Controversially, Rawls asserts that you clearly want to maximize the worst outcome in this case (the "maximin" principle). Economists strongly disagree as it doesn't take into account probability. If you have the potential to live in Junkland, where life is moderately unhappy for everyone, or in Omelas, which is utopia for 1,000,000 individuals and pure torture for 1, Rawls asserts that you should obviously choose Mediocreland. But if you are randomly assigned a place in Omelas, you have really great odds of coming out quite well. The book includes some contortions to ensure this outcome. It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.
Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?
I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.
There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.
> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?
Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.
Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off.
So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical.
That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.
What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)?
Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.
Why would a rational actor want to do that though? Show me a single decision theory that does reasonably well in game theory simulations (I mean R-CDT/UDT tier), that also supports maximin, and I'll write a 1000 word article in the praise of John Rawls.
The answer to that seems to be so simple. Each of the 1Mio rich people gives just less than 1Mioth of his property/values to the one poor soul, and all ends up with utopia and restores fairness - at least with regard to property. There may still remain unfairness regarding physical and mental integrity, as well as regarding freedom. The two former ones are difficult to handle/solve.
Omelia is not a problem to be solved, its a thought experiment with predefined rules for how it operates. In order for the million people to live in utopia, there MUST be a person sacrificed to suffer utterly. These facts cannot be changed. The questions then arise about the ethics and morality of this society.
But it can't be a thought experiment about humans since humans would not tolerate the outcome in the first place. Humans are moral animals who are compelled to act on their morality. One aspect of morality is fairness. Another is compassion. See Johnathon Haidt's work on this.
As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.
It's hyperbole, but humans do tolerate a similar outcome all the time. Our modern technological civilization is in many ways built on suffering. Migrant workers suffer to pick our vegetables and clean our homes, child slaves suffer to build our electronics and mine rare earth minerals. We buy goods from companies like Amazon knowing how they treat their employees. Most of us don't care as long as we get our goods on time. People have rationalized far greater evils (chattel slavery, manifest destiny, imperialism and colonization), incorporated them into their moral framework, and turned the cognitive dissonance into virtue. Those people simply choose their lot in life, they're lazy and indigent, God made them less than us, that's just the price of progress.
Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.
People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others. At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.
In the first case, what you're looking at is unawareness, stiff competition for limited attention and care budgets, and a diversity of opinion with respect to the evaluation of tradeoffs for this specific, micro-topic. People who labor in sweatshops that provide goods for Amazon want those jobs because its better than the alternative. They don't want those conditions, but that's a problem that is not going to be fixed tomorrow, whereas they have to worry a lot about their tomorrow. People making decisions within that complex matrix of forces is not evidence that Amazon buyers don't care about other people. It's evidence that the world is complex and that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time. Even Ghengis Khan was talked out of genociding the Chinese by someone who admired Chinese society and suggested that he would be better off taxing the skilled artisans of China instead of genociding them, as he usually did to any society that defied him.
Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ? Or that morality was the sole possession of a tiny vanguard ? If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
>People using Amazon is not evidence that humans don't care about the suffering of others.
Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that.
>At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.
It very much is. Colonialism was built on slavery and genocide, and the colonizers cared very little for the suffering of the colonized.
>Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time.
"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature.
>Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ?
Now we're at the part of the comment where you purposely misconstrue my comment and make it into some weird anti-leftist rant.
No, I didn't say that, and when did I even mention anything about modern partisan politics? Of course diverting from the topic with strawman arguments means you don't have to take the topic seriously, which is another coping mechanism.
>If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
Ooh. "I wonder what you'd be willing to do?" That's a nice turnabout. The only true evil is pointing out evil. I bet you also like to say the only true racists are the black people who keep complaining about racism. Turning me into the enemy, nothing but a windmill to be tilted at, is yet another coping mechanism.
Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point. Not only would you not leave Omelas, you don't even think there's anything wrong with Omelas. Rather you'd be the one spreading FUD about anyone who does leave.
"Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that."
So you say about them. Thinking you have the power to pass moral judgment on everyone else's internal processes, reasoning and decisions about where to place their attention and care is an error.
"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature."
Never said it or implied it. Since you can't attack the fact, you attack the speaker. The fact remains, the universal existence of slavery does not imply most people in history were amoral. People buying from Amazon doesn't mean they are uncaring. Your thoughts and opinions don't determine facts about people you've never met. Sorry but you're displaying an ugly self indulgent narcissism in this post. Do better.
