Which is entirely seperate from having a grasp on how much money it is you're borrowing and how hard it will be to pay back

I feel like this still slightly misses the problem. I couldn't give less of a shit whether they do or don't make money from my data, I care that they are tracking so many things for that purpose that I can be identified and many lifestyle habits are visible, which is a problem when the data ends up with someone who wants to use it to spy on me. Which probably has never targeted me specifically, but my data is almost certainly in a tool capable of this. Because this happens frequently.

Of course this happens because they want to make money from it and sell it, but even if they only want it to idk customize my feed to make me like their website more and it never leaves their server, I'd still have to worry about data breaches. Or just someone else taking over and deciding that selling it is great, actually.

And even though I have decided that I personally don't really care enough to deal with the downsides for quality of life, that doesn't mean I don't want this to stop via legal means.

It's insane. Of course we can't just jail a corporation and just shutting them down forcibly would cause more problems than it solves, but really that fine needs to be at least 50 times as high. Probably 100 times. Something that hurts, a lot. Not enough to outright bankrupt them, but enough to do that if it happens again any time soon. Their yearly revenue is 72 billion. This is the equivalent of someone making 50k a year paying a $200 fine for gross negligience that killed people. What the fuck?

Allowing everyone to ping @everyone is asking for it though.

Actually determining the total gain seems insanely hard to impossible. Percentage of turnover is just easier to implement, and still effective if it can scale up as it can for gdpr.

I love that the first example on that page is .co.ck

This feels underutilized.

The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion. As far as I know nothing is stopping the EU from imposing higher and higher fines with continued breach of guidelines there, and I would expect these fair market regulations to work similarly.

Also for reference, that fine was against meta, who had 34 billion in revenue in 2023. So that fine cost them around 3% of their global revenue, which I'm sure is tolerable, but definitely approaching the point of hurting.

"Race" for humans is a made up concept and "racism" has been used to refer to any kind of hating a group for their ethnicity. "Ethnicity" is a very ambiguously defined concept notably including shared attributes like nationality, language, history, religion, etc.

I, too, am not a fan of words being used incorrectly, but this is not an incorrect use of "racism".

The article says that 90% of 39 million euros in public transport revenue came from locals, so the cost should be around 35 million, perhaps with some savings on staff or infrastructure since fewer people have to buy tickets (as well as possibly less road maintenance if fewer people use cars as a result). And the city is financing it through a new tax on companies with more than 11 employees.

It's not a world ending amount of money, so I don't see why it shouldn't be viable. Germany's 49€-ticket, while currently having some financing trouble, is similar too in that it is extremely cheap, and is nationwide, and it happened in a nation with an extremely strong car lobby.

It's not free, but it should be possible anywhere with enough political will.

Usually something in the testing process, or perhaps the testing process itself is lacking. For medical applications it should be pretty rigorous as the consequences if something slips through can be very bad.

If this is a new feature, then every step of the process designed to make sure it works failed. Which those are precisely will depend on the project, it could mean that multiple devs and QA had a look and either missed it or didn't think to test for it. Where I work the developer implementing a feature tests it, then 2 other developers review the code, one of them also tests it, then it goes to dedicated QA who will test it more in depth and also do regression tests (checking that existing functionality still works). The testing QA member also checks with another QA member about anything they may have missed in their test steps. But this can vary heavily, also depending on the general model of development cycle (agile or waterfall) etc - though I'm working on much less critical software, no ones going to get injured even if nothing works correctly.

If the bug was introduced through an update to this or another feature, their regression tests might be lacking.

It's also possible (though imo extremely negligient for such an application) that they don't have dedicated QA in the first place, and even don't require their devs to test comprehensively in place of dedicated QA.

Or, they found the bug, but management didn't want to allocate the resources to fix it.

Imo something like this slipping through shows negligience of some form, it's impossible to guarantee bug-free software, but this is not some obscure, hard to reproduce error.

Going off google the energy required to heat the oceans by 1 degree is approximately 5.4*10^21 kj, or 1389 trillion GWh, or the energy output of over 170 million nuclear power plants over an entire year. Safe to say putting all the server farms in the world in there still isn't going to make a dent.

It might affect local temperature by a relevant amount if there's too many in one spot perhaps, and that could be pretty bad. But generally, saving energy is a good thing.

Ban use in public in general. I don't want to be forced to walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke in front of a train station or waiting at a traffic light any more than in a restaurant. People can do what they want at home but constantly having to deal with drug addicts polluting the air around me shouldn't be accepted.