I think we're looking at Mr. Iacocca with some rose-tinted glasses. He sought government bailouts, fought against requiring seatbelts in cars (because a few dollars worth of nylon would "ruin" his margins), and also fought against environmental standards, particularly requiring catalytic converters (to be fair, catalytic converters probably did ruin his margins).
He is definitely an icon, but do not forget that he was a cutthroat businessman that would do anything to make sure his businessed thrived.
That link isn't very fair, in 1956, he pushed ford to roll out safety as a sales point, they got plowed over by GM that year, and determined rightly, that safety doesn't sell. He was in favor of seat belts, opposed to airbags (I still think airbags have a poor rate of return - dollars for lives saved).
Please don't do that. Although airbags are much less controversial now than when they were first introduced, there is still legitimate debate about cost vs benefit, especially given that airbags themselves are quite capable of causing injury.
No, the debate is fine of course. But you framed your question as an oblique attack, implying some sort of ethical deficiency on the part of the parent. It presumes the least charitable interpretation of Aloha's comment -- that they are doing nothing more than comparing lives to dollars using a binary criteria.
In reality, the debate over mandating safety technology is nuanced and not at all straightforward. Airbags are a great example. Yes they save a lot of lives, no question. But they're also explosive devices aimed at your head from two feet away, which can easily add tens of thousands of dollars to your hospital bill. Ask all the folks whose wrists are broken by airbags that deploy in otherwise relatively minor fender benders. Never mind the fact that airbags are a lethal threat to small or frail people like kids and the elderly and disabled.
Airbags themselves are quite expensive. They add thousands of dollars to the purchase price of a new car, and they cost thousands of dollars to replace, if their deployment didn't cause your insurance company to total your car, which it frequently does.
I keep only liability insurance on my car, because that's what I can afford, but that also means I probably can't afford to fix my car even after a minor accident if the airbags deploy. I appreciate the airbags' protection in the event of a catastrophic wreck, but I also live in just a little bit of fear of them because they can conceivably total my car and break my arms if I get rear-ended. It happens often enough that there are attorneys who have built careers on airbag lawsuits.
So yeah, there's lots of room for argument here, and no surprise that there are strong feelings about it. And it also shouldn't surprise you that passive-aggressive comments to the tune of, "So exactly how much is a life worth to you?" might get you frowned at a little.
It was a valid question to the statement. He's saying the costs are too high for the safety they provide. Obviously this is categorically false on its face, considering car companies wouldn't use them if they didn't save lives.
Secondly, I welcome a debate, instead all I got, before this last fine post, was you asking me to "please stop." and little else added to the conversation that isn't already obvious. My statement may have been a loaded question, but it was certainly not a passive aggressive statement on the order of politely being asked to sod off.
Car companies use then because they are mandated to do so - when they were offered an an optional thing in the early to mid-70's virtually no one bought them.
Airbags were mandated because not enough people wore seatbelts.
I'm not saying airbags are worthless, they're not - they work, but is the reduced injury in most cases worth the cost? I don't know - when worn with a Seat Belt, Airbags don't generally save lives, but they reduce injury level - the core issue is, we pass regulations with the idea that everything we do ought to be perfectly safe.
A good example is backup cameras, a backup camera adds somewhere between 250 and 1000 dollars of cost to a car, yet only about 200 people or so a year are killed in such a way that they might have been prevented by backup cameras. We sell 17 million cars a year or so every year, which means, the added cost of backup cameras is somewhere between 4.25 and 17 million dollars a year - meaning assuming the regulation 100% effective, we spend 21,250 to 85,000 dollars per death prevented - most of which could be prevented if the operator of the vehicle just did a walk around before pulling out of a parking space. Is that 17 million a year well spent? Airbags lead to a similar set of questions, is the cost injuries prevented enough to offset the cost of the airbags?
I don't know, I would suggest we should be asking these questions, rather than just scream 'for the children' and put another rule in place - because in the end all of these rules add a cumulative cost - and the poor pay it first. Bear in mind, I'm not suggesting we get rid of all emissions and safety standards for everything, I'd just like some more choices in what I find acceptable for my personal risk level - I, for example, might not buy a car with 16 airbags or however many you can get now - I might chose to only buy an option with two airbags, or none at all (one of my cars is without airbags). Similarly I might chose a backup camera as an option, because it will save me body damage when backing in or out of parking spaces - but I should still get that choice.
You've broken the site guidelines in quite a few comments today. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in its intended spirit? We'd be grateful.
I'll concede your point and try to be more pleasant, but you definitely need to put a stop to these passive aggressive commentators. May I suggest a new rule to that effect?
In your original comment you never mention bank bailouts. A far more appropriate comparison would be the more recent bailouts of US automakers in which the TARP loans were all repaid. Granted, the partial ownership of the companies that the government took on during the bailout resulted in a loss- but I'm not sure if it would have been more appropriate for the government to hold the stock until it recovered.
TARP was primarily about the banks, but the money authorized was expanded to cover automakers as well. The government made a profit on it overall, and both the bank and auto parts were profitable.
The problem with TARP was the government should have got a lot more equity in return for what it provided (for example, Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffett also invested, and got better terms, but the government's impact was even greater, and should have gotten as good terms, if not even better ones than Buffett and Goldman).
GM bondholders, many of them retirees, were also screwed. The govt overrode traditional bondholder priority in restructuring, in favor of the union. This was wrong.
I think the comparison to bank bailouts is fair: in his autobiography, Iacocca complained that he had to go to Congress to get a billion dollar loan, but the Federal Reserve routinely loaned similar amounts to banks (although I don’t know how well he understood banking, so his definition of loans to banks may have been unfair).
The bailout that Iacocca oversaw didn't cost taxpayers anything. Those were loan guarantees; the federal gov't essentially co-signed a loan from Manufacturers Hanover (now JPMorgan-Chase). At no time was public money given, only risked if the loan defaulted.
He is definitely an icon, but do not forget that he was a cutthroat businessman that would do anything to make sure his businessed thrived.
https://nader.org/1979/10/25/iacoccas-gw-commencement-speech...