The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.

Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.

Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.

People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!

Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".

It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.

You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.

See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.

Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.

Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.

Sorry, the zoom meeting link has changed so now the meeting will take 4 hours and you must get the agenda by FAX.

(this is what happened to OP)

As a German I envy your meetings with Germans

Don’t worry. You can drag them on the street! Safety first and all that.

"I was just following orders." --Any German soldier after 1945

That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to released early in order to get a position in the government.

"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.

But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.

They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.

At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.

It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.

Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

Raw investment numbers don't necessarily matter, but the productivity of said number. Even if things are more expensive in Switzerland, if they make efficient use of said investment, then it can work out ok (or even better).

I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes and productivity have decoupled, especially in the angosphere, it is still usually correlated).

I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.

Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.

Why?

Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.

Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.

We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.

No amount of money will overcome the fundamental issue: monopoly.

Airlines are subject to market competition since any competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route and buy their planes into those slots. If they can execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than you, and thus put you out of business.

Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and demotivation that inevitably results from being a monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to competitive forces due to the real world constraints of the infrastructure needed.

Just an aside, as a railway-nerd:

> The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.

While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h.

ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h), and IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without "Sparpreis") pricey.

TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.

Add to that the transport buisness beeing marginal to the company who is mainly a immo speculation company trying to sell the strips of inner city land they hold.

Could be. It used to be that to get phone service in Germany could take up to a month after putting in the order, that’s when it was state controlled. After the reforms installations were quicker.

So to me, there doesn’t seem to be a panacea except to hold the services accountable in some way.

Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.

> "In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same."

Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird. I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture" twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in... Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine attached.

> "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic."

Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C., I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The spice of life!

> A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.

This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.

Note that what is eschewed and illegal is crossing at a traffic light when it is red. Just walking 50m away and crossing there is fine.

Nobody cares if you jaywalk as long as no children are around. If there are children around, most people will avoid crossing a red light even if they otherwise would cross. But that's not a rule-following thing, it's a "don't set a bad example to children" thing. It's easier to teach children the rules about how to behave in traffic if you have fewer adults obviously violating them.

I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.

But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.

The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.

Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.

It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.

In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.

Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?