One makes a sloppy joe and the other makes a jalopy slow
Read This Earlier Today:
> Yeah. I remember the story of the Ford Pinto. The CEO at the time wanted a car that was sold for less than 2000 dollars and weighed less than 2000 pounds. You know, marketing shit. Under these arbitrary metrics a bunch of departments (that didn't work together, but sort of adversarially in some cases) had to design a car.
> An engineer realized at one point that if someone hit the Pinto just right then one of the mountings on the car would dislodge and ram into the gas tank which would cause a fire. This could be fixed with a 75 cent (in 1970's money) piece of plastic around the mounting. After people talked about how much profit could be had versus the amount they'd have to pay for wrongful death suits, they decided not to put the 75 cent piece of plastic on the mounting.
> If the CEO didn't have these weird, arbitrary metrics, then the people who died from Pinto fires, some 500ish people as well as tons of people who received permanent burn damage likely wouldn't have suffered and/or died either. Could've just sucked it up and made it 2000.75 and 2000 pounds and four ounces from the plastic. But nope, get me my 2000 dollar car under 2000 pounds no matter what.
> I wouldn't say that all of the decision makers are defacto bad people. Some of them are, but a lot are just doing what they need to do to get by. And if you drive something like a car eventually some people are going to be killed no matter what happens. That's just life and it sucks. Nature of the beast. Bad luck. But most of the people who designed the Pinto understood at some point that it was going to kill people due to a design flaw and that those people who got into an accident were going to burn to death. Men, women, children, in the flames.
> So some people in some department ran the numbers and said it was likely that it would kill X amount of people and that it would cost Y dollars and that Z profit was high enough to be worth it. What they did was think about how many people would die in this pool of Pinto buyers and realized that this pool was riskier than normal because people would die due to the stupid, arbitrary decision made by a shitbag CEO. Some people would normally die because they're unlucky or careless. Normal human shit. But they purposefully increased the risk pool on purpose and that risk was "people are going to fucking burn to death because of this decision". And they just signed off on in because profit overrides conventio
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