4 ms·

>multimillion or billion dollar catastrophes while the lowest classes get life sentences for ruining a single life. Is the implication here that causing econom

by hueving 10y ago

>multimillion or billion dollar catastrophes while the lowest classes get life sentences for ruining a single life. Is the implication here that causing economic harm is the same as murder?

tomp 10y ago
Pollution is murder (statistically).
- justinjlynn 10y ago
  As is reproduction, in general. Of course, there's little point in pedantry.
  - bottled_poe 10y ago
    7% of humans ever born are not dead. Pedantry is alive and well here.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder". Enforce the laws you have to help keeping honest people honest, but please do not selectively blow individual cases out of proportion with gut appeal tactics.
  - tomp 10y ago
    All these examples are regulated by laws that control the extent of damage done. Clearly the society believes that the existence of these is, after accounting for the positive and negative effects, better than nonexistence. But, skirting the laws in most of these cases can result in harm/death, and should be treaded as such (e.g. selling cars with faulty brakes, selling cakes with too much trans fats... a bit harder to say for schooling noone has really figured out how to do it well on a large scale).
    - freehunter 10y ago
      To elaborate a bit more on that (because I agree with you): selling cheesecake is not a crime, even though foods high in calories and sugar are known to cause obesity which causes premature death. It's the consumer's choice to buy these, but since they are recognized as potentially dangerous, the government does regulate the production of cheesecake. There are ingredients you cannot use, you have to disclose the ingredients you do use, and you have to include a nutrition facts label that shows how much sugar and how many calories are included in this cheesecake. What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label. You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    You can decide not to buy a cheesecake. What am I supposed to do when the pollution limits in my hometown are exceeded basically the whole winter?
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder". Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.
    - Nitramp 10y ago
      > Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake. Is it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/06/29/sugary-drinks-linked-to-180000-deaths-a-year-study-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0... > Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans. I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.
      - hx87 10y ago
        Cheesecake =/= all sugary foods. It's not even a plurality.
        xorxornop 10y ago
        Not to mention cheesecake is not pumped into the surrounding atmosphere as a gas where you breathe it involuntarily!
Sharlin 10y ago
A human life does have a price tag, just ask insurance companies. Conversely, negative externalities can be quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (qaly).
jamessb 10y ago
Emissions from Volkswagen cats above those permitted by the Clean Air Act (enabled by cheating on emissions tests) are estimated to have caused a significant number of premature deaths in the US: > According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early. https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-60-premature-deaths-1029 https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-6...
- throwaway30911 10y ago
  In that case it would make more sense to forbid cars entirely except for utility vehicles or electric cars. Which the government hasn't done for decades, so it is a little hypocritical to make a big thing of the VW scandal.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Yes it would. Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable. Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing. Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.
  - csydas 10y ago
    I think this somewhat misses the forest for the trees - the case against VW and the punishment isn't over hypothetical deaths, it's about cheating the emissions tests and not complying with regulatory standards. In a tangential way yes, the goal is to increase quality of life, but that's not really the point of the case/arrests, nor is it realyl the focal point of the research done, which was more a study on just how much excess pollution was produced as a result of the scandal. The FBI's actions have nothing to do with the MIT link.
Tharkun 10y ago
Murder isn't the only "crime" that can result in your life being ruined if you're poor.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life. 2000 hours/(365 days * 24 hours) = 22%, so that is 500 * 0.22 = 114 lives wasted on a fruitless project. If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k). Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money. Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe': * Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party. * Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument. * Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking. * Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects. In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?
- literallycancer 10y ago
  1 000 000 / 20 000 is 50 50 work years or 11.4 years of time are wasted per $1 million.
- londons_explore 10y ago
TeMPOraL 10y ago
At some point, "causing economic harm" stops being an abstract thing, and literally means children starving, adults going homeless and freezing to death in winter, or people turning into crime to avoid fates like these. So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.

by hueving 10y ago

>multimillion or billion dollar catastrophes while the lowest classes get life sentences for ruining a single life. Is the implication here that causing economic harm is the same as murder?

tomp 10y ago

Pollution is murder (statistically).

justinjlynn 10y ago
As is reproduction, in general. Of course, there's little point in pedantry.
- bottled_poe 10y ago
  7% of humans ever born are not dead. Pedantry is alive and well here.
usrusr 10y ago
Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder". Enforce the laws you have to help keeping honest people honest, but please do not selectively blow individual cases out of proportion with gut appeal tactics.
- tomp 10y ago
  All these examples are regulated by laws that control the extent of damage done. Clearly the society believes that the existence of these is, after accounting for the positive and negative effects, better than nonexistence. But, skirting the laws in most of these cases can result in harm/death, and should be treaded as such (e.g. selling cars with faulty brakes, selling cakes with too much trans fats... a bit harder to say for schooling noone has really figured out how to do it well on a large scale).
  - freehunter 10y ago
    To elaborate a bit more on that (because I agree with you): selling cheesecake is not a crime, even though foods high in calories and sugar are known to cause obesity which causes premature death. It's the consumer's choice to buy these, but since they are recognized as potentially dangerous, the government does regulate the production of cheesecake. There are ingredients you cannot use, you have to disclose the ingredients you do use, and you have to include a nutrition facts label that shows how much sugar and how many calories are included in this cheesecake. What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label. You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  You can decide not to buy a cheesecake. What am I supposed to do when the pollution limits in my hometown are exceeded basically the whole winter?
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder". Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.
  - Nitramp 10y ago
    > Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake. Is it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/06/29/sugary-drinks-linked-to-180000-deaths-a-year-study-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0... > Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans. I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.
    - hx87 10y ago
      Cheesecake =/= all sugary foods. It's not even a plurality.
      - xorxornop 10y ago
        Not to mention cheesecake is not pumped into the surrounding atmosphere as a gas where you breathe it involuntarily!

Sharlin 10y ago

A human life does have a price tag, just ask insurance companies. Conversely, negative externalities can be quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (qaly).

jamessb 10y ago

Emissions from Volkswagen cats above those permitted by the Clean Air Act (enabled by cheating on emissions tests) are estimated to have caused a significant number of premature deaths in the US: > According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early. https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-60-premature-deaths-1029 https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-6...

throwaway30911 10y ago
In that case it would make more sense to forbid cars entirely except for utility vehicles or electric cars. Which the government hasn't done for decades, so it is a little hypocritical to make a big thing of the VW scandal.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Yes it would. Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable. Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing. Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.
- csydas 10y ago
  I think this somewhat misses the forest for the trees - the case against VW and the punishment isn't over hypothetical deaths, it's about cheating the emissions tests and not complying with regulatory standards. In a tangential way yes, the goal is to increase quality of life, but that's not really the point of the case/arrests, nor is it realyl the focal point of the research done, which was more a study on just how much excess pollution was produced as a result of the scandal. The FBI's actions have nothing to do with the MIT link.

Tharkun 10y ago

Murder isn't the only "crime" that can result in your life being ruined if you're poor.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

If you think of money as labor and say there are 2000 work hours in a year, then at $10/hour a $1 million waste of money is wasting 500 work-years of human life. 2000 hours/(365 days * 24 hours) = 22%, so that is 500 * 0.22 = 114 lives wasted on a fruitless project. If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k). Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money. Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe': * Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party. * Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument. * Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking. * Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects. In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?

literallycancer 10y ago
1 000 000 / 20 000 is 50 50 work years or 11.4 years of time are wasted per $1 million.
londons_explore 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

At some point, "causing economic harm" stops being an abstract thing, and literally means children starving, adults going homeless and freezing to death in winter, or people turning into crime to avoid fates like these. So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.