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Posted by: crossbowman 05/01/2008, 00:53:29  (About author)
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He has a copy of the film from a training class he attended. It's rather horrifying when you see it and consider the aftermath. It opens inside the venue, filming the band and the crowd watching them. The fireworks trigger - big sparkler thingies, nothing you'd ever imagine could do something like that - then the black foamed wall behind the band catches fire, and the fire spreads like someone had spread gasoline all over the wall. The camera crew retreats, backing out, and continues filming outside. It's only a matter of a few short minutes from the point the fireworks are lit to the point fire is shooting through the roof and out the doors and windows, and you realize on seeing that that most of the people you just saw five minutes ago on the film are still inside there and now very dead. The more complex our technology becomes, the more complex and interwoven our economy becomes, the greater the impact that individual stupidity can have and the greater the need for rules and rules enforcement. There is a logical point at which one declares that the individual must bear responsibility for his own survival and Darwin take the fool, but at the point at which the survival of a hundred innocent souls within the blast range of a propane truck depends on that driver's good sense and willingness to stop for the night rather than drive fatigued, then there must be some method of ensuring at the very least that the driver in question knew the risks before he took them. If nothing else, consider a cost-benefit analysis. When the cost of not doing something and enduring the results is greater than the cost of government interference, then logic clearly supports the government interference. When it ceases to cost more, withdraw the government interference. We have an interesting case-in-point in New Mexico. For decades, we've had TB-testing requirements among our health-care employers to help stem the spread of TB by ensuring their employees were free of the disease. Now the disease is so rare in this state that the cost of testing and dealing with the occasional false positives is far greater than the cost of actually dealing with the few exposures that occur, so we eliminated the requirement and instead set up a system where doctors report the cases they encounter and then Epidemiology goes out to find out who might have been exposed and treat them. "Robbins’s claim fails because the Hobbs Act does not apply when the National Government is the intended beneficiary of the allegedly extortionate acts." WILKIE ET AL. v. ROBBINS. David H. Souter, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
with John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy,
Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito concurring. |
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