5 ms·

This doesn't seem like a very sensible policy. There are a great many harms that once done, cannot be undone.

pfdietz 1y ago
Harms don't need to be undone, they just need to be penalized. For example: statistical deaths can be compensated for by fines using the statistical value of a human life (about $12 M). Nuclear power regulation could be based on this principle.
- timeon 1y ago
  Not sure if people [0] would do anything if they would not know rules (regulations) but could be drastically penalized if something happens. [0] Except for reckless gamblers.
- saagarjha 1y ago
  How do you feel about extending this to direct murder?
  - hnbad 1y ago
    I'm sure there are at least several people in the US who would gladly pay $12 million to directly cause someone's death without further repercussions. There are several people who could easily afford that several times a year without noticeably having to give up any wealth or expenses. But more charitably: they did say "statistical death" so I presume the implication is "unintentional and non-targeted". Deliberately setting up deathtraps or ensuring a specific person will die but not others would probably be exempt. Of course that could be extremely difficult to prove if gross negligence became so easily affordable.
    - BurningFrog 1y ago
      There are also millions who would volunteer to be killed for $12M to pass on to their heirs. You "statistical death" is of course 100% correct. These kind of tradeoffs are done all the time when designing safety features, and using a monetary value per human life is the right way to do it. Some people can't deal with that kind of rationality though.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Giving the next of kin of murder victims $12M would certainly be a game changer.
    - slightwinder 1y ago
      The victim would still be dead. And there are not that many murders who even have $12M. This whole thread is so ridiculous...
      - throwway120385 1y ago
        I'm sure there's at least one billionaire who secretly longs to hunt the greatest game the world has ever known.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        Do you: Pay $12m in litigation to prove in litigation why your business thing is fine and legal Pay $12m to off whoever's the driving force behind your harassment preventing them from doing it to the next guy who's pockets might not be deep enough to fend it off. It's the pro-social thing to do really.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Let's turn that around: how do you feel about extending the laws about murder to statistical deaths? Because that would be completely impractical. It would cause the economy to cease functioning. Statistical deaths and individual murders are fundamentally different things. There's a fuzzy boundary between the two (as effects are concentrated on smaller and smaller numbers of people) but that doesn't mean there's no difference. Even with individual murders, there are gradations depending on intention and mental state. Manslaughter and first degree murder are different crimes, even if the number of dead bodies is the same.
- detaro 1y ago
  That's great, so we just need to make some scapegoat companies go bankrupt from fines occasionally and can do whatever we want? (It's already somewhat of an issue in construction industries, build shoddy homes and dissolve the company before the majority of buyers realizes how bad it is, repeat)
- discomrobertul8 1y ago
  Ok cool, this bodes well for my "disposing of household waste by dropping a nuclear bomb on it in Central Park" startup
  - tdeck 1y ago
    Better add some AI to that pitch.
- mapt 1y ago
