Oh, I see. So this restriction is only on banks, but every other type of company is free to engage in this sort of activity? That'll solve the problem.
You're an idiot. Your suggestion is nothing but an ill-considered, ill-conceived abortion of a plan which will do nothing to solve the problems you claim it will, and will only put people out of work and retard economic growth.
Demagoguery, motherfucker, demagoguery. It tends to be about as useful as your proposal would be.
Because it's easier to simply jump right into apple-bashing, rather than read the summary or the article, where it references the "Mac App Store," rather than the iOS App Store.
Really, bashing Apple is what he was going to do anyway, so there's no point reading the summary. I expect that even if the headline was "Apple cures cancer, promises free treatment for everybody," the response would be something like: "Oh please, I bet they think they INVENTED MEDICINE now, and they're just trying to lock people into their walled medical garden!"
Could you do everything you do today, unchanged, if I cut your income by taking 90% of it away from you? If you think that a tax rate that high wouldn't require a lot of corporate programs to be cut (which means significant job losses, too, incidentally), then you're clearly not thinking logically. And if you don't care about the jobs you're destroying - both directly, and through lowered (perhaps even negative) economic growth - then I'd suggest that you're one of the disgusting vain assholes you're carrying on about.
Stop with the mock outrage and demagoguery and engage your brain.
I'd say we'd be in pretty much the same place as we are today if the British government could have obtained the identities of Publius, since the British government had absolutely zero jurisdiction over the authors of the Federalist Papers at the time they were published.
The Revolution ended, in practical terms, with the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781. It ended officially with the treaties of Paris & Versailles in 1783. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788.
I thought about it for a bit, and I've conlcuded that your proposal is stupid.
Corporate tax rates and economic growth have a strong negative correlation. Start jacking those taxes up to 90%, and yeah, they probably would close shop, and they'd lay off a lot of people. And then your country slowly sinks into a deep depression as more and more companies leave. If you're taxing corporations at 90% of their income, then there AREN'T "huge profits to be made."
But don't let your dreams of "soaking the fat cats" get in the way of the reality of the situation.
I purchase mutual fund shares once a month as part of my 401(k) investment plan. I've been doing so for the last 11 years. My investments have grown immensely in that time, even accounting for all the ups-and-downs.
Maybe they're not "freezing" people out as much as you think. The only way you're "frozen out" is if you're an idiot and decide you want to play the picosecond trading game with somebody who has way deeper pockets and an army of computers that are way faster than your 5 year old laptop.
Your proposed system will simply introduce more volatility in the market, and produce more gaming. Why? Imagine what happens when all trades are queued up for a minute, and then processed at once. Who wins? The guy who got in his trades 1 picosecond before the minute window closed, after everybody else had made their offers. Trying to introduce latency into the market means that the arbitrage will occur around "buffer +/- 1 picosecond". You haven't solved the problem, and in fact, you may have made it even worse by trying to make the systems less transparent and less responsive.
No, now we have somebody saying that basic stock literacy is a good thing if you don't want to lose money in the stock market by making stupid decisions.
Sort of like, if you want to fly a plane, basic aerodynamics & flight controls literacy is a good thing. Sort of like, if you want to drive a car, basic maneuvering and road sign literacy is a good thing.
If you want to participate in the investment system, and you don't educate yourself about basic principles for investing wisely, then you are simply gambling that you'll pick the right "horse" (using the technical decision making process known as "I like that horse's name!") in a very big race in which everybody else knows WAY more about horses than you do.
I just don't see the market for an "in-between" device. A 5-6" screen would be awkward to hold & use as a phone, more difficult to carry around in a pocket, and still have a screen that's too small for anybody who doesn't have very good eyesight. I think it's a lot more likely that you'll see the current larger tablets continue, perhaps with small increases in screen size as the weight of the components allows them to keep the larger screens as light as the current crop;
The phones I think are more likely to (eventually - I don't see this happening any time VERY soon) end up growing into "laptop replacements" of a sort - portable, easy to carry & use as a phone, usable compute functions in a pinch with built-in hardware/on-screen keyboards, and then when you get into the office (or your hotel, or your home), you can slap the phone into a KVM dock and it'll essentially serve the function of a docked laptop, giving you keyboard/screen/mouse/power/etc. for when you need to get "real work" done.
