Shouldn’t we hold business to the same standards as a 13-year old boy? Do we really worship business so much that we don’t even expect it to have teenage standards of conduct, must less adult?

Sometimes, business equals death. And we don’t care. Want to commit murder? Incorporate. Then, it’s easy.

I read three news stories today:The Florida Supreme Court threw out the tobacco company hundred-billion-dollar penalty because, as RJ Reynolds spokesperson David Howard notes, “The damages would have been crippling to businesses… It was excessive. … As a matter of law, punitive damages are not intended to put people out of business.”

If you recall, the reason for the supposedly-large award (really not very big compared to the total Tobacco company revenues altogether), is that it turns out … whoops … tobacco companies knew their product was addictive, had lied about it to Congress under oath, had deliberately created campaigns targetting children, and knew full well that their addictive, teenage-targeted product killed people.

Surely they’ve learned their lesson. For example, consider today’s study just released, estimating that 1 billion people will die this century from Tobacco-related causes.

CUT TO: A 15-year old boy found guilty of killing a playmate. He gets 26 years in jail, effectively destroying his chances at life. That means his entire prime is spent behind bars. All the years in which he could build a base of education, experience, etc., get taken from him. Effectively, any chance he has of a productive life is over.

I guess I just don’t understand why the double standard. Perhaps I’m the world’s worst Harvard MBA, but shouldn’t businesses be subject to penalties as least as severe as individual penalties? Or, given how much public infrastructure they take up (most of the justice department is corporate law, for example), shouldn’t they be held to higher standards of conduct?

Tobacco destroys value. It kills people. People are valuable (don’t believe me? Lose a child. Then you’ll understand). The medical costs of Tobacco company actions is born by individuals and insurance companies. Those costs aren’t allocated back to the company. This pricing misallocation leads the companies to false profitability.

Now add in executives who lie, falsify uncomfortable scientific data, deliberately target teenagers for addiction and death, and then lie to Congress about it. How should we react? Apparently by worrying that “we might cripple the business.”

I say: euthanasia. Terminate it. Lock it up. Deprive it of oxygen. Slaughter it. Force it to spend its prime eating gruel until it’s good for nothing. Disassemble it. Disperse it. Scatter its parts to the winds, until some other enterprising entrepreneur uses those resources in a way that’s healthy to society, as well as being healthy to the owners. And what about the shareholders? They lose. They get nothing. Because they invested in a company that destroyed value. And they, as owners, deserve to take responsibility for their actions.

But that’s not what we do. Instead, we celebrate profits and breath a sigh of *cough cought* relief that business is safe, even as we’re dying by the billions.

Posted by Stever as Ethics at 3:14 PM EDT

No Comments »

The LA Times reports the Supreme Court will be hearing a case on whether the goverment should act to stop global warming.

They’ll be hearing the case in the fall. It will affect whether California’s rules take effect in 2009. Is anyone other than me scared about this?

Twiddling Our Beaurocratic Thumbs Could Kill Us

First of all, go watch In Inconvenient Truth. It’s pretty clear that global warming is an exponential growth process. That means that the longer you delay, the faster things build up. And unfortunately, human beings are atrociously bad at dealing with exponential growth. Our brains consistently underestimate how fast exponential growth happens.

Here’s an experiment: imagine a lily pond with one lily. It takes a day for the lily to reproduce, so tomorrow, there are two lilies. The pond is big enough so it will be totally full of lilies in 30 days. When is the pond half-empty? Answer: on the 29th day. For the first 28 days, the lilies look harmless. In fact, they don’t even cover half of the pond. Until finally on the 29th day, we say, “Gee, it looks like those lilies are sure growing. Maybe we should trim them back in a couple of days.” Too bad at that point, we don’t have a couple of days. We\’re toast.

The same thing may well be the case with global warming. By the time things get serious enough so we get off our butts, we may be on day 29. Things will only look half-serious, but we may be just a day or two away from no more lily pond.

That’s why the 2009 date is a bit troublesome. It could well be way too little, way too late.

No One Except the Government(s) Can Take Action

And Constitution or not, if it’s not the Government’s role to address global problems, who will? The market? How? While we like to pretend the Market is some all-knowing sentient being, the Market is nothing more than the daily decisions of lots and lots of people engaging in short-term financial transactions. Do we really expect that those people will start valuing low-CO2 technologies more highly than existing technologies soon enough to stimulate enough growth to change the entire world’s production and distribution systems? Not likely. Policy doesn’t move that fast. It took over a decade after the Ozone hole was discovered to ban CfCs. And that was a single chemical. With global warming, we’re talking about the entire way we think about producing and transporting goods. That makes CFCs look like child’s play.

Global warming is real. Call MIT’s Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department and ask. They’ll tell you about the real debate: whether warming will be 3 degrees or 15 degrees by 2100. If 3 degrees, we may be looking at “just” a 20-foot sea level rise. If 15 degrees, today’s adults may be the last human generation to die of old age. Human caused or not (scientific consensus: at least partially, if not wholly, human caused), we have to do something about this and something major.

Some think global warming is nothing but a fake story cooked up by scientists to get funding dollars. Get real. Scientists may be geeks, but they’re damned smart geeks. If they wanted to attract money, they’d make up stories about up-and-coming cancer cures, hair regrowth breakthroughs, immortality, and seven-hour erections that don’t require medical attention. Global warming isn’t going to be the ticket to riches.

So call your Government to action. We need leadership on this. Only Governments have the scope, resources, and ability to act without need for profit to tackle a problem like this. They did it with the Manhattan Project in World War 2, this just might be the time for another big push.

Posted by Stever as Misc, Oil at 1:10 AM EDT

No Comments »