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Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

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Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#151

Post by jmyeet »

tokai wrote: post #40

The only way to tackle this is to put leadership in prison. If that is not possible give them the oligarch experience; frozen assets, interpol warrant, etc. It makes no sense that breaking the law gives milder consequences just as long as your crime is transnational and very extensive in scope.

Let's compare. In China, two people were executed for a tainted milk scandal [1], In the US, Purdue and the Sackler family were significantly responsible for the opioid epidemic. They knowingly liked about OxyContin. Not only have they avoided prison but the government tried to give them a deal where they could pay a fraction o the fortune they made doing it over a number of years so it would essentially be paid by earnings on the billions they get to keep [2].

Fines are the cost of doing business. They are nothing more than an expense item. People who knowingly cause people to die or otherwise cause great harm as leaders of a compnany should go to prison way more often. Every penny the Sacklers made should be seized by the government.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-opioid-crisis-purdu...

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#152

Post by throw__away7391 »

BorgHunter wrote: post #138
throw__away7391 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The concept of a corporation is fundamentally unjust. No it is not. The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous. The quality of life enjoyed by the average person even in developing countries would have been unimaginable by many measures to people living just a few centuries ago. All the little first world boys whining on social media are perfectly happy to have clean water to drink,…

> The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous. Sure. What are the drawbacks? Where are the opportunities for improvement? Also, you provided a list of things we enjoy today that you're presumably attributing to capitalism. But clean water and roads are usually provided by governments, and electricity and garbage collection (in the US) are generally in a weird liminal space where it's us…

The status quo is that the quality of life for nearly everyone in the planet is improving faster than it ever has before in history and the rate of the improvement is accelerating as well.

I am living in a country which currently has a “socialist” government who have made a big show recently of implementing anti-capitalist policies to stick it to the greedy rich. We do not have clean water. I need to buy bottled water for drinking/cooking. The situation is getting worse as these policies come into effect. The government can’t do shit without someone to pay for it.

This is a fantasy land where you take your pick of attributes from different countries and pretend you can have all the things you want without giving anything up and all the money is going to come from other people.

The situation is like the anti-vaxers living in a protected bubble while simultaneously blaming it for all their problems.

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#153

Post by arp242 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #150
arp242 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just prefer personal accountability because it seems a fair and just way to organize things. These things don't happen as a force of nature: it's someone (or a bunch of people) making a decision, and then someone (or several people) implementing it. If I scam someone in my brick and mortar store with fake products I will be held personally responsible as the owner, and rightfully so. And if other people knowingly p…

But it'll likely conflict directly with personal freedoms. Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?

I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict?

Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#154

Post by rented_mule »

hef19898 wrote: post #141
hermannj314 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting confuses me. I thought both of those would only be asset transfers and not hit income statement I guess the EPS line would be impacted in a stock buy back, and that is on the income statement. I know companies play games with good will write-downs in the years after a merger.

Accounting is confusing, and I am dar from an expert. Some basic knowledge is extremely helpful so, IMHO. It explains a ton of things happebing in a company, and being able to read your employers balance sheet, if you work for a public company, is eye opening sometimes.

To your point, in Jeff Bezos' 2004 letter to shareholders(1) he writes about how free cash flow and GAAP profit are not the same. It's easy to assume that profit would be the same as how much more is left in the bank at the end of the year vs. the beginning of the year, but it's not. And understanding these things illuminated how Amazon was operating.

I joined Amazon shortly after this letter, and internally the strategy was to minimize profit as the IRS would calculate it in order to pay no taxes while maximizing free cash flow. And it was built as a conceptual "dial" that Bezos could turn at any time to start making a profit. Wall Street did not understand this about Amazon for close to a decade after the dot com crash (or half a decade after he broadcast it in this letter).

As a result, Amazon's stock was hammered because investors thought Amazon couldn't find a way to make money. All the while, they were plowing tons of excess money back into long term bets like massive distribution centers, optimizing shipping logistics, AWS (be the internet equivalent of utility companies), and Kindle (don't let anybody else cannibalize the paper book business). These were all being done with an eye toward massive future scale (e.g., at the time, many thought AWS was designed to use Amazon retail's excess server capacity, but it was the opposite... Amazon retail should fit in AWS' excess capacity).

Nobody expected all this from a "glorified book store" who "couldn't figure out how to turn a profit". But they were looking past the growing free cash flow and massive R&D investments in the financial statement, all unburdened by taxes.

----

(1) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312505...

