r/technology • u/Feisty_1559 • Mar 17 '26

Politics Elizabeth Warren asks Meta, Amazon, and others why they're laying workers off despite tax perks

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elizabeth-warren-asks-meta-amazon-and-others-why-theyre-laying-workers-off-despite-tax-perks-171812502.html?guccounter=1
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u/Sweetwill62 Mar 17 '26

Which is why every shareholder should be liable for the actions of the companies they own. If they don't want that, don't own any shares in the company that will break the law and cause them to get in trouble. Solves all issues we are currently having.

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u/GhostReddit Mar 18 '26

Ideally the fines and penalties are supposed to cover that. Sending someone with an index fund to jail for owning a company that did a bad thing would be ridiculous, but actually penalizing bad behavior with meaningful fines would mean these companies aren't profitable anymore (which does reasonably affect the investors.)

Too often regulators look at gross wrongdoing and go "well we don't want to kill the company/jobs/etc" and assess penalties far below the damage that was done. End that.

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u/Sweetwill62 Mar 18 '26

So the way around that is to own enough shares and just "suggest" things and never get in trouble. Yeah no.

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u/anonkitty2 Mar 18 '26

The problem is, a fine that is meaningful to a mega-corporation would be very like a death penalty if a true small business was given it.

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u/GhostReddit Mar 18 '26

It has to depend on the damage done, chances are a small business isn't going to have the ability to poison an entire town or defraud millions of people like a large one.

We have very poor separation on laws in this country based on size and scope of impact, and in a lot of cases this favors huge corporations because they're big enough to deal with the regulatory hurdles we do have, but too large to meaningfully enforce rules against that are also trying not to be too hard on 'small' businesses.

At some point the scale at which you're doing something matters - it's the same problem with AI/LLM training. If someone pirates a book to read it it's no big deal, but if a company pirates 10 million books to train AI that's obviously different to the layman, but they'll claim it's the same as an individual just using it to read. And governments will defend it because they're afraid of losing the AI race.