Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important. Violating privacy using mass surveillance has no visible downside to the uninformed public. Policy makers just notice that destroying privacy makes it easier to catch cybercriminals and decide it’s a worthwhile trade off. You probably disagree with that. But there are far too many people who just go along with it.
It’s pretty rare for good people to become immensely wealthy and stay good people. Money corrupts, and once you’re to a point where money is no longer survival but a high score, that starts to drive your thinking.
I hate fire department robots. Those bitches can get fucked.
I hate police robots. Those bitches can get fucked.
If you really think I’m defending the companies here while attempting to insult me, I’m afraid this conversation is over.
I did just read your username, and unfortunately, I believe I have interacted you before and prior interactions also offered more insults and ad hominem than conversation. I hope you eventually outgrow this phase, but right now, you’ve been really annoying to interact with, despite our political views being aligned on this.
Not hyperbole. Analogy. If you think I am comparing fines to the death penalty you have drawn the wrong conclusion. I’m comparing your reasoning to Draco’s. The exact punishment itself doesn’t actually matter.
Saying “fuck your argument” does not make it invalid. It’s not about “feelings” and I don’t know why you think it is. I’m saying that companies who break the same law should face the same degree of punishment. That’s more than just saying that forking over the same amount of money is therefore an equal punishment. The goal is to make the punishment have an equal degree of pain no matter who it is inflicted upon.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be punished harshly. I’m saying that different companies who break the same laws should face the same degree of punishment.
The proposed system has a variable degree of harshness which is either far too lenient or extremely harsh, depending on factors that shouldn’t be taken into consideration when deciding punishment.
So firstly, that doesn’t matter, because net income is one of the most regulated figures in financial history, and manipulating it has got people into extremely deep trouble. Even rich people. If Amazon paid zero tax, which in most years, it doesn’t, then it is because of the manipulation of tax loopholes, not because of net income manipulation.
Secondly, I don’t advocate for monetary fines as a way to punish corporate lawbreaking at all. No matter what system you choose to calculate fines, there will always be problems with it. There’s a more creative way to go about it.
You might notice that it’s possible to put humans who break laws in jail, but not companies. But there’s a punishment you can inflict on a company that you can’t inflict on a human: you can confiscate part of their existence. The way that would work is a fine denominated in the equity of the company. So a 10% equity fine would mean that 10 new “golden shares” of the company get minted and pass into the possession of the Government, while the remaining common and preferred stock of the company now only represents 90% ownership.
This sort of fine would result in a direct 10% decrease in the stock price of the company, as the holder of the golden shares is now entitled to 10% of the company’s dividends and gets 10% of the votes in corporate elections. Since the golden shares each represent a fixed percentage of equity, they cannot be watered down by the issuance of more stock. The golden shares can either be disposed of or they can become an investment for the state pension fund/sovereign wealth fund.
Since it seems that all stockholders and executives care about nowadays is to make the line go up, forcing the line to go down directly is a great way to discourage the behaviour that results in the line going down.
This is a bad line of reasoning to use in penal law. Have a look at the legal code of Draco of Athens (after whose name an interesting adjective was coined meaning “excessively harsh”). Why was it so harsh? Well, in Draco’s view, all the minor crimes deserved death. It’s not that complicated, really. If you don’t want to die, don’t steal cabbages.
If there is one thing companies and rich people are good at regardless of their sector it’s making them appear poor on paper
This is not true. Companies openly show themselves to be very rich on paper. What you’re thinking of is the systemic exploitation of tax loopholes to avoid tax liability. That’s not the same thing as “looking poor”.
Consider this document from Amazon (PDF). The company openly shows its net income to be some $30 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
The number reported to investors is extremely important and there is a voluminous amount of legislation to ensure it isn’t manipulated (accountants who help a company cook its books will lose their licences and could go to prison), because it’s the basis for shareholder decisions regarding the company’s stock. If there’s any number that the 1% will not allow to be manipulated, this is the one.
You are, however, correct that this does make it hard to punish a company that isn’t currently profitable. But that’s really just pushing against the limits of what a monetary fine is even capable of achieving, because you will eventually run into the problem of it being impossible to draw blood from a stone.
A better way to approach this is to fine companies a portion of their equity. So a company which is hit with a 10% equity fine means that 10 new “golden shares” of the company are minted and passed into the possession of the Government, while the remaining shares of the company (owned by its shareholders) now only represent a 90% ownership stake. The golden shares would represent a fixed amount of equity and cannot be diluted by the issuance of more stock. They can be disposed of, or they can become an investment to fund things like social programmes and public pension funds.
Fining companies a portion of their equity, in my opinion, is the most effective way to punish them, because it goes directly after the line which is supposed to go up. Suddenly, a 10% fine means line go down 10%. That’s a huge incentive not to do the thing that results in a fine.
