Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
I had trainings upon trainings about this, particularly because in my line of work I deal with medical data, which is categorised as sensitive.
Not enough not, you still get almost all market participants trying to skirt the law instead of actually respecting it.
If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.
So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
Making the fine cover all revenue from the crime makes more sense. A bank robber doesn't get to claim that some of what they took should go to pay for their getaway car.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.
IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
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?
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.
You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.
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?
Similar, even fines proportional to income are still unfair because to determine how much a fine hurts you need to compare it to whats left of the income after basic needs have been paid for. For someone that has much more than they need, getting fined 50% of their income will suck but not immediately change their lifestyle while someone who is living paycheck to paycheck is going to be ruined by the same percentage fine.
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.
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.
Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?
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.
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.
10% is more just. Than a flat fine.
But 10% hurts more when you are poor and have no savings and you need that money to pay rent. For small companies is the same. Bigger corporations have more resources available to minimize that 10% impact. Power does not scale linearly with money.
But to take a percentage is a much better way than a flat fine. Flat fines are totally ineffective when applied to big corporations.
No, 10% of income doesn't hurt the same no matter your income. (Even if you ignore the relationship loose correlations between income and savings that can be used to cushion the effects of unexpected expenses, and assume neither party has any such resources.)
While fungibility pushes slows the decline compared to less-fungible goods, declining marginal utility applies to income, too, which means not only does a flat fine have less impact on the rich, so does a flat percentage.
(This gets even more true when you do consider savings, etc.)
Even better might be a percentage of disposable income but even that is not going to be enough and with more complexity in the rules comes more opportunity for creative accounting which again benefits those more well off.
Id rather have it scale badly than not at all though.
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?
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.
Who are you referring to?
> The less severe infringements could result in a fine of up to €10 million, or 2% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
> These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".
It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.
They can and will change it later.
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"
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...
[0] https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/AAPL/financials/
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...
Because the politicians and "regulators" rotate back into the private sector and earn generational wealth for playing ball.
So what happens is that they wind up going with non-massive fines to enforce compliance as a trade off (like you wouldn't deal out the death penalty for someone who was caught stealing).
And this has been known for 150+ years and it has been written about extensively, its just not considered acceptable/appropriate knowledge. Marxists study this.
Just look up all the ecological and environmental disasters in Eastern Europe and Russia, or the insane economic fuckups from the ‘great leap forward’ (or even going on right now!) in China for a breath of fresh air, amiright?
People be people. No system is going to magically solve these problems, but some (anything authoritarian, usually!) can certainly make them worse.
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.
I'm a socialist because I know you can't stop it that way. It's simply impossible. They will corrupt/lobby/influence their way around it. They currently do.
What is your plan? To REALLY SUPER DUPER trust the next candidate you have zero control over?
"Democratic socialism" is not democratic or socialism. Socialism is actually democratic and prevents exploitation.
The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others. Individuals shall make their OWN assets through their own muscles. No ownership of property that allows you to reap what others sow. It's logically the only way to avoid power imbalances. And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Remember, democracy is not trust, its control.
Any group larger than a dozen is fundamentally going to have someone else controlling other peoples stuff - de facto or de jure. It’s how things scale.
"So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
So, the goal is that the people must become the state directly and dissolve the divide.
And so representative systems are necessary, as you say. And representative systems are not inherently bad.
What makes them bad is the other parts of society that allow a small group of people to take advantage of representative systems.
That small group is the capitalist class. Their control of production, and their profits give them a front row with the state.
Representation is all about context.
In order for the people (AKA literally everybody) to become the state we must undo that power imbalance and let people control production themselves.
How do you propose this would actually work?
What is interesting to note is that none of the other famines listed is attributed to ideological systems, just the last one even though monarchy ruled for the longest time. Also there has never been another famine in China since. But, anyways, I am not particularly fond of modern China and their affinities for capitalist production.
> How do you propose this would actually work?
The organization of the masses into our own political force. I dont mean middle class white people, I mean everybody. It literally requires the reorganization of our lives for the creation of mass democracy. It requires proactive participation of all of us that can. It requires physical tools as well as organizational tools. Democracy is something we do, not something that is done for us.
