> This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.
There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.
This is already the case. Or rather, a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action. That physical action will be performed by a human, who can then be found guilty. If he was ordered to do so by (e.g.) the board, the board will be held as accessory to the crime and cam also be found guilty.
The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.
Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.
> a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action.
Not true. Consider investor-owned utility PG&E in northern California.
"While on probation [for previous felonies], PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 wildfire that wiped out the town of Paradise, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco."
If they know about malfeasance and don't stop it, they are complicit; if they don't know about it, they are grossly negligent. In either case, they should be held accountable for the crimes. Maybe in an ideal world it would not be that way, but since we are seeing corruption run amok in corporate board rooms, it's clear they need a greater incentive to police their organizations.
What we have is a severe lack of enforcement of the laws we do have.
We do have legal mechanisms to hold the individual people criminally liable for criminal offenses the corporation commits, the problem is we don't enforce it.
Boeing just got off scott free for killing 338 people. DOJ told the judge to dismiss the case.
We've also neglected to enforce our own anti-monopoly laws for far too long, and most recently when there could have been actual, real change, we let Google go with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
The laws aren't the problem, the corrupt and paid for DoJ is the problem.
I mean we live in a country where 'defund the police' and 'eliminate jails' are considered somewhat mainstream legal positions (In that there are many politicians elected to office throughout the country who have held these views). All of its stems from a lack of desire to enforce standards.
Given that neither the police nor jails are relevant to corporate violations of the law, do you have a point other than that you don't understand either of those?
There is already a standard of evidence for this: "Knew or should have known". Which covers needing to exercise a certain standard of care, but without the overly rigid definition of strict liability (something that tends to result in very stupid and unfair situations).
The are already liable and have always been liable if it can be shown they had knowledge of it. The logic is already applied. Corporations are not people, but they are legal persons. For some reason, using language that sounds the same makes people confused and causes a large section of society to get irrationally angry.
It's always possible to think up new rules that solve social issues. The challenge is seeing how such rules would ever robustly come into place. In your example, medical lab directors have no lobbying power and less dramatically profitable upside to their activities.
That's exactly my point. It's not hard to figure out how to "put a corporation into prison", the issue is that we've been trained to accept corruption as a normal facet of corporate personhood.
And yet the owners for the benefit of whom those high ranking employees have committed their crimes run free, keeping the spoils. Not even "spoils except for some monetary punishment" is they sold at the right time. Imprisoning CEOs solves depressingly little.
They've already been doing that, just not at scale yet. Trump's political enemies like Latisha James and officials who protest ICE or try to show up at ICE facilities to inspect them.
Kind of hard for the government to “prepare society to move forward” when the AI companies and their financiers lobby for conditions that worsen the ability of society to do so.
They are talking about US suburbs. For example, the house I grew up in is over a mile to the nearest grocery and you have to cross two large intersections on the way.
The intersection stuff sucks, but "over a mile" seems to be between 1.5 to 2km, is that considered far to walk in the US? Measuring where I go to have my morning coffee at a cafe each day, it seems to be 1.3km away, and I walk there and back every morning...
Go to Google Maps, drop the StreeView person anywhere in the US 10 times and count how many times you find yourself in a place where you would be happy to be walking right now. Try and look for sidewalks and pedestrian crossings. It's hard to understand the layout of American cities for the European and Asian mind.
I've been to the US many times and I'm still shocked when I need to drive from this parking lot to that parking lot across the street because it would be dangerous and possibly illegal to just walk there.
Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.
> Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop?
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.
That rips off the advertisers and/or leaves the poor poorer.
For any given ad supported service, one of two things must be true:
(1) the ad spend was more than or equal to the cost of the service for those users
(2) the ad spend was less than the cost of the service for those users
From fork (2), it follows that the service isn't sustainable anyway.
From fork (1), it follows that the buyers of the ad slots in turn only make a profit if those ads led to sales higher than the ad spend.
But for any given poor person, buying that which was advertised on the ad supported service necessarily means spending more than they would have on a non-ad-supported version of the same ad supported services.
or (3), the non-obvious, or non-advertised effects of the service may be valuable enough for powerful people to make the service "profitable" through artificial money flows (e.g. by paying for ads, endless investing, stock price manipulation, etc).
