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Comment by mgleason_3 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, does 6-months in jail seem a little severe? How does one even get someone prosecuted for this crime?

We hired a licensed plumber on 2 occasions - to install a sink and later a shower.

We just had a different plumber out because the sink was plugged up. He pointed out that the prior plumber had installed the sanitary-t upside down basically guarantying it would eventually become clogged.

We also had him look at the shower because we couldn’t figure out how to get the screen out to clear the hair. Turns out the grate was also installed upside-down and the screws holding the screen in are in-accessible. So, there is no way to get it out without demoing the shower.

Should this plumber be sentenced to 6-months in jail?

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I understand it depends on whether the FBI can show malice, planning and intent, and the size of the damage ($42k in the Siemens case). So in your plumber case it's probably impossible unless it's like a pattern of fraud rather than just one mistreated client. If a plumber actually tried to make a fraudulent business model out of such behaviour, then I could totally believe they might get jail time. Furthermore, if you sue the plumber yourself, that's a civil case and so jail time is not possible at all (the Siemens case was handled by the FBI).

I personally do not think that 6 months' jail for stealing $42k from somebody is so severe, to be honest, it's a lot of money.

Right.

If you stole a car (often valued at less than $40k), you could have gotten 1-9 years in the USA (depending on the value of the car).

If he's purposely making mistakes to get work in the future then I don't think 6-months in jail is that bad. It's just plain fraud isn't it? Not to mention an expensive inconvenience for all of his customers who have to deal with his shoddy work.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible the plumber made an honest mistake.

Yes the plumber obviously went to upside-down plumbing school where he learned the profit-maximizing techniques of installing everything upside-down.

Nah he's probably just Australian

Or he made a mistake.

Is your argument that the programmer in the FA was tired after a long day and accidentally concocted a scheme to defraud his client of $40,000?

This sounds similar to planned obsolescence, so the moral is if you design it that way, as a manufacturer, you are ok. Definitely a grey area here.

Edit: After some thought, I feel a precedent. My car has parts that don't become obsolete, they flat break requiring never ending service. Surely I can sue for fraud as the auto company has the ability to use another means. (Devils advocate)

Deliberately introducing errors in one's work to defraud an employer is not remotely close to planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is not the deliberate introduction of malfunctions, it is the engineering tradeoff between longevity and other characteristics.

For example, Apple noticed that most customers replaced their phones within 2-3 years. A lithium ion battery's lifetime is determined by its charging and discharge characteristics. Its life is extended if it is charged more slowly and neither charged or discharged fully. But this increases charge time and reduced usable battery capacity - both of which are key selling features for smartphones. So Apple optimized the iPhone's battery management to deliver good charging and usable capacity, with the tradeoff that it would degrade significantly beyond 2-3 years of use.

This contractor's activities would have been analogous to Apple introducing code that checks the current timestamp with the timestamp from when the phone was sold and degrading performance when that difference exceeded a threshold.

"Deliberately introducing errors in one's work to defraud an employer is not remotely close to planned obsolescence"

Perhaps, but it's two points on the same continuum.

No they are not. One is intentionally, secretly, and illegally introducing flaws to defraud an employer. The other is managing tradeoffs based on technical constraints.

I don't think that planned obsolescence is unintentional. If it's not completely secret, it's not admitted to either, and it's not illegal because it's not illegal.

Is it particularly that you think that there isn't a continuum from legal actions to illegal actions? Isn't it possible and common that two instances of similar actions can be on the right and wrong sides of the law?

Planned obsolescence is not at all unintentional, it is highly deliberate. Every product needs to plan for it's intended lifespan, from phones to nuclear reactors.

Planned obsolescence and what this contractor did are not on any sort of continuum. This contractor was not making a trade-off, he deliberately sabotaged his work. This is not on any sort of continuum with optimizing phone's battery life for a certain number of years, or making similar tradeoffs.

I agree with you to the extent that companies design their products to become obsolete in a way that actually considers all of the trade-offs in a way that makes optimal use of the resource at hand and does not intentionally shorten the lifespan of its products in an attempt to boost sales at the expense of generating additional waste and reducing the value of the finished product. Once you start doing that, you ARE being intentionally destructive.

What I think you're ignoring is that they are both examples of utilizing dishonesty for profit.

Planned obsolescence could in the abstract be just about making a trade-off between price and durability, but in all real instances it leverages the fact that the consumer can't reliably assess the ratio of cost to lifespan of a product. If the trade-off was transparent to the buyer, then competition would produce much more durable products, even if not infinitely durable.

> it's not completely secret, it's not admitted to either, and it's not illegal because it's not illegal.

