Scientist Forced To Remove Earthquake Prediction 485
Hugh Pickens writes to mention that Italian scientist Giampaolo Giuliani, a researcher at the National Physical Laboratory of Gran Sasso, recently gave warning about an earthquake that was to happen on March 29th of this year near L'Aquilla. Based on radon gas emissions and a series of observed tremors he tried to convince residents to evacuate, drawing much criticism from the city's mayor and others. Giuliani was forced to take down warnings he had posted on the internet. The researcher had said that a 'disastrous' earthquake would strike on March 29, but when it didn't, Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, last week officially denounced Giuliani in court for false alarm. 'These imbeciles enjoy spreading false news,' Bertalaso was quoted as saying. 'Everyone knows that you can't predict earthquakes.' Giuliani, it turns out, was partially right. A much smaller seismic shift struck on the day he said it would, with the truly disastrous one arriving just one week later. 'Someone owes me an apology,' said Giuliani, who is also a resident of L'Aquila. 'The situation here is dramatic. I am devastated, but also angry.'"
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
My immediate reaction is to say, "Ha! Science, bitches: It works!" and laugh at the officials who denounced the prediction. However, the very fact that the prediction was *so* precise, saying that the devastation would strike on a certain day, seems particularly irresponsible.
My thoughts go to those hurt in this incident. As the official says, though, it's not a habit to plan for stuff like this---perhaps it should become so.
Still (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone have data on how many truly false predictions have been made? Because one out of X might not be enough to condemn the politicos and glorify the scientist. Clearly these things do need to be managed carefully.
Off by a week? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on... (Score:5, Insightful)
If indeed, it is "impossible to predict earthquakes, it seems to me that getting a minor quake on-the-day of prediction, and the major quake hitting a week later is pretty much as good as could possibly have been expected.
Now if all he did was guess, it'd be a whole different ball-game, but as far as I remember, doing this "science" thingy involves recognising a problem, taking measurements, postulating a theory to fit those measurements, and (sadly, in this case) testing that theory against further predictions it made. Seems like he followed the rule-book on that one...
Part of the problem, of course, is that people (including, one might say *especially*, elected officals) aren't good at assessing risk. They consider risk to be the consequences of an event, whereas really it's the consequences of an event multiplied by the probability of that event. It's why we look out for "global killer" meteorites, even though they are incredibly unlikely. The risk inherent in such a strike makes it worthwhile to keep putting in the effort at detecting them. It's easiest to illustrate when the fate of the whole world lies in balance, but the principle remains the same even for localised disasters such as this one...
So often, it comes down to better education being the key to good decision-making. Why is it that we let people who only want to run for power take on the mantle of power over us ? I recall a Sci-Fi story where on election, all a (wo)man's worldly goods were forcibly sold, and the cash amount held in trust. Once the successor appeared, the departing official was given access to his/her trust fund again - the implication being that you had to do well by everyone else before you could do well for yourself. I'm not suggesting this is workable, but perhaps an element of personal stake might be a useful thing for a politician to have... Perhaps then they'd listen to the scientist, and not just go on gut instinct...
Simon.
regardless of his science credentials (Score:5, Insightful)
this man can pretty much go to any city on the planet right now, make an excitable announcement, and cause a mass exdodus
that's a rather interesting gift
Re:How can... (Score:5, Insightful)
the government force you to take down posts on the internet? I know little of the Italian legal system, but even if he was pretending to be an expert, wouldn't that fall under some form of freedom of speech? We have pseudo-experts on /. all the time, wouldn't this fall under a similar "just ignore him" sentiment?
Yelling fire in a crowded theater.
Crying earthquake in a volcanically active region.
I think the issue isn't that he posted predictions, but that he called for evactuations.
Stupid scientists! (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare you be inaccurate in your warning about the timing of a natural disaster? You caused me to be outraged and dismissive on record in the media! Now people think I'm a douchebag, and it's all your fault!
Must be a European thing. I'm sure nothing like that could ever happen here in the good ol' US of A.
Give me a break (Score:2, Insightful)
It's pretty clear that no one owes this guy an apology (from the article)
Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after Giuliani predicted the quake was about to strike.