Paying for ads like that is still a subset of fork (1). Even as propaganda, it has to somehow be "worth it" to spend the money.
Endless investing is, depending how you look at it, either not (just) ad supported and preceeds the premise, or it still is ad supported (and hence (1)) just with extra steps to badly hide who is doing it.
Hmm… I suppose the purchase of a vote in a democracy is something that a poor person might not otherwise be able to sell, and where "we advertised and convinced you" is (depending on campaign finance etc. rules) one of the legitimate ways to do it… but even then, for reasons too long to type on my phone, I'd say in this case it would still make the poor poorer.
This assumes that poor people's attention is liquid and can readily be turned to cash whenever they please.
It doesn't matter how much you think my attention is "really worth". If I want the service now, have no cash, but can pay with my attention, I am strictly more enabled than if the service only accepts cash.
The fork between (1), (2) is how much cash their attention is actually turned into.
To put it another way: what's the attention of a poor person really worth, in dollars? Answer is always less than or equal to the amount they can spend.
The comment you were responding to said that the free tiers were a boon for the poor and you responded that they (under the fork of interest) "left poor people poorer".
I mean I supposed every transaction leaves someone poorer of something and richer in something else. I'm not sure of the point though.
I concede that if the ad companies are willing to forgo collecting X dollars in exchange for showing you an ad then it must be worth >=X dollars to the ad company for the person to see the ad.
But it remains true that the poor person has no way to convert their attention directly into X dollars, and all that taking away the free tier does is make it so that someone who would have made a trade (of their attention for a service) cannot do so.
I fail to see how. Having ad-subsidized access to Facebook and YouTube has not reduced poverty, hunger or made housing and healthcare more affordable for them. The overwhelming majority have not used it to up-skill or improve their income prospects. Predatory "free" pricing appears to have simply made the poor more easily targeted by propaganda and advertising.
Have they though? Have you seen the scammy, misleading, trash ads that litter most sites and wondered, "who falls for this crap and gives these people money?"
Google thinks the same of me and I don't even edit the URL. I can have a session working just fine one night and come back the next day, open a new tab to search for something, and get captcha'd to hell. I'm fairly sure they just mess with Firefox on purpose. I won't install Brave, Chrome, or Edge out of principle either. Safari works fine, but I don't like it.
Google has gotten amazingly hostile toward power users. I don't even try to use it anymore. It almost feels like they actively hate people that learned how to use their tools
Sure. If Smedley Butler has been less disillusioned by his work history and successfully carried forward the business plot it’s pretty easy to imagine.
Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.
Parasitic worms are huge, complex multicellular animals that co-evolved to sometimes survive the immune system response to their presence; Freezing kills them because they are huge and the scale of ice crystals severs important body parts. Living bacteria, living fungi, spores from these, viruses, and importantly heat-resistant toxins produced by these, are what I'm worried about.
One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
This obviously varies by animal, but some meats are safe to eat raw or undercooked if the animal was healthy because the meat doesn't have lots of pathogens inside it. Flash freezing won't kill bacteria or viruses that the immune system of an animal might.
Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive. They're literally swimming through a soup of arthropods, plankton, algae, bacteria, and viruses that would love nothing more to turn their meat into more of themselves. There's always a bigger fish that is trying to eat them, yes, but the smaller critters want to eat as well!
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
> Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive.
Ah, good news for you then! Fish immune system most definitely does NOT stop parasites. Every (and I mean it, every) salmon you've ever eaten had some parts of parasites in them.
That's also why you absolutely should NOT eat fresh-caught salmon without thoroughly cooking it. Industrially-caught salmon is always frozen, and it kills parasites.
These fish grew large enough for humans to eye as food, because parasites were effectively limited by the immune system from devouring the entire fish. It's not perfectly effective, but it doesn't need to be.
The only way Silicon Valley will become pro-family is if they are dragged kicking and screaming by the organized force of their workers. I'm not particularly optimistic.
There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.