Because if, as the regulator, you fail to benchmark what they gained then your laws can be ignored and your fines paid as simply a cost of doing business.
Its why you find the Australian regulator for consumer affairs handing out $200m+ fines to telecommunications companies, for example.
This entire issue is sidestepped by having graduated fines (which GDPR has). If they keep doing it the amount keeps going up until eventually they go out of business. It really limits the ability to take advantage of the system which hopefully makes it not worthwhile to bother doing.
Up to 4% of turnover. So if they make more than that it is still profitable to keep going.
Not that it is likely that they make that much in profit, but still. There probably shouldn’t be a limit, and there probably should be personal legal consequences such as jail time for repeat offenders.
You can apply a fine multiple times in a year if they don’t stop. As that 4% is based on global revenue you’re eventually going to make it unprofitable.
Huh. Any idea if it's individual fines or total fines that are capped? It never occurred to me before.
Anyway this is all purely academic. 99% of violations aren't going to increase profit by more than the maximum fine (or even anywhere remotely near that) thus it seems to me that the law has sufficiently broad coverage for addressing a behavior that does not directly result in physical injury.
By that logic regulators should lower fines if the action wasn’t profitable. Which creates an expensive legal fight around the net profits of some action were after guilt is determined.
Instead, it’s much better to scale fines based on the scale of the entity involved, which also results in huge fines, but it’s easier to measure revenue. Thus the fines are more broadly effective, and you can still escalate if they don’t stop.
Like in Finland where speeding ticket fines are based on your income. For instance, in one well known case a businessman was fined €121,000 for going 82 km/h in a 50 km/h zone.
And before anyone calls this crazy, note that jail time costs you your time, whatever that's worth. This is the same idea without the physical incarceration.
Rich and retired are very different thing. A CEO can be out hundreds of millions due to a long prison sentence, but most fines don’t scale nearly that far.
That's considerably more than someone near me who was doing 245km/h in a 90 zone (Well 55mph which is 89km/h). I still don't know why that person didn't lose their license (other than the obvious fact that they were rich enough to afford the Lamborghini that they were driving in); it wasn't just any 55 zone, it was one with a reputation for being dangerous.
I don't think that logic works. In your vein, if I say " If it gets hotter, I'll want it to be colder" that would imply that if it gets colder I'll want it to be hotter. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case thought.
If they made a profit and I want them to pay more than the base fine doesn't mean if they made a loss I want them to pay less than the base fine.
I think the rest of your come t stands though. There is difficulty I proving profit and Hollywood accounting can probably change those numbers.
> If they made a profit and I want them to pay more than the base fine doesn't mean if they made a loss I want them to pay less than the base fine.
I’m not saying they would get a rebate just that for this to be meaningful for a mid sized or larger company requires a large portion of a given fine to be based on profits. So a company receiving a fine based on their profits would argue they made less money from the behavior, it’s a legal argument without any risk.
Consider a fine for a mid sized company that’s base 100k + 10m based on profits it ‘goes away’ if they win but it also ‘goes away’ if they drop it by 99%. Thus just as much effort would be spent on how much money they made as is put forth to defend the fine in the first place.
Now obviously you could set the base large enough to offset that, but doing so defeats the point of profit based fines in the first place. Which means inherent to the idea of profit based fines is the concept they largely go away if a major company can argue their profits where non existent.
It's not about what you want nor is it about exacting revenge. The end goal is simply a marketplace where a given behavior isn't happening. Appropriately structured fines should accomplish that.
It's a nice theory, but only works if the company gets caught and fined enough times to make a difference. Even a zillion dollar fine is useless if the law isn't applied. Also, when the fine comes out of corporate coffers, not individuals' pockets, there is less incentive to comply with the law. If you really want results, fines should come out of management's personal bank accounts, not to mention some jail time.
Sure, if the regulator doesn't move to enforce then the law won't have any effect but at least to me that sounds like a problem with the government as opposed to a justification for draconian penalties.
Targeting management seems like a tactic that should only be employed where great urgency exists such as life threatening danger. I don't think marketing material is anywhere close to qualifying.
