Sure, and you probably should. Taller children require larger roasting pans, and sometimes even bigger ovens. You could instead do them on a spit over a fire, but if you need to scrunch them up on the axle of your spit (since they are taller), it's going to affect how evenly they cook.
The whole thing is a protection racket. Companies feel they MUST "buy influence", or else politicians, who now in practice have unlimited power to ruin companies or industries, might set their sights on them.
Oh, horseshit. Money has been trying to influence politics for centuries. It's not protection money, it's bribery. It's the politicians who suffer if the money doesn't come, since they won't be able to get re-elected.
The solution is limited government. If neither candidate could take away people's livelihoods, then suddenly corporations don't have to care anymore.
Ridiculous. You're right, corporations wouldn't have to care... because they could run amok without regulation and oversight, just as they did prior to regulation and oversight.
Whatever, man... you go ahead and keep trumpeting the cause of your corporate overlords.
Blind adherence to the rule of law is problematic. There are times when unjust law needs to be ignored in protest. Rosa Parks, the original Tea Party, etc.
People who do not recognize this fact scare me... they are the people that fascist governments rely upon for support.
I'm also a resident of New Jersey, and our local property taxes really are that high, although it varies by locality.
Property taxes are based on assessed value. They cover lots of services that may be provided at a different level (province/state, national) where you live.
Some of the things they cover (though sometimes supplemented by State or Federal funds): local government (council, mayor, staff, etc), county government (the level between local and state), schools, local roads, emergency services, municipal management, local police, local courts, county police (sheriff's department), local parks, libraries, etc.
In addition, here in NJ we also have the delight of funding some other things via property taxes: graft, buyouts of overpaid local/county contracts, lots of debt due to Christie Whitman's cutting of tax revenue while increasing the state budget, etc. The last one pisses me off because it passed the cost of a lot of services to the local level, while she took credit for lowering state taxes while bemoaning the high property taxes that resulted.
I'm in a very low-tax area for NJ, since we have a few corporate world headquarters in my town of very big companies that are HUGE ratables. I pay about half of what parent to your post does, but next town over they pay just as much, of not more, than him.
Whoa dude, you read that link completely wrong, if that's our source.
Habituation to alcohol most likely creates a increased risk of APAP poisoning.
Acute alcohol ingestion reduces APAP toxicity.
Alcohol habituation "primes the pump" so to speak, for conversion of APAP to toxic metabolites by P450 enzymes. But if you give large amounts of alcohol to someone who has excessive amounts of APAP in their bloodstream, that is what is protective, since the alcohol is preferentially taken up by the P450 enzymes.
The lessons to be learned if you don't want APAP poisoning: (1) don't be a heavy drinker and take APAP and (2) if you do ingest a lot of APAP somehow, drink a lot of booze right away to keep it from poisoning your liver.
This is not medical advice, contact a poison control center if you suspect you have any kind of poisoning.
Money is not the only factor in elections. If it was, multi-millionaires like Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, or Jon Corzine could buy their way into office whenever they wanted. But they can't.
It's not the only factor. But it sure does have a huge influence. For example, both Romney and Corzine DID buy their way into office initially.
Your frustration should be directed towards the disinterested voting public who are so easily swayed by that stuff.
Except that can't be changed, while the rules for money involvement can be changed.
Like it or not, information dissemination (especially to disinterested voters, which most of them are) requires "astounding amounts of money." Any attempt at removing this from the political process will just put government in control of picking our candidates for us. And when that happens, democracy will be utterly meaningless. The president will have the power to choose his successor.
No, you can have publicly financed elections without having the government in power picking the candidates. This removes the ability for private spending to corrupt the process, while still allowing for media messaging by the candidates.
You are not thinking it through. There is no reason, as another poster pointed out, that the current system should remain in place unchanged.
So your proposal is to punish people who buy mutual funds, but not those that actually buy and own the shares of the companies they do the wrongdoing.
My proposal is to reinstate some of the association between the suppliers of capital and the actions of the company they have invested in.
None of it makes any sense.
None of it makes sense to you because you choose not to think about alternatives to the way things are currently done. A failure on your part to engage your brain does not make me irrational.