No, your assertion is quite wrong. All engineered products have service lives, because they all have failure modes that are taken into account in the design process. If a phone's failure mode consists of the battery dying the the battery will be designed to ensure it will likely work well for a minimum of x time following a typical usage pattern. Likewise an airplane failure mode is the fuseage breaking off due to fatigue, thus it is designed to be flown X times (takeoff/landing counts, number of hours in flight) taking onto account the likelihood of cracks forming and propagating. Targeting a certain service life in a design does not mean there is mischief in play. It only means engineering.

Thus obviously planting time bombs has absolutely nothing to do with engineering a product.

You're talking about 2 different things. The implication with "planned obsolecence" here is that the device becomes nonfunctional or less-functional because the manufacturer simply designed it to fail after a while. See for example the Phoebus Cartel, who actually fined manufacturers who made lightbulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.

> because the manufacturer simply designed it to fail after a while.

You're missing the whole point. Everything fails after a while. Everything. It's the engineer's job to ensure that it fails only after X amount of use, which can be expressed in time of normal usage. There are no time bombs, only the fact that designers picked a small service life.

The point is not that tradeoffs are inherently unethical, it's that in practice, deceiving the customer about those tradeoffs affects how they are made. You go to the supermarket and they have to post unit prices so you can compare, although this is gamed as much as possible. But you go and look at shoes, and you can only guess whether the $100 pair is going to last proportionally longer than the $80 pair. Some things, like tires and cars, you can get information from others experience and testing about lifespan, but even so, there is still a segment of the market that buys the poor quality products which is being deceived in the sense that they might well choose differently if it was thrown in their face how they are being screwed.

> Perhaps, but it's two points on the same continuum.

They really aren't. All engineered products are designed to meet a target service life. Even today's houses are designed with a design lifespan of 50 years. A consumer product is not different.

Saying all products have an engineered service life is beside the point. Planned obsolescence is not transparent. They don't tell you what those engineering decisions are - they don't put labels saying this item costs $X/year and this item costs $Y/year. Consumers would choose differently if they had trustworthy information for everything. Saying people are ok with that is like saying people choose to get melamine in their milk if they choose the cheapest.

Weren't there some printer manufacturers doing almost exactly that with ink cartridges?

It feels like your being obtuse on purpose.

Surely you understand the difference between a part that naturally wears out over time due to friction and wear and tear, versus a part that's delibrately installed incorrectly to cause a malfunction?

You're assuming the guy did that just to you. If he does the same in every installation, I'd say that six months is not enough.

It seems the specifically designed logic to fail at a certain date is the reason. If stuff breaks because of a screwup, or at least something that people can be convinced is a routine screwup, that's one thing. Actually creating a new module to make something fail is something else.

It's like if the plumber designed, built, and installed a device specifically to make your plumbing leak or clog or something at a specific point in the future, instead of just installing a normal and expected device incorrectly.

The law does tend to take intentions into account for crimes and punishment. Killing somebody by a freak accident is different from making a plan in advance to kill somebody and executing it.

This does make it feel rather odd that it's legal to DRM things though.

"It's like if the plumber designed, built, and installed a device specifically to make your plumbing leak or clog or something at a specific point in the future, instead of just installing a normal and expected device incorrectly."

Intent is what matters. The distinction you're describing just affects whether it's deniable.

Well yeah. Doing something that makes it easy to prove that your intent was malicious does tend to change things a bit.

No he shouldn't. We need to stop sending people to jail for all but the most heinous of crimes. He should be ordered to pay you back twice for what it cost to install and repair.

Twice seems a very low.

It sounds like you're confusing criminal liability with civil liability.

Does it matter? Practically, what seems more just to you: jail time, or remuneration with additional penalties?

That would be interesting, the victim gets to decide the penalty (up to a limit of course). The perp would have to plead their case to the victim directly, not just the judge. No jury necessary unless requested.

No, I just don't think jails solve the problems besides costing taxpayer money. Maybe more things should be considered civil.

Just sued for the cost of putting the job right.

Unlike code, law considers intent.

6 months for fraud doesn't seem unreasonable.

That age-old saying comes to mind: “Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.”

Also known as: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

However, I tend to disagree with this approach when the final result is that the "incompetent" one stands to profitably gain from their alleged incompetence or ignorance.

How about adding your judgement, based on the specific evidence, of the likely cause? One of:

1. Ignorance/Incompetence -- wasn't paying attention?

2. Gross negligence -- doing it wrong was somehow quicker and cheaper.

3. Fraud -- calculated to fail.

p.s. Dealing with similar case of malfeasance myself just now (electrical). Looks to be about #1 20%, #2 80%.

Did the previous plumber install a timer on a pipe, ensuring it would leak every 6 weeks?

The "timer" was based on hair amount in water flow.

Any amount of jail time for non-violent crimes seems excessive.

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