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Accidents caused by others is a misnomer. If someone swerves into your lane and you rear end them, it's their fault for swerving recklessly, and your fault for not allowing sufficient following distance, and maintaining sufficient vigilance to allow an option other than colliding.
As to one handing, my dad, a retired power company employee told me that The worst thing that can happen when you take a shortcut in a safety process, is to get away with it..then the shortcut BECOMES the process"
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I think that all this is a lot more complicated and I couldn't really agree with your first post. Every accident is not necessarily preventable. Only a relatively small number of important factors are available to us as facts and conditions. There are many things we can't know without somebody advising us, or teaching us, or codifying the issues in text or in procedures. The real world consists of manuals and safety protocols, along with ignorance, willful disregard, and hidden dangers.
I agree with your dad. I fired a journeyman electrician when I found him teaching an apprentice to find out if the circuit was live by using his two fingers as the current path for the test. I didn't hear him say anything about what happens on a hot sweaty day, or if the kid is standing on a wet floor, or his left leg is leaning against something made out of metal and grounded. Those conditions dramatically alter the shortcut of his voltage test.
I had his check brought out to the job that afternoon, and while he was waiting, he sputtered and complained about the inherent safety of his advice because “electricity follows the path of least resistance”.
Well, let me say it again, the idea is wrong, stupid, against the laws of physics and parallel circuits, and the apprentice following his advice would easily find the cruelty and finality of that lesson--and we would have no clue as to why or how it happened to the kid.
Accidents are often caused by others; and accidents are often caused with us as participants. Many times, the circumstances of the moments before the accident can be difficult to trace and find. Someone popping into the lane ahead of me is a part of the general universe of surrounding stupid drivers and I may be checking my side view mirror for doofus 2 while doofus 1 makes his abrupt lane change. Is that my fault? I suggest that my decision point at the moment was dealing with doofus 2 and human reaction time couldn't help me in averting a collision with our primary meatball.
Our world abounds with hidden dangers and a stunning amount of them are conscious and purposeful; the legacy and policies of businesses that are only concerned with their bottom line.
We have the well-established business practices of writing things so that they don't inform; shoveled in as legalese or simply omitted. Those techniques pretty much guarantee that we will be misinformed and ignorant, and everybody knows it--except us.
There are also the hidden dangers of defects in design and manufacture that stay in place for a long time because the companies don't want to affect sales. Sometimes they just don't know, but more often they make decisions like the cost liability of Pinto gas tanks placed against the number of vehicles sold.
Let me take us close to home. Up in Nova Scotia, I was looking for a used truck and answered an ad posted in the co-op grocery. I went to see the truck and the owner was an arborist whose only occupation was clearcutting. We sat in his trailer with a curtain dividing our kitchen section from the other half were his two kids were trying to keep quiet. We talked for quite some time; he didn't really have any choice in trying to explain to me what his life was like right then, and why he had to sell his truck.
He couldn't hold a chainsaw anymore, and the company had switched him to running a machine, but it was harder and harder for him to work. His despair included looking at his immediate future and listening to the sound of those kids behind the curtain.
Did he know? Was there really a point of decision somewhere in all this for him?
I will certainly extend the courtesy to manufacturers of believing that as they found out about the problems, they set about to fix them. But how long did it take? And what was the amount of human proof that was necessary to bring a problem to the level of something that should be solved. (I expect all sorts of spin doctoring and apologists who will take issue with my cynicism and irritated mutterings, so here is a URL for a Google search independent of my concerns.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=chainsaw+vibrations&qscrl=1 )
I'm a blue-collar guy who learned very early as a new father that I needed to stay safe in order to continue to provide for my family. I rather quickly learned that some people were quite happy to injure or kill me to make a buck. I also figured out that my own stupidity, and ignorance, they're two different things, needed to be minimized to protect my family with me as the breadwinner.
Maybe, I'll come back and write some more in saying that those things I saw and learned steered my career into safety design with really high standards and expectations. We live in a world of “that's good enough”, and “so what”, and “here, use your fingers so you don't need to carry no testers.”
A motorcycle can be a matter of choice. Wearing things to keep your body parts attached is another matter of choice. It's not my business, unless you're my friend and I have to visit your family.
The chainsaw is unavoidable for the guy trying to survive in rural Nova Scotia and he slowly becomes evolved collateral damage. Who knew over 30 the years he spent with a saw in his hands? Where do I find his decision point?
Traffic engineers design for the most stupid and lazy drivers. I've spent a lot of my time throwing myself at that brick wall. Who do I complain to?
The banana peel is the infinite number of variables that surround us externally and internally, if you think of plaque and arteries, and we've had those troubles back to the time when we were trying to outrun saber tooth tigers.
I don't really disagree with cerviaborist, but I do think he's closed the door too quickly on where liability and responsibility get placed. If we dismiss or restrict the focus to somebody who should have known better, there's little reason to look further at actual causes. I get the feeling that I would be pleased to be working alongside him and his dad; they would probably do a very good job of guarding my back. But there still is that outside world that are full of dangers that are not preventable and there is a sad percentage of people who will swap a danger for a buck anyday as long as it doesn't happen to them.
At any given point in time, I can review the statements of doctors and lawyers and scientists who absolutely insist that they are the beginning and end of knowledge. They have explanations and excuses that are time-tested, well-worn, and likely eternal.
My google list:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=ch...4346378062276d6
On doc Semmelweis who tried to get doctors to wash the stink of cadavers off their hands before they went in to examine pregnant women. His efforts preceded the presentation of the germ theory.
Buy the books:
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, a 1906 novel that led to the Food and Drug Administration's creation.
Generation of Vipers by Phillip Wylie, a 1942 muck-racker book that I found in my mom's bookcase and scared the crap out of me as a young reader.
Wolfowitz