To me, it does not make any sense that people who are owners of a company (whether they are the owner of record or not, they are in effect owners of the company) are completely disassociated from the actions of the company they own, except for the possibility of losing their investment. That is a much bigger problem than your hangup about changing the way things are currently done.
The reason I made the differentiation between the two phrases is that I felt the parent to my post was ignoring the scope of the Citizens United decision, and that the bit I paraphrased from him (a few friends...) was misleading in his post.
You raise some very good points... namely:
that, in my opinion, is not speech but, rather, the public sale of public assets (social laws) to private interests. That does seem wrong.
but I do have to point out that
So maybe an effective way to fight abusive campaign spending would be to enforce a law that allows a corporation to donate money to political campaigns only from a specially designated campaign account which can only have money transferred into it by private employees of the company. This would ensure that the corporation really does represent the voice of its employees. It may seem like a bit of a work around, but I'd love to see that idea gain traction...or something similar.
might be a bit off because corporations are not entities that represent the employees of a corporation... corporations are proxies for owners of the corporation. Sometimes their interests are aligned, sometimes not.
The problem is that we have people who are extremely wealthy who have disproportionate input in the political process. Because those people can influence elections with money at a personal level, or they can run it through corporations, AFAICT, the only way to fix that is to remove the ability to influence elections with money.
I'm getting really concerned that so many people are confused what the words "the rule of law" mean. I must have missed the memo where the scope of interpretation of the law was made equivalent to the rule of law.
Legally, the judiciary is to interpret the law as written (in the US, anyway). For them to do so is not in violation of the rule of law, though we may disagree on the scope allowed for their interpretation.
"The rule of law" refers to the extent to which members of society obey the rules of that society. It does not refer to how the law is created, nor to how the law is interpreted so that it can be obeyed and enforced. It simply refers to whether the people in the society obey the law.
Your argument is so completely bogus I'm not sure.
No, it's not bogus. I just started out with the extreme in order to make a point. Did you ignore my actual argument, and just get caught up in the opening line?
The rule of law is only valid when the law is just, and the means to change the law is not subverted.
If you believe the rule of law is absolute, please consider the ramifications of that. I'm sure you can think of many examples where acting against the law is the right thing to do.
Secession is 100% different from the judiciary deciding that a law means something other than what the law says.
Oh, so now we're talking about something different. You're no longer talking about the rule of law, now you're talking about what the scope of interpretation of the law should be. They're two different things.
Declaring that you're no longer going to be under the law of a remote and oppressive government is NOT the same as having a mass of laws which don't mean anything.
And yet, prior to declaring independence, your second clause was the state of affairs in the American colonies. And both states of affairs are derived from abrogating the rule of law. So in that sense, they are the same. Which was the point of the analogy. Does this still not make sense to you?
And for that matter, what does remoteness have to do with it? Either you're being represented fairly, or you're not. My take is that normal people are not being represented fairly, because we are outweighed by corporate spending in the political process.
Like an earlier poster asked, how do you mete out punishments? By shares owned?
Exactly.
What if you've purchased a mutual fund that gives you shares in a company found guilty of a crime. How much liability do you have?
In proportion to the amount of shares you own.
What about the fund manager? Should she or he be held responsible as well?
No, unless they were directly involved in the wrongdoing. The fund manager is an agent of the owners; they do not get to escape risk by passing it on to him. He will lose his livelihood if he does not act in his clients' best interests.
What if you only have common shares, and not voting shares? Should you face a fine then? It's not like you have any say.
You do have a say. You can invest your money, or not. You should still be liable for the actions done using your money. FYI, this would result in devaluation of non-voting shares.
What about foreign ownership? Are you going to extradite people because they have shares?
Yes.
What about when one company owns another? Do the shareholders in the owning company get charged?
Yes, in proportion to the shares of the child company owned. You're responsible for what your investment does, no matter how many shell companies it's passed through.
Sure. But we still need a mechanism to allow for the relatively free movement of capital, as it's a big driver of economic activity. So we'd need to replace it by amending how we deal with partnerships. Why not just change the rules for corporations so that much of the existing structure can be used?