We would eliminate the regional bourgeois-state and replace it with the organized peoples representatives with essentially accounting roles FULLY accountable to regional and neighborhood councils. (blockchain could help manage funds) No more politicians with wealthy connections. No more policy groups deciding what goes on. It would be a council of representatives selected and organized by neighborhood councils whose collective aim would be the control of regional production. No more bourgeois-courts, it would be replaced by a peoples courts.
And you may say "That's what we have now", but it isn't. Your average citizen is so far removed from any democratic action and money has taken such a hold in politics that even voting is totally nullified in our system. That's why we call it bourgeois-democracy. Candidates are just celebrities/performers for their billionaire constituents and average people have ZERO control over candidates and their policies. Policy does not come from the people.
THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT MASS DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION.
And the reason that this cannot be taken advantage of within socialism is at the very core of socialism itself: and it is that through revolutionary education, people would learn to spot capitalists and eliminate them from social life. Like a person would stop a thief stealing in your own house. And we're talking about capitalists as a class, not necessarily individuals. No one will be allowed to own production for profits. No one will be allowed to employ other persons for a profit. People would enforce this with an iron fist in order to preserve their own working class power.
Just like if you see slavery you would stop it. Right? In the same way that slavery was extinguished and made unacceptable, so would capitalism. We would halt it as one would halt abuse on a street. If someone is using property to make profit from you they would be jailed as the only way to profit would be through wage theft, meaning paying employees less than what they worked for. Wage theft would be made a serious crime. Unlike today.
This is the "grandiose" check and balance of socialist representative democracy that through the democratization of production we dont allow individuals to leverage production. There shall be no profit-market from production.
We would then start reigning in that production and use production solely for the sake of satisfying needs, not generating private profits. Work would be a right, guaranteed. More workers is only better (except if you're producing for profits). Think about that, capitalism is the only economic system where more workers is worse because for-profit-production cant handle so many workers.
These are just thoughts I have from actually reading communist literature. At least read something. I've read about everything before making up my mind. Its called being intellectually honest.
Read about past revolutions from the perspective of people who were there, not the perspective of ideologues fear-mongering funded by millionaire think tanks. What is also very important to understand is that these 20th century revolutions were never "induced" by communists. They truly did arise from mass discontent, what the communists leaders did was guide the discontent into an organized form through teaching people who didn't even know how to read how to liberate themselves from for-profit-production.
Democracy is not something some dude on the internet writes into a chat box. We will decide on the best way to organize ourselves when the time comes, but private production ALWAYS leads to authoritarianism.
Shit like this actually happened and not even that long ago. It sounds like you've been Americanized in such a way as to see social change impossible.
You've got suburb mentality. The capitalists define your historical progression, even your conception of it.
Authoritarianism follows that mentality.
Like I said, a lot of this actually happened. Its word salad cause you're probably used to reading fiction.
Take the state and distribute its functions across organized neighborhood councils, treat capitalism like a crime, make production satisfy needs not generate profits.
There I condensed it for you.
Regulations enforced by courts are the only tool functioning societies are willing to use to limit corruption, including under communism. Some forms of communism are anarchic and just assume it will work without it, but then I can say this about anarch-capitalism too, and it's just as wrong there.
> The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others.
There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today. Money itself is a fungible token of power, and the very same corruption works just as effectively when it's any other form of power. It's even possible just by barter, as demonstrated by that guy who swapped his way from a paperclip to a house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system, and I know of nobody who wants one of those even in principle due to the downside of what "omniscient" means, and in practice it doesn't matter anyway due to the lack of incorruptible people to act in this role.
> And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.
Ah, the small-commune model of communism. For reasons too long to go into, this limits you to roughly the tech level of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Even then, this is only even stable until someone outside your council comes along with an army, and at best they insist you use modern tech you previously couldn't import because you abolished money, at worst you're working for a 1700 AD equivalent to the Spartans.
You are doing wishful thinking. The world is not ideas the world is real.
Regulations meets deregulation backed by billionaires. They can completely fund political candidates and judges. They can carry out conspiracies to avoid and circumvent regulations. In fact they do. The powerful already are the law, dont you see? They cant do everything they want, but they do almost all of it.
Do you think politics is as it seems? The very existence of the massive power imbalance requires you to think deeper about how politics works and not believe the illusion of modern democracies.
> There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today.
Your mentioning of "many kinds of profits" is ignorant, we're talking about profits and capital, it doesnt matter what the currency is. The rule is still exactly the same:
The accumulation of profits from the work of others leads to power imbalances. The type of currency is irrelevant.