Yes, he predicted that a major earthquake would happen. But he didn't predict when with enough certainty or accuracy to make his prediction useful.
[Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute] said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes. "We have earthquakes, but then we forget and do nothing. It's not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A broken watch is right twice a day (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who can claim "horologist" as an official title earns my respect.
Re:cry wolf (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, if a police officer was stopped from preventing some catastrophe, and also humiliated in the process, how do you think that officer would feel?
Hell, instead of a police officer, how about any person at all?
Re:Give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, given that the economic and logistical viability of moving a large number of people out of their homes and to somewhere else plummets after just a few days, his prediction wasn't good enough for use; but equating him with the boy who cried wolf(who, you'll remember, was deliberately dishonest, not merely wrong) is a bit much.
Unless the quality of earthquake prediction gets considerably better, the punchline is that the money is better spent on decent architects and engineers. Building structures that won't collapse and crush everybody inside isn't trivial; but it is doable now, which makes it a better investment.
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
You cannot evacuate cities for long periods just to find out that it was a false alarm.
Perhaps not, but tell that to people who lost loved ones in the earthquake.
my tea leaves tell me that your town is going to be destroyed by an earthquake next week. You better evacuate. If you don't, then you'll be responsible for telling the people who lost loved ones that you ignored my dire warnings.
Re:A broken watch is right twice a day (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A broken watch is right twice a day (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:earth sciences, who needs them? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with calling something "not part of economic stimulus" is: All spending is stimulus.
Volcano monitoring, which is part of the money in question, gives money to consumers (workers who are paid) to place and monitor equipment which is purchased (money to sales) from a manufacturer (money to manufacturing company and workers therein).
"spending money", by definition, "stimulates spending" (as it *is* spending)
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem here is saying ludicrous things like "It will happen on March 29th". That's simply trying to get one's name in the paper, so to speak. A more rational approach, if the underlying science fits (and I don't think seismology or vulcanology is at the point where you can say anything definite like this) is to say "Look, I'm getting some very troubling readings here that suggest that a major earthquake is imminent."
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like the guy kinda went about it the wrong way. He should have just had a note or a webpage up with his current data and predictions with chance of an event happening on any given day. Folks would treat it sort of like a weather forecast.
Heck, when it comes to weather, we like to look at the live radar maps and make our own decisions. Hey it's going to be raining for the next hour or two... ;) We aren't quiet there for earthquakes, yet.
Re:earth sciences, who needs them? (Score:4, Insightful)
It appears that Jindal was right. You stated yourself that the program is working just fine without additional funding.
I believe this was exactly the sort of thinking that caused NASA to languish, and then continue to languish when the thinking became "More money? Where's the results from that standard funding we've been giving you every year? You were able to do everything just fine with less money in the 60's, so why not now?"
I'm sorry if I seem like an economic heathen for hoping that this sort of thing doesn't happen to something like volcano monitoring.
Re:Bad Science (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell it to the people who lose loved ones to the panic caused by the false alarms. Heck, even if the alarm was real, people will panic like Chicken Little.
Re:Give me a break (Score:3, Insightful)
would you also leave your job? would you close the hospital and all the schools for a month as well? and what if, after a month, there hasn't been any earthquake? do you keep the schools & hospitals closed, would you stay away from home?
in this case, the scientist made his prediction for a specific day. According to the article the people of the town were warned, and the earthquake didn't happen.
He was close, kudos to him, but not close enough.
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would have been met with, at best, polite disinterest. So, in practical terms, the result would have been the same.
Re:Bad Science (Score:4, Insightful)
If by "tea leaves" you mean "recorded radon emissions from seismically active areas in the city" then I'm outta here...
Are you saying science and technology is nothing more than tea leaves? The computer you typed your post on...is it made of tea leaves?
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
Weak analogy. Getting within a few weeks of correct on an event that occurs irregularly on the scale of decades to centuries seems pretty good to me.
The funny part is, he was *immediately* labeled an imbecile when the earthquake was late.
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite so. What if they HAD left on the predicted date. There was a small tremor. The destructive earthquake didn't happen for another week.
