At least one actual human has plead guilty: "The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired [sic] fraud."
Let's say this guy gets 2 years for conspiracy. Not even doing the crime. He loses 2 of about 45 years in the workforce, or vaguely 5% of his lifetime income.
For this to be proportional, ticketmaster should lose either 2 full years worth of income, or 5% of all profits in perpetuity. The amount they were fined for actually doing the crime was a rounding error by comparison.
> I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything
But you probably do, just not on purpose. It's smaller decisions that you don't realize involve trading 'healthy adult life' for money/convenience/pleasure/release. And of course, the work hours you put in are very directly trading healthy adult life for money.
Opportunity cost is not something that we, as humans, are particularly good at. It is of course possible that you are exceptional, in which case you can assume I'm speaking from my own fallible experience of existence.
You're correct, I should have been more precise. 4.5 years lost all at once is what is unacceptable. I recognize work and all of life's "chores" take time, and that every decision I make cuts off an infinitude of other choices. Though most chores have a positive reward for doing them, while prison has very little.
The larger point I intended was that for most people (especially handsomely-paid professionals like software devs) time is a more constrained resource than money.
Lastly, time lost all at once is worse than time loss incrementally, i.e. if I could serve my 4.5 year sentence 40 hours a week, that doesn't sound so bad, or that unfamiliar... ;)
> At a San Francisco meeting attended by at least 14 employees of Ticketmaster or its parent company Live Nation, the employee used one set of credentials to log in to an account to demonstrate how it worked.
I think 15 conspiracy charges are appropriate, bare minimum.
The article notes that Zeeshan Zaidi, a Ticketmaster exec, plead guilty to violating the CFAA and to wire fraud in 2019, and is apparently still awaiting sentencing.
Aside from the usual explanation (white collar crime), any idea why someone can be found guilty and then still not given a sentence for more than a year. AFAICT he isn't even incarcerated at the moment.
A corporation regular committing crimes is a good revenue stream if they pay the fines consistently. So yes, the outcome is expected to be different, this shouldn’t be mind blowing.
While superficially a good idea, it would probably punish shareholders more than the actual perpetrators and would most likely lead to a far lower performing company, so a weaker economy. How many state run companies do you know are performing great?
Tesla may do any number of shady or illegal things but without Musk and his vested interest in the company it would probably be a footnote in some corporate obituary.
Because the company’s growth story which much of the high valuation is built on is instantly eliminated, sending prices plummeting while the people working inside the company just go on to get new jobs somewhere and make more money.
- The shareholders shouldn't necessarily be held responsible because most have no input or knowledge when it comes to any shady business.
- The company would perform worse because without the drive for profit (and whatever gray means they use to achieve them) that most private entrepreneurs have, the company would almost definitely perform worse. Privatized companies usually run better because the state might be a good minority shareholder but not the best when it comes to driving a company.
Because there are many investors that have no input in day to day operations or simply had no influence or knowledge of the particular offenses. If the state takes over they will certainly have to take a huge loss.
Take your bank as an example. You gave them the money they used to commit whatever illegality and you profited from it. Now imagine the state takes over and only pays you a fraction of your deposits.
Worse yet, it incentivizes the shareholders to try to keep things hidden where today they would likely sue the company or CEO.
The investors have plenty of input. They don't have to own any of that stock, and can choose to own stuff where they do have control. Knowing is their responsibility. If they want to shirk it, sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't on the hook for what they should have done, which is to have control over what their money is doing.
Otherwise the argument "companies need free speech and rights because they're just extensions of the owners few speech and rights" makes no sense, because the owners have no actual say in what's going on
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Why would investors sue the ceo when nothing bad will happen to them? How do they even have standing when the ceo does wrong if shareholders are indemnified?
In this banking example, it would be my fault for picking a poor quality bank? I'd also expect that the fine isn't going to be that much more than double the profits I made, so maybe $100-$1000? It's not like im making much money on my savings in a bank.
Some of the "sovereign citizen" folks have a whole mythology based on "incorporated people", it has some appeal in that it'd be nice if there was just one law and it applied to all.
Why can't we have our own personal corporations, which can stiff our creditors, cheat customers, etc etc with impunity? Surely all the social benefits of allowing this behavior from groups would only multiply if these liberties extended to individuals as well.
Right, if they think your "corporation" is just a shell to shield you from justice, they will just prosecute you instead of going with the charade of trying to punish your shell company. The feds rarely have trouble prosecuting someone when they want to, they've got somewhere between 95-99% conviction rate.
I am not sure if I disagree with your main point. But the conviction rate is only proof that they don't prosecute cases when they do not have the evidence to win.
That's only for really obvious cases. Part of the problem is that a corporation can effectively distribute liability across different people/groups, so no single individual can have a really good idea, or is even aware of what's happening collectively, to facilitate bad behavior, so to speak.
Doing this allows them to effectively engage in the same bad behavior an individual can, but without the risk associated with a single individual doing all of those things themselves. It also may allow them to scale better too. :/
Well, sure, conviction rates only cover cases when charges were filed, so we'll never know when they decided not to bring charges in the first place because the strength their case didn't meet some internal threshold.
But I think the Feds are pretty good at building cases. Since it's a crime to lie to a federal investigator, all they have to do is find some fact they can prove about you that you'd be likely to lie about, and get you to lie. (Technically the lie has to be material to the investigation, but in practice any vaguely related lie seems to do.) Apparently it's often not that hard to do; they're trained to exploit the psychology of the situation to their advantage.
And once you've lied, they have something on you, and they can use that as leverage to get more.
I have a certain sympathy for the SovCit people, because while 99 times out of 100 they're trying to evade their legal responsibilities, they are making a valid point that such evasion is in many ways institutionalized in our society as long as you can throw some money at the problem ahead of time.
I have sympathy for the concept, but not the people. All the videos I've seen of them arguing their cases are so mind-numbingly stupid that it pisses me off just that they're wasting taxpayer money taking up law enforcement and court time with their bullshit "tactics".
Reality doesn't fly out the window just because they want something to be true.
Some of them are stupid and mean, but some are just stupid and think they've found a secret code or way to 'hack the legal system'. I agree they're time-wasters and the people who sell them on the scam are legal fraudsters, but I also think it highlights a problem of excess complexity in our legal system to the point of seeming arbitrary and impenetrable. The sad thing about most sovereign citizens is that they're not usually trying to accumulate big fortunes or run elaborate criminal schemes, they're trying to get off the hook for petty criminal or administrative violations that have disproportionately impacted their lives.
I kind of agree with Plato that a society with too many laws ends up becoming tyrannical because it's impossible for the average person to keep up with them all. Also, in our modern society every wrong thing you do follows you around forever, and our bureaucracies tend to be Kafkaesque (also due to stupidity rather than malice). While I do not agree with the trope that 'most people commit three felonies a day', simplicity and clarity would be a good foundation for better civics education.
That literally describes the situation now with human drivers. The only difference is that human drivers get more sympathy because most voters are also drivers.
Except they rarely punish individuals, and as long as they are large enough or with plenty of government contracts companies rarely get a punishment that's more than "the cost of doing business".
Look at the GM ignition switch scandal where executives knew explicitly the likely consequences of their decision and yet no real punishment was enacted even after repeatedly lying about the death toll (initially by at least one order of magnitude) that eventually officially reached 124 deaths and likely much higher in reality.
Look at Boeing's 737MAX scandal where executives also knew the likely consequences and worked to go around rules, regulations, certification in order to pretend those consequences won't happen. Both Boeing and authorities either buried or turned a blind eye to reports that this happens. No real punishment here either.
Autonomous cars or not, as long as corporations pay for your laws you will always be on the lower rungs of the ladder.
> Ms Vasquez was charged on 27 August, and made her first appearance in court on 15 September. The trial is now set for February next year.
> Despite the decision not to levy criminal charges against Uber itself, the company did not escape criticism.
> Days before the crash, an employee had warned his superiors that the vehicles were unsafe, were routinely in accidents, and raised concerns about the training of operators.
> Following the crash, authorities in Arizona suspended Uber's ability to test self-driving cars on the state's public roads, and Uber ended its tests in the state. It received permission to carry out tests in the state of California earlier this year.
So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
>> Days before the crash, an employee had warned his superiors that the vehicles were unsafe, were routinely in accidents, and raised concerns about the training of operators.
>So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
A thought experiment: if a municipality was warned about safety failures about its streets (high speed limits, poor lighting/signage, lack of pedestrian crossings), and some kid got killed in a car accident, should the municipality be liable? What if everything that uber/the municipality did was within the law, and the only thing they're guilty of is not taking additional safety measures? eg. dropping the speed limit to 20mph in suburbs will probably eliminate all pedestrian deaths, should the municipality be liable if it set the speed limit to 30mph and the kid died?
Drivers often do not face any consequences for killing people as it is. Unless the driver was intoxicated, it is generally written off as an accident.
If only the people who get outraged about self-driving cars were as outraged by this fact and applied pressure to improve street design and speed limit enforcement.
And to be clear, this largely makes sense: humans are not good at preventing long tail failures that require constant vigilance and are not responsive to unlikely punishments, no matter how severe. The thing we have to do is improve the systems in which people operate.
A lot of car fatalities are accidents that don't involve alcohol - around 70%.
One time I lost control of my car while driving on the highway and hitting a patch of black ice. Luckily, nobody died. But that happens all the time.
Presumably, a self-driving car will drive slower in adverse weather than a human might, as well as being able to control the car if it hits an ice patch better than an untrained human can.
Also, the car can notify other cars on the same road of the ice patch, instantaneously.
There are an insane amount of car accident-related deaths & injuries every year. At least 30,000 deaths/year in the USA alone. Because humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc, and sometimes just make mistakes.
With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement.
This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.
An accident is just something that occurs without intention. In the cases you're describing people don't intend to hit another car or person. That makes accident a reasonable label.
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional.
"To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
I agree with that, but I think "accident" in this particular context has the undesirable property of allowing people to weasel out of taking responsibility. Just because you didn't intend to do something, it doesn't make it not your fault if you do. But the system and culture around this is set up to try to disclaim blame, even to the point that insurance companies tell you to never ever admit you were at fault after a crash.
> With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation.
Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological.
The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.
Nothing in my comment implied this will happen soon. I don't think a safe, fully automated system will arrive anytime soon.
What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen.
I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
But the other commenter’s “corporations will kill people without consequences” isn’t a contrived example. It is just an extrapolation of what happened already when Uber’s self driving car killed a woman because the management and executives decided to manually disable the automatic braking on the car.
Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today.
If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.
> Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever?
As someone who spends more time cycling than driving, watching videos like this[1] give me more confidence in today’s self-driving technology (assuming good conditions) than in most drivers on the road, even knowing that any internal video is bound to have a dose of propaganda. It’s not entirely even that drivers are to blame; our infrastructure puts cyclists at risk as does the human limitation of only having two eyes.
you answered your own questions. people that don’t understand the nitty gritty details of technology (any technology) will put more faith in it than people that understand it.
> Because humans drive tired, drunk, while texting, etc,
But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.
And I care about dying from being hit by lightning and airplane crashes. It's statistically so unlikely that it's ridiculous to worry about it.
If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch.
> "But I don't"
I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
nah. it sounds like you’re arguing what the odds are but let me ask a question: what are the odds that a self driving car has a “glitch”?
At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive?
Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
We're not there yet, but at some point we will be. It probably won't be within the next 5 years, maybe even 10. All that matters is that the # of deaths from automated driving ends up less than the # of deaths from human driving.
If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation.
I really don't see how people focus so much on "potential glitches" and not the current reality: drunk drivers, angry/hostile road-ragey people, people on the phone, people texting while driving, people on medication, people driving while sleepy, etc. A few glitches here and there is objectively superior to the current state of affairs.
> If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation.
This isn't true. The odds of me dying in a car crash is lower than the average as a result of precautions I take to be safe. For me 1,000 deaths/year might be a improvement (or it might not) but to say it's a 30x+ improvement just by looking at the total number of deaths is just false.
The focus on potential glitches is because it's something the driver has no control over. Is there a similar measure for number of completely accidental deaths (eg. someone swerving into your car or t-boning you at an intersection)?
