4 ms·

Manslaughter's a capital offense in some places, so yeah if your bug kills people a la 737 Max or Therac-25 maybe you do deserve to be shot.

• renewiltord 6y ago
  Yeah, but it's no surprise that those places of yours didn't birth Boeing or Atomic Energy of Canada.
  • NoOneNew 6y ago
    I sense you have a deeper issue and/or gripe. Care to elaborate?
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      In the sense that a bunch of people who haven't read anything around organizational dynamics making outraged comments annoys me, yeah, I've got a gripe. All these comments are like 1960s level of conversation around safety engineering. Everyone thought back then that if you just ramped up punishments, things would get better. Turns out they didn't. Anyway, to save you from getting it from an inferior source (me), I'll give you some good ones: - The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker - The Challenger launch decision : risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughn You don't have to but you can also read how the FAA only pursues civil actions in severe cases. The equivalent penalty for a thing like this would be the lowest level action, either administrative action (pretty much a notice and a record on a file) or require proof of correction. Maybe the thing we should actually issue fines for is commenting on subjects without first reading about how they're handled well. Maybe 10x the hourly wage of each person who read it. Yeah. That'll be good. Comments will probably be great then.
      • harry8 6y ago
        Again you are arguing against a case that has not been made. A straw-man. There were consequences for the Challenger disaster - there was a full, televised enquriy. Feynman was there. That's a pretty deep and expensive consequence. Obviously NASA differs from Paypal. Beyond that I'm pretty sure those involved would feel consequence about their colleagues having died. Total sociapathy at that level is relatively rare in my experience. This is a quite different thing to make peace with to screwing some very small percentage of customers. To apply exactly what I said to _this_ case the consequences are: Estimate the loss to this person, 10k seems like a reasonable liberal guesstimate but yes, actual data would be better to get a harder number. Paypal pay her $100k as compensation. She's happy and paypal have a cost function to optimise sesibly. That's a start on proper incentive. Then if they do it more than N times then they're not taking the consequences seriously and they are only optimising that cost function considering breach as merely a business expense with no regard for ruining people. Someone needs to have a real, non-financial consequence for making a decision like that wittingly or unwittingly. The CEO is good because the buck stops there. It's his or her job to make sure that kind of "we'll screw over this many people because it's in our financial interests not to fix that" does not happen. Now we can discuss what the value of N should be. Should it be 10, 100, 1000? What should constitute a breach? Nowhere is a guillotine part of this. I can't actually see /anything/ you've argued a part of this. I see the outraged comments as being yours. You seem utterly outraged at my holding an opinion I do not hold and did not advance.
  • knolax 6y ago
    The US still has capital punishments...
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Oh, that's right. I forgot to tune in to CNN for our ceremonial shooting of the 737 Max aeronautical engineers. Washington does not execute people and certainly not for misdemeanors.
      • knolax 6y ago
        Killing hundreds of people with shitty code is not a misdemeanor. Also most executions are carried out by state governments not "Washington".