FTFY
*BTFY (broke that for you)
The problem with setting fines as a percentage of revenue is that it is far more punishing on some types of businesses than others, and it doesn’t treat all types of businesses equally. For example, let’s say you have a widget manufacturer and a fintech company, both found guilty of some anti-competitive violation and fined 20% of their annual revenue each.
The widget manufacturer might have billions in revenue but its material costs, operational expenses, and labour costs are much higher because manufacturing widgets is a very physical process. These costs can’t be cut to save money once the fine is paid, because the fewer workers you hire and the fewer raw materials you buy, the fewer widgets you make and the effect on revenue is much more direct.
In contrast, a fintech firm which has a similar level of revenue has far lower costs, meaning more of their revenue is either (1) profit, or (2) spent on non-production expenses like marketing or lobbying, both of which can be easily scaled back without immediate impact on revenue.
The consequence of this is that a 20% fine of revenue is devastating to the widget manufacturer, but it is just an inconvenience to the fintech company.
Luna is the only moon in the Solar System which is appropriately-sized relative to its planet’s distance from the Sun and its own orbital distance to create impressive total solar eclipses. If a moon is too small, it won’t cover up the Sun fully, and if it is too big, it will cover up all the light and you would see nothing but darkness.
This is to combat money laundering and tax fraud. I’ll give three examples.
I saw an episode of Border Security Australia where a woman has previously claimed a VAT refund on a pair of earrings worth tens of thousands of dollars. As you may know, many countries allow you to claim a refund of VAT on products intended for export, as VAT is intended to be a tax on consumption. But customs agents caught her wearing the earrings, meaning she had not actually exported them and essentially cheated the tax authority out of thousands of dollars in VAT.
Last year, during a trip to Hong Kong, my mother withdrew 20,000 USD in cash from her American bank and took it with her in person, and then deposited it in her Hong Kong bank account. It was just easier to do it this way since an international wire transfer would have been expensive and slow. She declared it to both US customs and Hong Kong customs, and in both cases they just checked her passport, noted down the transaction, and let her through with minimal questions. It’s intended to be an anti-money-laundering check. If that money has been obtained through crimes, most criminals would not willingly disclose that to customs, and it’s such a large amount of cash that anyone doing so must be trying to move money internationally and not just pay for a holiday. There is literally no penalty or tax and minimal hassle to declare it, so pretty much whoever is trying to sneak large amounts of cash or gold or whatever through customs is either (1) very ignorant or (2) up to no good. Further questioning usually allows customs agents to separate the first category from the second.
On the topic of China, there are strict capital controls in place to prevent wealthier Mainland Chinese individuals from moving all their money abroad. This policy is to encourage domestic spending and investment and it also has the effect of drastically lowering borrowing costs for the Chinese government. Moving large amounts of cash or gold in person is the most obvious way to evade these limits so Chinese customs has to take a strict stance against such behaviour in order to prevent China’s airports from becoming a massive hole in their capital controls. Being caught with undeclared cash provides an easy excuse for customs to confiscate the money in question, where the passenger can’t really argue over their guilt, since, again, anyone carrying such a large amount of cash pretty much has to know what they’re doing.
Pope Leo is weak on crime
Technically, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world, fluctuating between 1 and 1.5 crimes per capita. But this is mostly pickpocketing committed by foreigners against other foreigners. Vaticans themselves mostly commit financial crimes and religious crimes. Obviously the solution here is to build a big, beautiful wall along the border and make Italy pay for it, to keep out all those foreign criminals.
He was too young to vote in 2016. He voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024. I asked him a week or so ago whether he plans to vote Republican in the upcoming election. He says he plans to throw his ballot into the bin.
Since there’s not really that many Christians on Lemmy, I took the liberty of showing my former college roommate that image. He is a devout Catholic and also a two-time Trump voter, though I will note he has since soured on Trump since his re-election (for these and other reasons). His reaction was that the image was insulting to the Catholic religion and blasphemous.
Last year, I had also asked his opinion on Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as pope when Pope Francis died, and he said that post was “not cool”. He said that to imply one could simply become pope without first rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church, especially someone as unpious as Trump, was disrespectful to those who dedicate their careers to the clerical service, and he found the image offensive.
The Polymarket rules are not laws. “Oops I broke the rules you caught me lol, looks like my crypto wallet’s banned now so I’ll have to make a new one in 5 seconds”
“It’s not gambling and it’s not an unregulated securities market. Think of it as a bribe to encourage political insiders to spill their secrets.”
That doesn’t prove anything. There’s no proof that the person currently using it is the same person as the person who created the account.
By the way, you might also notice this argument also works against age verification systems where the user’s age is verified only once. Unless you intend to check their identity every single time they log in.
Age verification is just a ham-fisted way for the state to try to take over a role that should be exercised by parents. Parental controls exist, people!