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Comment by J_Shelby_J | Hacker News Reader

Potential jail time? I’m with china and how they handle the infant formula debacle.

I hadn't heart about this but, to summarize, two people received capital punishment over this, one suspended death sentence, 3 life imprisonments, 2 15 year jail terms, and 13 others with lesser jail terms. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-01/23/content_742298...

Cover it up until the Olympics are over?

better late than never

The infant formula thing is actively adding something to cheat. This looks like an accident.

Where did you get any evidence, or anything to go on at all really, that lead you to assume "accident" instead of "American cost-cutting"?

Because I didn't see anything to back up corporate-whoopsie in TFA.

It'd be cheaper to add nothing, or water, than lead.

Really? It occurred in multiple food packagers, suggesting a supply problem. Do you know how many American suppliers make cinnamon domestically? I believe that number is very close to zero.

It looks like they got contaminated cinnamon. Lead (II,IV) oxide (red lead) is a reddish-brown pigment which could have been used to adulterate the cinnamon to make it look better (hide imperfections since it's close to the color of high-quality cinnamon bark). Similar to how lead (II) chromate gets added to turmeric to hide imperfections. So I'd not rule out deliberate addition of red lead to allow selling a cheaper product.

More like buying cheap cinnamon, and not checking for lead. Which is kind of the same thing.

Good point. I wasn't aware that cinnamon was used as an adulterant to improve cinnamon marketability

I’d much prefer these guys generate money rather than be an ongoing cost to taxpayers. Allow them on some kind of supervised work-release program with every bit of income over a certain amount above going towards care for their victims.

The point of punishment is deterrence. You maximize value by facilitating a culture that doesn't lie, cheat, steal, and do harm to others. The value a single person can generate is dwarfed by the value an ethical culture will.

"Worse case scenario, I have to live like middle America" is a terrible deterrent.

Not just deterrence, but also safety.

If these folk have already demonstrated they are willing to harm others in order to "generate money", having them do more of that seems... counterproductive.

Harm done to others, meanwhile, is not free. Each of the affected toddlers will have had hospital time, and could have had a productive life of "generating money" had they not been killed by a fruit pouch; so even if you throw morality under the bus and focus purely on picking the outcome that "generates money"... society loses much more money with the death of a toddler than it gains with the sale of a fruit pouch. If it turns out that someone deliberately made that choice, that person is a risk to society and must be prevented from acting in ways that might cause further harm in the future.

Oh, and this is in the case the child dies.... survival may be worse. Lead and the developing brain are two things that should never mix. The mental declines caused by lead will leave a damaged, crippled human being robbed of their abilities.

To clarify, I didn’t mean “can keep their current job”. My thought was that this is a crime of greed: the kind of CEO who’s going to cut corners to save a buck is going to be as deterred by the prospect of never in their life being in authority or better off than working class but taxpayers are better off if that guy’s staying out of jail to pay his victims than being a pure cost in jail.

Would you trust such a person not to throw others around them under the bus to benefit themselves if they are left free to exploit such opportunities in daily life, even once they are no longer CEOs of anything?

I wouldn't. I used to have such faith in humans once, but, well, lead in toddler food.

It’ll come down to what an investigation turns up. If they knowingly picked lead, sure, lock them up like any other poisoner. What I’d bet will turn up, however, is that they picked the lowest bidder and did the legal minimum required testing. In that case, I have trouble saying they’re uniquely dangerous to the public unless we’re also jailing, say, the CEOs of fossil fuel or tobacco companies, big meat suppliers like Tyson’s and the farmers whose worker mistreatment reliably produces E. coli outbreaks, or, for that matter, people who drive around looking at their phones since we could save ~40k lives a year by doing nothing more violent than taking away driver’s licenses from irresponsible people.

It’s natural to be angry here but I think what we should be doing is channeling this anger into demands for more aggressive regulation. Waiting until people get sick is too late, we should expect things like lead or salmonella testing to be done constantly. We could crucify the CEO of this company on livestream and it wouldn’t have much lasting impact because the kind of people who do this think the odds of getting caught are low – change that and it’ll have a much bigger impact.

I agree 100%.

For example, we could start punishing people who sell drugs with harsh punishments.

It’ll surely work!

Its the balance of deterrence and incentives. In the case of drugs, no one really goes to jail fo doing drugs, only selling them.

People therefore feel free to do drugs, which drives demand for people to sell them. Thus an incentive arises, which, for some, is worth the risk.

