You have or should have no responsibility or liability for my actions unless you specifically knew of them before enabling them with the loan.
This is a false analogy in some ways. In your example the drug-seller is an individual who is responsible for their actions. A corporation is no such thing. Let's say you create an enterprise, with documentation and everything, to buy and sell cars at a profit. You ask your buddy for $100 to get you started, in exchange for partial ownership of the enterprise. He agrees, gives you the cash, and then you go on to buy and sell drugs. Does he have responsibilty? Yes. He did not oversee the actions of the entity (like a partner in a partnership) or hire anyone to do so (like shareholders in traditional corporation). His money enabled the drug dealing.
It doesn't matter if he knew of the specific actions you'd take with his money. He should have known, it is his responsibility as a partner or shareholder.
This is one reason why we pay corporate board members so much. They assume a lot of the personal risk that the shareholders would otherwise hold. The legal structure allows shareholders to divest the risk onto the board... but someone can still be held accountable to some extent.
The question is: why should limited liability impose a constraint on collective political speech?
Because limited liability is designed to separate the person from the entity. Why should the entity have any right to political speech? It is not a person, it is not a citizen. It cannot vote. You do not give up any rights to free speech (or any other human rights) when you form an LLC.
Corporations are people: living, breathing people. Corporations are comprised neither of space aliens nor of soulless robots, but of real people, organized for collective action.
Not so. Corporations are formed of money and contracts and legal structure. The entire reason for corporations to exist is to divest oneself of risk and responsibility for the actions of your investments.
When a corporation acts, it acts through people.
This is true. But those are not the people who the corporation actually represents. The shareholders are who the corporation acts as proxy for, not employees of the corporation (including executives) -- insofar as those employees and executives are acting in their role as such, and not acting as shareholders should they happen to own shares..
The key question regarding human rights, such as the right to free speech, is whether citizens must entirely surrender their right to free speech when they organize together under a corporate form.
That's not the key question. It doesn't even make sense, when divorcing the entity from the citizen is the entire purpose of incorporation. No citizen gives up their right to free speech when they invest in a corporation. The question is, why should an intangible legal entity have the same rights as a citizen?
If you have land on which you are trying to grow food, and need to extract large amounts of food per acre, growing corn to turn into fuel or using farming methods that are guaranteed to result in lower yields with no discernible benefit is definitely a poor choice.
The question is, what are the costs you bear of using the more efficient methods to increase your yields? How are those costs expected to change with the cost of fossil fuels and water? What are the societal costs, and are there ways to have farms and agribusinesses absorb those costs instead of the general public or specific sectors of the public?
Would it be more economical to just farm more land instead of maximizing yield on the land you have?
I'd happily give up both if you gave up your suburbs that waste substantially more land.
Obviously there is greater value in that land being used as suburban housing than there is for the land to be used for farming. Otherwise it would be used for farming.
I live in a mixed rural-suburban area in one of the wealthier counties in the US (top ten by median income). No farmer can afford to outspend developers for land, only through joint public-private ventures like Green Acres can farmers compete for land. This is a byproduct of very cheap food, meaning razor-thin margins for farmers.
The problem is not suburban people wanting to have a suburban lifestyle. The problem is unsustainable cheap farming methods (due to limited supply of fresh water, dependence on fossil fuels, and carelessness with regards to land degradation) that are pricing farmers out of owning that land. As food prices rise over the next decades, farming will become a more economically viable use for some suburban land, and we'll see agricultural uses of land start to compete a little better.
Efficient in terms of what? If land area were the only limiting factor on food production, then you'd have a point. But land area is not the prime limiting factor for food production going forward. Water and sustainability of arable land are -- just look at the croplands of Australia and California that are becoming too saline due to over-irrigation and over-pumping of wells.
What we need are water-conserving, low-dependence-on-fossil-fuel, sustainable agricultural methods. Some of these methods are organic, some are not. There are efficient ways to farm organically.
The Green Revolution multiplied what could be produced per unit area, and it was a both a lifesaver and a stimulant for massive population growth in parts of the world. But it came at a cost, in terms of land quality, fossil fuel use, and irrigation water depletion. The surging price of fossil fuels is making the Green Revolution kind of irrelevant -- food is no longer as cheap to produce using those methods.
I prefer to buy (1) local and (2) from smaller growers. Organic is sometimes a nice side effect, but mostly I want to support growers that use and experiment with low-irrigation sustainable methods.
