Slashdot Mirror
Google Bans Ads For Payday Loans (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has decided it doesn't want to promote predatory lending practices that are harmful to consumers, so the company has decided to ban ads for payday loans and some related products from their ads systems. "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Google's product policy director, David Graff, writes in a blog post. Payday loans often come with extremely high interest rates if they aren't paid back immediately, which can push people further in debt. Georgetown's Center on Privacy and Technology notes in a statement, "Payday lenders profit from people's weaknesses -- particularly poor people and people of color. Every time someone clicks on those ads, search engines profit, too." While Google may lose some revenue in the short-run by removing these ads, the move will likely benefit the company in the long-run (positive PR doesn't hurt) as Google users should have more trust in the ads they come across. Payday loans will be banned from Google globally starting June 13th.
Now when are they going to ban this one weird trick that almost broke the Internet among all the other forms of idiot bait.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
and raise 2 harmfuls. maybe your ad is next.
That's a fair point, but I don't know if a direct comparison to prostitution is reasonable. The obligatory John Oliver segment does point out that they are as close to illegal fraud as anything in the banking industry, and if you cut advertising, you should reduce the number of customers.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Even if such loans are "predatory" and "harmful" to consumers, this will just increase the strength of the variables that Google sees as being predatory and harmful in the first place. It's unfortunate that, due to either ignorance or cynicism, Google is the one harming consumers the most. http://reason.com/blog/2016/05...
The Reason article is just one long Nivana fallacy/perfect solution fallacy.
Also, it keeps comparing governments banning stuff to Google (a private company) doing so. There is a big difference between a government and a private company in cases like this. Since they are presenting a libertarian argument, they should know the old libertarian counter argument about private companies - if you don't like what Google is doing, use Bing or some other search engine.
users should have more trust in the ads they come across
Hahahahaha, no. That ship sailed a long time ago.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
"they are as close to illegal fraud as anything in the banking industry"
Could have saved some words and just said "they are legal".
"they are as close to illegal fraud as anything in the banking industry"
Could have saved some words and just said "they are legal".
No, there is real political effort to stop this kind of business... But it's hard...
And oh, they are most likely are illegal it's just hard to prove that their intentions are bad (Note: having bad intentions is rarely legal).
But really, this comes down to you not electing politicians who is willing to work on fixing (A) the political system, or (B) all of these types of "crimes" where regulatory and enforcement agencies don't have enough proof to shut them down.
Did he REALLY say that? Ok no exactly but what would make "people of colour’s" weaknesses any more vulnerable than 'white people' (though of course white is a colour too so this whole differentiation is racist to begin with).
O what he MEANT was that by percentage 'people of colour' are more poor than others...but he already said 'pool' so why would the extra distinction be necessary? O, of course so we can throw in the race card of course. But how about we just leave this at 'weaknesses of the poor'...what does it MATTER what colour they are?
Push come to shove I'm absolutely disgusted & fed-up with this whole 'people of colour' thing like there are people who have a colour & others that don't...besides its just a way to say 'non-white' but if they actually said 'non-white' that would be OBVIOUSLY racist rather than allowing stupid people to believe they aren't actually being racist....
Do we have to bring race into everything. Payday loans prey on poor people, period end of story. People of both color and means dont fall prey to payday loans schemes, in fact i'd say its racist to suggest they do.
so called "payday loans" may indeed be harmful. however there is a method to ban harmful things; democratically enacted legislation. (indeed some states and countries have baned them).
but should we trust and rely on big corps like google to nanny us and make us safe according to their own vague moral code?
would google next decide interest over certain percentage as harmful? perhaps google would decide all interest taking as usury, and ( like some fundamental religious nuts/muslim countries now, and many Christian ones in past) ban all interest loan ads?
where is the limit ?
of course google wont ban other loan ads, and many other 'harmful' ads, because that would be harmful to its bottom line.
may be google's limit on 'do no evil' absurdity is how much of its revenue will be effected by such decisions.
and there is nothing wrong with that . companies are supposed to pay attention to their bottom line.
but don't be a hypocrite and launch pr stunts like this, taking a public holier than thou attitude, because you ban some "evil" that conveniently do little harm to your profits, while ignoring other "evils" that may harm your profits.
