[vonmoltke]

> This whole thing feels like Monopoly money. First, it’s $200m to a company valued at more than $800B.

> Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.

No, it isn't. A company's valuation is not money in the bank. The proper comparison is to profit.

[leetcrew]

some might argue the proper comparison is to the severity and scale of the offense itself.

[notyourday]

Proper comparison is the reaction of a CEO - if the CEO responds by firing the upper management->product management responsible for the part that caused the fine then the fine got a point across.

[true_religion]

It’s okay for a fine to be insignificant. Parking tickets are insignificant fines too, but in aggregate act to control parking behavior.

What’s needed is better enforcement, not more stringent fines.

[notyourday]

Not at all. Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business. Get a ticket, pay it on the web.

Now if the car is towed that becomes a problem because just pulling out a credit card does not fix it.

[leetcrew]

> Those who have cars and can afford the fine consider parking fines to be a cost of doing business.

I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

[jlarocco]

> I don't. if the fine is $50 and it costs $5 to park, I will pay unless I suspect enforcement is so lax that I have a >90% chance of getting away with it.

That amounts to the same thing. You obey the regulations (pay for parking) except when you think it's cheaper not to. Companies do the same thing. Most of the time it works out, but sometimes there's a fine.

[leetcrew]

the above poster is saying that parking fines don't work so you gotta escalate and tow the person's car. I'm saying you don't have to do that, just hire a few more meter enforcement people and stick with fines that are proportional to the offense. personally, I think $40-50 is a reasonable fine for attempting to subvert parking regulations. if you park in a way that blocks a whole lane of traffic, you have caused a big bigger and time sensitive problem that justifies a tow truck.

[zapzupnz]

I don't believe for a second that this represents the minority. One might be tempted to conjure reddit-like images of Chads and Karens who park their cars where ever, when ever, and for however long they like, but the majority of people aren't like this.

[notyourday]

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violat...

That's 11.7M violations for fiscal 2018.

[zapzupnz]

And? What does a page full of data tell me? At a quick glance I can see a lot of violations made repeatedly for the same licence plate; there's no data on whether certain violations are made multiple times by the same person with different vehicles; it's not easy to tell what kinds of violations there are, how much of each, and which are easy to get tickets from unscrupulous parking attendants or which would require actual lack of action by the vehicle's driver or owner… this isn't evidence of anything.

The population of New York may be only 8.5 million, but that doesn't make 11 million infractions an indicator that the majority of those people are the sorts of people to accept parking fines as the cost of owning a vehicle.

[zapzupnz]

Ahh, I meant to say "I don't believe for a second that this represents the majority"! Man, this comment makes no sense. Apologies.

[krj]

That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.

The only way of really judging is through repeat offences which is difficult in a case like this where the judgement was that Google didn’t do enough. That line of “enough” is going to be redefined a lot as the web develops (as it should be).

[notyourday]

> That doesn’t really work for a company like google with a largely blameless culture.

That's only the case because the cost of mistakes are insignificant. Should the mistakes start costing them 5% of revenue you can bet a farm that the person would be fired.

[Traster]

Alphabet has $125Bn cash on hand.