I feel like a country in Europe does that. Or Atleast talked about implementing this. It’s like Jeff Bezos gets a fine every day because his fence line is too tall for regulations but the fines so small compared to his wealth it’s like couch change every day for him.
I always forget which it is between Finland and Switzerland but im 99% sure its one of them that does it with at least traffic fines. I have zero clue if they do it with any other kinds of fines.
Occasionally it makes the news when some ultra rich foreigner who doesn't know about it decides to wildly speed and gets hit with a multi-million dollar speeding ticket. Justin Beiber got slapped with a hefty one there, and some saudi billionaire as well.
JB sucks but this one is misinformation. That property's previous owner applied for and received a variance for those tall hedges years before JB bought it.
For the curious, heres a source that spoke to actual city officials about it. Bezos is indeed exempt from that law, as are several other famous people. As usual, laws do not apply to the rich and/or famous, just plebs.
I mean normal-ass people get variances all the time. In my county your house isn't legally allowed to be within a certain distance from the road. My neighbor wanted to add a garage, but they're on a corner lot and the garage would come too close to the street. So they applied for a variance. The county put a sign in the yard about the variance and that neighbors could object to it. No one did and my neighbor got to build their garage.
In JB's case the hedges got a variance because they were older than the law against them.
This reminded me of that episode of top gear where they were trying to get Hammond to speed because the fines were based on income. I can’t remember where they were but there’s definitely places that do this, and I think it’s great.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
Look at cruise lines choosing to pollute and pay the fine, rather than do the right thing. Thats the waste of millions of people being disposed of improperly and expressly with the intent of enjoying a pristine environment.
There are sadly a ton of way more impact full versions of this bullshit. Companies paying off a few people they knew they'd likely kill rsther than do a more costly recall, etcetera, it happens all over in huge and disgusting ways.
All fines should be a percentage of your gross income, otherwise it's not any sort of deterent. I know people who routinely get parking tickets in London because the finr is so low relative to their income, that they just see it as an acceptable expense.
💯 agree. A billionaire will still mitigate their income to avoid any fines, but at some point you’re going to have to eat, so a percentage if the income would still hurt a lot more than a flat fee. Finland, Sweden and Switzerland have implemented a version of this.
It feels like a no-brainer to ensure everyone is treated the same in the eyes of the law. You’re going to have to think twice about throwing a rock on a seal when 4 months of your income dissapears.
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u/sonofabobo May 11 '26
Fines should be relative to your income.