I'm no advocate of the CCP, but China has seized assets from, imprisoned, exiled and executed white collar criminals that committed fraud, engaged in corruption, etc. Risking your assets, freedom and life might make brazen fraud less enticing.
NY is corrupt enough that it might have been intended as both an underhanded victory announcement and as a public quelling measure to make people think justice was done.
Those two things aren't related. This was during a Republican FCC adminstration and Ajit Pai would've repealed net neutrality even if every comment was for it. He doesn't care what public comments say nor does he need to.
That not mattering was then canceled out by another not mattering, because California passed the same rules so they effectively apply to everyone anyway.
It's also about public sentiment towards the companies and their interests. Comcast, for example, as a long history of trying to silence its critics[1][2].
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
Doesn't seem like it mattered here. Everyone noticed at the time, it didn't matter (because Ajit Pai doesn't care what you think), and there was no harm (because California doesn't care what /he/ thinks.)
Comcast has been losing lately as more places have been repealing their municipal internet utility bans IIRC.
Just because the outcome would have been the same doesn’t mean we can just allow this to happen with not even a slap on the wrist. This should be serious jail time.
"An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent."
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It seems the thing to do, before you dump toxic chemicals into the water or whatever, is to open a corporation. "Mistakes were made", after all.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
I will not silently go to prison because my 401k worth under USD 20k owns 0.0015 shares as a part of some mutual fund.
The CEO and the board do not do my bidding.
Send them to prison.
Technically you own shares of a mutual fund, and the mutual fund owns the stock. Unless the mutual fund only owns its shares via ownership share in a bank, which owns a derivative which owns the 0.0015 shares.
Which is generally why responsibility stops with the board of directors, because there’s no way there was criminal intent through four layers of indirection. (Except shell companies, of course.)
That sounds like it would be a very strong incentive for investors to avoid potentially bad actors and instead favor non-criminal investments such as bonds. This is a feature.
So you do a convertible bond with a buy option that give you 90% of the company if it's successful and you still avoid risks and get all of the profit.
We deliberately changed this with the advent of the LLC, which is a new thing (~50 years)
Before that shareholders were liable for corporate acts. At least monetarily
LLC's are state inventions, and thus vary quite a bit, but one standard feature is that you can't be liable for more than you put in. Thus they are shielded from any excess liability beyond their investment. This is true of c-corps today for sure.
However, on top of that, they usually have almost no formalities or regulations, making piercing the corporate veil incredibly difficult.
C-corps have limited liability (now), but piercing is much easier for bad acts, and they have lots of regulation and formality (historically) that helped prevent bad acts in the first place.
The LLC changed a lot here - you could form businesses basically structured any way you want, with almost no regulations, and still not be liable. Outside of constructing an LLC to do totally illegal things (like rob banks or something), you and your shareholders are pretty much never liable.
That is definitely not true of C-corps, and was even less true historically :)
For limited liability in general:
General forms of limited liability are about 100-150 years old, depending on country.
IE before 1850, it was pretty rare. I believe new york has an earlier statute, but it was uncommon.
LLC's are not corporations, either, under most state law, they are special forms of companies.
The alternative mind you, was sometimes double liability for shareholders, who both lost their investments, and had to pay for excess loss.
I'm actually okay with that - it's a good way to ensure better diligence and less risk.
It's true that LLC's enabled innovation that would have been slower, but at a tremendous cost - enabling almost any risk to be taken for free is to me, a lot worse than slower innovation. It also lead to totally perverse things (toxic dumping, etc) and shareholders didn't worry or care because at most they lost some of their investment, and most of the time, could easily pull it out before the shares dropped, and move on to investing in the next horrible thing. In the old world, they would have been responsible for the entire cost, even if they pulled out.
Limited liability is a bad idea as long as people can do horrible things to each other and the world faster than you can (or should) make them strictly illegal.
People can always think of horribly destructive ways to make money, and ensuring not just personal, but shareholder liability for them, is one of the only ways to keep things in check.
These things would happen a lot less if the ROI was not as high, and in particular, if downside risk was not minimal.
Your friendly billionaire is going to invest a lot less in arms dealers if the downside risk is not just their 1 million investment, but their entire fortune.
