4 ms·

What about VW though? They got around regulation.

• csydas 9y ago
  The expectation isn't that such regulation will prevent violations of the regulation from ever happening, but instead that there is a legal mechanism by which appropriate punishment can be administered. Laws and regulations don't in-and-of themselves prevent bad behavior from happening, they just grant entities permission to apply force as a response; the force can be jail time, fines, sanctions, etc, but it's granting an entity permission to apply force if the law or regulation isn't adhered to. So yes, regulations are circumvented or ignored intentionally, but that doesn't mean that it's somehow a bad idea; the idea is to enforce positive behavior by attaching an undesirable response to not doing the positive behavior. It's meant to shape behavior in the long run, and it's why pulling funding and reach from regulatory agencies is usually shitty, as more than anything, it's meant to induce a scenario where one can say "look, we have these regulations, but X, Y, and Z continue to do the bad behavior! The regulation is senseless!"; in reality, X Y and Z have just run the costs and determined that it's cheaper to fight the regulation than to adhere to it.