Safety Matters

[alwaysinjured]

You mean a bit like Churchill then in the thirties when he was virtually alone in warning of the German arms build up

Churchills "air parity lost" is one of my favourite speeches - the monologue from "When the situation was manageable it was neglected" is so true of almost all human endeavour to wait for the horse to bolt before closing the stable door. Most burglar alarms are sold the week AFTER a burglary...

People concerned with safety in all walks of life are always accused of scare mongering.

One of the worst recent examples went almost unnoticed.
One of the big bank compliance directors was essentially fired (made so uncomfortable he left)not long before the massive bank crash, for warning of the perils of overgearing, undercapitalization, leveraged derivatives , the unaffordable deals given to sub prime applicants and so on: the (non banking qualified) executive telling him he was just scaremongering for effect: stating publicly that the bank had safe trading methods - and that he was off message the profitable practises. He was also the only qualified banker in that case but outvoted. That alas is the way corporate structures work. Lay majorities often outvote specialists then expect them to toe the line. The rest of course is history costing the tax payer billions. My question on all that is how did Mervyn King keep his job when asleep at the wheel of it all?

At a political level now, there is hopeless denial of the scale of the problem caused by excessive public sector pensions, and the consequence of the massive increase in the cost of providing them because the employees have "broken the economics of the deal" by living decades longer, still expecting the same payout at a time when annuity rates have plummeted, and still expecting to retire early.
No government has had the political will to act in slashing those pensions.

As moneyweek point if the cost of those pensions is liquidated into the national debt, the scale of it is way beyond the possibility of austerity measures to prevent it spiralling out of control. Greece a deja vu of the inevitable consequence. Yet the teachers strike regardless -Ostrich syndrome a fact of life, even amongst the supposedly intelligent.

The overstretching of chinese banks, the gradient of increase of US debt, let alone its unprecedented size,and the hopeless state of western economies such as ours , let alone what happens when interest rates twitch up, herald an economic disaster that will make the last one seem like a sniffle of a cold compared to the imminent pneumonia. Warning signs are never heeded.

In another context - We seem to want to wait for the lights to go out before recognise that alternative energy can never fill the void left by fossil fuels, and that nuclear for the present is the only realistic course - fusion rather than fission the only real solution. Governments are always unwilling to act till long after action can be effective.

Lawyers in eternity, have discovered it is far more profitable to trade on the misfortune of people with hindsight wisdom, either blaming or defending that blame, than it ever is to get involved in an ounce of prevention or caution. Disgraceful but true none the less.

So yes, Churchill said it all.

I particularly like his comment on the americans."you can always rely on the US to do the right thing, AFTER they have tried everything else!"