This is just a token gesture by the google trying to convince us "Don't be evil" is still relevant, when now the actual motto is "All your attention are belong to google".
Oh yes. It also persuades me that the payday lender ads were not particularly profitable, so the token gesture was cheap enough.
Here are a couple of suggestions that the google could implement if they actually cared about being less evil:
1. Stop supporting scammers in Google Play by exposing the business models. They don't have to force the developers to reveal every detail of their business model, but they could provide a "financial model" tab and let the developer have his say, in many cases followed by supporting commentary for the parts the google can actually check on. It would also be a natural place for google to report on any complaints against the developer, but the basic idea is to give us sufficient information to make informed choices about which apps to install. (Obviously it should be linked to the permissions page so we could assess such things as whether the developer's business model for a flashlight app actually justifies permission to read our Contacts.)
2. Stop supporting spammers dropboxes for the suckers (especially for 419 scams). Seems like a no-brainer, but evidently google can't figure out a way to shut the spammers down quickly enough to discourage them. Hey, google. Why don't you let us help you? I'd be glad to flag the dropbox so you can nuke it before the spammer can harvest the suckers. (Same approach can be expanded to ALL email harvesting with a simple convention: If some other email service is slow about nuking the spammers' dropboxes, then Gmail can become slow for ALL of the email to and from that email service.)
3. Stop supporting wholesale pwning on YouTube. This one is especially amazing in terms of the brazenness of the criminal enterprise and the many years it has gone on. The same obvious searches will still produce pages of fresh pwn-your-computer results that could again be dealt with. Obviously google is profiting from supporting these criminals and their zombot networks, though I can't imagine how. It seems like they are just supporting competitors for stealing attention.
4. Stop stealing our personal information. Okay, that one isn't practical given the nature of the monster the google has become, but at least they could give us some options to make the theft less obvious. Take Gmail as an example. They system could be inverted (as an option, perhaps a paid option) with all of my email stored on MY computer and the analysis and search requests (for the same ads) could be run locally on my end.
What we REALLY need is an economic system that would let a non-EVIL company compete effectively against the google by offering such anti-EVIL services and options.
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If you are poor or have bad money management you may have a choice like.
1) Having your electricity turned off.
2) Overdrafting your checking or exceeding your credit card limit triggering large fees
3) Going to payday lending service and paying the fee.
I assume the payday lending fee is much less than option 2. This is the only reason why banks are so angry and lobby to get rid of their competitors.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
So will Google lend money to these high risk, low equity individuals, whose only way to live through the month before the next paycheck arrives may be by borrowing money from these so called 'loan sharks', people who are willing to lend money out to the highest risk individuals?
You can't handle the truth.
It's a nice gesture, but they need to drive through my old neighborhood sometime. In the southeast, it used to be that the liquor store to church ratio was the gauge of a town's squalor. These days, you can't go drive down a street without passing a handful of payday loan places. Internet advertising isn't to draw people in who otherwise wouldn't consider a payday loan, it's to make sure your slice of the pie is the biggest. Some cities pass ordinances limiting the number of payday loan places, but in many towns, one place can easily become five. As a result, keeping an adequate flow of new customers becomes increasingly important. Buying ads for "payday loan bessemer alabama" is just one way to do that, and is honestly preferable to the ongoing battle for "most obnoxious LED display" that many places are engaging in.
In my area, they're extremely aggressive: I live in a apartment complex, and they apparently buy names/addresses from the credit agencies. I used to receive about 3-4 "personal loan" offers from the local payday place a year until I got around to renewing my prescreen opt out.
