Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Fight Club Car Recall

In the film Fight Club, among the depths of monologue and conversation, the Narrator explains to another airline passenger how his employer, a major car company, goes about initiating a recall. The exact quote is: 

So boiling it down, there are the four variables.
A. Number of vehicles 
B. Probable rate of failure
C. Average out-of-court settlement
X. Cutoff number for a recall

Following the narrator's math, X<A*B*C or Recall<Vehicles*Probability*Settlement

Sounds terrible and mathematical right? If a business does this, we should boycott their clearly unethical behavior, right? Well, legally, this is not only ethical, but legal and expected behavior from any person. 

Welcome, to the wonderful world of negligence law. In particular, the formula the narrator describes is a rephrased version of the "Calculus of Negligence" or Hand Test. Now, lawyer's typically aren't good at math, so leave it to them to make a very basic Algebraic formula "Calculus." Here there are three variables:

B. Burden of taking Precaution
P. Probability
L. Loss

Applied, this formula comes out as B<P*L or Burden<Probability*Loss.

 Starting to look familiar? That's because this is the same formula the narrator rattled off. The probability multiplied by the number of the cars in the field gives you the total probability of loss in the field. The loss in this case is the average settlement, and as 97% of cases are settled out of court, using the average out of court settlement is completely fair. 

So was the car company evil? That's completely debatable from a moral perspective. Granted, they didn't beat people half to death, but they didn't do a voluntary recall to save some lives. However, legally, they were completely in the right, as long as their math was right.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Inane Explained Explained

Inane -noun
1.      Something that is empty or void, lacking sense, significance, or ideas.

Quite often I find myself wondering what something means. Very rarely is it something that is actually important. Whether it is a symbol in a movie, an odd name, or a reference in a song,  hours of my life that could have been productive are instead spent researching the symbol until I am sufficiently satisfied I know more about the topic than I would ever reasonably need to know. So rather than give this up and actually be productive, I thought it would be better to let other people be unproductive as well. Enjoy.