RE: https://mastodon.social/@workchronicles/115887342621053928
All you need to know to understand how actually-existing crapitalism operates.
(You don't deal with a mafia organization by fining them on a per-offense basis: you deal with them by jailing their leaders, confiscating all their assets, and ruthlessly hunting down all their cronies.)
@cstross Don't take this a me opining not to punish corporations significantly harder. But. Punish the persons. If a corporation does something illegal, then someone has given the order, someone has followed it, punish those persons accordingly. As a not insignificant bonus people might start squealing to get reduced sentences.
@NohatCoder I agree! But which person is responsible? There's often a multiyear lag effect between decision, impact, and prosecution, during which executives resign or retire and are replaced. With big cases against big firms taking decades to hear, do you jail for current CEO for something their predecessor-but-one started and they were only present for the end of?
@cstross You obviously need to do some criminal investigation, you know the thing police tends to do when people commit illegal crimes. Like: Arrest the people who seem most likely to be involved at once and take their statements without letting them coordinate. Look through their computers to find emails, Slack messages, source code with weird if statements. As for people leaving the job, as long as they are not dead you can still punish them.
@cstross
In principle, I think the fines are Ok. Merely they need to go up, no limits as you repeat the offense.
Possibly make the repeat criminal after a while.
Escalation with off ramps is good: in the end we want compliance, not full jails.
What @johnrogers.bsky.social called his 2nd law of crime: "Punishable by a fine" means "legal for a price".
@cstross
Yes. And when Russia and China do it you call them authoritarian. 🤔
You can fine them per offence as long as the size of the fine multiplied by the probability of enforcement is significantly higher than the profit that's possible to achieve from the activity.
Companies tend to be good at optimising for profit. If breaking the law will bring in $X/year and comes with fines that average $Y/year (including inconsistent enforcement), then they will break the law if X>Y. If Y is 2X, they probably won't break that law at all, and definitely won't do it very often.
This is why I was initially optimistic about the GDPR. Fines expressed as a percentage of global turnover can easily exceed global profits and can be scaled to ensure that the violation is deeply unprofitable.
Unfortunately, the probability of enforcement has been so low that it isn't working.
@david_chisnall @cstross Comes a point where it just becomes cheaper to buy out the regulators and/or legislators.
One of the things that always surprises me about #USPol is just how cheap they can be bought. Qataris with their 9 figure bribes look pretty stupid compared to FIFA, for example.
@rupert @david_chisnall Consider how cheap it was to buy the entire UK as a tax haven, by bankrolling the propaganda for "Leave" in the Brexit referendum and buying a few rounds of drinks for the hacks in the Fleet Street boozers
@cstross @rupert @david_chisnall it's not like the EU even allows those fines to go above a rounding error. And even then it doesn't enforce them.
Go ahead. Tell me a single meaningful fine the EUC has enforced.
Google? $3.45B, suspended, and that's less than 3 days of revenue.
Amazon? $746M for GDPR violations; that's not even 8 hours of revenue.
ALT TEXT:
Two characters A and B
B: What you are suggesting is illegal
A: What happens if we do it anyway?
B: We get fined.
A: So it's legal, but for a fee.
@cstross hence RICO. Which is also a fruitful source of civil rights violations.
@cstross And the prospect of that happening? Practically non-existent.
@pzmyers Depends where, and under what circumstances—but right now, in the USA, UK, or anywhere that's part of the US-dominated trade system, nope. (Although the UK is actually considering—shock!—banning X/Twitter completely. Not just the CSAM stuff from Grok; Elon didn't do himself any favours by attacking the prime minister personally.)
