Technology

I really don’t like how class actions work. The payouts are almost always a pittance. If the judicial system really wanted to use them as a deterrent for shitty companies doing shitty things to large groups of people, class action damages should be structured such that every claimant gets $N… and the upper limit of valid claimants is not limited, though those claimants would still be subject to validation and verification. This would have the express intent of exposing a company to immediately catastrophic and unrecoverable financial damage.

Edit: and in terms of payout priority, the claimants should automatically go to the head of the line - before investors, shareholders, executives, employees, contractual obligations, etc. The process should be intentionally disruptive, painful, and harmful. The deterrent intent of the policy would be not only to provide catastrophic consequences for people and corporations who engage in broadly harmful and predatory activities, but also to strongly discourage anyone from doing business with entities like that.

There are a lot of problems with capitalism, but for all its flaws, I do still think that it can provide some good influences under the appropriate circumstances and constraints. This should be one of the constraints. Capitalism should not reward those who maliciously exploit populations in a systematic, malicious, amoral, and unsustainable fashion.