I would be completely open to prosecuting a majority stake holder who insisted they were not responsible for a companies' abhorent actions because we have no evidence that all their personal requests passed the board.
I would be perfectly fine with prosecuting every single employee as well. The level of “I didn’t see the contents of documents I printed” is far too high everywhere, and if employees were unwilling to carry illegal activity, it would be much harder to perform this level of crime.
It’s exactly similar to everyone who participated in a pyramid scheme is liable for the last round of victims. Up to you to get informed.
Not really. Vast majority of the crypto money made in 2021-2022 was by swarming ICOs and launchpads with sometimes hundreds of thousands (among people i personally know) and probably millions among those i don't, fake accounts - all having real names, addresses, IPs, passport scans etc. - getting in onto highly deficit launches when like 1 in a 100 trying gets in, and then the coin goes 10x because of immense demand. You do it with 100K accs, 1000 get in and buy coin for $500 each, you get $4m profit spending $500K for buy-ins and another $500K for accounts themselves ($5 apiece). Until even that stopped working because apparently, these fraudsters simply ran out of people worldwide. Some rather ordinary people made north of $100M this way, and i'm sure there are those i don't know (i'm not really in crypto at all, just like hanging out with smart guys) tho made billions. No one went to jail as far as i heard.
Many went to jail and some celebrities got fines. I'm pretty sure some went under the radar but the prosecution is still working on the years 2016-2019. If you are in the US and you've been involved in such sh*t, you are in really bad position.
"but it says right here in article 5 paragraph 20 section b of the EULA you agreed to that we may use your personally identifiable information to improve our service."
Authoritarianism will reliably produce such outcomes regardless of the economic system or ideology at play, and violent revolution/vanguardism will reliably produce authoritarianism.
Vanguardism and violent revolution are a failure, that doesn't make capitalism the only alternative. Indeed, that's entirely orthogonal.
Plenty of capitalist states have committed similar atrocities. An obvious example being the early United States - the transatlantic slave trade and the various death marches inflicted on Native Americans are every bit as horrifying as the crimes of the USSR, and were committed explicitly to obtain labor and real estate (notice these are both forms of capital) for our burgeoning capitalist economic system. Yet the people who claim the USSR proves communism is necessarily violent don't seem to take this as evidence that democracy or capitalism are similarly irredeemable.
If you aren’t able to distinguish communism and revolutionary authoritarianism you have very little right to enter these sorts of arguments with any sort of authority. Take your US propaganda view of political and economic systems and run off elsewhere.
You are describing totalitarian authoritarianism, not communism.
This is why I felt that the distinction between communism and the failed USSR experiment was necessary. Sadly, whenever many people from the US hear the word communism, they immediately assume it means the Soviet Union. Communism was one of many aspects of USSR, many of which were much less desirable by its people.
Could you provide one example of communism that did not end up an authoritarian regime?
Communism is just not compatible with freedom. When free to choose, societies do not become communist, they embrace production and trade. You cannot achieve what communists want without extensive use of force
It has not been implemented on a state level without the state also being totalitarian. There have been few tries to do it on a state level, anyways.
However, on a town or district level:
1. Primitive Communism — basically all human history before the agricultural revolution.
2. The Paris Commune — Paris was run by its workers for a few months before bloody suppression by capitalists.
3. The Israeli Kibbutz movement.
4. The Zapatistas in Mexico.
5. The Rojava region in Syria.
Overall, there are many cases in which communism has been successful and sustainable for a long time at a district scale. In case of primitive communism, for thousands of years.
In the game of prisoners dilemma, they defected and won. This means their strategy of corruption is a winning strategy. It means our law has failed and we can expect more people to practice a strategy of corruption and flouting the law rather than a strategy of adherence to the law or ethical principles.
Breaking the rules and cheating has been a celebrated strategy here and in the startup community. Remember that Uber and AirBnB were blatantly illegal when they launched and made millions. Remember how YC was encouraging people who advertised how to lie to skip covid vaccine wait lines as a "social hack"?
