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Comment by stodor89 | Hacker News Reader

Yep. If a train ticket costs 100 euro and the fine for freeloading is 5 euro, you'd be a fool to buy a ticket.

Don't blame Google for pushing boundaries. That's what people (and corpos) do in any competitive activity. Do blame our politicians for being incompetent and ill-meaning.

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Even if a train ticket costs 9 Euros and a fine is 60 Euros but you are almost never checked it quickly becomes cheaper to eat the fines.

Until the tragedy of the commons kicks in.

That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!

pours vodka into a mayo jar

When the fare dodging rate increases they send out more fare controllers too.

Back when I lived in Cambridge, someone worked out this was actually true for one of the car parks.

(Not those exact numbers, but the same point).

I lived in a city where police can fine you for biking in the night without the lights on, but police catches people so rarely that, per ride, the mathematical expectation of a fine was lower than the cost of batteries.

You really shouldn't apply statistics this way. Expected value is useful if you're an insurance company because you can price insurance products slightly above the expected value, but if the fine is $100, batteries are $90, and you get fined after going on 10 bike rides the fine doesn't magically become $10 it's still $100 and you still could've saved $10 by spending $90 before getting on your bike. That is, unless you put $10 in a piggy bank every time you get on your bicycle, and then at that point why not put $90 down and then pay yourself back $9 per ride with $1 of interest?

I mean that if fine / E[N_f] < battery_cost / E[N_b], where E[N_] is an expected number of rides before a fine / battery expire, then I save money per ride. In your example, you just pick the values such that the relation becomes '>'.

Today? Wow. You must have very weirdly expensive batteries and/or electricity. Around here, a complete replacement of non-rechargeable bike light batteries would cost €1.25, and they'd still last more than one ride each. Rechargeable batteries may cost more, but last thousands.

That was quite a while ago. I can't recall exactly anymore, but the yearly battery cost was probably indeed quite low, ~20 euro maybe? They just didn't fine people often enough.

Nor. It more like train costs 15 and fine 5 if caught, and payed later.

You're leaving out the tiny detail that Google, like all tech giants (and like all big companies) is pouring tons of money into politics, and that's just talking about spending out in the open. How much money do you think Google and it's investors have collectively spent to influence politics?

So no, Google shouldn't get a pass for pushing boundaries. Thinking like this only protects the capital class and the politicians responsible for this mess.

Of course they shouldn't get a pass.

My point is, we can't expect them to behave. And if they promise to, that promise isn't worth much.

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