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Comment by TwoBit | Hacker News Reader

His prison sentence (11 years) and fine (800K pounds) should have been much worse. People go to prison in the US for 11 years for smoking weed.

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So what? This is not the US where people are sentenced to multiple life sentences. It's the UK, which has a different view on crime and punishment.

I'd prefer shorter sentences for non-violent drug offenses.

Tom Hayes interned at UBS in 2001 [1]. Most interns are about 20 years old; we can thus estimate his age at about 35. A man born in the UK in 1981 is expected to live about 70 years [2]. Hayes' 14-year sentence thus represents almost 40% of his remaining life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hayes_(trader)

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

When he was born in 1981 he had a life expectancy of 71 years. By surviving until now he has increased that value.

In the UK you're entitled to early release on licence at the half-way point in a sentence, assuming good behaviour. So he should serve only 5.5 years in any case.

> I'd prefer shorter sentences for non-violent drug offenses.

I'd prefer much more reasonable drug policies- how growing a plant can be deemed illegal?

(pharma, alcohol, tobacco industries are not happy)

I'm amazed he got any jail time at all. Look back at the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis was riddled with fraud, and yet the executives from many of those banks that caused the crisis left with multi-million dollar bonuses and zero jail time.

Not high enough on the totempole most likely. Thus he was thrown under the bus to deflect attention.

>Thus he was thrown under the bus to deflect attention

Why is it so hard to imagine someone doing this without direct order? Why do we assume the "executive" is evil, but the lowly worker is "good"?

Being generally scummy and not getting caught (or not getting caught by anyone who matters) gives you a big advantage in business. Those who rise to the top through many rounds of competition are therefore either generally scummy or are just so damn good that they can be saints and still outcompete the (possibly colluding and therefore even harder to beat!) assholes. Source: all history of business since forever, and/or an evening of drinks and discussion with any mid-ladder-climb MBA.

The lowly worker, meanwhile, has failed to rise in the ranks and is therefore less likely to be evil than the population average since some of the evil people (but proportionately fewer not-evil people) have moved out of his or her cohort (to higher-paying positions).

QED.

>yet the executives from many of those banks that caused the crisis left with multi-million dollar bonuses and zero jail time.

Can you point to the actual crimes or specific cases? Because, fortunately, we don't throw people in jail on speculation.

According to the article, Hayes was "chief informant, who in return would receive leniency and, more importantly, an agreement that he would be dealt with in the UK. To secure this arrangement Hayes had to agree to tell the SFO everything he knew and promise to testify against everybody involved. Crucially, he also had to plead guilty..."

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