9 ms·

I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-

I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund. We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business.

HeavyStorm 3y ago
No; we need jail.
kerkeslager 3y ago
Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines." Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions. Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.
- pydry 3y ago
  >Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines." This is like "if you raise the minimum wage we'll only have to lay people off" which is equally self serving and utterly, completely wrong. Employees dont pay. Shareholders pay. If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so.
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    > If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so. But they couldn't pay workers less or decrease workforce, because they needed those workers to execute the unethical business plan. They weren't waiting for a fine to cut workers, they were waiting for the cash cow to stop producing milk to cut workers who were necessary to keep the cash cow going.
    - Kinrany 3y ago
      That's a completely different argument, and a worse one at that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers No they don't, they get passed on to shareholders. The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that. If the company could get away with paying workers less or decreasing its workforce in order to boost profitability, it already would have. It's not waiting for a fine to justify doing so.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    In the parlance of an old internet meme, "why not both"? Also, they _are_ cutting employees. There have been a lot of layoffs recently, and some of them have explicitly stated it'd not because they can't afford those employees.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Because that's not how it works, it isn't both. Yes HP is laying off employees just like pretty much every other large tech company right now. Which shows you it has nothing to do with fines, and rather everything to do with industry-wide overexpansion during COVID and high interest rates now.
      - mcny 3y ago
        > Because that's not how it works Exactly! I don’t know how to deal with people who talk about the economy in terms of a perfect competition free market where all participants have full knowledge and are all equal in terms of power. If a physicist talked in terms of zero friction or spherical cows, we would laugh them off and never listen to them again. And yet people continue to talk about the economy with these assumptions that make zero friction and spherical cows look like practical applied physics.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        I don't know where the requirement of full knowledge became part of the definition of a free market. Because it isn't true. Another word for lack of knowledge is "risk". The amount of risk is factored into the price of everything you buy and sell. For example, a name brand item sells for a higher price than a generic item because the name brand carries with it less risk for the buyer.
- amluto 3y ago
  If you can run a successful business by selling $100 objects that cost $20 each to make and result in an average of $90 of fines per sale, and make it up by mistreating your workers, I applaud you.
  - DanHulton 3y ago
    Mistreatment happens in a variety of ways, some of them, yes, financial. These can be, but are not limited to: - Layoffs - Demotion - Canceling of raises - Canceling of promotions - Reduction in perks and other business benefits - etc
  - pengaru 3y ago
    Does being Too Big To Fail and getting government bailouts count as successful?
  - LorenPechtel 3y ago
    But if they could mistreat their workers they would so anyway independent of the object in question. $100 sale - $20 costs - $90 fine = -$10 per unit. Nobody's going to do that unless having that in people's hands makes them money somehow. (We have seen that with game systems--sell at a loss and make it up on the games.)
- usernew 3y ago
  They do not get "passed on to the workers." That's not how that works - not how any of that works. A business needs a certain number of workers for a certain output. Those workers need to be paid a market amount for their skillset, for the amount of output. If the company does not have the funds to pay them - due to fines or competition or any other reason, the company lays off workers and reduces output and revenue - giving those sales to competitors, or goes out of business. Yes, if the solution to "we broke printers" is to refund every single affected sale, the company will lay off workers, reduce output, and close down if that happens enough. Their competition will increase output to fill the unmet demand, and hire workers. That literally is the point of the fine, and is a good thing, not a bad thing.
mcny 3y ago
I used to think this as well but then I learned of something called a principal-agent problem. I am talking in general, so while fines might work in this exact case, they won’t work in general. The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag. I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority. I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.
- jeltz 3y ago
  While GDPR is far from perfect those fines made a huge difference. Hefty fines do scare companies.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    The most visible difference inside the EU is a significant degradation of the user web browsing experience.
    - unionpivo 3y ago
      Maybe visible, but as someone who works in EU, behind the screen there is a lot more emphasis on either not collecting data, or being more strict with what you collect and how you collect it. PII data identifying, documenting it, and periodic review's of that is becoming standard procedure. I remember when GDPR was announced, where for most projects, there was not anyone who could tell you for any given project, what all data is being collected and stored where. So GDPR did have positive* effect at least with the part of the market I am familiar with. * As in positive for people privacy
- educaysean 3y ago
  > The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag. Did these people continue to maintain the processes and rules enacted by their predecessors? If so they aren't "left holding the bag", they are the remaining beneficiaries of the system. If you are one of the few who have the power to stop something but you don't because you benefit from the status quo, you aren't a victim. You are the perpetrator.
option 3y ago
the CEO absolutely needs to face prison for this - they basically destroyed other peoples’ property.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >destroyed other peoples’ property. What property was destroyed? The HP printer still works with genuine ink cartridges and the third party ink cartridge will work for printers that don't require genuine HP ink.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    Kind of a weird world we live in where intellectual property gives someone else legal power over what we may do with our own devices, but conversely our ability to do things with our devices that is within our legal right is not considered our property.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      That's not what's happening here. HP doesn't have power over what you can do to your printer. If you want to modify your printer so that it allows for ungenuine ink to be used you are free to do so.
      - Zak 3y ago
