And that is how you get to no traffic deaths in a year

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...

Up to. It should be minimum instead.

I don't think eu and the thing that gave us the cookie banner is a model of good governance.

> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.

In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.

Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.

Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.

Non proportional fees just means there as a level of wealth where the law effectively no longer applies to you. Imagine if parking tickets cost you a penny, would you care where you parked? This is effectively the same thing.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.

But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.

If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.

Being charged the same percentage of income is still the same punishment. It’s a non-controversial concept in economics that there is a marginal utility to money, as in, if you have a billion dollars, then getting an extra hundred doesn’t give you more utility. However a struggling family would be thrilled at a hundred bucks and maybe that means eating for the next several days. These people should not be charged with the same static dollar amount.

> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?

If you jail different people, they lose out on different amounts of income. Is that unfair?

Now remove the physical jail component and keep the rest of the punishment. Is that unfair?

There is one side of the political spectrum that feels that the penalty for a crime should be set irrespective of the perpetrator because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction pay the same absolute amount.

There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.

IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.

> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same.

I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?

Wow people actually think like this? Have you ever been poor? Genuinely wondering.

10% hurts the same no matter your income.

Fines are about punishment and deterrence. You cant deter a millionaire with a 100$ fine like you can a pensioner on a fixed 1000$ income.

Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.

The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.

If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.

Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.

Is that fair?

This is the thing. There needs to be personal responsability, not just some diffuse (and weak-ass) fine. As it stands the literal worst thing that can happen is the CEO gets fired with a multimillion dollar severance. Is this a joke?

Just look at 2008. I'm convinced many things started to go downhill hard when the worst global financial meltdown since the 1930s went down with not one single person going to jail.

Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.

This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.

The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.

My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...

Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated.

The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"

"letter" here wasn't intended to mean "letter of the law", rather "letter of whatever we tell you to do".

Would love a source on them not paying. They've appealed the latest one rather than refusing to pay [0].

The 500 million one is also for anti-trust rather than GDPR, which is the one that includes % global revenue fines.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

I don't think you get it. Detroying a company doesn't make the situation better, most regulation is centered around "punish and correct," rather than "vindictive destruction." The company has to survive to learn its lesson, or you haven't really made any progress.

> The form of capitalism that existed when Marx wrote his thing, stopped being used in most places around the Great Depression era.

The type of capitalism Marx described is alive and well.

It exists in the undeveloped parts of the world, and it is maintained through force by many capitalist blocks and their allies. People around the world are kept exploited because their economies eventually tie into ours, and their exploitation makes us "competitive". Just because its not you and your kids toiling all day doesn't mean there aren't any.

And it was like that here too, it was only undone through force by socialists, that's why you're allowed to work 8 hours a day only, we have a minimum wage, and children aren't working in factories.

This didn't happen by the graciousness of profiteers, it happened through the threat posed by the masses, people were killed on American streets for this. Don't ever forget that. That's how they rewrite history.

Don't think it can't arise again, it evidently is... slowly.

Marxism and Marxist theory has made prescient points about capitalism that have repeatedly been confirmed in the past ~200 years.

Obviously they did not get everything right (far from it), as their most fervent acolytes believed. But then again, in economics, who does?

Then why it's so pertinent that capitalist countries waste billions fighting it wherever it arises?

More murder and war has been perpetrated as part of anti-Marxism than any other cause in history.

- The Vietnam "War" (Genocide) - The Korean "War" (Genocide too) - The whole Afghanistan affair that still resonates on today - Balkanization (induced by NATO) - Indonesian govt killing 1.5 million in a single year (CIA) - US trained South American Death Squads - Invasion of Barbados by the US - the overthrow of Burkina Faso - the overthrow of Allende - the School of the Americas - Nazis killed more non-semitic East Europeans than jews in the name of anti-marxism

You could, in a very real sense, draw a line through the history of modern warfare and the history of anti-Marxism.

Only for Americans is it a myth because they are primed by their billionaire controlled media and educational system to avoid it.

All in all, its a theory of socio-economic development that implies the democratization of production. That's literally whats so bad about it.

Which is why democratic socialism exists, which has capitalism constrained by regulation as well as government participation in the economy.

Most industries require regulations, to maintain competition, to avoid market manipulation, to maintain public health and safety, and to stop crime.

Some industries require government intervention or even participation, to ensure the existence of nationally critical infrastructure and to protect national resilience and safety.

"Pure" capitalism is just as much a nonsense as "pure" communism.

it feels like there's some lack of equivalence that makes this analogy invalid.

Unless junkies have started a new service to help me find the nearest hospital that I'm not familiar with. Otherwise, spontaneously blocking Google could cause material harm to people reliant upon it. You'd be surprised how many users are so net-ignorant that they wouldn't even know how to get to Bing if their default page stopped resolving.

> The lengths they go to in order to operate in China are magnitudes greater than to operate in the EU, yet EU makes them $10+ billion more profit than China.

> You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech

Except Google pretty much doesn't operate in China and shareholders seem fine with that.

This kind-of sort-of already happens now with Big Model / AI release. Rest of the world already gets features & model drops much much before the EU does.