Comment by gspr
11 hours ago
I do think that regulations prevent some murders. I think lots of companies and some sociopathic individuals would be more likely to kill people, e.g. for profit, if it were legal.
We need both regulations and technical solutions.
This.
Also because when encountering a new socio-technical problem it is very non-trivial to determine which one of regulations or technical solutions are easier or more effective.
To even make a good guess you need to be an expert in both domains, which is extremely rare especially in this case.
Technically, they do already kill people for profit.
When some coked-out analyst in Manhattan projects what a company will be able to earn in profit in the next fiscal quarter, people listen to him and thus, the company must perform to that standard. Budgets are set accordingly.
If you have a maintenance backlog at a company facility, and that backlog includes things likely to cause injury or death to workers or the general public, that backlog must be handled in such a way as to satisfy that projection. If that means that you don't spend money to replace a series of gauges that alert operators as to overflow of a dangerous chemical, or don't hire enough people so that the operators are too fatigued to do their jobs safely, that's what that means.
The US CSB documents these as the cause of the 2005 BP Amoco Texas City disaster [0]
If you don't deliver the quarterly numbers expected, investors get mad, and in our current system and regulatory regime, that's worse than people being killed.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuJtdQOU_Z4