I believe that the rules are structured to prevent that. Something along the lines of, "if a subscription offer is made outside the app, the same or better offer is made inside the app as well, using the in-app subscription functionality that Apple has built." I can't say this is certainly disallowed, but it seems like a fairly obvious loophole that runs counter to the strategy they seem to be pursuing.
Sorry, but given the chunk of the tablet market that the iPad owns, I think it's safe to say that you can't expect "most normal tablets" to have those features, because "most normal tablets" are iPads.
Already, Netflix, Kindle, etc. are on the chopping block on the App Store unless they pay up 30% of the user's fees to Apple.
While I agree that the In-App Subscription guidelines overreach on Apple's part, I think it's important to point out that the "30% for Apple" ONLY applies in cases where a new subscriber signs up for the services using the in-app subscription functionality. Existing subscribers, and subscribers who sign up using say, a non-iOS device, or the service's website, are exempted from this requirement.
It may affect prices, or services may try to keep their revenue streams intact by adding new subscribers to offset the lower revenue-per-subscriber. Apple's betting that their services and their customers will help developers do the latter. Aggregator / Middleman services like Readability will probably have to rethink their business model, unless Apple relents, and either change the proportion they pass on to publishers, or move away from subscription billing. Instapaper manages without subscription fees, so there's certainly some way to make the economics work.
I'm curious why you think that "personal responsibility for corporate misdeeds" is the issue with SOX?
Did Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom), Ken Lay (Enron), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco Int'l), John & Timothy Rigas (Adelphia), and the dozen-or-so officers from Peregrine Systems who all were convicted & sentenced on various charges escape "personal liability" in their misdeeds? I'd argue that their convictions certainly suggest they didn't escape.
What SOX is about is *restoring investor confidence* by requiring more transparency in governance & accounting for publicly traded companies. After the spate of scandals that prompted passage of SOX, congress and investors were interested in making sure "this sort of thing can't happen again." So they passed some new legislation requiring stricter accounting practices, and everybody left feeling satisfied that they were "safe" again. But allowing directors to be held directly liable was nothing new - corporate officers have been held personally liable for misdeeds before SOX, and we'll be holding directors personally liable for misdeeds after its passage as well.
Work longer - bigger, longer lasting battery; Store more - more internal flash storage available; Display more - 10" screen, rather than 3.5" screen. Take advantage of a larger interface control area (see screen size difference. You know it's a touchscreen, right? You know that simply miniaturizing an iPad-sized interface onto an iPhone screen would produce controls that are too small to be reliably manipulated by touch, right?
Again, if you think that those differences in capability don't make a difference in what you can do with the device, then you're being deliberately obtuse. It's also likely, as somebody further up the thread suggested, that you have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between a sedan and a station wagon, or a jet and a kite. Or is it just that the Apple logo causes your brain to seize up so completely that the red haze it causes prevents you from perceiving reality?
It's like YOU didn't even read MY post - like specifically, where I wrote, "So you mean the bigger version does something more, or different, than the smaller version?"
The larger size of a swimming pool enables you to immerse yourself in water and splash around in a refreshing way on a hot summer afternoon. But that larger size also means that a swimming pool would make a terrible coffee cup. Conversely, a coffee cup is perfect for enjoying a bracing swallow of freshly brewed Colombian coffee, but it makes an absolutely TERRIBLE swimming pool, unless you generally swim a few cells at a time. They both are vessels for holding liquid, but their size differential means that each of them is best suited to a particular need.
Perhaps my analogy is fine, and your reading comprehension is flawed? If you really can't see that there's a significant difference in what you can do with a 10" touchscreen as opposed to a 3.5" touchscreen, then you've got way too much of a hard-on for Apple-bashing for anybody to take you seriously.
You're absolutely right. I'd like to relate this similar story:
My friend says to me the other day, "Hey, I think we're going to put a pool in behind the house this summer!" I say, "But dude, why would you bother?" "Because we want something to take a swim in now and then! It's going to be great!" "Wait. I've been in your kitchen before. You have a bunch of cups." "Yeah... so?" "So a pool is just a big cup. Why would you waste your money on one when you already have the smaller version?" "Uh... because they're not the same thing at all? I can't climb into a cup and enjoy a nice swim on a hot afternoon." "What the fuck, man, you already have a BATHTUB, and you can CERTAINLY soak in that! What's the point of a pool? I bet you can't even tell the difference between a pool and a bathtub!" "You know what? Just don't bother coming over."
