this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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And any fines are essentially pennies that just get factored into the cost of doing business.
costs that just get passed onto the consumer anyway.
Yes fines should be a percentage for exp 5-20% of company valuation.
Valuation can be manipulated, it should be gross income.
They should be however much the company made by breaking the rules, with a hefty addition included, inversely multiplied by the chance that the company was going to get caught.
For a company, deciding whether or not to break the law is a purely mathematical equation. If you can make $1M a day by breaking the law, there’s only a 1% chance per day that you’ll get caught, and the fine is only $5M? That’s a no brainer. To the company, they see a project with $1M income per day, a 99% success rate, and a $5M failure cost. All you need to do is go undetected for five days, and you’ve already made your money on the “investment”. Everything after that is pure profit.
So the fines should be adjusted to fit that model. Using those same numbers, the fine would be the $1M per day that the scheme was going (meaning any profit made is now completely forfeit), plus the $5M, multiplied by 99 because they only had a 1% chance of getting caught.
For a scheme that ran for 100 days before getting caught, (meaning they made $100M in profit) that fine would be a grand total of $10.395B… Not million. Billion. Because in order to deter companies from breaking the law, the punishment needs to account for the fact that the company is going to do the math on whether or not they’ll get caught, and what the fine is going to be. And when the company runs the numbers and decides that they have a 1% chance of getting caught, that should be a fucking terrifying number instead of just a slap on the wrist.
I love the idea. The math works out a bit different though. After 100 days it's a 63% chance of getting caught so the fine would be 100/0.63= 159 million plus the additional fee. After 1 day the fine would be 1 million /0.01= 100 million plus the additional fee.
I love the actuarial precision of the fine so that all the probability of profit is priced in. Calculating that probability will be complex though because they could argue there is a 100% chance of getting caught after you caught them lol.
I say we start arresting board members until thing stop sucking. Death penalty on the table.
Death penalty is barbaric, lets not sink to that level.
How about we sink to this level?
The death penalty's only ethical application is when the subject is uncontainable by other means. The rich are proving that's exactly the type of criminals they are, and when they do get close to getting caught the one guy who's testimony could bury them mysteriously dies by 'suicide' at exactly the moment the cameras malfunction. I can't think of a cabal of crooks more deserving of the death penalty.
I get where you're coming from, but we as a society haven't even TRIED to hold billionaires accountable. Do they make it difficult? Of course they do, but a huge percentage of the population still look up to the ultra rich and think they're geniuses who deserve it.
If society ACTUALLY got fed up and demanded they be held accountable, and jail and seizing their assets wasn't enough, then you consider more severe forms of punishment. As it stands right now we're barely handing out the equivalent of an occasional speeding ticket to these people and wondering why it isn't effective.