Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.
Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.
The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.
Remember when everyone was talking about how an amoral AI paperclip optimizer could destroy the planet? We have those, they're called corporations and they optimize dollars.
> Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.
I had a pretty spirited argument that was ongoing for about a week with my friend, who was my co-founder at the time, where my position was similar to yours. (Note: this is all in the context of U.S. Law and Government) His argument was that it's impossible for any entity to be amoral because whether a corporation or person, both are treated as persons or entities meaning that they can provide their will. So, once a corporation reaches a point it indeed can be moral because it goes beyond a legal instrument and is dictated by a collective staff, leadership, and/or stakeholders. He would have said that in the case of a solo entrepreneur's company, it would just be an abstracted will of the entrepreneur. I eventually got to the point where I couldn't argue against the legal precedence of Corporate personhood. [0] I think there is a point when a corporation outgrows their founder and becomes self-sustaining where it's corporate culture dictates it's "morals".
I agree that a corporation can make what would be perceived as moral actions, exactly due to the human staff running it, but that does not erase that morals does not factor into the objective function that a corporation is meant to optimize. This is exacerbated as the morals of its actions become difficult to analyze for the individual and the moral actions of employees becomes less individually significant. The concerted effort, on which the fitness of the corporation is ultimately measured, will still amount to the optimization of the bottom line.
This is especially true when the corporation outgrows the control of its original founders who may have had a moral vision.
In the end the analogy I am making is that a corporation has reins, and as it grows it becomes increasingly unwieldy for the handlers (= staff) to direct it where it does not want to go (away from profit).
It is of course easy to have a corporation act moral when this objective overlaps with optimization of its objective function. I don't consider such a happy occurrence to qualify as truly moral, however.
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane...
For that to be always true, the customers would have to be amoral too. Many companies find success in differentiating themselves to appeal to morally conscious consumers, and even more companies find themselves having to react to them from time to time.
But that is not moral, is it? The company is still not beholden to a willful idea of morality, but rather sociopathically concerned with appearance. For companies where this matters little this concern for appearance is quickly shed.
You could say the same about any social contract. The criticism applies to any person as much as it applies to any company. It’s the same as saying that altruism doesn’t exist because it’s logically impossible to conceive a scenario where an altruistic act doesn’t benefit the actor.
A "scientifically-supportable theory"* is one that describes a phenomenon that can be observed sufficiently to form a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis by experiment.
In what way would you propose to test the simulation hypothesis by experiment?
(* I'm assuming you're using the word "theory" loosely here.)
6.5 years for most devices, 5 years for some legacy cases, and it is a soft limit ie. they don't automatically enter EOL, they just stop guaranteeing the updates.
6.5 is pretty respectable. Not quite like Windows or general purpose Linux which can be upgraded almost indefinitely. I have Vista laptops released mid-2009 (>8yrs old) that run Windows 10 rather well considering their age. Of course, no one would have guaranteed 8yrs on those devices. I'd wonder what experiences people with EOL Chrome devices out there are having with upgrades.
I imagine you could still update with some wench-work. An EOL date of 6.5 sounds to me like a way to say that "beyond this point we will stop testing and ensuring compliance, and to avoid fucking over your relic (in PC terms), with an update that is untested on your specific hardware, we simply disable the automatic updates. Good luck."
> JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.
You mean "introduced", right? Back before the modern web, when we all expected software to run on our machines, there was no responsiveness and latency problems, because data didn't travel over the wire unless it absolutely had to.
Not in practice, given that in reality of this use case, JS code also does network requests, which tend to be at least as slow as downloading a HTML page.
That said, what I meant is modern JS enabled moving into the web things that should have stayed local. It's literally two step backwards (moving software into "the cloud") and one step forward (giving back some responsiveness through AJAX).
Most of the time when you put JS on your page, what you're doing is breaking the thing that would - without JS - still correctly do what it's actually supposed to do.
While I generally agree with the sentiment of "do more by coding less", and minimalist user interfaces, there are plenty of cases where you throw a whole lot of functionality out the window by outright banning JS.
> WWW solved an entirely different problem, namely distribution and communication.
> JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.
I don't think either of these statements is correct. There wasn't a problem of 'responsiveness' and 'interaction' on http to begin with, in fact what Sun and Netscape did with javascript was to overengineer the web because they saw it as a business opportunity to add client-side code. http was designed (badly) to exchange hypertext documents, not to perform transactions over the server, or render video-games, or play music and videos, and certainly not to transfer files, for the latter ftp was desgined (also badly).
While I accept that my description of JS et. al. might be contentious, I don't see that you have argued against my piece on the WWW in general.
Regarding latency and responsiveness I agree that they are issues that depend largely on your use cases and your skill at implementing solutions. In this regard I can agree that some pages simply don't need JS. It is also being misused for ads and tracking to a degree that is problematic and can in itself cause issues.
Wanting not to be discriminated against / handled separately != wanting special treatment. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The only people who consider that an entitled position are those who think there is nothing wrong with relegating people to second-class citizen status, even if they refuse to consider it as such.
Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.
Store credential information where it is used. It is not used by the repository, so it is an improper location for it.
If someone gains access to a system that uses the credentials, then there is, in principle, no difference between puppeteering that system versus stealing its credentials.
IANAL but it is my understanding that if those tax reduction schemes are legal many companies are legally bound by their stock holders to exploit them, or else be found negligent in their duties.
>... if those tax reduction schemes are legal many companies are legally bound by their stock holders to exploit them, or else be found negligent in their duties.
That's not the case. There is no way a company's management could be sued for "gross negligence in tax planning".
If shareholders are unhappy about this issue, their recourse is the same one that's always available to them: elect a new Board of Directors and hire new management that will follow the board's guidance on tax evasion schemes.
I admit to be completely out of my depth, but my understanding is that it is a fiduciary duty of the directors to act in the best interest of the shareholders. Tax planning is a huge part of profit and thus shareholder value, so wouldn't such "gross negligence" represent a breach of fiduciary duty?
Suing directors for negligence is not easy at all. It's hard to imagine a shareholder lawsuit that basically says: "As a director you didn't guide management to move operations to Jersey, so we want you to pay us $100 million"... It's even harder to imagine a US court being friendly to such a case.
The greatest example of board negligence in this industry (that I can think of) in recent years would be when Hewlett-Packard's board hired Léo Apotheker as CEO in 2010. The board members had never met the man and his career had been on a different continent, yet they didn't even interview him in person before giving him the job!
Apotheker spent $10.2 billion to buy a British company named Autonomy. Soon after he was fired. Only a year later, HP was forced to write down $8.8 billion of Autonomy's purchase price.
That enormous loss was directly the fault of HP's board for hiring such a terrible CEO and letting him do the terrible deal. But shareholders didn't have any recourse; the best they could do is vote on a new board.
What if the reason big companies avoid tax is that the shareholders ensure someone values fiscal results over supporting the country they earned the finance in is in the directors chair.
Yes, that's exactly why American corporations do the things they do.
It's not a legal obligation though. Shareholders could choose to have corporations managed differently. That kind of "pro-tax" activist shareholders don't exist, but it's not inconceivable that large public funds (pensions etc.) could become such.
Perhaps if governments started penalising corporate tax avoidance by confiscating a percentage of a company's shares the shareholders would be incentivised to make sure whoever is running the company will pay taxes fairly.
If companies are duty-bound to act unethically (if legally) for the sake of share holder profits then I think that speaks to a flaw in the system driving these decisions.
This is a common misperception, but it is incorrect. There is no fiduciary duty to avoid or minimize tax, and conversely no legal duty to maximize taxes either. It is up to each company to choose how aggressively they pursue these tax-avoiding strategies.
They're only thus bound if increasing stakeholder returns over time is an explicit condition of their contract (which I imagine is the case for executive contracts in many if not most public companies, though I don't know - can anyone confirm?)
But there's nothing in the (US, at least) legal definition of a fiduciary that proscribes increasing share holder profits by any means necessary. That's simply a convenient myth spread to normalize cutthroat, profit-seeking behavior at all levels of business.
Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.
The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.