You seem to be implying that a worker should not have to take responsibility for "having a bad day at work".
No, I'm implying that by removing the corporate personhood, you're forcing the plaintiff to spend time, money, and tons of effort determining for themself exactly which employee is the one who had a bad day, so that you can bring a lawsuit specifically against them. After all, if there's no "corporate" entity, Toyota doesn't give a shit about your lawsuit - you think their car caused your wife's death due to the negligence of someone at Toyota? Great, go figure out which person specifically was negligent, and sue them directly! And if you're wrong, pick a new target, and try again.
Or, you can file a suit against "Toyota," and turn Toyota's vast resources towards figuring out exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong, and who specifically had a bad day. In the former case, you're spending years of your own time in a fruitless search for someone to blame. In the latter case, you know that "someone at Toyota" screwed up, and the lawsuit is a way to compel them to assist you in both finding out who did it, and compensate you for your damages.
And as for slip and fall litigation, the issue is liability. There are obviously *some* frivolous lawsuits, but in the case where the negligence of an employee does cause damages, again, it's nice to have a single entity to file suit against, rather than trying to find the names of the 8 people who happened to be working at the specific walmart at the specific time you specifically slipped and file suit specifically against them, which will result in a 5 million dollar medical costs & damages judgement, which you'll then be left to try and collect from those 8 or 9 individuals who all probably make (minimum wage + 5 dollars) / hr. In cases like this, think of the corporation's existence as a form of liability insurance that those 8 or 9 negligent people get by virtue of working for that corporation. You still get your judgement payout, and they don't have to hand it out from their own pocket, though they might also find themselves out of a job as a result of their negligence causing a judgement against the corporation.
Involuntary man-slaughter might be involuntary, but it still lands me in the slammer. Compare that to what happened in the gulf explosion. People died, nothing happened to anybody.
First: the explosion occurred less than 1 year ago. I think it's safe to say that we haven't even begun to see the end of the lawsuits that will occur as a result of this, but you can see here that there are already several hundred lawsuits filed in the US over the event, and it appears as if more criminal charges may be coming.
Second: it's entirely possible for you to accidentally kill someone, and have no charges filed as a result - accidental deaths do happen, and unless there is specific negligence or recklessness on the part of the person who "caused" the death, there may not be criminal liability at all - the law does not impose a liability for failure to act unless there is a specific requirement to act codified by law. There may still be civil liability for wrongful death, however. Given the nature of the event, and the fact that multiple factors and conditions contributed to it, it's possible that there is simply no way of pinning the blame for this on a single person's actions or inactions.
And that has nothing to do with the "corporation" - if people are criminally liable for their negligence, and it can be proved, you will see people stand trial for it. Suggesting that the largest spill & disaster the oil industry has ever seen should have all its legal loose ends tied up less than a year after the event is a pretty tall order, especially when investigations are still ongoing.
Because people can band together in the legal construct of corporations, individual responsibilities for activities carried out under the banner of the corporation get diluted to the point of being null. This creates immense freedom for individuals to act in manners that are not accessible to individual people, or people in single-person corporations.
This has nothing to do with corporations per se, and everything to do with the fact that in large groups of people working together, it's often difficult to determine where one person's culpability begins and another person's ends. Unions aren't incorporated - does this mean that wrongdoing (and hiding that wrongdoing) is somehow harder for them because of it? The mafia isn't incorporated - are they a model of transparency and clear lines of responsibility & liability?
What incorporation DOES grant people is the existence of a single entity to sue for damages & wrongdoing, and who has assets which can be forfeited to satisfy judgements against them for wrongdoing. Let's turn it around: if you work for a company that files for bankruptcy protection, and I'm a creditor, should I be able to go after your house? After all, you draw a salary from a company which owes me a lot of money - aren't I entitled to recover the money owed to me from the assets of the people involved in the group of people who are stiffing me? I could certainly make a legal argument, if you do away with the idea of corporate personhood, that your house was paid for with money which rightfully should have been used paying me for the goods & services your employer got from me, and then failed to pay for. The fact that you work for a *corporation* protects you from having to defend yourself against actions like this.
