The discount rate

If you're just an average motorist who lets a couple of traffic citations pile up, the authorities would  hound you to death. But if you're a railroad that racks up more than 1,500 tickets for blocking city streets, that's a different story:

Until Tuesday, 1,551 tickets issued to Norfolk Southern since at least 2004 had remained unprosecuted by the Lake County prosecutor's office.
[. . .]

The railroad initially had faced more than $850,000 in penalties, but on Tuesday wrote one check for $50,000 to cover the two settlements, which are still subject to the court's approval.

That's about 6 percent. If the rest of us had to do only 6 percent of the time (or fine) for doing the crime, it'd be quite a different world, wouldn't it?