If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class

Too bad I don't live in Texas, and fuck you Texas, what are you going to do?
- I live in Texas. I know what they want to do. And they cant. The answer to all this is that they are powerless. Continue on as normal and shit post to your heart's content.
  That's the fun thing about the Internet. Volume beats quality. Amazon and tiktok are corporate proof of this fact. It takes a good damn army to make wikipedia barely functional, and since 4chan crashed, there is an actual apocalyptic army of degens with nothing but free time and bandwidth.
  as a patron and contributor to the mind sink that is the Internet, they can never beat the valueless shit show of volume that our degenerate minds can contribute.
  Carry on you worthless shitlords. Magnificent bastards every one. Do your worst.

For the filthy rich, the ONLY penalty is very often a fine, and it's a very small one proportionate to the profit they made from the crime. It's the cost of doing business.
The filthy rich only do jail time if they bilked other filthy rich people out of their money.
- Rich people are far less likely to do time, because "the companies I own are responsible for other people's livelihoods, you'd be punishing them as well" is generally accepted by most courts of law as a valid reason not to jail them. If they were less short-sighted they'd be treating the fact that the person had power and responsibilities as an aggravating circumstance and giving them longer sentences...

Here in Finland, many fines are "means-tested" i.e. based on one's income.
For example, a person gets caught speeding 30 over the limit.
Person A has monthly income of 3000, the fine is 180.
Person B has monthly income of 50,000, the fine is 100,000.
The fine is intended to inflict the same amount of pain, regardless of one's income. For a rich person, it makes sense to just hire a chauffeur for 35,000 a year and pay their 180 fine if they get a ticket.
- That last line is somewhat the problem with this. Way too many loopholes around this, many rich people barely have income on paper but work around it in other ways
  
  Let’s clarify the objection. Is the concern that a wealthy person arrives faster? Or that they can legally hire someone to absorb a penalty designed to equalize discomfort?
  Because if what offends us is that inequality persists despite mechanisms meant to neutralize it, then the issue isn’t the mechanism, it’s the expectation that justice should feel like equal suffering. That’s not justice. That’s calibrated envy.
  Means-tested fines don’t eliminate structural advantage; they merely simulate fairness by scaling pain. They don’t dismantle hierarchy, they accessorize it with the appearance of equity. When a wealthy individual hires a chauffeur to avoid tickets, they aren’t cheating the system. They’re operating within it, creating employment, not evading law.
  If that offends our moral instincts, we should question the instincts, not the transaction. Because a system that punishes prosperity instead of regulating behavior will always confuse justice with vengeance.

Oh so a first amendment violation as a law.
- You thoughtless person, where’s the disclaimer?! I dislocated a rib laughing at this
  
  Ahh JD's true form!
- It actually sounds sane, but no, won't pass 1A muster in any court.
  https://old.lemmy.world/comment/16787464
  
  The issue is whether that matters. Texas has always been a testbed for things like "can we just ignore the Constitution" and "can we just ignore court orders".

The law applies only to office holders, candidates, campaigns, or to people who buy or sell political advertising.
People and platforms who post and distribute content without exchanging money are exempted.
All the big media firms: tv, radio, ISPs, Internet content platforms, and billboard operators are exempted when they just run someone else's ads. The people who are liable are the ones who place the ads.
The requirement is to include a disclosure message when depictions of a public figure have been altered by technology: Photoshop, AI, deepfake audio, or whatever else. The content itself is not censored, it just has to be noticed that it's artificial.
"Superficial" alterations are exempted from the notice message, for example, changing the color balance on a video.
- What does this actually accomplish then?
  
  Hard to say for sure, but probably more "fine print" style notices on TV ads and billboards.
  This could conceivably be used to prosecute dirty tricks-style campaigns. For example, many years ago there was an anonymous mailer campaign against the incumbent mayor in my city where a photograph of him was photoshopped to insinuate that had been beaten up, when he really hadn't. That kind of thing might become the target of this if it becomes law.
  It's also possible that federal courts will step in and carve out some exceptions for obviously fake parody stuff. Texas law cannot override the first amendment.
  
  A chilling effect and job security for lawyers.
  