As to people who 'lost everything', don't be so quick in that judgement. How many of the people that lost their houses actually had any equity?
I did. Of course, I didn't lose my house. I did, however, lose a lot of my equity.
Nobody wanted to admit it was a bubble (almost nobody, those who talked about it were laughed at)
Bullshit, stop revising history. Everyone knew it was a bubble, people just differed on when they thought it would burst. Seriously, how can you possible misremember that?
How many people bought second homes, bought cars, expensive furniture and gadgets, took vacations, etc.etc., all by refinancing their homes that they thought could never fall in price?
Many fewer than you imagine.
but because so much of that money was just printed, it was everybody and every business that suffered from inflation,
Inflation was low-to-modest during the the housing runup, and even lower since then.
the costs of which pushed investment capital to Asia and other places
It was the drop in the value of the dollar relative to other currencies that drove investment elsewhere. This is not the same as inflation.
Do you seriously believe even half the stuff you write?
I also would like to mention that tillage technology & methods played a big role. There was a big push of settlers moving west who tilled their soil extremely fine before planting... once they started clump-tilling instead, the dust problem wasn't near as bad.
Seems to me that the statistic you provide is meaningless unless we know the numerical relationship between users and makers/sellers. Seems to me to be quite likely that 4:1 is too low of a ratio; likely the DEA is busting a higher percentage of makers/sellers than users.
No drug, not even alcohol, can bring out of a person something that was not already in that person. A lot of people have unresolved emotional baggage, insecurities, and unhealthy tendencies that they barely keep in check, mostly through fear of consequence. This is not real character or real strength and the dissolution of inhibition can cause it to break down.
Please stop spouting armchair psychology.
The relationship between drugs and psychosis is complex and not completely understood... but your point-of-view is hopelessly outdated. Drug-related psychosis has little to do with the "dissolution of inhibition".
People who have real character don't become "a different person" when drunk or high.
Yes, morphine is addictive. And before it was criminalized, there were plenty of doctors, lawyers and other responsible professionals addicted to it. This interfered with their personal and professional lives no more than smoking does today..
I have not found a workaround for youtube, but I don't like having google gathering all this data about me & creating a profile.
You don't think Yahoo would like to do the same thing?
You'd trade one information overlord for another. For all I'm concerned about Google's information-collating abilities, Yahoo has a track record of more problems with data security than Google.
In the end... if you want to be plugged in to technology services, you have face the fact that the service providers will also be plugged in to you.
You do understand that by definition, a conservative wants to be keep things the same (static), and that liberals want to change things (dynamic)?
That's a matter of context. In the economic context, those are not valid definitions of conservative and liberal; in a social context, those are not valid definitions of conservative and liberal.
If you look up definitions of economic and social conservatism/liberalism, and you'll find out how everyone else uses those terms, and why your definitions are not particularly useful.
So you just specified a policy change that would reduce choice and force people to give things up
No he didn't. Go back and re-read what he wrote. Please explain how the policy change he described would reduce choice and/or force people to give things up.
For videogames you simply don't have that kind of market. So spending the same kind of money to make an AAA game that WILL NEVER EVER reach the same kind of audience as a blockbuster film is just PLAIN STUPID. It is for all intents and purposes economic suicide.
Except, of course, the blockbuster video games who have made bank for their publisher (GTA IV comes to mind, > $100 million in dev costs, > 22 million units sold).
You claim that COD and other AAA videogames don't change the equation, but I don't think you have a leg to stand on with that claim. The numbers don't lie -- blockbuster games with blockbuster budgets can make a ton of money.
With Oracle, that changed a lot in the late 90s, early 2000s. Larry learned his lesson when the company almost went under due to unprofitable contracts.
Since then, Oracle's pricing has been pretty consistent.
Keep in mind that Oracle needs to be very sensitive to potential claims of predatory pricing, as well as the fact that they need to give the US government "most-favored-pricing" terms... meaning that if they steeply discount for one customer, they'll need to offer the same pricing to the US government.
Meh. Google opened at $85, a PE of about 80. Yet at close on the day of their IPO, GOOG was trading just over $100, for a PE in the high 90s.
Anyone who bought GOOG at $100/share seems to be sitting pretty happy right now...
Not that Google's IPO is a good model for the Facebook IPO, but just so you're aware that there is at least one IPO with a ridiculous PE ratio that could be considered superficially similar.
your post is a field day for the average slashdotian because there is too much room for interpretation
Look, I'm no true oldtimer, but *everyone* knows the term is "slashdotter".