Are you really positing that the NY State AG was colluding across four years of time with the Trump administration's FCC? That's getting a big beyond "jaded" and into tinfoil territory, to be honest.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
I mean, the rhetoric for net neutrality was pretty extreme. According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass. Only services affiliated with the big greedy telcos were going to be given a pass while all the other services on the web were going to require additional fees to get adequate bandwidth to/from. That was a major fear mongering argument that hasn't come to pass. All the major tech sites were publishing the same rhetoric.
At the time home broadband wasn't so cheap outside of about a few hundred major cities, satellite internet was a joke, and phones were still on 3G networks with relatively aggressive data caps.
It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.
In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).
What did these companies get out of pushing to repeal it then? If the regulation was banning a business model that no one was going to use anyway, I don't see the impetus to commit mass fraud. Does net neutrality prevent anything beyond fast lanes and censorship?
- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.
- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads
To overly simplify it I believe we witnessed a battle of big tech vs big ISP. Each had a financial stake. Big ISP didn't want to pay for investments in infrastructure it didn't think would bring a good ROI or the extra costs you mentioned above with having to comply with new government regulations. And Big tech didn't want to pay extra fees for being some of the biggest servers of data on the internet. The fact so many comments here don't acknowledge big tech also had business interests in net neutrality passing like big ISP had business interests in it failing scares me. They are both big business looking out for their own backsides. I'm saying this as someone who grew up in a house that STILL doesn't have access to highspeed landline internet in 2023 because the ISPs did t consider the density of houses in the area worth the investment. I'm not immune to Big ISP or a shill. But this legislation was not the good vs evil it's made out to be by so many. Big tech companies have little problem taking a stand for some opinions they don't seem acceptable. they don't give neutrality to their platforms either.
Big tech has large service costs because a large number of little people are requesting data from their networks. Data for which the transit has already been payed for by the requestor. Despite the 'asymmetries' in throughput vectors, the market value equivalent of a Poynting vector is minimized with settlement-free peering. Paid peering is only enforceable because there are few enough retail providers for large segments of the population that they can wield monopsony power without customers fleeing on masse from degraded service.
> According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
They have a new fantasy where they want a fee from high bandwidth platforms like Netflix and YouTube, because suppisedly they can't deliver what they already charged consumers for. More likely because there's a lot of money moving about and they want a bigger slice.
I remember back then, it was abundantly clear that this is what it was. Ajit Pai was against it. He’s a corporate shill. They were doing stuff deliberately to sour the process. Also, like 100% of the fake comments were against net neutrality, which was quite telling. The fake comments weren’t even spread in a believable way. The times look very much bot generated. Simple stuff to filter out if you were honest.
Interestingly the actual judgement is significantly higher (still single digit millions). I dont really know what a "Statement of Financial Condition" is but I assume it means they are taking basically all the money these companies + their directors have.
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
Yeah I mean without looking into specifics of what criminal laws would or wouldn’t be applicable, that definitely seems like something the CEO should do a bit of prison time for.
Right. They need to reopen commentary and unrepeal net neutrality. How is it that we have a system that rewards endless appeals in the judiciary but the equivalent of a mistrial in public policy is treated with a barely-there fine?
> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
> But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute.
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Not prosecuting it is a dangerous precedent. Especially now we have AI text generation, such actions should lead any company to be sued into bankruptcy, and jail time for its leaders.
> Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Propaganda (a.k.a , advertising/marketing) is broadly legal (though some specific methods and certain actors participating in certain kinds are restricted), deliberately making materially false statements to the government in the course of, and in order to influence, a government proceeding is prohibited. Firmly drawing the line between those things is a good thing.
Such a disheartening outcome. They perpetuated fraud at a scale we've never seen, they get away with it, they changed history, and now we have to live with it.
I remember a case from a few years ago where Comcast/Xfinity did exactly this, using other people's identities to flood legislators with letters when there were hearings for public comments on legislation that would impact the company. I think it was during hearings on net neutrality bills.
It's a great way to drown out the public's actual comments and drum up fake support.
Public comments aren't votes so they aren't part of democracy. Influencing an unelected official like the FCC chair who gets to rule however he wants isn't democracy.
Comments that have no legal force (because they're not actually required to respond or respect them) surely aren't.
There's other situations like community meetings for land use that are far more democratic. Although, those are mostly bad, because it means only people with lots of free time can attend them!