These things are poison. Thinking of them in terms of interest rates just confuses the matter. Once someone living paycheck-to-paycheck uses a payday loan whose fees + interest works out to (say) 15% of their paycheck they basically have to live the next two weeks on just 85% of what they usually live off of. Thus guaranteeing they'll be short again next paycheck, forcing them to take another payday loan, and driving them further underwater.
When I learned that a not-insignificant number of our employees were using these, I got the board to approve no-fee advances on your paycheck for emergencies (i.e. on request once a month, after manager approval if you needed it more often - to prevent someone from abusing this to go from living paycheck-to-paycheck, to living half-paycheck-to-half-paycheck). If you're one week into the 2-week pay period, you've already earned your pay for that first week. The company is just holding onto your money to simplify the bookkeeping. If you have an emergency and need to tap that paycheck early, there's really no reason for the company to refuse (unless they're also surviving payroll to payroll).
The long-term solution is to build up enough savings so you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck. But employer-approved pay advances can help stop someone from slipping into the negative due to a one-time unexpected expense, at which point these loan sharks will make sure they stay underwater.
And contrary to what someone else commented, these loans do not prey on poor people. This isn't an income problem, it's a cashflow problem. You can be poor (low income) and never need a payday loan (income > expenses, and have sufficient savings to tide you over to next paycheck in the event of an emergency). These loans prey on people living paycheck-to-paycheck. You can be rich and run into the exact same problem if your expenses exceed your income and you don't have a savings buffer. That's how professional athletes and celebrities wind up going bankrupt.
That kind of depends on the Libertarian. Fraud is, after all, never acceptable to those who truly tout the ideals of a free market.
However, Libertarianism is a political ideology and not an economic model - though many have somehow managed to conflate the two. I, for example, would prefer the nomenclature "Classic Libertarian" but the most descriptive is "Socialist Libertarian." You might, if you're European, think of me as a Social Democrat but for very different reasons.
My ideal being, of course, the maximum opportunity to use one's freedoms to best enjoy one's liberties. And no, those two words are not synonymous.
I'd type more and, indeed, I started to. However, it's likely futility and I'm impatient today. If you've any questions or doubts then I'd refer you to the Wikipedia article. It is, oddly, actually fairly accurate and well done. I'm not exactly sure how the Randians (for wont of a better name) managed to overlook it. They've pretty much usurped the party and the rest of the world has been duped into believing some really odd things.
For example, once upon a time - we Libertarians were the kooky left. Yup... Now, somehow, we're the crazy right - but I've not really changed any of my beliefs except to refine them over these many years. I'm a Socialist Libertarian because it's the most logical position and that's different than the typical left. I used facts, reason, logic, and math to reach this position. (It's cheaper to feed you than it is to hire goons to keep you from stealing my stuff. I like my stuff, that's why I bought it. It's cheaper and easier to keep you healthy and educated than it is to clean up after your mess. It's not just my liberty that matters - your liberty is of as much importance to me as my own. That sort of thing.)
So, yeah, a Libertarian position would be that anyone defrauding needs to be punished and prevented from doing so. We're not (generally) Anarchists. We believe companies should provide the goods they say they'll provide BUT you should (I suppose) have the opportunity to make an informed choice and select a lesser product provided you harm no others with it. See, Liberty (caps on purpose) is really only valuable if we maximize if for everyone. It does us no good if just a few have access - that's how you get violence and have to clean up messes. A company can, I suppose, sell shit in a sack but they damned well better sell shit in a sack that is honestly marketed as such and contains the shit they said it will contain. A fairly free market (free markets don't exist and never will) doesn't work with fraud.
Yeah, I know, I wasted my time and folks will keep on believing what they want but, there you go. That's a Libertarian speaking to you. (I've been involved with the party since 1978 or so.) Yeah, we've got our share of idiots in the party or claiming to speak for the party but every party has those. To put it into perspective, I'd far prefer Sanders than any other candidate in the US race but he's certainly not ideal. He also isn't very honest and that's unfortunate.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Still hate typos (and I did Preview carefully). Near the end, "They system" should be "The system" or even "Gmail" specifically.
