Montag Beeblebrox
9 HN mentions · mentioned in 8 months, 2020–2026
1:34 · 251K views · Dec 29, 2009
A two-minute clip from the film Fight Club in which the narrator, a former recall coordinator, explains the formula companies use to decide whether a recall costs more than paying out settlements.
Cited whenever a thread shows a company weighing cost against safety or customer harm.
9 comments from Hacker News
None of this is true. A company left to their own devices will optimize for maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else. Every cost of their business that's possible to externalize will be externalized. Every corner will be cut in the name of marginally better profits. For example, you say lawsuits are costly. To a company, that's meaningless. The only question is, is the cost of a lawsuit greater than the money saved cutting corners? If not, it's better to kill people and deal with the lawsuits: [1]. Moreover, companies are still run by people, and people have biases. Most notable of which is the short-term thinking bias that results in companies irrationally optimizing for short-term gains, compromising long-term ones. And what fits perfectly into that trap? Yep, safety. Do you know how much money you could save by delaying maintenance? Lots, lots of money to be had right now vs a nebulous concept of potentially higher chance of an accident at some uncertain point in the future. The monkey with its primitive brain chooses the immediate reward every time. [1]: this video
this video Not sure you understand how "The Formula" works. The profit generated by adding this feature will outweigh the cost of any resulting accidents that they take liability for. A less pessimistic way of phrasing it is that within the boundaries they've defined, their self driving system is so much better than a human that they're willing to assume responsibility for crashes deemed "at-fault" while using the system. Not intentionally trying to compare that with other automakers, but Mercedes is the only "you can buy now" vehicle (ignoring robotaxis/Waymo/others) that assumes liability with those capabilities. Until other automakers provide that legal guarantee, they're parlor tricks at best that will continue to get folks killed in scenarios that they otherwise wouldn't had they been actually paying attention.
this video The economic benefit exceeds the human loss of life. Of course no economist SAYS that because one of the big lies economics runs away from is that the value/cost of a random human death is about the same as the value of, say, paving over a swamp estuary or, say, the ocean becoming acidic to the point we lose photoplankton and will kill off all aerobic creatures in the world. If economics can't properly value something that doesn't impact the budget/spreadsheet within a couple months, it pretends it doesn't exist and has zero cost. Heck, proper economics will happily assign negative value to humans. Old? Sick? Debilitated? It's GOOD that person died! But economists don't talk about those things, and don't even study them, well, not publicly. Because it would destroy economics as a serious discipline.
>Other manufacturers treat defects in their products by doing a recall and wearing the costs of their mistake. No. Other manufacturers treat defects with recalls after analyzing the fiscal prospect of doing so, and determining whether or not state/regional laws require them to do it. Here's one of the "not that wrong" scenes from Fight Club to better explain[0]. [0]: this video
It's kinda insane that they can't do a "undo last commit; git push; tell the CI/CD to push a new OS release" procedure. But there's a probably Fight-Club-esque math (1) there that make it "If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.". Congrats Google, your procedures have made you an overweight gorilla that isn't agile enough... (1) this video