10 ms·

Similarly, it shouldn't take a security breach for companies to care about security. Poor budgets are what is eliminating the safety nets.

underwater 5y ago
Isn't this a predictable failure mode of capitalism and free markets? Entities are disincentivised from preparing for rare and catastrophic events.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  No. The building was communally owned by its residents, and they squabbled for years about allocating money for the repairs. All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I think the idea is that the market is supposed to work by the principals having good information about their situation and thus being to choose the best decisions. That's at least my one line summary. In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals. And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves. No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here. Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves. I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security. For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light. I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage. Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      Maybe no system results in the best possible outcome every time? Government owned bridges have collapsed because warnings were ignored. Privately owned apartments collapsed because warnings were ignored. The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa. Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
  - underwater 5y ago
    I think a free market tends to work better with predictable events, transparency, and large market sizes. None of those applied in this case. In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent. The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't. If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  It's a predictable failure for human organizations in general, I'd say. There are plenty of instances where the government fucks up similarly, no profit motive required.
  - underwater 5y ago
    Generally government fuck ups are different though. Like creeping bureaucracy, corruption, failure to innovate, etc.
cudgy 5y ago
A big problem with motivation to prevent security breaches is the lack of a significant penalty when they occur.

underwater 5y ago

Isn't this a predictable failure mode of capitalism and free markets? Entities are disincentivised from preparing for rare and catastrophic events.

WalterBright 5y ago
No. The building was communally owned by its residents, and they squabbled for years about allocating money for the repairs. All economic systems begin and end with the lament "if only we had more money, we could do it right."
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I think the idea is that the market is supposed to work by the principals having good information about their situation and thus being to choose the best decisions. That's at least my one line summary. In this case it's hard to say someone else was to blame, because the principals had mostly not delegated the decision, they were literally deciding with their own lives at stake. If it were some principal agent problem you'd find a common excuse: it's the agents fault, they chose in their own interest and not the principals. And yet somehow they didn't decide to repair the building. So yes, even though we had a bunch of free adults with years to make the decision and the lowest interest rates ever, they didn't fix a thing that represents a catastrophic risk to themselves. No doubt someone will dig deeper into this and find some way the market was impeded, ideological wars being what they are, but it's hard to see how that would explain away the casual observation that people had the agency to avoid getting killed here. Note that I'm not arguing for more government control over these things, that tends to create an agency problem. Just puzzled over how it could get to this, and a bit questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > questioning how useful it really is for people to decide these things themselves. I suggest putting this into context of all the buildings in the US. This is an exceedingly rare event. Perhaps the very fact that buildings are so safe in the US lulled the residents into a false sense of security. For example, when an earthquake hits a third world city, half the city falls down. When an earthquake hits a US city, the damage is light. I remember the Nisqually quake here 20 years ago. The ground was rocking and rolling making it risky to walk, poles were swinging, and buildings were swaying. But there was very little damage. Back in the 80's I was in Tokyo and woke up to an earthquake. I mentioned it at work the next day, and the reaction of the workers there was "so what".
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    Maybe no system results in the best possible outcome every time? Government owned bridges have collapsed because warnings were ignored. Privately owned apartments collapsed because warnings were ignored. The common factor here is that the warnings were ignored by humans. Creatures that reached the peak of their evolution on the plains of Africa. Whilst masters of the earth, our cognition just isn’t tuned to dealing with low-probability high-consequence events that may occur on a time scale outside our life spans.
- underwater 5y ago
  I think a free market tends to work better with predictable events, transparency, and large market sizes. None of those applied in this case. In this case the negative event was a black swan event. The board and residents were required to correctly understand the risk of failure to remediate problems in this specific building. Who does an in-depth analysis of risk of building failure when renting or buying a property? Not a single person correctly identified that a collapse was imminent. The other problem with rare events is that you can ignore them most of the time and not suffer any consequences. If there is a one in a thousand chance of something bad happening, and addressing that risk will cost you your job, or money, or your reputation then 99.9% of the time you incur that cost unnecessarily. That means that an entity that addresses risk becomes less competitive than a (lucky) company who doesn't. If you increase the market size, then a lot of these complaints go away. Assessing risk of collapse across a hundred thousand buildings, like an insurance company might do, is much easier. If buildings were maintained by corporations that controlled many properties, people could avoid companies with poor track records.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
It's a predictable failure for human organizations in general, I'd say. There are plenty of instances where the government fucks up similarly, no profit motive required.
- underwater 5y ago
  Generally government fuck ups are different though. Like creeping bureaucracy, corruption, failure to innovate, etc.

cudgy 5y ago

A big problem with motivation to prevent security breaches is the lack of a significant penalty when they occur.