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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (78234)	10/17/2004 1:11:39 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793843

I agree that the risk is relatively small in general But that misses the point, again. You can do three sorts of calculations. One, is a personal calculation. You can analyze your personal probability of being killed by an exploding Coke bottle. The risk is very small, and you don't worry about it. Two, is an industrial calculation. You know that if you make x number of Coke bottles, y Coke bottles will be defective and explode. After your first taste of what a jury thinks about that, you weigh the costs of the inevitable damages against the costs of mitigating the damages. You've priced the decision. Third, there's a madman planting exploding bottles in the Coke bottling plant. You don't know the frequency or intensity of the potential mad bottle bomber bombings. You don't sit around justifying not doing anything about the mad bomber because the individual risk per capita is slight. You stop the bomber, period. Derek

To: Ilaine who wrote (78234)	10/17/2004 7:44:54 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793843

Rain will wash away and wind will blow away most of the radioactive dust over time. That time may be measured in tens of thousands of years. And a dirty bomb is not the only nuclear threat. You already mentioned larger bombs. And there are bigger threats than that. If Three-Mile Island became a Chernobyl and the winds were normal southwesterlies, much of PA, NJ, NYC and Connecticut would be uninhabitable forever. We don't hear about the tens of thousands of square miles rendered uninhabitable by Chernobyl because they are located in the sparsely populated Ukraine. Washington DC is surrounded by large nuclear facilities.