zlacker

> Execs are already rich. To risk jailtime, which fraud can lead to, you'd need to see something more existential than slightly increasing margins on used van sales.

This seems incredibly naive. You'd have to be willfully ignorant to think that a) rich people won't break the law to make a tiny bit more money, and b) fraud committed by large corporations often results in jail time.

I agree with you that this article isn't worth very much, but that's only because lawsuits in general shouldn't be trusted without corroborating evidence, not because a rich executive would never do this.

>>burkam+(OP)
At some point it’s like an addiction.

“No one becomes a billionaire without hurting a lot of people” is still true, though inflation will eventually make us have to change that to “multi-billionaire”.

>>burkam+(OP)
> This seems incredibly naive.

I personally see nothing naive in the parent post. It brings arguments based on knowledge how organization works and appeals to a game theory (stakes do not match). I'm not saying the reasoning is necessarily valid, but it is not naive.

The only part of the parent comment I do not approve from a methodology standpoint is an appeal to "exception that proves the rule". Exceptions do not prove rules, they disprove them.

>>burkam+(OP)
> you'd need to see something more existential than slightly increasing margins

in worlds where existence is related to health care which costs money which is related to margins, tampering with margins can be existential

>>ordu+Xj
“No parking on Sundays” is an exception that proves the rule. The implied rule is that parking is allowed on Monday through Saturday.

I almost never see this phrase used correctly however.

>>Negiti+av
I don't think there's a single "correct" way to use that phrase, different people understand it differently. The meaning I'm most familiar with is an obscure exception demonstrating that your rule of thumb is usually reliable. For example:

"Street parking is always allowed"

"Not always! Three years ago there was a marathon that went through this street and you weren't allowed to park here that morning."

This exception is so specific and obscure that it "proves" (in a casual conversational sense) that "you can always park here" is a good rule. Not all exceptions prove the rule: if the exception is "except on weekends and holidays and overnight", that's so significant and obvious that it actually disproves the rule.

>>ordu+Xj
If it helps, you can rephrase it to "the exceptional nature of these examples proves the general rule that it is not the case."

This is, as I recall, literally the origin of the term?

>>burkam+Hy
The person you are replying to used it in the classic sense.

It was commonly mis-used to mean “eh that just a minor exception that you should ignore.” But it’s been mis-used so much that now it has both meaning.

>>taeric+VF
I thought it was more along the lines of prove = test; the exceptions clarify the rule. Or in AI training terms, you need negative test cases as well as positive test cases to adequately define a rule.

Thou shalt not kill, except all the times thou shalt.

>>saalwe+H51
Words being what they are, and us not speaking the language that created this saying, I'm guessing both general ideas can be true. :D

My memory is this came from Cicero and was about a place excluding women by rule, as they pointed to the exception of a woman that was allowed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule seems to support both interpretations, and at least shows I got the speaker right. Not seeing that my specifics are good, though. I would not be shocked to know that I am wrong there.