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?
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.
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?
Rules stop mattering when companies have the wealth of multiple entire nations combined.
And any fines are essentially pennies that just get factored into the cost of doing business.
Yes fines should be a percentage for exp 5-20% of company valuation.
Valuation can be manipulated, it should be gross income.
costs that just get passed onto the consumer anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imaginary wealth
All wealth is imaginary. If you have stocks “worth” X amount of money and can borrow real against it , it’s wealth.
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.
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
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
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).
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.
Accepted financial risk