While I also like this idea in principle, where do you draw the line? What about someone who participates in a fund that owns part of Corp X, and this person doesn't even realize they own a portion of Corp X? Are they liable [1]? Is the fund manager [2]? If jail time is being handed out, do you distribute it evenly between shareholders based on their stake in the company [3]? Do you hand it out at the top?
I've added in numbers above so I can address these questions.
[1] Yes. One of the problems with the current situation is that ownership is completely disassociated with the actions of the companies they own. The whole purpose of what I propose is to remove that disassociation.
[2] No. He is an agent of the people investing, who have chose to trust him. If he violates their trust, that is their problem. This would place a premium on trust managers who are capable of doing their due diligence and also of pressuring the companies they invest in to do the right thing.
[3] Yes, you pro-rate it according to ownership stake. There would need to be a minimum threshold of when sentences need to be served, and there'd have to be a consideration to what sentences are assigned. Perhaps a swap of community service for jail time, personal liabilities for fines, etc.
I'm sure there's lots of things not considered yet. I'll be thinking about them:)
Further, confiscating the assets, instead of giving the assets back to the shareholders, would screw more people not directly involved with the corporation than people involved in the corporation. For instance, I can own stock in Microsoft. If Microsoft dissolved, the corporation would buy it back, and I would get some of my money back (probably not a lot). You're suggesting I get none of my money back. Why? Who knows! I certainly don't think you have a rational explanation.
I agree with parent to you post to some extent. And I DO have a rational explanation.
Corporations were created to spread risk among investors, and to pool resources for large capital-intensive ventures. But currently, corporations absolve investors of all risk other than financial. If a corporation is dissolved, then investors money should only be returned after appropriate fines are levied. This may mean that *no* money gets returned to shareholders in egregious circumstances.
I believe this is fair -- as a matter of fact, I believe it doesn't go far enough. I can be sued into bankruptcy, and even do jail time, if someone I employ accidentally kills someone in the course of doing their work for me (e.g., if I, as the employer, was guilty of some kind of contributory negligence to manslaughter). Why are owners of a corporation sheltered from that risk of jail time? So we can make sure capital is available to businesses, without regard to the impact of the operations of those businesses? I say, we make owners of corporations *personally* liable for punishment for wrongdoing, pro-rated according to their share of the ownership. Fines should come from owner's pockets directly. Community service and jail time should be pro-rated. Then we'd see some real reform in corporate behavior.
The people inside the corporation spend money on lobbyists, PR campaigns, PACs, and so on, but they are merely the servants of the corporation. When Altria spends millions on local, state, and federal elections every year, it's not because J. Worthington Snipe, the guy who runs their Dirty Tricks Division, is exercising his rights as an individual. It's because Altria is taking advantage of its legal right to free speech, as defined by a series of Supreme Court decisions that completely ignore the fact that voting rights only matter if they are not completely overpowered by the 1st Amendment rights of goliath corporations.
Well said. I'd just like to add that, in theory, it's the owners of the corporation who are exercising their rights to free speech when a corporation takes political action. This is one reason why CEOs get paid so much -- because they (and other Officers) take on some of the risk from the shareholders.
What I'd like to see is some of the legal risk being reassigned back to the owners of corporations. That'd make corporations clean up their acts, though it'd do nothing wrt the problem of political spending.
Go tell that to King George. I'm sure he would have loved more simple-minded Loyalists like you [1].
This country wouldn't even *exist* if the rebels hadn't chosen to override the rule of law in favor of fighting for their freedoms. Chew on that for a while as you contemplate strict adherence to the rule of law.
The rule of law can only be respected when the law is just. It's not; it favors those with the wealth to buy the media. The law is broken, the means to change the law (via the electoral process) is broken, because the democratic political process has been undermined by capital seeking more capital.
[1] I think I'm getting the hang of using Teabagger debate techniques to undermine their arguments. Using American Revolution analogies is my new favorite anti-Teabagger technique. Not that the parent to this post is a Teabagger; I don't know. But I'll bet he sympathizes with them.
But even then, so what? We have the resolution to get 10 decimal places of lang and lat. Do the math -- here, I'll do it for you.
