I will preface this comment with a change in my opinion when it comes to semantics, I think my 2-5% range is too low after researching a bit more, I would be much more in favor of 5-15%, but the remainder of my point stays the same.

I don’t think so. It’s not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.>

Which fines are you referring to, in my opinion the biggest problem that we currently have is that there are realistically no penalties for breaking the law.

Just doing a quick Google search, apple made about 400b in revenue last year, and apple just had a 2b fine from an antitrust lawsuit. Applying the 5% fine, that 2b would become 20b which equates to 20% of their annual earnings for that year.

If we applied the 50% penalty that started this thread, that becomes a fine of 200b which means, using the apple example, that the company loses 100b when they get down to their earnings. This is the reason why I feel like 50% is too much, if one privacy court case in one country is enough to bankrupt a company, no company would ever attempt to provide a service that is remotely adjacent to that law: in my mind, some of the services that would cease to exist would include search engines, payment processors, and email newsletters.

All in all, I think that the penalty should be a fine, because realistically this is a civil matter, and I am not a big proponent of jail time without a criminal conviction. I do agree that the fixed amount fines are too damaging to smaller firms and a slap on the wrist for large ones, so after looking at the numbers for apple and Google 5% equates to a noticeable hit to the companies bottom line, and 15% is a little bit short of making the company entirely unprofitable; this means that the fines range from hurting or stunting the growth of a company for one privacy related issue in whatever country is enforcing this law. This also means that on the high end bankruptcy will loom over any company that has 2-3 privacy issues in any given year.

Addendum: if you were wondering, about the numbers for 15%, the earnings in 2024 for apple would be 35b or a 37% decrease, and for Google it is 47.5b or a 48% decrease.

For web browser’s, check librewolf or brave, I would lean further towards librewolf just because it’s oss which is something I value.

For search engines, we’re in a weird spot right now because Microsoft is restricting the use of Bing’s search API, but duck duck go is good, and ecosia as well, but they both may be in a rough spot soon.

Work computer you can’t do much other than ask your supervisor to ask about moving away from ai stuff, all you can do directly is limit your personal information on your work station.

For phones, If you have apple, sorry, if not, you could look into changing the operating system on it to something like e/os or graphene os, they are both operating systems that are focused on privacy and security.

If you need anymore information about my recommendations, I am happy to help.

Out of curiosity what devices are giving you these issues? I may know of some alternatives depending.

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.

I would say so, in my opinion the US has an education problem when it comes to fire arms. People are rightfully scared of what they don’t know, but culturally, the people who don’t know that much about them are adamant against learning about them. This coupled with the lack of respect given to them by people who do know how to handle them leads to the position we find ourselves in today.

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 second this, endeavor is for all intents and purposes exactly arch with some extra branding, but what I really like about it is that their community forums are great, so if I run into a problem I can ask in endeavor forums, and if they don’t have a solution I can ask the tech gurus on the arch wiki as well.

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.