I know the human tendency is to think in extremes, but I would prefer to have a system that is as balanced as possible, or at least one that affords adecuate protections to all parties involved.

The issue I have with the "just don't do anything illegal" argument is that depending on how the illegality is defined, it can be used as a tool for bad actors. Take for instance something like the afformentioned 50% penalty with mandatory jail time for repeat offenders, if I decided that jim's furniture store shouldn't exist anymore, I would only need to find some tiny thing wrong with their data handling, like for instance, assuming this specific hole exists, that they asked for contact info before it's needed for purchase verification. Now they may lose on this minor infraction, and pretty much any small business will die a horrible death without half their revenue. Meanwhile the mega corps will likely find some workaround do to their high priced lawyers, but even assuming we make a rock solid definition, they still just cycle the ceo immediately, because no one will want to be an active ceo when they are one court case from jail.

I agree with the sentiment, but that harsh of an enforcement method is overkill, the penalty should be a fine, not jail time, because otherwise it could be abused to an insane extent, and 50% will immediately bankrupt pretty much any company immediately, most well structured businesses could probably sustain fines on the order of 40%, I do like your inclusion of percentage based penalties, but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.

Edit: after doing the math on some actual companies, I believe 2-5% is too low, realistically 5% is the lowest that would actually change business dealings, and 25% will make a company just barely dip into the red. For this reason I think 5-15% should be the goal post.

Thank you, I was aware of this, but I believe you are mistaken in your last sentence because Linux has always been the second one to be installed for me and the issue still crops up when I forget to heed my own advice

While I agree with your assertion in theory, I cannot agree that windows doesn't mess with grub. I have had 5 different issues with grub being overwritten, 1 was because windows and Linux were on the same drive, but the other 4 was simply because I launched windows through grub.

My advice for people dual booting is to never launch windows through grub and instead change your boot order in bios, this has made all of my boot related issues go away.

So much for space being untouched by capitalism.

I wouldn't say so, for most people what you have done is good enough. However there may come a time where you have to do something janky, at that point you'll probably wish you were on a different distro, but for 95% of people, they will never run into any issues with mint.