That's the reason why the companies should not be fined but the executives that make (or do not make) the decisions need to be punished with jail time.

And before someone say it: no, a company is not some strange entity that operate just because it exist: every decision in a company is made by a person or a group of people.

Excuse me, but gross profit isn't the money the company earns; rather, it's the money the company collects (for services, products, or other items) before deducting all expenses (salaries, research and development, operating costs, and so on).

A company can have 1 trillion $ of gross profit but if they spend 1.1 Trillion $ I would not say they are making money, strictly speaking.

More than that is a sign that this idea that the next quarter must be always better than the past one cannot work indefinitely.

In the end it is more important that the file you produce could be read (correctly) by someone else than that both use the same Office.

So we agree banning cars from.cities is good when the public infrastructure is put in place.

No, we do not agree. A ban is stupid even when there is a decent public infrastructure.
What is needed is to have a public transportation system so good that people do not want to use the car.

Also it’s not like all cars have to be banned fully, make a toll for cars to enter or limit where they can go.

Here they did it.
There are just two results: the problem just moved to the suburbs since the public transportation still cannot replace the private cars and people just changed their habits so they enter the city before the toll's time start and exit after the toll's time end.
Both for a number of reasons but principally because if you need to move around outside rush hours the car is still the best choice, time wyse.

Choose better politicians then...

I am not interested in the tit for tat tactics going on here, I am interested in why everybody around the mediterranean is allowing migrants to be cast over and over into the mediterranean.

Money. Only that.

Money for the smugglers.
Money for the politicians of the ports of departure countries, with a bit of blackmail (help us or we will not "stop" immigration).
Money for the people in the "reception" industry, while most of the people really help who arrive, we had some cases (that we know of) of money that were used to buy expensive items (luxury clothes and so on) by the people who should have used it to help the immigrants.

The immigrants are only a commodity to keep this "industry" going.

Nobody is making any kind of valid argument that this would be different in a non capitalist society.

Because they cannot.
Else they should admit that what they consider better than capitalism have the exact same problems, if not worse, that simply are shown in a different way. Or just totally hidden.

In the US maybe...

You mean like the right to not have your likeness fed into an algorithm and assembled into pornographic content without your consent?

What you are describing here is just a sexual fantasy.
It could be debatable that someone cannot imagine to have sex with the hot actress of the day (or the hot colleague) or to create a fake nude image of her to fantasize on, without harming in any way the object of his fantasy.

Or does having your image laundered by an LLM somehow magically make that ok?

It depends. How do you consider a personal sexual fantasy involving other people ?

That said, since the problem is the CSAM image in itself, as it should be, punish who create and distribute the images (like the real ones), not the platform/tool used to create them.
Else you should also punish who build the camera used to take the real images, don't you think ? (btw, you would never be able to punish someone who draw a CSAM image and keep it for itself, like you would be never be able to punish who create a fake image of the hot actress and keep it for itself, without violating his privacy)

Artificial CSAM is constructed from real CSAM,

I would not be that sure. 30 years ago it was possible to create photorealistics images with renderes (ok, you needed days of rendering probably)

It was possible to create fake xxx images combining the image of the face of a person (famous actor/actress, common guy/girl) with a body from a image scanned from a xxx magazine in a way that it looks like an original image (there were entire subgroups on Usenet dedicated to this).

I bet any decent AI image creator could now do way better than what was done by hand 30 years ago.

to the point that real CSAM victims have sued people who generated material resembling the victim.

Also nothing new. Do you know the origin of the "Every protagonists of this story is a finctional charaters and [blah, blah blah]" you see at the end of every movie ? Basically same problem you cite.

Marketing data is always kept close by the owners but they sell access or the data would be worthless.

So your scenario is moot.
The starting point is that company A get my data, then sell them to company B that then share them for free back to company A.

If the original company wants information about you, they don’t download everything from a marketing company. Like using Google, you type in your search and get a result. That search result is used and forgotten. You don’t have to download all of Google to use the results.

