All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.
It effectively mandates a lower-limit on spend for budgeting purposes.
Sure, that money might be spent ineffectively... but corporations will figure it out if their only options are to
1. Not invest in regulatory compliance at all and get fined for noncompliance.
2. Throw money at the problem, spend it inefficiently, and STILL get fined for noncompliance.
3. Throw money at the problem, spend it well enough to pass muster, avoid fines.
For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to stop this?
If someone is writing English and puts "billion" for 10^12, that's a translation error, much like writing "my grandfather became pregnant when he realized he'd locked the keys inside the car." (Instead of "embarrassed.")
Conversely, if I wrote a French or German sentence and put "billion" for 10^9, then I'd be the one making the translation mistake.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/billion
I would vote to revert it.
Empathy for other people and the environment is a sign of intelligence. Those that don't think of how their actions affects those around them and the neighbors they will never meet nor the environment have an lack of intelligent.
Those that lack empathy are the same that idolize bad actors like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Greed and the desire for it is a high indicator of lack of intelligence.
There is a difference between being well off and greedy. I would argue that Steve Wozniak is a great example and better of the two Steves from Apple to highlight this.
I have created jobs and brought in international commerce to where I live. I produce solutions for companies I don't even know their names. I have kept people safe and will never know their names nor will their families know mine. None of which has deluded my empathy for others, human and non-human, and the environment.
My previous statement was codified in another thread. This statement is a two part. One to re-enforce my empathy and a social experiment.
I feel sorry for those that lack empathy. Empathy is the only way to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Intelligence is a by-product. There is no other way to live a life you can never have nor experience.
Label of _radical_ is something I welcome. When former co-workers and people you meet want to shake your hand before leaving after giving them constructive criticize, it is a surreal experience. Not when it first happens, when it repeats itself.
What if they make a shadow profile for you? Do you count as a user? What if you've tried to delete your account and you can't? (I meant a real account here, not even a shadow profile. People have had the things reactivated years later)
But if a thousand people see some ad then the amount of damage is not much compared to their overall business. I'd go for a healthy penalty on top, and adding in more transparency to make sure they don't hide the real extent of the problem, but it's still probably small to them.
Getting Facebook to put in a reasonable amount of blocking effort is good. But it wouldn't fully fix the problem.
Instead it's a "I don't like this" and they will continue to ignore it.
Morality exists outside of the business world (and it should inside as well).
Further, it is a societies’ right to enforce the boundaries of what business are allow to do / not do.
For example: banning ads along roads and scenic areas.
Idk, the whole idea of “how much fines will I get doing X shitty business practice” is just gross. I’d rather see harsher enforcement to keep businesses on the straight and narrow more often than not.
Concrete example: If you run a construction business, even if you take all the required precautions, statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.[1] Is that proof all construction companies are evil, and we should shut them down for murdering their employees? Is it a problem that having to buy life insurance is "just a cost of doing business" for these companies?
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...
They will be given more leeway for small scale "screwups" if they can show that they are working to reduce large scale issues. As it is we are dealing with organisations that don't give a shit, so peoples attitudes reflect that back at them.
Maybe it's true Facebook doesn't care about this and if so that would be a problem, but I also think HN has an anti-FANG bias that causes people to give far too much weight to every negative news story that comes out about these companies.
The only real issue with FAANG IMO is just the way software copyright and network effects grant them local monopolies in certain spaces. Overall I don't think they're as a whole any better or worse than any other company, large or small.
Also, speaking of statistics, what?
> statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.
No, you're not. This would mean if you employed 50 full-time employees you'd expect 9 of them to die per year.
What that graph actually says: "In a population where there are 100,000 construction workers, you can expect 9 fatal workplace accidents per year".
> "Our automated review found nothing wrong with [this ad that implies a young child performing sexual activities]"
That's also a screw-up, and they should be fined accordingly, proportional to the amount of harm this screw up is causing to society. If there are any practical steps they can take to fix the problem, that should incentivize them to do so.
But if for whatever reason it turns out the only possible way to fix such screw-ups is for them to hire 100,000 employees to manually review every single ad, and the cost of that both exceeds the cost of paying the fines and the opportunity cost of turning off this feature completely, so they choose not to do that, is that a problem?
It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery. Maybe that would save some lives, but it would also be completely impractical.
There's a degree of "consent" here - yes, certainly, one can choose not to be a FB user. But if the sites you visit utilize FB's ad program, well, you can still get hit. Construction workers understand that their work is not zero risk (as are many jobs - I used to work in Fire/EMS), but that is tempered by OSHA etc., that have teeth. You can't (at least in theory) keep operating a construction company that operates unsafely and outside regulations or laws and say "it's all good, I'm just going to pay the fines" - OSHA will shut you down and render you liable to criminal prosecution.
If OSHA was dismantled yesterday (and state-level agencies), and people knowing how some corporations value the dollar versus people, there'd be a lot less people willing to work for riskier companies or in riskier professions.
> It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery.
In an admittedly limited subset of situations, this happens: "Lock out/tag out" systems that can physically prevent the operation of certain equipment if anyone is in the risk zone or performing maintenance. In some cases this is literally akin to a padlock workers carry at all times and put through the power switch of machinery when they go to work on it so someone else doesn't come along and turn it on.