        HP modified other peoples' printers without genuine[0] consent to make the printers less valuable. It should probably be illegal for them to do that. I imagine there isn't an existing criminal law covering that and I'm not in favor of interpreting criminal laws creatively to expand their scope, however I could be convinced to support making a new criminal law to cover this kind of behavior. [0] No doubt, they have some fine print in a clickwrap agreement giving themselves permission.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  If I start a business as a sole trader and do shit for this, I get prison time. If a big-time CEO does this, he gets a fay bonus
boycott-israel 3y ago
This is a surprisingly naive thing to say in the era of a CEO having a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder-value over the short-term / their tenure (whichever is shorter)
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  There is no fiduciary duty to maximising shareholder value.
- joelwilliamson 3y ago
  Can you give an example of a time when a CEO or board of directors lost a suit for taking the morally upright option instead of trying to maximize share value? I often hear people talking about this, but it's always generalities rather than specific occurrences.
- layer8 3y ago
  This is false and a misconception, see e.g. https://medium.com/bull-market/new-york-times-reporters-perpetuate-popular-corporate-governance-myths-926e24b0e1aa https://medium.com/bull-market/new-york-times-reporters-perp....
- gizmo 3y ago
  This is a myth that refuses to go away. A business can go in whatever direction it chooses, even if it hurts shareholders, employees, or other stakeholders by doing so. Anything short of directly looting the company coffers by directors is fine in a legal sense. Shareholders can just sell if they lose faith in leadership, or put pressure on the board.
  - largeluke 3y ago
    That's not right either, the board and officers have fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interest and to use reasonable business judgment. Less strict than maximizing profit, but more strict than anything-legal-goes.
jackphilson 3y ago
or just let the free market run it's course.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Doesn't work in cases like this because most people aren't going to do a lot of research on a technical buy - they're intimidated by the task so they go with whatever the salesperson tells them. And the salespeople are paid to tell them whatever brings in the most money.
- chimprich 3y ago
  And how well is that going?
joe_the_user 3y ago
I think you're fundamentally incorrect that a more consistent fine structure could fix the problems we have now. The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).
FrontierPsych 3y ago
Workers, yes, but mainly consumers. A million dollar fine, if you sell 500,000,000 cartridges (just a guess, but in 2012 I searched and saw they sold 315 million worldwide) means they would have to charge .2 cents per cartridge to pay for the fine. '' I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments. Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly. But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives. And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.
- gameman144 3y ago
  > Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly. Fines work great as long as they're sufficient enough to disincentivize the relevant behavior! If you made it so that any printer that you disabled cost more to you than one left enabled, then the business would absolutely change course, no huge single-time fine required. > But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives. Agreed, but I think that effect would be extremely detrimental to society (capital punishment for misbehavior also has a big impact, and is pretty clearly not the kind of thing we'd want.) If there is currently a criminal law that the CEO is breaking, then by all means they should be tried. If we're just trying to end business practices we don't like, though, regulation and monetary disincentives are the way to do that. Making an example of someone should only be done insofar as they've broken the rules. If we don't like the way they're acting while following the rules, the rules are the things we should change.
hedora 3y ago
The fine would have to be akin to a corporate death penalty, so that the CEO would never work again. Ideally, it would also pierce the veil of limited liability, so they’d be stuck in court for the next few decades. For this case, computing back: 94M printers are sold per year. HP’s market cap is $29 billion. So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.) Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant. After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity. As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)
- rafark 3y ago
  “So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)” Did I read this correct? Do consumer printers cost over $10k where you live?
  - dack 3y ago
    i think you have the proportion backwards i think he is saying $1000 = 10 x (retail price of printer). which would mean the retail price of a printer is $100
    - hedora 3y ago
      Yes, and 10x is reasonable when computing punitive fines.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  Nah. I wouldn't fine them for the printers. I would fine them the retail cost of all ink sold while the block is in place, paid to the consumers who bought it. (Basically a 100% rebate, simply submit your receipt. Make that the standard penalty for DRM-locking supplies.)
screwturner68 3y ago
The issue is the fine is paid by the company and not the people who actually did the crime. As a result, the CEO, the board and the other players will all get big fat bonuses and the company will take a hit. When the company takes a hit one thing happens the people at the bottom of the chain get fired, not the decision makers, not the people who pushed this policy but some fucking engineer that just had his first kid and thought being and engineer at HP was a great job. The system is setup so that people who screw up never pay but the people who have nothing to do with the problem always pay the bill. If the idiots at the top actually had some accountability I think we'd see a lot different choices being made, but that is just a pipe dream in the world we live in.
- adrr 3y ago
  It should be piercing fines that director and officers must pay and can’t be covered by the company in any form including D&O insurance.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money. A lot of corporate bad behavior would be fairly easy to stop by making it a cost rather than a benefit. Things like an improper denial, you owe 2x the amount. Late payment, you owe say +20% plus a high interest rate on the delay. Fairly routine things you have a clock that's tolled while the other party is actually responding to requests for information, not transit time. (From when they receive it to when they respond. Thus they'll do everything electronic unless original signatures are required.) Clock runs out, that's considered an approval.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money. True, but only when the cost is greater than the profit from doing whatever it is you don't want the business to do. From example, if paying a bill late comes with a 20% premium, but not paying it increases profit by 21%, then it's better to pay late. In the system of modern business it's really hard to see why things happen, so simple rules very rarely work. People are hugely creative when it comes to dreaming up ways around them.
margalabargala 3y ago
I'm not sure that will work. The intention here is to move the needle on what's acceptable. If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care. A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.
twangist 3y ago
> We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business. Maybe we don't need to, but we should.
twangist 3y ago
> We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business. Maybe we don't need to, but let's.

