> What confuses me is why you seemingly do not believe companies’ fines should correlate with the damage they’ve done. Because a LARGE part of the damage they'

> What confuses me is why you seemingly do not believe companies’ fines should correlate with the damage they’ve done. Because a LARGE part of the damage they've done IS the bad behavior. It's the lying, hiding of evidence that things are harmful, manipulation of the public and regulators. Those are ALL damage. They damage our social construct. That's in addition to the actual damage the product they're selling is doing to our environment and bodies. I understand that it is basically impossible to bring a product to market without causing some sort of harm. At a minimum you are likely burning oil/coal product and consuming resources. You might also be creating products that we know and understand are dangerous - and we apply rules to those companies to limit and offset those costs. THAT'S ALL FINE! If we can have a discussion about the harms and decide "we the people" are ok with it... It's absolutely fucking unnacceptable when one greedy party KNOWS they are doing harm, and is hiding it from the public, because they know having to deal with additional taxes/regulation/monitoring will hurt their bottom line. The literal harm here is the lying. If the company published the documents as soon as they knew... or were transparent from the start... then sure, lets have a small fine to help clean it up and address it moving forward. If the company instead goes "Fuck that - I'm going to hide this to make as much money as possible and bank on being fined like I didn't know and was playing ball"... then fuck em, nationalize that fucker.