  One of the things I have evolved on as a liberal/leftist. There are just too many situations today where somebody is paying the fine with a smile on their face, if not settling for some trivial amount with no acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Willful harms and even reckless harms by corporations need to be penalized aggressively and punitively. When a corporation worth $30 billion gains $1.3 billion in material benefit over 10 years by doing some activity that victimizes or risks people, it's fucking stupid to try and penalize them $10M with no jail time for anybody. "Cost of doing business" should never be a viable option, because the law needs a subjective bent, some small tyranny of justice, some adversarial person that corporations are structurally encouraged to be terrified of pissing off. If that means forcibly diluting their stock, or seizing the company, or terminating their charter, or throwing their executives down a hole for five years, that's evidently a necessary component of regulation. Deterrence is the name of the game, not just "seeking compliance". We created corporations, and demand their executives, to behave in a psychopathic, amoral, "rational" profit-seeking manner by the legal fiduciary duty. Passively failing to significantly penalize predatory acts is actively encouraging their continuation. It's creating tools meant to do a thing (Hammers) and using them wrong (Juggling) and then acting stunned when they land on your foot, and spending the rest of the day glaring at and shaming the hammers, demanding verbal assurances that they'll never land on your foot again. Occasionally, we hear about China rewarding corporate executives who commit malfeasance of a sufficiently malignant scale with capital punishment. The buck stops here. It sometimes makes the grass look greener on the other side, even with all the things I object to within that system.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  I don't know man, I don't wanna die in a shoddy building or an airplane crash, even if it means my partner gets $12M. To me, my own life is invaluable. I would assume most people feel similarly.
vintermann 1y ago
Especially when it comes to nature. "Oops, there's nothing left to save now anyway, might as well build that project we wanted!"
- _ink_ 1y ago
  And when companies with limited liability are involved. Case in point the research reactor in Germany. The company that was responsible to dismantle it just declared insolvency.
BurningFrog 1y ago
There is also great harm in valuable things never being built. Since that harm is invisible, it is very hard to factor in, and is almost always ignored.
- throwway120385 1y ago
  Would you live next to a chemical factory, knowing that the only way they can be punished for dumping chemicals is by making you sick?
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    The problem is in the fact that we have been treating more and more banal construction projects as if they were chemical factories. The permiting process for a normal residential block of flats in Prague takes several years, because every NIMBY can have their say repeatedly. Everything can be overdone and we as a civilization might have overdone it with safetyism. On a similar note, look at the "free range kid" movement, which is fighting hard to give children at least some freedom which, 40 years ago, was considered absolutely natural.
    - throwway120385 1y ago
      I think we're in agreement on that point. What I worry about is there's a line of reasoning in the US that there should be no permitting and zero code enforcement, and I think that's too far in the other direction. But I would like to see in the US a change to a model where you're not constrained to a Le Courbosier style development with residential, commercial, and industrial spaces situated in separate centers, because that's not a natural mode of development and it has created many ills here. I suspect that I would feel the same as you do about flats in Prague.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        The argument for codes and such is information asymmetry. The person selling you something may know corners were cut, but they don't tell you. An argument against codes (and licensing) is they are one size fits all. Maybe someone with different preferences would trade off quality and price differently than you do. I think this especially shows up in licensing: a rich person wants their doctor to be extremely good, even if that greatly elevates the cost; a poor person would be better off at lesser quality medical care they could actually afford.