Unless you're a Scandinavian daughter of the lead guitarist from Guns-N-Roses, in which case you're a Slashdottir, but that's kind of beside the point.
By the way, do you happen to know any farmers in the Midwest? Feel free to ask them if nothing bad is happening right now. In 6 months you can ask around the world. US food exports are going to take a major dive, which is going to spike up prices. Standby for a shitload of unrest.
What's unnerving about this is that the world is *already* consuming more foodstuffs than it produces. World food reserves are basically gone... and this has just happened over the past 10 years or so. So on top of the additional price volatility experienced because of dwindling food reserves, now we have a weather event that's going to tip prices higher.
If food reserves were in a healthy state, this drought would be a minor uncomfortable period in terms of food prices, just as the droughts of the 80s were. Instead we're going to have a food price spike far, far higher than general inflation.
Although I did not mention self-education, that doesn't mean my views don't incorporate it.
Meanwhile, your post implied that self-education is the be-all and end-all of education (if this were so, the current education setup would be quite different)... I'm not sure it's clear who made the common mistake here.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a false analogy in some ways. In your example the drug-seller is an individual who is responsible for their actions. A corporation is no such thing. Let's say you create an enterprise, with documentation and everything, to buy and sell cars at a profit. You ask your buddy for $100 to get you started, in exchange for partial ownership of the enterprise. He agrees, gives you the cash, and then you go on to buy and sell drugs. Does he have responsibilty? Yes. He did not oversee the actions of the entity (like a partner in a partnership) or hire anyone to do so (like shareholders in traditional corporation). His money enabled the drug dealing.
It doesn't matter if he knew of the specific actions you'd take with his money. He should have known, it is his responsibility as a partner or shareholder.
This is one reason why we pay corporate board members so much. They assume a lot of the personal risk that the shareholders would otherwise hold. The legal structure allows shareholders to divest the risk onto the board... but someone can still be held accountable to some extent.
Because limited liability is designed to separate the person from the entity. Why should the entity have any right to political speech? It is not a person, it is not a citizen. It cannot vote. You do not give up any rights to free speech (or any other human rights) when you form an LLC.
Not so. Corporations are formed of money and contracts and legal structure. The entire reason for corporations to exist is to divest oneself of risk and responsibility for the actions of your investments.
This is true. But those are not the people who the corporation actually represents. The shareholders are who the corporation acts as proxy for, not employees of the corporation (including executives) -- insofar as those employees and executives are acting in their role as such, and not acting as shareholders should they happen to own shares..
That's not the key question. It doesn't even make sense, when divorcing the entity from the citizen is the entire purpose of incorporation. No citizen gives up their right to free speech when they invest in a corporation. The question is, why should an intangible legal entity have the same rights as a citizen?
The question is, what are the costs you bear of using the more efficient methods to increase your yields? How are those costs expected to change with the cost of fossil fuels and water? What are the societal costs, and are there ways to have farms and agribusinesses absorb those costs instead of the general public or specific sectors of the public?
Would it be more economical to just farm more land instead of maximizing yield on the land you have?
Obviously there is greater value in that land being used as suburban housing than there is for the land to be used for farming. Otherwise it would be used for farming.
I live in a mixed rural-suburban area in one of the wealthier counties in the US (top ten by median income). No farmer can afford to outspend developers for land, only through joint public-private ventures like Green Acres can farmers compete for land. This is a byproduct of very cheap food, meaning razor-thin margins for farmers.
The problem is not suburban people wanting to have a suburban lifestyle. The problem is unsustainable cheap farming methods (due to limited supply of fresh water, dependence on fossil fuels, and carelessness with regards to land degradation) that are pricing farmers out of owning that land. As food prices rise over the next decades, farming will become a more economically viable use for some suburban land, and we'll see agricultural uses of land start to compete a little better.
Efficient in terms of what? If land area were the only limiting factor on food production, then you'd have a point. But land area is not the prime limiting factor for food production going forward. Water and sustainability of arable land are -- just look at the croplands of Australia and California that are becoming too saline due to over-irrigation and over-pumping of wells.
What we need are water-conserving, low-dependence-on-fossil-fuel, sustainable agricultural methods. Some of these methods are organic, some are not. There are efficient ways to farm organically.
The Green Revolution multiplied what could be produced per unit area, and it was a both a lifesaver and a stimulant for massive population growth in parts of the world. But it came at a cost, in terms of land quality, fossil fuel use, and irrigation water depletion. The surging price of fossil fuels is making the Green Revolution kind of irrelevant -- food is no longer as cheap to produce using those methods.
