One starfish is gently returned to the ocean...
I'm frequently surprised at how old-fashioned comic culture is. I expected that by now, superwomen's breasts would be made of aerogel.
Well, nuts.
Here I am standing in this house, and I was sure I'd be okay if I threw the stone very slowly.
"A fell and unspeakable clucking."
That is a sound image for the ages.
Predicate-free self-referential expression of admiration.
Greg London:
As long as corporations can donate soft money, they have direct influence in the political process.
What you have just said is that people are stupid, and that their votes correlate with candidates' money. I fail to see how this is a structural or philosophical problem with corporations. Fix it at the governmental level by getting rid of soft money, or fix it at the personal level by making people less stupid.
But it isn't the same. When individuals who work for a corporation make immoral or illegal decisions, the corporation often seems to buffer them from personal prosecution.
Yes, Greg. That's what limited liability means. You said upthread that you didn't think liability protection was the problem.
It's also not absolute. The corporate veil can be pierced, although courts are not prone to do it lightly. It's why Lay and Skilling are on trial right now. They made illegal and immoral decisions and now they are personally dealing with the consequences. You could make a case that it doesn't happen often enough, or that the penalties aren't sufficiently stringent, but I would not agree that it's "almost impossible" as you said previously.
All these accounting scandals and Martha Stewart is the one to go to jail? People on the boards of tobacco companies knew for years that their products were fatal but buried the information.
You're conflating three different things here. Martha Stewart didn't go to jail for an accounting scandal, but for insider trading. And yes, executives in several of those companies were personally prosecuted for accounting malfeasance.
As for tobacco: if you can post here a list of the names of individuals who broke the law and what laws they broke, then perhaps that might shed a little light. I agree that it's one of the two or three most immoral industries on the planet, but you don't go to jail for being immoral or working for an immoral company. You go to jail for doing things that are illegal, and not every immoral act has a specific law against it. "They're scum, so they ought to be in jail" is an insupportable charge.
Stefan Jones:
To make this vaguely topical: TSR got into trouble with copyright matters early on. D&D mentioned hobbits. One of their supplements referenced Lovecraft material by name. And they had a miniatures rules book, now fabulously rare, based on ERB's Mars critters. (And the monster statistic charts in the original D&D rules listed Martian monsters.)
And of course, in keeping with the Disneyesque circle of irony, after a strong period of growth and invention they spent more than a decade in a state of extreme copyright paranoia, suing anyone and anything who dared to publicly refer to D&D properties, post game material online, or interest people in playing it. (By that point the company was no longer run by people who played games.) This was actually a good stroke of luck for the rest of the role-playing industry, as a number of better and more original games thrived from smaller companies run by people who supported their fans.
To me the really amazing thing about D&D is that under Wizards of the Coast they seem to have at least partially gotten over that paranoia. D&D 3rd Edition and its rules system were released under an "open gaming license" that allows anyone in the world to freely copy, adapt, build on, or create entirely new games from their material, provided that they don't reveal:
1.) The exact steps for creating a character ("Pick a race and class, roll some ability scores, choose related stuff, write it all down"); or
2.) The exact methods for increasing a character's level from x to y ("Acquire x*1000 more experience points.")
Those two restrictions were supposed to make sure people had to buy the D&D Player's Handbook regardless of what game they were actually playing.
It sounds bizarre, but it worked. They've taken over the industry again, or what's left of it, and more and more classic games and settings are being converted to Wizards' d20 game system. I think that's a shame because a lot of the other systems were more fun, but I have to admit that the simplicity has made it easier for a lot of people to get back to the game.
Graydon:
...what's really important is to get the constitutional amendment that says 'corporations are not natural persons, and do not have the rights of natural persons. In specific, no corporation at any time possesses any civil right; no right of privacy, no right of freedom from search, no right of free speech, and no rights of representation, assembly, or to petition for redress from grievance'.
So your solution to make corporate fair is to ensure that they have no reliable ability to issue statements or publications, keep any information confidential, hold events, prosecute criminal or civil cases with cause, or keep people off their property. (It was quite generous of you, BTW, to leave them with the right to property.)
If you think the answer is to ban corporations, just say so. Wiping them out by stripping them of the ability to do anything is an inefficient way to go about it. Also totally unjustified.
...so long as you've got a large, rich entity that has all of the rights and none of the responsibilities, combined with a naturally autocratic form of organization, they're a profound threat to personal liberty and representative government.
It's completely wrong to say that corporations have no responsibilities. You can hold a corporation accountable for criminal and civil violations just as you can hold any individual accountable. Limited liability applies (when it applies) to the individuals within the corporation, not the corporation itself, which is treated as a natural person in court on either side -- plaintiff or defendant.
About the only thing the legal system can't do to a corporation that it can do to a person is throw it in jail. But it can put a stop to any and all corporate activities, which leads to a similar end result.
Richard Anderson:
Uh, governments are enablers?
And a corporation isn't?
That's a nice computer you're using. I trust that it was assembled by a local craftsman using entirely homemade parts. Who was the artisan? I'd like to send a courier to commission one from him, after I've done my part on the treadmill for the local power co-op.
One followup thought: if corporations are sociopaths, what are governments?
