454
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
454 points (100.0% liked)
News
23296 readers
2953 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I know Trump massively overstated his wealth, but fining him $5000 is like fining me £10. He won't even notice it's gone at the end of the month. $5,000, 000 or prison time would be a meaningful punishment.
If the punishment is a fine, it’s only illegal for poor people.
punitive fines should be a % of net worth or they are not punitive. zero deterrence
i guess were lucky they even mentioned jail time. lucky us.
The Internet loves that line but it is still wrong
If I suddenly lost 5-10% of my money? Well, I would probably have to sell my house and car and also figure out how to get money out of my 401k and IRA. So let's focus on the actual money I have in the bank. I would basically need to cancel an upcoming trip and postpone some renovations I am planning to have done next year. Which would be annoying, but whatever.
If someone working two jobs just to make ends meet lost 5-10%? They would not be able to eat or make rent and would likely be homeless and unemployed.
And if a millionaire lost 5-10% of their money? Well, they would be pissed, but it would not impact their quality of life at all.
Monetary fines will always favor the rich.
And if we do consider a world where your fine includes stuff like equity in a house? You would see an actually successful insurrection almost overnight because that is the kind of stuff the world associates with the less fun kings of england... and almost all colonizers.
It doesn’t have to be 5-10%, it could be 0.5-1% or 0.05%-0.1%. The point is to scale with wealth.
That is even more meaningless for the rich but still can ruin the life of the poor.
As a bit of an exercise to understand why this is so meaningless to the people it is meant to actually punish:
There are
24*365.25hours in a year.1M USD / 8766 hours ~= 114 USD/hourTo burn through one million dollars, you would need to spend 114 dollars per hour for an entire year.
Even at 1%, 10k is almost nothing. It sounds good on the news and keeps people from realizing just how massively fucked the world is, but it still isn't even the inconvenience of a medieval weregild.
You're still probably off by an order of magnitude too