And the red paperclip thing was a stunt, it is not an inherent part of modern economies. Its not "real".
> To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system
Nah. Blockchain can be used for managing funds. In fact the function of the state should be reduced to accounting, which almost anyone could do.
> Ah, the small-commune model of communism.
Im not talking about that. Read Lenin, real democracy requires local councils. Small communes dont work.
Honestly, dude, I can tell you know nothing about communism, marxism or even power dynamics in politics. I'm not being rude. Read about it, because if not youre just hating because someone told you to.
Like I said before: Marxism is a framework that describes the progression of society through socioeconomic theories. It implies the democratization of production. Thats whats so bad about it, according to the rich and their state. Thats why they made you hate it without you even knowing what it is.
The issue is that the stated ‘progression of society through socioeconomic theories’ is all good sounding wishful thinking, which is only actually ‘doable’ through authoritarianism.
It’s why it’s such sweet bait for people to get sucked into, and why everyone who has tried it for any group larger than can fit into a single room turns into a authoritarian dictatorship - which then usually ends up just abusing the control for their own ends. Best case. Or turns into something even worse, like the Khmer Rouge.
Not that it’s the ONLY path to authoritarian dictatorship mind you. But it happens every time.
Marx's Capital is actually a very well written piece of research, fully cited with notes for each citation. The dude was a proffessor. Lenins books are research pieces, not vague posturing. They are cited and founded in real phenomenon. In fact Lenin was persecuted because of the things he researched. He has books studying the rise of banking in Russia and Europe and how corruption arised from the simple business practices of finance capital and how that turned into imperialism through profit seeking of raw materials in foreign lands.
You would know that if you actually engaged with it instead of forming your opinions from vague notions passed down to you or read on social media.
Their theories arent unfounded.
> only actually ‘doable’ through authoritarianism
Nah. The central point of Socialism/Communism is the DEMOCRATIZATION of production. Calling it authoritarianism is a lie by billionaires to keep people hating it.
See, If peoples courts decide that wallstreet hedge funds and the military industrial complex deserved life sentences in jail they call it authoritarianism.
But when bourgeois judges systematically put poor people in jail its "just the legal system" and "hey it aint perfect, but nothing is".
Your ideas on Marxism are very western. The Khmer Rouge was backed by the CIA and the brits. Pol Pot was the only Marxist who said hes never read Marx, imagine that. Its almost as if they werent Marxists. He also adored Hitler, which is antithetical to Marxism.
Remember and recognize that a peoples state will always be called authoritarian by the rich.
Marxism is about making the people their own state. Make society FOR itself by eliminating the capitalists who create the imbalance of power.
and yet it always ends up the same, with one person in charge (chairman, commissar, supreme leader, etc.), and everyone at the point of a gun.
that you think because a bunch of academics wrote a bunch of words and that’s why it doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t always happen. provably. in real life.
because of exactly the reasons I stated.
I’ve known many people who lived through the USSR, and a few that lived through Mao’s China. I’ve lived in Eastern Europe and seen the long term damage. This isn’t academics. This is what happens when people are given high minded academics and use it to justify atrocities - which are easy to do in this case. Almost custom made to do.
because you know, it’s ‘for the greater good’. And there is always someone else to blame. but it never actually works, so doubling down we go….
And re: Pol Pot. Just beyond words [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot].
I'll tell you.
Pol Pot was never a communist. He was an anti-intellectual who himself said he had never read Marx and said he admired Hitler. Western Nations claim he was a Marxist in order to spook the average citizen. There are also serious allegations that the CIA and the MI6 were involved in trafficking weapons to them.
The Vietnamese were seen as a threat by the Cambodian capitalists and the Chinese didn't like the Vietnamese due to the sino-soviet split. The US, China, and the UK backed Pol Pot to get at Vietnam.
Pol Pot was a populist. Asian fascism was created to counter Marxism.
Read about the CIA backed killings in Indonesia. They aided in the killing of LITERALLY 125,000 people a month in order to squash communist sentiment in Asia.
> and yet it always ends up the same, with one person in charge (chairman, commissar, supreme leader, etc.), and everyone at the point of a gun.
Where did you read that?
Did you know that the Americans have placed more dictators in power than any other state in existence?
