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Your first point misses what I was saying (or I was bad at saying it). Of course you pay for the damages caused, not the product's price. In the case here I exp

Your first point misses what I was saying (or I was bad at saying it). Of course you pay for the damages caused, not the product's price. In the case here I expect someone (Amazon? Whoever) pay for the 1 million plus to replace the house. I brought up the product price just because I feel that paying more than a million in damages for a product that costs (say..) 100 dollar is already punitive in terms of business. Whoever has to pay even 1 million probably will be quite unhappy about carrying that product, without any further inflation: The price for this accident eats the profit for a BIG number of sales - ignoring the PR issues. So: Sure, if you sell a $1 device that causes $1,000,000 in damages, pay a million (or more). But paying a million (or more) caused by a $1 device seems already like a decent way to make the business .. reconsider some practices?

user5994461 10y ago
Yes. It hurts the business badly. That's why there aren't many manufacturers in business and they are all big. Even more so in the USA, because the law is retarded and people could sue for stupid reasons and win ^^ It seems that here the trick is to attack Amazon instead of the device manufacturer. The damages are scaled for Amazon size.
- sundaeofshock 10y ago
  The point of punitive damages is to hurt the company. Do you have other suggestions for how to punish companies that harm consumers?
  - darklajid 10y ago
    You make an interesting point. I will (no snark, I'm serious) try to figure out how this works in my home country and in Europe in general. Because .. I assume they have a strategy for this as well and 'pay a private party a lot of money' isn't something that's possible in Germany. But .. I'm too ignorant to know WHAT the strategy is over here, how companies would be/are being reigned in. Homework.
  - vubuntu 10y ago
    Punish/hurt the company with punitive damages, big enough to discourage negligent behavior - 100% on this Compensate the victims with amount equivalent to their loss(physical) + some decent compensation for emotional losses etc. But that need not be 30X of their actual loss. May be 2x or 3x. The rest of the punitive damages should be awarded to the regulatory body that can improve their oversight, or to a public research body that works on fire safety alarms/products etc for example, or to a public cause/charity that helps fire hazard victims or to a publicly funded affordable fire hazard insurance body etc. I see no need to award all the punitive damages to a single victim. This only encourages the 'sue first and for anything' behavior of the society.
mcphage 10y ago
> I brought up the product price just because I feel that paying more than a million in damages for a product that costs (say..) 100 dollar is already punitive in terms of business. Whoever has to pay even 1 million probably will be quite unhappy about carrying that product, without any further inflation: The price for this accident eats the profit for a BIG number of sales - ignoring the PR issues. It's actually similar to the manufacturer's side here. As the poster above said, if the manufacturer doesn't have to pay more then the cost of the product, then there's no incentive for them to worry about safety, since they'll at most lose the cost of a product. Similarly, if all a retailer has to worry about is losing the cost of a product line, then there isn't any incentive for them to care if the products they sell are safe: if one isn't, they just stop selling that line, and there's no reason for them to vet them ahead of time. But if they can lose more than a single product line 's worth of product, then they have to care that they're not selling dangerous junk.
sundaeofshock 10y ago
If you are making $100 milling in profit off of a faulty device, then $1 million is just the cost of doing business. A penalty has to be painful enough to the company that they don't want to do this again. Given how large Amazon is, and how their marketplace is a nightmare of consumer fraud, I think $30 million is not enough of a penalty to make them clean up their act. For more on this, I suggest reading "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.
- darklajid 10y ago
  Are you arguing about the case in this article or about general issues you have with the Amazon marketplace? Text is a crappy medium, this is not my native language, but you seem to have a problem with Amazon regardless of the issue in the article? If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon? I'm going to retire from this thread - it's past midnight and I was confused a long time ago. Further arguments make this process only _more_ alien and I certainly don't want to convince the US population that they Should Not Do This. But there's no way in hell to integrate this process with my upbringing - it feels entirely wrong and far too much like a cash grab. Chalk it up to cultural differences?
  - mancerayder 10y ago
    Cultural differences? Maybe, but not in the way you think. It's cultural in the political philosophy more than anything else. Let's summarize it thusly: the U.S. regulatory system, while not totally a free market, is a lot less stringent and red-tape-heavy than places like the EU. HOWEVER, you need a disincentive for 'bad actors' to cause harm, and in the U.S. we rely more on tort law ("wrongs") than in the EU, where things are more tightly regulated (in theory). It's a matter of degree. Rather than risk fines or even, in some cases, jail time, in the U.S. companies are afraid of getting sued, and thus you see all those 'don't put your finger in the socket' 'this knife is sharp, be careful' type notices on consumer products. The cultural aspect is around the idea that government shouldn't interfere overly in the market. The country was founded on the ideas of philosophers like Adam Smith. If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon? Good question, and sometimes class action lawsuits (involving hundreds, or even thousands of people) happen. Note, the point of 'punitive' is punishiment. Disincentive. Don't do it again. It's up to lawyers / juries to 'decide' what the renumeration is. As to whom goes a bulk, well, you can rest assured law can be a lucrative profession for a reason.