Looking over the other comments, I'm rather astounded by the defenses of loan sharks. Obviously paid shills or actual sharks, but it reminds me to wish that slashdot had some reputation-based options. My own simpleminded setting would probably be to hide any account that is not old enough. Not sure if two months would be long enough, but the setting should be tweakable by the user.
Ditto motto.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I'm a bit curious about why you think Google should be checking into a business model - and, really, what does that phrase actually mean?
The second makes me curious... What the hell is "dropboxes?" (I'm kind of fluent in criminal terminology (2 proficiency slots in Thieve's Cant.) What's that?
Also, why would they trust users or are you saying that you should flag them and they should review 'em?
I'm not actually sure why you'd expect Google (or really want, I guess) to do such things. Me? I just want them to give me search results.
I have no idea what you mean by pwning YouTube. I know what pwning is. Who's distributing malware by Google or hacking users through YouTube directly?
Are you talking about the links that people put in the description that take you off-site? I only see those when I'm hunting for copyrighted material.
The last one (I think) is "stealing your personal information." Err... They stole your information? How? They DO say they're slurping up your information and, in fact, make it part of their agreement to let you use their stuff. I'm not really sure where you're going with that one. I see them doing something I don't like (slurping up data) but they do make it pretty clear that that's what they're doing so I'm not sure that the word stealing applies. There might be something that I'm unaware of.
To the best of my knowledge, Google has no information about me that I didn't give to them. Well, there was the wireless router thing. I guess that'd count but I suspect that's not what you mean because that's long-since gone.
Then, I might be crazy, but didn't this:
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
appear in another thread from earlier today? Again, I'm not sure what you're going for.
I should mention that I've been quite pissed with Google for a long time. So, I'm not asking these questions just to be obtuse. I'm actually the guy that gave up on Android and got a Windows Phone. So, I'm really not a fanboy or anything. I do use YouTube. I do have a GMail account that doesn't get used. I do, actually use their search.
A note on that last part. I use their search AND I have profile set up so that it returns personalized responses. They're pretty good and come at a price - privacy. So, I do two things... I only let Google get my information when I give it to them on that particular page. I block all Google stuff (including images and fonts) by default by means of uMatrix. So, I'm not actually being tracked with their other stuff like analytics or tag. In fact, I need to go out of my way in order to even see their CAPTCHA - it simply does not load. (That has led to some interesting periods of confusion and some frustration but I consider it worth it.)
So, yeah, I'm mostly just curious about the personal information theft. See, I know how the 'net works and I don't actually consider tracking (if that's what you're even going for) to be theft. In fact, I consider people having given consent to such when they visit some third party site that has chosen to use their analytics or whatnot. I really can't think of any data that Google might have that I didn't give away by direct actions on my part. Yes, they index comments I make. They index a site or two. I don't actually consider that theft - I consider that being them doing their job.
Oh, forgot this... It's tempting to mention that "information wants to be free." That's not really my point. My point is that you're putting stuff out there knowing that it's going to be indexed (or, something?) and that you expect them to do some vague things with words that you have a cryptic definition for. I can not actually parse what is wholesale pwning of YouTube and I'm kind of fluent in computer (even blackhat) terminology.
It's almost as if you're asking Google to exert more contr
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If your car breaks down and you take a payday loan to get it fixed and not lose what job you have, it's a positive development for you even if you have to pay extra $20 on pay day. If you end up taking a loan before every paycheck, not so much.
Bottom line, even low income / high risk individuals can benefit from access to some kind of legal credit, even on lousy terms. Lots in developing world don't, hence the movement to provide microloans.
In the ideal world, payday lenders would be akin to credit unions, paying moderate salaries to local employees and redistributing any additional income between the same members who occasionally take the loans.
But even if such things do not exist yet, we should think twice before saying no to people with urgent need of immediate extra cash. Otherwise, they will have no choice but to go to the mob, where loans will cost an arm and a leg. And I mean, literally if you don't pay up.
