Smok
1yr ago
And if it was self-sabotage by Jones it does not count, for obvious reasons.
Smok
1yr ago
"shucks, guess that business venture failed" level but on the "I have to give up my previous life" one
Yes, I am aware of this and this is more "and that is why I am fine with Alex Jones fined into nonexistence, if this verdict will be applied" and less "that should be legislated immediately".
If I would be proposing actual law then it would be more reasonable - but still going into this direction.
But for example for predatory banks some actual penalties should be happening. It is absurd that entire sale division blatantly lies to people, companies going bankrupt and people losing their wealth - and nothing happens to people responsible for that. I consider "I have to give up my previous life" as desirable for CEOs presiding over this. Though not "and now they are homeless and starving".
nontrivial number of people would threaten victims into silence or even outright attempt to murder them (or even just run amok on third parties), because they'd prefer the chance of jail time to the certainty of losing $1m.
Yes, that is a risk. "You lose your home if you hit pedestrian" may end with China-style "we hit pedestrian? lets be sure that they end dead".
Again, it is more personal emotional reaction that ready legislation. In such cases I put much more effort and thinking into that (and what I got passed was extremely minor compared to what is discussed here, and I put much more effort into it)
Maybe one day there'll be Roko's Basilisk style scifi punishments you can mete out with certainty, but until then...
That would be unlikely to work, the problem is that many people outright ignore potential negative consequences. I am thinking more about compensation to victims than deterrence.
Why $10M is reasonable? I mean, spreading vile lies is without doubt despicable
I would not wish to be put through such thing (extreme lies about me and my dead children by someone influential enough to result in idiots and insane people harassing me).
Though I consider being willing to survive through years of that in exchange of massive amount of money such as 10 000 000 $ dollars.
Therefore it seems to me enough to offset damage caused.
And yes, I am not including murders itself in that.
Note also in general I think that transfer of funds to victim should be done more often. You hit someone with a car? That is not your car anymore but goes to a victim. It was not your car or some cheap wreck? 10% of income goes to victim unless huge amount of funds is paid, enough to offset damage you did. You robbed someone? 1000% of what you stole goes to the victims. (note: maybe this is done already in USA). You run automated call spam? Each victim is entitled to 500$. Wage theft? Worker is entitled to 10 times of what they were illegally not paid. Running fraud? You must give back 10 times what you stolen, etc etc.
(if I would be in power to legislate something - then maybe I would end with lower multipliers, but someone losing entire wealth after running large scale fraud seem much more reasonable than going to prison for few months and keeping stolen funds - again, maybe it is problem of local justice system)
I do not understand why it is reasonable that a person who was a victim of a lie (admittedly, a very vile and disgusting one, but still one lie), should instantly become top 1% rich just because of it?
"emotional damages" is overused but reasonable in this case. Being victim of top 0.05%* of harassment seems a good reason to get eye-watering amounts of money from chief harasser. In older times other solutions would be used, but this modern one seems preferable.
*1 in 5 000 harassment seems reasonable estimate to me in this case, as in "there are about 168 000 more harassed people in USA and 335 000 000 less harassed ones" but have not explored this one deeply and maybe I was mislead by what reached me.
Smok
1yr ago
Actually, Elon Musk is not my political opponent. And to my irritation even after that pedo guy I kind of like him despite trying to avoid that.
Also, I bet that many of bank fraudsters and CEO deliberately ignoring evil perpetrated by their bank share my political preferences (at least, enough of them to vote for the same people).
who should pay similar fines for saying things you agreed with at the time?
I was always against defrauding people and calling them paedophiles/murderers/etc or claiming to have fake children based on transparently false claims.
So I am not really able to provide such examples.
Smok
1yr ago
If you never were a multimillionaire, you can not honestly claim to restore harm done to you you should become one. When it's grievous bodily harm (say, you lose your hand, or get cancer) it may be different, because loss of life or quality of life is very hard to repair with money, and even to approach it one needs a lot of money. But here it's not the case
Claim that the same harassment is more damaging to richer people is absurd. If anything, richer people have more ability to shield from harassment.
Smok
1yr ago
What happens if the predatory bank is enabled by someone else? If your high-risk clients are minorities and the government says that if you don't lend to them, you get shut down for discrimination, and then a lot of those high-risk clients default on their loans, is it really fair to make the banks pay?
Have bank lied to them and promised that defaulting is impossible, taking loans has no risks or deliberately mislead them into this? Are they blatantly lying about lack of risk? Are they telling them to disregard mandatory disclosure of risk? Are they promising that they will repay less or the same despite that real interest is >0? If no then it does not really apply.
Though bank would have a problem if doing this would be needed to reach some diversity ratio or something.
And obviously, "the government says that if you don't lend to them, you get shut down for discrimination" is stupid and should be fixed. And yes, I know that it is easy to say.
As it stands, even a pyramid scheme operator will probably stop to help an injured child in a dark alley; I think he would not do that if he though that society's preferred fate for himself violated his sense of justice.
My expectation is that pyramid scheme fraudsters (and similar) behaving even less prosocially will be more than outweighted by curbing stealing that currently is de facto legal. And that sketchy businessmen will switch to other technically legal or forbidden by unenforced bans or punished but not enough things. Rather than going around and vandalising stuff because some specific scam is no longer viable.
And I disagree with this argument as it seems to be general argument against punishing any criminals short of murderers. For reasons similar as I would disagree with "As it stands, even a thief will probably stop to help an injured child in a dark alley; I think he would not do that if he though that society's preferred fate for himself violated his sense of justice." arguments against actual punishment for theft.