If the original company want my informations, it need to ask me the informations (and only the ones needed for the transaction) declaring the use it will do of such informations.
If the original company "googled" my informations, use them to contact my or to try to sell me something, I can ask where they get them and the answer cannot be "we googled them around". That is why the GDPR ask for an explicit consent to share personal informations with third parties.

There are special cases, like a company need to share information with a payment gateway or to retain information for a longer period as dictated by some other laws, but generally a company, without an explicit permission, need ask only the information needed for the transaction and to keep the informations only the time it need to complete the transaction. And even with an explicit permission it can not keep the information for more that a given number of years (3 if I remember correctly) without asking for permission again with the default as "if I don't answer, my answer is no".

The 3rd party wouldn’t be fined because if you knew who they were, you could send them a Gdpr and they would respond.

Your starting point is that I don't know who the third part is and I don't know my data were sold.
But te 3rd party would be fined if they were found with my data without being able to offer my persmission to have them when asked.

The problem is knowing who these companies are.

The GDPR state that any company must list all the 3rd parties it shares data with.

True, but then the data about me you have are useless if you only look at them.

There is no way that you get my data, you sold them to a third part (and here you are already at fault), this third part then share back the data with you for free and then you do nothing with my data, which you asked to begin with. Seriously ?

And I forgot, the third part is at fault too because they have my data without any reasonsand if they get caught they pay a hefty fine.

And if you don’t live in a city and don’t plan on going to a city why does it even concern you if cars get banned from cities?

Because mayor cities are not an entity that live in a isolated system.
I may not need to go to the city every day, but maybe I need to go every now and then. If you ban cars in a city, I am hit too the moment I could need to go to the city for whatever reason (parents, medics, whatever)

What they are usually doing though, it is not banning the cars from the cities but simply banning the car from outside entering the city, without improving the public transportation system (sometimes making it worse).

Right, so punish every company that make a product.
After all a company who make knives do not put any safeguards in place to avoid one of their knife if used to kill someone.
Or a telcom do not put any safeguards in place to avoid someone use a phone line to harass someonelse.
Or a car company since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their car is used for a robbery.

Or [any company] since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their product is used to [commit a crime]

Sounds better ?

For the significantly fewer in society who aren’t at all negatively affected by the vast majority benefiting by the elimination of car infrastructure and building of walkable cities and public transportation?

The majority of the people already live outside the mayor cities (and in my opinion even more people will leave the cities).
Having a walkable city with a good transportation system is useless for who live outside.
That Milano is walkable and have a subway train every 3 minutes is useless for me if I live outside and need 1 hour to travel the 20 km distance from where I live using a train.

Literally nothing, aside from now also having trains to the bigger cities and busses in their smaller towns.

Train to bigger cities where never the real problem, they were always present. Sometimes they have margings to be way better, but they exist.
What do not exist, and never will, is your busses in the small cities. Small cities have not a critical mass to make a public transportation viable, both inside the small town and to link nearby towns, without going to the big city of the area.

Simple:

1. make "no" the default answer when asking
2. massive fine, in the order of 50% of total revenue, the first time you get caught to be paid before the eventual appeal, which if lost raise the fine by 50%. If not paid in 90 days, the CEO goes to jail until it is paid. From now on for 2 years the company must show that it follow the law.
3. mandatory jail time for the CEO the second time you get caught with no option for parole or any other alternative sentence like a fine or whatever.

Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.

I know, almost impossible... :-(

The problem is that 6000 cycles in laboratory are not the same than 6000 cycles in real life scenarios.

It would be interesting to put that battery out in the field and to see how it perform in real life conditions (assuming that they are cheap enough to be produced in large volumes)

If they are really that good you are right, but there are always a lot of revolutionary advance in lab that never leave it.

Or, maybe, people realized that there is no reason to get a new phone every year.

It is interesting to see how people seems to think that if Ukraine (the victim) surrender everything will be ok while nobody think that Russia (the aggressor) could just stop.

I've seen somewhere else... let me think... oh yes, in the 1930's, just before WWII...

That’s absurd, what is anybody’s source on this claim?

History maybe ?