The same balance applies here. If we dont want something happening, it needs harsh punishments to outweigh the incentives.

I mean people will smuggle drugs into Singapore under the penalty of death. And the flow of drugs continues.

I’d imagine making tens of millions by selling poisonous food provides a similar incentive?

> I mean people will smuggle drugs into Singapore under the penalty of death

Yeah, but how many? Singapore has a very small drug trade when you consider its wealth per-capita. Most counties with similar wealth have trades several times larger per-capita.

You can't completely eliminate a crime no matter what punishments you hand out. Someone people are just blind to risk. However, that doesn't mean punishing people is futile. It has a demonstrable effect.

Now, I do believe that checks and balances that prevent crime are generally more effective than punishments, but punishments are still necessary to add risk to gaps in prevention.

> Yeah, but how many?

Lots of people. There are sizable drugs busts (kilograms of heroin) in Singapore every few weeks. It's a country of 5M, smaller than a larger US city.

That doesn't mean anything out of context. Yes, there are drug busts, but the size and frequency are much less than would be expected in a US or EU city of the same size and wealth. Even less than the percapita average of Japan if I'm not mistaken, which itself has laws nearly as strict.

> but the size and frequency are much less than would be expected in a US or EU city of the same size and wealth.

That's a claim that needs some data to back it up.

Singapore has 3.5M people. Kilograms of heroin is a huge amount. It's in the dozens of kilograms per year, and that's not counting all the heroin that doesn't get seized.

I think this takes the cake for worst opinions I've read on HN.

You're really suggesting criminals should go free as long as we cap their maximum income?

Really?

> You're really suggesting criminals should go free as long as we cap their maximum income?

Not free but under some kind of program where they’re allowed to stay out of prison in some kind of supervised program. These guys were greedy, not axe murderers, and I don’t think there’s much public risk as long as they’re no longer in a position where they can make decisions which affect other people’s health again.

I know it can feel satisfying to light the torches and demand vengeance – it’s a primal emotional reaction – but I don’t think it’s going to do anything. I doubt these guys are going to have evidence of intention to deliberately poison anyone, and I doubt that paying to keep them in jail is going to have more positive outcome than being allowed to stay out of jail so they can make restitution payments.

> These guys were greedy, not axe murderers

These guys did a lot more damage than any axe murderer ever did. Lining them up against the wall would do a lot to deter other CEOs from cutting corners in this way.

Sure, and if evidence turns up that they consciously chose to put lead into food they might even face serious charges but I sudd as kept this will turn out to be more along the lines of not doing enough to figure out why their cinnamon supplier could be so cheap or doing less testing because they hadn’t seen any problems so far. Once you’re at that level you’re going to need a lot of firing squads…

> These guys were greedy, not axe murderers

What if the axe murderer was after their wallet? That would put them in the same category as your sainted "job creators"

> That would put them in the same category as your sainted "job creators"

You have badly misunderstood my point. I’m not saying they should be tolerated to protect jobs, only that someone who is not uncontrollably dangerous to the people around them can probably serve society better than as an ongoing $100k/year cost.

You're making an invalid distinction between axe murderers and people that will poison children to make a buck. They are both "uncontrollably dangerous"

That’s only invalid because it’s incorrectly characterizing my position. Yes, anyone who intentionally poisons a child is a risk but in this case it’s orders of magnitude more likely that these guys bought something because it was cheap and didn’t test it carefully enough, verify that certifications about safety were legitimate, etc. and that starts getting into more systemic questions – do our laws actually require them to do anything which they didn’t? – and relative risk comparisons. For example, the most popular vehicles sold in the United States are designed to cause more collisions and more serious injuries or deaths in each collision, which add up to far more children being harmed every year than this horrible food safety failure. I have a hard time saying it makes sense to have a standard here which says we should jail the CEO of this company but not those of the SUV manufacturers.

If they are actually held responsible, they shouldn't end in a position of responsibility, so not that likely to generate high income.

Also, why not the mean? Surely they've made lots of decisions in their lives that were not so egalitarian as your proposal.

Yeah, median was a sloppy choice. My thought was just that someone this greedy is also going to be deterred by the prospect of not making more than, say, a barista or janitor but would jump at the prospect of staying gainfully employed instead going to prison.

Giving them life in prison serves as a warning to others looking to cut costs. Also the ones most responsible were executed so they aren’t costing the taxpayer anything now.

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