Dear Google, please also ban ads with great big "download" buttons on software-download pages. I hate those. Their sole point is to deceive.
"they prey on desperate people that have no one else to turn to"
Let's pretend that is literally true. What's going to be the outcome if you get your way and these "scummy businesses" don't exist any more? These desperate people will have literally no one to turn to. You've just hurt them even more.
Now we just need to ban ads. Tout suite!
There, much better now.
"they are as close to illegal fraud as anything in the banking industry"
But they are legal. Do you really want Google to censor legal ads that it feels are immoral or unethical?
If so then everyone should have the right to censor.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"No, there is real political effort to stop this kind of business... But it's hard...
And oh, they are most likely are illegal it's just hard to prove that their intentions are bad (Note: having bad intentions is rarely legal)."
You mean like selling pot?
Or selling tobacco?
Or selling porn?
What is a good or bad intention? Is making money a bad intention? Is stopping people from getting high a bad intention?
I do agree that they are scum and do prey on desperate people but they are legal. Do you want Google to censor ads based on ethics? If so who's ethics. That is why we have laws as a way to codify the ethics of the society as a whole. The second that we as a society decide those firms are illegal then they should be shut down. That is an action I am all in support of btw.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There must be some effort. They outlawed them in Arkansas. A bunch shut down right away around my town after that law was passed.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
"sane people consider that step one"
You know what's even more sane? Establishing and testing an alternative before shutting down the only solution that already exists.
>As opposed to legal fraud?
Yes, for example defrauding somebody by using a legal loophole or a badly written law to avoid being prosecuted for something that is clearly "gaining his money through deceptive practices".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Google has decided it doesn't want to promote predatory lending practices that are harmful to it's product.
Predators are not a solution. A solution by definition is NOT something that makes the original problem (lack of money in this case) worse.
In my youth on a tiny starting salary I fell short of money once. I went to a payday loan company because I didnt know better. But because tge charges were so high I was even more short the next month... after six months I would actuallt need to borrow more than my salary to cover the shortfall...
I was trapped with zero way out. My problem was not solved - it was exacerbated. I was lucky. I could go hat in hand to my dad, admit I fucked up and asked for help. He paid off the loan. Gave me enough money to get to payday. Helped me work work out a budget I could survice on including a manageable repayment to him. I paid back every penny.
Most people they prey on do not have somebody else who can throw down a rope when they are finally dug in so deep they realize there is no way out. I got my ego bruised and learned some hard lessons. Most people lose everything they ever had. That is not a fucking solution. I had upper middle class parents. Most of their customers do not.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"Most people lose everything they ever had."
[citation needed]
"I was trapped with zero way out."
See bankruptcy.
"That is not a fucking solution."
True, I'm not aware of any payday onanism loans.
Bankruptcy = having your assets siezed to settle as much debt as possible in return for not having to pay all of it. I.e losing everything you ever had.
You demanded a citation then gave name of the process you wanted as a solution !
Bankruptcy is only an improvement over being jailed for debt. It is not a good thing.
You want viable solutionsq ? Welfare based emergency aid finance. Nonprofit interest free loan organisations. Universal basic income. There you go. Three possible viable solutions. Why would you keep defending something that makes the problem worse ? People need a way to avoid bankruptcy and you are pointing at something that accelerates it and calling that a solution.
Just to underscore how bad bankruptcy is: every job Ive had in ten years came with a mandatory credit check. I earn a high income now and own multiple investments. Had I gone bankrupt I would still be earning minimum wage because I wasnt that good with money at age 19... bankruptcy is often a permanent poverty trap.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"You want viable solutions? Welfare based emergency aid finance. Nonprofit interest free loan organisations. Universal basic income. There you go. Three possible viable solutions."
Make those "viable" solutions alive then. Then you won't even have to agitate for the banning of payday loan services - people will naturally leave them. (Well, as long as the welfare money tree keeps blooming.)