But what you're assuming is a static starting position. The entire point of liberalism is, if you read the essay, to be fair. It is absurdly unfair to that one person and I'm pretty sure they'll never be able to advance in this society. This is not just about that one person though, it's the perception that society does not really care about an individual and that individual can be you. However, fairness is the starting position in Junkland and the argument is that this begets progress while a society like Omelas shows a complete disregard for fairness. This was the spirit of the original position.
> It has always been surprising to me that the original position argument had so much impact when it seems like a very odd starting point to me. But I like probability and statistics, so maybe I'm weird.
It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
You find it incomprehensible of late, but you've made similar arguments on this site in the past; for instance, the Rawlsian logic you're objecting to here is the same as the logic you use to justify antiterrorism work. So whatever the issue is here, I don't think it's your background in engineering.
I don’t support anti terrorism because I put myself in the shoes of victims of terrorism. I do it because I think terrorism requires harsh responses to maintain norms against political violence. So for example I would abolish the TSA because I’m not afraid of actually being the victim of a terrorist attack.
It’s possible this sentiment is punitive—I just want to see terrorists punished—and such a response isn’t necessary to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence. But I would submit that extreme responses to e.g. Islamism is important to keep a real threat to order at bay. We’ll probably have a real A/B experiment with this in Bangladesh now that Hasina—who was doing a good job crushing the Islamists—has been overthrown. Will Bangladesh turn into Pakistan in the absence of that enforcement? We will see.
It’s the same thought. Terrorist attacks are directed to the nation as a whole even if they kill a small percentage of the population. That makes them different from events that just happen to kill the same number of people.
>designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios
I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme.
It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.
Humans are risk averse and overestimate the probability of low-probability outcomes. So focusing people on hypothetical scenarios where they are someone other than themselves leads to over-focusing on the welfare of small minorities at the expense of the majority.
Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule
This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.
Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.
>Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes
Oh, wow, I had no idea. (Rawls's response is quite different from my response to the hypothetical of the veil of ignorance.) Sorry for adding noise to this thread. I agree with everything you wrote in this thread.
> the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.
It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.
> But that’s just another type of catering to the minority at the expense of the majority.
Rawls's original position (a.k.a. veil of ignorance) is, in essence, "There, but for the grace of God, go I or my loved ones — so let's help others the way we'd hope to be helped if life had dealt us a similarly-bad hand." (That latter part should sound familiar ....)
Not to mention that relief of human suffering comes mainly from technological advances and that, in turn, depends on advances in material science and basic science which wouldn't exist except for the economic incentives produced by a capitalist society which produces "stuff" for the 90%.
> The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
We saw a lot of folks carefully ignoring a related issue during the covid pandemic: They argued angrily that it made no sense to mandate masks, lock down society, and spend billions on vaccine development, when only a small percentage of people would die or have long-term adverse effects. (There was a lot of that kind of talk in Texas.) But those folks never seemed willing to admit that they were really saying, "I'm willing to roll the dice that I'll be all right; the rest of you, well, you're on your own."
Sadly, folks like that seldom take enough precautions on their own — and they're often the first to plead for "the gummint" to help them when they get in trouble. (Cf. the bail-outs of big, de-regulated banks during the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, the demands for federal hurricane assistance by people who lived in flood zones, etc. Privatize the profits, socialize the risks.)
Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up. The vax was hugely destructive to healthy people and did not prevent transmission. These things are well established facts. The argument was never ”I'm too selfish to care about grandma”, it was always about the facts at hand.
> Masking does nothing to stop the spread of viruses. Neither does social distancing. Look it up.
You’re going against what’s been widely publicized as the overwhelming scientific consensus, so it’d be useful if you’d cite some evidence, including your qualifications, to help the rest us feel comfortable accepting your judgment in this area. And you seem excessively sure of yourself (as do some of your other comments — yes, I looked you up), which tends to weigh against accepting your view.
Excerpt:
In the vaccination analysis, the vaccinated and control groups each included a mean of 884,828 persons. Vaccination was most strongly associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 3.24; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.55 to 12.44; risk difference, 2.7 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 1.0 to 4.6),
Excerpt:
Our meta-analysis indicates that within 30-day follow-up period, vaccinated individuals were twice as likely to develop myo/pericarditis in the absence of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to unvaccinated individuals, with a rate ratio of 2.05 (95% CI
(Reposted from below): I skimmed through your last cite about myo/pericardiotis, a meta-study in BMJ. There's an interesting sentence in the discussion part: "Thus, while the risk of myo/pericarditis is higher in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated group, the absolute risk of myo/pericarditis is small in both groups." (Emphasis mine.) That seems to be an important fact, but you don't seem to have picked up on it — either that or you're intentionally not mentioning it for your polemical purposes.