Individuals can incorporate. If you're smart enough to have billions of dollars to build & operate a drilling rig as an individual, then you're also smart enough to spend $500 to purchase the liability protection that incorporation gives you. The regulations simply need to state that "the entity which fucks up pays big fines." If you happen to be operating as an unincorporated individual, then you pay big fines yourself. If you're smart enough to structure & operate your business as a corporation (arm's length, proper protocols & filings, etc - all of the stuff which, when neglected, would allow a court to successfully pierce the corporate veil), then the corporation pays your fines, and your personal assets (not *corporate* assets) are safe.
Arguing that corporations somehow give protections to "groups" of people that are unavailable to individuals is just spurious nonsense. If you want the protection, it is available to you, even as an individual. File the legal paperwork, incorporate, and run your business properly to protect your personal assets.
So you don't believe that we should have to take responsibility for our actions as long as our actions were taken on behalf of our employer?
Please explain how you arrived at the conclusion that this is my position based on anything I wrote? Or did you simply not bother to read it in your haste to tell me that I'm totally wrong?
I specifically gave you 2 instances where individuals *were* held responsible for criminal conduct taken on behalf of their companies. I never suggested it was unwarranted, undeserved, or somehow wrong for this to happen. Just as, if you commit murder, you're still guilty of murder, regardless of who paid you to do it.
What I said was that the BULK of corporate litigation is of the "I was sold a defective product," or "I want medical expenses for my slip-and-fall at Walmart" variety - negligence and accidents by low- and mid-level employees which harm or damage someone somehow, and which it simply is not efficient, effective, or even plausible that "suing everybody individually, from the line worker to the CEO," is a workable outcome. Managing a lawsuit against, apportioning blame amongst, and collecting a judgement from 5,000 employees is a logistical nightmare which would rapidly swamp any legal system you tried enacting it under. It's easier, faster, and far more efficient to sue "the company", and let "the company" apportion blame internally after it's settled its legal issues.
A corporation is just a group of individuals and no legalese doublespeak is going to change that basic fact.
It's not "just" a group of individuals, and no amount of tritely oversimplified demagoguery is going to change that basic fact.
the interesting part of the question is whether corporations ever enable an individual to obfuscate such proof in a way that would not be possible as an individual.
But obfuscation is not a side effect of incorporation, it's a side effect of a large group of people working together - the actions of a single person become harder to track when they've got a hundred other people around them doing stuff that connects to their work. This is not a problem with corporations, per se, but an innate quality of any large group. In fact, the notion of corporate personhood helps to make that "herd immunity" less of an issue with assigning blame: even if someone in an organization manages to hide their individual culpability VERY well, it's still easy to demonstrate that the organization "as a whole" bears some liability for harm.
If you're truly concerned that obfuscation is a risk, then regulations to Increase retention and transparency on corporations may be a reasonable response, but I don't think abolishing the notion of corporate personhood does anything to address or mitigate against this risk.
the point isn't that corporations are allowed more freedoms than individuals,
But if you read back up through this chain of responses, you'll see very clearly that several people are in fact asserting that very thing - again, to review what was written by the person I initially responded to: "People working in corporations have MORE freedoms than those not working in one."
the point is that incorporation concentrates capability in such a way that corporations can do things that individuals can't (like create deep water drilling rigs)
I am not claiming that regulation of corporations is unnecessary or undesirable, however, the regulations should apply to the activity, not the entity performing the activity - if you want to regulate deep-water drilling, to use your example, then the regulations should be exactly the same on me if I'm an individual with deep pockets, or a corporation with deep pockets. The structure of the entity performing the activity being regulated shouldn't matter - the activity itself, and whether or not it's conducted lawfully, does.
You can't completely reject the claim without reviewing it first, can you? Or do you assume that assembly line workers are never negligent, or simply overlook things, or have a bad day, or even do downright malicious things?
All you've done is increased the number of lawyers and defendants and plaintiffs yelling at one another, and you'll probably end up unable to collect your judgement, since the bulk of the fault will probably end up being found in the engineering and manufacturing areas. So you don't get your money, or everybody in the world is then required to start carrying their own professional liability insurance if they don't want to end up living on the streets as a result of having a bad day at work and screwing something up. What a great solution you're offering.
