Comment by electroweak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electroweak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It seems to be an investment in underground distribution structures and advanced monitoring including predictive failure analysis.

However there's kind of a funny part to it that I read on the last page of New Scientist some years ago. According to that story, Singapore has by far the lowest rate of accidental line cuts - it's a step change to almost zero from the next best country. Apparently there's a worldwide organization that meets to discuss these things. At one meeting the Singaporean engineers presentation was eagerly anticipated but as he was going through his points the engineers from other countries were impatient - they know and do all this! Until he got to his final point: accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence. Hence the difference.

> accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence

I assumed it was something like that when I saw the graph for Singapore. They achieve the veneer of a perfectly clean and orderly society by punitive intolerance of anything else.

You can cause a lot of harm by breaking infrastructure. 10 years in prison is a bit extreme for an accident but it obviously has the desired effect. The current penalty in my part of town seems to be $0 and no time behind bars. My fiber optic internet is cut about once every 2-3 months.

I wonder if something in the middle could work. I feel like if you are legally responsible for a construction job and dig into the forbidden spaghetti that a little bit of mandatory community service isn't exactly an extreme response.

    > accidental line cuts in Singapore result in 10-year prison sentence

Attention HN readers: Brandolini's Law alert! This claim is bullshit. Ask any LLM and they will tell you the truth with authoritative sources. First, none of their laws say "accidental". The laws all say something like "willfully" or "maliciously". And the max is 5 years. Seriously, if accidental line cuts were enough to get a guaranteed 10 year prison sentence, then no one in the world would be willing to dig up anything with heavy machinery in Singapore.

A little digging leads to https://www.newscientist.com/article/1855873-feedback-577/

4 October 1999 - 27 years ago. It seems my memory still works!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com