Finally, until we have better laws that ensure companies are liable for their mistakes, companies won't take all the precautions to ensure vehicles are safer than a good driver (not just the average driver). Does anyone remember the Ford Pinto explosion issues because the company decided to use a cheaper gas tank and figured they would save more than they would pay from settling the few lawsuits that might emerge as a result?
> The odds of me dying in a car crash is lower than the average as a result of precautions I take to be safe.
I'm not specifically accusing you of this, but consider that more people than is numerically possible believe that they're better/safer than the average driver. There are a lot of people who believe they are much safer drivers than they actually are.
Regardless, just because you believe that you personally will be a safer driver than a computer, we should scrap the whole thing? What about all the people who aren't better drivers than the computer? Let's assume for a moment that you actually are safer than the eventual self-driving systems that are approved for general use -- which is by no means a certain assumption to make -- then maybe you just don't use or ride in a self-driving car? It's your choice, after all (especially in a place like the US, where I imagine manual-drive car ownership in a self-driving world will end up nearly as closely protected as firearm ownership). And sure, maybe someone else's self-driving car might hit you and kill you, but someone else's human-driven car might do the same. And if self-driving cars are doing that at lower rates than humans are, it's still a net win.
I think many people are taking this weird view that even though a self-driving car might make fewer mistakes (and cause fewer deaths) overall, it's somehow a worse situation that they'll likely make different mistakes than a human would; that is, a self-driving car might kill you in a situation where a human driver would save you. And that somehow makes the whole thing not worth it. I just find that line of reasoning to be flat-out wrong. It's an emotional appeal to some illusion of control. (Of course, unfortunately, logic doesn't write laws when it comes to contentious issues... emotion does.)
> The focus on potential glitches is because it's something the driver has no control over.
This is pretty short-sighted, because there are a ton of things that you have no control over when you drive your own car, and yet you've decided (in many cases likely unconsciously) that those things are acceptable risks.
I'm not saying you should ignore the possible risk of glitches, but focusing on a number that we don't even know yet, and immediately assuming that it will be too high for your risk tolerance is... a bit weird?
And that's the thing: I don't expect self-driving systems that have equal or worse crash records than humans do will be approved for use. And if they are, people will (rightly!) reject them. So any approved, accepted self-driving system will end up causing fewer deaths. Some of those deaths will be caused by outright bugs, and others will be caused by situations that a human driver would not be able to recover from either. All deaths are tragic, but fewer deaths overall is what we should be -- must be -- aiming for. Not playing games with control illusions. Not arbitrarily deciding that certain failure modes are somehow less acceptable than others when they cause the same (or even fewer!) deaths.
My position -- and what I believe to be the only logical, community minded position -- is that the glitch rate does not matter one bit. The only thing that matters is the overall death rate, and if self-driving cars have a lower death rate than human drivers, that should be enough. And if they don't, they should not be approved for use, and people will rightly reject them anyway.
I do agree with you that companies building self-driving systems need to be liable for mistakes and negligence to the same degree as human drivers are. Unfortunately that's harder to prove, but it's a necessary thing to figure out.
But you do make mistakes. All humans do. Maybe you had an argument with a family member earlier in the day, and your mind wanders and you don't notice a red light. Maybe it's night, and raining, and some unexpected glare combined with debris in the road causes you to crash. Maybe you do drive tired, just once, even though generally you're strict about not doing so. Having a perfect driving record requires both luck (that no one else around you screws up) and constant vigilance on your part. Blemishing that record only takes the tiniest mistake, just once. No one, literally no one, is immune to these factors.
As much as I dislike the term "accident" when talking about car crashes (because, to me, the implication of the word is no one has to take responsibility), sometimes things just happen, because we are imperfect beings with imperfect nervous systems and imperfect perceptions and imperfect reaction times.
Self-driving cars will be better at a lot of things, but, yes, possibly worse at others. They have the potential to eliminate many causes of crashes, but might add a few new ones.
When you're on a plane, you're trusting not only the pilots, but a ton of complex avionics software. Why is that ok, while trusting self-driving isn't? I get that the two tasks are very different, and self-driving will require more sophisticated, nuanced software, but in both cases you're turning your safety over to a computer. That didn't work so well with the 737-MAX, but no one is talking about scrapping modern aviation because a bunch of people died due to bad software decisions.
The problem is the illusion of control. People think that driving their own car means they're in control of nearly every possible outcome, but in reality, they're not. Plenty of things can happen in a car that are out of the driver's control, even without another vehicle involved.
Another part of it is that people (Americans especially) can be excessively individualistic. Many people will balk at a solution that will result in (just making up numbers here) 25% fewer deaths if it means they personally will have a 0.001% greater chance of dying. Frankly, I find that mindset really worrying in a society, even if it can be understandable.
(Somewhat relatedly, I recall an episode of Star Trek TNG where one possible solution to the problem du jour was to give the computer full control over propulsion in order to save the ship. And we're talking about a futuristic computer that could probably flawlessly simultaneously self-drive every car currently on Earth without breaking a sweat. But in the end, blatantly pandering to our "human control is always superior" biases, the computer was found to be not good enough, and humans saved the day. Even more telling, I believe it was Captain Picard who took manual control; they didn't even have Data, the android, do it!)
In case anyone was wondering, who, specifically went out of business:
> Court documents didn’t identify the rival company, but Variety reported it was Songkick, which in 2017 filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster of hacking its database. A few months later, Songkick went out of business.
I thought I was going crazy or that my English has gotten worse. Thank you. I initially read this as Ticketmaster going out of business and was shocked.
I hate the way this article is worded. Or perhaps the problem is the source documents.
"Ticketmaster" didn't do anything. Ticketmaster is a company which cannot make decisions or take actions.
- An employee at Ticketmaster stole a password (and financial documents)
- Multiple other Ticketmaster employees abused that stolen information to actively attack a competitor.
- Ticketmaster management was aware of this and rewarded that employee with a promotion and additional responsibilities.
Both the thief and the managers who rewarded the the thief should be going to jail. Instead the company is paying a small fine. I guess at least someone is going to prison, but I doubt all of the parties who were aware are. As usual, the executives in charge walk away.
Hopefully there is a class action lawsuit by the shareholders/ owners of this company against Ticketmaster.
Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act. If laws get broken, the individuals who made that choice should pay the price. This wasn't a defense of the company, I'm fine with the company getting fined here, so long as the people who did this get penalized as well.
So long as we let companies be a sort of shelter for the people inside the company, this kind of activity will continue.
No, the equivalent of this in the sports world would be fining a team some thousands of dollars for drug abuse instead of banning the offending players.
But this was a collective effort that involved multiple people within the company. When "the Astros" got caught stealing signs, we say it was the Astros, even though the majority of people involved with the team were not involved with the sign-stealing.
You are arguing semantics (and apparently my first post focused too much on semantics). I am mostly concerned about accountability. The Astros cheating scandal resulted in:
> "As a result, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A. J. Hinch were suspended for the entire 2020 season for failing to prevent the rules violations. The Astros were fined the maximum allowable $5 million and forfeited their first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. No players were punished because they had been given immunity by MLB in exchange for their cooperation.[1] The Astros subsequently fired both Luhnow and Hinch on the day their suspensions were announced"
The individuals who made the decisions were held accountable, or at least some of them.
When accountants at Enron defrauded the State of California and the SEC, we didn't say "accountants at Enron." We said "Enron" and held Enron, the entity, responsible.
All of those sentenced in the above article were for reduced sentences since many of them testified against Skilling and others in order to get a shorter sentence.
The only one who served any real prison time was Skilling.
Arguably, three people paid a heavy toll. Escaping prison because of suicide or having heart attack while waiting for your trial aren't exactly get out of jail free cards.
Aside from that, totally agree. Many of the people who benefitted from the Enron disaster walked away without consequence. Very unsatisfying end.
Team sports can be lost by a player, but must be won as a team. E.g. Kyle Williams of SF 49ers muffing two punts in the 2012-Feb-22 game against the Giants (off his knee, and the strip).
Corporations absolutely do act, just as surely a person acts even though only their fingers or individual limbs may be moving. I agree the individuals should be subject to criminal penalties, but so should shareholders and board members, who hoped to profit and looked the other way, respectively.
>Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act.
I'm not really sure why you think this distinction is important. If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it. Rather in this sense because there was no real punishment the employee was commended.
I agree that both the people involved and the company should be legally liable in this case.
The important point to me about the company being liable is that a) the company itself benefited from the crime, and b) management knew about the crime happening; this wasn't a single rogue employee who did crimes and hid that fact from everyone else. (Contrast this to an employee using company resources, in secret, to commit a crime that only benefits the employee.)
And no consequences for the people involved means there's no deterrence. In the future, employees with unethical management will realize that they can do this sort of thing with little risk to their own livelihood, so why not give it a try?
The last class action lawsuit against them resulted in people receiving unusable virtual tickets. I have hundreds of dollars worth. They’re incredibly good at ripping people off.
As usual, the DoJ has little appetite to prosecute non-weak people.
It is the most maddeningly predictable outcome of every DoJ action against a corporation (w/ well funded lobbyists). We can thank every administration ever for this.
Why are the people who did the hacking and those who ordered it not being brought up on criminal charges? How the heck is it that we have a legal system that shields criminals so long as the crime is in service to a large corporation?
The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud. According to prosecutors, the former rival employee emailed the login credentials to Zaidi and another Ticketmaster employee.
I was at law school during that merger and it was a major focus of the Competition Law course, one of the most obvious monopolies that was ever allowed to proceed in recent times really. I think entire academic staff expected the opposite outcome too!
I love law as a field, but the sad fact is that it's often a post-facto rationalization/repair of power politics. Sometimes it's like a conference of physicists trying to demonstrate that a fire in the room is not that hot instead of pouring water onto it.
TicketMaster was a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly WAY before that merger. I’ve written to a few senators about it. Jack shit has been done, of course.
Your point still stands, but a better comparison I think is cash on hand, since valuation doesn’t mean much in terms of paying fines. You can’t pay the government in stock.
You totally can pay the government in stock, you just have to sell it or set it aside in a trust.
There's prior art, this is what the IRS makes folks who are attempting to renounce their citizenship (or give up a green card held for over 8 years) do for illiquid assets when paying the expatriation tax.
I didn't realize paying criminal penalties was supposed to be fun and easy ;) this is literally restitution for a crime.
"Uh, no Judge, I don't think I should be forced to go to prison, that's hard"
[edit] Maybe this is controversial, I dunno, I might just be old fashioned that way, but my opinion is if you find the punishment too onerous maybe don't do crime.
Punishment is meant to deter others from doing the crime (whether or not that works is another issue), so I think you're correct.
If people/organizations are committing a crime, then one reason may be that the punishment/deterrent is too lax.
(There's of course other reasons, like the law making the act a crime is bad in some way, or the individual/organization has no, or knows of no, alternative.)
Maybe this is an opening for a new startup: Frictionless, delightful resolution of criminal charges for the ultrawealthy. Simple automated payment of slap-on-the-wrist fines, and with the optional Uber-for-inmates premium add-on we'll find somebody to serve any jail time in your place.
Restitution is one of the comparably less important facets of our legal system (IMO), the important strength of a good legal system is deterrence. Restitution should (again IMO) in fact be severed from judgement, harmed parties should be reimbursed by the government and the government can excise penalties on the offending parties. There are a lot of cases where defendants should be hit with serious fines due to the potential and foreseeable damages of their actions but the claimants suffered comparatively little - in these cases an imbalanced judgement where the defendant is hit with a strong penalty that is only partially awarded to the claimant is fair... Then again (in the US at least) the legal system is essentially privatized with very little government intervention in cases so this would require some other changes to do properly.
The other side of the coin is quite damaging to our society as well - a defendant being judgement proof (having nothing to penalize or fine) can deprive claimants of funds needed to repair the damage of the crime - this, again, is a case where the government awarding funds and then regaining those funds from the defendant independently would be quite beneficial.
Aren't people constantly arguing that deterrence is ineffective against individuals, and that rehabilitation is best? I don't take a personal view on these things, but I would imagine that the people arguing for more severe 'punishment' of corporations and white-collar criminals are the ones arguing for lenience in violent and other individual crime.
It's possible for both of those views to coexist. I have no idea if the data fits such a model, but off the top of my head here are a few factors which might matter.
1. White-collar criminals might be more significantly deterred by the threat of any prison time, perhaps because they have more to lose or because such crimes have more premeditation.
