If laws are never enforced do they exist? Need to imprison people for white colar crimes or ban them from ever holding a position of power equivalent to their current.
How else do you expect them to monetize every aspect of your life, Peasant? More money means Better Than You.
Know your place and hand over your information. What are you, a communist?
fair enough. I hope all the Linux distros take note. you can easily not comply with the age verification laws by, not complying with them.
Let’s do some logic. You’re an evil multitrillion dollar company that makes billions in profits by breaking the law. But, by doing so, you’ll be fined 12 million dollars, of which you’ll contest and get reduced to 7 million. Barely a blip on the monthly revenue stream.
I wonder why they keep ignoring (breaking) the laws.
It has always astounded me that penalties to companies are almost always either a tiny fraction or the ill-gotten gains, or at most the total amount of the ill-gotten gains.
I’m like NO! How about TEN TIMES the ill-gotten gains? Or literally some amount which is so much it’s going to hurt the company. Like 25-50% of the value of the whole company?
And if that sounds like it’s too much because the company would have trouble surviving, THAT’S THE POINT!
And then they get to KEEP the ill-gotten gains! What bank robber ever gets to keep the cash for when they get out?
Should get one warning fine and if they fail to abide by that the entire company gets parted out to a bunch of smaller entities and their software gets changed to FOSS.
This is a huge thing I am hoping Europe does. To vastly ramp up humungous fines
I’d vote for that 100%
Absolutely right. It’s not a law for them, it’s a fine.
Doesn’t even amount to the taxes they paid the month the fine was issued. It’s barely the cost of doing business.
The third largest economy in the world is uniquely positioned to end this, if they wanted to.
Exactly this, kick them out of California and don’t allow them back as an example of what happens when you fuck around.
Fining them a double digit percentage of their **gross ** revenue also works.
I like that idea, but I really feel that corporations should face actual permanent consequences (just like a regular person) in order to begin balancing society. Until we put our foot down and bring mega corps to heel they will continue to lie, cheat, steal, and assist in things like genocide.
This isn’t a new problem either. IBM provided the computing power and logistics that allowed Germany to carry out the Holocaust in the same way Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have done so for Israel.
These companies are at war with humanity.
Absolutely. A corporate death penalty would be even better than existential fines.
“Corporations are people my friend”, indeed.
We should be getting every Californian to work together to make that happen.
Also serious queation. What do you think they can do to make that happen?
Enforce existing laws to start with?
Legislate fines that are a percentage of the company’s gross revenue if they don’t act right.
These are things that have been tested in other countries & they work.
That’s the real war right now. Corporations versus governments.
Friend, the governments are almost entirely on the side of the corporations. The only war is class war - the rich against the rest of us.
From a global perspective, lower class Americans fit the criteria for being rich. The true conflict is between 1st world countries and the global poor.
You’re incorrect.
Wealth is not how much passes through your fingers.
It’s how much you get to keep.
Slavery is not being denied the ability to earn. It is being denied the ability to save.
Lower-class people in the United States may in fact have quite a bit of money passing through their fingers at any given moment, but the way that financial systems are structured in the United States, those people are not beneficiaries of those funds, but merely vessels from which each and every cent must be extracted. No money is left at the end of the month, after rents, health insurance, transportation, the absurd costs of food, et cetera.
No, on the contrary, these people do NOT fit the criteria for being rich. They lack ownership of everything, and are paid a wage that is intentionally set lower than their actual living expenses. The fact that their wages may be deceptively high is LITERALLY a sign of deception and not in fact a sign that they get to keep any of that money.
The war is ABSOLUTELY between the wealthy and the poor within each country.
It is pretty freakin laughable to claim that the wealthy in the United States and the poor in the United States are on the same side of this conflict. The poor in the United States are the most direct victims of exploitation by the wealthy in the United States(and not to say that the poor in other countries are not also extremely exploited, but the poor in the United States are the ones the wealthy in the United States have direct knowledge of inflicting pain upon).
That’s for sure true, but even America’s middle class has more in common with the global poor than they do with the billionaires. Resistance must be carried out everywhere, even and maybe especially in America.
While you’re correct, the cumulative effect of lower class and middle class Americans on 3rd world peoples dwarfs that of the upper class. It takes a lot of time and resources to maintain the lifestyle of a single person working 40 hours at McDonald’s.
His consumer products were made in 3rd world factories polluting their local environments and the coffee he’s drinking was bought for less than a dollar a kilogram from a farmer destroying a priceless rainforest. When this impact is multiplied by three-hundred million, the effects are as dramatic as they are unsustainable.
…I try not to think about it. It’s a conflict between guilt and gratitude.
It’s a shitty situation where we’re both correct. The only thing to assuage that guilt is to try to use our privilege to bring down the system.
Governments are complicit
Accepted financial risk
if (moneyMadeThroughCrime > (fine + bribeToOrangeMan)) doCrime() else doCrime(sneaky)Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.
Imaginary wealth
All wealth is imaginary. If you have stocks “worth” X amount of money and can borrow real against it , it’s wealth.
Which means the fines must equal the wealth of at least one nation to matter. I’m all for that.
How about we just don’t have private ownership of the means of production so we stop guaranteeing that only the most ruthless and greedy humans can rise to power? Democratic control over workplaces would largely prevent the monopolization on decision-making by the psychopath class.
At this point, there is no justification for privatized control of the means of production.
Especially for AI.
When the purpose of a technology is to remove the ability to work from as many people as possible, there is no valid reason for that technology to in any way benefit individuals without first benefitting those whose jobs it destroys.
The wealthy are literally job destroyers. That is what they actually are.
Tbf we have democratic control in government and the psychopath class does just fine consolidating power.