How is this a better outcome than being able to sue the "corporation"? Or have you (mistakenly) assumed that every suit against a corporate entity is for things like the fraud & deception of Bernie Madoff, or Enron? (Two examples where individuals *did* bear criminal responsibility for the actions of their companies, it's worth noting, as well.)
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Oh, I see. So this restriction is only on banks, but every other type of company is free to engage in this sort of activity? That'll solve the problem.
You're an idiot. Your suggestion is nothing but an ill-considered, ill-conceived abortion of a plan which will do nothing to solve the problems you claim it will, and will only put people out of work and retard economic growth.
Demagoguery, motherfucker, demagoguery. It tends to be about as useful as your proposal would be.
Because it's easier to simply jump right into apple-bashing, rather than read the summary or the article, where it references the "Mac App Store," rather than the iOS App Store.
Really, bashing Apple is what he was going to do anyway, so there's no point reading the summary. I expect that even if the headline was "Apple cures cancer, promises free treatment for everybody," the response would be something like: "Oh please, I bet they think they INVENTED MEDICINE now, and they're just trying to lock people into their walled medical garden!"
Could you do everything you do today, unchanged, if I cut your income by taking 90% of it away from you? If you think that a tax rate that high wouldn't require a lot of corporate programs to be cut (which means significant job losses, too, incidentally), then you're clearly not thinking logically. And if you don't care about the jobs you're destroying - both directly, and through lowered (perhaps even negative) economic growth - then I'd suggest that you're one of the disgusting vain assholes you're carrying on about.
Stop with the mock outrage and demagoguery and engage your brain.
I'd say we'd be in pretty much the same place as we are today if the British government could have obtained the identities of Publius, since the British government had absolutely zero jurisdiction over the authors of the Federalist Papers at the time they were published.
The Revolution ended, in practical terms, with the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781. It ended officially with the treaties of Paris & Versailles in 1783. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788.
Choose the wrong order, and you have a setup for "Weekend at Bernie's III."
And you don't see that liquidity - the ability to easily & quickly divest yourself of a holding - contributes to stable prices & lower volatility?
I thought about it for a bit, and I've conlcuded that your proposal is stupid.
Corporate tax rates and economic growth have a strong negative correlation. Start jacking those taxes up to 90%, and yeah, they probably would close shop, and they'd lay off a lot of people. And then your country slowly sinks into a deep depression as more and more companies leave. If you're taxing corporations at 90% of their income, then there AREN'T "huge profits to be made."
But don't let your dreams of "soaking the fat cats" get in the way of the reality of the situation.
I purchase mutual fund shares once a month as part of my 401(k) investment plan. I've been doing so for the last 11 years. My investments have grown immensely in that time, even accounting for all the ups-and-downs.
Maybe they're not "freezing" people out as much as you think. The only way you're "frozen out" is if you're an idiot and decide you want to play the picosecond trading game with somebody who has way deeper pockets and an army of computers that are way faster than your 5 year old laptop.
Your proposed system will simply introduce more volatility in the market, and produce more gaming. Why? Imagine what happens when all trades are queued up for a minute, and then processed at once. Who wins? The guy who got in his trades 1 picosecond before the minute window closed, after everybody else had made their offers. Trying to introduce latency into the market means that the arbitrage will occur around "buffer +/- 1 picosecond". You haven't solved the problem, and in fact, you may have made it even worse by trying to make the systems less transparent and less responsive.
No, now we have somebody saying that basic stock literacy is a good thing if you don't want to lose money in the stock market by making stupid decisions.
Sort of like, if you want to fly a plane, basic aerodynamics & flight controls literacy is a good thing. Sort of like, if you want to drive a car, basic maneuvering and road sign literacy is a good thing.
If you want to participate in the investment system, and you don't educate yourself about basic principles for investing wisely, then you are simply gambling that you'll pick the right "horse" (using the technical decision making process known as "I like that horse's name!") in a very big race in which everybody else knows WAY more about horses than you do.