Presumably, it's entirely possible that even being away for a week could have helped them out. One of the bigger ways to end up dead in an earthquake is to be in a large collapsing building and schools and such might have been closed or still in the process of reopening a week later.
That said, the returning people could have been completely caught off guard after returning from what they would consider a false alarm.
I have to say that I'm entirely with the people who were saying that the best method, by far, for dealing with an earthquake like this is to make sure you are in buildings that can take an earthquake. There's really no better way available to ensure that you are never caught by surprise.
They may well owe this guy an apology, after all he did predict it. On the other hand, I'm not entirely clear on whether it would have made things better or worse if they had done what he said to do at the time that he told them to do it.
Re:Bad Science (Score:1, Insightful)
You're seriously equating tea leaves with radon gas emissions and previously observed tremors? Methinks the latter are a *tad* more scientific than tea leaves.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Had the authorities simply disagreed with him, they would have been wholly in the right. As you say, earthquake prediction is a pretty fuzzy art at present, and evacuations of any nontrivial length are seriously impractical. If they had just said "We disagree with his conclusions, think there is no reason for concern, and recommend taking no action, other than usual precautions." then that would have been fine.
The trouble is, they threatened a scientist, who was delivering(so far as we know) a good faith warning based on his best estimates of the situation, with punishment and smears for doing so. That is what is excessive. You don't have to act on what just anybody says; but you'd better have a damn good reason for using state power to prevent them from saying it.
Well, how accurate would he be in general? (Score:3, Insightful)
Science demands more than a single data point of "within a week". He needs to get more data points so we determine whether he was just lucky or whether his predictions have some real value.
Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
If you throw out predictions left and right, well sooner or later you may get lucky. That doesn't mean you are actually any good at predicting. The predictive value of a model doesn't come from getting a single answer right or near right, it comes from accurately modeling reality. That means having a track record of predicting events, and not making predictions when there are no events.
As an extreme example I could make a computer program that predicts a major earthquake every single day. You input a day, it says "Major quake will happen." Well, that program would occasionally be right. Any time an earthquake happened I could claim my software predicted it. However that wouldn't me meaningful, in the face of the massive number of false positives, the thousands upon thousands of days where it was wrong.
So ya, I need to see some real data that shows that his software had a reasonable prediction rate, not just that he happened to get lucky this time.
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the quality of earthquake prediction gets considerably better, the punchline is that the money is better spent on decent architects and engineers. Building structures that won't collapse and crush everybody inside isn't trivial; but it is doable now, which makes it a better investment.
Add disaster recovery to that list. When you can't predict a disaster, you make sure you'll be handle it efficiently after the fact.
Also, investing in disaster recovery is great because it helps you against a lot of different threats. Mass terrorism, earthquake, etc. all involve more or less the same logistical considerations about moving lots of people/food/water/medicine quickly.
Re:earth sciences, who needs them? (Score:5, Insightful)
>I'm a freaking die hard democrat and even I can admit that there is a huge difference between those two things.
There isnt. Any stimulus bill is a really spending bill to keep people employed. For instance, the people doing the monitoring are buying supplies from my company that keeps me and others employed. They might use services from my friend's company. That money isnt destroyed, it goes into the economy in some fashion.
Jindal is a anti-science loon. The GOP is an anti-intellectual party and they often make jabs at spending in the sciences. Its pathetic.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
A more scientific conclusion would have been to use error bars in his prediction; "There is a 95% chance that an earthquake on this date, and a 99% that it will occur within seven days after this date".
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
If the town had evacuated on the day of his prediction, nothing would have happened, and they would have returned to get hit the week after anyway.
Re:A broken watch is right twice a day (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that prove he wasn't so sure about his own results then?
If he was sure there was going to be an earthquake, then he'd put out the warning, get arrested, and be vindicated when the earthquake hit as he predicted.
Re:Bad Science (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think predictions based on tea leaves are equivalent to predictions based on the best science available (albeit imperfect), then you are part of the problem. The whole *point* is that we should listen to scientists and not whackjobs like tea leaf readers and government bureaucrats, because even though the current science not perfect, there *is nothing better*. I absolutely guarantee you that scientists are going to give you better, more accurate, more often earthquake predictions than anyone and anything else in our entire known universe. You don't seem to get this simple fact, which puts you in the same camp as the anti-science politicians here.
