To reinforce social heirarchy, protect elites, and subjugate the proles.
It’s a (wilfully and very successfully engineered) absence of class consciousness.
the deportation cliff;
the prison cliff;
the insurance doesn't pay the doctor the half million they extort cliff;
the no financial aid cliff;
the debt cliffs (more like a mountain range unto themselves);
the you're fired or unemployment on your resume or bad resume cliff;
the addiction cliff;
the fertility (especially for women) cliff;
the sickly child cliff;
the disability cliff;
the homelessness or lose your house or get evicted[1] cliff;
And my personal favorite: the lobotomy cliff. It's the beautiflest as seen from below!
There's others I'm sure. Lots of cliffs to go around! Everybody gets lots of cliffs! No parachutes though, but if you're looking for a good time you can ride a motorcycle off them!
[1] So this one is...it's weird. I talked to a homeless kid (over 18 yeah but still a kid) and asked him, "so what do I do if I end up on the street? What strategies..."
"Just don't end up on the street."
"But if I DO end up on the street then what I do is I..."
"No. The street is cruel. You wake up with people spitting on you, or pissing on you, depends on the night. You for one, you specifically would get gutted and murdered by the guy you pissed off the other time who threatened to do just that. Just do whatever the FUCK you have to do WHATEVER ANYBODY ASKS to not end up homeless."
That's what I call a cliff.
[citation needed]
the problem:
2022: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/3fb2c64b/bi...
1. U.S. population growth has been slowing for years, and in 2021, the population grew only by 392,665—or 0.1%, which is the lowest rate since the nation’s founding. 2. The U.S. will be older and more diverse but also unable to meet the workforce demands of a dynamic and competitive economy.
one of a few sources:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/no-kids-no-ca...
3. Of the 92.2 million adults ages 55 and older in 2018, 15.2 million (16.5%) are childless, defined here as having no biological children...childlessness is more common among the younger cohort of older adults. This suggests that childless adults will make up an even greater share of the older adult population in the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/declining-birthrate-mo...
4. In more than two dozen interviews with young women in Phoenix and Denver, some said they felt they could not afford a baby.
> For corporations, will be the greater of:
$10,000,000
3 times the value of the benefit received, or
10% of annual turnover in preceding 12 months, if court cannot determine benefit obtained from the offence.[1]
[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/business/business-rights-protections...
In politics, and maybe corporates, there has to be a line that at some point also personal charges can be made, or persons can be held responsible in some way or another.
These huge organizational structures have all been created to defer personal responsibility, which is good to an extent, but it got a little bit out of hand.
From the racist criteria, used for years to identify and bankrupt innocent Dutch nationals. The destruction of documents by government officials, or the taking of children from families of innocent victims of said Tax office. To finally the reelection of the same prime minister that oversaw all for 6 years and lied to parliament about it...
"Scandals tarnish Dutch reputation for clean government": https://www.ft.com/content/9996a65e-0996-4a08-aa65-041be685d...
"Over 1,100 children taken from homes of benefits scandal victims": https://nltimes.nl/2021/10/19/1100-children-taken-homes-bene...
"The Dutch government has been rocked by scandal. Why does its leader remain untainted?": https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-dutch-government-has-been-rocked...
To put it another way, it is more painful to lose $250 when you're making $25,000, versus losing $3,000 when you're making $300,000.
> it's always summer,
is false. I went in winter and it was dark by 3pm. I love the cold and dark, so it was awesome for me
> the people are beautiful
is true. I was constantly stupefied by how attractive people are there. Also, I'm a 184cm male, and every single day I saw multiple women taller than me, just going about town. Not like I was at a basketball training center or something.
I guess you were walking around a city and had to see thousands of people to see multiple women taller than you? The average female adult height in Sweden is still only 165cm, with > 95% of women being less than 178cm. I'd imagine 99+% of Swedish women are < 184cm.
I live elsewhere in Scandinavia and although I sometimes have a feeling the people are more attractive here than in the states as a general rule, I think it's actually that I have a preference for the local fashion. I tend to like Pacific Northwest fashion as well, and there are some similarities.