2. Prison might work as a deterrent in general, but if 20yrs will already ruin your life then the additional threat of another 80yrs might have little to no impact.
3. Rehabilitation might have a stronger effect than deterrence, which could point to hybrid solutions leveraging both effects, supposing they mix appropriately.
At a high level, I think it would be silly to say that deterrence is entirely ineffective. I think most individuals making serious arguments against it state that it is only effective in certain circumstances, it has diminishing returns, and as a country, the US errors on the side of sentences which are much longer than necessary.
For example, If a crime is punished with incarceration, it seems unlikely that a person would make a calculated decision that 5 years in prison is an acceptable risk but 10 is not.
The idea that companies and humans are in any way equivalent is preposterous.
Companies can not be rehabilitated because they aren't moral beings. They only understand one thing: profit. Thus for companies the financial deterrent is effective and appropriate.
Exactly. If fines are less than the profit gained, the only price is the bad publicity and that often fades away after a few news cycles. This verdict sends a message that you might as well destroy a competitor in this way because the price will be insignificant even if you're caught. There might be personal risk if an individual is charged, but they can give some flunkie the job, make sure nothing is in writing, and then blame the employee or contractor if anything goes wrong.
We really need the "death penalty" for companies: dissolve the corporation after a certain number of offenses, sell the assets off to raise money to compensate the victims.
This was a deferred prosecution agreement between Ticketmaster and a DOJ lawyer, not the court's decision. In the US, courts have limited power to review these agreements and generally judges just approve them every time. In other countries that allow DPE's, courts may have the power to limit their use.
The agreement might state what Ticketmaster must do or refrain from doing after the effective date to avoid being prosecuted in the future. Paying a fine might be only one part of the agreement.
One can only make assumptions about what the court might have found regarding the CFAA claim. The fact is, it did not get the opportunity.
That’s not the right way to think about it. Enterprise value is some number say $19B (shares plus debt less cash; think of the equity in your house). Assume existing debt is $5B. You “give” a debt-like instrument to govt, say $10B.
Debt is ahead of stock. The stock is now “worth” a few billion. No new stock issued.
The Nobel prize in economics was won for this concept in 1990 iirc: the value of the firm is independent to how it’s financed. Just like how the value of your house has nothing to do with what interest rate you pay in your mortgage.
This seems like a huge gaping loophole in capitalism. I think companies should be disallowed to buy competing companies (even via proxy) and companies beyond certain threshold should by law be divided into smaller companies.
Counterpoint: This isn't a "loophole" or a "flaw" in capitalism. This is just capitalism working exactly as it was designed.
The entire point of capitalism is to acquire as much capital as possible, not to be the best at what you do. It's not a meritocracy. The best idea doesn't win - the best FUNDED idea wins, which means whichever dumb idea that benefits the rich the most is what you're going to get.
And if the rich people who own Match.com decide that buying up every competitor and rolling them into their platform is what's going to make them the most money, that's what they are going to do.
Don't view it as a flaw of capitalism that needs to be fixed, think of it as a feature of capitalism that necessitates a conversation about alternatives.
I'm sick of this meme. The purpose of any institution - economic, political, social - is to serve some function and if we can modify it to better serve whatever function we desire, we should be able to do so without disingenuous aholes in comment threads bitching through their 1-dimensional ploy to shut down all conversation that doesn't include their pet solution of "burn down everything so we can implement the system I want"
How about this: Improving what is there IS an alternative, and one that must be seriously considered.
LOL A criminal fine. Is there anything more insane than nobody being personally responsible for committing a crime. Like an institution woke up and developed cognition.
Fines for corporations should be a percentage of revenue, otherwise massive companies will keep doing heinous shit and write it off as a cost of doing business. The GDPR penalties in the EU are done this way (up to 4% of revenue).
That still just seems like a band-aid (sorry, I don't have a constructive alternative in mind).
If Massively-Evil-Plan™ increases profits from 10% to 20% then even after a 4% fine on revenue, real profits are still 15%. A company only motivated by profits and fines (which seems like a reasonable assumption if we're using laws like GDPR to deter "heinous shit") would be crazy not to continue with MEP™.
It's really the same kind of calculation as with fixed fines or fines based on damage done. When profitable, they're still written off as the cost of doing business. The only material difference would be that a fixed fine effectively allows large companies to do "heinous shit" while imposing fines so large that a small company can't compete, whereas with a revenue calculation you instead just need to make sure that your "heinous shit" is scalable. That doesn't apply in practice though, since GDPR has an alternative €20M fine which would go into effect, so in reality GDPR just says that to do "heinous shit" you need to be able to do a lot of it scalably and profitably.
The natural direction one might take this is just to say that the fines must not be big enough, but until you approach 100% of revenue the potential always exists for a new form of profitable "heinous shit" to crop up. If fines of that scale are on the table then that brings us to the other side of the coin: A single violation of any anti-MEP™ law will nearly certainly end the business. If a violation of an anti-MEP™ law necessarily meant that a corporation was doing "heinous shit" then that could plausibly be acceptable (definitely up for debate), but merely not appointing a data protection officer in the EU violates GDPR and potentially subjects a business to a 2% of revenue fine. The law will not perfectly align with what a reasonable person would consider "heinous shit," and too severe of a penalty in such situations seems prone to abuse.
This is the not-quite-last (there's a deferred prosecution agreement that is part of this) in a series of consequences in a case that goes way back in time.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of looking at the net worth of a conglomerate when assessing a fine. If someone parks the corporate car in a no-parking zone, or spits out chewing gum on the sidewalk, you're not going to fine them x% of net worth. At least in terms of consequences for the corporation, you'd they would be (punitively) proportional to the economic impact of the criminal activity.
What was the impact of this conduct? It's not mentioned in the story. If they paid a $10 million fine on criminal activity that gleaned them a $1 billion advantage, then yeah this is a slap on the wrist. If it's a $10 million fine on something that gave them a $10 advantage, it's arguably overly punitive.
Some countries actually do this, charge variable fines depending on net worth. The fine in this case is to de-incentivize bad behavior like reckless driving.
A $10 million dollar fine for this is hardly a disincentive for similarly minded actors to do the same. If you're a large incumbent company fearing a challenger, a $10 million worst-case scenario fine for taking them out is pennies compared to the saved revenue.
The bit that you can still see (ie. mobile app, website) is owned by Warner now actually, acquired by them in July 2017.
The bit that Ticketmaster/LN 'acquired' in 2018 was, by then, just a vehicle for the lawsuit related to this hack/other anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour.
I worked at Songkick. The business was not sustainable, there was no revenue stream in sight before the Crowdsurge merger. Crowdsurge effectively acquired us when they merged as Songkick had run out of funding, with no potential buyers or investors. Crowdsurge was not sustainable either, they lost money on every ticket sold, but mostly because TM would only allow 10% of any allocation at any TM venue. Crowdsurge were backed by Access (Len Blavatnik who owns Warner). The CEO and COO of Crowdsurge went after Ticketmaster as an exit. They built a corporate structure that made the employee share pool worthless. This meant that no employees ever saw any of the $110m "buy out" and they will never see any of this new $10m. The CEO and COO have a lot to answer for.
I worked at SK too, leaving to pursue my studies. I always wondered what happened in the end, so thanks. I assumed the crew at least got something from the buyout - damn I'm really sorry for them that they didn't.
The COO was a psychopath who treated daily company life as a game of poker. From the Crowdsurge side, it never really came as a surprise that the exec team were always planning to fuck over the company in their favour.
Could the $10 million fine be used by a future defendant to argue that the crime is not a big deal? What if members of FAANG+M decided to hack small startups or even each other?
> What if members of FAANG+M decided to hack small startups or even each other?
You mean the way Amazon does it every day to successful, independent small sellers, copies their products and bans them from Amazon without providing a reason why? The way Google removed Tutanota from search results? Microsoft spread FUD about open-source? Or like Oracle acquired MySQL?
And nobody will change their behaviors because all but one of them suffer no personal consequences. They got the benefit of the crime and have to pay no price.
Corporate crime needs to be prosecuted like personal crime, with 20-year-jail sentences in a jail full of Crips and Bloods and Aryan Brotherhood. Your Harvard MBA dude truly knows that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a place like that.
So Anthony Levandowski got 18 months in prison for stealing self driving car secrets from Waymo (Alphabet) and passing them to Uber. Live Nation did $10B in revenue in 2017 and they're fined 0.1% of annual revenue for a CFAA violation which has sentences up to 20 years for individuals.
Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.
It is one of the great imbalances in the justice system where technically corporations are people, but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.
That's one way to look at it, but I think the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful and benefit only them. Any new rules will be enforced as such. The HN thread discussing blue state concealed carry laws was very revealing; turns out those laws just lead to pay offs to police departments when some org needs permits. [1]
Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo.
The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered.
> the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful
The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum.
If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now.
The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
I don't think we actually disagree on a ton, my original comment was extremely vague on which "systems", I meant mainly western governments and mega corps.
I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
IMO everyone related to a corporate crime should be responsible. If a company dumps toxic waste in to a river, the person who pressed the dump button, the person who told them to and any management that signed off on the idea should all be personally as responsible as if I just took a bucket and walked down to the local river.
Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
And with (financial) protection for those who refuse to partake and report the crime. I guess the person pressing the dump button would usually make just above minimum wage and would be considered unimportant enough to fire if he stood up for what's right so there is no incentive except for a moral one which I would argue is not enough for most people.
As much as the liberal-libertarian crowd on HN likes to be vocal against most forms of government licensure, protection from ethical breaches like this is one of the best things about them. You can tell your employer to pound sand because neither you nor anyone they could replace you with will be willing to risk their license to do something unethical. And even if they could find someone sketch to try and push it through you’re protected by your professional review board.
I really love this term you've used: 'liberal-libertarian'. It succintly sums up the odd attitudes held by so many posters who barrack so strongly for near-radical left-wing views, and then balk at the idea of holding corporations even remotely responsible for their actions.
I'm not leftist and I haven't observed any strong bias here.
HN crowd is leftist only by US standards but then US is a country where most people think public health care is communism.
~42%-45% of the US population is in Medicaid, Medicare or other government healthcare solutions. It's very clear that most people in the US do not think socialized / public healthcare is tantamount to Communism.
The US is left leaning compared to the majority of all nations.
Besides that, the US is far more progressive than eg Europe in many respects (and that's ignoring parts of Europe still ruled by actual fascism and dictatorship, countries where it's perfectly legal to beat your wife if you so choose and being gay is practically a crime). In the majority of Europe gay marriage is still illegal. How much more regressive and backwards can you get? The US is at least a decade ahead of Europe when it comes to gay rights and identity / gender matters.
In Denmark they're committing vast human rights violations against minority Muslims while the world looks the other way. Is that left by US standards? I don't see the US forcing cultural eradication upon Muslims or taking their children away from them and indoctrinating them with nationalistic propaganda.
Across Western Europe de facto Neo Nazi parties hold immense political power.
In France Macron has practically declared open cultural war against Muslims.
Formerly open immigration nations like Sweden have become hyper xenophobic and have locked down access. Neo Nazism is rampant in Germany and so is xenophobia. Meanwhile the US is one of the few affluent nations on the planet that still welcomes the poor and the non-skilled, you don't need to be rich or successful to immigrate into the US (and that's before Biden's Presidency begins, in which the Democrats will dramatically liberalize immigration).
Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade. So where are all these nations around the world that are a lot further left than the US? There are maybe a dozen, tops.
The US now spends more on its welfare state as a share of its economy than either Canada or Australia. In the next 10-15 years it'll catch up to Britain on that point.
The US is also progressing much faster on drug decriminalization and legalization than Europe is. And half of Europe is guaranteed to remain backwards, regressive, on all of the previously mentioned items.
This is a good evidence for what I refer to as the rise of redditism on HN (US-biased views pretty much detached from reality, but constituting the majority of up/down-votes).
This is further supported by the dynamics of up/down votes. You will see GP comment up-voted when the US wakes up.
> ~42%-45% of the US population is in Medicaid, Medicare or other government healthcare solutions
Please, not this argument again!
Medicaid is an health insurance, not free health care!
They are completely different things (no, it's not the same thing as providing free healthcare)
And btw, only 23% benefit from it
"providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans)"
> Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade
The only progress US has made has been the number of homicides...