I just don't see the market for an "in-between" device. A 5-6" screen would be awkward to hold & use as a phone, more difficult to carry around in a pocket, and still have a screen that's too small for anybody who doesn't have very good eyesight. I think it's a lot more likely that you'll see the current larger tablets continue, perhaps with small increases in screen size as the weight of the components allows them to keep the larger screens as light as the current crop;
The phones I think are more likely to (eventually - I don't see this happening any time VERY soon) end up growing into "laptop replacements" of a sort - portable, easy to carry & use as a phone, usable compute functions in a pinch with built-in hardware/on-screen keyboards, and then when you get into the office (or your hotel, or your home), you can slap the phone into a KVM dock and it'll essentially serve the function of a docked laptop, giving you keyboard/screen/mouse/power/etc. for when you need to get "real work" done.
There's an app for that: http://www.phatware.com/index.php?q=product/details/writepad
I believe that the rules are structured to prevent that. Something along the lines of, "if a subscription offer is made outside the app, the same or better offer is made inside the app as well, using the in-app subscription functionality that Apple has built." I can't say this is certainly disallowed, but it seems like a fairly obvious loophole that runs counter to the strategy they seem to be pursuing.
Sorry, but given the chunk of the tablet market that the iPad owns, I think it's safe to say that you can't expect "most normal tablets" to have those features, because "most normal tablets" are iPads.
While I agree that the In-App Subscription guidelines overreach on Apple's part, I think it's important to point out that the "30% for Apple" ONLY applies in cases where a new subscriber signs up for the services using the in-app subscription functionality. Existing subscribers, and subscribers who sign up using say, a non-iOS device, or the service's website, are exempted from this requirement.
It may affect prices, or services may try to keep their revenue streams intact by adding new subscribers to offset the lower revenue-per-subscriber. Apple's betting that their services and their customers will help developers do the latter. Aggregator / Middleman services like Readability will probably have to rethink their business model, unless Apple relents, and either change the proportion they pass on to publishers, or move away from subscription billing. Instapaper manages without subscription fees, so there's certainly some way to make the economics work.
I'm curious why you think that "personal responsibility for corporate misdeeds" is the issue with SOX?
Did Bernie Ebbers (Worldcom), Ken Lay (Enron), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco Int'l), John & Timothy Rigas (Adelphia), and the dozen-or-so officers from Peregrine Systems who all were convicted & sentenced on various charges escape "personal liability" in their misdeeds? I'd argue that their convictions certainly suggest they didn't escape.
What SOX is about is *restoring investor confidence* by requiring more transparency in governance & accounting for publicly traded companies. After the spate of scandals that prompted passage of SOX, congress and investors were interested in making sure "this sort of thing can't happen again." So they passed some new legislation requiring stricter accounting practices, and everybody left feeling satisfied that they were "safe" again. But allowing directors to be held directly liable was nothing new - corporate officers have been held personally liable for misdeeds before SOX, and we'll be holding directors personally liable for misdeeds after its passage as well.
Work longer - bigger, longer lasting battery; Store more - more internal flash storage available; Display more - 10" screen, rather than 3.5" screen. Take advantage of a larger interface control area (see screen size difference. You know it's a touchscreen, right? You know that simply miniaturizing an iPad-sized interface onto an iPhone screen would produce controls that are too small to be reliably manipulated by touch, right?
Again, if you think that those differences in capability don't make a difference in what you can do with the device, then you're being deliberately obtuse. It's also likely, as somebody further up the thread suggested, that you have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between a sedan and a station wagon, or a jet and a kite. Or is it just that the Apple logo causes your brain to seize up so completely that the red haze it causes prevents you from perceiving reality?
It's like YOU didn't even read MY post - like specifically, where I wrote, "So you mean the bigger version does something more, or different, than the smaller version?"
The larger size of a swimming pool enables you to immerse yourself in water and splash around in a refreshing way on a hot summer afternoon. But that larger size also means that a swimming pool would make a terrible coffee cup. Conversely, a coffee cup is perfect for enjoying a bracing swallow of freshly brewed Colombian coffee, but it makes an absolutely TERRIBLE swimming pool, unless you generally swim a few cells at a time. They both are vessels for holding liquid, but their size differential means that each of them is best suited to a particular need.
Perhaps my analogy is fine, and your reading comprehension is flawed? If you really can't see that there's a significant difference in what you can do with a 10" touchscreen as opposed to a 3.5" touchscreen, then you've got way too much of a hard-on for Apple-bashing for anybody to take you seriously.
Huh. So you mean the bigger version does something more, or different, than the smaller version?