I prefer to buy (1) local and (2) from smaller growers. Organic is sometimes a nice side effect, but mostly I want to support growers that use and experiment with low-irrigation sustainable methods.
I did. Of course, I didn't lose my house. I did, however, lose a lot of my equity.
Bullshit, stop revising history. Everyone knew it was a bubble, people just differed on when they thought it would burst. Seriously, how can you possible misremember that?
Many fewer than you imagine.
Inflation was low-to-modest during the the housing runup, and even lower since then.
It was the drop in the value of the dollar relative to other currencies that drove investment elsewhere. This is not the same as inflation.
Do you seriously believe even half the stuff you write?
I also would like to mention that tillage technology & methods played a big role. There was a big push of settlers moving west who tilled their soil extremely fine before planting... once they started clump-tilling instead, the dust problem wasn't near as bad.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Furthermore, modern medicine and surgical practice is far different than it was 100 years ago.
Seems to me that the statistic you provide is meaningless unless we know the numerical relationship between users and makers/sellers. Seems to me to be quite likely that 4:1 is too low of a ratio; likely the DEA is busting a higher percentage of makers/sellers than users.
Tradition. We've been using alcohol as our drug of choice for millenia.
Please stop spouting armchair psychology.
The relationship between drugs and psychosis is complex and not completely understood... but your point-of-view is hopelessly outdated. Drug-related psychosis has little to do with the "dissolution of inhibition".
"No true Scotsman..."
Citation needed.
You don't think Yahoo would like to do the same thing?
You'd trade one information overlord for another. For all I'm concerned about Google's information-collating abilities, Yahoo has a track record of more problems with data security than Google.
In the end... if you want to be plugged in to technology services, you have face the fact that the service providers will also be plugged in to you.
That's a matter of context. In the economic context, those are not valid definitions of conservative and liberal; in a social context, those are not valid definitions of conservative and liberal.
If you look up definitions of economic and social conservatism/liberalism, and you'll find out how everyone else uses those terms, and why your definitions are not particularly useful.
No he didn't. Go back and re-read what he wrote. Please explain how the policy change he described would reduce choice and/or force people to give things up.
Except, of course, the blockbuster video games who have made bank for their publisher (GTA IV comes to mind, > $100 million in dev costs, > 22 million units sold).
You claim that COD and other AAA videogames don't change the equation, but I don't think you have a leg to stand on with that claim. The numbers don't lie -- blockbuster games with blockbuster budgets can make a ton of money.
If you fail to diversify your assets it's nobody's fault but your own.
If you take the stuff from the Silmarillion, you probably have enough for a couple hundred movies.
With Oracle, that changed a lot in the late 90s, early 2000s. Larry learned his lesson when the company almost went under due to unprofitable contracts.
Since then, Oracle's pricing has been pretty consistent.
Keep in mind that Oracle needs to be very sensitive to potential claims of predatory pricing, as well as the fact that they need to give the US government "most-favored-pricing" terms... meaning that if they steeply discount for one customer, they'll need to offer the same pricing to the US government.
Meh. Google opened at $85, a PE of about 80. Yet at close on the day of their IPO, GOOG was trading just over $100, for a PE in the high 90s.
Anyone who bought GOOG at $100/share seems to be sitting pretty happy right now...
Not that Google's IPO is a good model for the Facebook IPO, but just so you're aware that there is at least one IPO with a ridiculous PE ratio that could be considered superficially similar.
Look, I'm no true oldtimer, but *everyone* knows the term is "slashdotter".
Unless you're a Scandinavian daughter of the lead guitarist from Guns-N-Roses, in which case you're a Slashdottir, but that's kind of beside the point.
* For values of Z > 1.
What's unnerving about this is that the world is *already* consuming more foodstuffs than it produces. World food reserves are basically gone... and this has just happened over the past 10 years or so. So on top of the additional price volatility experienced because of dwindling food reserves, now we have a weather event that's going to tip prices higher.
If food reserves were in a healthy state, this drought would be a minor uncomfortable period in terms of food prices, just as the droughts of the 80s were. Instead we're going to have a food price spike far, far higher than general inflation.
Although I did not mention self-education, that doesn't mean my views don't incorporate it.
Meanwhile, your post implied that self-education is the be-all and end-all of education (if this were so, the current education setup would be quite different)... I'm not sure it's clear who made the common mistake here.