My sister corrupted my favorite game. She pressed fast forward on the tape deck while it was playing (and loading). I think that stretched the tape, because after that the game wouldn't load anymore, it would error out.
This happened to me in the early 80's with the family's Tandy Color Computer 1. We didn't have a disk drive, just loaded things using tape drive.
As an aside, I think the modulation used was a simple frequency shift keying, with likely no error correction.
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
I still don't really get what you're envisioning. If a government just has a "strict duty to enforce a civil remedy", how does that "empower individuals"? In particular, does it empower all individuals, or just the ones with the time and money to bring a civil suit?
Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.
Amazon are not resolving your issue in minutes because you have power over them. They do it because it is efficient and profitible for them to keep customers happy. Your actual influence over a trillion dollar company is tiny compaired to your influence as a voter.
One customer taking there business elsewhere does not affect Amazon in any meaningful way. One vote is counted directly. The gap is between how it feels and how the power actually works. This of course assumes you live in a democratic country.
How can a user become a customer in a sense that helps them with this? Not a business, an individual user. In any case, you're playing semantics - Google has effectively become unavoidable in daily life yet solving issues with them is at least as hard as with the government.
This is what China does. The problem is that the application is a little, uh, selective. As soon as you get any kind of corruption it becomes a power play between different factions in the elites.
You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.
And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.
The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.
You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.
It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.
My view is that the corporate death penalty is either dissolution or nationalization, whichever is less disruptive. If you make your company "too big to fail" without hurting loads of people, then use it to hurt people, then the people get your company. If it's a smaller operation it can just go poof. The priority should be ensuring the bad behavior is stopped, then that harm is rectified, and finally that an example be made to anyone else with a clever new way to externalize harm as a business model.
Sounds like a very extreme remedy. Not sure you want whatever government is elected every four years to have this power. Doesn't address the concern re regulatory capture, could lead to worse government incentives. Why not focus on allowing regular people to more realistically hold corporations and their owners/officers liable in civil courts? It's already hard enough given the imbalance of funds, access and power... but often legal doctrine makes the bar to clear impossible at the outset.
I would posit that we are in the current political situation precisely because we do not hold the capital class accountable. Do you sincerely believe that investors losing their investment is a “very extreme” response to gross corporate lawbreaking on their behalf?
We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?
The capital class chooses and presents the people you can vote for. They decide what issues are talked about in the media, they decide who gets the most funding, and they probably have ways of getting rid of or corrupt the people who somehow get popular without first being accepted by at least some people from the capital class.
We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.
They aren't servile puppets because they are children, they are servile puppets because that's what they are paid (and threatened, via financing their more pliable opponents) to do.
Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.
Except drug dealers do not sell you fentanyl just so you can get high because they do not care. They do not care about YOUR OWN intention. People demand, they supply. And these people can have legitimate reasons.
I have not, but perhaps it applies to low-level drug dealers, sure, but big-time suppliers really do not care what your intent is. Many of them sell legitimate pharmaceuticals and they do not ask you what your intent is before they sell it to you, as it is none of their concern.
What would they fear about it? Nationalisation would include compensation (as per relevant laws), so the shareholders don't lose a lot. Maybe the compensation would be less than the potential highs of the stock price, but it's not like they entirely lose out
The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
Problem remains: What do we do, if others don't care and violently start killing our group? Do we reward them, throwing away all our weapons and making them our new government?
This question of course currently has a very real real world parallel.
Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.
Of course that is wrong and it is not immoral; but, if you want to do it in the moral way, you have to consider the lives of any living things (plants and animals), including but not limited to humans. Furthermore, there is the consideration of what exactly has to be sacrificed and what kind of coercion is being used (which might be immoral for a different reason); morals is not as simple like they would say.
But, yes people do find all sorts of justifications, whether or not they are any good (although sometimes it is not immediately clear if it is any good, unfortunately).
Prime example: animal agriculture. By far the biggest driver of biodiversity loss and nature destruction. Yet people justify it constantly with trivial things like taste, convinience, tradition, etc.
> We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Surely "plot the downfall of civilization" is an exaggeration. Knowing that certain actions have harmful consequences to the environment or the humanity, and nevertheless persisting in them, is what many individuals lawfully do without getting together.
The group of pretty much all humans is such a group because we all conspire to burn fossil fuels. Do you really think a global civilization death penalty is a good idea? That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Maybe more parallels to tobacco companies. Incredible amount of taxes and warnings and rules forbidding kids from using it are the solutions to the first problem and likely this second one too.
1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
Deniers should watch the movie "The White House effect". It's a great documentary that shows where and how the strategies of the oil companies changed.
France, Germany, UK, Switzerland , Netherlands, Belgium are a few I'm familiar with. There are of course areas of improvement, but in all of those you have strong press that can annihilate politicians for for crimes, as well as more or less working institutions that punish corruption.
Take a look at France, where a former president went to prison. Okay, it got commuted to house arrest (same sentence as a former PM candidate for president), but that's still a pretty serious punishment, especially for a such a high level politician.