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#155

Post by luqtas »

hef19898 wrote: post #139
luqtas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just with the slightly difference of violating the park space of a single vehicle vs. violating the personal data of millions if not billions of users... quasi equal!

Last time I got a speeding ticket, it was considerably less than 2% of my gross salary. The basic idea so is the same, the amount of the fine is up for discussion so. Case in point: income based speeding tickets in Scandinavia vs. fixed amounts elsewhere (I favor the former, as things stand I don't care about the, for me, negligible amounts for 10 km/h speeding every once in a while, which is rather unfair, as I know…

also adding severe consequences for repeated offenses... like a driver would lose their permission to drive if they keep doing the same error!

now, what that would be, i have no idea; as i don't think any country wants to ban stuff like Google or Meta services from their population

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#156

Post by kortilla »

hef19898 wrote: post #123
kortilla wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue for a company makes no sense as a basis. It should be revenue tied to the crime.

Quantifying the revenue increase of said illegal behavior is close to impossible. Also, you want to discourage this behavior, so take the easier to quanitify and higher number.

So one UPS driver gets caught speeding and we should take 5% of UPS’s revenue for the year?

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#157

Post by hef19898 »

kortilla wrote: post #156
hef19898 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantifying the revenue increase of said illegal behavior is close to impossible. Also, you want to discourage this behavior, so take the easier to quanitify and higher number.

So one UPS driver gets caught speeding and we should take 5% of UPS’s revenue for the year?

You did this intentionally, didn't you? Either that, or your reading comprehension is abysmally bad.

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#158

Post by Chris2048 »

arp242 wrote: post #153
Chris2048 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it'll likely conflict directly with personal freedoms. Plus what's the logic behind the most draconian of implementations? - If we can hold Bezos to account, why not every AMAZON shareholder?

I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict? Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.

> Shareholders aren't making these decisions

What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#159

Post by arp242 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #158
arp242 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's draconian at all, or conflicting with personal freedoms. How would it conflict? Shareholders aren't making these decisions. But if shareholders voted for something they knew was illegal or could have known was illegal, then yes, maybe they should be held to account too.

> Shareholders aren't making these decisions What are "these decisions"? I assumed you are talking about punishing people like Bezos for the activities of Amazon, even without proof he had direct knowledge/involvement of them, purely based on his position as a c-suite figurehead?

I don't care who has direct involvement or knowledge; you're accountable for what you operate and if you operate something with rampant scams then you're accountable for that.

They're operating a platform that enables criminal activity and they benefit from it. They've been told this (and even without it, they can and should have known). And then they elected to not do all that much about it. "Don't do anything" is just as much of a decision as "do something" is.

Last time I looked at this they were literally recommending scams with "Amazon's Choice"[1]. That one is now gone, but you just need to "sort by price" (a reasonable thing to do) to find tons of scams.[2] None of this is new information. This has been going on >10 years. There's tons of stories about this sort of thing.

"Yeah, there's tons of scams on our site, and yeah, we're making a profit off those scams, but what can we do?" just doesn't fly. Rampant illegal activity you're making a profit on but somehow no one is accountable? Screw that.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34588734

[2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=2tb+usb+ssd&i=computers&s=price...

Re: Big Tech has already made enough money in 2024 to pay all its 2023 fines

#160

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

kmlx wrote: post #38

from the article: > As of seven days and three hours into 2024, they had already earned enough revenue to pay it all off. revenue is not the same as profit. this is basic stuff. from the same article: > Still, revenue is a more accurate depiction of a company’s size and profitability. it seems like this is rookie hour. then we look at the author's previous posts: https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-ipef With new trade de…

The author is publishing on a VPN company website; probably on the Proton AG payroll and performing her job. Sell VPN services.

It's really obvious. It's like reading something about companies fined for performing illegal disposal of carcinogens that potentially contaminate drinking water on a water purification company's website. It does not take a genuis to figure out the connection.

What is less obvious and decisively more deceptive, IMO, are Big Tech blog communications. There is no small amount of material about computer software and hardware, and various projects, but not all that much on programmatic advertising and its great utility to mankind.

Big Tech might sell some software and hardware, not nearly enough to pay these fines, but its "axe to grind" is data collection, surveillance and delivery of advertising services. The hardware and software are a Trojan Horse to support an online ad services business. Most of what is being discussed on these blogs is not for sale. They are not pitching advertising services, they are trying to attract audiences that will, knowingly or unknowingly, be targets for or otherwise support their efforts to conduct surveillance.

VPN companies do not seem nearly as conniving.

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