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Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad to me that situations where companies cause negative outcomes for people are paid for by fees and are labeled “the cost of doing business”. I saw a post here the other day that said that, rather than releasing products and later the burden be on others to prove they are unsafe, the burden should be on companies to ensure their products are safe prior to releasing them to the public. Money does not solve issues; you can compensate people for the cost of their cancer treatments, etc., but I’m sure they’d probably rather never have had cancer to begin with. The wrong can’t be retroactively undone.

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I think the simpler solution is to start holding the people in charge of the companies accountable for the actions they greenlight and continue to approve.

Johnson and Johnson knew their product had asbestos in it. It seems absurd they're not facing criminal charges. If I, as an individual, sold an asbestos tainted powder to people that resulted in deaths and cancer then there's a very good chance that I'd be spending the rest of my life in prison, even if I didn't knowingly do so. But if I do it as a massive global corporation, on a far wider scale, and with full knowledge of what I'm doing, my penalty is... nothing? I mean literally they're not even facing criminal charges, this was a civil suit. It just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and the stupidity of it all is enough to make one angry.

I don’t disagree with you; I think personal liability is in order in some situations, too (see: 2008 subprime mortgage crisis). However, again, these actions attempt to equalize after the fact. I suppose they also disincentivize beforehand. But why stop at disincentivizing the behavior, which requires relying on people to be rational actors, and instead not allow the behavior at all?

We have organizations like the FDA, etc., to ensure that the food and drugs we put in our bodies are safe. The reality is the gamut of technologies, products, and environments that impact our health are far more broad than “food and drug”; why not regulate them the same way?

> the burden should be on companies to ensure their products are safe prior to releasing them to the public

I don't know if this policy would make the world a better place. There are so many life saving or life improving technologies that would be delayed because of the burden of proving them to be "safe"

> the burden should be on companies to ensure their products are safe prior to releasing them to the public

I suspect big companies would love to stifle the competition from small competitors who can’t afford to sink money into this type of analysis

Sounds good to me, stifle away. Move fast and break things doesn't fit in with consumer safety.

Really, is this the argument you want to actually make? That we shouldn't regulate things that people put on/into their body because we might hurt the "little guy?"

Mind you I've been hearing about this mythical "little guy" that massive multinational corporations love to trot out when it comes to increasing regulations or taxes against them but over the course of my lifetime all I've seen is a massive increase in power and consolidation from these companies.

It's so odd realizing you live in a dystopian cyberpunk future without the pretty trinkets to go along with it.

>>"dystopian cyberpunk future"

This is the future all of us kids from the 1970s and 1980s BUILT on the premise of "wouldnt it be cool if...." -- We (and I am personally guilty, as are many HNers, of facilitating the "wouldnt it be cool if Cyberpunk tropes were reality?"

I helped build spying (marketing) infra, sentiment measures etc...

But the "little guy" that bigPharma preys upon is the 'patient' J&J needs corporate capital punishment, because this isnt the first time or only incident of them causing negative outcomes for profit (recall their tainted vaccines?)

> rather than releasing products and later the burden be on others to prove they are unsafe, the burden should be on companies to ensure their products are safe prior to releasing them to the public.

I personally agree with the precautionary principle and think there should be stricter requirements for certain classes of new products, but the best solution is probably some type of compromise based on level of newness and possible danger.

The core problem is the "unknown unknown". There's no upper limit to how much testing you should do to ensure a product is safe because the space of possible dangers is nearly infinite. So any policy will be a balancing act of false positives and false negatives and what levels of each are tolerable. I think this is the proper question and it is not an easy one to answer.

Why aren't there consumer products unions that certify products as safe ? That way, the people who care can get the certified product, and the rest can accept risk.

It won't work for something like cigarettes where the risk is external but if the risk is to you, then you can manage it this way.

There are, such as Underwriters Laboratories. But the human body is such a complex machine that it’s infeasible to do the experiments necessary to provide the kinds of guarantees that one would desire. Many effects have multiple causes and can show up decades later.

Ah, so we should label the products with the appropriate certification and if it is missing, consumers should choose their position on the risk-reward curve.

I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic, or just describing how life works.

Thing is people have been using talcum powder for many many centuries. It's just ground up rock... The thing is when you gather something from nature there will be naturally contamination. The claim is about asbestos being in the talc powder which is also a rock...

The thing is asbestos can occur naturally in and dirt all around the world. There are some places even in the US where dust storms are more dangerous just because this fact. Here's just a short memo about naturally occurring asbestos. https://ncceh.ca/sites/default/files/Naturally_occurring_asb...

I am not saying J&J should get off scotch free if they knew some sources of talc they were using had high levels of asbestos. However, I am gonna say it's not surprising that there may be some contamination. Moreover that's just one form of natural occurring contamination. There other minerals that naturally occur that also are unwanted contaminates such as heavy metals and so forth. What matters is are the contaminants reasonable low for a naturally sourced product since it's not possible to have zero contamination.

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