I hate my inbox being inundated with spam as much as the next guy but that doesn't mean drawing and quartering the perpetrators is justified.
>Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing.
2000 is "almost nothing"? What are you used to eating? Is it regular natural food or food industry crap loaded with sugar and calories? Here's two examples of eating througout the day:
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
- 10.5 oz salmon + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~750 kcal)
- 1 banana (~105 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + - 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts + 1 apple (~280 kcal)
OR
- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)
10.5 oz ribeye steak + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~1,000 kcal)
- 1 apple (~95 kcal)
- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice
+ 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)
- 1 oz mixed nuts (~175 kcal)
Both are around ~2000Kcal. Are these "almost nothing"?
>Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.
Make the latte into a black and it's 0 calories. But even with latte, you consume 1/4 of daily calories, in one of the 4 (3 + snack) meal of the day. Sounds about right.
This isn't enough for me as 82kg mid 30s man. I will lean out by 3-5 kilos and lose strength for lifting weights.
What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats? No idea how many cals "enough olive oil to lubricate" is. I consciously use cooking fats to creep in more healthy calories to sustain me.
You have to accept that losing weight and gaining strength are generally antagonistic goals. You won't hit personal bests, you may even see the numbers go down, but as long as you have adequate protein intake and enough stimulus, your muscle mass should mostly be preserved, and what little you lost will be back as soon as you're back to eating at maintenance or at a light surplus.
Enough for what? For losing weight, as a 82kg/mid 30s they're fine. In fact, you can live forever (and live longer that on higher calories) on those.
And you don't need to lose that much to begin with if you're at 82kg and like 5' 8"+ anyway. Perhaps your "ideal" weight is like 70kg or so, but if you're average height and 82kg and active, no real need to hit that for general health.
>What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats?
Spray some EVOO a few times. A few sprays (less than 1 tbsp total).
>People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.
Clearly, all those people who lost everything or even became homeless from some health issue despite paying insurance all their lives must be fictional
How many people per capita become homeless from healthcare in US vs how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?
Quite a lot for the first case apparently (see 1).
The U.S. had roughly 770,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2024. Even if one-third of cases involved medical debt as a contributing factor, that gives 200 homeless people per 100,000 residents with healthcare costs contributing to their fate.
And obviously way more affected if we expand from complete homelessness to a housing downgrade (e.g. from a nice home to renting some appartment or going to a trailer or some motel) to cover medical costs that would have been trivial elsewhere, and even more so for those.
As for "how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?", we know in Canada e.g.: 15,474 deaths while waiting ≈ 38 deaths per 100,000 people per year. And that's dying while waiting, not dying because of the wait. A lot of them are heavily impacted/elderly etc and would have died anyway with or without procedure (and the wait time of some of those could be comparable to a typical US wait time, or be totally independent from the healthcare system, and based on e.g. donor list priority, etc.).
To contrast, this report (2) estimates around 200,000 deaths/year ≈ 59 deaths per 100,000 Americans from lack of access / insurance/access-related mortality.
In recent years about 40% of uninsured adults reported delaying, skipping, or not obtaining needed care or medication because of cost. Even among insured adults, about 8% reported doing so. Gallup found 38% of Americans said they or a family member postponed medical treatment because of cost in 2022, the highest level in its long-running survey.
Keep in mind that about 8.2% of the US population that's uninsured (compared to ~ 0 in Canada). And that's not counting the US under-insured, claim denials, and costs that exceed deductibles and annual limits that all heavily burden even the insured in the US. In fact most US citizens with medical debt ARE insured.
>you asked it as if implying it's an argument against "socialized insurance" as opposed to a mere question
And how did you come up with that conclusion? Are you reading minds? No, I genuinely asked to know, since many factors are important, there's no winner out of the gate.
But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be. Good day.
I didn't, the parent commenter did. I simply answered your question on why HE did it, and even said it your question was put "as if" it implied it, not that it necessarily implied it.
Of course one could also come with that conclusion from reading your lengthy comment at the start of the thread pissing on socialized healthcare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581228 and trivially putting two and two together too.
>But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be.
Of course you will. Conveniently frees you from having to take into account my sibling comment with numbers and references :)
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