying to start my own... but never mind that) and so many times, the subject of the odds of getting your first novel published comes up.
"There are hundreds, maybe thousands of stories that land in the slush pile every day," they cry, "so my precious gem has only a 1 in (insert large number of your choice) chance of getting published!"
And I re-read slushkiller and smile to myself. If you can actually write something readable, the chances are much better than that, because you won't be in the early part of that list - and if you can't, your chances are basically zero. This isn't a coin toss...
An instructional tool...
I wonder if any instructor would be cruel enough to present it without saying that it's deliberately bad - and if any student would be brave enough to say that it's terrible.
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