That’s entirely because we don’t have democratic control of the economy. The reason the psychopath class is able to consolidate government power is because they own the economic power.
I’d like that to happen, but that’s sadly unlikely. Companies like Google and Microsoft should be global infrastructure under state control - even better would be UN control.
It’ll never happen for as long as you and people like you believe it’s impossible.
Once you all believe it is possible, it will become inevitable.
I said it’s unlikely, not impossible. I like to dream of a better future more in line with what we thought would be happening at the time when the internet was still young too.
It is ABSOLUTELY possible.
At this point, we need to stop listening to ANYONE who says it’s impossible.
What is NOT possible is sustaining the current system as it currently functioning.
Literally anyone can look at the current system and identify that it can’t continue to function in this way. And I’m not arguing that people will say that it’s too cruel to continue. I’m saying that regardless of whether anyone is working to try to change the system, it’s just not logistically possible for things to continue functioning the way they’ve been functioning. The population doesn’t have any more to give, but the wealthy demand more profits and profits at an increasing break.
We are at a breaking point with or without people trying to break anything.
And any fines are essentially pennies that just get factored into the cost of doing business.
costs that just get passed onto the consumer anyway.
Yes fines should be a percentage for exp 5-20% of company valuation.
Valuation can be manipulated, it should be gross income.
They should be however much the company made by breaking the rules, with a hefty addition included, inversely multiplied by the chance that the company was going to get caught.
For a company, deciding whether or not to break the law is a purely mathematical equation. If you can make $1M a day by breaking the law, there’s only a 1% chance per day that you’ll get caught, and the fine is only $5M? That’s a no brainer. To the company, they see a project with $1M income per day, a 99% success rate, and a $5M failure cost. All you need to do is go undetected for five days, and you’ve already made your money on the “investment”. Everything after that is pure profit.
So the fines should be adjusted to fit that model. Using those same numbers, the fine would be the $1M per day that the scheme was going (meaning any profit made is now completely forfeit), plus the $5M, multiplied by 99 because they only had a 1% chance of getting caught.
For a scheme that ran for 100 days before getting caught, (meaning they made $100M in profit) that fine would be a grand total of $10.395B… Not million. Billion. Because in order to deter companies from breaking the law, the punishment needs to account for the fact that the company is going to do the math on whether or not they’ll get caught, and what the fine is going to be. And when the company runs the numbers and decides that they have a 1% chance of getting caught, that should be a fucking terrifying number instead of just a slap on the wrist.
I love the idea. The math works out a bit different though. After 100 days it’s a 63% chance of getting caught so the fine would be 100/0.63= 159 million plus the additional fee. After 1 day the fine would be 1 million /0.01= 100 million plus the additional fee.
I love the actuarial precision of the fine so that all the probability of profit is priced in. Calculating that probability will be complex though because they could argue there is a 100% chance of getting caught after you caught them lol.
I say we start arresting board members until thing stop sucking. Death penalty on the table.
Death penalty is barbaric, lets not sink to that level.
How about we sink to this level?
The death penalty’s only ethical application is when the subject is uncontainable by other means. The rich are proving that’s exactly the type of criminals they are, and when they do get close to getting caught the one guy who’s testimony could bury them mysteriously dies by ‘suicide’ at exactly the moment the cameras malfunction. I can’t think of a cabal of crooks more deserving of the death penalty.
I get where you’re coming from, but we as a society haven’t even TRIED to hold billionaires accountable. Do they make it difficult? Of course they do, but a huge percentage of the population still look up to the ultra rich and think they’re geniuses who deserve it.
If society ACTUALLY got fed up and demanded they be held accountable, and jail and seizing their assets wasn’t enough, then you consider more severe forms of punishment. As it stands right now we’re barely handing out the equivalent of an occasional speeding ticket to these people and wondering why it isn’t effective.
Of course they are, there aren’t consequences.
Despite the general and indiscriminate scanning of people’s messages not being legal in the EU
Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap have already signaled in a joint statement to “continue to take voluntary action on our relevant Interpersonal Communication Services.” Whether this indicates continued scanning of our private communication is not entirely clear, but what is clear is that such activity would now risk breaching EU law. Then again, lack of compliance with EU data protection and privacy rules is nothing new for big tech in Europe.
It is utterly insane that any company thinks that they can ignore laws from at least two different continents and not only think they will get away with it, but are getting away with it, and doing it so blatantly, impetuously and with impunity.
They don’t think. They know. They have carefully weighed the likeliness of repercussions vs to the profit to be made from doing it anyway. They have also weighed how likely it is they will face legal action and what the legal action will cost them. They have also also stacked the deck against the common user and any legislators that might want to hold them accountable through lobbying and other forms of coercion or bribery.
This is a well calculated “risk” vs reward for them.
I think they will get their noses bloodied sooner or later, and well deserved too
Wait, hasn’t the EU also been pushing for mandatory scanning of people’s messages FoR tHe cHiLdrEn?
Or were they just pushing for a backdoor in the encryption to enable selective scanning at a massive scale?
That’s what the article linked is about. it was rejected, but Google, meta, snap etc… said that they’re going to scan anyway.
March into their campuses and start arresting executives and deleting servers at random until they comply.
You don’t need to go that far. Arrest and jail the CEO, and tell the execs you’ll come back for them in 3 days.
I absolutely guarantee you the bad practice stops within 24 hours (or some smartass may try to hide it better, might warrant a few years in jail with the commoners, of course).
This has the same energy as some medieval shit, a Protestant king ordering his army into a catholic monastery and burning all the books type shit. I’m here for it.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie
Also, Vive la France
Almost makes you wonder why class actions were gutted by the supreme court. Nobody is going to sue for 8k since hiring a lawyer would cost more, and a class action would be impossible to win. AG seems to have some power though.