(360*10^10)^2. That's about 1.3*10^25. Even if you reduce it by 75% to remove ocean surface, it's still in the 10^24 magnitude, which is approximately the security offered by a 255 character set 10-character-long password. Brutally long for a brute-force attack. A dictionary attack is different; but increasing the resolution of the "password" makes dictionary (atlas?) attacks harder.
But don't worry, you could easily go back to using a password. It would be trivial to write an app to convert a nice complex password into the coordinates required by a system like this. So you could have it both ways.
I have no problem with a few friends starting an organization with a goal of promoting political views, yet I dislike the Citizens United decision. The amount of money now being spent on political causes undermines the very notion of democracy, and after Citizens United, will only get worse. The problem is that we're not just talking about "a few friends" -- we're talking about "hundreds of millions of dollars". We're talking about money being able to buy elections via controlling the media with cold, hard cash.
The way I see it, if we sit back and allow multi-billion dollar corporations control our elections, we might as well pack it in.
Go ahead, trumpet your free speech rights all you want -- as an insignificant slave to our corporate masters, what good does your free speech do? Do you think anyone will listen to you when the media is dominated by organizations outspending you by a factor of a thousand to one?
We need to remove the need for astounding amounts of money from the political process. This is the only way we can restore some form of democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, and you probably should. Taller children require larger roasting pans, and sometimes even bigger ovens. You could instead do them on a spit over a fire, but if you need to scrunch them up on the axle of your spit (since they are taller), it's going to affect how evenly they cook.
Oh... for taller children. My bad.
Well, there's you're problem. You should try looking for ones behind, not in, bars.
What? I have low standards. So sue me.
Oh, horseshit. Money has been trying to influence politics for centuries. It's not protection money, it's bribery. It's the politicians who suffer if the money doesn't come, since they won't be able to get re-elected.
Ridiculous. You're right, corporations wouldn't have to care... because they could run amok without regulation and oversight, just as they did prior to regulation and oversight.
Whatever, man... you go ahead and keep trumpeting the cause of your corporate overlords.
No, that's exactly the meaning I intended.
Maybe I was unclear.
Blind adherence to the rule of law is problematic. There are times when unjust law needs to be ignored in protest. Rosa Parks, the original Tea Party, etc.
People who do not recognize this fact scare me... they are the people that fascist governments rely upon for support.
I'm also a resident of New Jersey, and our local property taxes really are that high, although it varies by locality.
Property taxes are based on assessed value. They cover lots of services that may be provided at a different level (province/state, national) where you live.
Some of the things they cover (though sometimes supplemented by State or Federal funds): local government (council, mayor, staff, etc), county government (the level between local and state), schools, local roads, emergency services, municipal management, local police, local courts, county police (sheriff's department), local parks, libraries, etc.
In addition, here in NJ we also have the delight of funding some other things via property taxes: graft, buyouts of overpaid local/county contracts, lots of debt due to Christie Whitman's cutting of tax revenue while increasing the state budget, etc. The last one pisses me off because it passed the cost of a lot of services to the local level, while she took credit for lowering state taxes while bemoaning the high property taxes that resulted.
I'm in a very low-tax area for NJ, since we have a few corporate world headquarters in my town of very big companies that are HUGE ratables. I pay about half of what parent to your post does, but next town over they pay just as much, of not more, than him.
Too bad his source doesn't support his claim. (See my response to his post for details).
And even if you fix his words so that his claim kind of makes sense, what he states definitively is expressed as "might" or "may be" in his source.
Whoa dude, you read that link completely wrong, if that's our source.
Habituation to alcohol most likely creates a increased risk of APAP poisoning.
Acute alcohol ingestion reduces APAP toxicity.
Alcohol habituation "primes the pump" so to speak, for conversion of APAP to toxic metabolites by P450 enzymes. But if you give large amounts of alcohol to someone who has excessive amounts of APAP in their bloodstream, that is what is protective, since the alcohol is preferentially taken up by the P450 enzymes.
The lessons to be learned if you don't want APAP poisoning: (1) don't be a heavy drinker and take APAP and (2) if you do ingest a lot of APAP somehow, drink a lot of booze right away to keep it from poisoning your liver.
This is not medical advice, contact a poison control center if you suspect you have any kind of poisoning.
It's not the only factor. But it sure does have a huge influence. For example, both Romney and Corzine DID buy their way into office initially.
