This is clearly a separate discussion, but it’s interesting to consider why we’re always so eager to jail people for street crime, but it “seems really excessive” when it’s a white-collar crime.

It seems likely that "street crime" mostly refers to physical violence or the threat of it, while "white-collar crime" refers to breaking some rules. While much more real damage might be done with rule-breaking, such activity doesn't provoke visceral fear, it's harder for most people to be emotionally invested in retribution.

"Street Crime" can also consist of selling single cigarettes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner

Or of hanging an air freshener on your rearview mirror: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/police-shooting-air-fr...

We empathize with "people doing their job" perhaps a little too much? But part if is must also be just how inhumane jail sentences have become. Prisons are terrible places in the US, and sentences really disproportanate. With that framing, maybe it feels harsh to send somebody to prison for years for "just playing hardball a little too much".

I don't know, but the US penal system needs a revamp anyhow.

The question is still the same, why do we feel it’s fair when blue-collar criminals are treated inhumanly, but harsh when applied to white-collar criminals?

The personal violation you feel as a victim of a mugging or a burglary is more visceral and real, whether someone steals a dollar or ten thousand dollars. The perp takes something from your psyche, and we want to extract the same.

When some character fudges a spreadsheet or sets up a viscous cycle in business, it is more abstract. We’ve all done it to some degree (received an undeserved discount, more change than owed, etc), and the black and white “wrongness” varies.

Another consideration is that the punishment for white collar crime is very severe in terms of loss of agency and autonomy. Once you’re convicted of a felony, you’re kryptonite — you’re trading your comfy middle class existence for something riskier and worse. Typical suburban punter is losing most of your friends and probably your home and spouse. The kids lose their nice school or get stuck in a grubby apartment. White collar criminals have more to lose, so the punishment standard is different.

There's a nice line by Terry Prachett in his book "Going Postal". This is near the start of the story, as the protagonist, a conman, is being confronted with the effects of his cons.

> "I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.

> "I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"

> "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

White-collar crime has effects. Every time people are encouraged to clock out, then clean up their station, that's 15 minutes of wage theft. Heck, sometimes this becomes so common that the criminals work to make it legal. Every time that Amazon has their mandatory daily exit screening, that's 30-60 minutes of time that should be on the clock, but is completely unpaid, legal and SCOTUS-approved, and wildly unethical.

Let me unpack this. Do you think any given person is more likely to be considered “kryptonite” because they committed insider trading than because they did, say, a smash-and-grab? If not, your last paragraph is not justifying more lenient punishments for a certain class of crime, but for a certain class of socio-economic status. To put it in other words, only poor people should go to jail.

The same reasons lie behind why we also tend to ignore many external costs.

I downvoted you because you are deviating the conversation. I find it hard not to attribute hidden intentions behind what you posted.

The parent comment quoted saying they were loading their ads before ads from competitor networks. Noone said anything about Jan 6, or anything touching on the event.

You are obviously trying to shift the conversation away from how Google controls AMP and apparently used it to gain an advantage in the ad market (basically an antitrust issue) to a partisan political conversation.

That's because HN's audience is composed of a large majority of white collars, and from a larger perspective, 99% of politicians, judges, lawyers, journalists, columnists, editorialists and commentators are white collars. It's just empathy (in this case, misguided empathy). We can identify more easily with a white collar criminal than a blue collar criminal.

No, it’s because a violent pickpocket puts my loved ones in more immediate, direct danger than some ads loading a little slower on a website.

How about a poor guy caught with a few grams of marijuana, only looking to pleasure himself?

On the other hand, Wall Street put many people's loved ones in clear danger, leaving them in the street, without jobs and without health insurance in 2008 and none of them went to jail.

I would guess that most people on HN would favor legalizing cannabis possession.

It is difficult to weigh actions that greatly harm one person against tiny annoyances to millions, but you could argue that the tiny annoyances to millions is a larger offense than violently robbing a single person on the street.

> you could argue that the tiny annoyances to millions is a larger offense than violently robbing a single person on the street.

