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Comment by hypersoar | Hacker News Reader

We shouldn't expect corporations to be so recklessly amoral. I'm all in favor of higher costs for doing shit like this, but the humans making the decisions bear moral responsibility for them. When they bury critical safety issues, they should be held accountable whether or not this particular financial calculus went their way.

Are there serious "people who claim all safety-related issues should get a recall"? That's not the only other available position. Not every safety incident needs to lead to a recall, but that doesn't prevent good-faith judgements on whether or not one is necessary. The fact that we assume this won't happen demonstrates how catastrophically awry we've allowed the artificial construct of a corporation to run.

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>We shouldn't expect corporations to be so recklessly amoral.

Either that, or we treat them like any other animal incapable of civility - we cage/muzzle them and don't provide them with any opportunity for responsibility.

Imagine if we had the "Nutrition Facts" equivalent for failure rates (and supply chain while we're at it.) That'd be an interesting world.

1. people will eventually tune them out, like with prop 65 warnings or the existing nutrition facts/calorie labeling

2. while it's easy to calculate what's the nutritional content in a food, estimating future failure rates isn't trivial and there's a lot of subjectivity involved. Companies will definitely be fudging the reliability numbers to get an edge. See for instance, the failure rates for hard drives. The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%. Therefore I'd expect these nutritional fact labels to be totally useless at best, and a waste of time/resources at worst.

Prop 65 warnings are pretty useless though, since they have very limited information that does not allow one to evaluate the risk incurred.

Case in point, my first internship in California was in a building with a sign that said "This building contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." What's in the building? Who knows. Could be really bad chemicals, or just someone who has a beer on their desk [0].

It would be much better to have some information about the chemicals contained, how bad are the chemicals, and what is the expected effect of the chemicals at the concentration at which they're encountered.

[0] https://oehha.ca.gov/chemicals/alcoholic-beverages-0

Yes, they need some actionable information. I remember seeing my first one as 15 year old Canadian on vacation. My first thought was good thing I'm in Hawaii. My second thought was I can't do anything with this vague information.

It was some green slime you put in your bike tires to prevent puncture leaks. I had never seen that before. I bought it and took it home with me, skillfully avoiding California so it didn't become carcinogenic.

So it was better when it was impossible to know what was in things and count calories? Not perfect doesn't mean not better.

> The annual failure rate on the spec sheets are around 0.3%, but empirical data by backblaze puts them anywhere from 0.3% to 12%.

I'd suggest dealing with that as fraud, not giving up.

His argument is pure straw, made up by him; not what is actually being argued by anyone.

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