Except that can't be changed, while the rules for money involvement can be changed.
No, you can have publicly financed elections without having the government in power picking the candidates. This removes the ability for private spending to corrupt the process, while still allowing for media messaging by the candidates.
No, I am not. Your ad hominem is out-of-place.
You are not thinking it through. There is no reason, as another poster pointed out, that the current system should remain in place unchanged.
My proposal is to reinstate some of the association between the suppliers of capital and the actions of the company they have invested in.
None of it makes sense to you because you choose not to think about alternatives to the way things are currently done. A failure on your part to engage your brain does not make me irrational.
To me, it does not make any sense that people who are owners of a company (whether they are the owner of record or not, they are in effect owners of the company) are completely disassociated from the actions of the company they own, except for the possibility of losing their investment. That is a much bigger problem than your hangup about changing the way things are currently done.
Centrifuges are wonderful appliances.
Not sure about the other issues, maybe starting with more yeast and figuring out a way to deplete the mash of oxygen?
Because vodka is more complicated to produce than beer.
Making vodka is like brewing beer, except you have the added step of distillation.
Although, if you're going to be transporting it in a gravity well, vodka's a better bet since you get more bang for your weight.
Good point.
There'd have to be a local tool to make it easier to select the passlocation. May not be feasible without compromising security.
You raise some very good points... namely:
that, in my opinion, is not speech but, rather, the public sale of public assets (social laws) to private interests. That does seem wrong.
but I do have to point out that
might be a bit off because corporations are not entities that represent the employees of a corporation... corporations are proxies for owners of the corporation. Sometimes their interests are aligned, sometimes not.
The problem is that we have people who are extremely wealthy who have disproportionate input in the political process. Because those people can influence elections with money at a personal level, or they can run it through corporations, AFAICT, the only way to fix that is to remove the ability to influence elections with money.
I'm getting really concerned that so many people are confused what the words "the rule of law" mean. I must have missed the memo where the scope of interpretation of the law was made equivalent to the rule of law.
Legally, the judiciary is to interpret the law as written (in the US, anyway). For them to do so is not in violation of the rule of law, though we may disagree on the scope allowed for their interpretation.
"The rule of law" refers to the extent to which members of society obey the rules of that society. It does not refer to how the law is created, nor to how the law is interpreted so that it can be obeyed and enforced. It simply refers to whether the people in the society obey the law.
Yes, I'm sure.
No, it's not bogus. I just started out with the extreme in order to make a point. Did you ignore my actual argument, and just get caught up in the opening line?
The rule of law is only valid when the law is just, and the means to change the law is not subverted.
If you believe the rule of law is absolute, please consider the ramifications of that. I'm sure you can think of many examples where acting against the law is the right thing to do.
Oh, so now we're talking about something different. You're no longer talking about the rule of law, now you're talking about what the scope of interpretation of the law should be. They're two different things.
And yet, prior to declaring independence, your second clause was the state of affairs in the American colonies. And both states of affairs are derived from abrogating the rule of law. So in that sense, they are the same. Which was the point of the analogy. Does this still not make sense to you?
And for that matter, what does remoteness have to do with it? Either you're being represented fairly, or you're not. My take is that normal people are not being represented fairly, because we are outweighed by corporate spending in the political process.
Exactly.
In proportion to the amount of shares you own.
No, unless they were directly involved in the wrongdoing. The fund manager is an agent of the owners; they do not get to escape risk by passing it on to him. He will lose his livelihood if he does not act in his clients' best interests.
You do have a say. You can invest your money, or not. You should still be liable for the actions done using your money. FYI, this would result in devaluation of non-voting shares.
Yes.
Yes, in proportion to the shares of the child company owned. You're responsible for what your investment does, no matter how many shell companies it's passed through.
Sure. But we still need a mechanism to allow for the relatively free movement of capital, as it's a big driver of economic activity. So we'd need to replace it by amending how we deal with partnerships. Why not just change the rules for corporations so that much of the existing structure can be used?
I've added in numbers above so I can address these questions.
:)
[1] Yes. One of the problems with the current situation is that ownership is completely disassociated with the actions of the companies they own. The whole purpose of what I propose is to remove that disassociation.
