demagogue on 6/9/2012 at 11:34

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To repeat what I said above, when I researched food regulation law I learned the insect parts largely come in during transportation, truck trailers & train cars, so now we're talking about hermetically packing crops at the farm to be opened & repacked at the processing plants. And the standard would never have passed if there were any real risk involved.

That said, you can at least get your money back if you discover stuff like that in your food.

Edit: Sort of on topic, another sobering fact I learned is that some companies know with near to 100% accuracy that there will be some small percent of their product, one every few million or so, that will cause major harms, classic examples being carbonated drinks exploding when you open the top & cigarette lighters exploding when you flick the tab. But they're still allowed to be distributed because we don't know which ones are going to cause harm (e.g., it's not like the designer can control some idiot shaking a can of Coke before someone else opens it not realizing), and the design is such to make the risk as small as possible and still do what it does -- you can't have a 100% safe carbonated drink or manual lighter however you design it, but you can minimize it as much as physically possible -- assuming it's not a defect based on some worker negligence, then they would be liable for that!

I just thought it was sobering that they can even know with exact detail, there will be like 3 people mortally wounded by our product this year, but not be liable for it.

demagogue on 13/9/2012 at 10:14

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Hmm, there are two spins one could give to respond to that. Yes they aren't intended design features, so they are "accidental" in that sense. But so are the Toyota (or whoever, I don't recall just now) gas tanks that exploded in fire, not intended, we don't know which ones will explode, but Toyota was still clearly liable because they knew it was a risk and didn't fix it to save money. One could argue the only difference with Coke cans & cigarette lighters opposed to the Toyota gas tanks is just in the %'s of accidents you can predict will happen: for the Toyota it was unreasonably high (one every 1000 or whatever) but not apparently for the Coke & lighters, only like one every 10 million or so.

This may be getting into semantics, but what counts as an "accident" is part of the issue. Is it really "accidental" when you can calculate to like 99.98% accuracy that at least 3 people *will* die from your product this year. Not may die; will absolutely guaranteed die; and not from some unforseen feature, but from a precise design flaw that you know about and actively decided not to fix because it would be prohibitively costly... You know they will die & you agree to let it happen.

I mean, it's easy for insurance companies to deal with because the causes are natural (floods, fires, etc). But when the cause is a known flaw in the design of your product that you choose to accept and push on the public (as long as we don't know which persons it will mortally maim). I think it's a little sobering. I agree with the law, you can't stop every single tiny risk in life and you can't just scale us back to the stone age to protect every little thing. But still, I mean we're talking about a CEO (or whoever) signing off on allowing 3+ people to die with his full knowledge, with something he might arguably fix(?) that he knows would save their lives and he chooses not to, knowing that it means they'll die. I mean, scientific knowledge to parts-per-million accuracy does a funny thing with our expectations about what's acceptable sometimes. That was my basic point.

demagogue on 13/9/2012 at 12:37

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Hmm, not sure if it's ever that simple. You can almost always pick a different design (just use plastic if the glass has bubbles), but then maybe you loose sales so there's a cost for the safer option. (Also, if glass were really very risky -- it's not -- but if it were, you'd be liable for picking the glass design at all, not for not-stopping the bubbles.) It's usually like, a company has 5 different workable options, and for some products (cars, lighters) *every* option will have some risk, some of the risks clearly unacceptable (1:1000 risk but dirt cheap) and some pretty acceptable (1:a billion risk but maybe way too pricy), then you get in this grey zone in between (1:50K to 1:500K risk but reasonable priced), and it's not immediately clear where the line is. It's one thing for the company to pick that; they're all doing pure cost-benefit analysis: the cheapest price for the most risk we can get away with. But the really tough job goes to the judge or regulator has to make the choice for the public interest, more protection or less cost the consumers have to pay. Not an enviable job, but somebody has to set the line, and the devil is in the details of that grey zone.