7 ms·

It really never ceases to amaze me the level of protections we have in this country for corporations, and the amount of personal insulation that the members of

It really never ceases to amaze me the level of protections we have in this country for corporations, and the amount of personal insulation that the members of those corporations receive from their actions. If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't push things for the sake of science, but the level of willful negligence displayed by tech companies on every front these days is just staggering because of it. It's the default attitude. You see it an absolutely everything, from illegally dumping millions of scooters everywhere in public, to arbitraging the subversion of well established social contracts that in some cases took decades or centuries of literal blood and sweat to work out, like labor rights (Uber) or urban zoning (AirBnB) etc.

poslathian 8y ago
Tax reform proposal: the limited liability shield is incredibly inexpensive, bordering on free ($600/yr here in MA). On the other hand, it’s insanely valuable. Let’s generate tax revenue by charging fairly for this incredible gift to business operators. In lieu of system wide income taxes, we can charge a percentage of revenue in return for limited liability protection. Don’t like the tax? Chance it, and shareholders can take legal responsibility for the actions of their organizations.
- Traster 8y ago
  Well let's call it what it is. You want a revenue tax on corporations. The obvious point is: high turnover businesses that make profits through volume would pay a disproportionate tax - a tax which ostensibly is to do with liability insurance, but doesn't correlate with the things that are likely to incur liability.
berberous 8y ago
>>"If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".
- CocaKoala 8y ago
  If you hit something every fifteen thousand miles, the cops will stop chalking it up to "mistake" pretty quick.
  - uxp100 8y ago
    No, they really wouldn't. About yearly for an individual? How many of these incidents would the cops even be involved? I doubt most instances of vehicles being damaged the cops ever get more involved than a report filed days later to satisfy insurance.
  - adkaplan 8y ago
    Even this isn't true, though. 15,000 miles is 15 months of driving. I would bet a lot of people hit "something" that often, with a more serious incident every 5-10 years.
    - Alupis 8y ago
      > 15,000 miles is 15 months of driving No, it's more like one year or less[1] > I would bet a lot of people hit "something" that often That's quite a claim... just from personal experience, I'd wager this is a very wrong assumption. Majority of people go most of their lives, if not their entire lives without hitting "something". More serious incidents are even more rare. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
      - Jeremy1026 8y ago
        From your source. Combined average is 13,476 miles per year. If you look at only men, or more specifically only men from 20-64 do you get to 15,000 miles in less than an average year of driving.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure that either having an accident every year or never having one in a lifetime is unusual. I base that on the following back of the envelope analysis. My collision insurance is $270 a year, which I think is fairly reasonable for NY. I was involved in an accident a couple years ago where the corner of my car was smashed in a bit, pretty much the definition of a "fender bender". It cost about $3500 to fix, and if I had been at fault, I would have had a $1000 deductible. Repairs could have been $2500 if I was more lucky in exactly what was bent. So, that suggests my insurance company breaks even if I go about 5-10 years between at-fault accidents, or 75,000-150,000 miles. In the aggregate, I assume they do estimate risk pretty accurately, so I expect that 5-10 years is normal. Whenever people mention what they are paying for insurance, it usually seems to be higher than mine.
stefan_ 8y ago
They haven't even charged the actual driver in that car, the one watching Hulu on their phone. It was only natural that the law-insulating aura that operating a vehicle provides in the US is extended to "self"-driving vehicles.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- surge 8y ago
  It was deemed the pedestrian was also partially at fault. She was crossing a road, at night in a dimly lit portion of the road, no where near an intersection and with seemingly no regard of awareness of oncoming traffic in dark colored clothes which is the opposite of pedestrian safety for walking/running at night. If you watch the video, even a human probably wouldn't have hit the brakes in time with average reaction speeds, the person was only visible for 1.5 seconds before impact. I believe the term is contributory negligence, when both parties are making mistakes that lead to the accident. Grounding the fleet would have saved her life, but its arguable any other driver could have hit her and only applied the brakes for a short period of time, not enough to stop or slow to a less lethal speed before impact.
  - stefan_ 8y ago
    You're watching a compressed to shit video of a cheap dashcam. Human eyes have literally thousandfold the dynamic range of the pinhole sensor in that thing. Sorry, but this is a human life we are talking about here.
woah 8y ago
Do you understand the concept of limited liability?
- perfmode 8y ago
  I believe this is precisely the concept under critique.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  They clearly don't, and obviously don't understand why it exists. Nothing interesting would be possible without it. Nobody on Earth would be a C-level executive if they had criminal liability for all their employees. I sometimes think that people that want to end it have never been in charge of anything nontrivial and have no idea how terrible the consequences of ending it would be.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    How do you propose we address the problems we face?
    - throwaway5752 8y ago