Yeah, no, you really couldn't. It sounds like you've never been the victim of direct, physical violence, and the psychological effects it causes.

It's an easy distinction for me. Incarceration shouldn't be used for anything but violent offenders. The torturous impacts on the inmate's mental state ring so many cruelty bells that I can't accept it as anything other than the last resort for people that have to be kept out of the public for safety reasons.

Who exactly is “we” in this discussion?

Even a few weeks would likely be at least some disincentive; and anything less than that - like fines - runs the risk of being "costs of doing business" (e.g. most of the EU's laughably low fines, and US fines are very unpredictable, though at least somewhat higher).

If it's not going to be imprisonment, then the fines need to be much quicker, and much higher; enough to threaten a corparation's viability. For some perspective the largest fine/court settlement in the past few years is VW US's, which was 37 billion, and vs. a tech firm the 2012 FTC settlement with facebook at 5 billion. EU's largest antitrust fine ever (vs. google in 2017) was just 2.4 billion. Those kind of costs are so low that they're unlikely to be preemptively discouraging, especially given how rare they are; alphabet's revenue in 2020 was 180 billion, and it's market cap is a little less than 10 times that.

Of course absurd fines that are rarely imposed are more like a reverse lottery than anything else; not exactly ideal either, really.

> e.g. most of the EU's laughably low fines

Which is why in new legislation, fines are proportional - GDPR has fines at max 4% of global yearly revenue or 100 million euros, whichever is higher.

Which is at least a factor 10 too low under the assumptions that fines of that size are the result of a lengthy legal process and thus that such fines are not levied more than once every few years. 4% is peanuts for a massive tech corps that can afford to take such massive hits because their margins are so huge, and their fixed costs quite controllable. As long as the risk cannot be existential, this becomes an accounting question, and the inevitable rarity of the fine unfortunately means the optimal strategy is likely to skirt as close as possible to illegality and pay the fine and ask forgiveness rather than being too proactive - that way they only need to bother with behavior changes that really matter. 4% is just too little for large corporations, at least.

Then of course there's the fact that the GDPR - possibly due to a bit of regulatory capture - very strongly encourages venue shopping, and with resources like that, bending a small venue (like Ireland) to your will even slightly is conceivably feasible, and valuable. Personally, I'm not too impressed by the implementation of the GDPR, even if the fact that it's finally on the agenda is a good thing. It may even exacerbate misuse of personal data, because the burdens it imposes are much harder to bear for small parties than for large ones; and that's a competitive moat that encourages centralization of private data, and that encourages shifting the balance of power toward the corporation away from the individual (who says no to google's privacy policy?), and the combination of "willing" users, a lax privacy policy, and huge centralization encourages misuse. Proportionally your local sports-club is likely more impacted than Google, which is absurd.

> GDPR has fines at max 4% of global yearly revenue

In other words, laughably low.

> or 100 million euros

Unless you're a small business, in which case they'll happily bury you.

Then apply the "death penalty" to the company instead of people. A "death penalty" would also discourage gigantic companies, in general, as one out of hand division could kill the others.

And if you claim that the workers don't deserve it, well, then exactly who DOES deserve it?

Or "jail" time for the company... Suspend them from operating or getting new clients while they are in "jail". And maybe have them forfeit all profits earned during their "jail" time.

Really the possibilities of solution to some of these issues are endless, limited only by our creativity. We're just stuck as a society with what we already have and there is huge push back against anything out of the ordinary or creative or different when it comes to government and our governance models.

I think this is society's greatest threat... We are unwilling to take risks to solve problems.

laws need to have teeth or people will violate them

I believe that there's evidence that the best legal system is one where there's a high probability of lawbreaking being punished, though not necessarily harshly. In contrast, the situation prevailing in the US, where there's a high probability of not getting punished at all, and a small probability of getting the book thrown at you, is not a great way of administering justice.

How else are we supposed to deal with repeat offenders who flout the law?

The idea that white collar crimes don't damage people's lives is easily debunked: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/economic-do...