A nation where a thousand people every year are killed by the police and that has almost 700 people in jail every 100,000 of population (25% of the global jail population) looks more like a dictatorships than a progressive country.
As a comparison in Italy for the police to kill a thousand people it would take 333 years. USA has only 5.5 times the population of Italy.
CWA, CAA, CERCLA, and RCRA provide these protections for whistleblowers and a framework for financial incentives, though these incentives are paltry compared to SEC whistleblower rewards.
The problem is also that the power imbalance is severely stacked against the whistleblower. Sure, retaliation isn't allowed, but it's a far stretch to think it doesn't happen.
I've seen it happen, or what probably was retaliation, but how do I know for sure? They said the person wasn't competent or doing their job when they got fired. I don't know for sure if that was true, but I do know they reported significant theft that would likely have involved someone higher up, and not long afterwards he was fired.
I agree, and I would go slightly farther. One of the lessons the mortgage bubble taught us is how much executives benefit from plausible deniability. For corporate crime, I think the standard of "knew or should have known" should apply. If CEOs are going to hoover up a lot of the profits when things go right, they should hold at least as much responsibility when things go wrong on their watch.
For criminal behaviour from the organisation, the burden of proof needs to be reversed. The CEO should need to prove they did not know and did not endorse tacitally or otherwise and would have reacted strongly to prevent and effectively sanction those responsible if they had found out in advance.
It's their job to know. Only if they are a victim of a genuine criminal conspiracy performed by other employees and it can be shown without the CEO's knowledge should there be any defence.
CEO's are quite happy to tell people to do things without telling them to do the thing. That has been going on for centuries. Shakespeare wrote whole plays about it.
OT, but "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" reminds me of a funny Mitchell and Webb sketch about evil villains using ambiguous phrases when ordering their henchmen to kill someone.
This is the same argument that tech corporations say should apply to them. They should be allowed to grow uncontrollably to make as much money as possible but it's actually impossible for them to know the details (moderate content in this specific iteration of the argument) of what they have grown. The point of this thread is the same argument against that very idea.
If the organization is so big that the CEO believes that, it shouldn't matter. They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization. No one forced the company to be that big and no one made them take the job.
Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), the worker will lose his/her job if (s)he doesn't do it, and the manager will get someone else to do it. If the worker reports it, it's his word against the managers, the manager will just say it was leaked rainwater, and that they asked the worker to spill it in the gutter, so the worker has no real choice, if they want to feed the kids that night. People above the manager have no idea about that local wallmart, and that one time issue.
Then, the worker dumps the chemicals into the stream, the chemicals just happen to be very dangerous, and a million fish die in the river downstream. Is the CEO really the guilty on here? Did he really know?
On the other hand, you have the VW dieselgate, where a whole team had to work on the software, and atleast a few level of mangers had to have known about the issue. But on the corporate ladder, where every level is squeezing the level below it to "do more", "bring in more profits", it's possible that some manager in charge of something actually didn't tell the people above him, just how exactly he solved the exhaust issue, just that he solved it, and saved millions of euros (and got a huge bonus). On the other hand, coordinating a big team of coders, and such info not getting to higher ups or to members of different teams in the same company (with different managers) is probably unlikely.
What i'm trying to say is, that blaming the CEO by default is bad, because in the first case, it's unrealistic to expect the CEO to even know that that local walmart exists.... and in the second case, that there should be a very thourough investigation just how high the knowledge went, and have the whole chain of comand held responsible.
The problem is management can just abuse this by saying something like "Dispose of these chemicals safely, you have 5 minutes to be back". The manager clearly said to do it safely but 5 minutes only leaves time to dump them unsafely. How do you assign blame to the manager or even higher systems which tell people to do these things without literally saying it.
> it's unrealistic to expect the CEO to even know that that local walmart exists
Maybe, just maybe we then should not have so large entities that nobody can be responsible for? Limited liability is a massive handout from society to the owners of the Limited liability company and should be priced accordingly. (I do not propose banning limited liability. I propose being more selective how and which operations actually deserve limited liability. And tax it appropriately.)
That would be nice in a way but then we couldn't have complicated products like laptops or iPhones. Abstraction barriers aren't optional when managing sufficiently complex processes.
The worker should be incarcerated for doing the act, whilst knowing that it was harmful to the environment, instead of reporting the manager to the authorities and higher ups.
The manager should be incarcerated, for directly ordering the said act to be done and due to therefore also being responsible for it.
The CEO should be incarcerated for failing to set up proper procedures so things like these can't happen (unauthorized dumps where just one party is trusted with these substances), for failing to set up mechanisms of oversight and control (which would terminate said manager from the company) and as an example to prevent systemic inaction due to noone caring and having no motivation to do proper implementations.
The particulars of how long these incarcerations should be, however, could be up for debate.
Financial penalties, as a function of net-worth, should also be considered.
In this scenario the CEO should be able to point to a body of evidence that show the Walmart has strong and robust procedures for dealing with type of waste, and they provide enough time and training to employees to follow those procedures.
Thus this specific act was the result of an employee failing to follow procedure, despite being given the training and time to do so.
This is the exact burden of proof that is used for health and safety. When an employee is seriously injured, there’s a burden on the employer to demonstrate that took all reasonable precautions to prevent the injury. That mean procedures, training and evidence that those procedures and training is followed, enforced and enough time and space to provided for employees to follow them.
This should exist through the entire chain of command, with each level ensuring that the level below isn’t cutting corners, and it part of a CEO responsibility to build that management framework. I mean it already exists for controlling costs and ensure health & safety in most successful companies, why can’t it exist for all legal and social obligations?
You are confusing "really guilty" with "really knows".
The whole theory behind paying CEOs their current absurd salaries is that they are 5-D chess geniuses, responsible for the value created by up to millions of people doing actual work.
How can a CEO be in control enough to deserve all of the profits but so out of control that they deserve none of the blame?
The practical outcome is that high-level executives create plausible deniability. In your story, they issue edicts like "our chemical disposal bill is too high! Fix it!" or just "Our per-store costs are too high!" and ride roughshod over objections. "Don't bring me problems! Solve them!" The pressure rolls downhill. People trying to do the right thing get yelled at or fired; people doing the wrong thing skate on by, because the metrics look better. So everybody learns to do what the CEO implicitly wants: cutting corners to increase profits.
If the CEOs don't know that's the natural outcome of their behavior then they're negligent or criminally incompetent. If they do, they're just criminals. But they have plenty of money to create enough deniability that they can walk away. Possibly using some lower subordinate as a scapegoat, when he was just responding to incentives that the CEO set up.
In my view, whether or not a CEO has direct knowledge of a direct crime is irrelevant. At the CEO level, they don't have direct knowledge of anything, but they have power over everything. It's not clear to me positions like that should exist, but as long as they do exist, they should be responsible for the whole system that they have so eagerly taken charge of. Ignorance cannot be an excuse.
but what is "them" in this case. You are talking about the corporation, but does this mean CEOs, managers, or some combination of the two?
I'm not sure I'm arguing along those lines at all. What I'm saying is most CEOs are far removed from anything direct, but I'm not sure how that translates to "and therefore no one is".
> They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization
I disagree. You don't really argue why, and I argue, at least, that it's not at all practically. Best case it leads to scapegoating the CEO for things they aren't best positioned to control, and/or executive-levels micromanaging lower levels for fear of liability.
> I don't think CEO is the right level. It may be the top position with high pay, but a CEO is so high up the food-chain that they touch very little.
Funny then how the CEO is the right level to take that high pay, which is generally defended as compensation for the ultimate responsibility.
Either the CEO is responsible for what happens under his reign, or he isn't. If he is, why shouldn't he shoulder the blame for the bad parts; if he isn't, why should he be paid for the good parts?
If a CEO is so high up the food chain that nothing they do matters, then why should they have the high pay? I don't understand the notion that they're responsible for all of the good things their employees do but none of the bad ones. Especially when, as here, it's the bad ones that are so profitable.
It is the CEO's job to set the organizational culture and expectations. CEO doesn't need to know what's going on farther down the food chain, but the CEO is responsible for setting the culture in which they make their decisions.
One of the things I found incredible about the antitrust hearings this past year was how heavily every Big Tech CEO relied on "I don't know", "I don't recall", or "I'll have to get back to you". Often about things I, an outsider, know of.
It strains plausibility they didn't know, they're just punting to a time they aren't under oath.
If it’s a crime for you to misspeak wouldn’t you err on the side of caution?
Anti trust hearings of 4 tech companies at once... ridiculous... All 4 of you have a monopoly on... something!
Bullshit politics. You aren’t being forced to use ANY services from big tech in the US there is HEAPS of competition. Just US lawmakers shoring up constituents
While I very much dislike the anticompetitive practices of these companies, I have to agree they aren't really close to monopolies. Google and Facebook are not social media companies. They are advertising companies. They sell ad space. There are still a lot of different ways to spend as money.
This is wrong in a few ways. One, antitrust includes more than monopoly, including oligopoly and monopsony. Two, there is no generic advertising market; there are a variety of specific ones. Three, Facebook and Instagram are the only way a lot of small companies find buyers, because their platforms give them rich data for ad targeting not available elsewhere. This came up during the Stop Hate For Profit campaign; large companies joined easily, but many small businesses couldn't. Having zero effective choice is a clear sign of anti-trust concerns.
This would be more plausible if VCs weren't spending billions openly trying to create the sort of market dominance that lets them exercise outsized pricing power. The book Super Pumped, for example, shows clearly that Uber was seeking a monopoly. They only got a duopoly in which they're the dominant player, but from a pricing perspective that's nearly as good.
It follows from VC efforts that market dominance produces massive profits. That money comes from somewhere. Anti-trust enforcement is way too weak in the US. Congress's motives in going after the tech companies is decidedly mixed, but given decades of laxity, I'll take it as a good start.
Uber didn’t get a monopoly... and there are a bunch of competitors in lots of different countries. And Uber is paying for this with epic losses every year... where is the anti trust?
We were talking about US-based tech companies speaking to the United States Congress about possible anti-trust violations in US markets. A bunch of competitors in other countries doesn't mean anything for US markets. And epic losses are a sign of the antitrust violation: they're burning capital unsustainably to buy market share from which they can extract oligopoly rents.
I like the concept of this, but it seems like it'd be tough to validate that something was actually illegal from the individual actor's level. For instance, if management made clear that the hack here was illegal, the individual person doing the typing is just as culpable. It seems like it'd be very easy to mask that from above, however (e.g. telling a junior developer that there was a contract with Songkick and they needed to just do a database dump).
I guess the problem is the higher ups know not to put any of this on record and the new person doesn't know that they should be recording this info so when it gets investigated its all "I never told him to do that".
> I like the concept of this, but it seems like it'd be tough to validate that something was actually illegal from the individual actor's level.
By design. The corporate structure of plausible deniability protects executives, and ultimately shareholders, when lower level actors are subtly "encouraged" to commit criminal behavior which advantages the company — and then cut loose if they get caught.
The incentives provide a strong force ensuring corporate criminality in the aggregate which completely overwhelms the weak force discouraging it at the individual level.
> ... but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.
We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
[Edit]
I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value.
It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.
This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
> shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation
That's crime-laundering. Whether it should be punished by criminal prosecution is dubious, but whether it should be punished by investors losing money is not. Otherwise the system manifests a perverse incentive to invest in corporations which commit crimes.
Then again, facilitating criminality by the investor class is the whole point, isn't it?
1) it’s rare, if ever, that a CEO, CFO or COO faces jail time for crimes the company committed that are similar or worse compared to jail-able offenses by individuals. So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.
2) shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company. If my dog maims you because of my negligence to control it, I’m liable. If a corporation knowingly commits crimes, then the CEO (and everyone in the chain down to whoever performed the criminal action) is a criminal, and the board and the shareholders should be liable for not exercising proper control and guidance. When you own something you also take on responsibility for that object. Stocks are no different.
> So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.
It happened in this case. From the article, "Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company..." Anyone else who conspired with him could be charged with the crimes.
> shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company.
The entire purpose of the corporate entity is so that investors can share in the ownership of a business that they do not manage without risking personal liability. Shareholders can completely lose their investment because of liabilities of the corporation, but they usually don't face personal liability.
