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This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the co

This is just a general problem. Companies very often kill people and get fines. The body count before a company starts to get close to "this might kill the company" is absurdly high. Consider, the Dalkon shield which had a hospitalization rate of 5 in 1000 and a death toll easily in the 1000s (maybe 10s of thousands). [1] The company went bankrupt but not defunct. It is now a part of Pfizer. Nobody experienced any sort of jail time in association with the deaths (and, after it was banned, they started selling the dalkon shield in poorer regions). A serial killer killing 10 people gets the death penalty, yet there exist mining companies that have easily killed 1000s of employees with silicosis (and are still operating today, looking at you Dow [2]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalkon_Shield [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawks_Nest_Tunnel_disaster

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you. But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Yeah, the big issue we have is that we reward ignorance. It's in the legal best interest for companies producing physical products to be as oblivious as possible to issues of safety. Legally, the worst the worst outcome for them happens when there's documented evidence of safety problems. It's far better to feign ignorance. "Who could have predicted that opioids were addictive!". "How could we have known that this doctor was overprescribing, we are a big company without the resources to track everything". It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet. If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

yep, this is why I said it should be an existential crisis. mistakes happen, but if your mistakes can potentially cause bodily harm you better be damned well prepared to show how it was not negligence in any way or you should get a fine that scares the shit out of you. But that's the idealist side of me talking, the realist understands that will never happen.

cogman10 3y ago
Yeah, the big issue we have is that we reward ignorance. It's in the legal best interest for companies producing physical products to be as oblivious as possible to issues of safety. Legally, the worst the worst outcome for them happens when there's documented evidence of safety problems. It's far better to feign ignorance. "Who could have predicted that opioids were addictive!". "How could we have known that this doctor was overprescribing, we are a big company without the resources to track everything". It should really be the opposite in an ideal world. A company that has documented "this is what we did to make sure everything was safe" should less culpable than the company that moves fast and breaks things/people/the planet. If a company killed someone, I'd want their defense to be a list of everything they did to prevent that person from dying, not a "well shucks, accidents happened, and this was a tragedy that couldn't be avoided!". That's the response that should end a company's existence.