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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see particularly untrustworthy companies stripped of all assets, buildings razed and executives jailed

Jail executives? Sure. Tear down 3m? Why? 3M is useful. They make a lot of stuff we need.

Cool! Seize the assets and auction them to companies who don't do crime. Maybe a bigger fuck you would be to revoke all thier intellectual property. Seize the assets under asset forfeiture and release them into the public domain.

> Seize the assets and auction them to companies who don't do crime

Like one of the dozen other companies that manufacture PFAS, which continue to be totally legal in America.

What is the actual evidence that justifies a complete ban, in your view?

> What is the actual evidence that justifies a complete ban, in your view?

That’s outside my circle of competence. It’s just interesting to note the predictable drumbeat of calls for jail time, even in cases where we forgot to make it illegal.

This HN comment section is fascinating from a sociological point of view, most of the debate here comes down to whether an individual believes the burden of proof lies in proving safety vs proving danger when releasing a product with unknown risks and externalities.

I liked the part where we even razed their buildings

Im guessing they want a mechanism to hold shareholders feet to the fire. I venture to guess that there are better options for this.

These fines should just be paid by shareholders (backdated to whoever profited from their misdeeds)

That kind of thing is called an "unlimited company", which exists, but is rare and puts off investments (but apparently makes borrowing easier?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlimited_company

Random "unsophisticated investors" (e.g. me) are supposed to get some degree of protection from catastrophic mistakes we can't be expected to recognise heading our way, in order to encourage us to participate in the stock market without having to worry we might inadvertently be taking on some fractional responsibility for a debt exceeding our net worth.

Likewise, governments don't like it when pension funds are bankrupted because of what they invested in.

Limited liability and other contraptions are just tools capital and feudalists use to avoid liability. In fact these should be reveresed. In fact most of these should be tried as RICO cases

Feudalists avoid liability by conscripting peasants and ordering them to fight their creditors' peasants, or handing out literal piracy (privateer) licenses, or steal money from monasteries after denouncing the Pope or accusing the specific holy order in question of practicing witchcraft.

RICO came after 159 years of US experience with all the benefits of limited liability and in the midst of the Cold War where the US was fighting for the freedom to keep government out of the way of business, so selecting that as your magic legal phrase is about as sensible as trying to fight Covid lockdown restrictions by putting a printout of Magna Carta in a shop window.

Why? And please, cite sources when making the case for reasonability.

The people benefiting from any behavior ranging from deceptive to criminal should be at least partially held liable (at minimum to not receive any profit whatsoever from those misdeeds).

Will this change investor behavior and industry culture? Yes, and that is not only a net good but absolutely necessary.

If you want capitalism as a financial system then holding the capitalists liable for wrongdoing that benefits them is the only way you avoid turning the planet into a hellscape.

You need to be very careful with how you phrase that and what exactly you mean — as (for example) 3M and Boeing pay taxes and make stuff broadly useful across society, the set of people benefiting from misbehaviour which these companies are deemed responsible for is… basically everyone.

Even in a more narrow case with no complications (even narrower than SBF, because he distributed money to good causes who can't pay it back), you're including the defence lawyers.

I'm (caveat: not a lawyer) more in favour of specifically criminal behaviour being handled by "piercing the corporate veil", putting the penalty directly on the humans who actually did the crime without letting them hide behind corporate personhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

But of course, it can be hard to prove who knew what, so sometimes "follow the money" is easier. And yes, I also agree with you that there are misaligned incentives in capitalism that lead to bad outcomes and we should work to improve that — just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

To clarify, I am only talking about direct financial benefit (capitalist ownership). But it has to be backdated to the owners at the time range when wrongdoing occurred. That way you can go after people who sold (for profit) their stock before the wrongdoing was discovered.

Financially punish the capitalists who benefit from crimes and the executives that are currently getting away with crimes won't continue to get away with anything. (Laws and regulations will change rapidly when money is on the line)

Punishing only the people responsible for the crimes is a losing strategy. You have to eliminate the demand for that behavior. Because there an endless supply of morally corruptible people to take the fall so that capitalists can gain.

> 3M is useful. They make a lot of stuff we need.

Doctors are even more useful, but they do end up in prison if they commit murder

Less than you would think (in case we talk about manslaughter / kill by negligence, outright murder may be a slightly different topic).

Literally every seasoned doctor has what they call a 'small cemetery' of their failures. Got this from a GP, you don't need to be a surgeon for this to apply. In fact GPs have probably highest chance of saving/not saving lives due to volume of cases and potential severity of those, even if they don't do any invasive medicine themselves.

Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.

Its just a number game. You see say 15 patients per day, so maybe 3000 a year. Even if you have a tiny 1% chance of overlooking something, thats 30 cases a year, easily. In a career, that jumps to 1000 cases minimally.

Now a lot of folks come to doctors with very vague problems - ie 'chest pain' is probably the worst since it can be from nothing to killer (and it really often is). Also you need to keep constantly full mental model of all the other problems of patient (allergies, injuries, degenerative diseases of literally everything in the body), plus all their medication and how it interacts with those problems and whatever new treatment you are applying. Old folks are generally worst in sense that they are just breaking down altogether including their mind, so everything is potentially a problem, but then you sometimes have very little time to decide.

Its just not possible to not make mistakes, and its only matter of time before they become fatal. But doctors will never admit this to strangers, even close ones they often keep avoiding this topic. I grok them - idealists who want to save lives, but reality ain't some MSF hospital in middle of warzone where you save 50 lives a day and people celebrate you like a national hero, its small churning of all above, tons of bureaucracy and regulations and various financial pressures, so they do their best just like rest of us, and like rest of us mistakes (even if just misunderstandings with bad consequences) do happen.

And send their employees to penal colonies.

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