HeavyStorm 3y ago

No; we need jail.

kerkeslager 3y ago

Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines." Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions. Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.

pydry 3y ago
>Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines." This is like "if you raise the minimum wage we'll only have to lay people off" which is equally self serving and utterly, completely wrong. Employees dont pay. Shareholders pay. If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > If they could have fired 1 employee and collected a bit of extra profit they would already have done so. But they couldn't pay workers less or decrease workforce, because they needed those workers to execute the unethical business plan. They weren't waiting for a fine to cut workers, they were waiting for the cash cow to stop producing milk to cut workers who were necessary to keep the cash cow going.
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    That's a completely different argument, and a worse one at that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 3y ago
> Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers No they don't, they get passed on to shareholders. The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that. If the company could get away with paying workers less or decreasing its workforce in order to boost profitability, it already would have. It's not waiting for a fine to justify doing so.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  In the parlance of an old internet meme, "why not both"? Also, they _are_ cutting employees. There have been a lot of layoffs recently, and some of them have explicitly stated it'd not because they can't afford those employees.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Because that's not how it works, it isn't both. Yes HP is laying off employees just like pretty much every other large tech company right now. Which shows you it has nothing to do with fines, and rather everything to do with industry-wide overexpansion during COVID and high interest rates now.
    - mcny 3y ago
      > Because that's not how it works Exactly! I don’t know how to deal with people who talk about the economy in terms of a perfect competition free market where all participants have full knowledge and are all equal in terms of power. If a physicist talked in terms of zero friction or spherical cows, we would laugh them off and never listen to them again. And yet people continue to talk about the economy with these assumptions that make zero friction and spherical cows look like practical applied physics.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        I don't know where the requirement of full knowledge became part of the definition of a free market. Because it isn't true. Another word for lack of knowledge is "risk". The amount of risk is factored into the price of everything you buy and sell. For example, a name brand item sells for a higher price than a generic item because the name brand carries with it less risk for the buyer.
amluto 3y ago
If you can run a successful business by selling $100 objects that cost $20 each to make and result in an average of $90 of fines per sale, and make it up by mistreating your workers, I applaud you.
- DanHulton 3y ago
  Mistreatment happens in a variety of ways, some of them, yes, financial. These can be, but are not limited to: - Layoffs - Demotion - Canceling of raises - Canceling of promotions - Reduction in perks and other business benefits - etc
- pengaru 3y ago
  Does being Too Big To Fail and getting government bailouts count as successful?
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  But if they could mistreat their workers they would so anyway independent of the object in question. $100 sale - $20 costs - $90 fine = -$10 per unit. Nobody's going to do that unless having that in people's hands makes them money somehow. (We have seen that with game systems--sell at a loss and make it up on the games.)
usernew 3y ago
They do not get "passed on to the workers." That's not how that works - not how any of that works. A business needs a certain number of workers for a certain output. Those workers need to be paid a market amount for their skillset, for the amount of output. If the company does not have the funds to pay them - due to fines or competition or any other reason, the company lays off workers and reduces output and revenue - giving those sales to competitors, or goes out of business. Yes, if the solution to "we broke printers" is to refund every single affected sale, the company will lay off workers, reduce output, and close down if that happens enough. Their competition will increase output to fill the unmet demand, and hire workers. That literally is the point of the fine, and is a good thing, not a bad thing.