We're getting off topic here. This discussion is about Rawls and whether it's OK for majorities to tell minorities that suffer misfortune, yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's not our problem.
But since you're going there: Sure, there are studies saying various things. I'm not competent to evaluate these studies. So, like jurors in a courtroom trial (I'm a lawyer), I go with indirect evidence and which witnesses seem most reliable.
A March 2023 Washington Post article [0] quoted a lot of experts, including Dr. Peter Hotez, a local Houston icon. Hotez and his colleague Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because they came up with corbevax, a low-cost covid vaccine that can be made very cheaply (esp. in developing countries) and put it in the public domain with no patent coverage. It might not be as good as mRNA vaccines (I have no idea), but it's far, FAR better than no vaccine at all.
All of the folks quoted in the WaPo article are vaccinated. (Several touted vaccines.) Most said they wore masks in poorly-ventilated crowded spaces.
I have confidence that Hotez — who's among many, many others who hold similar views — stays open to evidence and doesn't fall in love with his own opinions or get locked into groupthink.
And to repeat: We don't know who you are, and you've offered no evidence about your qualifications concerning pandemic measures or the significance of the studies you cited.
In a courtroom trial, judges and jurors generally aren't experts; that's what expert witnesses are for. But a purported expert witness won't even be allowed to testify in front of the jury until the party that wants to call the witness has put on evidence of the witness's qualifications, and the trial judge has concluded that the witness's opinion testimony is likely to be reasonably reliable. This is called the Daubert standard: A proposed expert witness has to be shown to (probably) know WTF s/he is talking about. [1]
We have no Daubert evidence about you. So for now I'll stick with Peter Hotez and his friends.
You moved the goalpost. First, you wanted evidence. So I gave you evidence. Now you say you can't evaluate evidence, even the evidence of the people who told you to social distance admitting, under oath, they don't know where that idea came from and they know of no evidence to support it.
Look, friend: I don't have infinite time to go digging into all the cites you provided. For all I know, you're doing the Steve Bannon "flood the zone with shit" trick — I don't know that you're doing that, but neither do I know that you aren't.
YOU say that these publications say various things. But I'd also asked you for evidence that you know what you're talking about and can be trusted to be honest. You didn't provide any such evidence, nor even your real name.
EDIT: I skimmed through your last cite about myo/pericardiotis, a meta-study in BMJ. Key phrase: "Thus, while the risk of myo/pericarditis is higher in the vaccinated group than in the unvaccinated group, the absolute risk of myo/pericarditis is small in both groups." (Emphasis mine.) That seems to be an important fact, but you don't seem to have picked up on it — either that or you're intentionally not mentioning it for your polemical purposes.
As some other comment mentioned, these systems have been controversial, because some of them are used in ways that don't take into account normal human needs. E.g. some schedule back-to-back shifts, change with little notice, and can't take into account sorts of real life things (like child care) that a human manager might be able to.
There's a phenomenon in which inflation-related posts generate lots of comments or concerns that the CPI methodology is manipulated in some way. If you are interested in learning more about CPI, the methodology is very complex but transparent. You can find documentation here: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/
and raw datafiles here: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm
If you would like to publish your own dataset based purely on changes in price level of chocolate cupcakes, per pound, in cities, you can do so by extracting series APU0000702411 from the raw datafiles.
Although it was not my main subfield, I spent a bit of time in grad school with people who are deep in the theory and practice of measuring inflation. It's really really hard, and it's the sort of place where there is a great public desire for a single number, but it's not clear that a single number is meaningful to cover all the most common use cases for inflation. (Use cases include: managing cost of living adjustments, understanding money supply, making investment decisions, making historical comparisons of other time series.) The many variant measures of inflation (core, non-core, etc.) exist to try to serve different use cases more effectively.
Thanks for the important context. We are all exposed to inflation in significantly different ways! I think many people feel helpless because you can make every right decision but still get bulldozed by the economy in ways you can not predict.
Specifically, buying a house with an American fixed-rate style mortgage hedges against inflation in terms of interest rates (assuming they rise to counter inflation), value (assuming it rises in tandem with inflation), and leverage (broadly-accessible 1:5 with no call isn't bad!).
