Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerbear4328 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that incentivize people to try to get companies to "ruin their lives"? If someone had a way to get a well paying income, then get a big company to do the bare minimum that counts as "ruining their lives", they live the rest of their lives comfortably without having to get a job.

I think that, in theory, compensating people for life-ruining is obviously the right thing to do. The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system, and if we can assume that, then we can just get rid of law enforcement and become a communist utopia.

What is practical is making these companies far more liable than they currently are, though. It is unacceptable that they have no penalties for destroying someone's future.

View on HN

What you’re suggesting is fraud. There are already penalties for it.

While it might create an incentive, it’s a very high risk activity.

It also creates the right incentives for the company that it should:

A) not create policies that can result in ‘ruining a consumer’s life’ or at least do so knowing that it is a high risk, high cost activity.

B) know that if they choose to create such policies, they need to be adequately monitored for fraud and false positives.

That seems like a positive outcome.

> The issue is that it relies on people to be perfect and never try to abuse the system

Unlike the current system which relies on companies to be perfect and never try to abuse the system.

Of course, companies abusing the system happens far, far more often and at far, far larger scales than people abusing the system.

Insurance industry already has a lot of experience dealing with fraud of the similar type, and yet insurance companies still like the insurance business.

This line of thinking just sounds like being afraid of the mythical welfare queen and other policies enacted to protect wealth for rare occurrences.

It sounds good to make all these measures to make sure the scummiest people can't do their scams but most of the time you end up punishing people who need the protection the most by locking them out of the protection for not being able to legally navigate all the box checking.

Punish scammers harshly when caught, make it some exponential number of any profit gained, and open them up to audits in the past to figure out that exponential number. Opening it up to criminal liability and elimination of certain settlements without admitting guilt seem like it might help too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com