I'm not necessarily sure the victim(s) should get all of the punitive damages. $329 million is a gargantuan sum of money; it "feels" wrong to give a corporation-sized punishment to a small group of individuals. I could certainly see some proportion going toward funding regulatory agencies, but I fear the government getting the bulk of punitive damages would set up some perverse incentives.
I think in the absence of another alternative, giving it to the victim(s) is probably the best option. But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
This feeling has a name; loss aversion.
It's a really interesting human traits. About 66% of people feel bad when someone else does well. The impact of this feeling on behavior (even behavior that is self-harming) is instructive.
The concept of "Fairness" comes into play as well. Many people have an expectation that the "world is fair" despite every evidence that it isn't. That results in "everything I don't get is unfair" whereas "everything I get I earned on my own." Someone rlse getting a windfall is thus "unfair".
I have some great news for you, then: the attorney probably took a third (more if they win an appeal).
> But is there an even better possible place to disburse the funds from these types of fines?
Oh, my mistake: I thought you meant way worse.
Only when it comes to rights. When it comes to responsibilities the corporations stop being people and go back to being amorphous, abstract things that are impossible to punish.
You're never going to make executing the wrong corporation as thoroughly wicked as the numerous occasions on which we've executed the wrong human, so you can't make the scores even but you can stop putting more on the total for human misery.
Historically it was impractical to permanently warehouse large number of humans, death was more practical = but the US has been doing it for all sorts of crap for decades so that's not a problem here.
The US would still have much harsher punishments than Western Europe even without the death penalty, because it routinely uses life-means-life sentences where no matter what you're never seeing the outside again.
What if we garnished 100% of the future wages of all the employees in perpetuity as well as dissolving the corporate entity? You know, to to make sure the company stays all the way dead.
Fines. Massive fines.
"Corporate death penalty" is a genius invention of corporate lawyers to distract from the punitive effect of massive fines.
Fines and license revocable are precedented. They take real money from the corporation and its owners. Corporate death penalties are a legal morass that doesn’t actually punish shareholders, it just cancels a legal entity. If I own an LLC and have a choice between a fine and the LLC being dissolved, I’d almost always opt for the latter.
But fines are boring. Corporate death penalty sounds exciting. The anti-corporate folks tend to run with it like catnip, thus dissolving the coalition for holding large companies accountable. (Which, again, a corporate "execution" doesn't do. Nullifying my LLC doesn't actually hurt me, it just creates a little bit of work for my lawyer, and frankly, getting out of a fuckup by poofing the LLC without touching the udnerlying assets is sort of the selling point of incorporation.)
Ahistoric and orthogonal. Corporate fines and personal sanctions have coëxisted since corporations were a thing. Charter revocations, on the other hand, have almost always followed individual liability, because again, just poofing a corporation doesn't actually do anything to its assets, the part with actual value. (In the English world, corporations frequently came pinned with trade charters. The actual punishment was losing a trade monopoly. Not a legal fiction being dissolved.)
Nothing about corporate death penalties or corporate fines prevents personal liability. And neither particularly promotes it, either, particularly if guilt is never acknowledged as part of the proceedings.
This is just expropriation. Which is legally complicated. And raises questions around what the government should do with a bunch of seized assets and liabilities that may or may not be in a going condition, and whether some stakeholders should be reimbursed for their losses, for example employees owed pay, also do pensions count, and if so executive pensions as well, and look at that the discussion got technical and boring and nobody is listening anymore.
On the other hand, a massive fine punts that problem to the company. If it can pay it, great. It pays. If it can’t, we have bankruptcy processes already in place. And the government winds up with cash, not a Tesla plant in China.
Corporate death penalties are stupid. They’re good marketing. But they’re stupid. If you want to hold large companies unaccountable, bring it up any time someone serious threatens a fine.
Bullshit they aren't listening. Executives get no payout. Whatever happened happened on their watch. Summary dismissal. Keeps the incentives aligned. Otherwise you're just incentivizing unlawful behavior behind the corporate veil. Pensions do count. Since we've got such a fucked up social safety net in the U.S. that doubles as a mandatory investment slush fund for our corporate overlords, stewardship of said retirement funds should obviously be escrowed until such time as a new more compliant set of execs can either be installed, or the assets can be unwound.