However, people in Scandinavia also generally walk a lot more than their US counterparts (since European cities are built for walking and American cities are generally not) so I find it plausible that they're more fit on average. I don't know if NYC is unusually walkable for an American city.
Additionally, the more left-aligned European states also have a few other factors going for them. With stronger welfare states comes less homeless, and obviously impoverished people (on average) that you will see in public than say, on the streets of New York City. On the opposite side of the spectrum, people on average, simply appear to be healthier in such cities than one finds in the USA, and this is reflected in statistics like average national height.
Going further, most European cities (not all) tend to take some form of civic pride in the design and caretaking of their cities, while equivalent US cities stress some form of architectural individualism, which has its advantages, but means you are more likely to see random pieces of squalor or ugliness even in nice areas.
You put all of these things together, and one of the things people visiting Europe from the US find, is a feeling that wow: "These people are dressed more nicely than I'm used to, look healthier/taller than I'm used to, are living in nicer settings than I'm used to."
You hear it more about Sweeden (which I cannot attest to, having never been), but yeah, it lines up with the above.
This isn't to say there aren't advantages to the US system, but that's a different topic : )
Obesity: Sweden 20.60% United States 36.20%
Life expectancy: Sweden 83.33 United States 79.11
for developed countries, that's a huge difference!
It's my subjective opinion. I've been to NYC multiple times and found the people totally average, same as Munich, LA, Miami, Seoul, etc.
> I guess you were walking around a city and had to see thousands of people to see multiple women taller than you?
Yes I was in a city. But again, not in LA, nor NYC, nor Seoul, nor Munich did I see that many women taller than me in as short a time
edit: another commenter made a good example, which is weight. I barely saw overweight people in Sweden. I find being overweight extremely unattractive, so that plays into my subjective view of the Swedes I saw as more attractive in general
It feels like breaking traffic regulations should maybe be considered crimes with dagsböter (income based penalty).
Elon's fine could easily be 10x that but maybe not 100x. I don't know his finances and I'm not sure how capital gains are included.
There are a few reasons not to make fines scale overly aggressively, from the perspective of a western government. They feel capricious and encourage expatriation, they punish (potentially hundreds or thousands of) innocent employees who want financial security, and they incentivize worse behavior. This last principle is counterintuitive but has been repeatedly discovered over the last thousands of years. An immoral person is incentivized to behave by a reasonable grade of punishments and will risk the worst behavior of all punishments are equally deadly or above a certain threshold.
Hopefully that answers your question; this is just an explanation.
We have fully scaling fine. The concept is päiväsakko (literally day fine) that’s determined linearly by your net monthly income. Cops give you X dayfines.
In code terms the formula is max(6, (net_monthly_income - 255)/60));
That means there is regularly some person in newspapers whining about their 30000€ speeding ticket (iirc the highest was 100k€ in 2004). In reality that’s just an acceptable way to brag how much you’re making.
You can only have repertory (recuperative) damages.
There are no "monetary payments to deter future crime" in Australian civil law.
Digest that one for a second.
Deterrence is regularly a factor in civil infringement cases brought by regulators.
In other civil lawsuits, ordinarily damages are strictly ‘compensatory’. However, ‘exemplary’ damages also exist in some circumstances; and functionally identical to punitive damages.
In Australia, criminal behaviour can incur fines[1]:
> Fines are monetary fines (criminal penalty) imposed by courts in criminal proceedings. Criminal standard of proof is required.
The ACCC has pretty significant ability to impose penalties:
> The maximum penalties per breach of the ACL [..] maximum penalties for breaches [..] will be the greater of: $10,000,000; or If Court can determine "reasonably attributable" benefit obtained, 3 times that value, or if Court cannot determine benefit, 10% of annual turnover in preceding 12 months.
[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/business/business-rights-protections...
Not all fines are punitive damages.
The nature of the business though is that they're almost never awarded, except maybe for contempt of court?
Certainly not in a significant quantity against a corporation.
They are awarded in a certain sets of circumstances. Contempt of court is far from the only example
substantial sums exemplary damages are certainly capable of being awarded against a corporation on the right set of facts
I might be missing something but it seems like a good idea that a civil court is unable to punish people after deciding it is necessary to encourage them not to break a criminal law in future.