Yet public commentary was requested and even required to be evaluated. Therefor, fraud existed. Either is was the US government implying this was a democratic process, or the perpetrators of identity theft committed a crime. Which was it?
Seems more like petitioning a monarch to me. A more democratic system would be that if an official doesn't listen to you, they lose their election. Ajit Pai doesn't have an election.
> There are places that were welding people's homes shut at that point.
Yes. Many places including new Zealand did unthinkable authortiarian things. Easily could be classified as torture.
> Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?
How on earth did you arrive at "move away from democracy"?
Also, the coercive and sometimes violent authortiarianism perpetrated by govs with media/big tech collaboration (who saw massive profits from lockdowns) had little to do with democracy. In fact, extreme powers that go against different constituinal documents were enacted in the most damaging security theater ever.
Net Neutrality was one of the handful of things I wrote my representatives about. I knew it was going to be mostly fruitless, but goddamn this is disgusting.
They are wrong here. A regime which is not western democracy probably would pretend that nothing happened. It is much more suspicious when there are not investigations like this. Sometimes it is worse: such kind of investigations are conducted by independent entities, which are then prosecuted and silenced.
I agree, that fine is a joke and cast doubt on western democracy, but what I want to say, is like Chircill's:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[1]
In practice absolute level of your belief doesn't matter, only a relative one when comparing with alternatives.
3 companies defrauded the government and pretended to be millions of US citizens in order to make billions in illegitimate profits.
Were fined a few hundred thousand.
Why isn’t every individual involved in jail? Why haven’t all the company assets been seized?
Also, given that they were impersonating real living people, can we please get a list of those people? Or at least have the victims of identity theft, fraud, and I think for many on HN defamation?
The _only_ reason those details should not be available is to further protect these shit stains.
Once again nothing being done to stop the pillaging of western civilization by large corporations, executives building as much personal wealth as possible before the entire system eventually comes crumbling down, just like civilizations before it.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the "user content" (product reviews, brand engagement, comments on social media sites, etc) is completely fake, bought for and paid by big money interest aka bots. No different than automated scans of the IPv4 address space: simple, unsophisticated, low-cost and without any repercussion.
I've been burned to the tune of thousands of dollars because I took star ratings on Google at face value without looking into the actual reviews to see if they were real or not. I still feel like an idiot because of it.
I keep getting this eerie feeling when seeing product reviews and the rest of things you list here - I would never in a million year consider writing a paragraph long glowing review of my car jack on amazon, and yet there are millions of such interactions all over the web.
I was startled to recently discover that a local gastroenterologist has numerous excellent reviews on Google Maps by people talking about what a lovely colonoscopy they had, some of whom related the specific medical condition that brought them there. Never in a million years would I consider doing this either. It turns out people are pretty weird.
> I was startled to recently discover that a local gastroenterologist has numerous excellent reviews on Google Maps by people talking about what a lovely colonoscopy they had, some of whom related the specific medical condition that brought them there. Never in a million years would I consider doing this either. It turns out people are pretty weird.
I mean, you kinda are talking about visiting a colonoscopist on hacker news, so there's that.
It's such a double-edged sword anonymity on the internet, but it really is starting to come to be a massive problem where you have no idea whether someone is a person or a bot and now with LLMs, I fear the fake review spam will be next level where it'll be almost impossible to tell real from fake.
$615 million dollars seems like chump change for 9 million counts of identity fraud. I recently read a story where the local DA in Portland charged a homeless man for identity theft for stealing a wallet. He hadn't tried to represent himself as the other person; he literally just had the wallet and ID.
Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.
ETA: Upon rereading, this feels pretty weasely and I don't stand by it, so I'd like to add this was my bad & I'm sorry for being overly literal. Ultimately it's as much my responsibility to understand the sarcasm as it is other people to make it clear to me. I feel this way when I'm misunderstood despite being fairly clear, so it's only fair that I apologize and accept responsibility when I am the one to misunderstand.
Looking deeper I see you're likely correct, but honestly I disclaim responsibility for misunderstandings caused by Poe's law when I'm on this end. I see this trip people up all the time, so I know it's not just me. I see the sincere version of this statement made, defended, and doubled down on regularly, so no, I can't reliably tell the difference without a sarcasm marker (/s). I admit this is a weakness on my part, but I don't really feel responsible for it.
