Comment by burningChrome
4 hours ago
This is so true. When you have a billion users, you can literally lose hundreds of millions of users and it wouldn't make a dent. The only way is to get the government involved and regulate this and just keep hammering them with massive fines that really make a dent in their bottom line.
For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to stop this?
I guess you're used to standard billions (a million millions). A US billion would certainly suffer from losing hundreds of millions, you're talking about a double-digit percent.
10^9 is the standard definition of a billion, it's very wrong to call 10^12 a "standard billion." You can say "long scale billion" if you want to refer to the definitively non-standard 10^12 billion.
To quibble/add-nuance: The words have diverged into a false-friend [0] situation. It looks like the same word, but the correct/standard meaning depends on which language is being used at the time.
If someone is writing English and puts "billion" for 10^12, that's a translation error, much like writing "my grandfather became pregnant when he realized he'd locked the keys inside the car." (Instead of "embarrassed.")
Conversely, if I wrote a French or German sentence and put "billion" for 10^9, then I'd be the one making the translation mistake.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend
I doubt they are saying any services out there have 1,000,000,000,000 users.
Something like three strikes and the CEO, top executives, and three primary share holders go to jail while forcing the company to dissolve seems to be the only solution to removing bad actors in corporate settings.
Careful, I was called a "radical" on this site for suggesting a corporate death penalty. Because jobs are so important that when a corporation risks its own existence so it can break laws, dissolving the corporation as punishment is the government's fault and not the corporation's.
Ah, what a pleasure to imagine that scenario, however unlikely, for just a few seconds. People profiting from running unethical ads and child sexual abuse material, for whom financial gain is more important than any ethics, laws or health of others, who frankly speaking don't give a fuck about anyone else but themselves amassing more money, being held responsible and being moved to a new, very different kind of home behind bars. It would be as if angels started to sing and cleanse planet Earth just a tiny little bit. We would have reason to rejoice and celebrate. On the streets! On the roofs! Everywhere! Celebrate that the law still has teeth, and is upheld. It would also be a nice measure to heal other businesses from many bad practices.
As long as we can also shoot tresspassers and thieves, you got a deal.
> When you have a billion users
What if they make a shadow profile for you? Do you count as a user? What if you've tried to delete your account and you can't? (I meant a real account here, not even a shadow profile. People have had the things reactivated years later)