We really do need liability for software.
To who? The company? The developer?
How factories were made safe
11–20 of 114 posts
Re: How factories were made safe
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which software? Drone target acquisition or TikTok?
Both. All?
Granted, Hacker News is banned for causing depression in too many people :D
Mozilla went bankrupt because too many ~~idiots~~ outstanding citizens tripped and fell while using Firefox.
YouTube was banned for causing deaths with their irresponsible use of information.
Who knew fixing a car, building a high powered laser or eating a Tide pod is dangerous?
Not the users' fault.
Re: How factories were made safe
#13This is a summary of how the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of why the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers' Comp., which made injured workers a cost for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers' Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by G…
Thanks for posting this. I noticed that, install a guard was one of the last "if only" possibilities.
Re: How factories were made safe
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.
Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might be the solution to the problem.
Well, CCPA started doing this in California. In the event of a data breach, the company can be sued for actual damages, or statutory damages of $100-750 per affected consumer.
As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during the Equifax incident, the statutory damages only for California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum. As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they agreed to with 48 states combines to about 1/3 of that amount.
Re: How factories were made safe
#15I love reading about the industrial revolution and the social and economic change from the mid 19th to early 20th century, because you can draw so many parallels to the modern information revolution. The details of the story are different, but the outline is the same: We've got massive progress and insane improvements to efficiency. The world as it exists now couldn't have been dreamed up half a century ago. On the o…
Do you have specific examples of "massive" progress and improvements to efficiency since, say, the late '60s?
I tend to agree with Neal Stephenson that "the threat now has become not too much innovation, but not enough". [1]
Re: How factories were made safe
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Info leaks have negligible provable harms. It's a real moral hazard. It's not that there aren't harms, it's that it's nearly impossible to link any harms back to any specific leak.
Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might be the solution to the problem.
If an info leak occurs in a data center and no one is harmed, does it make any liability?
Re: How factories were made safe
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why automatic defined liability for the leak might be the solution to the problem.
Well, CCPA started doing this in California. In the event of a data breach, the company can be sued for actual damages, or statutory damages of $100-750 per affected consumer. As a point of comparison: If CCPA had been in effect during the Equifax incident, the statutory damages only for California residents would have been $1.5 billion minimum. As far as I can tell for Wikipedia, the settlement they agreed to with 4…
If a multistage class action lawsuit is settled for billions and people harmed receive only free credit monitoring gift cards, is our sense of justice served?
Re: How factories were made safe
#18It's tempting to use macro trends, like the advent of workplace safety, to confirm one's existing beliefs. Economy-wide changes like this are pretty much without exception driven by a bunch of different factors working together and you can pretty much always find some to cherry pick to back whatever your opinion is that minute.
Pretty much all the current literature about workplace safety seems to follow one ideological bent. I commend the author for at least hitting the topic from a wide array of angles even if he missed a couple.
Re: How factories were made safe
#19Re: How factories were made safe
#20This is a summary of how the factories were made safe masquerading as a summary of why the factories were made safe. It comes to the Whiggish conclusion that factories were made safe because time moves forward. It mentions that the real reason was Workers' Comp., which made injured workers a cost for employers, and buries in a parenthetical that Workers' Comp was created by socialist union protests, and taken up by G…
Really pathetic but unsurprising that people here are downvoting this comment. It's not often that you see an author constructing a literal straw-man these days; the piece flatly ignores the importance of the massively powerful labor movements of this period--so powerful that states were regularly resorting to armed struggle with them--instead pretending that "social reformers" existed in a vacuum.