But to the broader point, bemoaning helplessness in the face of inflation is false.
There are tons of things essentially everyone could do to hedge inflation, if they were willing to pay the fee to do so.
Man, I want to appreciate a nice new hardware approach, but they say such BS that it is hard to read about them:
> “There might need to be a new term, because by the end of next year we’re going to deploy enough LPUs that compute-wise, it’s going to be the equivalent of all the hyperscalers combined,” he said. “We already have a non-trivial portion of that.”
Really? Does anyone seriously believe they are going to be the equivalent of all hyperscalers in compute next year? (Where Meta alone is at 1 million H100 equivalents.) In the same article where they say it's too hard for them to sell chips? And when they literally don't have a setup to even accept a credit card today?
Hercule Poirot (in "The Cornish Mystery"): "Hein, the pancreas is nothing. Of the digestive organs, the liver is the key. Look after the liver and life will take care of itself."
(I have cut my alcohol to 2 drinks per week to look after my liver - still looking forward to life taking care of itself!)
Funny, i went from the typical culturally alcoholic or at the very least binge drinking Brit to having a drink only when ‘forced’ to by circumstances which equates to one or two pints every few years when I visit Liverpool, my birthplace.
I feel culturally American now though and huge part of that is feeling alienated, pressured and ridiculed when back in the UK because of my refusal of alcohol.
I don’t even talk about it or ‘holier than thou’ about it or even care at all about others drinking but many people back there see it as a personal insult if I choose not to drink. Even if i sneak a Shandy or 0% beer.
So weird to me now but I was fully part of that culture until aged 28. I even remember ‘jokingly’ bullying people into drinking to excess.
I’m now 46 and have been in the USA since 2005 full time.
If your company makes $1bln per year now and pays a CEO $1 mln, and then someone comes along who has much better ideas, better work ethic, and more experience and you (the board) are convinced they can add 5% of revenue as pure profit to your company per year. They will add $50 mln in value per year. If that person asks $5 mln as compensation would it be responsible to say no?
Or to take a more concrete example, if Elon Musk decided to quit Tesla in a huff and focus entirely on X and stop dealing with the annoyance of public markets, the stock's would probably lose $75 bln in value overnight. If your legal goal is to maximize the company's value and it takes $500 mln pay per year to keep that from loss happening, it seems like it's probably a good deal to just pay the $500. As another example, Steve Jobs received hundreds of millions in stock options, and that was probably an excellent deal for Apple, though they probably could've hired someone cheaper.
I agree there are many cases where a more expensive CEO is actually worse. But I think it is very very easy to imagine cases where it makes a ton of sense to pay a large amount for an expensive CEO if they are the right person for the job and will add 10x more value than their pay.
This isn't a fair comparison to most companies as Musk has made Tesla largely about him, can you think of many other companies where if the CEO left a 75 billion dollar stock drop would happen?
I have a very conscientious friend who used to drive across state lines to do a video visit from their car with an out of state provider. It's pretty wild to think about what a waste and time sink this is for families with complex illnesses.
At one point during the pandemic, I lived in a different state than two doctors who I saw virtually every few months (due to moving during the pandemic to a nearby city that happened to be just across the border). The state I lived in put fairly short deadlines on how long they'd allow out of state telemedicine, and whenever it came within a few weeks, they reiterated to the doctors I saw that they would _not_ extend the deadline...only to extend it at the last minute anyhow. By the time it finally didn't actually get extended, I had moved back, so I didn't need to actually make this decision, but the sense I got is that the ones who would have gotten in trouble would be the doctors, not the patients, and considering that I knew and liked these doctors (and obviously had a vested interest in them continuing to practice), I wouldn't have risked it for their sakes, despite the inconvenience.
I regularly see an out-of-state provider via telemedicine and no, nothing stops me from lying and saying that I'm in the same state as the provider. (He knows and doesn't care.)
The telemedicine visits themselves are conducted through MyChart. It's definitely not checking my IP or it would've caught me a long time ago, especially since I have to check the "I am currently in <x state>" checkbox every single time I see him :P
You can just trust IP geo databases to be accurate down to the country* - and that's only most of them time and not even considering VPNs exist.
Sure, if something looks fishy you could then go through the appropriate legal channels to get a more exact location from the ISP, but false positives are going to happen so often, eventually everyone involved might get a bit cranky.