Re:Give me a break (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A broken watch is right twice a day (Score:2, Insightful)
A broken watch is right twice a day, that does not make it a scientist.
I always hated that expression, a completely broken watch may be right twice a day, but a slightly slow one may only be actually right once a decade. Even so, I'd rather have the slightly slow one than the completely broken one.
Re:Bad Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
This story has been getting a lot of press in the news along the lines of "stupid politicians try to silence brave scientist," but seriously, what would YOU have done if you were those politicians?
Called some geologists and gotten a second opinion. He had specific evidence and claims that were open to scrutiny.
Re:Mistake in repoting the earthquake correctly. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Over predicting (Score:3, Insightful)
One should not lambaste officials without looking at the scientist's track-record. I have yet to see a single item suggesting that he had a serious track-record of predicting with any reasonable level of accuracy the time, place and magnitude of an event as well as "safe" periods.
Fortunately that's OK, as we have also yet to see a single item suggesting government officials are any different ;}
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, he might of been a 'week' off, but yeah, a more in depth study of his accuracy needs to be done - damage and lives avoided if he's right, the expense if he's wrong, adjusted by his accuracy.
In order for it to be worth it, I'd say his false-positive rate needs to be less than 50%.
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is like Journalism. It can be done by anybody; there may be a distinction between professional and amateur, but science needs no particular certification, license, or accreditation.
Re:earth sciences, who needs them? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder why all the rednecks aren't having major issues from cognitive dissonance due to the wonderboy of the "New Republican" Party being an immigrant (or the son of one, I don't know where he was born)?
Probably because all the "rednecks" are more open-minded and tolerant than you apparently are.
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dear citizens, it has come to our attention that there may be a large-scale earthquake in the near future. While no prediction mechanism is 100%, you should always be prepared. Please review your plan, make sure you have a first aid kit, bottled water, food, blankets, clothes, a radio, batteries, medicine."
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
His problem is that people are just smart enough to go "You can't possibly know exactly when this is going to happen." And it's the truth, he couldn't possibly know the exact date, the science just isn't that good. What one can know is, with a certain degree of probability, that an event could be about to occur. Whether it's an increase in certain gas emissions from a volcano suggesting an eruption, or an increase in smaller earthquakes suggesting pressure build-up at a fault that could lead to an earthquake, you can only speak in probabilities.
It's a tough call for any government. Even where the seismologists are saying "Hey, I think there's something big time bad gonna happen", there's always the possibility that the activity will die down. Sadly, public officials want certainty, but science usually can only deliver statistical likelihoods.
Re:Bad Science (Score:3, Insightful)
The call to evacuate was stupid, I agree.
However it is regrettable that the authorities decided to dismiss the warning out of hand. They could have dusted off their emergency plans, checked the inventories of bottled water and blankets, done some drills, done some public education on how to save yourself in an earthquake, etc. That could all be done without starting a public panic, and would have been an appropriate, and responsible, way of addressing the warning.
Perhaps no public official was actually negligent in their duties, but there was certainly a lot of room for a more prudent response than attempting to discredit the warning.
Re:Bad Science (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm disgusted by this kind of charlatans.
Personally I am disgusted that nobody thought to check the structure of buildings in an earthquake prone area.
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
I really hate this idea that the individual overrides the social, it's a very narrow minded view that causes no end of grief. Sure, we would like to believe we're all unique and special, but it's just not true. We're part of a bigger "machine", just cogs. Sure, we can have individual ideas and attitudes, but we aren't here to merely satisfy our own individual wants. If that's the case we'd be solitary creatures.
The problem with this that has cropped up again and again throughout history is that when humans attempt to place the society's needs over the individual as an ethos of governance, individual ideas and attitudes are, and must be, suppressed.
The more emphasis placed on society's wants and needs over the individual, the more thorough and brutal the repression, indeed oppression, of individual ideas and attitudes. Especially when it comes to criticism of the society's leaders and their laws.