Well, thanks to this genius system — and criminal-adjacent advocacy such as this — for ensuring that corporations which commit crimes will always be awash in investor money, since such criminal corporations enjoy an advantage over law-abiding corporations.
Advantaging criminality to this degree is a choice. Our economic institutions did not have to be designed in such a way that criminality is rewarded so highly. We could architect them differently — but then it would be harder for a small number of people to make a great deal of money ripping off the rest of us.
> ... such criminal corporations enjoy an advantage over law-abiding corporations.
There is no advantage to criminality. It is a general rule of law that no one should be able to profit from his crimes. That rule applies to corporations as well as individuals and there are many ways to hold corporations and their managers and employees accountable (civil and criminal liability are two of them).
My point was that passive investors shouldn't be criminally liable for criminal actions of employees of the corporation that they knew nothing about.
> "Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
Is there any doubt that YCombinator would be investing in TicketMaster if it were a startup? Is there any moral distance between the scofflaw insouciance of AirBNB and TicketMaster? TicketMaster just eliminated a threat to its quasi-monopoly through criminality and were rewarded because the criminal penalty was utterly inconsequential compared with the commercial advantage obtained. They have "won" in the "marketplace", as that criminality-advantaging "marketplace" was constructed.
The unjust demolition of TicketMaster's competitors, and the resulting systemic economic inefficiency, is underpinned by rhetoric like yours.
Seriously, as messed up as this is, what TicketMaster did is completely rational if the game is all about making $$ and the rules say, "$10 million fine. 1 guy go to jail. go directly to go and continue to collect $x billion/year".
Shareholders are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the corporation they've invested in. If shareholders have a reasonable chance of signfiicant loss of value, then they're more likely to require the company take steps to mitigate that (i.e don't do shady stuff).
As for prosecution of employees for crimes - that, too, is often rarely done, or focuses on the wrong people. Plenty of cases where it was the whistleblower, or someone who was raising red flags that gets the harsher penalty, rather than management who deliberately ignored it and has better paid lawyers to go for some light-weight bs
There is a "head I win, tails you lose" here dynamic that is pernicious. Executives and shareholders can get rich off the monetary extracted via a company's activities. But when something bad happens, suddenly they had nothing to do with it. It seems to me if they're responsible enough to get paid for the good parts, they're responsible for the bad parts too.
> It seems to me if they're responsible enough to get paid for the good parts, they're responsible for the bad parts too.
Executives involved in crimes can face personal liability for those crimes. The corporation can also be wiped out and the shareholders can lose their investments.
I'm less interested in "can" than "do". The 2008 financial crisis, for example. Anthony Mozillo, just to pick one representative miscreant, was one of the most severely treated. His penalty? To pay back a portion of his gains.
> I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Regardless of whether your intent was angelic, devilish, or neither, rampant corporate criminality (such as TicketMaster's) is the obvious consequence of building a system according to principles that advantage criminality so baldly.
Like TicketMaster was brought to justice? What a joke.
TicketMaster is not an outlier — corporate impunity is the rule, not the exception. The incentives you advocate have proven utterly inadequate to ensure either "justice" (for those who care about justice) or economic efficiency arising from legitimate competition.
It is news like this that makes me want to go back to puppy videos on YouTube. In what universe 35 years in prison can be justified for Aaron’s alleged crime?
>Not in this universe anyway, nothing close to 35 years was ever on the table. To suggest otherwise is deliberate disinformation.
The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years.
The offer was a plea deal which the prosecutor thought was an appropriate sentence yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept and waive the constitutional rights he'd have during a trial.
He declined and his counter offer was rejected.
This illustrates how it is a legal fiction that plea bargaining is a voluntary negotiation between the prosecutor and defendant
> The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years
The theoretical maximum is utterly irrelevant.
> guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept
So you acknowledge that he definitely did violate the law, no? Sounds like the prosecutor was very generous with their plea deal offers.
“According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.”
Yeah he violated the law and the few months offered in the plea deal isn't that long but the fact that you can be blackmailed/threatened into basically being forced to take them and giving up your rights in court or get fucked otherwise is a travesty of the American justice system.
If the proper fitting punishment for his crime was 4 months or 6 months or what have you like that should be the kind of punishment that's on the table and expected during a fair trial. Not something that's achieved outside of court trough deals.
Looking from the outside in from a western European country it's hard to see why this is such ingrained concept in the US.
yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway
Why? What does she get out of it? I honestly do not understand. It is one thing pile charges on a violent murderer - not that it makes it right, at least it is debatable. Why would she think decades in jail makes sense in this case?
I honestly do not understand. How do these people sleep at night?
Threatening with many many years in jail which you don't even believe they deserve in order to get someone to give up their rights in court is immoral.
I find this principle useful - that a fine is just permission slip for people who can afford it.
But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime.
So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are.
> The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are.
The only thing the sufficiently rich can't call-and-raise you on is time. Fictional sums of money, sums that may be less than likely to ever really be paid, are more easily reckoned with than jail time.
Still not a great system unfortunately. Time based punishments still disproportionately punish the poor who have less of it.
Suffering based punishments hurt everyone equally, they don’t waste a person’s time they could be contributing something positive to the world and can be scaled to fit the crime. One hell of a deterrent too.
Entirely true. There are crimes, particularly ones against the body politic, where it a reasonable disincentive on top of the reparative justice of paying for cleanup, though. Reparations are still important--but those reparations will just not raise enough of a threat to prevent it from being done again. Adding some blood is really the only option.
Because, candidly, the poor aren't dumping toxic waste in factory quantities.
Sorta? I say this only speaking for myself. Given the option between a jail or prison sentence and receiving corporeal punishment I would take the latter always. I draw the line at anything that causes permanent harm or actual torture (which is an "I know it when I see it kinda thing.")
Things that would be absolutely miserable but I would do.
* Physical exertion like having to run suicides.
* Being forced to stand in an uncomfortable position hours.
> But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime.
Stealing is also an economic crime then, as they are stealing it because they cannot financially afford it and no one should go to jail but only pay a fine.
Of course not, the reason might be economic but the crime is against much more than the economy and the punishment should be even greater still. Fines do not even register.
In the US, especially during this new gilded age, I'd probably change that to be a percentage of total wealth or a percentage of annual income, whichever is larger.
At least one of the individuals involved in this TicketMaster hacking pleaded guilty to the hacking.
"The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."
Arguably a single conviction won't achieve anything. If it's just one sucker who gets taken out (years later) as a result of an incredibly profitable scam, it's easy to convince your employees that they won't be the one to take the fall. If you have a significant portion of the executive team or other leadership getting punished it sets a clearer example.
You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1].
Yes. If you pistol whip a clerk you would get 10. If you get caught hacking you will get 5 in federal (35ish year max). The guy pistol whipping will get parole in 5. Same same.
Probably not but if you have a possibility of 35 years in a US prison, or even 5 years, looming over you that is a heavy burden. And we all know how it turned out.
Aaron never received any penalty at all. The government offered him 6 months in jail, with the opportunity to argue for further leniency. There’s a very good chance that he would’ve walked away with essentially nothing.
The government threatened him with 35 years in prison and a lifetime of debt in order to extract a forced confession. That's what a plea deal often amounts to, a confession under duress.
So they knowingly committed multiple felonies and got fined 0.1% of their annual revenue? That sure will show them!
That would sting about as much as me getting a parking ticket. So somehow hacking a competitor is on the same level as parking on a wrong side of the street.
This one is really brazen, isn't it? I always wonder why this kind of nonsense doesn't end in criminal charges for the chain of command involved. On the other hand, historically, the entertainment industry has thrown notoriously heavy hands about to defend its perceived territory. I wonder if this is the price American society pays for patronage of the global entertainment industry.
If you're curious what Ticketmaster or it's parent organization LiveNation's revenue is, to compare this fine... it looks like the pandemic predictably took a huge bite out of it, but here are some numbers:
> Third-quarter revenue was about $154 million in 2020 compared to over $3 billion in 2019, with the company — which operates both Live Nation and Ticketmaster — reporting a $173 million loss for its concert business and a $142 million loss for ticketing.
Less than 0.1% of their market cap, in exchange for detroying a rival, a move that probably netted them well more than $10M. Cost of doing business, a message to all companies that they might as well do this kind of thing because any fine will be far less than the profits gained.
At the very least, the manager who approved this hack should be charged with a criminal offence. This imbalance in the justice system is beyond disgusting. People need to protest this in front of DOJ offices. There are people in prison right now fur doing security research yet these criminals are off with a fine.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadHe appears to be awaiting sentencing.
For this to be proportional, ticketmaster should lose either 2 full years worth of income, or 5% of all profits in perpetuity. The amount they were fined for actually doing the crime was a rounding error by comparison.
I would gladly give up say 10% of my lifetime earnings for all sorts of things, but I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything.
But you probably do, just not on purpose. It's smaller decisions that you don't realize involve trading 'healthy adult life' for money/convenience/pleasure/release. And of course, the work hours you put in are very directly trading healthy adult life for money.
Opportunity cost is not something that we, as humans, are particularly good at. It is of course possible that you are exceptional, in which case you can assume I'm speaking from my own fallible experience of existence.
While I'd be willing to do my current job for X, if you wanted to double my hours, you'd need to pay me than 2X.
The larger point I intended was that for most people (especially handsomely-paid professionals like software devs) time is a more constrained resource than money.
Lastly, time lost all at once is worse than time loss incrementally, i.e. if I could serve my 4.5 year sentence 40 hours a week, that doesn't sound so bad, or that unfamiliar... ;)
I think 15 conspiracy charges are appropriate, bare minimum.
A person doing the exact same thing would be heading to prison.
Seems like the same crime has a very different outcome when a corporation commits it.
You can read the criminal complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.439451...
Aside from the usual explanation (white collar crime), any idea why someone can be found guilty and then still not given a sentence for more than a year. AFAICT he isn't even incarcerated at the moment.
Tesla may do any number of shady or illegal things but without Musk and his vested interest in the company it would probably be a footnote in some corporate obituary.
- The shareholders shouldn't necessarily be held responsible because most have no input or knowledge when it comes to any shady business.
- The company would perform worse because without the drive for profit (and whatever gray means they use to achieve them) that most private entrepreneurs have, the company would almost definitely perform worse. Privatized companies usually run better because the state might be a good minority shareholder but not the best when it comes to driving a company.
Otherwise you incentivize hiring fall guys to do a crime and go to prison, while the shareholders profit off of their crimes
Take your bank as an example. You gave them the money they used to commit whatever illegality and you profited from it. Now imagine the state takes over and only pays you a fraction of your deposits.
Worse yet, it incentivizes the shareholders to try to keep things hidden where today they would likely sue the company or CEO.
Otherwise the argument "companies need free speech and rights because they're just extensions of the owners few speech and rights" makes no sense, because the owners have no actual say in what's going on
------
Why would investors sue the ceo when nothing bad will happen to them? How do they even have standing when the ceo does wrong if shareholders are indemnified?
In this banking example, it would be my fault for picking a poor quality bank? I'd also expect that the fine isn't going to be that much more than double the profits I made, so maybe $100-$1000? It's not like im making much money on my savings in a bank.
Of course it does. There's a separate justice system for the rich and powerful.
Why can't we have our own personal corporations, which can stiff our creditors, cheat customers, etc etc with impunity? Surely all the social benefits of allowing this behavior from groups would only multiply if these liberties extended to individuals as well.
>Factors that a court may consider when determining whether or not to pierce the corporate veil include the following
>[...]
>Was the corporation being used as a "façade" for dominant shareholder(s) personal dealings; alter ego theory;
Doing this allows them to effectively engage in the same bad behavior an individual can, but without the risk associated with a single individual doing all of those things themselves. It also may allow them to scale better too. :/
But I think the Feds are pretty good at building cases. Since it's a crime to lie to a federal investigator, all they have to do is find some fact they can prove about you that you'd be likely to lie about, and get you to lie. (Technically the lie has to be material to the investigation, but in practice any vaguely related lie seems to do.) Apparently it's often not that hard to do; they're trained to exploit the psychology of the situation to their advantage.
And once you've lied, they have something on you, and they can use that as leverage to get more.
Reality doesn't fly out the window just because they want something to be true.