      Per my earlier comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657024) regulating and enforcing regulations. This already exists, and when not deregulated or captured, works well. There is no magic system that removes the human element to this, and the cost here is a vigilant population that holds elected officials responsible and doesn't allow deregulation or regulatory capture. There is no possible solution to this that works absent a population that doesn't consider it important. This is exemplified in jurisdictions where police turn a blind eye because so-and-so is the son of so-and-so and it's tolerated. Criminal liability (vs limited liability and corporate regulation) for executives is just as weak and has large unintended consequences.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >They clearly don't, and obviously don't understand why it exists. Nothing interesting would be possible without it. Nobody on Earth would be a C-level executive if they had criminal liability for all their employees. I sometimes think that people that want to end it have never been in charge of anything nontrivial and have no idea how terrible the consequences of ending it would be. Well perhaps those things should be illegal or made untenable. If you are publicizing risks in such a way that you are privately profiting from the public endangerment, you really don't have any moral or legal right to that money. Yet here we are again in a situation where people are killed, an executive says "we're sorry", and they continue pocketing the money.
paulcole 8y ago
> If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." The best way to kill someone in America is with your car. As long as you're not drunk and can afford a lawyer you're going to get a slap on the wrist.
- rocky1138 8y ago
  If you ever kill anyone with your car, your post will be used as evidence in court against you. I don't think it was too smart to post this, honestly.
  - root_axis 8y ago
    Stating a hypothetical is not evidence of a crime.
    - bdcravens 8y ago
      In many high profile murder cases, you'll hear details about what they were searching for or watching on Youtube before that.
      - root_axis 8y ago
        Just because the media reports it doesn't necessarily mean the court will consider it admissible evidence, but even so, looking up ways to kill people online is completely different from a tongue-in-cheek remark about how the legal system treats vehicular deaths.
  - cromulent 8y ago
    I think you can argue the idea was out there. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-a-new-frea...
  - paulcole 8y ago
    I have never driven a car.
throwaway5752 8y ago
I honest do not understand your point. What is confusing about corporate vs individual liability? The corporation (Uber) will be held accountable at a civil level and employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point). All this "let's frog-march the execs" talk because "if I did X I'd be in jail now" stuff is tiresome. I honestly do not think you understand the law well enough. Perhaps you should be upset over the enforcement of the law (which has been repeatedly and intentionally gutted in multiple areas of regulation by a major political party in the US). But that is a social and cultural problem, not a problem with the legal entity of a corporation.
- swsieber 8y ago
  Potato Potato. The law is written such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people. The law is enforced such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people. It seems like a very small difference at this point. It just seems that corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    > corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people And that's exactly by design. Wealthy people own corporations and pay lobbists to stay above the law.
    - longerthoughts 8y ago
      Lobbyists, by definition, are used to try to influence legislation (i.e. shape laws), not avoid prosecution once laws have been broken.
  - towelr34dy 8y ago
    Actually, I'd add that this is more related to the importance of the individual or company as a node in the country's economic network. The larger the impact on the network in terms of either magnitude or volume of souls owned, the greater the ability to get away with actions that forward individual gain over general good. Shareholders and directors of many corporations do get prosecuted. The disincentive for the government is always going to be the effect of removing an important node from a network. Especially when the government and people gain from the stability of the network, even if certain negatives happen. Not to say the way we treat corporations isn't really horrible. It is. Adam Smith would roll in his grave if he knew we were justifying our corporatocracy on his writings. I'm simply pointing out that large nodes are always treated differently because it is logical to do so. If 3 people do something and you take them out, the economy keeps up exactly the same. But take out the head of a company that owns... er... hires 100,000 souls? Or maybe the company only hires 300 souls, but they are developing nuclear bombs, or maybe developing a new gene editing tech, or green fuel? Then we have magnitude instead of volume. You got yourself political backlash if you remove these nodes.
ataturk 8y ago
Plus they are fucking us out of free speech and gun rights, which are two "well established social contracts that took decades and uncountable lives and blood to secure."
bendbro 8y ago
I don’t think we should lean on the negative impacts progress has on social contracts, since this is one of the primary arguments the alt-right uses to justify their position. Social contracts always change, especially so when a country is composed of an ever increasing portion of immigrants, asylum seekers, and migrants. Despite the blood, sweat, and tears, being open to social change ensures society doesn’t get locked into a local minimum via well intended but ultimately misplaced concern.
- rbongers 8y ago
  Do you mean to say that a change to the social contract is necessary where it could be acceptable in some cases for someone to get killed by a car? I am just trying to understand what you mean by this comment.
- eximius 8y ago
  I don't think they're saying that change is bad but that THIS change is bad - a regression for a hard fought thing. Characterizing all such critiques as the same reduces the toolset we have to answer things like the alt right.
bytematic 8y ago
Sometimes we have to have trust in private entities in order to achieve technical advancement. Also we don't want to discourage it for others
- anyfoo 8y ago
  We certainly do want to discourage willful negligence.

