The problem at TMI was a bad flow meter. I don’t know who made that particular flow meter, but Matheson Scientific sold and shipped some of their flow meters to TMI. I know the person who was in charge of inspecting flow meters back then. She’d give the downcheck to production, but the bosses would ship it anyway.
I don’t think that surprises anyone who has ever worked in a factory. In one sense, there is a conflict between quality assurance, and plant management, and QA almost always reports to plant management, but if plant management is doing its job right, the quality assurance department helps plant management do a better job.
And this is the same problem that happened with the World Trade Centers. Bin Laden was flabbergasted that the buildings fell. New York is notorious for corrupt building inspectors, and it really should not surprise us that the WTC towers fell, but that there are any big buildings still standing in NYC.
The real problem, however, is not with quality assurance and the lack of adequate inspection and testing of incoming materials, but with the existence of the corporation. The IGA grocery stores used to advertise that you knew they did things right because the owner is in the store. I know if I owned a supermarket, I sure wouldn’t want to sell spoiled meat, because it would affect my long-term profitability. If I were just a manager, though, who cares about the long term? If I do well this quarter, I can get promoted to a better job in a different organization – and someone else will get stuck dealing with the consequences of my bad actions.
After the financial debacle of a year ago, politicians were screaming about “transparency” and the fact that high-risk behavior was rewarded because it’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation in that industry, but in fact, it’s that way in all large corporations. We needed large corporations in the 1800s and early 1900s to finance huge factories – but today, with materials more expensive, and computers making it quick and easy to change tooling, it makes sense to produce exactly what customers want, rather than produce huge amounts of unwanted crap – and if you’re producing custom products, you don’t need facilities like Ford’s River Rouge plant, you need small facilities like Orange County Choppers, facilities which can reasonably be owned by the people in charge.
That’s not true for everything, of course; it probably makes sense to produce flour in huge factories, but except for basic commodities, the corporate structure is not only not essential, it’s actually evil. Because of this, we need a two-prong approach to government regulation. We need to free up regulation for non-incorporated businesses, demanding only that the owner be held responsible for the consequences of his actions, and more stringent regulation for incorporated businesses, where it’s hard to pin the blame on any given individual.
Yes, standardized design of nukes makes sense – but the basic problem here isn’t a nuke problem, it’s a problem with corporate structure. The owners of NewsLanc pay close attention to what NewsLanc does, knowing that they win or lose accordingly. If the managers of, say, General Motors, were equally as responsible, many of the bad business practices we all detest would disappear.
