{"id":864,"date":"2012-04-17T05:52:19","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T12:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=864"},"modified":"2013-01-05T20:12:50","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T01:12:50","slug":"fine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=864","title":{"rendered":"Fine!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the many things that fascinate me are fines. \u00a0I’m referring to penalties, not “its all good.” \u00a0Are they proportional? \u00a0Is there a logic? \u00a0Do they work?<\/p>\n

When I was growing up, people used to go to the library (this dates me!). \u00a0Typically the check-out period for a book was 30 days. \u00a0If you kept the book longer than 30 days you had to pay a fine. \u00a0As I remember it was something along the lines of a nickel per day. \u00a0Those nickels added up quickly! \u00a0Be late for a month and it would cost me a buck fifty which was about a third of my weekly allowance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As an adult, one of the fines I’ve paid most often is for parking where I shouldn’t have or longer than I was supposed to. \u00a0Fines in the District of Columbia are not cheap. \u00a0I think the last one I paid was $100. \u00a0If you’re late they double. \u00a0Rack a few of those up and you’re talking real money<\/a><\/strong>. \u00a0Let’s say that you average a couple of parking fines a year. \u00a0And you’re late on one of them. \u00a0That’s $300. \u00a0If you’re the average person with an average family income (which is $51,413<\/a><\/strong>), that’s about .6 percent of your income. \u00a0Not much.<\/p>\n

I read yesterday that the FCC fined Google a whopping $25,000<\/a><\/strong> for for impeding an investigation. \u00a0It had something to do with Google collecting information without permission. \u00a0I don’t know if the FCC was right in fining Google. \u00a0And I don’t know if Google was really guilty of anything. \u00a0But I’m thinking that Google doesn’t look at the FCC fine the same way I did my late library book fines or parking fines.<\/p>\n

According to Gooogle Finance, Google has about $57 billion in the bank<\/a><\/strong>. \u00a0But that’s not liquid assets that they can use to pay the FCC. \u00a0No, their liquid assets (cash and equivalents) are only $23 billion. \u00a0And now that I think of it that’s not the right measure either. \u00a0When I paid library fines or parking fines, I didn’t pay them out of savings, I paid them out of income. \u00a0So what is Google’s income? \u00a0Well for the quarter ending in March 2011 net income was a paltry $3.5 billion<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

So how does $25,000 stack up to $3.5 billion? \u00a0By my math (and I had to search to find an online calculator that would go far enough in decimals to figure this out) it is\u00a0.0007 percent. \u00a0But that is over three months. \u00a0The math gets a bit better if you look at it through the lens of monthly income. \u00a0If we assume that\u00a0Google’s net income is running about $1 billion a month (a bit more than my allowance growing up and slightly higher than the median family income) then they are making net about $33\u00a0million\u00a0every day (this includes Saturdays and Sundays! … those Google people never stop working!). \u00a0 And assuming that these guys are working 24\/7, then the math works out to $22,916 in net income – that is income after expenses and taxes – every minute.<\/p>\n

So that’s the FCC fine. \u00a0The government got sixty seconds of Google’s net profit.<\/p>\n

So here’s the question. \u00a0If the library only charged kids sixty seconds of their allowance after candy, soda, and music … if the DC parking authority only charged us sixty seconds of our income after taxes, rent, and food …<\/p>\n

Do you think we’d ever bring back a book or pay a parking meter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many things that fascinate me are fines. \u00a0I’m referring to penalties, not “its all good.” \u00a0Are they proportional? \u00a0Is there a logic? \u00a0Do they work? When I was growing up, people used to go to the library (this dates me!). \u00a0Typically the check-out period for a book was 30 days. \u00a0If you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[113,77,6,14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}