Australia does presumably have punitive fines and other punishments that are for deterrence in criminal punishments?
If I can steal $5 from you, and the worst thing that happens if I get caught is that I have to give the $5 back, what sort of incentive do you think that creates?
Theft is a criminal matter, and there are punitive remedies for crimes.
It's the same concept. If a corporation commits a civil crime, the maximum in damages it can repay is the amount of damage it caused, give or take interest.
> It's the same concept. If a corporation commits a civil crime, the maximum in damages it can repay is the amount of damage it caused, give or take interest.
It sounds like you're just making that up. I found the agency and the page on the regulation being breached:
https://www.accc.gov.au/business/business-rights-protections...
The maximum penalties per breach of the ACL including unconscionable conduct, making false or misleading representations, and supplying consumer goods or certain services that do not comply with safety standards or which are banned:
For corporations, will be the greater of:
* $10,000,000*
* 3 times the value of the benefit received, or
* 10% of annual turnover in preceding 12 months, if court cannot determine benefit obtained from the offence.
So what's the basis for what your seemingly contradictory claims?
But the corporation didn't break a criminal law like the person in this example.
> But maybe you're on to something, here - perhaps they should.
Directors and executives can absolutely get convicted of crimes relating to their operation and oversight of the company. Whether the laws and investigating agencies have as much power as they should is very debatable but the legal framework is there.
There have been a few posts in the last couple of days of people posting inaccurate information with complete confidence
I have some bad news for you
They'll simply do the cost/benefit equation on breaking the law.
Only criminal charges against corporate officers and punitive damages promotes change.
That's a factual statement without any evidence supporting it. There's plenty of punitive damages against drug abuse and do you see any signs of it working ?
Compared to individuals addicted to illegal substances.
Absolutely. The discussion is centered on fines to companies but the other side is personal punishment of the actual physical people who made the decision to break the law.
That's Finland, which is not Scandinavia.
Had to look that one up. Doesn’t seem clear cut given that Wikipedia lists Finland as part of the “wider” definition of Scandinavia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia
EDIT: Reading further it looks like the English usage of the word Scandinavia is often used in a broader sense (to include Finland) whereas local usage of the term tends to refer to a more narrow definition.
Interesting. I never knew this difference in definition existed.
citation needed!
german here, business ppl routinely joke about the fine for illegal parking on public gounds is mostly far less than a few hours at a commercial parkinghouse.
But criminal law (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB) makes extensive use of it. Every time you see the StGB talk about a fine, unless explicitly stated otherwise, it will be a scaled fine based on the daily income of the convicted party (Tagessatz). Courts can estimate the income if need be.
A court may e.g. find that somebody committed minor battery, and issue a fine of 12 Tagessätze. If you make 3000 EUR a month (net), that's 3000EUR/30 = 100 EUR for a Tagessatz, and then 10 Tagessätze is 1200 EUR.
However, it's not fully scaled, as it is capped at 30,000 EUR per Tagessatz. E.g. a football (soccer) player was recently convicted[1] of battery against his former partner, and fined 60 Tagessätze. He makes (or used to make) significantly more than the 30K cap, so "only" would have to pay 1.8M EUR instead of the probably 3-5M EUR he'd have to pay if there was no such cap.
Personally I'd welcome if traffic and many other fines were scaled fines, too. The reason it isn't is probably because fine issuance would not scale itself: too many violations and each violation would then involve a court deciding what the net income of somebody is and therefore what the scaled fine will be. With a flat fine you can avoid involving the courts most of the time (most parking tickets will be uncontested).
[0] The parking violation joke was common, indeed, but not so much anymore, as the fines for parking violations have been drastically increased this year, from 15 EUR to 55 EUR per violation or even 110 EUR if you obstruct traffic, including pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Obstructing traffic also earns you one point in the traffic register now, so even people who still think a ticket is cheaper than paying for a proper parking space will not like it when their license is suspended eventually due to too many parking violations.
[1] The sentence is not final yet. The defendant, the prosecution (state) and the accessory prosecution (victim) each appealed the decision.