  About as much as Trump trying to do a pushup 🤷
- Honestly sounds reasonable to me. But it would be nice if they could include deterring that over dramatic black-and-white effect lol.
  
  It sounds reasonable to me, too, but given that it was passed by the Texas legislature, I'm certain there's something nefarious about it. Texas politics is dirty tricks all the way down.
- But will they face consequences?

It irks me when rich people will just pay the fine rather than following the law. Example: Parking in handicap spots and not caring about a $250 fine. It is like paying $5 parking fee for low income drivers.
Finland actually has speeding fines proportional to your income! In 2002, a Finnish millionaire was fined €103,000 (over $100,000 USD at the time) for going 75 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. (47mph in a 32mph zone)
- Like the Tesla in New York City which has racked up $38,000 worth of parking tickets?
- So if you are homeless, you can commit crimes for free?
  
  If you are homeless, it costs almost nothing to park your Tesla in the handicapped space. Huge loophole.
  
  Minimum sentencing.
  
  Depends on the crime, but there have always been shit laws nobody enforces

Come at me bro!
- I can tell this is fake. Trump would have bigger moobs.
  
  The horse would also have snapped in half.
  
  "My moobs are the biggest, most beautiful moobs in the world. Skinny Joe Biden wishes he had moobs like mine."
  
  Putins nipple shines through. Just just copied Putin's body.
- This one time Nazguls tried to look like humans.

I thought that was some sort of weird cyberpunk monocle 🙀

I'll say it until I'm dead: fines need to be calculated by income and net worth, increasing exponentially. The only way for a fine to act as a deterrent is for it to cost more relative to a person or company's ability to pay it.

Damn, from democracy to lèse-majesté in 100 ~~months~~ days, congrats guys!
- Days*
  
  Oops, you're right. 100 months will be the length of Trump's second term.

And so, the era of the illegal meme dealer has begun
About time
- Pssssst... Hey buddy. You looking for some memes? I got the good stuff...
- shady guy opens trenchcoat
  "I got spicy, i got deep-fried, I've even got some rage comics if you're old enough to remember em. $375 for a ½ gig, $700 for a full gig"

Lol. Have fun trying to enforce that while real crimes are happening.
Texas set to overtake Florida for America's redheaded stepchild.
- The trick is, they don’t really care about enforcing it - just having it as a potential charge to pursue when they hate someone.
  This just in: Breathing is illegal. They’ll only bother prosecuting critics of Trump though.
- As always with these laws, they are a tool designed to be used selectively against someone you already decided you don't like.

Disclaimer: Go fuck yourselves.

base fines on income as Finland does for traffic violations
- The rich can always find ways around the law, including income-based fines. See the death of singer Kirsty McColl.
  
  They can afford the best/worst lawyers
- What does the average traffic violation set back the average person in Finland?
  
  depends on their income
  
  Few hundred euros if you’re minimum wage, IIRC

Holy shit I didn't know he was part of a gang

"herp derp jerb creators deserve to be above the law!"
What our robber barons have convinced many to most Americans to believe to spin their greed disease into being somehow noble, and what those robber barons unreflectively believe about themselves.
There are developed nations, which we most certainly are not, that literally prorate vehicular fines as a percentage of income. We would never do that here, because this shithole, including tens of millions of self-hating, deluded fools, believe the person that exploits thousands of laborers for private profit deserves to risk your life doing 90 on main street on the basis of their successful exploitation.
https://www.mic.com/articles/79039/the-untold-story-of-alice-walton-s-dwi-incident
- The very definition of neo-liberalism: neo-feudalism. They can do whatever they want. Rules are for us, the serfs, not for them.

Who are they going to pay to evaluate all the damn memes on the internet? What counts as alteration? Resizing, cropping, other basic photo manipulations that people use all the time? Has a politician ever used images of themselves without touch up?

Specific to the fine: unless it scales with net worth/income.
Also, fuck Republicans.
- I bet Trump has other people pay fines for him. "Take it out of the special Russian account."

Ms13 is everywhere they even alter images with their art department mspaint

That penis was actually there, not interpreted, don't do this. The penis was tattooed right on his face.

Is that as high as he can count?
…11, 12, 13, man, camera, tv, Putin….