Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Making penalties a fraction of profits is questionable since companies can do strange things to show "no profit."  Making it a fraction of revenue punishes the wrong people (usually).

Even more fun, now there's a $6B lawsuit in the UK against Sony because apparently the playstation's digital store commission of 30% is artificially causing prices to be too high and "hurting customers."  It's like people don't even know how pricing works - can you imagine if they find out what a typical retail markup is?  Oh wait, for some reason even if they know that, because "it's digital" they somehow think it's different.

For those of you that know my post history, you will know that I'm vehemently against rent seeking - but charging a commission that the market can (and is willing to) bear is not it.  Especially for luxury goods like video games - just don't buy them, and either prices will drop or you'll find something else to do.

For this one I'll agree, it's ridiculous.  Of *course* console manufacturers put a surcharge on games.  For a time (perhaps even now?) they sold their consoles at a loss, and made their money off licensing developers to release on their consoles.

This is why buying too far into a particular console is a risky proposition.  Not to "PC master race" here, because Microsoft tried the same shit with Games For Windows Live, and still continues with their Windows As An App Store BS.  But I've got little sympathy for someone getting mad after they *chose* the walled garden.  Yeah, the buy-in looked cheaper at first, and the exclusives were so tantalizing.  They weren't doing that for free!

It’s the literally ancient debate about “eye for an eye” versus arbitrary punitive damages.

I’d personally have a system with mandatory compensation (you wreck my car, you guve me a replacement of equal value) instead of maybe getting a replacement if you happen to win a suit.

Partly I think it’s because we lost the personal aspect and can offset our risk with insurance.  I’d expect people to be way more careful if they were on the hook for a larger part of risk than a relatively small insurance premium and deductible.

This also applies to giant corps, as they carry liability insurance.

Eye-for-an-eye is insane even without the reality of court fees and access to justice issues.  An accident is one thing.  Deliberately hurting someone is another.
Let's take it literally:  Is it just for me to take the eye from a hated political figure, if I'm willing to pay with my own eye?
In the same way is it just for a rich person to smash my window, then pay precisely the cost of replacing it?

Perhaps a perfect justice system would factor in less tangible damages.  A VIP's eye is worth far more than mine because it might impact their high-paying career.  Having my window casually smashed for fun causes me emotional distress beyond the cost of fixing it.
That's difficult to nail down, so we barely try.  Here in reality we punish deliberate harm punitively.

We also don't have proper access to justice, so a corporation has to REALLY fuck things up to get hit with punitive damages.  That often takes the form of a class action lawsuit (pooling a large number of victims in order to stand a chance against a corporations legal team).  The lawyers are often paid on spec, and thus take a sizeable chunk of the potential payout.  Which is rough for the victims, but the important thing is to HARM the offender so they stop HARMING PEOPLE for MONEY.

[Frumple]

Wow, a jury awarded a single family punitive damages of $1.7 x 10⁹ due to a fatal rollover crash.  (They received a $24M compensatory damages award already.)

I'm of two minds here. I understand the concept of punitive damages but I cannot understand the rationale behind a 70x multiplier on compensatory damages.

Usually when you see something like that, it's due to either extreme malfeasance on the part of the charged company, or something very fucky with legal limits on compensatory damages.

... in this case it was the former, and the amount itself is all of <1/60th of the company's worth, which... that's frankly chump change, especially considering what the punitive damage are over (i.e. willfully endangering millions of their customers, slow rolling necessary changes to prevent the consequences of their literally fatal horseshit, etc.). They had years to fix a problem they knew existed, knew could (and eventually did) kill people, and... didn't.

It would have been fairly reasonable to very literally throw whatever part of their administration that made those decisions off a cliff, nevermind just throwing a probably-going-to-be-reduced punitive fee at the company that's not even a tenth of their yearly gross profits.

Punitive fees are generally going to scale with scope of the problem and the company involved. 1.7 billion is basically a tax writeoff for a company the size of Ford. Even with a 70x multiplier it's not a sure thing they'll change their behavior over the lawsuit. Thing was probably only that low to keep the chances relatively high it wasn't thrown out of court as a suggestion

[Great Order]

Oh yeah, we really need to start going after the individuals that cause major, dangerous fuck ups, too often it's just the company getting a fine because somehow you can get away with murder so long as there's an "Inc." involved somewhere.

