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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

I was with you until: "and fined for half their annual profits by the FCC". Not only is that not the FCC's job, but that's an insane fine for a relatively small problem. If anything, NVIDIA should be required to recall the adapters and replace them with working ones at their cost, and maybe pre-fund a settlement fund to pay out in cases of damage due to this connector.

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Fair enough, changed it to just federally fined. But maybe going "we know this can cause fires, we're going to sell it anyway" should come with an insane fine. If you're willing to burn down the place for sales, see if you can recover from the same being done to you. And if you can't, maybe that should be the price for prioritising sales over human lives.

It does come with an insane fine. You just need to report it to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

You mean the commission whose highest ever fine "omg so bigs" ever was a paltry 4 million dollars? Pass, this needs a bit more of an iron fist "we take half your revenue. If you go under, tough shit, you deserved it" approach.

I'm not sure where you got that information, but it is wrong.

They have handed out over $35 million in fines this year, with the largest being $27.25 million in 2018.

I'd like to get better information, but google sure isn't finding me any, got a link that lists the fines issued per year?

And of course with that said, $27 million is nowhere near enough to hurt a company like NVIDIA, which pulls in SIX BILLION DOLLARS per quarter. Even if they slapped down a 30 million fine, that'd be less than half a day's revenue, and basically says "this is perfectly acceptable behaviour in our country, thank you for dining, here's the bill, no tip required, come again".

For megacorporations like NVIDIA, "a million" is not a big number, it's passive income that rolls in over a lunch break. Real fines for megacorps need to "b" rather than "m" to actually matter.

https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Civil-and-Crimi...

27.5 million is chump change for nVidia.

>a relatively small problem

This is an overcorrection to OPs comment. If Nvidia knew about the very real risk of fire but continued to push unsafe products with misleading statements, that is a significant problem and hints at a fundamental rot within the company.

This is the bigger issue that isn't addressed by what effectively is a minor tax on gross negligence.

Corporations aren't going to adjust their behaviour until the punishments for their malfeasance start becoming a true existential threat

Agreed, and if this also seems like a valid case for holding individuals accountable if it can be shown they knowingly ignored or covered the situation. Perhaps criminally so if there were injuries.

They spend lots and lots of money to make sure this doesn't happen. It's more or less why the entire right wing legal movement (Federalist Society et al) exists.

Sadly, this. "Tort reform" is the name of the game, and it's depressing how well it's worked. Much like the more recent efforts to rebrand estate taxes as a "death tax" to bolster public support for the wealthy giving up less of their inherited fortunes.

If they were aware of the risks/problem then I do not think it is unfair punishment. We as a society need to have a stronger response to companies choosing profits over safety.

> relatively small problem

Setting the houses of their customers on fire is a small problem??

Setting people's houses on fire is in fact a large problem. Potentially setting houses on fire is also a problem, but it is "relatively smaller" than the liability of actually injuring or killing someone, or hundreds of people.

Melting connectors is not all that uncommon of an issue with shoddy electronics. Well designed hardware rarely has this problem, but if you buy enough no-name import junk, you'll probably run into this with other products. (I have) Most of the time it does not cause a fire.

This isn't okay, but it also isn't Surfside condo collapse levels of bad.

This is a high amperage connector. It is significantly more prone to catching on fire that the majority of connectors in no name import junk in case of it melting.

Fire is caused by heating something to its ignition temperature, and heat is a function of the conductor its flowing through just as much as it's a function of the current itself.

The current provided from a base-spec USB charger is enough to start a fire, given the right (er... wrong) conductor. Plenty of us remember lighting Estes rocket motors with flashlight batteries (zinc carbon, no less) as a kid.

When a junction melts, it is often the case that the connection itself will become much more resistive, which will make it heat up more and more. For an application where the PSU might be able to supply hundreds of Watts, it's much easier for things to get very hot and ignite.

This is despite the use of a good conductor.

And the issue is that when the power source is that much more powerful you're more likely to make whatever is nearby catch fire.

a nice juicy fine would certainly make sure they wouldn't knowingly release fire hazard GPUs again.

Sorry, but that's nowhere close to being enough.

This isn't an "insane fine" or a "relatively small problem."

These things are dangerous and they had to know that they were dangerous when they shipped them. They deserve to get financially nuked for being so ridiculously irresponsible. Companies that put profits ahead of consumer safety shouldn't be allowed to have profits.

There's "they should've known, but it seems they didn't", which is bad engineering and should be punished somewhat.

On the other hand, this seems to be "they knew about it and went ahead anyway" a la Boeing 737 MAX, which is many, many levels above and it should be the equivalent to a financial nuke, IMHO. Recoverable, but something that is talked about in the company for the next 15 years.

Dare I say, if there's provably a person who was presented with this as a problem and overrode the decision so as not to delay the problem, there should be criminal liability for them?

Yes, there should be, in addition to financial penalties. Unfortunately, what is considered to be a "fair" punishment for a corporation rarely ever reaches the level of criminal prosecution and never forces the corporation to change its operating strategy. In an ideal world, corporations would be punished financially, criminally, and be forced to reorganize whenever they attempt to wipe obvious dangers under the rug for profit's sake.

An honest mistake is different from an informed decision.

The consequences are not small, and the action was apparently fully informed. Those two things combined constitute a very Big Deal deserving no forgiveness at all.

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