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That is false. Safety engineering sometimes only mitigates risk, but often reduces it to practically zero, such that people have to be deliberately negligent to prevail in bringing about a safety incident. E.g. elevator holds 15 people, yet 45 somehow jam themselves in as a stunt.

Partial safety mitigation isn't so much how safety engineering works; it's how it ducks out of working due to non-engineering reasons. If any safety issue remains, that means engineering was not done in that regard: the safety engineers were excused from the requirement to design anything for that risk.



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