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Comment by njovin | Hacker News Reader

They have been fined $38m for killing 8 people, which amounts to a tad over 1% of their 2023 revenue.

I'm very happy that an example is being made of them to warn other corporations that committing murder to protect your profits may cause a slight dip in your next earnings report.

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> They have been fined $38m

This is damages, not a fine.

> for killing 8 people

If this verdict stands, you can bet there will be more lawsuits coming.

> which amounts to a tad over 1% of their 2023 revenue

There's income statements available for some years. Their margins are tiny - usually profits are 10% of their revenue or less. Sometimes much less or none.

Of course it’s not nearly as much as it should be, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Incrementalism normalizes dystopia, in my view; this becomes just another contingency that can be budgeted for.

Imagine, by contrast, the impact that executing one Chiquita executive would have.

I don’t know if I necessarily agree with eye for an eye mentality, but risk of prison or enough money that it makes you actually consider your decisions, seems like a better path. The goal being that it is enough so that it cannot and should not be planned for and can’t be covered by insurance or similar.

> risk of prison

Ship a couple of them to La Modelo

Bukele did not think the same and he was right.

Perhaps they would hire two executives.

I agree with wanting stronger action, but incremental change isn't incompatible with revolutionary vision. We can say, "Yes, this is a good move, and I still want the other 99% of the work done." It is likely that at some point we'd have to move faster than 1% at a time, but it's easier to get up to speed when you're already moving vs standing still.

> Incrementalism normalizes dystopia

Radicalism creates dystopia in the first place (e.g., the USSR was far more dystopic).

It can certainly exacerbate it. I'm less sure about creation; Tsarist Russia was not a nice place for anyone but the aristocracy, and life was also highly precarious in China before Mao came along - the Taiping Rebellion is estimated to have killed as much as 10% of the population, while China's population grew close to 50% during Mao's tenure despite the death of tens of millions from starvation.

I'm not communist, but it has arguably been a good fit for underdeveloped agrarian societies that feel a strategic need to industrialize rapidly without giving up political/industrial autonomy.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/publ...

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