poslathian 8y ago

Tax reform proposal: the limited liability shield is incredibly inexpensive, bordering on free ($600/yr here in MA). On the other hand, it’s insanely valuable. Let’s generate tax revenue by charging fairly for this incredible gift to business operators. In lieu of system wide income taxes, we can charge a percentage of revenue in return for limited liability protection. Don’t like the tax? Chance it, and shareholders can take legal responsibility for the actions of their organizations.

Traster 8y ago
Well let's call it what it is. You want a revenue tax on corporations. The obvious point is: high turnover businesses that make profits through volume would pay a disproportionate tax - a tax which ostensibly is to do with liability insurance, but doesn't correlate with the things that are likely to incur liability.

berberous 8y ago

>>"If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".

CocaKoala 8y ago
If you hit something every fifteen thousand miles, the cops will stop chalking it up to "mistake" pretty quick.
- uxp100 8y ago
  No, they really wouldn't. About yearly for an individual? How many of these incidents would the cops even be involved? I doubt most instances of vehicles being damaged the cops ever get more involved than a report filed days later to satisfy insurance.
- adkaplan 8y ago
  Even this isn't true, though. 15,000 miles is 15 months of driving. I would bet a lot of people hit "something" that often, with a more serious incident every 5-10 years.
  - Alupis 8y ago
    > 15,000 miles is 15 months of driving No, it's more like one year or less[1] > I would bet a lot of people hit "something" that often That's quite a claim... just from personal experience, I'd wager this is a very wrong assumption. Majority of people go most of their lives, if not their entire lives without hitting "something". More serious incidents are even more rare. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
    - Jeremy1026 8y ago
      From your source. Combined average is 13,476 miles per year. If you look at only men, or more specifically only men from 20-64 do you get to 15,000 miles in less than an average year of driving.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure that either having an accident every year or never having one in a lifetime is unusual. I base that on the following back of the envelope analysis. My collision insurance is $270 a year, which I think is fairly reasonable for NY. I was involved in an accident a couple years ago where the corner of my car was smashed in a bit, pretty much the definition of a "fender bender". It cost about $3500 to fix, and if I had been at fault, I would have had a $1000 deductible. Repairs could have been $2500 if I was more lucky in exactly what was bent. So, that suggests my insurance company breaks even if I go about 5-10 years between at-fault accidents, or 75,000-150,000 miles. In the aggregate, I assume they do estimate risk pretty accurately, so I expect that 5-10 years is normal. Whenever people mention what they are paying for insurance, it usually seems to be higher than mine.

stefan_ 8y ago

They haven't even charged the actual driver in that car, the one watching Hulu on their phone. It was only natural that the law-insulating aura that operating a vehicle provides in the US is extended to "self"-driving vehicles.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
surge 8y ago
It was deemed the pedestrian was also partially at fault. She was crossing a road, at night in a dimly lit portion of the road, no where near an intersection and with seemingly no regard of awareness of oncoming traffic in dark colored clothes which is the opposite of pedestrian safety for walking/running at night. If you watch the video, even a human probably wouldn't have hit the brakes in time with average reaction speeds, the person was only visible for 1.5 seconds before impact. I believe the term is contributory negligence, when both parties are making mistakes that lead to the accident. Grounding the fleet would have saved her life, but its arguable any other driver could have hit her and only applied the brakes for a short period of time, not enough to stop or slow to a less lethal speed before impact.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  You're watching a compressed to shit video of a cheap dashcam. Human eyes have literally thousandfold the dynamic range of the pinhole sensor in that thing. Sorry, but this is a human life we are talking about here.

woah 8y ago

Do you understand the concept of limited liability?