There is no point in leaving something in the hands of the provably reckless/malicious. Which is exactly what these type of people are (executives making decisions that are traceable to reasonably foreseeable loss of life) are.
I'm done with victim blaming when we've made a habit of building orphan mulching machines that we just happen to call corporations.
"Corporations are people" means a corporation is people, not a corporation is a person.
People have rights, whether they are acting through a corporation or not. That's what Citizens United determined.
I hope you think about who misled you to thinking that "corporations are people" meant a corporation is a person and trust them a little less.
It's not in the state's interest to kill profitable things most of the time except occasionally as a deterrent example. It's the same reason richer people (who pay a lot of taxes, engage in activity spawning yet more taxes, etc) tend to get probation instead of jail. Likewise, the state is happy to kill small(er) businesses. It does this all the time and it doesn't make the news. Whereas with the big ones it just takes its pound of flesh and keeps things running.
As long as that incentive mostly remains, the outcomes will mostly remain.
What behavior do you want them to change? Remove FSD from their cars? It's been nearly 10 years since released and over 3bn miles driven. There's one case where someone died while fetching his cell phone. You would think if it was really dangerous, people would be dying in scores.
This is obviously targeted and the court system should not be playing favorites or going after political opponents
- There have been a lot more than one incident. This is one court case about one incident.
- There are an insane number of accidents reported; does it only matter to you if someone dies? A lot more than one person has died in an accident that involved a vehicle that was equipped with FSD.
- Your comment is obviously targeted and disingenuous.
There was even a recall over it: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/02/16/tesla-full-self-driv...
So to answer your question of what one might want to come out of it, perhaps another recall where they fix the system or stop making false claims about what it can do.
This was a jury trial of a civil case - the family of the deceased took Tesla to court, not an anti-Tesla/Musk court system conspiracy.
And how many times did humans had to take over and save themselves and others from Tesla killing or injuring them? Tesla won't tell us this numbers, guess why ? The tech might be safe as a backup driver , but so far you need a human to pay attention to save himself from the car bugs/errors/glitches etc.
I really hate this bullshit safety claims pulled from someones ass, it is like me trying to convince you to get operated but an AI doctor by claiming "it is better then the a old and drunk doctor , he only killed a few people when the people supervising it did not payed attention but in the rest was very safe, we can't tell you how many times real doctors had to perform the hard work and our AI doctor only did stitching , those numbers need to be secret, but trust us the human doctors that had to intervene are just there because of the evil laws it could do the full job itself, we would not call it Full competent doctor if it can\t perform fully all expected tasks.
Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".
> Tesla cars come standard with advanced hardware capable of providing Autopilot features, and *full self-driving capabilities* — through software updates designed to improve functionality over time.
> Tesla's Autopilot AI team drives the future of autonomy of current and new generations of vehicles. Learn about the team and apply to help accelerate the world with *full self-driving*.
Now you can say that can be interpreted multiple ways - which means the copywriter is either incompetent, or intentionally misleading. Interestingly, the text from 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20191225054133/tesla.com/autopil...) is written a bit differently:
> ...full self-driving capabilities *in the future*...
> > > What behavior do you want them to change?
> > Don't advertise their driver assist system as "full self driving".
> The system involved in this crash was never advertised as "full self driving".
I assume "system involved in this crash" is referring to "Tesla Autopilot"; my reply was to contradict the statement '...*was never* advertised as "full self driving"'.
But you mentioning a date made me curious about when the advert text was changed - apparently ~1.5 months after that lawsuit was filed: https://web.archive.org/web/20210603132215/https://www.tesla...
I knew that was complete nonsense, because I knew people who worked on Tesla's self-driving software, but that's how Tesla salespeople were selling the cars.
Could the dealer have been referring to the automatic parking or the summoning?
The pattern here is constantly hyping self-driving as something that is basically ready, and at the dealership I went to, they went a step further and claimed full self-driving was already a reality.
I hope we haven't internalized the idea that corporations should be treated the same as people.
There's essentially no difference $3M and $300M fine against most individuals, but $3M means very little to Tesla. If you want Tesla's behavior to change - and other automakers take notice and not repeat the behavior - then the fine must be meaningful to them.
That's another difference - fining an indivisible is not going to change risks much, the individual's behavior changing is not that meaningful compared to Tesla's behavior changing. And it's not like a huge fine is gonna make a difference in other drivers deciding to be better, whereas other automakers will notice a huge fine.