zlacker

But that's what "up to" means. Almost every indictment is reported as "up to X" with X being the maximum. But it's almost never the maximum.

>>ehsank+(OP)
I mean, it’s a bit like if I reported “Next-gen Tesla could reach speeds as high as 671 million miles per hour”. But in both cases the reality will fall so far short of the maximum that the maximum’s value is essentially irrelevant.

>>ehsank+(OP)
Technically correct isn't actually the best kind of correct. "Local Man Shorts One Share of IBM, Faces Up To One Billion Dollars of Loss" is technically correct, in the sense that there's no real upper bound, but it's not useful, and it's actively misleading.

A reasonable estimate based on sentencing guidelines isn't super hard for a lawyer to work out, and it'd be far more useful for readers, but it's slightly more work and it makes for significantly less exciting headlines.

>>Cobras+P1
I mean, a short stock is unbounded. A sentence for an individual charge is bounded.

Lots of things lawyers do are easy for lawyers to figure out. That doesn't mean a programmer is going to be able to make a reasonable estimate unless they both understand the law and the history of the accused.

>>Cobras+P1
Neither your example or the example below with Tesla speed make sense.

Sentencing is a fairly well defined things. You have guidelines and upper limits that come with specific charges, and then the judge uses those guidelines and various other factors to then sentence somewhere along that spectrum. Anyone read a handful of sentencing news stories is very well familiar with how it works.

>>pixl97+Y4
> I mean, a short stock is unbounded. A sentence for an individual charge is bounded.

Okay fine. Local man shorts 1 share of IBM and pays a penny to get a call option at $huge. He faces a loss of up to $huge!

>>ehsank+(OP)
So then, leaving it off the headline, and including something like your comment as a hefty qualifier when mentioning it in the article would be a way to present that aspect more honestly and without sensationalising it?

>>Cobras+P1
> A reasonable estimate based on sentencing guidelines isn't super hard for a lawyer to work out

I'm not sure what priors the lawyer would use to guess the expected penalty for something as unprecedented as "Crashed a plane on purpose for YouTube likes."

Perhaps the maximum sentence is preferable for the news outlet because it's a number that's definitely not wrong?