user5994461 10y ago

Yes. It hurts the business badly. That's why there aren't many manufacturers in business and they are all big. Even more so in the USA, because the law is retarded and people could sue for stupid reasons and win ^^ It seems that here the trick is to attack Amazon instead of the device manufacturer. The damages are scaled for Amazon size.

sundaeofshock 10y ago
The point of punitive damages is to hurt the company. Do you have other suggestions for how to punish companies that harm consumers?
- darklajid 10y ago
  You make an interesting point. I will (no snark, I'm serious) try to figure out how this works in my home country and in Europe in general. Because .. I assume they have a strategy for this as well and 'pay a private party a lot of money' isn't something that's possible in Germany. But .. I'm too ignorant to know WHAT the strategy is over here, how companies would be/are being reigned in. Homework.
- vubuntu 10y ago
  Punish/hurt the company with punitive damages, big enough to discourage negligent behavior - 100% on this Compensate the victims with amount equivalent to their loss(physical) + some decent compensation for emotional losses etc. But that need not be 30X of their actual loss. May be 2x or 3x. The rest of the punitive damages should be awarded to the regulatory body that can improve their oversight, or to a public research body that works on fire safety alarms/products etc for example, or to a public cause/charity that helps fire hazard victims or to a publicly funded affordable fire hazard insurance body etc. I see no need to award all the punitive damages to a single victim. This only encourages the 'sue first and for anything' behavior of the society.

mcphage 10y ago

> I brought up the product price just because I feel that paying more than a million in damages for a product that costs (say..) 100 dollar is already punitive in terms of business. Whoever has to pay even 1 million probably will be quite unhappy about carrying that product, without any further inflation: The price for this accident eats the profit for a BIG number of sales - ignoring the PR issues. It's actually similar to the manufacturer's side here. As the poster above said, if the manufacturer doesn't have to pay more then the cost of the product, then there's no incentive for them to worry about safety, since they'll at most lose the cost of a product. Similarly, if all a retailer has to worry about is losing the cost of a product line, then there isn't any incentive for them to care if the products they sell are safe: if one isn't, they just stop selling that line, and there's no reason for them to vet them ahead of time. But if they can lose more than a single product line 's worth of product, then they have to care that they're not selling dangerous junk.

sundaeofshock 10y ago

If you are making $100 milling in profit off of a faulty device, then $1 million is just the cost of doing business. A penalty has to be painful enough to the company that they don't want to do this again. Given how large Amazon is, and how their marketplace is a nightmare of consumer fraud, I think $30 million is not enough of a penalty to make them clean up their act. For more on this, I suggest reading "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.

darklajid 10y ago
Are you arguing about the case in this article or about general issues you have with the Amazon marketplace? Text is a crappy medium, this is not my native language, but you seem to have a problem with Amazon regardless of the issue in the article? If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon? I'm going to retire from this thread - it's past midnight and I was confused a long time ago. Further arguments make this process only _more_ alien and I certainly don't want to convince the US population that they Should Not Do This. But there's no way in hell to integrate this process with my upbringing - it feels entirely wrong and far too much like a cash grab. Chalk it up to cultural differences?
- mancerayder 10y ago
  Cultural differences? Maybe, but not in the way you think. It's cultural in the political philosophy more than anything else. Let's summarize it thusly: the U.S. regulatory system, while not totally a free market, is a lot less stringent and red-tape-heavy than places like the EU. HOWEVER, you need a disincentive for 'bad actors' to cause harm, and in the U.S. we rely more on tort law ("wrongs") than in the EU, where things are more tightly regulated (in theory). It's a matter of degree. Rather than risk fines or even, in some cases, jail time, in the U.S. companies are afraid of getting sued, and thus you see all those 'don't put your finger in the socket' 'this knife is sharp, be careful' type notices on consumer products. The cultural aspect is around the idea that government shouldn't interfere overly in the market. The country was founded on the ideas of philosophers like Adam Smith. If 30 million isn't enough, what would be enough? "All the profit of this product"? "All the revenue based on this product"? And .. would you award that to some random party? Because that's what this is about as well, no? Someone was hurt (financially, emotionally) and now there's supposed to be a pay out. Would you suggest giving the "victims" 100 houses for the one house they lost? One party/family should be able to own a small village of luxury houses to hurt Amazon? Good question, and sometimes class action lawsuits (involving hundreds, or even thousands of people) happen. Note, the point of 'punitive' is punishiment. Disincentive. Don't do it again. It's up to lawyers / juries to 'decide' what the renumeration is. As to whom goes a bulk, well, you can rest assured law can be a lucrative profession for a reason.