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Comment by smeggysmeg | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I want to see real, serious punishment for corporate crimes, on par with the life disruption experienced by people who see a jail sentence. It's almost always brutal - major income disruption, job loss, etc. If it's a small fine, which it always seems to be for corporations, then there is no incentive for following the law. I'm also in favor of corporate death sentences for large-scale egregious violations - liquidate assets and jail executives.

By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy.

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>By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy.

Again, this is false. At the very least there's financial penalties, which the shareholders are on the hook for. Moreover the corporate malfeasance that does happen don't map nicely to human crimes. If you kill a guy, you get sent to jail for decades. But what if you're a company, that makes a machine with sloppy code[1] that unintentionally kills someone? What do you do? Jail the programmer who wrote the code? Jail the manager who did the code review? Jail the CEO who had no knowledge of it but "buck stops with him" and we hate CEOs? How does the death penalty work? If you think it through it's basically a fine equivalent to the company's market cap. If Boeing does a bad that kills one person, does that mean the US government just repossesses the entire company?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Depending on how severe the error is, it could be professional negligence. In other professions, including engineering, this can result in a loss of the professional's license and their inability to continue to work in that field. Also, for negligent drivers, a suspension of their driving license can apply. So there is precedent for severe punishment even if nobody gets a jail sentence.

In Australia it's the board of directors who are liable. They can be liable if they personally direct the company to do something illegal (obviously?) but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public. Directors can be personally liable for breaches of this duty and the penalties extend to possible imprisonment and very substantial fines.

For example: https://www.owhsp.qld.gov.au/court-report/fines-imposed-fail...

>but there is also a positive obligation to exercise due diligence. This covers (but is not limited to) workplace safety and safety of customers and the public.

Is there any indication this requirement was breached for this case? I'm all for jailing executives of companies where they specifically failed to enact safety measures, or even didn't care enough about safety, but in this case it's simply a case of a edge they didn't test. It's not for lack of trying either. Apparently they have their own AI model to generate test data, so they can train/test what happens if a hurricane hits, for instance.

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...

In this case it just sounds like the thought process was

> waymo did a bad

> someone doing the same would be arrested (?)

> therefore somebody needs to be arrested

> in this case it's simply a case of a edge they didn't test. It's not for lack of trying either.

Agreed. And because responsible driving is almost all edge cases, they shouldn't be held liable for any of them as long as they tried.

After watching the movie "dark waters" about the whole Teflon scandal, seems like it should be the highest up person (or people) who had knowledge of the incident (obviously must be proven). An individual engineer knowing a car has a dangerous edge case isn't enough to get them in trouble in my view, especially if the company has claimed they are working on fixing it. Also legitimate mistakes are just mistakes, companies won't get it right every single time.

However there's cases where its completely proven that someone high up knew there was a systemic safety issue (they had a broad view and could see all the different areas of what was going on), they knew exactly what was causing it, and they do nothing because they want to keep the profit going. The fact those people don't go to jail just tells me that corporations have way too much leeway.

I think of the corporate death penalty as being more appropriate when leadership knew exactly what was going on and chose profits over people. Exxon, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063. Purdue Pharma, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma. Company gets sold for parts and Cauitebgoes to prison probably for life due to the amount of lives they potentially destroyed. Pretty much all the tobacco companies knew how harmful their product and made a concerted effort to fund their own bogus studies to throw up a smoke screen. Facebook makes billions from (for example) scams and fraudulent ads: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu.... Maybe don't throw their CEO in prison but at least fine them 10x the profit they made vs. the usual .0001%.

> At the very least there's financial penalties, which the shareholders are on the hook for.

If i poison someone, i go to jail. If DuPont poisons thousands, "there's financial penalties".

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