[2] No. He is an agent of the people investing, who have chose to trust him. If he violates their trust, that is their problem. This would place a premium on trust managers who are capable of doing their due diligence and also of pressuring the companies they invest in to do the right thing.
[3] Yes, you pro-rate it according to ownership stake. There would need to be a minimum threshold of when sentences need to be served, and there'd have to be a consideration to what sentences are assigned. Perhaps a swap of community service for jail time, personal liabilities for fines, etc.
I'm sure there's lots of things not considered yet. I'll be thinking about them
I agree with parent to you post to some extent. And I DO have a rational explanation.
Corporations were created to spread risk among investors, and to pool resources for large capital-intensive ventures. But currently, corporations absolve investors of all risk other than financial. If a corporation is dissolved, then investors money should only be returned after appropriate fines are levied. This may mean that *no* money gets returned to shareholders in egregious circumstances.
I believe this is fair -- as a matter of fact, I believe it doesn't go far enough. I can be sued into bankruptcy, and even do jail time, if someone I employ accidentally kills someone in the course of doing their work for me (e.g., if I, as the employer, was guilty of some kind of contributory negligence to manslaughter). Why are owners of a corporation sheltered from that risk of jail time? So we can make sure capital is available to businesses, without regard to the impact of the operations of those businesses? I say, we make owners of corporations *personally* liable for punishment for wrongdoing, pro-rated according to their share of the ownership. Fines should come from owner's pockets directly. Community service and jail time should be pro-rated. Then we'd see some real reform in corporate behavior.
Well said. I'd just like to add that, in theory, it's the owners of the corporation who are exercising their rights to free speech when a corporation takes political action. This is one reason why CEOs get paid so much -- because they (and other Officers) take on some of the risk from the shareholders.
What I'd like to see is some of the legal risk being reassigned back to the owners of corporations. That'd make corporations clean up their acts, though it'd do nothing wrt the problem of political spending.
Go tell that to King George. I'm sure he would have loved more simple-minded Loyalists like you [1].
This country wouldn't even *exist* if the rebels hadn't chosen to override the rule of law in favor of fighting for their freedoms. Chew on that for a while as you contemplate strict adherence to the rule of law.
The rule of law can only be respected when the law is just. It's not; it favors those with the wealth to buy the media. The law is broken, the means to change the law (via the electoral process) is broken, because the democratic political process has been undermined by capital seeking more capital.
[1] I think I'm getting the hang of using Teabagger debate techniques to undermine their arguments. Using American Revolution analogies is my new favorite anti-Teabagger technique. Not that the parent to this post is a Teabagger; I don't know. But I'll bet he sympathizes with them.
Right, which I addressed in my post.
But even then, so what? We have the resolution to get 10 decimal places of lang and lat. Do the math -- here, I'll do it for you.
(360*10^10)^2. That's about 1.3*10^25. Even if you reduce it by 75% to remove ocean surface, it's still in the 10^24 magnitude, which is approximately the security offered by a 255 character set 10-character-long password. Brutally long for a brute-force attack. A dictionary attack is different; but increasing the resolution of the "password" makes dictionary (atlas?) attacks harder.
But don't worry, you could easily go back to using a password. It would be trivial to write an app to convert a nice complex password into the coordinates required by a system like this. So you could have it both ways.
I have no problem with a few friends starting an organization with a goal of promoting political views, yet I dislike the Citizens United decision. The amount of money now being spent on political causes undermines the very notion of democracy, and after Citizens United, will only get worse. The problem is that we're not just talking about "a few friends" -- we're talking about "hundreds of millions of dollars". We're talking about money being able to buy elections via controlling the media with cold, hard cash.
The way I see it, if we sit back and allow multi-billion dollar corporations control our elections, we might as well pack it in.
Go ahead, trumpet your free speech rights all you want -- as an insignificant slave to our corporate masters, what good does your free speech do? Do you think anyone will listen to you when the media is dominated by organizations outspending you by a factor of a thousand to one?
We need to remove the need for astounding amounts of money from the political process. This is the only way we can restore some form of democracy.
Well, my fantasy was more of a libertarian dystopia... I don't think a libertarian utopia can exist.