Fail-safe?

Is there any such thing as fail-safe? It certainly does not seem to have been the case with BP's oil well shut-off valves 5,000 feet down on the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the braking system that was supposed to prevent run-away Toyotas, or the many "redundant" mechanical systems designed into the equipment at the Thousand Island atomic power plant. Undoubtedly you can think of many more such sad examples, or perhaps you simply believe that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

What drives me round the bend, is just the thought that any man made contraption should be branded with a fail-safe stamp. Surely it is only a matter of when, rather than if, something is going to go wrong due to human error, metal fatigue, or some other hitherto invisible fault. After all, isn't that one of the Peter principles. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Gambling on survival & hoping for the best.

When you stop to think about it, don't you agree that the world is involved in far too many high stakes games of Russian roulette, and that the single bullet in the gun's chamber is inevitably going to explode, driving a missile into our collective brains. The environmentalists believe, and indeed many scientists more credibly agree (not that I am necessarily one of either of these groups) that if we continue to burn carbon-based fuels as an energy source, Armageddon is only a few decades away.

So should we purchase more insurance? Or do you believe in kismet, what will be will be, the world is actually evolving as it should, or any of that nonsense. I've heard so much negativity being expressed about the insurance industry recently that I rather doubt it will be around after the end of the world, and they would probably do their damndest to avoid a pay-out anyway on the grounds that it was an "act of God." Now there's a strange relationship, God and the insurance industry. But if you're a gambling man, who knows?

I for one will continue to cling to the perhaps rather optimistic hope, that a sufficient number of us worldly beings will come to our senses... before everyone discovers that it really is too late.