Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

Not just that the CEO or board "knew" because that is a hard thing to prove. Better to have it be "reasonably should have known". If this is a thing that the company is doing and has been doing for a long time then the senior managers should know about it and are therefore liable and responsible. Such a rule would also incentivize managers from 'looking the other way' at wrong-doing because the saying 'I didn't know' won't matter.

View on HN

This is very important. Each time there is a leak of a bunch of personal data companies whip out the "we have not found any evidence of the leak being ours" or something to that tune, which incentivizes them not look for evidence.

This is how it already works in e.g. foreign bribery for UK and US companies.

Executives just “letting” it happen is a crime, they have to explicitly ensure employees are educated and told not to do it.

Source: I worked in finance where we had tons of such useless courses.

I agree with the sentiment here, education is needed and finance / bribery is a good example. At a certain point though, you have to wonder what is wrong with society where "Don't kill a bunch of people through negligence" becomes something that needs to be educated.

perhaps it relates to a concept of LD50 in chemical testing.. that is, run tests and show a distribution of content and application, that results in "greater than fifty percent" fatality or "less than fifty percent" overall mortality.. continue to evaluate through the entire market system..

No action or formulation is one hundred percent pure and beneficial, though many actions or formulations are certainly one hundred percent fatal, now or over time. This is true in products created by companies, and markets push towards maximum profitability, not maximum safety.

The thought experiment of that there is a button and if you press it then you get $1M, but also a person you don't know somewhere far away dies. Turns out lots of people will press that button all day long. "Reduce worker safety conditions" PRESS!, "Dump cancer-causing waste in river" PRESS!, etc.

It often feels like the only requirement to be an executive at a large corporation is the ability to create plausible deniability via willful ignorance.

CEO on stage at a trade show: "Look at all these great things my company has done! Let me share with you all the details!"

Same CEO during a deposition: "I have no idea what my company even does! Do we make soup or something?"

Ironically enough, the government has been moving in the opposite direction - No fault compensation schemes like NCVIA, anti-lawsuits bills like PLCAA, limits on torts.

I do wonder why? Must be Big Business (in the NCVIA case, Big Pharma), right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Ah, so the regulators should share in the punishment when wrong doing is found, not just the CEO's.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com