> Take a look at France, where a former president went to prison. Okay, it got commuted to house arrest
There is no house arrest, he appealed and is innocent until proven guilty. People stay in prison after appealing in case there is a serious risk of them fleeing the country or in case they present a danger to society, both of these have been deemed low enough
The US-ians voted twice for Trump so far. I have difficulty seeing the good it did for the world , let alone the USA and the US-ians.
Specifically for corporations, giving everyone in the world the power to vote for dismantling Meta (a world mega-corp) might be interesting to see , though.
He is doing good to his supporters, at least as far as they think. He has delivered all sorts of stupid, cruel and self-destructive stuff that they want.
The problem is that they wants have been steered in that direction by decades of cynical media manipulation, but that's just the nature of democracy.
It almost seems like a collusion among the developed countries to allow in so many immigrants. Canada allowing in almost a million students, mostly from India. USA had basically an open border to the south, probably around 10 million. I'm not sure about Europe.
They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.
I don't really think it's "collusion" so much as it's a question of incentives. Most Western countries want cheap/captive labor, and immigration policy is one way to achieve that with a very long historical precedent. (Much of the Western US railroads were originally built by a predominantly Chinese immigrant workforce; earlier, the colonies relied heavily on Irish laborers as well.)
How much of our labor is comprised of immigrants, documented or otherwise? We've seen what happens when we make it difficult or impossible for cheap labor to make it into farm fields with Brexit: fruit rots on trees and farmers lose piles of money and grocery stores go without berries for the season.
Similarly, what will happen when cheap labor for hotels, construction, landscaping, or manufacturing dries up?
To be clear, I think the status quo is also bad: those jobs trend towards being exploitative, and immigrants are easier to exploit than native populations (generally speaking), my point is that there's been historical economic incentive at the population level to encourage immigration.
> They must have known it was deeply unpopular, yet it was still done.
Realistically something as complex as "immigration policy" is not going to boil down to a single straightforward cause. Similarly, while it certainly was "deeply unpopular" with certain portions of the population, it's absolutely popular with other portions. At a minimum there's been strong humanitarian arguments that resonate with many people, at least in Europe: what else are you going to do with thousands of people fleeing a warzone?
Similarly, the American Dream is so widely known for the promise of being able to make a life there regardless of where you come from. I vividly remember my civics textbooks in US gradeschool being proud of our immigrant heritage and how much newcomers had contributed and achieved there.
Additionally, this is one of those cases where there's counterintuitive forces: restricting immigration leads to a larger undocumented population [1]. If the state's goal is to drive down the number of undocumented immigrants, then it's incentivized in part to make it easier to legally cross the border.
I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
The ME countries you are talking about are UAE, Qatar etc. where a lot of labourers are brought in from South Asian countries for construction etc. That's why you see so many 20-40 males.
Interestingly enough if you change the filter to "US" and rewind the data to 1950 (it looks like that's how far this graph goes), if you advance up by 5 years you can see the "bulge" of baby boomers age up into retirement where they are right now.
Yeah there are plenty of stories about how Intel doesn’t understand how to be a foundry, that it doesn’t appreciate different needs and priorities. Something like they could build muscle cars but never a minivan.
I was reading accounts from the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. One of the survivors was blown out of the house and was stuck neck deep into water. Couldn't get free, so had to wait for rescue. They didn't get much of any radiation sickness afterwards.
It seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system they inherited. I remember Trudeau talking about eliminating first past the post in Canadian elections. But once he got into power he forgot about it.
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
> seems like whatever party gets into power, suddenly doesn't want to change the system
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
>California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
> inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad?
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments.
I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.
In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.
> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.
> What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
> the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
Every amendment to the constitution restructured the government. We are certainly in an era of high divisiveness and a Congress that had abdicated all of its powers to the other branches so that they’re never caught actually holding a position, but the US government system has restructuring built into it
> In history generally the only way governments are ever restructured is through civil war (or invasion)
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Uhm, the Republicans will change their mind quickly when the next Democrat president takes control with the expanded powers they inherited from the Trump administration (even the Supreme court doesn't like to contradict itself so quickly). I'm pretty sure...if America survives at all, we will have a constitutional convention really soon that push through changes because the current status quo has become an unstable mess.
I trust the gang of six’s use of the shadow docket is cleverly designed to make sure only a republican president meets their unitary executive theories.
Do you think they will let the Democrats take control given the risk to them if they take control?
I see Gerrymandering after the supreme court annuls the voting rights acts. And then more shennanigans for a third term.
That's why I premised this with "If America survives at all". There is definitely a possibility that the whole country just falls apart. A constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario.
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
> constitutional convention is more of a best case scenario
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
> Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
> It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution
Sorry, I actually missed this. Thank you for clarifying. (I mixed it up with the New York State process, where the Convention's proposals go straight to popular ratification.)
This happened to me in the early 80's with the family's Tandy Color Computer 1. We didn't have a disk drive, just loaded things using tape drive.
As an aside, I think the modulation used was a simple frequency shift keying, with likely no error correction.