> I’ve known many people who lived through the USSR, and a few that lived through Mao’s China. I’ve lived in Eastern Europe and seen the long term damage. This isn’t academics. This is what happens when people are given high minded academics and use it to justify atrocities - which are easy to do in this case. Almost custom made to do.
Did you know that capitalism started world war 1 AND 2? What has caused more destruction in Eastern Europe than both world wars? Did you know that most of the destruction and social chaos in Africa was caused by capitalism? Did you know that capitalism has decimated South America? Why do you not say that the poorest countries on earth are all capitalists?
I'm not here to defend or espouse the doings of past states. I'm here because I want to put power in peoples hands. The billions of us, not just the middle class. I don't want anyone above me, like there is now. I want people to have democratic power in order to end this artificial poverty that generates power for the few. All poverty world wide is sustained for profits and that is evident.
It rarely spilled over directly until Cambodia kept crossing over into Vietnam and murdering people when they got overzealous with their own internal murdering. Eventually Vietnam got fed up and stomped on them.
The CIA hated both of them with a passion.
You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.
China, the CIA, and MI6 backed them solely because they were against the NVA. They were tools. And they severely lacked an ideological backbone which is why shit go so bad in Cambodia. It was fascism.
Like I said before Wikipedia is average tier knowledge, but sometimes it compounds sources well, so follow the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
And it would be inline with what it has been proved the US did in that same time frame in Indonesia as well, and for very similar reasons too.
Marx's Capital is actually a very well written piece of bad research. He cherry-picked the data, ignoring evidence that was available to him that disagreed with the conclusions he was reaching. Let me say that again: There was evidence against his theories present in the data he was perusing.
> Nah. The central point of Socialism/Communism is the DEMOCRATIZATION of production.
How does that work out? You can call what happened "democratization", but it sure looks like central control to me - central control by an authoritarian. That's what has happened every time.
You know how they say "the purpose of a system is what it does"? Well, at least by that standard, no, the purpose of communism is not the democratization of production, because that's not what it does.
Also
I mean "what it looks like" to you is kind of irrelevant because we really do not live in a democracy but it probably looks like one to you.
Are you OK that your country aids in the literal enslavement and exploitation of people abroad for cheap goods?
Are you OK that capitalist countries perpetrate more war and caused more death than any other before it? You must be if you believe in democracy.
Wake up, there is no democracy.
ALL poverty is fabricated and sustained for profits.
So in the same sense: How does capitalism work? Is it democratic or is it a profit extraction system that knows no bounds?
I know communist states commited some mistakes in the 20th century, most are inflated for capitalist propaganda but there are legit ones.
But Im not here for apologia. I do what makes sense. And it makes sense to me that profit creates authoritarianism. And that to create true democracy we must democratize production. That shit makes more sense to me than "getting rich makes everyone better through competition".
Read communist literature and decide for yourself, be intellectually honest, and move on if its not right. I dont care. I dont want someone to rule over me. And I'll never EVER vote for someone who isnt enacting mass democracy. Which is why I havent voted. I'm a real person with real aspirations and I wont be taken advantage by the rich who provably run this shit.
There are many problems with the current system, but it’s hard to think of a better indictment of everything you’re saying than “Which is why I havent voted. I'm a real person with real aspirations and I wont be taken advantage by the rich who provably run this shit.”
Huh?
Corporations already fund some politicians and judges whole careers. Corporations fund the policy groups within popular political parties. They fund the policy groups/think tanks that influence popular political parties as well.
Did you think this was just the will of the people?
Ever heard of Citizens United? What is Lobbying?
Do you think these people are just gonna come out and say: "Hey, influencing politics is a whole industry worth billions."? and "We make sure your political options are aligned with our interests before they even reach your perception"?
None of them propose mass democracy because they know its not in their interest, but it is in ours.
Don't vote for images. Democracy is not trust, Democracy is control.
And you keep not answering the question while spewing a whole bunch of random other BS.
It reads like your only exposure to real life is Political Science 101.
And the stuff you’re complaining about isn’t even specific to capitalism! Do you think judges in other countries (especially communist and social countries!) are somehow totally independent? Do you think massive abuses of workers and the population didn’t (and don’t) happen in the USSR or under the CCP in its various iterations?
