this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
132 points (100.0% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
16559 readers
1561 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article
--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If the punishment for a crime is a fine it's not a punishment for the rich. It's just the cost of doing business.
The company is disappearing as a result of this, this is not "the cost of doing business". It's the corporate death penalty.
Also:
That is an eye watering sum of money.
And still not the hangman's noose.
Which is what the Sacklers deserve, not to ride off into the sunset on a pile of money.
This leaves poor David with only $5B. Is he ok? Did somebody check on him? Should we start a crowd fund?
"Corporate death penalty" is not that much of a punishment. Humans committed crimes, but will essentially only have their income reduced.
How about some sentencing for the people who made the decisions? They willingly did things knowing they would endanger, ruin and end lives.
If you endanger a life or cause someone to he killed, there's specific crimes you'd get tried for.
I agree that jail time would be good to see, but with an organisation like this, it's often hard to pin something on any one individual.
Everyone who held a title from the SVP level and up, plus all the owners and board of directors from the moment Oxy was put on the market. These are people who could have stopped the problem, but each are complicit in making it worse for piles of money.
Also, each and every doctor who took a "commission" for prescribing Oxy.
The doctors should, at the bare minimum, have to pay that money back, or the cash equivalent for intangible things like events, travel etc.
Are you purposefully not quoting the most enraging part?
It literally is the cost of doing business.
My 3-second search on the Sackler net worth puts them at $11 billion. It could be high or low. I don't care. Now here's the fun part. Put that $11 billion into an investment calculator with a 6% interested compounded annually for 15 years, and the result is...$26.3 billion. Take away that eye watering $7 billion they may finally have to pay and the poor, bereft Sacklers will have to figure out how they're going to get by on only $19 billion instead of the $11 billion they have today.
And before you say, "Oh, how will the poor Sacklers survive if all their money is invested?" Well, if they only invested the $7 billion for those 15 years with the same values as above, it would give them a meager return of nearly $17 billion instead, leaving them with a mere $10 billion more to figure out how to get by on, plus whatever is left from theire $4 billion of spending money for those last 15 years.
How is this anything but a simple cost of doing business? And how is this anything but making the penalty for making billions on the lives and health of millions of people as painless as possible for the Sacklers?