Comment by harry8
1 year ago
Unless senior managers and board members get criminal convictions and jail time it will continue and the "disturbing" will cease only by being normalized.
1 year ago
Unless senior managers and board members get criminal convictions and jail time it will continue and the "disturbing" will cease only by being normalized.
Hoping for a magic responsible all powerful legal daddy to come enforce a just set of laws is pure fantasy.
The people doing regulation and oversight have been bought and paid for by these "managers and board members." Citizens united codified their right to do this into law.
If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
If the legal system cannot provide consequences to these people, then it's time to start thinking about where those consequences are going to come from. Hoping for consequences is not a very good strategy. A union is one such vehicle.
> No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
Neither of these is actually applicable here.
GM makes its money from selling cars (and financing for cars). If someone offers them a little extra for the data, they might take it, but they really don't care.
Neither do the insurance companies, except that if their competitors do it then so do they. If any insurance company has the data then they raise rates on the higher risk drivers and turf them to the ones without it, which puts them out of business. But if they're all banned from using it then they're all on a level playing field and again nobody really cares.
All you'd need is a law prohibiting insurance companies from using telemetrics and that would be the end of that. The main lobby against it would be the data brokers in this specific submarket, but they're hardly Big Auto and The Banks.
> All you'd need is a law...
Start asking 5 whys here and see where it takes you. I'm pretty curious what your model of reality is that "5 whys" doesn't make you feel hopeless.
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For years, I've been wondering when the data bubble was going to burst.
The whole "we'll make a TV with a $700 BOM and sell it for $600 because the viewing data is so valuable" situation. The "we'll burn valuable customer trust and loyalty for a $40k car because the insurance companies will pay us so much for the monitoring data." The grocery store desperately needing to track individual consumers rather than the aggregate "we sold 500 cans of Spam at this location today"
Civilization somehow managed to work for centuries without having to passively instrument every activity. So we can assume that what's being chased is marginal gains-- slightly better targeting and rates than we could get out of the information we were, as a society, comfortable with being public.
Does it really cover its costs? I always imagined so much of it was institutionalized FOMO-- "we must be data driven because our competitors are"-- and eventually someone's going to run the numbers.
>If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
How's that working with police and/or teacher's unions?
Moreover, it's unclear how "professional ethics" would interact with legal and/or business decisions. If you think it's unethical and the legal department says it's A-okay, then what? For professions like engineering you could plausibly make the case that engineers should have the final say on decisions involving safety or structural soundness, but that's less convincing for business decisions. For instance would civil engineers be expected to reject building a luxury condo on "professional ethics" grounds because the the building would gentrify the neighborhood and displace marginalized groups?
I think a union is a tool like a gun. A gun can be used to steal money. A gun can be used to keep your home safe. A gun can be used to protect your country from foreign invaders. The gun is amoral.
How do you stop a bad guy with a gun? Ironically, the people generally most anti-union know the answer to that question the best.
The police union demonstrates that unions work. They have completely removed police oversight and made officers exist generally above the law and provided incredible overtime pay. That is not an anti-union argument, that's a why the hell aren't you in a union argument.
Teachers unions are more complicated because teachers care more about the children than themselves and that creates a problem because in order to act in their own self interest by exercising union power they have to harm children and maybe even a generation of them. Of course one could also cogently argue that the general undesirability of being a teacher is and has been harming children for decades.