Even ‘return production to the people’ is ludicrous without even specifying how. Because
1) why should the current owners be okay with it, and what are you going to do to them if they aren’t. (Historically, this is often ‘murder them’)
2) how would ‘the people’ even operate it ‘individually’ without destroying it or having the same hierarchical (or worse) power structure (historically this is ‘don’t worry, our political appartchik/crony will run it’)
and 3) how do you stop abusive pieces of shit from abusing the structure? (Historically, this is murdering anyone who complains that we’re being abusive).
People like Stalin and Mao did untold damage under the banners of communism and socialism, because people kept just spouting the same bullshit you are and never asking these actual questions.
There are dozens and dozens of books outlining revolutionary experience of different peoples. I can't tell you all of it cause I haven't read every single one, and for the ones I have read this isn't the place to do so. Seek them out and read them, I can only give you a general overview.
> Do you think judges in other countries (especially communist and social countries!) are somehow totally independent?
No doubt corruption will literally ALWAYS be a problem. But capitalist property rights allows people to corrupt for a living.
Capitalist property relations means you control a vital part of a functioning society, its production, which allows you to profit from peoples labor and "invest" in politics to attain a better outcome. Workers can't do that, you and I cant do that.
Corruption under capitalism is intensified by the very nature of how capitalism works. In one phrase: Capitalism always leads to authoritarianism.
> 1) why should the current owners be okay with it, and what are you going to do to them if they aren’t. (Historically, this is often ‘murder them’)
They are not going to be okay with it. But you gotta get outta your head that capital is "mom and pop shop". Capital is finance, raw materials, and monopolies. Mom and pop shops are almost as equally squashed under the boot of monopolies as average workers .
That's also why monopolies and finance capital conflate themself with mom and pop shops, they want you to think they're "just like us". Half of us don't own our houses or cars, they own six of each.
The way this take over happened in the past is that workers would organize and after a long political struggle end up controlling production in their workplace.
The ownership of production would be made a crime enforced by the workers themselves. The incentive to uphold it is better share of the outcomes of good production.
> 2) how would ‘the people’ even operate it ‘individually’ without destroying it or having the same hierarchical (or worse) power structure (historically this is ‘don’t worry, our political appartchik/crony will run it’)
The workers already operate 98% of all production everywhere. They just dont do it according to their own collective interests. Right now workers operate production to squeeze pennies for the shareholders/owners. Think about what a manager does: put profits over quality.
What a socialist workplace would do is they would operate in a similar way by sustaining operations, organizing with other branches (top and bottom), coordinating with neighborhood/regional councils, increasing production to the highest degree, all in order to take production to the highest level and produce enough for all. No profit extraction to slow them down.
All workers would partake in the decision making towards sustainable production. They WANT to keep their jobs, so they have to operate well. Capitalists aren't ruling all of production and keeping it from falling apart, people aren't dumb.
> and 3) how do you stop abusive pieces of shit from abusing the structure? (Historically, this is murdering anyone who complains that we’re being abusive).
Ever heard the phrase "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? It's a poetic way of saying that the people must arm themselves and be their own police force if they are to preserve their own order. These neighborhood councils would (and did in the past) organize their own police forces made up of volunteer members.
Neighborhood representatives would be members of your neighborhood, if they were stepping out of line you could literally put them in jail yourselves. No big money to fund the police and defend them.
This requires deep political knowledge to recognize when a person is trying to take over property for their own gain. Total transparency of public income will be made a right, I'm sure everyone will agree.
> People like Stalin and Mao did untold damage under the banners of communism
You say that about Stalin and Mao, and sure they did commit mistakes, I am not here to defend them. But also think about what monarchies were doing and how they helped undo that. THE MAJORITY of people in Russia and China were indentured slaves, serfs. Many were prohibited from reading and kept in a state of constant toil and suffering for profits.
Many of those serfs rose up and killed their masters, its not right, of course, but what is? It happened get over it.
The communists didn't create the revolution, the revolution truly did happen organically and the communists were there to guide them into a state without capitalism.
Read a fucking book, there are dozens talking about just this.
Obviously they did not get everything right (far from it), as their most fervent acolytes believed. But then again, in economics, who does?
Sort of? Marxism is like economic phlogeston. It’s experimentally predictive to many extents. But it gets some basics wrong and is superseded in its entirety by better models, particularly for information-age and increasingly-automated economies.
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.
Capitalism as we have it today is (roughly speaking) to laissez faire capitalism as modern China is to Maoism.
Marxism isn't as wildly flawed as some want it to be — but it is very, very out of date, a response to a world which we no longer live in.