[Egan_BW]

limited liability baybeeee

[McTraveller]

Right I mean that's part of the WTF. It's tempting to say "just jack up the damages value to something that hurts!".  Because of the way corps are structured, the "hurt" (if there is any) is not directed in an effective place.  It doesn't address the specific fault in the system; it's too general.  In this case it also doesn't even remove the risk in the field - if the risk is really that high, they should be mandated to replace all the suspect vehicles; otherwise the detrimental effect will continue.

On the flip side - if there are few incidents in the field, then the punitive damages are indeed egregious because the data really doesn't support the claimed severity.

I admit my interest will wane before I'm likely to go looking up the data though.

[EuchreJack]

I fail to see how this is truly a WTF.
Punitive Damage awards like these have been around for decades. The only really amazing thing is that few Republicans these days are harping on the issue like they did two or three decades ago.

Not that I personally care about this issue. The juries usually have legit reasoning behind the punitive damages, then the trial judge invariably shaves down the amount, then the appellate judges shave down the amount further, then maybe another appellate court may even shave down the amount even further.

[pisskop]

Kind of in the mood to play DF.  But IDK if I really want to take the time to learn whatever new stuff theyve put in.

[TamerVirus]

I'd just wait for DF's steam release which apparently is "Sooner than you might think!"

[McTraveller]

I'd just wait for DF's steam release which apparently is "Sooner than you might think!"

I immediately thought of some trap involving magma and a water channel.

[EuchreJack]

Kind of in the mood to play DF.  But IDK if I really want to take the time to learn whatever new stuff theyve put in.

Pretty sure learning how to play the game is part of playing the game. I usually have the DF wikipage open on a tab while the game is running.

[pisskop]

haha.  For a while I didnt need it except to reference things like critter statlines.

Do you know how long it took me to learn how to wheelbarrow?  Embarassingly long, I just assumed they didnt need them

[Enemy post]

Kind of in the mood to play DF.  But IDK if I really want to take the time to learn whatever new stuff theyve put in.

There haven’t actually been any real changes since your mod came out, aside from a couple crash bugs being removed.

[pisskop]

Fair play.  Funny that mod, there used to be a whole lot more.  it was primarily an add-on of Megas, Semis, and Night Horrors.

Things like legion from castlevania that melted its limbs into zombies, and tweaks on races to give them a little more variety.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm still really into the AI generated images rabbithole. John Oliver recently did a piece where some guy on Midjourney (a pretty sophisticated AI for generating images) apparently made something resembling a story about John marrying a cabbage.

There was a video in my youtube feed recently about a Japanese website called Mimic that can apparently be trained to copy anyone's personal style, and a lot of artists are scared of being rendered obsolete.

I then looked up an article about artist's concerns about trained AI's giving corporations artistic work for free, using data trained from artists without their permission. That they should be legally restrained in some way, for the sake of real artists.

I can see where they're coming from, honestly I'm so gobsmacked at how awesome AI generation is becoming that artists have a legitimate concern of being cut out entirely. Though there's a part of me that thinks that these AI's should simply be considered to be tools, and that with these tools the standard of quality for art is going to be raised significantly; and that artists will be incorporating these tools into their art to enhance their artistic goals, rather than simply be replaced by machines.

Then again, I'm not concerned about corporations making profit with AI generated art, I'm worried about unscrupulous governments or extremist organizations using it to pump out propaganda on a mass scale. If an AI can make a very convincing image in someone else's style, it can definitely learn how to convincingly make mass amounts of radicalizing propaganda, or hateful memes to disrupt all productive/peaceful discourse.

[Frumple]

Yeah J, that general thought has a voice in the back of my head enthusiastically going "Democratize the means of production!"

It's one of those cases where, like, I'm sympathetic to the potentially undercut artists, yes, but. Consider for a moment what it entails for everyone else if these programs are seeing enough distribution and use to actually manage that. The world's creative output would explode. The world's creative access would explode, the means to make excellent art being made available even to people without the time or talent to develop those means, bottlenecked only by a program's processing speed, not money to commission artists or said artists' available time. It potentially opens the gates that were locked behind talent and years of dedication and practice to just, everyone. The disabled, the dysgraphic, the folks that are struggling to find the time and means just to eat, nevermind making and practicing art.

It'd probably kinda' suck for a lot of current artists, in all honesty, and there's definitely other potential issues that could crop up (like the use for propaganda, absolutely), but. It's hard to put into words what being able to have a pocket artist on your side would mean to people that have ideas but for whatever reason can't art worth a damn otherwise.