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Comment by umeshunni | Hacker News Reader

This isn't Reddit

This might not be Reddit, and the parent's point might be crudely made, but watch the fines companies are awarded, and put it in terms of revenue, and then scale it to /$60k USD, to put it terms of how "big" of a fine it would be, from an average person's pocket; you'll find that many of these fines are in the sub-dollar range, which to me, makes it completely fair to dismiss them as any sort of real penalty.

That's a very interesting point, but make sure to do it with profit, and not revenue. Revenue is meaningless on this context.

(If it's a sub-dollar fine over revenue, it will probably be around $20 on profits, what just moves the needle from the cost of home-made coffee to an airport coffee.)

I disagree that profit is the right metric when scaling a fine to a normal person; $60k is the average American's revenue (not profit — I'm not even sure how I'd calculate profit for a human, in a year), so I use the corresponding amount — revenue — when comparing.

For example, a $10 fine to a company w/ a net loss but $1B in revenue is clearly not a large fine.

Profit is what the company has for the shareholders to spend by themselves. For workers, the equivalent is the salary.

> That's a very interesting point, but make sure to do it with profit

No dont do it with profit. You can just reinvest all your actual profits in the business and then on paper have a very small profit or even show a loss.

> but watch the fines companies are awarded, and put it in terms of revenue, and then scale it to /$60k USD

What are your thoughts on RIAA suing people for $20,000/song? Appropriate fine since it's large against a person's income, right?

This isn't Instagram either, can you clarify what this is supposed to mean?

Hackernews discourse is supposed to at least take some thought when making a comment.

>ah cos big corps just do what they want with no penalties unless they piss off enough people that the politicans feel like they need to make a point.. ...we're well into gangster capitalism now

This is just a lazy comment.

ah ok, so reddit is known for lazy comments?

I can make the point more articulated.

Quite simply everytime one of these stories comes up big corp breaks the law...is anyone going to do anything about it...The answer is pretty much always no not even fines...

Even something where a CEO admits intentionally breaking the law not much has happened. No talk of jail time? https://www.ft.com/content/3fbc5918-ad04-4003-8e09-3df12d7dc...

I think maybe I'm jaded with 'it's illegal'. If the law is not enforced it doesn't matter.

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