I've seen amazing progress over my lifetime, and I see enormous potential in current social movements. It's not guaranteed, and I see incredibly destructive social movements picking up speed as well, but I do believe it's possible.
I think that there are many overlapping and mutually supporting systems that produce injustice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy), so progress on for instance LGBT rights moves forward the broader cause of creating a more just society and makes progress along other axis more tractable. Eg, LGBT bigotry and the accompanying rigid gender roles provide a buttress for abusive elements in our society, for instance by telling men that an element of masculinity is to endure any hardship without complaint, thereby sabotaging their ability to recognize they are being taken advantage of and organizing to support each other in opposition to, say, an abusive employer.
I think people are starting to understand that our relationship to work and to resource extraction is untenable and that momentum is building. Of course this has been understood for a very long time, but anything remotely opposed to capitalism has been demonized and had almost no role in mainstream discourse (at least here in the US). I think that's changing pretty quickly.
On a long enough timescale, my confidence we can build a utopian society approaches 1. I think the trick is surviving long enough to get there. I suspect that a more just society is an attractor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor). It may not be the only attractor, there may well be a totalitarianism attractor, but if we can get sufficiently close to the just society attractor we can get caught up in it's influence & remain stable in that state for a long time. Not by magic, it would take lots of work to maintain that society at it does to maintain ours, I'm saying society would reliably produce the people and conditions that allow it to maintain and improve itself. My diagnosis would be that our current society can create people with the ability to improve it but can't reliably create the conditions for them to succeed - but just because it isn't reliable doesn't mean it doesn't happen every now and again, so the trick is being able to make the best of whatever cards you're dealt and to stay in the game until you get a good hand.
This is mostly speculation based on my experiences and observations, I can't prove to you this is true (I can't, beyond a shadow of a doubt, prove it to myself). But it gives me hope, and I believe it reflects a truth about human nature rather than being a vain hope. So I offer it to whomever it may be useful, and if that isn't you, that's okay, feel free to discard it.
I have seen how fast any past progress can be reversed by sufficiently determined populist conservatives. Don't take it for granted when every liberty you have can be disappeared with one election.
From the time Lincoln was assassinated in 1895, until Roosevelt was elected in 1933, we had the age of robber-barons, enormous wealth disparity and the rich owning all of America.
We've had something like social progress from then until, when? Reagonomics? 1981.
So maybe 50 years of socially progressive government. Out of 250. Pretty dismal.
>Portland charged a homeless man for identity theft
Can you source this? Here's the closest I can find[1], an event in 2017 where a homeless person stole the wallet and wedding ring from a dead man after someone else murdered him.
Yesterday I saw a graph of how money these operators make each second, revenue is in billions, a ~600k is like a business trip cost for one of the executives.
What's a compelling argument in rejection of net neutrality (that these fake identities hypothetically would use)? Better delivery of in-network content, perhaps?
The best argument against it is you would be mandating that companies peer and increase the peering regardless of anything else; and that companies would have to peer with other companies even if they didn’t want to.
Criminal organizations conspiring to subvert democratic processes... The companies should be dissolved, the people who organized it should go to jail, and the broadband companies should be fined millions.
The irony here is that none of that mattered for the purpose of this agreement. They committed fraud by saying they'd subvert the democratic process in one way, but did it in a lazy way instead.
314 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadPretty good deal if you ask me
Just call it the cost of doing business hah
That not mattering was then canceled out by another not mattering, because California passed the same rules so they effectively apply to everyone anyway.
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2008/06/09/comcast_2/
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/comcast-accu...
Comcast has been losing lately as more places have been repealing their municipal internet utility bans IIRC.
Legal for a fee. Amazing ROI.
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
State Power is great isn't it?
"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
Stock ownership is rewarding because it's risky. Let it be risky.
Which is generally why responsibility stops with the board of directors, because there’s no way there was criminal intent through four layers of indirection. (Except shell companies, of course.)
In principle though, I think partial ownership of a harmful company should expose you to some liability, whether or not the CEO listens to you.
People seem to not realize this.