You can at least sue a corporation and sometimes win.
Re: Corporations as sociopaths -- I'm gathering that the problem perceived with corporations isn't their existence (I think we all grant that there are endeavors too big for one person or a small group of people who trust each other), but the liability limitation. I have to ask, then: has anyone here tried to imagine a modern-day world with modern-day legal culture without limited liability?
I'm trying now, and it isn't pretty. The corporate veil doesn't just apply to executives. If I get the wrong product in the mail, I can track down the guy who took my order on the phone and take him to small claims court. If my new car's transmission goes out, I could set out to ruin the lives of everyone on shift in the factory that day. If I don't understand the instructions for my VCR, I sue the guy who wrote the manual. And if the siding on my house turns out to be crap, I arrest the guy who installed it as an accomplice.
The only winners I can see in this scenario are the insurance companies, because everyone will be required to carry umbrella liability insurance -- it'll be as important as health insurance. Only they'll find it very hard to find staff, because the customer service representatives will probably get named in every lawsuit for giving confusing coverage information over the phone.
I sense that there's a middle ground here, but I'm not smart enough to figure out what it is. I don't think it's "Only hold the executives liable" -- it isn't really fair to them either to lose their houses because somebody thinks their iPod headphones are too loud. There are already exceptions to the corporate veil for egregious misconduct -- perhaps that should simply be better enforced? I don't know.
If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. I'm not being rhetorical. I seriously can't think of any way to achieve most of the cool stuff of the past century without structures that allow very large groups to pool effort without fear of major personal reprisal for minor work errors. It may be that we just have to put up with sociopathic corporations -- and keep them away from our daughters.
Thanks, Teresa. It's been a while since we've seen you tear someone a new one. I hadn't realized how much I missed it. >8->
On my podcast a couple months ago I coined a new word for link farms and blog farms: Webfungus. I felt that "farm" was too positive a word.
The amusing part to me is that when you Google it, you get a couple of original citations back to my podcast commentary, and a greater volume of webfungus reposting the original blog posts.
Just because you're an idiot on a large scale doesn't mean you can't also be an idiot on a small one.
HP:
A request: I'm looking for alternatives to Site Meter and Technorati for tracking visitors and links. Any recommendations?
Does your Web host give you access to your log files? If so, there are several software packages you can run that work well. I'm a fan of AWStats; it's moderately complex to install, but gives just the right level of detail for me.
You can also try Google Analytics, which is free and has some very nice reports. My only problem with it is that it's intended primarily for online marketing types, so you'll have to ignore a lot of stuff about "goal conversions" and other voodoo concepts.
I seem to recall our hosts finding an alternative to Technorati that got the thumbs up, but the search engine didn't return anything, and I couldn't find a link on the front page. (Although I could simply be linkblind.)
IIRC they were talking about IceRocket. I personally find IceRocket's interface annoying, and Technorati appears to have improved in the past few months so it's not as frustrating anymore, but it is there as an alternative.
Hey, can I bring up another round of Name That Story? Just got this question in e-mail:
"Also, on a side note, i've been trying to track down the name/author of a story where these people are running out of oxygen in their solar-powered space suits on a small planet so they have to chase the sun as it sets to stay alive. I've been looking for the name of that story forever, I read it when i was a little kid. If you know, or if you have a good sci-fi network of people who might, maybe you could put the word out and see if anyone knows...???"
Anyone have a thought? The querent is a musician who just gave me permission to podcast one of the most powerful SFnal songs I've yet heard, so I really want to help him out.
I don't approve of hardcopy piracy of hardcopy publications, or online piracy of online content. That's a different thing. But so far, when it comes to scattered feral electronic versions of hardcopy publications, the rule seems to be that familiarity breeds audience.
Yes. Hallelujah.
What I've been doing since my summer vacation: I've been buying short stories from authors, most of which were already published, and giving them away on a Creative Commons license that allows everyone else to give these particular audio readings of said stories away perpetually.
Buying things and giving them away sounds like a strange business model -- but in eight months we've made enough money doing it that we've been able to raise our payment rates, put two more people on paid staff, and we're finally forming a company for the thing. (We were going to do a 501(c)(3) initially, but it became clear that we could do less good that way.)
Meanwhile, we've had authors who keep contributing to us because they say their stories on Escape Pod get them more fan e-mail than the original print publications.
That's the new world. I love it. And as important as copyright is, I'm grateful that we have Creative Commons today as a balance for its excesses.
I assure you, the Escape Pod ad is absolutely safe to click on. Our researchers have subscribed ten thousand laboratory rats to the podcast feed, and not a single one of them developed any aberrant growths.
(Didn't hurt our download numbers, either.) >8->
Here's an interesting one that Ye Who Make Light may see fit (or may not) to bring some attention to -- the fellow at Electric Politics did an interview last week with General William Odom, former director of the NSA, who called Iraq "the greatest strategic mistake the US has ever made."
It's a long interview. I'd give a direct link to the post, but their blog software seems not to offer a la carte; there's just text on the front page and a link to the MP3.
I thought DiFi was how non-natural blondes checked their e-mail.
("Your roots are showing! Better apply the latest security patch!")
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