Turned out there were a lot of ways to regulate capitalism besides all-in on Marxism.
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.
We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR. This has lessened somewhat as it has become more clear that those massive fines aren’t being handed out and the language has been clarified, but I sat through multiple meetings where companies were debating if they should block GDPR countries until the dust settled even though they believed themselves to be compliant. They didn’t want to risk someone making a mistake somewhere and costing the company a percentage of global revenues.
Talking about massive fines that destroy big companies and crush their executives is really popular in internet comment sections but it would be extremely unpopular if people woke up one day and found Google was blocked in their country for fear of violating some law with extreme damages.
Where do I sign up to be too big to punish?
You have no idea just how much revenue Google et. al make from e.g. the EU. The shareholders would absolutely eat Google alive for just walking away from many billions of dollars rather than just complying. I've said this here before:
> A point we're still lightyears away from. 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.
> What would actually happen is that the US would start seriously threatening (blackmailing) the EU to a degree where it's forced to relent long before Apple would pull out.
> Apple's estimated operating profit from the EU is around $40 billion dollars. If the US government wouldn't get involved, they could force Tim Apple himself to live on top of the Alps and he'd happily do it rather than lose that $40 billion, or shareholders would vote him out ASAP.
You can substitute Apple for Google or any SV big tech.
>We got a little peek into this when the GDPR was rolled out and many small and medium companies simply blocked GDPR countries rather than risk the massive fines spelled out in the GDPR.
So you do "% of global revenue", "gatekeeper/minimum size applicability" and so on. Absolutely trivial stuff, this has been figured out ages ago.
> 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.
Entirely different from their EU operations to just give one example.
EU social welfare programs are all in a precarious state and the EU is currently taking on massive debts to re-arm again. Their economy is also not growing and China is eating their lunch economically (autos, manufacturing, industry).
Public opinion has turned so dramatically against big tech that triggering $10B in fines is like taking candy from a baby. Expect this to 10X by the end of the decade.
The incentive structure is there and the EU has already realized they can raid US companies in the name of 'privacy' without much pushback (hilariously, they're also constantly trying to undermine encryption at the same time...so we know they don't actually care about "privacy," just easy money).
And the reality is that the US government would start blackmailing the EU long before that dramatic escalation is reached.
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 were released across the same time frame (staggered releases that affect users even within regions not withstanding) for EU and US customers.
ChatGPT Agents meanwhile had a three week delay, but that was not EU specific and affected other countries such as Switzerland as well. Previously, I have also seen the very much not EU UK included in such delayed releases.
Essentially, all recent LLM releases I am aware off either dropped simultaneously for EU and US customers or, if they were inaccessible within the EU early on, that generally included none-EU countries with different or no applicable regulation as well. Any example of differences in accessible features I know of hasn't been limited to EU member states.
Sora was the only outlier here, though as always, the restrictions did not encompass just the EU and were lifted shortly there after, just like with ChatGPT Agents:
> Right now, users can access Sora everywhere ChatGPT is available, with the exception of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Economic Area. We are working to expand access further in the coming months.
This may be true, but arresting drug dealers would also be unpopular with a lot of junkies. :-)
The problem is that these kinds of harmful practices (by companies) are like a slow frog-boil. The companies foreground the benefits and hide the costs until people are lulled into dependence and are unwilling to roll it back. But that doesn't mean we don't need to roll it back. It might hurt, but we still need to do it.
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.
Certainly I acknowledge that Google provides useful and maybe even essential services to people. But just because we want those services doesn't mean we necessarily need to allow Google to continue providing them. A parallel in the drug world might be shady pharmacists who get people hooked on painkillers. Yes, maybe it's good to have Vicodin, but that doesn't mean we need to let this particular person control it. Similarly it might be good to have maps, but that doesn't mean it's good to have some megacorp controlling them --- even less so if they try to use that as leverage to prevent regulation of other harmful aspects of their business.
Regarding loci of control: I've been using mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap as of late, and they're good, but they're no replacement for Google Maps. Things Google makes simple like "restaurants near me" are just fall-flat-on-your-face bad in most of the OSM clients I've seen. So I'm loathe to declare we need to kill the working thing when the alternative is worse. My preferred approach to ending a Google map monopoly would be to invest in making the alternatives better (particularly the open alternatives). Give people a better option, and we won't have to "kill" Google; the market will do it for us.