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Re:Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does... by necovek on Friday August 21, 2026 @06:29AM (#49386131)
I am not saying it's impossible to come up with numbers, but that they will be somewhat made-up.

You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.

So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.

I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)

Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.

Re:Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does... by Dylan16807 on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:23PM (#49392042)
2 billion dollars per 200 deaths, not per death. So that immediately drops your rough calculation to $500 per ticket, not too far off from actual ticket values.
Re:Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does... by necovek on Saturday August 22, 2026 @04:02AM (#49397630)
Got it, thanks for the correction: it does surprisingly line up!