Why, that sounds just like the difference between an iPhone and an iPad!
You're absolutely right. I'd like to relate this similar story:
My friend says to me the other day, "Hey, I think we're going to put a pool in behind the house this summer!"
I say, "But dude, why would you bother?"
"Because we want something to take a swim in now and then! It's going to be great!"
"Wait. I've been in your kitchen before. You have a bunch of cups."
"Yeah... so?"
"So a pool is just a big cup. Why would you waste your money on one when you already have the smaller version?"
"Uh... because they're not the same thing at all? I can't climb into a cup and enjoy a nice swim on a hot afternoon."
"What the fuck, man, you already have a BATHTUB, and you can CERTAINLY soak in that! What's the point of a pool? I bet you can't even tell the difference between a pool and a bathtub!"
"You know what? Just don't bother coming over."
No, I'm implying that by removing the corporate personhood, you're forcing the plaintiff to spend time, money, and tons of effort determining for themself exactly which employee is the one who had a bad day, so that you can bring a lawsuit specifically against them. After all, if there's no "corporate" entity, Toyota doesn't give a shit about your lawsuit - you think their car caused your wife's death due to the negligence of someone at Toyota? Great, go figure out which person specifically was negligent, and sue them directly! And if you're wrong, pick a new target, and try again.
Or, you can file a suit against "Toyota," and turn Toyota's vast resources towards figuring out exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong, and who specifically had a bad day. In the former case, you're spending years of your own time in a fruitless search for someone to blame. In the latter case, you know that "someone at Toyota" screwed up, and the lawsuit is a way to compel them to assist you in both finding out who did it, and compensate you for your damages.
And as for slip and fall litigation, the issue is liability. There are obviously *some* frivolous lawsuits, but in the case where the negligence of an employee does cause damages, again, it's nice to have a single entity to file suit against, rather than trying to find the names of the 8 people who happened to be working at the specific walmart at the specific time you specifically slipped and file suit specifically against them, which will result in a 5 million dollar medical costs & damages judgement, which you'll then be left to try and collect from those 8 or 9 individuals who all probably make (minimum wage + 5 dollars) / hr. In cases like this, think of the corporation's existence as a form of liability insurance that those 8 or 9 negligent people get by virtue of working for that corporation. You still get your judgement payout, and they don't have to hand it out from their own pocket, though they might also find themselves out of a job as a result of their negligence causing a judgement against the corporation.
First: the explosion occurred less than 1 year ago. I think it's safe to say that we haven't even begun to see the end of the lawsuits that will occur as a result of this, but you can see here that there are already several hundred lawsuits filed in the US over the event, and it appears as if more criminal charges may be coming.
Second: it's entirely possible for you to accidentally kill someone, and have no charges filed as a result - accidental deaths do happen, and unless there is specific negligence or recklessness on the part of the person who "caused" the death, there may not be criminal liability at all - the law does not impose a liability for failure to act unless there is a specific requirement to act codified by law. There may still be civil liability for wrongful death, however. Given the nature of the event, and the fact that multiple factors and conditions contributed to it, it's possible that there is simply no way of pinning the blame for this on a single person's actions or inactions.
And that has nothing to do with the "corporation" - if people are criminally liable for their negligence, and it can be proved, you will see people stand trial for it. Suggesting that the largest spill & disaster the oil industry has ever seen should have all its legal loose ends tied up less than a year after the event is a pretty tall order, especially when investigations are still ongoing.
This has nothing to do with corporations per se, and everything to do with the fact that in large groups of people working together, it's often difficult to determine where one person's culpability begins and another person's ends. Unions aren't incorporated - does this mean that wrongdoing (and hiding that wrongdoing) is somehow harder for them because of it? The mafia isn't incorporated - are they a model of transparency and clear lines of responsibility & liability?
What incorporation DOES grant people is the existence of a single entity to sue for damages & wrongdoing, and who has assets which can be forfeited to satisfy judgements against them for wrongdoing. Let's turn it around: if you work for a company that files for bankruptcy protection, and I'm a creditor, should I be able to go after your house? After all, you draw a salary from a company which owes me a lot of money - aren't I entitled to recover the money owed to me from the assets of the people involved in the group of people who are stiffing me? I could certainly make a legal argument, if you do away with the idea of corporate personhood, that your house was paid for with money which rightfully should have been used paying me for the goods & services your employer got from me, and then failed to pay for. The fact that you work for a *corporation* protects you from having to defend yourself against actions like this.