They do it for other stuff:
[1] "Day-fine"
"...A day-fine, day fine, unit fine or structured fine is a unit of fine payment that, above a minimum fine, is based on the offender's daily personal income... "
"...Jurisdictions employing the day-fine include Denmark (Danish: dagbøde), Estonia (Estonian: päevamäär), Finland (Finnish: päiväsakko), France (French: Jour-amende), Germany (German: Tagessatz), Sweden (Swedish: dagsbot), Switzerland, and Macao...."
"The Limits of Fairer Fines: Lessons from Germany" https://www.fairtrials.org/app/uploads/2022/01/Day_Fines_Rep...
Otherwise, why would a company ever respect the law?
You hire any fresh grad accountant, have them figure out that:
Profit from breaking law > cost of fine
and the company will rationally decide to just keep breaking the law.
That's not a deterrent, it's just another line item in an accounting spreadsheet.
It is not possible to arrange the world so that the financial incentives are always aligned with what is the right thing to do. So if we want to "have nice things" and live in the sort of world that most people will want to live in then we need to have some kind of ethical system which guides our action independently of the profit motive.
This seems to be one of the bigger cultural differences between the US and Europe. In the US the attitude seems to be "if there's some situation you can exploit and it's not illegal then why would you not do so". In Europe there is much more emphasis on societal-level reciprocity: not just "will there be negative consequences to me if I do this", but "will this lead to the sort of society I want to live in if everybody does this". Of course there are still bad actors. There will always be bad actors. But the assumption is that most people won't be, rather than that most people will be.
It only really works when people die.
The overton window in america is so far to the right that the prospect of charging rich people for breaking the law is unheard of.
"Entre le fort et le faible, entre le riche et le pauvre, entre le maître et le serviteur, c’est la liberté qui opprime et la loi qui affranchit."
("Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the lord and the slave, it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Henri_Lacordaire
the risk to everyone else around you is the same regardless of how much you make
This is worse than any financial penalty, even to me, and I ain't rich.
Avoiding the time wasted while pulled over does sound like a reason not to speed but even there it's a tradeoff. How much time do I save off my commute vs how long a stop would take weighted by the probability of being pulled over.
The fines will be scaled based on the income of the chauffeur, not the highly paid executive in the back. Even if it’s actually the executive who’s paying them.
Also begs the question, do wealthy people speed more than non-wealthy people? Do they need a deterrence?
> The overall TA mortality rate was 26.6(95% CI 13.4, 39.8) per 100,000 person-years, which was almost three times higher in men than that for women (40.4 vs. 12.1 per 100,000person-years). Lower economic level was associated with increased incidence and mortality of TA.
Optimizing for deterrence maybe means charging poor men a larger ticket. You see how this way of thinking is wrong?
Also imagine having to disclose your entire financial status to some court because you got a speeding ticket? It's a gross violation of privacy.
> Wealthy people often park illegally and just eat the fine because it's more convenient than the alternative.
Where do you come up with this stuff? Your vision of how "wealthy people" behave is so off from what I've observed.
> Using parking ticket data in 2016 from the City of Los Angeles, this study shows that the number of parking tickets is higher in neighborhoods with a larger presence of renters, young adults, and Black residents.
https://nbrazil.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites...
In any case, here's an example of a high profile wealthy person paying parking tickets like they're just a normal cost: https://dailytargum.com/article/2020/02/jeff-bezos-parking-t...
This isn't something I made up, it happens.
What is the law, and what is equal? There's a law saying you have to pay taxes, so do you object to the fact that this law is applied unequally to rich people who have to pay more? And the crime of not paying taxes is also punished with a fine that is proportional to the amount unpaid.
Your viewpoint makes absolutely no sense, so yes. I don't get it. Arguing against proportional measures for deterrance is equivalent to saying you're okay with rich people committing crimes and paying a minuscule fine for it (unless you have a totally different framework of punishment in mind).
Cheers.
That's exactly my point. That's why some people have this fantasy of Scrooge McDucks throwing around money and disobeying all laws just because they have money, when its just not true.
As LeBron James once said, 'two points is not two points'. If 'fairness and equal treatment' are context-blind, then they are just another empty platitude.
What does this have to do with tax rates? Are tax rates punitive or a means for raising money for collective spending?