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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

The last thing I want to see is mobs of people, angry over the deaths of their loved ones, tracking down executives and dealing with the problem themselves, but I'll admit I'm very surprised it doesn't happen more often. I imagine most people are just struggling to keep their lives together through their grief and satisfying a vendetta takes a lot of time and effort. Also many people aren't as comfortable with hurting others as the executives of Juul are. Still, I am surprised.

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Because it’s not financially motivated

If I had to have an opinion on the matter, it would be strongly aligned with this one.

If we could work out a way to financially incentivise taking care of each other many of our problems would change swiftly and dramatically.

This is easy. Rather than paying $16 for a pack of vape pods, I should pay 0.0001% of my earnings over the rest of my life.

Then the vape company has a direct incentive to help me be successful.

Such a payment system should be assisted by government (ie. Government should give out forms which prove your earnings), and banks (who would remember who is due what percentage of your earnings and distribute appropriately).

The basics of such a system already exists in the UK, where students commit to paying 9% of their future income to pay for university (with a time limit and money limit).

While the UK system (which does not last the rest of a person's life) is a better means of paying down student debt compared to the US (where most students will pay a higher percentage of income each month at significantly higher interest rates) that's not my ideal for handling educational costs and it's certainly not going to solve the problem with corporate greed. Companies like Juul would take your earnings and still poison/kill you if it would put more money into their pockets somehow. They've made a deliberate choice to cross the line from amoral to immoral.

At least in the US, we would also need extensive regulations and caps on the cost of products. As a commonly cited example, when Pell Grants (Federal student subsidies) were increased to adjust for inflation and costs of living somewhat recently, average costs of tuition went up by about the same amount across nearly all colleges.

This is a classic move in our economy: 1) product or service slowly becomes more expensive relative to income, 2) a subsidy that was supposed to go to the bottom tier to help even the playing field but is now used by more and more people due to 1 adjusts it's payout to return to it's planned effectiveness, then 3) product or service operator notices that consumers have more available money and adjusts their cost upwards.

Similar effects have been observed in more nuanced ways, like the costs of fresh fruits and vegetables being higher than boxed and processed foods, so low income food subsidy programs bump their monetary payouts to encourage purchasing of fresh foods, and some boxed or processed foods have a statistically unusual bump in retail prices in the area. This is the kind of bullshit that really starts to make me think that the USA needs a secondary monetary system (not bitcoin/blockchain, and not Dollar based) to be used for redemption of welfare and entitlement benefits which would make it impossible to track between something like an increase in food stamp benefits and monetary compensation for the use of those benefits. I'm cool with Kraft thinking that Velveeta cheese "product" needs to be more expensive in our magical capatalistic society, I'm just not cool with them thinking that only because the lowest income shoppers suddenly have 5 more cents in their account every month.

So you're saying we should put Go-Fund-Me bounties on malicious executives?

Not at all. Not even sure how you made that leap.

Just pointing out the obvious, people do crazy and harmful shit for money all the time (eg. Juul execs). Possibly more often than people with more “legitimate” reasons (eg. Vengeance).

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