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual. It's been proven repeatedly throughout history up to the present day that it causes no end of grief including genocide, wars of aggression, and brutal oppression.
A healthy society and its' governance should impact as little as possible on individual freedoms, ideas, and attitudes.
"That government is best that governs least."-Thomas Paine
Sadly, we have forgotten Thomas Paine and are the worse for it.
Strat
Re:Bad Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct, but you could update your emergency kit, stock up slightly on water and food, make sure your car has a full tank of gas, and run some refresher fire/earthquake drills. On a larger scale, the government could pre-position medical supplies, communications equipment, vehicles, and staff.
In other words, depending on the perceived accuracy of the alarm, you have a range of options that cost various amounts of money. An earthquake warning with a week's error can already save lives for just minimal cost.
Re:Over predicting (Score:5, Insightful)
As to the charge of "silenced", I'll wait and see what that really means.
The first articles specifically states that he was "forced to remove warnings from the internet". He was reported to the police & dragged into court.
Personally, I would count that as having been silenced.
Re:cry wolf (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you can't predict earthquakes with enough precision to move populations out of risk areas, you still can raise emergency preparation. A lot of damage can be prevented if you can cut power and gas lines quickly enough and have emergency personnel from nearby locations on heightened alert and hospitals fully supplied for disasters. Many of those supplies have lng shelf lives and can be taken from emergency to emergency.
Scientists - What do they know? (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news many still deny global warming despite what these so-called 'scientists' are telling us.
Sigh.
Re:cry wolf (Score:1, Insightful)
Here is another predictive system:
If somebody makes a barely relevent post with libertarian leanings, 5 mod points will occur.
Re:cry wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's OK if someone poisons your water by pouring toxic waste into the river (to save a few bucks), thereby forcing the entire populace to import their water / install expensive systems to clean it up (thousands of people multiplied by much more than you saved) ???
So it's OK if you hire armed gun-men and snipers (because you have the money) to dominate a good fishing river and place gill-nets across the river to catch 100% of the fish for personal profit even if it destroys that resource forever ???
So it's OK if your burn down the next 10 houses around you because you didn't want to have trash handled properly and you decided to put up a home-built incinerator that let fly-ash go uncontrolled.... too bad that they didn't leave their yard as bare dirt and chop down their trees for your convenience ???
Sorry, but the only 'repression' here is _NOT_ having (at least some) areas where society outweighs the individual. I can't believe your at +5 for that drivel.
Re:cry wolf (Score:3, Insightful)
I really hate this idea that society outweighs the individual.
So it's OK if someone poisons your water by pouring toxic waste into the river (to save a few bucks), thereby forcing the entire populace to import their water / install expensive systems to clean it up (thousands of people multiplied by much more than you saved) ???
So it's OK if you hire armed gun-men and snipers (because you have the money) to dominate a good fishing river and place gill-nets across the river to catch 100% of the fish for personal profit even if it destroys that resource forever ???
So it's OK if your burn down the next 10 houses around you because you didn't want to have trash handled properly and you decided to put up a home-built incinerator that let fly-ash go uncontrolled.... too bad that they didn't leave their yard as bare dirt and chop down their trees for your convenience ???
Sorry, but the only 'repression' here is _NOT_ having (at least some) areas where society outweighs the individual. I can't believe your at +5 for that drivel.
Look, nobody is saying there doesn't need to be rules. Those rules however need to be the absolute minimum needed for society to function in order for individuals to have freedom.
When a society gets to the point where there are so many laws, rules, regulations, codes, etc etc, on and on, to the point where no human can possibly live a normal life without being in violation of something, usually multiple-somethings, or when a government punishes its' citizens for voicing dissent, or uses its' punitive powers (criminal, financial, or otherwise) to do social engineering in an attempt to change peoples' beliefs and behaviors to what *it* considers "acceptable", then that's much, much too far and that government has far, far too much power.
That was the whole premise for the structure of the US government originally. Just enough short of anarchy to maintain order and a functioning nation, nothing more. This is what Thomas Paine meant with that quote in my previous post. *That* is what the US has forgotten.
