Not to suggest that analogies solve anything, but perhaps it adds large-scale context to mention that throughout history various (and frequent!) events of technological disruption have had similar effect upon particular fields of work.
I used to work in land surveying, entering that field around the turn of the millennium just as digitalisation was hitting the industry in a big way. A common feeling among existing journeymen was one of confusion. Fear and dislike of these threatening changes, which seemed to neutralise all the hard-won professional skills. Expertise with the old equipment. Understanding of how to do things closer to first-principles. Ability to draw plans by hand. To assemble the datasets in the complex and particular old ways. And of course, to mentor juniors in the same.
Suddenly, some juniors coming in were young computer whizzes. Speeding past their seniors in these new ways. But still only juniors, for all that - still green, no matter what the tech. With years and decades yet, to earn their stripes, their professionalism in all it's myriad aspects. And for the seniors, their human aptitudes (which got them there in the first place) didn't vanish. They absorbed the changes, stuck with their smart peers, and evolved to match the environment. Would they have rathered that everything in the world had stayed the same as before? Of course. But is that a valid choice, professionally speaking? or in life itself? Not really.
Likewise, a lot of what we learn at school or university is superceded by new knowledge or technology (who needs arithmetic, when we all have a calculator in our pocket??), but having an intimate knowledge of those building blocks is still key to having a deeper and more valuable aptitude in your field.
For many years, local maps were my day-to-day work.
Regulations dictated that north should be at the page top, but exceptions were made so that the relevant land mass would efficiently fit on standard paper sizes. For example, you could fit a lot more detail onto a printed map of Japan with the paper as Portrait, rather than Landscape. So the practical aspects of the printed paper age have long been a side factor in map orientation.
And there was no doubt that the exceptions, where maps had north other-than-up, proved mentally more difficult for everybody to deal with. People not used to working with maps would struggle because it didn't align with other maps, and people used to working with maps would struggle because our minds were locked into the convention that came from 95% working with north-up maps!
The principle of fines being made proportional to income - and set at a % level that hurts - is one of the few possible paths to fairness in this area.
Like some European country(s) do with personal fines, afaik.
When you rob a bank, there isn't a minimum fine where you can walk away and still keep some of the banks stolen money.
If we want to stop bad behaviour, there can be NO PROFIT from illegal actions.
So if a company makes billions of dollars, through illegal actions, all of those billions of dollars need to be the fine, and the board and senior executives should also face personal fines, so they aren't also profiting.
It needs to be more than the company profits from the crime, otherwise the employees still benefit.
Making the fine cover all revenue from the crime makes more sense. A bank robber doesn't get to claim that some of what they took should go to pay for their getaway car.
why punish employees? punish the executives. most employees want to live their lives. punishing employees would mean a total stop to all economic activity. i get that you want to be the cool guy and one up the next for punishments but the path you’re on will only lead to your ideas being ignored
How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
Google doesn't do stuff to be evil. It does so bc it makes economic sense on the margin. It doesn't like paying fines and arbitrary enforcement will just be used politically. You might like this case bc Google bad, but what if NBC gets fined an insane amount by current admin for their interview cropping, to discourage bad behavior, because you know, fairness.
IMO the fairway thing would be to remove as much discretion as possible so not to make things political by either side
> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same. Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
The purpose of a fine is not supposed to be a fee for a crime but a penalty that has deterrent effects. A flat fine is not an equal deterrent for people of different financial means.
In Finland the system is called "day fine", meaning it should match approximately a day of labor/income. In some situations you can even go to sit in prison for time proportional to the day fines, although this is nowadays rare.
Proportional to income is "the same" under the equivalence of time and money. A fine is some % of your income which is some % of your working time. The fine as a penalty should roughly be equivalent to time spent in prison, so that is some fixed amount of time which automatically translates to some lost amount of salary. Going to prison being an alternative to paying a fine when you aren't solvent.
Otherwise it isn't a penalty and is just the price of being permitted to do a thing which might be out of reach for the poor. That's just fundamentally unfair to permit the rich to do things we consider immoral if they are just able to afford it.
Non proportional fees just means there as a level of wealth where the law effectively no longer applies to you. Imagine if parking tickets cost you a penny, would you care where you parked? This is effectively the same thing.
> Isn't fairness in law defined as being blind to the perpetrator?
Fairness in this case would mean giving equal fines for equal crimes.
But equality in which units? There's a case to be made that dollars are an implementation detail and that the political system cares about utility units.
If you want the fine to equally disadvantage all parties in utility units then the dollar values are going to be different. Because the idea is that each criminal should be equally unhappy with receiving the fine.
Being charged the same percentage of income is still the same punishment. It’s a non-controversial concept in economics that there is a marginal utility to money, as in, if you have a billion dollars, then getting an extra hundred doesn’t give you more utility. However a struggling family would be thrilled at a hundred bucks and maybe that means eating for the next several days. These people should not be charged with the same static dollar amount.
It seems disingenuous to talk about marginal utility in this context, you're bringing up a non-controversial thing to try to make charging different people different dollar amounts for the same crime also seem non-controversial, which it is certainly not, at least based on the comments here.
You can say it's the same percentage so it's the same punishment, but you can't pretend this isn't a recent change in jurisprudence.
If anything, jailing a low income worker means they loose their job and have trouble finding another one after getting out while jailing a business owner or stock trader etc. will mostly mean they are in the same position when they get out as when they were jailed.
Similar, even fines proportional to income are still unfair because to determine how much a fine hurts you need to compare it to whats left of the income after basic needs have been paid for. For someone that has much more than they need, getting fined 50% of their income will suck but not immediately change their lifestyle while someone who is living paycheck to paycheck is going to be ruined by the same percentage fine.