Individuals can incorporate. If you're smart enough to have billions of dollars to build & operate a drilling rig as an individual, then you're also smart enough to spend $500 to purchase the liability protection that incorporation gives you. The regulations simply need to state that "the entity which fucks up pays big fines." If you happen to be operating as an unincorporated individual, then you pay big fines yourself. If you're smart enough to structure & operate your business as a corporation (arm's length, proper protocols & filings, etc - all of the stuff which, when neglected, would allow a court to successfully pierce the corporate veil), then the corporation pays your fines, and your personal assets (not *corporate* assets) are safe.
Arguing that corporations somehow give protections to "groups" of people that are unavailable to individuals is just spurious nonsense. If you want the protection, it is available to you, even as an individual. File the legal paperwork, incorporate, and run your business properly to protect your personal assets.
Please explain how you arrived at the conclusion that this is my position based on anything I wrote? Or did you simply not bother to read it in your haste to tell me that I'm totally wrong?
I specifically gave you 2 instances where individuals *were* held responsible for criminal conduct taken on behalf of their companies. I never suggested it was unwarranted, undeserved, or somehow wrong for this to happen. Just as, if you commit murder, you're still guilty of murder, regardless of who paid you to do it.
What I said was that the BULK of corporate litigation is of the "I was sold a defective product," or "I want medical expenses for my slip-and-fall at Walmart" variety - negligence and accidents by low- and mid-level employees which harm or damage someone somehow, and which it simply is not efficient, effective, or even plausible that "suing everybody individually, from the line worker to the CEO," is a workable outcome. Managing a lawsuit against, apportioning blame amongst, and collecting a judgement from 5,000 employees is a logistical nightmare which would rapidly swamp any legal system you tried enacting it under. It's easier, faster, and far more efficient to sue "the company", and let "the company" apportion blame internally after it's settled its legal issues.
It's not "just" a group of individuals, and no amount of tritely oversimplified demagoguery is going to change that basic fact.
But obfuscation is not a side effect of incorporation, it's a side effect of a large group of people working together - the actions of a single person become harder to track when they've got a hundred other people around them doing stuff that connects to their work. This is not a problem with corporations, per se, but an innate quality of any large group. In fact, the notion of corporate personhood helps to make that "herd immunity" less of an issue with assigning blame: even if someone in an organization manages to hide their individual culpability VERY well, it's still easy to demonstrate that the organization "as a whole" bears some liability for harm.
If you're truly concerned that obfuscation is a risk, then regulations to Increase retention and transparency on corporations may be a reasonable response, but I don't think abolishing the notion of corporate personhood does anything to address or mitigate against this risk.
But if you read back up through this chain of responses, you'll see very clearly that several people are in fact asserting that very thing - again, to review what was written by the person I initially responded to: "People working in corporations have MORE freedoms than those not working in one."
I am not claiming that regulation of corporations is unnecessary or undesirable, however, the regulations should apply to the activity, not the entity performing the activity - if you want to regulate deep-water drilling, to use your example, then the regulations should be exactly the same on me if I'm an individual with deep pockets, or a corporation with deep pockets. The structure of the entity performing the activity being regulated shouldn't matter - the activity itself, and whether or not it's conducted lawfully, does.
You can't completely reject the claim without reviewing it first, can you? Or do you assume that assembly line workers are never negligent, or simply overlook things, or have a bad day, or even do downright malicious things?
All you've done is increased the number of lawyers and defendants and plaintiffs yelling at one another, and you'll probably end up unable to collect your judgement, since the bulk of the fault will probably end up being found in the engineering and manufacturing areas. So you don't get your money, or everybody in the world is then required to start carrying their own professional liability insurance if they don't want to end up living on the streets as a result of having a bad day at work and screwing something up. What a great solution you're offering.
How is this a better outcome than being able to sue the "corporation"? Or have you (mistakenly) assumed that every suit against a corporate entity is for things like the fraud & deception of Bernie Madoff, or Enron? (Two examples where individuals *did* bear criminal responsibility for the actions of their companies, it's worth noting, as well.)