That is why we in the US have been steadily losing our freedoms for a long time. That is 95% (or more) of the reason for the troubles in the US we see today. That is why it will only get worse as time goes on unless there are radical changes in how the government works and how & what the citizens think about and expect from government.
The more a government can provide, the more it can take away. The more it protects, the more it can destroy. It is up to the people. They have been conditioned and dumbed-down, their abilities for independent critical thinking dulled, so as to expect all things from government so therefor government now has the power to take all things away.
The more power a government is given to do "good things", the more power it has to do bad. This is not not right-left, liberal-conservative, or any other political credo. It's just the way governments work because they are ultimately run by flawed, imperfect people.
Strat
Re:false alarm your butt (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. I know tragedy inspires emotion in people, but you take it to the next level and completely shut down any part of your brain that wasn't formed as a small child throwing toys out of your pram. You're pure reaction huh, no thought behind it at all. Voi idiota.
Scientific progress (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how scientific progress works. The real geniuses are usually thought of as imbeciles.
Of course, the imbeciles are also thought of as imbeciles, and it's often hard to differentiate the two. :3
Re:Still (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, this is Italy. An inspector finding structural problems with a building is just asking for a donation.
Corruption is rampant and institutionalized in Italy, just look at their complete and utter failure to solve the garbage problem round Palermo.
Re:cry wolf (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a fine beginning, and I don't think there are many people who disagree with it.
The problem is when you take it too far. Then you get much stranger laws, such as "protecting the institution of marriage", making it illegal to have homosexual sex, prohibition, criminalization of victimless crimes, and calls for anybody acting "suspiciously" to be reported.
Those things don't really favor society. It doesn't benefit society as a whole when laws tell you to look at an amateur chemist as a new unabomber in the making. It does however benefit some paranoid politician who will get credit for passing laws that are completely counterproductive to society.
And that's the real problem. Too far down that road it's not longer really for society's benefit. It's all full things done for the carreer of politicians under the guise of benefit for the society. And unfortunately many of the society's members can't look far ahead enough to see what they're getting into.
Re:cry wolf (Score:4, Insightful)
You forget the biggest reason: specialization. Individuals can't be experts in everything, and there are far too many subtle things to cheat on that even an expert might not notice. These things can cause disproportionate harm down the road. Rules are one way to try to avoid having people cheated on something in which they aren't expert. Look where trusting in too loosely policed financial experts got us.
It's not always The Government making these rules. One example is the Underwriter's Laboratories. The UL was started by insurance companies seeking to reduce the damages they paid thanks to products with obvious defects. Would a manufacturer knowingly choose an option that was far more dangerous, if it saved them a few pennies up front? Especially if the consequences wouldn't show up for some years, and if they do, could probably be blamed on the buyers? Some would! A gas appliance could do all kinds of nasty things if poorly designed. Might shoot flames out and ignite the house. Might leak gas or combustion byproducts and poison and suffocate everyone inside. And there are all kinds of rules concerning electrical appliances, so they don't spontaneously short out and start a fire.
And buildings? Tons of codes so that when the contractors skimp, they're in trouble. Have to have codes and professional building inspectors. Otherwise, the builders would cheat every time, and we'd all end up with housing that looks great at first but which falls right down in the first windstorm or earthquake. Or falls down all by itself in 10 years thanks to poor foundations. Or in 10 years the wiring gives out and starts a fire. And then they get to sell the victims another cheap building!
I don't want manufacturers making decisions like that. Freedom to design and manufacture product any way they want, so long as it doesn't involve hazards the public would not have knowingly chosen. (We know cars are dangerous, but that we go into with eyes open, for the most part.) Manufacturers are inherently biased towards their bottom line, as they should be, but that often doesn't correlate with my bottom line. Too many would save themselves a few pennies doing things people would not accept but will not be able to see until it is too late. If nothing reins in the cheaters, the rest would feel compelled to do the same things, to stay "competitive". The smarter manufacturers want rules and enforcement too. Look at the ridiculous irresponsibility shown by those trailer home manufacturers, in selling formaldehyde tainted trailers. They hurt customers, and ultimately themselves. They gave the entire manufactured housing industry a black eye. Very unfair to the responsible members.