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Let's say this guy gets 2 years for conspiracy. Not even doing the crime. He loses 2 of about 45 years in the workforce, or vaguely 5% of his lifetime income.

For this to be proportional, ticketmaster should lose either 2 full years worth of income, or 5% of all profits in perpetuity. The amount they were fined for actually doing the crime was a rounding error by comparison.



Discussing the length of a prison sentence strictly in terms of income lost is also greatly understating the actual severity of the punishment.

I would gladly give up say 10% of my lifetime earnings for all sorts of things, but I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything.


> I wouldn't trade 4.5 years of my healthy adult life for anything

But you probably do, just not on purpose. It's smaller decisions that you don't realize involve trading 'healthy adult life' for money/convenience/pleasure/release. And of course, the work hours you put in are very directly trading healthy adult life for money.

Opportunity cost is not something that we, as humans, are particularly good at. It is of course possible that you are exceptional, in which case you can assume I'm speaking from my own fallible experience of existence.


You're correct, I should have been more precise. 4.5 years lost all at once is what is unacceptable. I recognize work and all of life's "chores" take time, and that every decision I make cuts off an infinitude of other choices. Though most chores have a positive reward for doing them, while prison has very little.

The larger point I intended was that for most people (especially handsomely-paid professionals like software devs) time is a more constrained resource than money.

Lastly, time lost all at once is worse than time loss incrementally, i.e. if I could serve my 4.5 year sentence 40 hours a week, that doesn't sound so bad, or that unfamiliar... ;)


No, marginal cost of free time gets very expensive for most people.

While I'd be willing to do my current job for X, if you wanted to double my hours, you'd need to pay me than 2X.


I agree, but unfortunately, bribery, I mean, lobbying has a great ROI. It's cheap to buy your way into Congress.




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