The Orwellian idiot strikes again. Google hiding ads for loan businesses is nanny state protection, who declared Google to be the government? They have the right to discriminate of-course, so it's their right to hide whatever they want in their search results, but their morals will hurt people looking for payday loans in the free market.
You can't handle the truth.
Those are things we need to get government to do. Google cannot do them. It can howevee mitigate the harm by choosing not to market companies that makes things worse.
I really do not want to live in a world where companies have more power than that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"it is the right of every free citizen to only allow, on their own property, behavior that accords with their own ethics"
So where do you stand on the gay cake/bakery situation?
Or Citizens United?
I don't get any junk mail at all from the RNC (or the DNC for that matter). You must have gotten on their mailing list somehow.
However, even though both parties are very similar in many ways, they are beholden to different industries. The Republicans are in bed with the fossil fuel industry, for instance. Meanwhile, the Democrats are in bed with the media industries (MPAA/RIAA) as well as the payday-loan industry.
It's honestly really disgusting that the party that claims to be in favor of helping poor people is so happy to work for an industry that brazenly preys upon those poor people with usurious interest rates and fees. It doesn't help that Hillary is also sold out to private prison corporations, yet another industry that preys upon poor people by profiting off their incarceration for BS "crimes" (like drug possession) and which lobbies heavily for stronger laws to keep more people in prison.
So again, your "viable" alternatives are not even fertilized, born, never mind mature. But you're so sure that customers are hurting themselves, and that they must all be protected from their own possibly silentcoder-disapproved decisions.
Why do you patronize and hate the poor so?
Okay then you can not complain when WalMart only sells clean versions of albums or if google does not want to run ads for a political candidate you like.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore can refuse to do business in North Carolina then why should a bakery have to do business with someone they disagree with?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Gay cake bakery: civil rights act. The right not to be discriminated against is protected and your right to freedom of association cannot intrude on it. Neither does property rights apply in a business which serves the public. Refusing to serve a gay customer is no different from putting a whites-only sign in the window.
Companies however are not people, cannot be discriminated against and dont have civil liberties.
Citizens united extended a legal right that nobody should have at all. Bribery is not protected speech.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yeah... i "patronize" people by saying "i made that mistake myself once and nothing but dumb luck gave me a better outcome". On the contrary my argument was "there but for the grace of god go I" - except that Im an atheist.
It is mathematically impossible for payday loans not to make things worse. Ergo they are fraudulent.
Even so, even if you persist in the insane belief that their business model is not to finance as protection rackets are to insurance it is not relevant. Nobody at all banned them. Nobody even proposed banning them. I never proposed banning them. I merely applauded somebody choosing not to advertise them.
Or do you think the pro life movement should be forced to hand out brochures for planned parenthood too ? I have a moral problem with their business. Moral problems however are very rarely appropriate to fix by legal means. Maybe this is one of those cases, probably not - I actually demand compelling evidence that the law is the only resort before supporting it. But I have the right to my moral belief, the right to agitate for said belief and the right to applaud when others agitate for it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> I.e losing everything you ever had.
People that use these kinds of loans already have ZERO assets. Full liquidation is not going to hurt them any worse than they are already. In general there's this persistent hysterical fear of bankruptcy among proles. Meanwhile the 1% view it as just another legal tool.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... so your principles about rights of free people stood as long as 90 minutes before crumbling before political correctness ... maybe that's a record
In the context of monopolies, companies that are merely dominant, or companies too large to fail, such abuses can't be swept under the rug. The founding fathers despised big business as much as big government. There just wasn't as much of it then. Otherwise they might have directed more attention to it.
They would likely distrust Google as much as the British East India Company.
Corporate censorship isn't any better than when the government does it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The rights of free people can only exist if there are limits to them - otherwise NOBODY has freedom. And political correctness is merely the term people use for "respecting OTHER people's freedom" when they don't.
