Mastodawn

Dan Luu Feb 11, 2023

These comments from people in/near railroads/shipping explaining why something like the hazardous Norfolk Southern train derailment was inevitable (and, in fact, there have been three derailments in Ohio alone in the past 5 months) read like the comments from Intel folks leading up to the rash of serious CPU bugs starting ~10y ago (https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/)

This kind of thing seems expected under weakly regulated capitalism since the company avoids most of the cost of negative externalities, but

We saw some really bad Intel CPU bugs in 2015 and we should expect to see more in the future

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Jordan

@danluu I question your assumption that it's cheaper to ignore these kinds of issues. If a company screws up they do have to pay a lot of money (product recall, compensation, etc).

The point of cost comparison is the additional outlay to do things right vs paying for screwups - the problem you'd run into is screwing up constantly would quickly get very expensive.

At best you could argue current employees may not have sufficient incentive, and take short term profits at long term expense.