mcny 3y ago

I used to think this as well but then I learned of something called a principal-agent problem. I am talking in general, so while fines might work in this exact case, they won’t work in general. The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag. I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority. I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.

jeltz 3y ago
While GDPR is far from perfect those fines made a huge difference. Hefty fines do scare companies.
- nickpp 3y ago
  The most visible difference inside the EU is a significant degradation of the user web browsing experience.
  - unionpivo 3y ago
    Maybe visible, but as someone who works in EU, behind the screen there is a lot more emphasis on either not collecting data, or being more strict with what you collect and how you collect it. PII data identifying, documenting it, and periodic review's of that is becoming standard procedure. I remember when GDPR was announced, where for most projects, there was not anyone who could tell you for any given project, what all data is being collected and stored where. So GDPR did have positive* effect at least with the part of the market I am familiar with. * As in positive for people privacy
educaysean 3y ago
> The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag. Did these people continue to maintain the processes and rules enacted by their predecessors? If so they aren't "left holding the bag", they are the remaining beneficiaries of the system. If you are one of the few who have the power to stop something but you don't because you benefit from the status quo, you aren't a victim. You are the perpetrator.

option 3y ago

the CEO absolutely needs to face prison for this - they basically destroyed other peoples’ property.

charcircuit 3y ago
>destroyed other peoples’ property. What property was destroyed? The HP printer still works with genuine ink cartridges and the third party ink cartridge will work for printers that don't require genuine HP ink.
- contravariant 3y ago
  Kind of a weird world we live in where intellectual property gives someone else legal power over what we may do with our own devices, but conversely our ability to do things with our devices that is within our legal right is not considered our property.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That's not what's happening here. HP doesn't have power over what you can do to your printer. If you want to modify your printer so that it allows for ungenuine ink to be used you are free to do so.
    - Zak 3y ago
      HP modified other peoples' printers without genuine[0] consent to make the printers less valuable. It should probably be illegal for them to do that. I imagine there isn't an existing criminal law covering that and I'm not in favor of interpreting criminal laws creatively to expand their scope, however I could be convinced to support making a new criminal law to cover this kind of behavior. [0] No doubt, they have some fine print in a clickwrap agreement giving themselves permission.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
If I start a business as a sole trader and do shit for this, I get prison time. If a big-time CEO does this, he gets a fay bonus

boycott-israel 3y ago

This is a surprisingly naive thing to say in the era of a CEO having a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder-value over the short-term / their tenure (whichever is shorter)

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
There is no fiduciary duty to maximising shareholder value.
joelwilliamson 3y ago
Can you give an example of a time when a CEO or board of directors lost a suit for taking the morally upright option instead of trying to maximize share value? I often hear people talking about this, but it's always generalities rather than specific occurrences.
layer8 3y ago
This is false and a misconception, see e.g. https://medium.com/bull-market/new-york-times-reporters-perpetuate-popular-corporate-governance-myths-926e24b0e1aa https://medium.com/bull-market/new-york-times-reporters-perp....
gizmo 3y ago
This is a myth that refuses to go away. A business can go in whatever direction it chooses, even if it hurts shareholders, employees, or other stakeholders by doing so. Anything short of directly looting the company coffers by directors is fine in a legal sense. Shareholders can just sell if they lose faith in leadership, or put pressure on the board.
- largeluke 3y ago
  That's not right either, the board and officers have fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interest and to use reasonable business judgment. Less strict than maximizing profit, but more strict than anything-legal-goes.

jackphilson 3y ago

or just let the free market run it's course.

nerdbert 3y ago
Doesn't work in cases like this because most people aren't going to do a lot of research on a technical buy - they're intimidated by the task so they go with whatever the salesperson tells them. And the salespeople are paid to tell them whatever brings in the most money.
chimprich 3y ago
And how well is that going?

joe_the_user 3y ago

I think you're fundamentally incorrect that a more consistent fine structure could fix the problems we have now. The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).