Harms don't need to be undone, they just need to be penalized. For example: statistical deaths can be compensated for by fines using the statistical value of a human life (about $12 M). Nuclear power regulation could be based on this principle.

timeon 1y ago
Not sure if people [0] would do anything if they would not know rules (regulations) but could be drastically penalized if something happens. [0] Except for reckless gamblers.
saagarjha 1y ago
How do you feel about extending this to direct murder?
- hnbad 1y ago
  I'm sure there are at least several people in the US who would gladly pay $12 million to directly cause someone's death without further repercussions. There are several people who could easily afford that several times a year without noticeably having to give up any wealth or expenses. But more charitably: they did say "statistical death" so I presume the implication is "unintentional and non-targeted". Deliberately setting up deathtraps or ensuring a specific person will die but not others would probably be exempt. Of course that could be extremely difficult to prove if gross negligence became so easily affordable.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    There are also millions who would volunteer to be killed for $12M to pass on to their heirs. You "statistical death" is of course 100% correct. These kind of tradeoffs are done all the time when designing safety features, and using a monetary value per human life is the right way to do it. Some people can't deal with that kind of rationality though.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Giving the next of kin of murder victims $12M would certainly be a game changer.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    The victim would still be dead. And there are not that many murders who even have $12M. This whole thread is so ridiculous...
    - throwway120385 1y ago
      I'm sure there's at least one billionaire who secretly longs to hunt the greatest game the world has ever known.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        Do you: Pay $12m in litigation to prove in litigation why your business thing is fine and legal Pay $12m to off whoever's the driving force behind your harassment preventing them from doing it to the next guy who's pockets might not be deep enough to fend it off. It's the pro-social thing to do really.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Let's turn that around: how do you feel about extending the laws about murder to statistical deaths? Because that would be completely impractical. It would cause the economy to cease functioning. Statistical deaths and individual murders are fundamentally different things. There's a fuzzy boundary between the two (as effects are concentrated on smaller and smaller numbers of people) but that doesn't mean there's no difference. Even with individual murders, there are gradations depending on intention and mental state. Manslaughter and first degree murder are different crimes, even if the number of dead bodies is the same.
detaro 1y ago
That's great, so we just need to make some scapegoat companies go bankrupt from fines occasionally and can do whatever we want? (It's already somewhat of an issue in construction industries, build shoddy homes and dissolve the company before the majority of buyers realizes how bad it is, repeat)
discomrobertul8 1y ago
Ok cool, this bodes well for my "disposing of household waste by dropping a nuclear bomb on it in Central Park" startup
- tdeck 1y ago
  Better add some AI to that pitch.
mapt 1y ago
One of the things I have evolved on as a liberal/leftist. There are just too many situations today where somebody is paying the fine with a smile on their face, if not settling for some trivial amount with no acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Willful harms and even reckless harms by corporations need to be penalized aggressively and punitively. When a corporation worth $30 billion gains $1.3 billion in material benefit over 10 years by doing some activity that victimizes or risks people, it's fucking stupid to try and penalize them $10M with no jail time for anybody. "Cost of doing business" should never be a viable option, because the law needs a subjective bent, some small tyranny of justice, some adversarial person that corporations are structurally encouraged to be terrified of pissing off. If that means forcibly diluting their stock, or seizing the company, or terminating their charter, or throwing their executives down a hole for five years, that's evidently a necessary component of regulation. Deterrence is the name of the game, not just "seeking compliance". We created corporations, and demand their executives, to behave in a psychopathic, amoral, "rational" profit-seeking manner by the legal fiduciary duty. Passively failing to significantly penalize predatory acts is actively encouraging their continuation. It's creating tools meant to do a thing (Hammers) and using them wrong (Juggling) and then acting stunned when they land on your foot, and spending the rest of the day glaring at and shaming the hammers, demanding verbal assurances that they'll never land on your foot again. Occasionally, we hear about China rewarding corporate executives who commit malfeasance of a sufficiently malignant scale with capital punishment. The buck stops here. It sometimes makes the grass look greener on the other side, even with all the things I object to within that system.
saubeidl 1y ago
I don't know man, I don't wanna die in a shoddy building or an airplane crash, even if it means my partner gets $12M. To me, my own life is invaluable. I would assume most people feel similarly.

vintermann 1y ago

Especially when it comes to nature. "Oops, there's nothing left to save now anyway, might as well build that project we wanted!"

_ink_ 1y ago
And when companies with limited liability are involved. Case in point the research reactor in Germany. The company that was responsible to dismantle it just declared insolvency.

BurningFrog 1y ago

There is also great harm in valuable things never being built. Since that harm is invisible, it is very hard to factor in, and is almost always ignored.

throwway120385 1y ago
Would you live next to a chemical factory, knowing that the only way they can be punished for dumping chemicals is by making you sick?
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  The problem is in the fact that we have been treating more and more banal construction projects as if they were chemical factories. The permiting process for a normal residential block of flats in Prague takes several years, because every NIMBY can have their say repeatedly. Everything can be overdone and we as a civilization might have overdone it with safetyism. On a similar note, look at the "free range kid" movement, which is fighting hard to give children at least some freedom which, 40 years ago, was considered absolutely natural.
  - throwway120385 1y ago
    I think we're in agreement on that point. What I worry about is there's a line of reasoning in the US that there should be no permitting and zero code enforcement, and I think that's too far in the other direction. But I would like to see in the US a change to a model where you're not constrained to a Le Courbosier style development with residential, commercial, and industrial spaces situated in separate centers, because that's not a natural mode of development and it has created many ills here. I suspect that I would feel the same as you do about flats in Prague.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      The argument for codes and such is information asymmetry. The person selling you something may know corners were cut, but they don't tell you. An argument against codes (and licensing) is they are one size fits all. Maybe someone with different preferences would trade off quality and price differently than you do. I think this especially shows up in licensing: a rich person wants their doctor to be extremely good, even if that greatly elevates the cost; a poor person would be better off at lesser quality medical care they could actually afford.