I kind of agree with Plato that a society with too many laws ends up becoming tyrannical because it's impossible for the average person to keep up with them all. Also, in our modern society every wrong thing you do follows you around forever, and our bureaucracies tend to be Kafkaesque (also due to stupidity rather than malice). While I do not agree with the trope that 'most people commit three felonies a day', simplicity and clarity would be a good foundation for better civics education.
...except the corporation being fined and/or sued in civil court, along with the executives/engineers responsible facing criminal charges.
"Tragic. Thoughts and prayers. Software problem. Nothing we could do."
Look at the GM ignition switch scandal where executives knew explicitly the likely consequences of their decision and yet no real punishment was enacted even after repeatedly lying about the death toll (initially by at least one order of magnitude) that eventually officially reached 124 deaths and likely much higher in reality.
Look at Boeing's 737MAX scandal where executives also knew the likely consequences and worked to go around rules, regulations, certification in order to pretend those consequences won't happen. Both Boeing and authorities either buried or turned a blind eye to reports that this happens. No real punishment here either.
Autonomous cars or not, as long as corporations pay for your laws you will always be on the lower rungs of the ladder.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359
> Ms Vasquez was charged on 27 August, and made her first appearance in court on 15 September. The trial is now set for February next year.
> Despite the decision not to levy criminal charges against Uber itself, the company did not escape criticism.
> Days before the crash, an employee had warned his superiors that the vehicles were unsafe, were routinely in accidents, and raised concerns about the training of operators.
> Following the crash, authorities in Arizona suspended Uber's ability to test self-driving cars on the state's public roads, and Uber ended its tests in the state. It received permission to carry out tests in the state of California earlier this year.
So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
>So despite all the safety failures by the company, just the hired driver was charged...
A thought experiment: if a municipality was warned about safety failures about its streets (high speed limits, poor lighting/signage, lack of pedestrian crossings), and some kid got killed in a car accident, should the municipality be liable? What if everything that uber/the municipality did was within the law, and the only thing they're guilty of is not taking additional safety measures? eg. dropping the speed limit to 20mph in suburbs will probably eliminate all pedestrian deaths, should the municipality be liable if it set the speed limit to 30mph and the kid died?
If only the people who get outraged about self-driving cars were as outraged by this fact and applied pressure to improve street design and speed limit enforcement.
One time I lost control of my car while driving on the highway and hitting a patch of black ice. Luckily, nobody died. But that happens all the time.
Presumably, a self-driving car will drive slower in adverse weather than a human might, as well as being able to control the car if it hits an ice patch better than an untrained human can.
Also, the car can notify other cars on the same road of the ice patch, instantaneously.
With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement.
This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.
The outcomes of those choices are known and have causes which are preventable; they are by definition not accidental in nature.
I know it's not intentional but words matter. Crash is a better word 99% of the time than "accident".
This post addresses "The Semantics of Intention":
https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol...
excerpt:
Drivers aren't out there aiming for pedestrians and cyclists, so how does intention factor in?
UCLA's Madeline Brozen argues it can be traced back to both failure to follow road safety laws and a lack of understanding about how dangerous driving a car is — especially since unsafe speed is the top contributing factor in L.A. traffic deaths.
Research shows that a pedestrian struck by a driver going 20 mph has an 80% chance of survival. If that driver accelerates to 40 mph and hits a pedestrian, the victim's chance of surviving drops to just 10%.
"The act of going above the speed limit or going fast [in unsafe] road conditions...that is an intention," Brozen said. "When someone is driving in a way that can kill someone, they are creating a risk."
According to John Yi, another "degree of intention" in traffic deaths falls on car-centric society and L.A.'s leaders, who are "intentional about what we're building and what we're not building."
City officials have stated clearly that L.A.'s mission to eliminate traffic deaths is informed by the fact that "underserved communities are disproportionately killed in traffic crashes." But Yi argues that the historic neglect of those communities can be viewed as intentional.
"To take that away, I think, is really not looking at some of the most disinvested communities and what they're going through," he said. "To put it squarely on the shoulders of drivers and say it's their fault and they're the ones who should be moderating behavior is overlooking the situation altogether."
Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological.
The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.
What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen.
I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today.
If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.
As someone who spends more time cycling than driving, watching videos like this[1] give me more confidence in today’s self-driving technology (assuming good conditions) than in most drivers on the road, even knowing that any internal video is bound to have a dose of propaganda. It’s not entirely even that drivers are to blame; our infrastructure puts cyclists at risk as does the human limitation of only having two eyes.
https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8
But I don't. I don't care about 30k deaths a year if I'm killed by a floating point exception or an image reconnaissance glitch making my car think the truck in front of me is part of the sky.
If you die from a car crash it doesn't matter if it was from a drunk driver or an ai glitch. What matters is which is more likely- and humans are assholes. It will be orders of magnitude more likely to die by a human's hand than a random glitch.
> "But I don't"
I'm glad. Crashes still happen even when 1 party practices defensive driving techniques. Driving sucks.
At what threshold should one be willing to bet their lives in this probability every time they drive?
Right now we are speculating what the odds a self driving car has to make a mistake. But there aren’t any truly self driving car out there. So how do you determine the actual odds? If you replaced all the cars with self driving cars how many accidents would we have?
If 1,000 people a year die from software glitches, that's still a 30x+ improvement from the current situation.
I really don't see how people focus so much on "potential glitches" and not the current reality: drunk drivers, angry/hostile road-ragey people, people on the phone, people texting while driving, people on medication, people driving while sleepy, etc. A few glitches here and there is objectively superior to the current state of affairs.
This isn't true. The odds of me dying in a car crash is lower than the average as a result of precautions I take to be safe. For me 1,000 deaths/year might be a improvement (or it might not) but to say it's a 30x+ improvement just by looking at the total number of deaths is just false.
The focus on potential glitches is because it's something the driver has no control over. Is there a similar measure for number of completely accidental deaths (eg. someone swerving into your car or t-boning you at an intersection)?
Finally, until we have better laws that ensure companies are liable for their mistakes, companies won't take all the precautions to ensure vehicles are safer than a good driver (not just the average driver). Does anyone remember the Ford Pinto explosion issues because the company decided to use a cheaper gas tank and figured they would save more than they would pay from settling the few lawsuits that might emerge as a result?
I'm not specifically accusing you of this, but consider that more people than is numerically possible believe that they're better/safer than the average driver. There are a lot of people who believe they are much safer drivers than they actually are.
Regardless, just because you believe that you personally will be a safer driver than a computer, we should scrap the whole thing? What about all the people who aren't better drivers than the computer? Let's assume for a moment that you actually are safer than the eventual self-driving systems that are approved for general use -- which is by no means a certain assumption to make -- then maybe you just don't use or ride in a self-driving car? It's your choice, after all (especially in a place like the US, where I imagine manual-drive car ownership in a self-driving world will end up nearly as closely protected as firearm ownership). And sure, maybe someone else's self-driving car might hit you and kill you, but someone else's human-driven car might do the same. And if self-driving cars are doing that at lower rates than humans are, it's still a net win.
I think many people are taking this weird view that even though a self-driving car might make fewer mistakes (and cause fewer deaths) overall, it's somehow a worse situation that they'll likely make different mistakes than a human would; that is, a self-driving car might kill you in a situation where a human driver would save you. And that somehow makes the whole thing not worth it. I just find that line of reasoning to be flat-out wrong. It's an emotional appeal to some illusion of control. (Of course, unfortunately, logic doesn't write laws when it comes to contentious issues... emotion does.)
> The focus on potential glitches is because it's something the driver has no control over.
This is pretty short-sighted, because there are a ton of things that you have no control over when you drive your own car, and yet you've decided (in many cases likely unconsciously) that those things are acceptable risks.
I'm not saying you should ignore the possible risk of glitches, but focusing on a number that we don't even know yet, and immediately assuming that it will be too high for your risk tolerance is... a bit weird?
And that's the thing: I don't expect self-driving systems that have equal or worse crash records than humans do will be approved for use. And if they are, people will (rightly!) reject them. So any approved, accepted self-driving system will end up causing fewer deaths. Some of those deaths will be caused by outright bugs, and others will be caused by situations that a human driver would not be able to recover from either. All deaths are tragic, but fewer deaths overall is what we should be -- must be -- aiming for. Not playing games with control illusions. Not arbitrarily deciding that certain failure modes are somehow less acceptable than others when they cause the same (or even fewer!) deaths.
My position -- and what I believe to be the only logical, community minded position -- is that the glitch rate does not matter one bit. The only thing that matters is the overall death rate, and if self-driving cars have a lower death rate than human drivers, that should be enough. And if they don't, they should not be approved for use, and people will rightly reject them anyway.
I do agree with you that companies building self-driving systems need to be liable for mistakes and negligence to the same degree as human drivers are. Unfortunately that's harder to prove, but it's a necessary thing to figure out.
As much as I dislike the term "accident" when talking about car crashes (because, to me, the implication of the word is no one has to take responsibility), sometimes things just happen, because we are imperfect beings with imperfect nervous systems and imperfect perceptions and imperfect reaction times.
Self-driving cars will be better at a lot of things, but, yes, possibly worse at others. They have the potential to eliminate many causes of crashes, but might add a few new ones.
When you're on a plane, you're trusting not only the pilots, but a ton of complex avionics software. Why is that ok, while trusting self-driving isn't? I get that the two tasks are very different, and self-driving will require more sophisticated, nuanced software, but in both cases you're turning your safety over to a computer. That didn't work so well with the 737-MAX, but no one is talking about scrapping modern aviation because a bunch of people died due to bad software decisions.
The problem is the illusion of control. People think that driving their own car means they're in control of nearly every possible outcome, but in reality, they're not. Plenty of things can happen in a car that are out of the driver's control, even without another vehicle involved.
Another part of it is that people (Americans especially) can be excessively individualistic. Many people will balk at a solution that will result in (just making up numbers here) 25% fewer deaths if it means they personally will have a 0.001% greater chance of dying. Frankly, I find that mindset really worrying in a society, even if it can be understandable.
(Somewhat relatedly, I recall an episode of Star Trek TNG where one possible solution to the problem du jour was to give the computer full control over propulsion in order to save the ship. And we're talking about a futuristic computer that could probably flawlessly simultaneously self-drive every car currently on Earth without breaking a sweat. But in the end, blatantly pandering to our "human control is always superior" biases, the computer was found to be not good enough, and humans saved the day. Even more telling, I believe it was Captain Picard who took manual control; they didn't even have Data, the android, do it!)
In case anyone was wondering, who, specifically went out of business:
> Court documents didn’t identify the rival company, but Variety reported it was Songkick, which in 2017 filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster of hacking its database. A few months later, Songkick went out of business.
"Ticketmaster" didn't do anything. Ticketmaster is a company which cannot make decisions or take actions.
- An employee at Ticketmaster stole a password (and financial documents)
- Multiple other Ticketmaster employees abused that stolen information to actively attack a competitor.
- Ticketmaster management was aware of this and rewarded that employee with a promotion and additional responsibilities.
Both the thief and the managers who rewarded the the thief should be going to jail. Instead the company is paying a small fine. I guess at least someone is going to prison, but I doubt all of the parties who were aware are. As usual, the executives in charge walk away.
Hopefully there is a class action lawsuit by the shareholders/ owners of this company against Ticketmaster.
It's sad that people can write things like this and still expect to have their opinions taken seriously.
IMO both the individuals and the corporation should be held responsible.
Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act. If laws get broken, the individuals who made that choice should pay the price. This wasn't a defense of the company, I'm fine with the company getting fined here, so long as the people who did this get penalized as well.
So long as we let companies be a sort of shelter for the people inside the company, this kind of activity will continue.
Through symmetry if a player is expelled from a league for doping, a manager who arranged/encouraged it should face the same, probably.
That's all I'm looking for here.
> "As a result, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A. J. Hinch were suspended for the entire 2020 season for failing to prevent the rules violations. The Astros were fined the maximum allowable $5 million and forfeited their first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. No players were punished because they had been given immunity by MLB in exchange for their cooperation.[1] The Astros subsequently fired both Luhnow and Hinch on the day their suspensions were announced"
The individuals who made the decisions were held accountable, or at least some of them.
Andrew Fastow committed suicide
Ken Lay died of a heart attack before his trial
Lou Pai walked away with $250 million and disappeared
The litany of charges that were brought against the rest of the people involved have not been very successful:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-ap-enron-trial-glance-sto...
