The People are Represented by Two Separate Yet Equally Important Groups

Tonight's Law and Order raises an interesting question. A company makes body armor for the U.S. Army. They have a batch of the ceramic armor material that they suspect / know to be poor quality (to the point of being ineffective). They ship this armor as well as the good armor to the Army, which distributes it to the troops in the field. A soldier dies after being shot in the ineffective armor. To what extent is who to blame? The CEO of the company knew that the armor was defective and shipped it anyway. The defect was in a report to the Army, but it was on page 319 of a 400+ page report. These defective vests are a significant portion of production during that time, say 25 - 50%, of the 3,000 total vests. I offer both arguments as I see them:

(1) The company is obligated to determine which vests are defective, remove them from the shipments, and take whatever financial loss there is, possibly losing the entire contract. They do not sell a largely defective product at all. Good vests continue to go to the troops, just delayed because of the bad batch.

(2) The company ships all the vests to the troops, leaving some soldiers wearing vests which do little more than match everyone else's. These soldiers are no more protected than they would be in their t-shirts. They are just as protected as they would be if the company had shipped no vests at all. However, there is no mechanism for replacing the defective vests in the field.

What is changed if the company says publicly, "Some of the vests are defective; some are good," and the option is given to the soldier? Should this even be done at all or just pull all the defective vests? If you are the Army, do you end the contract, possibly creating more delays in armor distribution, or stick with the company with some defective products? Does it matter from any viewpoint if the defect was caused by a politically motivated chemist who has been fired and is therefore unlikely to happen again?

If I haven't yet, I will open my comments section to the outside poster. Opine and discuss.

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I think winter is going to be no fun in class. It was 50 - 60 degrees outside today, and the heater in the classroom was running. It was hot, almost unbearably so. I was certainly uncomfortable. I need to remember to stop in Monday or Tuesday and turn that thing way down. I can't deal with those temperatures for the rest of the semester.

Battlestar Galactica tonight was good, but not great. It was about how you deal with the people who collaborated with the enemy during a time of war. It had some interesting themes, but nothing noteworthy. It had issues that needed to be addressed, and it handled them well, but Lee and I had called the results when we saw the previews last week. It was almost to the letter of what we expected. Kind of ruins the drama.

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! More tomorrow.