• JustAnotherPodunk@lemmy.world
      2·
      17 hours ago

      I live in Texas. I know what they want to do. And they cant. The answer to all this is that they are powerless. Continue on as normal and shit post to your heart’s content.

      That’s the fun thing about the Internet. Volume beats quality. Amazon and tiktok are corporate proof of this fact. It takes a good damn army to make wikipedia barely functional, and since 4chan crashed, there is an actual apocalyptic army of degens with nothing but free time and bandwidth.

      as a patron and contributor to the mind sink that is the Internet, they can never beat the valueless shit show of volume that our degenerate minds can contribute.

      Carry on you worthless shitlords. Magnificent bastards every one. Do your worst.

  • Vainamoinen@leminal.space
    3·
    17 hours ago

    Here in Finland, many fines are “means-tested” i.e. based on one’s income.

    For example, a person gets caught speeding 30 over the limit.

    Person A has monthly income of 3000, the fine is 180.

    Person B has monthly income of 50,000, the fine is 100,000.

    The fine is intended to inflict the same amount of pain, regardless of one’s income. For a rich person, it makes sense to just hire a chauffeur for 35,000 a year and pay their 180 fine if they get a ticket.

    • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      That last line is somewhat the problem with this. Way too many loopholes around this, many rich people barely have income on paper but work around it in other ways

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    For the filthy rich, the ONLY penalty is very often a fine, and it’s a very small one proportionate to the profit they made from the crime. It’s the cost of doing business.

    The filthy rich only do jail time if they bilked other filthy rich people out of their money.

    • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      17 hours ago

      Rich people are far less likely to do time, because “the companies I own are responsible for other people’s livelihoods, you’d be punishing them as well” is generally accepted by most courts of law as a valid reason not to jail them. If they were less short-sighted they’d be treating the fact that the person had power and responsibilities as an aggravating circumstance and giving them longer sentences…

  • JustAThought@lemm.ee
    58·
    2 days ago

    It irks me when rich people will just pay the fine rather than following the law. Example: Parking in handicap spots and not caring about a $250 fine. It is like paying $5 parking fee for low income drivers.

    Finland actually has speeding fines proportional to your income! In 2002, a Finnish millionaire was fined €103,000 (over $100,000 USD at the time) for going 75 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. (47mph in a 32mph zone)

  • mkwt@lemmy.world
    74·
    2 days ago
    1. The law applies only to office holders, candidates, campaigns, or to people who buy or sell political advertising.
    2. People and platforms who post and distribute content without exchanging money are exempted.
    3. All the big media firms: tv, radio, ISPs, Internet content platforms, and billboard operators are exempted when they just run someone else’s ads. The people who are liable are the ones who place the ads.
    4. The requirement is to include a disclosure message when depictions of a public figure have been altered by technology: Photoshop, AI, deepfake audio, or whatever else. The content itself is not censored, it just has to be noticed that it’s artificial.
    5. “Superficial” alterations are exempted from the notice message, for example, changing the color balance on a video.
      • mkwt@lemmy.world
        14·
        2 days ago

        Hard to say for sure, but probably more “fine print” style notices on TV ads and billboards.

        This could conceivably be used to prosecute dirty tricks-style campaigns. For example, many years ago there was an anonymous mailer campaign against the incumbent mayor in my city where a photograph of him was photoshopped to insinuate that had been beaten up, when he really hadn’t. That kind of thing might become the target of this if it becomes law.

        It’s also possible that federal courts will step in and carve out some exceptions for obviously fake parody stuff. Texas law cannot override the first amendment.

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      2 days ago

      Honestly sounds reasonable to me. But it would be nice if they could include deterring that over dramatic black-and-white effect lol.

  • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
    29·
    2 days ago

    I’ll say it until I’m dead: fines need to be calculated by income and net worth, increasing exponentially. The only way for a fine to act as a deterrent is for it to cost more relative to a person or company’s ability to pay it.

  • cygnus@lemmy.ca
    33·
    2 days ago

    Damn, from democracy to lèse-majesté in 100 months days, congrats guys!

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    Lol. Have fun trying to enforce that while real crimes are happening.

    Texas set to overtake Florida for America’s redheaded stepchild.

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      2 days ago

      The trick is, they don’t really care about enforcing it - just having it as a potential charge to pursue when they hate someone.

      This just in: Breathing is illegal. They’ll only bother prosecuting critics of Trump though.

    • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      As always with these laws, they are a tool designed to be used selectively against someone you already decided you don’t like.