* Only the likes of Google have the scale and requisite information to keep more accurate and up-to-date databases, and even those are fallible.
> You can just trust IP geo databases to be accurate down to the country*
You can't trust even that. There's an ISP which shares the IP pool between its child companies (? or some similar arrangement) in Crimea and Poland. We found out when Polish subscribers got affected by sanctions on business with Crimea.
My home IPs get placed into another country by geolocation all the time (it's probably more wrong than right). My VPN IPs (for which I always use either Finland or the Netherlands) have been geolocated to: three states in the US, Dubai, and several other EU countries.
Atherton is prime silicon valley real estate that could allow engineers and startup founders to live there at a reasonable price and fuel growth in the tech economy. But if it's going to inconvenience Marc or compromise his nice views, growth is no longer important to him.
I don’t really know Atherton (I’m from outside the U.S. and have only visited the main centers un Silicon Valley) and I have mixed feelings about Andreessen’s rhetoric in recent years, including the tech utopianism expressed in this post.
But this kind of attack is just a classic cheap shot. If the argument was accompanied with evidence that it was feasible and economically optimal to build the infrastructure (transportation, retail, local services) in Atherton that could support a dramatic increase in the number of residents in the area, then sure, you could have a reasoned debate about it. Without that it’s just a sneer, and it does nothing to refute Andreessen’s argument that there should be more development in areas where it is logistically and economically practical.
Wow, what's even the point of such a small fine? Even in their reduced revenue state, X probably does $3 bln/year in revenue? So this fine is 1/10000th of their annual revenue for the company. X seems to have barely even tried to avoid this, leaving "some questions entirely blank" in the questionnaire to explain their approach. Given this fine size, I can see why they didn't bother getting a team of moderation and legal experts to huddle on the documents.
Filling in a regulatory questionnaire like this is amateurish at best and speaks to really poor governance and internal controls (not necessarily surprising here?). This this was a bank I’d expect the people involved to swiftly have departed well before this announcement.
This will very likely draw closer scrutiny of their processes and actual enforcement actions (a regulator being annoyed enough to issue a public fine in this, or really any, amount over a sloppy response to a routine sort of data gathering is quite unusual for any industry; people normally at least have the professionalism to put /some/ answers down. )
You can do compliance so badly as a bank that in a single day your entire business can be taken away from the owners/shareholders and given to a different bank to operate. Literally overnight.
Twitter regulators can fine Twitter for bad compliance to the tune of approximately a nickel.
There's an honest expectation that a chat platform is going to respond to the government at the same level a bank would?
Further, I find the government's approach to managing child abuse to be poor governance and a complete mockery of internal legislation. How is a survey from twitter intended to help them honestly combat this problem and prevent children from being victimized? It really looks like a giant "CYA" exercise by the government, and I find it hard to blame X or Google for not taking it particularly seriously.
> There's an honest expectation that a chat platform is going to respond to the government at the same level a bank would?
If I was an investor in X, I would be concerned. Isn't the end goal to be an "everything app", not just a "chat platform"? How is X going to become a payment processor (a key element of "everything apps" like WeChat) if even the kinds of questions a chat platform gets are beyond its capability to answer?
Why not? Twitter's market cap/revenue is probably larger than that of many banks and certainly more than many hedge funds, which are regulated out the wazoo. Rest of your questions seem disingenuous, if governments didn't consult tech firms about their policies and metrics on this issue people would be complaining about heavy handed regulation based on ignorant assumptions.
380,000 is a couple FTEs for a year, right? I'm surprised that wouldn't have been enough to hire some moderation and legal experts for however long it would take to fill out a questionnaire.
Typically this sort of fine is a warning shot meant to encourage compliance rather than to damage. I don’t have time right now to dig in and verify, but there’s a Guardian article that mentions the potential for assessing retroactive daily non-compliance fines going back to March 2023. You’d also expect ongoing fines in that case.
But how much of that revenue is profit, and how much of that profit derives from Australia.
Assuming 3bn in revenue, Australia represents 1% of Twitters users, and they have a profit margin of 5%. That means profit is maybe 1.5m. So that's fining them 25% of the year's profit for failing to fill out a form properly.
To be very cynical, to ensure that only large companies can enter this market. If you're a sole proprietor making a chat app, this fine for filling out a form wrong ruins your life. If you're X, you can ignore it basically consequence free. Thus, only X can be in the market.