(I do not see a real difference between thief breaking in and causing damage of 10 000$ and stealing things worth 10 000$ and banker convincing the same person to gamble 20 000$ on "it is risk-free, ignore that standard warning template about risks" and proceeding to lose that, and I would love to see both actually punished and treated both behaviour as antisocial evil)
Though at least in USA with current asset forfeiture laws it is clear that care about such things as blocking currently legal stealing is nonexisting among lawmakers.
"triumphalist copyright laws result in software/music pirates who laugh in your face if you make moral arguments about the wellbeing of content creators" (that's me, too!) to pretty general ones like "minority that believes it is being discriminated against will steal and vandalise anything the moment the eyes of the state are looking away".
That is legitimate risk, but currently financial fraudsters will basically laugh at victims, fully aware that in the worst case they will lose what they stolen and get slap on the wrist as their activity was technically legal or de facto legal. Except outrageous cases like FTX where there is a decent chance for some punishment at least for some.
Smok
1yr ago
I assume stupidity and zero effort and that they found already cropped clip on Twitter or similar place and reposted it.
Maybe they were more malicious and less lazy and stupid.
Smok
1yr ago
For comparison, that's equivalent to the maximum compensation for spending 100 years imprisoned on false charges in some states (...) It is absurd to argue that the former should payout more than the latter.
It is also possible that compensation for wrongfully convicted are really low.
Smok
1yr ago
And the prosecutors will prosecute and the judge will go along and so will the higher courts and no amount of pointing out that it's a shoelace will save you from jail time. And to add insult to injury, if and when all this commences, all those law-n-order conservatives who agreed that indeed a shoelace was not a machine gun will say "Well, what did you expect? You knew a shoelace was a machine gun, BATF said so."
Somehow I suspect that it is hyperbole and not what you actually believe, but I am not really sure.
Smok
1yr ago
I would argue that 500$ would be better, because if people responsible can be reached then "get 500$ for spam call" will result in rise of cottage industry of people earning this way and being deeply interested in hunting down responsible people.
That is a fully intended effect.
I was looking for order of magnitude estimate as far as forum posting goes. I am happy about "50M per person is definitely too much, 1M per person definitely not enough"
If I would be on jury or judge or my opinion would matter I promise that I would put more effort into that.
Sure, Western countries "aren't at war' with Russia, but somehow, billions of dollars in weapons and lots of qualified military personnel end up fighting Russia in Ukraine.
That is typical proxy war, NATO is definitely not fighting directly.
Also, they cannot be at war. At most in "a special military operation". After all, Putin said that it is not a war :)
Smok
1yr ago
my government has literally been warning people about possible blackouts
Which one? Not sure whether in Poland risk is lower or whether is the same or greater and government is more incompetent (or yours is more panicking)
Smok
1yr ago
they would have obtained rights to the video before playing it.
I am pretty sure that they could claim that it is case of fair use, so they had no need for that
(IANAL)
Smok
1yr ago
But, then again, there was some shit that I can't see being beneficial to fraud and really does look like stupid/lazy people simply not bothering with rules: e.g. the revelation that they apparently paid expenses via chat emojis.
I do not understand why handling expense claims via Discord or Slack bot is somehow problematic. This emoji thing gets repeated together with other clearly problematic ones and I do not understand it.
Smok
1yr ago
that no matter what you are doing the most efficient form will always be whatever the train equivalent for the field is
is it entire interesting part? Or have they got interesting examples?
Smok
1yr ago
I agree that both can apply, and that in case of humanities less people should be doing this (I got convinced by lack of useful output and repeated calls to discriminate my ethnical group - and guess what, I am against racism, especially against myself)
Smok
1yr ago
If you live in the UK or Germany, uh… I’m sorry. If I was living there and couldn’t afford a plane ticket out, I’d get some of those charcoal burners and maybe tape for the windows.
Plane to where? Also, Germany seems unlikely to get to "charcoal burners" stage.
Smok
1yr ago
use a shoelace to more effectively bump-fire a semi-auto rifle
note that it is distinct "shoelace is machine gun"
where pulling a trigger once results in multiple rounds being fired is technically making a "machine gun"
"triggering multiple guns at once in weird way counts as machine gun" is far more defensible and reasonable than "shoelace is machine gun"
(and yes, trying to legislate definition of things where border is fluid and with adverse groups will result in a lot of stupid shit, but less stupid than "shoelace is machine gun")
And you could almost imagine someone getting in trouble for having in their possession a semi-auto gun and a loose shoelace, because they could be readily assembled into a machinegun.
OK, that parts makes sense and I can easily imagine someone interpreting maximally evilly.
Smok
1yr ago
But that need not be because of how much money it is, but because money is fungible to other projects that we care about. E.g. maybe saving lives is infinitely valuable
People often declare that lives are infinitely valuable and proceed to spend money on entertainment rather than donating it to save lives. Nearly noone actually behaves like lives were infinitely valuable.
Smok
1yr ago
I am genuinely frustrated by this common sentiment that the more murders you carry out, the more monstrous you are. Maybe that's true if we're talking about murdering one person versus murdering their whole family, but when we're working with a scale that is beyond emotional comprehension for most (all?) people, I don't think the distinction is important.
Murdering 2 000 vs murdering 2 000 000 000 is beyond my emotional comprehension (if all of them lived far away and were not known to me and my friends and had no strong connection to them).
Nevertheless someone murdering 2 000 000 000 is far more monstrous than someone murdering 2 000 000 or 2 000.
Smok
1yr ago
Have he also taken down his lies and made clear to his followers that he was lying for fame/gain/whatever?
What caused this?
At the very minimum he should also apologise for blatantly lying and inventing conspiracy theories about their dead children and refund costs caused by his lying.
And also some reasonable compensation (maybe about 10 000 000 $ per slandered person?).
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