That's the real war right now. Corporations versus governments.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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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.
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.
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.
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
Somebody could sue under the CCPA.