More importantly - none of your examples WERE individuals. Businesses are NOT individuals and don't HAVE the rights of free peoples. They have a limited subset there-off - in order to maximize the liberty of the people that subset should at all times be kept as minimal as possible, the bare minimum with which it is possible for a business to exist is the maximum freedom a business should have.
Businesses are not people - so they can't be free people, nor can they be non-free people. You can't intrude on the freedom of a business anymore than you can enslave a hammer, defraud a wall or discriminate against a cloud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
A business is a group of people.
No it isn't. Not even slightly. A business is a distinct legal person - that happens to have contracts with a group of people, it is not a human being nor is it a group of human beings.
Each of those individuals whom it has some sort of contract with (including the ones with whom that contract is "owns shares") are free to act as individuals on their own behalf - but when acting within the confines of the contract that lets them represent the business they only have the limited subset of freedoms that the business has.
If you're going to give an oversimplified argument to try and prove a point without thinking - at least get your facts straight. In no legal jurisdiction ever conceived has a business been a group of people. No law has ever seen it as such. Now you could lobby that the law SHOULD see it as such - no business would agree though, because if a business is a group of people then limited liability is a travesty of justice that completely conflicts with the principle of equality before the law.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> Meanwhile the 1% view it as just another legal tool.
For the one percent it doesn't mean NEVER having a chance to stop being poor. It doesn't mean being excluded from ever having a better job, or ever owning a home. That's what it means if you're working class however.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Of course I can. I will defend their right to do so - but I will ALSO defend my right to complain if they do.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Are you by any chance confusing ... sole proprietorships / partnerships / corporations?
And more importantly, reality / legal fictions? When you want to control what a business does, you want to control what the people who ganged together to form it do. Just because there is a level of indirection doesn't make a mandate any less imposed on human beings.
No it isn't and hasn't been for more than 200 years. That definition became invalid the day we passed the first limited liability law. If a business was a group of people then limited liability would be a travesty of justice that absolutely flies in the face of the principle of equal before the law.
Limited liability could only be made law in the free world by defining a business as NOT a group of people but a completely distinct legal entity which is not human but has contracts with a lot of people.
For some of them it's an employment contract, for others it's shareholding (which is a contract) but none of them are the business, nor are they collectively the business. Even if there's only one of them then he or she is STILL not the business. They are merely somebody who has a contract with the business that establishes ownership.
Hell if businesses were people shareholding would be slavery.
Businesses are not people and the very idea is fundamentally incompatible with every principle of a free and just society which is why the law does not and cannot define them as people.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Are you by any chance confusing ... sole proprietorships / partnerships / corporations?
There is no difference relevant to the topic at hand. If the sole propietorship was it's owner, then it's owner's assets would be at stake if it went bankrupt.
>When you want to control what a business does, you want to control what the people who ganged together to form it do
Nope. You're doubly-wrong. Firstly I never proposed controlling what a business does - I proposed restricting what it can do, there is an important difference. I'm not saying you can force a business to sell peanut butter. I'm just saying you CAN prevent it from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
Your other point however is even MORE wrong. It absolutely DOES mean that. The owner of the cakeshop has every right to retain her religion. She has every right to practise it. To believe gays are evil or whatever. I'm not in any way restricting that. Her business does NOT have that right but that does not in any way compel her to do anything.
If she personally has a problem with a gay marriage, the company has every right to hire a temporary employee to serve this particular customer. The business has to fulfil it's legal obligations.
In a corporation every one of the many people it has contracts with has the right to, in their own capacity (i.e. on time not covered by the contract) believe and act however they see fit as long as they don't interfere with anybody else's rights to do the same. But there's no reason the COMPANY should have that right.
If you oppose birth control, you have every right not to use it. But that's your ONLY right. Your company has no such right, and cannot impose your belief on people who work for it (since by definition it's about what they do outside work in their private lives). You are free to believe nobody's health insurance should pay for it. Your company is not free to refuse that.
