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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Companies play a lot of games to minimize income for tax reasons. Allowing them do do the same with fines is unreasonable.

It’s actually fairly difficult to get an objective measurement of a companies size. Go by total sales and industries with high profit margins look much smaller. Go by number of employees and retail looks vastly larger than tech companies etc.

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Go by market cap (for public companies). The markets are pretty effective at valuing companies.

/me looks at GameStop

There's tens of thousands of publicly traded companies worldwide, and one company having some weird fluctuations for a period of a few days at a time is a tiny little rounding error. This is the exception that proves the rule. All the other metrics proposed by Retric have worse edge cases than this, which they pointed out.

Market cap has several issues. Most companies are private. The market cap is likely to tank before any major fine. Company size is a proxy for how much stuff their doing so a minor fine for an individual restaurant is wildly overkill applied all of McDonalds revenue.

Finally, it promotes using lots of subsidiaries to firewall risks from fines which adds a lot of pointless overhead to the economy.

I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying it's the best we have. What alternative are you suggesting? The problem of private companies applies to every metric you can think of, as none of those metrics are private!

But... they like the stock

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