On Tuesday, July 16, 2019 at 4:21:09 PM UTC+1, Radey Shouman wrote:

One valuable aspect to mandatory hard hats is that it sets those that
are supposed to be on site apart from members of the public that have
just wandered in.

Quite. That's why when I wander into a construction site to try out their battery-powered angle grinders on bicycle U-locks, I always drop into the site office first, because there are always hard hats lying around there. Once you have a hard hat, nobody questions your presence or actions.

Once I had eight miles of reflector mounts removed by the contractor's workmen from railings beside a favourite road by simply walking onto the site, putting on a hardhat and the engineer's jacket which hung over the back of his chair when he went to the lavatory, and ordering it. These reflector mounts were real knee breakers for cyclists, metal, triangular, mounted on solid wood (half-sawn logs) at around 18" above the road, including in places where the hard shoulder, which cyclists would normally ride on this busy highway, just disappeared, pouf, gone. They never went back up, because the next day the whole shebang moved across a bridge beyond a junction where I always took the other fork.

Andre Jute
The greatest advantage of having been so thoroughly educated in so many countries (besides never going hungry even when I was a stateless, passportless political exile because there isn't a country in the world without some mover and shaker who was at college with me), is acquiring the proper tone of command, which is never questioned, in so many languages. Very useful, that, if you have the balls for it (in South America I started a couple of shooting incidents because my Castilian accent was precisely what the revos were fighting against -- oops!).