And this is a much better example - because if we assume you ARE the business -then LOTS of people's personal freedoms are now dependent on YOUR whims. If you and the company are distinct, then you cannot use the company to enforce your whims on employees about matters unrelated to the business. Clearly and obviously the latter scenario is the one that maximizes freedom for the most people.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So you want to restrict their rights?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A business is a group of people.
Have the people who make up a business lost any of their individual rights by virtue of being connected with the business such that the business has to be given rights to compensate? I don't think so.
We grant corporations certain aspects of personhood so they can be treated as a single entity in the legal system but since corporations don't exist outside of the laws that define what they are they have no rights except what are granted in those laws.
Nice write-up. (I was an 18 yr old family-tradition Republican when I first voted in '72, but I was registered Libertarian by '74.) The only thing missing is a link to the World's Smallest Political Quiz (ten agree/disagree statements - five on personal issues, five on financial.)
You may not agree with the results interpretation, but the two dimensional political field representation is still of interest.
You sound like a Libertarian in the vein of author and astrophysicist David Brin. I check out his web page "Contrary Brin" from time to time and find it interesting. You might too.
No. How does my complaining restrict their rights ? Thats right ! It doesn't. I can only change their behavior with persuasion.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So you think that censorship is okay as long as you agree with it?
Frankly I do agree with Google doing this but the militant anti censorship folks are always so ready to attack any perceived censorship I decided to play devil's advocate.
I have no problem with Walmart only selling clean versions of albums because frankly only Walmart has the power to force the record companies to produce a clean version. AKA it means more options for the consumer since you can buy albums in more that one store.
Frankly I do not even think this is a freedom of speech issue or censorship since it is company and not a government providing the service.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
>So you think that censorship is okay as long as you agree with it?
You're the only one who has promoted censorship. I was promoting NOBODY being censored.
Wallmart gets to promote and not promote whatever they want.
I get to say about that whatever I want.
Neither party is censored.
Indeed - neither party CAN ever censor anybody. Censorship can only be done by somebody with serious authority (like a government). Wallmart may choose to stock only clean albums - other retailers will still sell the rest. I may choose to complain -they can ignore me. Nobody in your scenario is prevented from expressing whatever they want so nobody is being censored.
Free speech is such a simple concept... it's amazing how many people always get it wrong.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Not "polite request".
Not saying you're a troll or whatever, but that's because I don't care that much about you, at least based upon that "response".
I don't feel like apologizing for writing about complicated topics. If I were a serious author then at least I would care about simplifying my writing or motivating readers to make sufficient efforts to understand them, eh?
So I'll follow your lead and change the topic. My new topic is the moderation system. There should be several orthogonal dimensions with plus and minus scoring. On the "polite" dimension, your reply deserves a negative mod point. I think there should also be a dimension for "thought provoking", though I don't like that particular label, and that is the dimension where I would like to earn the most positive mod points. There should also be a dimension for "sincere", and I would like to earn positive mod points there, too, but I'm mentioning it here because I think the ability to award negative mod points should be related to your own received mod points, and in this example, someone with a net negative sincerity would not be able to award negative mod points for sincerity. (I think the real trolls would have large negative scores for politeness and sincerity, but that's just a research hypothesis.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
They can do what they want, as they are not the government. Or are you saying that everyone should be able to be coerced into saying what anyone else wants them to say?
It is not mutually exclusive to be for someone's rights, disagree with how they are using their rights, voice your disagreements, and not be guilty of censorship.
You are terrible at this. Really, really bad. You are getting incredibly confused about some very basic concepts you appear to think you support very strongly.
As I said that is how also how I feel. I am just shocked to see someone on Slashdot feel the same way.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hmm... Okay, nice try :)
:)
Let's me try that too:
If the US can refuse to do business in North Korea then why should a bakery have to do business with someone they disagree with?
On topic, if as a baker you have circumstantial evidence to think the cake will be used to commit a crime, you can also refuse.
If sued for discrimination the requirement for evidence isn't the same, as in a criminal case against the cake-buyer...
Or one could argue that there is a difference between people and corporations