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Comment by mcmcmc | Hacker News Reader

> The point of a fine is to change behavior. It's not outsize if it's enough to do that.

This is definitely not true, or legal. Would a billion dollar fine for speeding change some behaviors? Yes. Is it completely out of proportion? Also yes. There’s a reason punitive damages are capped. Yeah one way to stop bad corporate behavior is fining them into insolvency, but that doesn’t really help anyone unless the company is purely net negative. And those companies tend to die on their own, since you won’t get a lot of revenue if you don’t provide someone value.

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>>"Would a billion dollar fine for speeding change some behaviors? Yes. Is it completely out of proportion? Also yes."

Maybe not the best example, since Finland does asses speeding fines based on income. So a 1bn fine would be appropriate if someone was ludicrously wealthy, although I'm not sure there's anyone rich enough on the planet to hit that mark. But for example, this guy [0] got a €54,000 speeding ticket in 2015. Honestly, this seems like a pretty good system. Would someone like Jeff Bezos even notice a speeding ticket in the US? The only real annoyance to him would be getting pulled over, the fine amounts to literal seconds of income. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that fines and legal penalties should be in proportion to the income of the person or company they are being assessed against. Otherwise, you end up with the problem of legal penalties just becoming part of doing business, and ideally they should be changing behavior.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

Can't remember where I saw it but some years back someone wrote something like "if the punishment for a crime is financial then it only deters poor people" which makes sense.

In the past, it has been humorously and falsely attributed to a Final Fantasy game.

Even a few tens of billions in fines doesn't come close to putting Meta into insolvency. The histrionics are entirely uncalled for.

A billion dollar fine is entirely unnecessary to dissuade a typical driver from speeding. The fine needs to be enough to change the behavior, not 500,000,000% that amount.

Meta is worth $1.5T while most of us getting tickets are worth less than $200K. Meta brings in $200B/yr. Taking 10% of that, even 20%, would hardly slow the company down in most of its business.

I think 15% of revenue per year of uncorrected behavior is about the right amount. After a few years of that, I'd wager Meta would start to change how it treats children, probably by screwing over adults even more, but that's fine with me. Adults get what they deserve. Children deserve better than being handed over to a mega-corporation for monetization.

My point is that saying “there is no unreasonable fine if it works” is naive absolutism. Even with proportional fines, does fining someone 99% of their income count as too high? If proportionality is irrelevant than there is no way to differentiate which crimes deserve what punishments.

It depends. Does fining someone 99% of their income make it impossible for them to live with basic dignity? There are many, many people for which it wouldn't, especially if you limit to W2 income (as so many income-based tests do).

I've long been of the opinion that the focus on "how much is being taken" is wrongheaded, and pushed primarily to advantage elites. What about, "how much are you left with?" Now, suddenly, it's in their best interests for the popular understanding of "enough to live on" to be quite high.

If we're talking perverse incentives, we are currently living in a regime worse than many of the alternatives.

> Yes. Is it completely out of proportion

Maybe not if the speeder is Mark Zuckerberg. If you have 200 billion, any fine substantially less than a billion might not modify your behavior.

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