Counterintuitivity

How much a finger is worth depends, of course, on whether the finger is yours or mine. To me it’s priceless. To you, if you make table saws, it’s worth whatever the insurance companies, courts, and juries decide your liability will cost you when a fingerless customer sues.

Table saws are incredibly effective at severing what passes across the table, which makes them extremely dangerous to operators who are at all careless or unlucky. Tens of thousands of disfiguring injuries—deep lacerations, broken bones, amputations—occur annually to table saw users even though technology exists to eliminate the danger almost entirely.

Steve Gass invented and patented the SawStop safety system that stops blades from operating when they sense the electrical conductivity of fingers, or even hot dogs, presented to the blade. Within 3/1000s of a second, the blade senses the conductive tissue and stops turning. Instead of severing fingers or lunch items, it slightly nicks them. Gass says the technology would add $100 to the cost of a table saw. His company has sold thousands of saws using the technology. In 1300 documented cases, customers have come into contact with the blades of their saws and come away with just tiny nicks.

But eight years since he offered to license the SawStop system to Black & Decker, Bosch, Makita and others, no manufacturer has yet agreed to use it. In an interview with NPR’s Chris Arnold, Gass said: “We’re just a small company, you know, in Tualatin, Oregon that nobody’s ever heard of and, you know, we’re trying to change an industry. And they don’t want to be changed. They want to keep the status quo and keep making saws that, you know, cut their customers’ fingers off.”

Recently, the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously to introduce new safety regulations to force saw manufacturers to reduce injuries, but the big companies are strenuously resisting. They say, among other things, that consumers should have the right to choose. SawStop is available in the marketplace to those who want it, they claim, and that’s as it should be. Requiring new safety standards would force new equipment and higher costs onto the thousands of saw users who don’t injure themselves every year.

From the time of the Civil War until almost the beginning of World War II, long after slavery had been abolished in our country, thousands of black men, perhaps as many as 200,000 altogether over the years, were routinely arrested in the South for “crimes” as trivial as changing jobs without permission or talking loudly in the presence of white women. Once arrested and hurriedly convicted, these men, who could not afford to pay the fines and fees with which they’d been charged, were sentenced to hard labor and “leased” to American companies, most notably US Steel, to work in mines or factories for no pay often for the rest of their lives.

So reports Douglas A. Blackmon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and bureau chief, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book. In painstaking detail, Blackmon chronicles how such abuses occurred most often at times when cheap—almost free—labor was most needed, not at all in relation to the amount of actual crime committed. That such a system could thrive at the same time the country celebrated the growing independence and self-reliance of blacks in America freed from the yoke of slavery defies reason and strains belief. But, as is so often the case, where there is monetary gain to be had from pursuing an illogical or unreasonable course of action, we find people acting counterintuitively.

An excerpt from the introduction to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II:

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”1 Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

I urge you to follow the link to the author’s homepage and read the rest of the excerpt there.

Samoa’s recent decision to jump across the International Dateline reminds us that man, not nature, makes these rules about what day and time it is.

In an effort to do more business with Australia and New Zealand, Samoa decided that Friday was actually Saturday and that instead of being the last nation to see the sun go down every day it will from now on be the first nation to see the sun come up.

Previous to the change, New Zealand and Australian businesses were already closed for the weekend while Samoans were trying to finish their Fridays strong, and while Samoans were observing religious Sunday services, their neighbors were hard at work on Monday.

Somebody once said that nothing Congress could do would make the sun shine a minute longer, but what Samoa has done makes it clear that while we can’t change what is, we can always change what we call it.

Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests and monks came to blows during preparations for Orthodox Christmas celebrations at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

Scuffles break out often at the church where Christians believe Jesus was born, when rival groups of clerics perceive another group has encroached on their territory.

Follow this link to the VIDEO.

Two days after Christmas, 2011, bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas celebrations scheduled for January 7, 2012.

Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes.

Lt-Col Khaled al-Tamimi of the Bethlehem police said,”No one was arrested because all those involved were men of God. It was a trivial problem that… occurs every year,” he told Reuters.

The 1,700-year-old church, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, is in a bad state of repair, largely because the priests cannot agree on who should pay for its upkeep. Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site where many Christians believe Jesus was crucified, has also seen similar incidents.