Screw this. OSHA and other safety violations should, by default, pierce the corporate veil. Particularly ones where those that help others in need get injured.
[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vgh-baden-wuerttember...
Anyone who’s enough of a sociopath to intentionally park like a jerk knows the right things to say to appear repentant.
I wonder what Germans think of this waste of time / money / effort.
It’s weird to me how right wing Americans seem primed to catastrophise about Marxist big brothers when they hear about any vaguely effective or equitable example of public policy.
German here, yep, exactly that.
Who loses their license for a parking infringement and doesn’t go through the motions of getting it back.
Like anyone thinks: yeah, fair enough, I’m such an irredeemable reprobate I think I’ll just walk from now on.
Only people with organic brain damage are failing that.
I live in a regional Australian city.
And I've never heard anyone use freedom of movement to argue against prisons, so I think we can all agree that limiting someone's movement can be an appropriate response to certain violations of law.
I don’t know why this is, only that it is. And it’s unclear how to change it. You could lobby for new laws, but those tend to be lobbied by the very companies that would stand to lose from those new laws.
The delusion of recompense for damages incurred is a placation of known risk. By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.
But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.
What's harmful is dying or losing limbs or the ability to work and employers don't pay much for cases like that.
Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.
There were thousands of workers, tens swapped out daily (which is why there are fewer deaths than you would expect). If you weren't a top performer because you were the lowest on the near-manual boring machine with mud/water and stone dumping on you from above, you were replaced. This was built during the Great Depression where there were crowds appearing at the gates everyday looking for the opportunity to work. My great-grandfather, grandfather and granduncle all worked it as Foreman, Carpenter, and Shift Supervisor, respectively. These were at different times in the project.
My extended family all know a different version where there certainly are bodies. I think they are more credible dead, than the official numbers for a highly controversial project back then. Peck wasn't an outlier, but it had the problem of accounting for the people lost. The Hoover project did not.
Negligence is separate from known and unavoidable risk.
> By that, I mean, if you think you can sue your employer for doing you dirty, then you feel safe to work there.
Maybe I just assume they're following relevant safety laws?
> But it almost never works in the favor of the harmed unless it's a violation of a protected class and that's not really harmful.
A settlement is separate from criminal charges. Settlements happen all the time. The state even provides it's own injury compensation plan.
> Get groped by your boss and you'll get millions tho.
The point of that is to prevent the company from blithely creating more victims in the same way it did the first. That's what _true_ wealth actually is.
My sense is it would be significantly worse than it is now.
They will only do the business so long as it is profitable. If the fines are high enough that they internalize the negative consequences of the business's behavior, you should get a good outcome. For example, there should be a very large fine if a waymo hits and kills someone. It should not be an infinitely large fine or result in jail time for waymo executives. To operate self-driving cars, they should have to put enough money in escrow to prove they can pay the fine.
You don't want an infinite punishment and you don't want no punishment. You want to align the incentives. Fines are probably the best way to do that for rational actors
Plus, as this story shows, if the fines are large enough they just phone up their friends to have the fines quashed.
Naming culpable individuals inside corporations and regularly holding them accountable is the only way to make this stop.
How can you say that after not only this instance but also all the other instances that showed how ineffective they are?
That also has the huge assumption that companies are rational actors. They're not. They're merely profit machines that'll do anything to achieve their goal.
It simply does not work.
The way this is done is by certification and testing. Mercedes Benz for example? They got their driving assistant certified under SAE Level 3 [1]. Do that and you'll get a pass because you followed the legal guidelines - but if you don't and use an uncertified system, it means jail time.
Autonomous cars aren't some random webshop or bananaware (ripens at the customer's), autonomous cars are two ton heavy ballistic weapons capable of mass murder (as a bunch of terror attacks show) and should be treated as such - test before going on the road, not afterwards after you used the general public as guinea pigs.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Autonomes-Fahren-Mercedes-wird-Lev...
Correct. In terms of cost-effectiveness in preventing crime, 30 days in jail for an executive is much more useful than 3 years for a shoplifter. Courts should routinely be handing out short sentences, rather than fines, to suits.
I favour this penalty especially for crimes related to worker unions.
The revolving door continues to spin. Wouldn’t have guessed that a former Tesla executive now leading state infrastructure policy would give special treatment to another Musk-owned company.
Unsurprising but still despicable that the Boring Company disregards worker and emergency responder safety to this level, and that even a slap on the wrist fine was enough for them to go crying to the governor.
It’s almost like the media companies no longer serve the population, and only serve the corrupt.
I’m hiring lots of amazing people from the feds. My client is going to make a fortune as the smartest people regulating them are now advocating for them. The government is, as intended, going to be generationally broken.
The federal government has been trying this approach for a number of years, and it doesn't seem to make it more efficient or mobile. Justl ook at the state of it's digital services, they are stuck in 2005, at best.
Thats before you talk about the IRS. Virtually everywhere else most tax on wage is automatic, where filings are the exception.
Do you have any thoughts on why that might be or any times you haven't seen that to be true?
Almost ? Who do you think owns the media companies ? /s
Boring Company fined nearly $500K after it dumped drilling fluids into manholes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45862674
Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas
Who failed to inform the firefighters that quickening agents can leech from walls?
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/environment/no-boring-co-...
https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/c...
This reminded me of another local story (I live in both locations). The local swimming hole was fined for releasing seawater back to where it came from, cleaner than it was beforehand.
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2010/01/20/redondo-beach-asks-li...
https://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2018/8/th13b/Th13b-...
These are what are claimed to be the onerous regulations slowing down innovation.
alwa•2mo ago
(Long may it live)
As to the grout accelerant in question:
TDS [PDF]: https://assets.ctfassets.net/ctspkgm1yw3s/DMSY-1685695220-39...
MSDS [PDF]: https://assets.ctfassets.net/ctspkgm1yw3s/3Tp3imoxG5XfZlrlzU...
I am not skilled in the arts of aggregate curing and occupational exposure, but I wonder if it’s the “silicic acid” or a non-table-variety of “sodium salt” (from the MSDS) that’s sloughing the firefighters’ skin off here… or something that happens when the sodium oxide (from the TDS) hits water? Chemistry class was a lifetime ago but does that turn it back into lye? Is the oxide technically a “sodium salt”?
EdwardDiego•2mo ago
And yep, Na2O + H20 -> 2 NaOH, sodium hydroxide :)
[1] https://www.epa.govt.nz/database-search/chemical-classificat...
ndkap•2mo ago
Off topic, I found out that my university blocks archive.is or any of its mirrors. Why does the university care about this?
clort•2mo ago
kukkeliskuu•2mo ago