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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

> "The environment needs to be a core value, and I hope and pray it becomes your daily anthem."

Strong words from the judge on a fine that's less than 1% of the company's annual profits and about 0.1% of the company's annual revenue.

These fines need to be a percentage of revenue (with a large floor). Not some random number that's a drop in the bucket for most corporations committing these crimes in the first place. As it stands, these fines are (in many instances) less expensive than correcting the issue that caused the fines in the first place.

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> These fines need to be a percentage of revenue (with a large floor). Not some random number that's a drop in the bucket for most corporations committing these crimes in the first place. As it stands, these fines are (in many instances) less expensive than correcting the issue that caused the fines in the first place.

Rather than fines, it is more effective to withdraw operating licenses (temporarily) and ask for corrective actions to be taken before operations resume.

The article mentioned that the judge threatened to stop Carnival from docking in US ports. That seems like it would have been pretty effective at getting companies to pay attention.

Shutting them out of the US wouldn't change much. It would stop their Alaska cruises, but everything else is mostly non-US countries. It is somewhat common to have fly to some non-US country to get on your cruise already. Those who drive to Texas or Florida to get one will be harmed, but for everyone else they are already flying so where they fly to is just a detail.

The real losses are to the US cities (in Florida, Texas, California, and Puerto Rico) that lose the tourism trade.

Now if other countries like Jamaica get on board things would change fast - but here is a case of each country acting alone loses, only by acting with others do they win. (and there is reward for cheating: if everyone else enforces this and you say you will but don't you get the tourism trade).

Of course if Carnival's customers start caring that will drive changes.

Carnival is a horrible unethical company. Our nation would be lucky to be rid of them.

There are plenty of other cruise lines. If one is thrown out, others can increase their business in the same area. There's no loss to any of those cities.

Not really, if you follow the ownership chain Carnival owns most of them somehow.

Also, a corporate structure shouldn't shield you from criminal prosecution. The company pled guilty to multiple felonies... why aren't the executives facing criminal action, given that event the judge thinks they're not taking their responsibilities seriously?

i feel these "fines" should scale both with the companay's revenue and how much they saved in performing the violation. so at a minimum, the fines should be at least as much as they saved and then increased even more in line with severity of the violation and revenue.

edit: i see your edit now, which is what i am saying, but i'll leave it.

The fine should be 10x the actual cost to properly dispose it, it might be a better "deal" to just get the fine than to properly do the job.

Just like how all the massive big pharma fines which consistently continue to happen every year will changes things? (this list only goes until 2013).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...

A $20M fine on $18B in revenue is a penalty of 0.001%. The equivalent fine for the average US household is $62.70, or a meal with a couple of drinks at an average restaurant. It won't even be noticed.

They should be required to clean the ocean of 100x the amount of waste that was dumped in addition to a $200M fine.

And thus why the GDPR has such big scary possible maximum fines.

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