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> You know who never goes to jail? Regulators. Nor should they unless they were colluding with him or accepting bribes. The punishment for just being bad at y
by kenj0418 11y ago
> You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.
Nor should they unless they were colluding with him or accepting bribes.
The punishment for just being bad at your job should be getting fired, not jail. Of course, I doubt many lost their job either.
- civilian 11y ago> The punishment for just being bad at your job should be getting fired, not jail. You should keep that in mind next time you get surgery. :-)
- kjs3 11y agoPeople dying is not equivalent to people loosing money.
- temuze 11y agoOr building a bridge. Or coding software for medical machines. Or being a pilot or a bus driver. Or construction.
- schwap 11y ago> Or coding software for medical machines. I don't believe anybody was arrested for the Therac-25[1] accidents. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoI know of people who have been arrested. They were upper management, though, not engineers. They tried to ignore the FDA, and they got walked out in handcuffs. (This was not in relation to Therac-25.)
- OvidNaso 11y agoYou really want the surgeon who is only doing his best due to fear to be operating on you? None of those listed professions at any time motivate their training due to fear of imprisionment. It is a complete non factor and it's only effect is to shovel more pain and tragedy on already tragic situations to the illusion of relief for a small porportion of the parties aggrevied.
- EliRivers 11y agoYou really want the surgeon who is only doing his best due to fear to be operating on you? I don't care why he's doing his best. It would be nice if he was doing his best because he's a dedicated professional, but doing his best out of fear is far better than being operated on by some slacker not giving their best. So the answer to your question is yes, please, I want the surgeon who is doing his best; not the one who is slacking.
- pwnna 11y agoA bad engineer who designed a bridge that later collapsed and injured/killed people will go to jail, in addition to being fired.
- kjs3 11y agoPeople dying is not equivalent to people loosing money.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoMass loss of money, while not as direct a cause and effect, can be far more lethal. People not going for checkups they can no longer afford. People scaling back budgets resulting in less healthy choices. People forgoing using costly medication. People moving to cheaper (and less safe) neighborhoods due to money lost. The general increase in stress with the money lost. Far harder to measure but magnitudes greater damage.
- Crito 11y agoMadoff was sentenced to more prison time than many murderers. Murder and fraud may not be equivalent, but that does not mean that one must necessarily be less serious than the other.
- tsotha 11y agoFinancial crimes in the US carry some pretty draconian penalties in terms of sentence length. They have to, because if people think financial institutions are going to run off with their savings the whole industry collapses. In Madoff's case there was an additional issue - the people he defrauded were mostly wealthy and powerful.
- wwweston 11y agoCan anyone verify that there are cases of criminal negligence where engineers have been imprisoned as a penalty?
- 11y ago
- _yosefk 11y agoI don't know the answer to the following questions, but I'll take wild guesses: 1. Were Madoff's regulators fired? (My guess: they weren't, it wasn't even weighed as a realistic option by whoever should fire them.) 2. Was there an investigation into whether they were bribed, as there should be when someone is so spectacularly incompetent at their job that it's hard to reconcile with having the mental skills necessary to get the job in the first place? (My bet: there was no investigation whatsoever.)
- rcarrigan87 11y agofiring a public employee is like pulling teeth from healthy gums
- tsotha 11y agoRegulators can only make decisions based on the information they have, which ultimately comes from the people they're trying to regulate. Eventually the wheels come off, but you can give plausible numbers to the government for a long time before that happens. Your assumption they were either bribed or incompetent is unwarranted.
- _yosefk 11y agoTo spot a Ponzi scheme you only need to look at the balance sheet, not? Do regulators not have a right to do so, especially having gotten multiple warnings (from people who, unlike public employees, have an actual stake at the game because they competed with Madoff and figured his official returns on investment were impossible?) If the SEC cannot look at the actual balance sheet as maintained by banks etc. until "the wheels come off" and until then they can only rely on what the org says its balance sheet is, things are really bad but somehow I doubt that's the case.
- tsotha 11y ago>To spot a Ponzi scheme you only need to look at the balance sheet, not? No, actually. This is wrong. You can't spot a clever Ponzi scheme if the person who provides the balance sheet is willing to put down false information. As an auditor all you can do is correlate the bits of information you have. If the criminal is intelligent you won't spot anything until it's too late. The "warnings" they got were that Madoff's fund was making money too consistently. That's useless.
- shit_parade2 11y agoWhat about when police officers wantonly kill people or CIA operatives torture the innocent? Of course they should go to jail, justice is blind, the law applies to all, look up the magna carta. When some are more equal than others injustice and corruption occurs, we see it vividly throughout the US corporate-fascist complex.
- jbooth 11y agoInvalid comparison. Failure to prevent something is not the same as personally perpetrating it.
- mg1982 11y agoIt's not necessarily invalid, at least not for the reason you give. Lifeguards can go to jail (in Europe, at least) for manslaughter, as can ski marshals, if they're deemed sufficiently negligent when someone dies. It's pretty rare, but certainly something on the equivalent scale to causing a global economic crisis would warrant it.
- honksillet 11y agoThere are plenty of examples of regulators acting abusively or in bad faith. They can get away with this because there are no repercussions.