There is one side of the political spectrum that feels that the penalty for a crime should be set irrespective of the perpetrator because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction pay the same absolute amount.
There is another side that feels the penalty should "hurt" the same amount because that's fair. Two people that commit the same infraction feel the same amount of pain (theoretically), roughly corresponding to paying the same relative amount.
IMO this falls apart when you accept the almost tautological fact that these laws are enforced selectively, so "fairness" goes out the window almost immediately. Enforcement is used as political pressure and as punishment. Under that view, the second option above feels much worse than the first.
Even if enforcement was "unfair" (let's ignore for a fact that this is not a binary determination and not being able to be perfect isn't an argument for not trying) then everyone having the potential to experience the same hurt from the unfair system is still more fair than a corrupt society where some people can have their lives destroyed by an unfair fine but others can just shrug it off.
I agree it's not a binary thing but you're still viewing it as "an unfair system that is trying its best" vs. "a corrupt society" and my entire point is that is a completely false dichotomy. As Madison said, "enlightened men will not always be at the helm" - you have to design your system in such a way that bad actors are limited in their scope.
Proportional fees "hurt" everyone the same and give the government the discretion to "hurt" whomever they choose via malicious prosecution and selective enforcement. Flat-rate fees at minimal amounts save most people from this corruption. If the difference is between a flat rate penalty that hurts 5% of society if imposed, and a proportional penalty that hurts 100% of society if imposed, how is the first one not objectively better in the nearly certain scenario of a bad actor being in charge at some point in the future?
> How is it fair? I would think if two parties commit the same crime they should be charged the same.
I think the reasoning as that when Google does it, it affects far more people than if (say) I sold a single phone with only my own apps pre-installed. Should I be fined $55 million?
No, 10% of income doesn't hurt the same no matter your income. (Even if you ignore the relationship loose correlations between income and savings that can be used to cushion the effects of unexpected expenses, and assume neither party has any such resources.)
While fungibility pushes slows the decline compared to less-fungible goods, declining marginal utility applies to income, too, which means not only does a flat fine have less impact on the rich, so does a flat percentage.
(This gets even more true when you do consider savings, etc.)
Agreed, but a percentage fine is still a much more effective deterrent than a flat fee which becomes insignificant much more quickly.
Even better might be a percentage of disposable income but even that is not going to be enough and with more complexity in the rules comes more opportunity for creative accounting which again benefits those more well off.
But 10% hurts more when you are poor and have no savings and you need that money to pay rent. For small companies is the same. Bigger corporations have more resources available to minimize that 10% impact. Power does not scale linearly with money.
But to take a percentage is a much better way than a flat fine. Flat fines are totally ineffective when applied to big corporations.
You actually need to have it scale beyond a flat percentage to be punitive. Someone getting fined 10% of their fixed income can end up homeless. A billionaire getting fined won’t see their lifestyle impacted at all.
Leaving a second comment to provide another perspective.
The more your wealth (and note that income is a crude approximation here), the easier your ability to pay. Hopefully you agree that a $50 parking fine means virtually nothing to a billionaire; it may as well not exist. Whereas to someone living at the poverty line, it is incredibly significant.
If you feel it's fair to penalize everyone the same absolute amount of money, that means you believe that rich people have effectively earned themselves a right(!) to violate laws that poor people can't afford to.
Or, putting it more bluntly, it means you think rich people are superior to poor people.
Perhaps they have not been given the credence that you assume. It is typically not the NIMBY complainers who have the capacity to hire powerful experts to argue their cases in Councils and courtrooms ad nauseam. That is heavily weighted towards the developer side. I say that having worked for such developers, to further their cases in great detail.
Factors like failing or under-capacity infrastructure are coming to the fore a lot more in recent years. I've been in land development for about 25 years, and an increasingly common theme in my region is that a landowner wants a new suburb, but is not willing to upgrade all the necessary pipes and roads in order to not overwhelm existing upstream/downstream systems, and conversely the public are literally not able to subsidise that for them - public money is almost always stretched very thin already.
It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side".
Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
This is one of those extremely important points that we say every once in a while and then forget to emphasize. Opposing good ideas or supporting bad ideas because they somehow get tagged into weird ideological buckets along with completely unrelated issues is a big reason why our political system is so dysfunctional.
While it's a common joke, not quite - if you're hit by baseball, your velocity does not change significantly as energy is dissipated in other ways, and the change in velocity of the baseball is a consequence of the lost energy, not a cause of damage.
You quit working in the conventional, modern, hierarchical contract employment system - a very tight and specific definition of "work".
But I'd be very surprised if you didn't still spend a goodly proportion of your time beavering away at endeavours that were productive to yourself or others in your family and community.
The discussion is around sustainability: when people quit paid work they no longer contribute to the very tax base that is necessary to sustain a basic income.
Most UBI proposals I've heard of are the equivalent of $5.00-7.50 per hour wage. If what you imply were true - that upon achieving that level, people simply said "goal reached" and ceased to be further productive - then the USA median hourly wage would not be $22.
Even if UBI is set so low that it's not sufficient to live, change still happens at the margin. You will have people who were thinking about retirement that may now realize that with UBI they can bridge the gap until they get their full pension a few years from now. There will be people who are unmotivated and will now choose temporary work for part of the year and rely on UBI to make meets end. People work because they want money; reduce that incentive and fewer people will work.
That argument still relies upon the debatable premise that less formal employment means less human productivity.
For example, those "bridging the gap until their pension" are as likely to be reducing childcare costs (which are otherwise often subsidised by government/tax) for their descendants, spending more time on their own health, reducing the $health burden upon government, and any number of other potential reductions of the need for government spending. In equal proportion to the reduction in formal employment load upon the individual.