All of those sentenced in the above article were for reduced sentences since many of them testified against Skilling and others in order to get a shorter sentence.
The only one who served any real prison time was Skilling.
Aside from that, totally agree. Many of the people who benefitted from the Enron disaster walked away without consequence. Very unsatisfying end.
Examples:
Mike Tomlin fined for blocking an on-field player, the team may have been penalized by forfeiting draft picks: https://www.nfl.com/news/mike-tomlin-fined-100-000-for-actio... They weren't: https://www.nfl.com/news/steelers-won-t-lose-draft-pick-for-...
Coaches fined $100k for not wearing face masks, teams fined $250k: https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-fines-broncos-49ers-seahawks-fo...
Saints fined $500k and stripped of draft pick: https://www.nfl.com/news/saints-fined-500k-draft-pick-patrio...
Controversial team fines: https://www.nfl.com/news/draft-picks-that-have-been-stripped...
- Falcons for fake crowd noise
- Patriots for "deflategate"
Saints were fined as a team, head coach suspended, players suspended for "bounty gate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Saints_bounty_scan...
Team sports can be lost by a player, but must be won as a team. E.g. Kyle Williams of SF 49ers muffing two punts in the 2012-Feb-22 game against the Giants (off his knee, and the strip).
I'm not really sure why you think this distinction is important. If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it. Rather in this sense because there was no real punishment the employee was commended.
The employees most responsible are the executives who signed off on, were aware of and/or managed the criminal activity.
What they felt was a gentle caress across their wrist, which some may pretend was a slap.
The fine was likely less than the cost of the C-Suites annual bonus package.
There should be at least 15 conspiracy charges in addition to the CFAA violation charge.
The important point to me about the company being liable is that a) the company itself benefited from the crime, and b) management knew about the crime happening; this wasn't a single rogue employee who did crimes and hid that fact from everyone else. (Contrast this to an employee using company resources, in secret, to commit a crime that only benefits the employee.)
And no consequences for the people involved means there's no deterrence. In the future, employees with unethical management will realize that they can do this sort of thing with little risk to their own livelihood, so why not give it a try?
Ticketmaster did do something. They clearly broke the law. So did the individuals. All should be severely punished this is egregious behavior.
At some point the employees involved were fired. So there was some short term reward, and long term... I don't know.
Also, the article says that Zeeshan Zaidi, plead guilty to 26 months ago. So obviously this is the last in a series of consequences.
As usual, the DoJ has little appetite to prosecute non-weak people.
It is the most maddeningly predictable outcome of every DoJ action against a corporation (w/ well funded lobbyists). We can thank every administration ever for this.
The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud. According to prosecutors, the former rival employee emailed the login credentials to Zaidi and another Ticketmaster employee.
Live Nation is worth $16 Billion. This is like a person with a $100k net worth having to pay a $62 fine, basically an expensive parking ticket.
They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
LYV had $2.6b on hand last quarter.
There's prior art, this is what the IRS makes folks who are attempting to renounce their citizenship (or give up a green card held for over 8 years) do for illiquid assets when paying the expatriation tax.
"Uh, no Judge, I don't think I should be forced to go to prison, that's hard"
[edit] Maybe this is controversial, I dunno, I might just be old fashioned that way, but my opinion is if you find the punishment too onerous maybe don't do crime.
The stone might've committed a crime for which it should bleed, but that doesn't mean you can make it do that. Get it?
If people/organizations are committing a crime, then one reason may be that the punishment/deterrent is too lax.
(There's of course other reasons, like the law making the act a crime is bad in some way, or the individual/organization has no, or knows of no, alternative.)
The other side of the coin is quite damaging to our society as well - a defendant being judgement proof (having nothing to penalize or fine) can deprive claimants of funds needed to repair the damage of the crime - this, again, is a case where the government awarding funds and then regaining those funds from the defendant independently would be quite beneficial.
1. White-collar criminals might be more significantly deterred by the threat of any prison time, perhaps because they have more to lose or because such crimes have more premeditation.
2. Prison might work as a deterrent in general, but if 20yrs will already ruin your life then the additional threat of another 80yrs might have little to no impact.
3. Rehabilitation might have a stronger effect than deterrence, which could point to hybrid solutions leveraging both effects, supposing they mix appropriately.
For example, If a crime is punished with incarceration, it seems unlikely that a person would make a calculated decision that 5 years in prison is an acceptable risk but 10 is not.
Most people learn over time when they are young that it is a losing proposition.
Companies can not be rehabilitated because they aren't moral beings. They only understand one thing: profit. Thus for companies the financial deterrent is effective and appropriate.
We really need the "death penalty" for companies: dissolve the corporation after a certain number of offenses, sell the assets off to raise money to compensate the victims.
The agreement might state what Ticketmaster must do or refrain from doing after the effective date to avoid being prosecuted in the future. Paying a fine might be only one part of the agreement.
One can only make assumptions about what the court might have found regarding the CFAA claim. The fact is, it did not get the opportunity.
Debt is ahead of stock. The stock is now “worth” a few billion. No new stock issued.
The Nobel prize in economics was won for this concept in 1990 iirc: the value of the firm is independent to how it’s financed. Just like how the value of your house has nothing to do with what interest rate you pay in your mortgage.
Match Group owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge, and PlentyOfFish as well as a metric fuck ton of niche sites.
> The Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission was set up on 1 January 1949
was for, now the Competition Commission. How well that works is debatable.
The entire point of capitalism is to acquire as much capital as possible, not to be the best at what you do. It's not a meritocracy. The best idea doesn't win - the best FUNDED idea wins, which means whichever dumb idea that benefits the rich the most is what you're going to get.
And if the rich people who own Match.com decide that buying up every competitor and rolling them into their platform is what's going to make them the most money, that's what they are going to do.
Don't view it as a flaw of capitalism that needs to be fixed, think of it as a feature of capitalism that necessitates a conversation about alternatives.
How about this: Improving what is there IS an alternative, and one that must be seriously considered.
If Massively-Evil-Plan™ increases profits from 10% to 20% then even after a 4% fine on revenue, real profits are still 15%. A company only motivated by profits and fines (which seems like a reasonable assumption if we're using laws like GDPR to deter "heinous shit") would be crazy not to continue with MEP™.
It's really the same kind of calculation as with fixed fines or fines based on damage done. When profitable, they're still written off as the cost of doing business. The only material difference would be that a fixed fine effectively allows large companies to do "heinous shit" while imposing fines so large that a small company can't compete, whereas with a revenue calculation you instead just need to make sure that your "heinous shit" is scalable. That doesn't apply in practice though, since GDPR has an alternative €20M fine which would go into effect, so in reality GDPR just says that to do "heinous shit" you need to be able to do a lot of it scalably and profitably.
The natural direction one might take this is just to say that the fines must not be big enough, but until you approach 100% of revenue the potential always exists for a new form of profitable "heinous shit" to crop up. If fines of that scale are on the table then that brings us to the other side of the coin: A single violation of any anti-MEP™ law will nearly certainly end the business. If a violation of an anti-MEP™ law necessarily meant that a corporation was doing "heinous shit" then that could plausibly be acceptable (definitely up for debate), but merely not appointing a data protection officer in the EU violates GDPR and potentially subjects a business to a 2% of revenue fine. The law will not perfectly align with what a reasonable person would consider "heinous shit," and too severe of a penalty in such situations seems prone to abuse.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of looking at the net worth of a conglomerate when assessing a fine. If someone parks the corporate car in a no-parking zone, or spits out chewing gum on the sidewalk, you're not going to fine them x% of net worth. At least in terms of consequences for the corporation, you'd they would be (punitively) proportional to the economic impact of the criminal activity.
What was the impact of this conduct? It's not mentioned in the story. If they paid a $10 million fine on criminal activity that gleaned them a $1 billion advantage, then yeah this is a slap on the wrist. If it's a $10 million fine on something that gave them a $10 advantage, it's arguably overly punitive.
> They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
Not even. I bet a person with a $100k net worth will probably rather pay $62 than have to do the blackboard punishment.
What the hell is the app installed on my phone, then?
The bit that Ticketmaster/LN 'acquired' in 2018 was, by then, just a vehicle for the lawsuit related to this hack/other anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour.
You mean the way Amazon does it every day to successful, independent small sellers, copies their products and bans them from Amazon without providing a reason why? The way Google removed Tutanota from search results? Microsoft spread FUD about open-source? Or like Oracle acquired MySQL?
Corporate crime needs to be prosecuted like personal crime, with 20-year-jail sentences in a jail full of Crips and Bloods and Aryan Brotherhood. Your Harvard MBA dude truly knows that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a place like that.
It's up to the judge whether he sees the inside of a jail cell.
Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo.
The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193861
The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum.
If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now.
The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
The US is left leaning compared to the majority of all nations.
Besides that, the US is far more progressive than eg Europe in many respects (and that's ignoring parts of Europe still ruled by actual fascism and dictatorship, countries where it's perfectly legal to beat your wife if you so choose and being gay is practically a crime). In the majority of Europe gay marriage is still illegal. How much more regressive and backwards can you get? The US is at least a decade ahead of Europe when it comes to gay rights and identity / gender matters.
In Denmark they're committing vast human rights violations against minority Muslims while the world looks the other way. Is that left by US standards? I don't see the US forcing cultural eradication upon Muslims or taking their children away from them and indoctrinating them with nationalistic propaganda.
Across Western Europe de facto Neo Nazi parties hold immense political power.
In France Macron has practically declared open cultural war against Muslims.
Formerly open immigration nations like Sweden have become hyper xenophobic and have locked down access. Neo Nazism is rampant in Germany and so is xenophobia. Meanwhile the US is one of the few affluent nations on the planet that still welcomes the poor and the non-skilled, you don't need to be rich or successful to immigrate into the US (and that's before Biden's Presidency begins, in which the Democrats will dramatically liberalize immigration).
Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade. So where are all these nations around the world that are a lot further left than the US? There are maybe a dozen, tops.
The US now spends more on its welfare state as a share of its economy than either Canada or Australia. In the next 10-15 years it'll catch up to Britain on that point.
The US is also progressing much faster on drug decriminalization and legalization than Europe is. And half of Europe is guaranteed to remain backwards, regressive, on all of the previously mentioned items.
I stopped reading after this
This post is the craziest collection of misconceptions and outright untruths I've read in... A very, very long time.
Please, not this argument again!
Medicaid is an health insurance, not free health care!
They are completely different things (no, it's not the same thing as providing free healthcare)
And btw, only 23% benefit from it
"providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans)"
> Progressiveness is vanishing from Europe, while the US is becoming more progressive by the decade
The only progress US has made has been the number of homicides...
A nation where a thousand people every year are killed by the police and that has almost 700 people in jail every 100,000 of population (25% of the global jail population) looks more like a dictatorships than a progressive country.
As a comparison in Italy for the police to kill a thousand people it would take 333 years. USA has only 5.5 times the population of Italy.
https://echo.epa.gov/report-environmental-violations
https://www.whistleblowers.gov
I've seen it happen, or what probably was retaliation, but how do I know for sure? They said the person wasn't competent or doing their job when they got fired. I don't know for sure if that was true, but I do know they reported significant theft that would likely have involved someone higher up, and not long afterwards he was fired.
I find it obvious that such retaliation happens, otherwise it would be strange to have such laws.
It's their job to know. Only if they are a victim of a genuine criminal conspiracy performed by other employees and it can be shown without the CEO's knowledge should there be any defence.
CEO's are quite happy to tell people to do things without telling them to do the thing. That has been going on for centuries. Shakespeare wrote whole plays about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
(NSFW) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6cake3bwnY
Any level of management with a direct responsibility is where blame should lie.
If the organization is so big that the CEO believes that, it shouldn't matter. They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization. No one forced the company to be that big and no one made them take the job.
Imagine some local wallmart having an issue with something (eg. a bunch of expired chemicals, that have to be disposed as dengerous), and they don't want to deal with that in a proper way, and some local manager tells some local worker, to just dump the chemicals into a stream behind the wallmart. Usually noone notices stuff like that, if the chemicals are not "too bad" (=fish die), the worker will lose his/her job if (s)he doesn't do it, and the manager will get someone else to do it. If the worker reports it, it's his word against the managers, the manager will just say it was leaked rainwater, and that they asked the worker to spill it in the gutter, so the worker has no real choice, if they want to feed the kids that night. People above the manager have no idea about that local wallmart, and that one time issue.