perfmode 8y ago
I believe this is precisely the concept under critique.
throwaway5752 8y ago
They clearly don't, and obviously don't understand why it exists. Nothing interesting would be possible without it. Nobody on Earth would be a C-level executive if they had criminal liability for all their employees. I sometimes think that people that want to end it have never been in charge of anything nontrivial and have no idea how terrible the consequences of ending it would be.
- perfmode 8y ago
  How do you propose we address the problems we face?
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    Per my earlier comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657024) regulating and enforcing regulations. This already exists, and when not deregulated or captured, works well. There is no magic system that removes the human element to this, and the cost here is a vigilant population that holds elected officials responsible and doesn't allow deregulation or regulatory capture. There is no possible solution to this that works absent a population that doesn't consider it important. This is exemplified in jurisdictions where police turn a blind eye because so-and-so is the son of so-and-so and it's tolerated. Criminal liability (vs limited liability and corporate regulation) for executives is just as weak and has large unintended consequences.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >They clearly don't, and obviously don't understand why it exists. Nothing interesting would be possible without it. Nobody on Earth would be a C-level executive if they had criminal liability for all their employees. I sometimes think that people that want to end it have never been in charge of anything nontrivial and have no idea how terrible the consequences of ending it would be. Well perhaps those things should be illegal or made untenable. If you are publicizing risks in such a way that you are privately profiting from the public endangerment, you really don't have any moral or legal right to that money. Yet here we are again in a situation where people are killed, an executive says "we're sorry", and they continue pocketing the money.

paulcole 8y ago

> If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." The best way to kill someone in America is with your car. As long as you're not drunk and can afford a lawyer you're going to get a slap on the wrist.

rocky1138 8y ago
If you ever kill anyone with your car, your post will be used as evidence in court against you. I don't think it was too smart to post this, honestly.
- root_axis 8y ago
  Stating a hypothetical is not evidence of a crime.
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    In many high profile murder cases, you'll hear details about what they were searching for or watching on Youtube before that.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      Just because the media reports it doesn't necessarily mean the court will consider it admissible evidence, but even so, looking up ways to kill people online is completely different from a tongue-in-cheek remark about how the legal system treats vehicular deaths.
- cromulent 8y ago
  I think you can argue the idea was out there. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-a-new-frea...
- paulcole 8y ago
  I have never driven a car.

throwaway5752 8y ago

I honest do not understand your point. What is confusing about corporate vs individual liability? The corporation (Uber) will be held accountable at a civil level and employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point). All this "let's frog-march the execs" talk because "if I did X I'd be in jail now" stuff is tiresome. I honestly do not think you understand the law well enough. Perhaps you should be upset over the enforcement of the law (which has been repeatedly and intentionally gutted in multiple areas of regulation by a major political party in the US). But that is a social and cultural problem, not a problem with the legal entity of a corporation.

swsieber 8y ago
Potato Potato. The law is written such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people. The law is enforced such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people. It seems like a very small difference at this point. It just seems that corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people And that's exactly by design. Wealthy people own corporations and pay lobbists to stay above the law.
  - longerthoughts 8y ago
    Lobbyists, by definition, are used to try to influence legislation (i.e. shape laws), not avoid prosecution once laws have been broken.
- towelr34dy 8y ago
  Actually, I'd add that this is more related to the importance of the individual or company as a node in the country's economic network. The larger the impact on the network in terms of either magnitude or volume of souls owned, the greater the ability to get away with actions that forward individual gain over general good. Shareholders and directors of many corporations do get prosecuted. The disincentive for the government is always going to be the effect of removing an important node from a network. Especially when the government and people gain from the stability of the network, even if certain negatives happen. Not to say the way we treat corporations isn't really horrible. It is. Adam Smith would roll in his grave if he knew we were justifying our corporatocracy on his writings. I'm simply pointing out that large nodes are always treated differently because it is logical to do so. If 3 people do something and you take them out, the economy keeps up exactly the same. But take out the head of a company that owns... er... hires 100,000 souls? Or maybe the company only hires 300 souls, but they are developing nuclear bombs, or maybe developing a new gene editing tech, or green fuel? Then we have magnitude instead of volume. You got yourself political backlash if you remove these nodes.

ataturk 8y ago

Plus they are fucking us out of free speech and gun rights, which are two "well established social contracts that took decades and uncountable lives and blood to secure."

bendbro 8y ago

I don’t think we should lean on the negative impacts progress has on social contracts, since this is one of the primary arguments the alt-right uses to justify their position. Social contracts always change, especially so when a country is composed of an ever increasing portion of immigrants, asylum seekers, and migrants. Despite the blood, sweat, and tears, being open to social change ensures society doesn’t get locked into a local minimum via well intended but ultimately misplaced concern.

rbongers 8y ago
Do you mean to say that a change to the social contract is necessary where it could be acceptable in some cases for someone to get killed by a car? I am just trying to understand what you mean by this comment.
eximius 8y ago
I don't think they're saying that change is bad but that THIS change is bad - a regression for a hard fought thing. Characterizing all such critiques as the same reduces the toolset we have to answer things like the alt right.

bytematic 8y ago

Sometimes we have to have trust in private entities in order to achieve technical advancement. Also we don't want to discourage it for others

anyfoo 8y ago
We certainly do want to discourage willful negligence.