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That would be acceptable if we were talking about buildings, a blue collar job. But if you try to apply it to a white collar executive you're going to run into
by otakucode 9y ago
That would be acceptable if we were talking about buildings, a blue collar job. But if you try to apply it to a white collar executive you're going to run into social resistance of a great magnitude. White collar crime is a social norm and only very rarely even lightly punished. It is, to a degree, expected. White collar crime kills more people and does much more economic damage every year compared to street crime, but our society has established as a norm treating street crime harshly while turning a blind eye to white collar crime. If the builders company gave the builder substandard materials to build with and refused to supply him with the tools needed or the time needed, few will get behind the idea of executing the executive who got his shareholders a 0.1% bump in profitability that quarter through those cuts, no matter who it killed.
Just look at Toyotas "unintended acceleration" case. If their firmware engineers had access to static analysis tools (a few grand for a license), the bug would have been pointed out to them immediately. Instead, Toyota hired inexperienced engineers, deprived them of appropriate tooling, and pushed the cars out to the marketplace where they killed people. The result? Toyota was cleared of any wrongdoing. They're computers. They're too complicated. No one can know how they work.
- wpietri 9y agoYeah, far too much executive crime gets to a "who could have known" resolution when they certainly should have known. Or a "few bad apples" resolution when the system the executives designed created and rewarded bad apples. I would love to see that change. Right now, though, we're in a big wave of "inequality is great", which I think strongly contributes to this problem. Let's hope that wave crashes, letting us start to hold executives and managers accountable.