FrontierPsych 3y ago

Workers, yes, but mainly consumers. A million dollar fine, if you sell 500,000,000 cartridges (just a guess, but in 2012 I searched and saw they sold 315 million worldwide) means they would have to charge .2 cents per cartridge to pay for the fine. '' I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments. Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly. But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives. And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.

gameman144 3y ago
> Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly. Fines work great as long as they're sufficient enough to disincentivize the relevant behavior! If you made it so that any printer that you disabled cost more to you than one left enabled, then the business would absolutely change course, no huge single-time fine required. > But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives. Agreed, but I think that effect would be extremely detrimental to society (capital punishment for misbehavior also has a big impact, and is pretty clearly not the kind of thing we'd want.) If there is currently a criminal law that the CEO is breaking, then by all means they should be tried. If we're just trying to end business practices we don't like, though, regulation and monetary disincentives are the way to do that. Making an example of someone should only be done insofar as they've broken the rules. If we don't like the way they're acting while following the rules, the rules are the things we should change.

hedora 3y ago

The fine would have to be akin to a corporate death penalty, so that the CEO would never work again. Ideally, it would also pierce the veil of limited liability, so they’d be stuck in court for the next few decades. For this case, computing back: 94M printers are sold per year. HP’s market cap is $29 billion. So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.) Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant. After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity. As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)

rafark 3y ago
“So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)” Did I read this correct? Do consumer printers cost over $10k where you live?
- dack 3y ago
  i think you have the proportion backwards i think he is saying $1000 = 10 x (retail price of printer). which would mean the retail price of a printer is $100
  - hedora 3y ago
    Yes, and 10x is reasonable when computing punitive fines.
LorenPechtel 3y ago
Nah. I wouldn't fine them for the printers. I would fine them the retail cost of all ink sold while the block is in place, paid to the consumers who bought it. (Basically a 100% rebate, simply submit your receipt. Make that the standard penalty for DRM-locking supplies.)

screwturner68 3y ago

The issue is the fine is paid by the company and not the people who actually did the crime. As a result, the CEO, the board and the other players will all get big fat bonuses and the company will take a hit. When the company takes a hit one thing happens the people at the bottom of the chain get fired, not the decision makers, not the people who pushed this policy but some fucking engineer that just had his first kid and thought being and engineer at HP was a great job. The system is setup so that people who screw up never pay but the people who have nothing to do with the problem always pay the bill. If the idiots at the top actually had some accountability I think we'd see a lot different choices being made, but that is just a pipe dream in the world we live in.

adrr 3y ago
It should be piercing fines that director and officers must pay and can’t be covered by the company in any form including D&O insurance.
LorenPechtel 3y ago
The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money. A lot of corporate bad behavior would be fairly easy to stop by making it a cost rather than a benefit. Things like an improper denial, you owe 2x the amount. Late payment, you owe say +20% plus a high interest rate on the delay. Fairly routine things you have a clock that's tolled while the other party is actually responding to requests for information, not transit time. (From when they receive it to when they respond. Thus they'll do everything electronic unless original signatures are required.) Clock runs out, that's considered an approval.
- onion2k 3y ago
  The CEO will pay attention to problems that cost them money. True, but only when the cost is greater than the profit from doing whatever it is you don't want the business to do. From example, if paying a bill late comes with a 20% premium, but not paying it increases profit by 21%, then it's better to pay late. In the system of modern business it's really hard to see why things happen, so simple rules very rarely work. People are hugely creative when it comes to dreaming up ways around them.

margalabargala 3y ago

I'm not sure that will work. The intention here is to move the needle on what's acceptable. If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care. A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.

twangist 3y ago

> We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business. Maybe we don't need to, but we should.

twangist 3y ago

> We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business. Maybe we don't need to, but let's.