Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

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> They chose to buy it.

No, absolutely not, never ever. This just highly incentivizes Manufacturers to dump trash garbage into the market (since you've just forced consumers to bear all liability for Manufacturer failures).

You do this once, and you might as well kiss all of society away. Imagine a toy that kills children, and you tell parents, "well, you pressed the 'On' button, so it's your fault". Imagine a furnace that burns down your house, and you tell homeowners, "well, you pressed the 'heat' button, what did you expect?". No one would be willing to buy anything at all, because every manufacturer would be in a race to see the shittiest thing they could trick people into buying. Every product on every shelf would be snake oil.

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Manufacturers should always be fully liable for any and all problems, that can not be directly attributed to extreme gross negligence on the consumers part.

"wel, consumers are the ones pressing the "run the self-driving car" button" -- absolutely not. Manufacturers sold car with a "self-driving" button, consumers hold zero fault for pressing the button Manufacturers promised would work, unless there's some kind of extreme gross negligence involved. (i.e., pressing the button, while the car is already dangling off a cliff-side, or pressing the button after gouging out every camera and sensor on the car, or whatever).

"But then Manufacturers couldn't sell a self-driving car" -- cool, then the car isn't ready to be sold anyway. If a car company isn't ready to take on the liability for their self-driving product, then it isn't freaking ready for the road -- no exceptions.

> Imagine a toy that kills children, and you tell parents, "well, you pressed the 'On' button, so it's your fault". Imagine a furnace that burns down your house, and you tell homeowners, "well, you pressed the 'heat' button, what did you expect?". No one would be willing to buy anything at all, because every manufacturer would be in a race to see the shittiest thing they could trick people into buying. Every product on every shelf would be snake oil.

You're totally right! This is why we have in the past had a regulatory (and partial participatory) state that, prior to decades of attacks and gutting, prevented that stuff from being sold. Perhaps the self-driving car hypemen need their own equivalent of UL/ETL and need to convince insurers and the NHTSA that they have a sufficient story--and perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to sell cars that sport those features at all until they do!

Completly agree. NHTSA should (imho) have full regulatory control over the approval of any and all self-driving car tech on the road. (Rather than just 'Voluntary Guidance' suggestions and 'safety-related defects', which encourages manufacturers to ship a known-defective product, and hope NHTSA can't catch it in a recall)

100%. Like, maybe my original post sounded like a sop to manufacturers--to be totally clear, hell no. I want them not selling shit at all if it isn't exhaustively checked by an independent regulatory body. But if we can't have that, I want customers feeling the fear of God and not buying the stuff because the responsibility for the tool falls on them too.

Our regulatory state mandates small airplanes use leaded gasoline and has for many decades, literally harming poor children the most.

Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing in numerous ways (zoning, arc-fault breakers, "look and feel", etc). Children don't hardly see their parents because they must drive long distances to commute, they don't get adequate supervision.

Our culture is what allows this to continue. We culturally don't demand excellence. We denigrate smart people. We refuse to have standards for raising children, leading to inter-generational idiocy. And now those idiots vote to keep making more idiots ("don't say gay", anti-abortion, no free BC, etc.) Regulation won't fix a broken culture.

> Regulation won't fix a broken culture.

That's fine. Regulation's "job" isn't to "fix a broken culture", it exists to prevent repeat mistakes -- especially risky/damaging ones. The saying goes, "safety regulations are written in blood" -- that most of the regulations we have exist to prevent some kind of tragedy that has already happened at least once.

> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing in numerous ways ("look and feel", etc).

Most of those are not regulations, they're just rules. (i.e., 'neighborhood character / look and feel').

> Our regulatory state drives up the cost of housing (arc-fault breakers)

That's not a 'cost drive-up', that's basic safety. (AFCI breakers literally prevent home electrical fires, Home Depot sells these at full retail markup for like ~$50/each. (120v,15a). You might use, what 12 of these on the average home? $600 total? On a $300k new build, AFCI costs you 0.2% of your total budget. These are not why housing is expensive).

It's not "basic safety", it's akin to mandating helmet use while driving cars.

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