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Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

Wait up, I am not sure what the company worth is now, I keep reading two or three trillion dollars, so let me get this straight:

Company valuation: 2*10^12

Your fine for some wrongdoing: 8.5*10^6

So, they were fined roughly 4.25*10^-6 (or 0.00000425) of their worth. This sounds like a pretty small fine. Not sure if that even stings, a little.

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Equivalently every time you forget to pay for a parking ticket, and every other equivalent law infraction, you should be fined your total annual disposable income?

Maybe with some punitive disincentive on top I guess. If you have a ten percent chance of being caught, then fine you 10 years of your “profit” seems a good appropriation. Just make it a year’s salary - that is a fair approximation that everyone would understand. You certainly would learn to pay more attention to the many thousands of minor laws you need to personally adhere to.

Edit: I especially want to see some of those rich-ass software devs working for letters from ACRONYMS get taken down. I’m safe: I live in New Zealand and I can’t easily work at a letter of an ACRONYM.

IIRC Sweden (or one of the scandis) does exactly that, a parking ticket is based on a percentage of your gross yearly wage (or something to that effect, maybe the sticker price of the car?) rather than being a set cost, since otherwise those kinds of fines disproportionally target lower income individuals while it becomes a small hassle that the wealthy pay off and forget about.

Corporate fines should work similarly, any infraction no matter how small should be fined at a % of their cashflow. I think Apple, with their 2 Trillion(!!!!) Dollars can hire a lawyer or two to make sure they're not breaking any silly privacy laws, after all :)

I would wager they spend more than that a week globally on coffee and plastic ware in the cafeteria . Or other similar incidental expenses.

This is nothing.

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