Then, the worker dumps the chemicals into the stream, the chemicals just happen to be very dangerous, and a million fish die in the river downstream. Is the CEO really the guilty on here? Did he really know?
On the other hand, you have the VW dieselgate, where a whole team had to work on the software, and atleast a few level of mangers had to have known about the issue. But on the corporate ladder, where every level is squeezing the level below it to "do more", "bring in more profits", it's possible that some manager in charge of something actually didn't tell the people above him, just how exactly he solved the exhaust issue, just that he solved it, and saved millions of euros (and got a huge bonus). On the other hand, coordinating a big team of coders, and such info not getting to higher ups or to members of different teams in the same company (with different managers) is probably unlikely.
What i'm trying to say is, that blaming the CEO by default is bad, because in the first case, it's unrealistic to expect the CEO to even know that that local walmart exists.... and in the second case, that there should be a very thourough investigation just how high the knowledge went, and have the whole chain of comand held responsible.
Maybe, just maybe we then should not have so large entities that nobody can be responsible for? Limited liability is a massive handout from society to the owners of the Limited liability company and should be priced accordingly. (I do not propose banning limited liability. I propose being more selective how and which operations actually deserve limited liability. And tax it appropriately.)
But who says no one is responsible? There are clearly guilty parties, just not the CEO.
The worker should be incarcerated for doing the act, whilst knowing that it was harmful to the environment, instead of reporting the manager to the authorities and higher ups.
The manager should be incarcerated, for directly ordering the said act to be done and due to therefore also being responsible for it.
The CEO should be incarcerated for failing to set up proper procedures so things like these can't happen (unauthorized dumps where just one party is trusted with these substances), for failing to set up mechanisms of oversight and control (which would terminate said manager from the company) and as an example to prevent systemic inaction due to noone caring and having no motivation to do proper implementations.
The particulars of how long these incarcerations should be, however, could be up for debate.
Financial penalties, as a function of net-worth, should also be considered.
Thus this specific act was the result of an employee failing to follow procedure, despite being given the training and time to do so.
This is the exact burden of proof that is used for health and safety. When an employee is seriously injured, there’s a burden on the employer to demonstrate that took all reasonable precautions to prevent the injury. That mean procedures, training and evidence that those procedures and training is followed, enforced and enough time and space to provided for employees to follow them.
This should exist through the entire chain of command, with each level ensuring that the level below isn’t cutting corners, and it part of a CEO responsibility to build that management framework. I mean it already exists for controlling costs and ensure health & safety in most successful companies, why can’t it exist for all legal and social obligations?
The whole theory behind paying CEOs their current absurd salaries is that they are 5-D chess geniuses, responsible for the value created by up to millions of people doing actual work.
How can a CEO be in control enough to deserve all of the profits but so out of control that they deserve none of the blame?
The practical outcome is that high-level executives create plausible deniability. In your story, they issue edicts like "our chemical disposal bill is too high! Fix it!" or just "Our per-store costs are too high!" and ride roughshod over objections. "Don't bring me problems! Solve them!" The pressure rolls downhill. People trying to do the right thing get yelled at or fired; people doing the wrong thing skate on by, because the metrics look better. So everybody learns to do what the CEO implicitly wants: cutting corners to increase profits.
If the CEOs don't know that's the natural outcome of their behavior then they're negligent or criminally incompetent. If they do, they're just criminals. But they have plenty of money to create enough deniability that they can walk away. Possibly using some lower subordinate as a scapegoat, when he was just responding to incentives that the CEO set up.
In my view, whether or not a CEO has direct knowledge of a direct crime is irrelevant. At the CEO level, they don't have direct knowledge of anything, but they have power over everything. It's not clear to me positions like that should exist, but as long as they do exist, they should be responsible for the whole system that they have so eagerly taken charge of. Ignorance cannot be an excuse.
but what is "them" in this case. You are talking about the corporation, but does this mean CEOs, managers, or some combination of the two?
I'm not sure I'm arguing along those lines at all. What I'm saying is most CEOs are far removed from anything direct, but I'm not sure how that translates to "and therefore no one is".
> They should be ultimately responsible for the entire organization
I disagree. You don't really argue why, and I argue, at least, that it's not at all practically. Best case it leads to scapegoating the CEO for things they aren't best positioned to control, and/or executive-levels micromanaging lower levels for fear of liability.
Funny then how the CEO is the right level to take that high pay, which is generally defended as compensation for the ultimate responsibility.
Either the CEO is responsible for what happens under his reign, or he isn't. If he is, why shouldn't he shoulder the blame for the bad parts; if he isn't, why should he be paid for the good parts?
It strains plausibility they didn't know, they're just punting to a time they aren't under oath.
Anti trust hearings of 4 tech companies at once... ridiculous... All 4 of you have a monopoly on... something!
Bullshit politics. You aren’t being forced to use ANY services from big tech in the US there is HEAPS of competition. Just US lawmakers shoring up constituents
It follows from VC efforts that market dominance produces massive profits. That money comes from somewhere. Anti-trust enforcement is way too weak in the US. Congress's motives in going after the tech companies is decidedly mixed, but given decades of laxity, I'll take it as a good start.
Uber didn’t get a monopoly... and there are a bunch of competitors in lots of different countries. And Uber is paying for this with epic losses every year... where is the anti trust?
Before Uber... where were the taxi anti trust hearings?
By design. The corporate structure of plausible deniability protects executives, and ultimately shareholders, when lower level actors are subtly "encouraged" to commit criminal behavior which advantages the company — and then cut loose if they get caught.
The incentives provide a strong force ensuring corporate criminality in the aggregate which completely overwhelms the weak force discouraging it at the individual level.
That person would often be paid minimum wage, have at best a high school education and so on. That may not exactly be fair in all cases.
If a superior gives you an order that violates set rules or laws (e.g shoot civilians). You HAVE to obey and BOTH parties will be accountable.
It's crazy how severity of ignoring an order can be worse than tribunal. However I totally agree with accountability.
Though corps would figure out a way to weasel past this regardless.
We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
[Edit]
I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol?
> the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
Do they?
Because they invested money into the corporation when the corporation issued stock.
It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.
This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
I agree. That is part of the risk investors take.
That's crime-laundering. Whether it should be punished by criminal prosecution is dubious, but whether it should be punished by investors losing money is not. Otherwise the system manifests a perverse incentive to invest in corporations which commit crimes.
Then again, facilitating criminality by the investor class is the whole point, isn't it?
1) it’s rare, if ever, that a CEO, CFO or COO faces jail time for crimes the company committed that are similar or worse compared to jail-able offenses by individuals. So your second point doesn’t really happen in practice.
2) shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company. If my dog maims you because of my negligence to control it, I’m liable. If a corporation knowingly commits crimes, then the CEO (and everyone in the chain down to whoever performed the criminal action) is a criminal, and the board and the shareholders should be liable for not exercising proper control and guidance. When you own something you also take on responsibility for that object. Stocks are no different.
It happened in this case. From the article, "Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company..." Anyone else who conspired with him could be charged with the crimes.
> shareholders SHOULD be punished for the actions of the company.
The entire purpose of the corporate entity is so that investors can share in the ownership of a business that they do not manage without risking personal liability. Shareholders can completely lose their investment because of liabilities of the corporation, but they usually don't face personal liability.
Advantaging criminality to this degree is a choice. Our economic institutions did not have to be designed in such a way that criminality is rewarded so highly. We could architect them differently — but then it would be harder for a small number of people to make a great deal of money ripping off the rest of us.
There is no advantage to criminality. It is a general rule of law that no one should be able to profit from his crimes. That rule applies to corporations as well as individuals and there are many ways to hold corporations and their managers and employees accountable (civil and criminal liability are two of them).
My point was that passive investors shouldn't be criminally liable for criminal actions of employees of the corporation that they knew nothing about.
Of course there is. That's why YCombinator prefers "naughty" companies that break rules but get away with it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
> "Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
Is there any doubt that YCombinator would be investing in TicketMaster if it were a startup? Is there any moral distance between the scofflaw insouciance of AirBNB and TicketMaster? TicketMaster just eliminated a threat to its quasi-monopoly through criminality and were rewarded because the criminal penalty was utterly inconsequential compared with the commercial advantage obtained. They have "won" in the "marketplace", as that criminality-advantaging "marketplace" was constructed.
The unjust demolition of TicketMaster's competitors, and the resulting systemic economic inefficiency, is underpinned by rhetoric like yours.
Shareholders are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the corporation they've invested in. If shareholders have a reasonable chance of signfiicant loss of value, then they're more likely to require the company take steps to mitigate that (i.e don't do shady stuff).
As for prosecution of employees for crimes - that, too, is often rarely done, or focuses on the wrong people. Plenty of cases where it was the whistleblower, or someone who was raising red flags that gets the harsher penalty, rather than management who deliberately ignored it and has better paid lawyers to go for some light-weight bs
Shareholders lose their investment
Investors that didn't invest in the criminal corporation get to buy the assets for pennies on the dollar.
Perfect harmony.
Executives involved in crimes can face personal liability for those crimes. The corporation can also be wiped out and the shareholders can lose their investments.
> I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
Regardless of whether your intent was angelic, devilish, or neither, rampant corporate criminality (such as TicketMaster's) is the obvious consequence of building a system according to principles that advantage criminality so baldly.
As I wrote elsewhere, there is no advantage to criminality because there are many ways that a corporation can be brought to justice.
TicketMaster is not an outlier — corporate impunity is the rule, not the exception. The incentives you advocate have proven utterly inadequate to ensure either "justice" (for those who care about justice) or economic efficiency arising from legitimate competition.
The prosecutors had offered Aaron 6 months, he could’ve got less.
The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years. The offer was a plea deal which the prosecutor thought was an appropriate sentence yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept and waive the constitutional rights he'd have during a trial. He declined and his counter offer was rejected.
This illustrates how it is a legal fiction that plea bargaining is a voluntary negotiation between the prosecutor and defendant
The theoretical maximum is utterly irrelevant.
> guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept
So you acknowledge that he definitely did violate the law, no? Sounds like the prosecutor was very generous with their plea deal offers.
“According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.”
If the proper fitting punishment for his crime was 4 months or 6 months or what have you like that should be the kind of punishment that's on the table and expected during a fair trial. Not something that's achieved outside of court trough deals. Looking from the outside in from a western European country it's hard to see why this is such ingrained concept in the US.
Why? What does she get out of it? I honestly do not understand. It is one thing pile charges on a violent murderer - not that it makes it right, at least it is debatable. Why would she think decades in jail makes sense in this case?
I honestly do not understand. How do these people sleep at night?
But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime.
So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are.
Separately, fines which rise in proportional to wealth can work in a progressive way, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm
The only thing the sufficiently rich can't call-and-raise you on is time. Fictional sums of money, sums that may be less than likely to ever really be paid, are more easily reckoned with than jail time.
Suffering based punishments hurt everyone equally, they don’t waste a person’s time they could be contributing something positive to the world and can be scaled to fit the crime. One hell of a deterrent too.
Because, candidly, the poor aren't dumping toxic waste in factory quantities.
Things that would be absolutely miserable but I would do.
* Physical exertion like having to run suicides.
* Being forced to stand in an uncomfortable position hours.
* Being belted/caned/shocked so many times.
* Forced labor.
Psychology says no.
Stealing is also an economic crime then, as they are stealing it because they cannot financially afford it and no one should go to jail but only pay a fine.
Of course not, the reason might be economic but the crime is against much more than the economy and the punishment should be even greater still. Fines do not even register.
I completely agree?
In the US, especially during this new gilded age, I'd probably change that to be a percentage of total wealth or a percentage of annual income, whichever is larger.
"The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."
[1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.
You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1].
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
I am not saying that our system doesn't work. It just feels that there is so much left to do.
That would sting about as much as me getting a parking ticket. So somehow hacking a competitor is on the same level as parking on a wrong side of the street.
> Third-quarter revenue was about $154 million in 2020 compared to over $3 billion in 2019, with the company — which operates both Live Nation and Ticketmaster — reporting a $173 million loss for its concert business and a $142 million loss for ticketing.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/live-nation-revenue-dr...
I mean, I guess maybe there could be and we don't know.