We should undo it. It was a mistake
C-corps have limited liability (now), but piercing is much easier for bad acts, and they have lots of regulation and formality (historically) that helped prevent bad acts in the first place.
The LLC changed a lot here - you could form businesses basically structured any way you want, with almost no regulations, and still not be liable. Outside of constructing an LLC to do totally illegal things (like rob banks or something), you and your shareholders are pretty much never liable.
That is definitely not true of C-corps, and was even less true historically :)
For limited liability in general: General forms of limited liability are about 100-150 years old, depending on country. IE before 1850, it was pretty rare. I believe new york has an earlier statute, but it was uncommon.
LLC's are not corporations, either, under most state law, they are special forms of companies.
The alternative mind you, was sometimes double liability for shareholders, who both lost their investments, and had to pay for excess loss.
I'm actually okay with that - it's a good way to ensure better diligence and less risk.
It's true that LLC's enabled innovation that would have been slower, but at a tremendous cost - enabling almost any risk to be taken for free is to me, a lot worse than slower innovation. It also lead to totally perverse things (toxic dumping, etc) and shareholders didn't worry or care because at most they lost some of their investment, and most of the time, could easily pull it out before the shares dropped, and move on to investing in the next horrible thing. In the old world, they would have been responsible for the entire cost, even if they pulled out.
Limited liability is a bad idea as long as people can do horrible things to each other and the world faster than you can (or should) make them strictly illegal.
People can always think of horribly destructive ways to make money, and ensuring not just personal, but shareholder liability for them, is one of the only ways to keep things in check.
These things would happen a lot less if the ROI was not as high, and in particular, if downside risk was not minimal.
Your friendly billionaire is going to invest a lot less in arms dealers if the downside risk is not just their 1 million investment, but their entire fortune.
There are lots of good articles on this:
https://www.bus.umich.edu/KresgeLibrary/resources/abla/abld_...
https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-instituti...
etc
It’s exactly similar to everyone who participated in a pyramid scheme is liable for the last round of victims. Up to you to get informed.
Vanguardism and violent revolution are a failure, that doesn't make capitalism the only alternative. Indeed, that's entirely orthogonal.
Plenty of capitalist states have committed similar atrocities. An obvious example being the early United States - the transatlantic slave trade and the various death marches inflicted on Native Americans are every bit as horrifying as the crimes of the USSR, and were committed explicitly to obtain labor and real estate (notice these are both forms of capital) for our burgeoning capitalist economic system. Yet the people who claim the USSR proves communism is necessarily violent don't seem to take this as evidence that democracy or capitalism are similarly irredeemable.
This is why I felt that the distinction between communism and the failed USSR experiment was necessary. Sadly, whenever many people from the US hear the word communism, they immediately assume it means the Soviet Union. Communism was one of many aspects of USSR, many of which were much less desirable by its people.
Communism is just not compatible with freedom. When free to choose, societies do not become communist, they embrace production and trade. You cannot achieve what communists want without extensive use of force
However, on a town or district level:
1. Primitive Communism — basically all human history before the agricultural revolution.
2. The Paris Commune — Paris was run by its workers for a few months before bloody suppression by capitalists.
3. The Israeli Kibbutz movement.
4. The Zapatistas in Mexico.
5. The Rojava region in Syria.
Overall, there are many cases in which communism has been successful and sustainable for a long time at a district scale. In case of primitive communism, for thousands of years.
An almost absurd question, but would it be possible to add love to company interactions?
A company might emulate love, but it’s really just veiled manipulation.
Then factor time:
1000000000000÷12÷30÷24÷60÷60
Somebody is making $32k profit per second. Who? That's about 5% margin/tax on $615k, so yeah, it's happening per second.
What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…
God, I’ve grown jaded.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.
In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).
- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.
- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads
Just because Netflix paid their providers, your local isp wants their cut as well.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
Can you explain your analogy? I'm unclear if the aquifer is the ISP, the video platform, or something else.
Here are some sources for anybody who doesn't want to believe this happened:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizon-throttled-californi... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/verizon-throttle-fir... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/verizon-firefighter-data-s... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/verizon-explains-why-throttle...
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Propaganda (a.k.a , advertising/marketing) is broadly legal (though some specific methods and certain actors participating in certain kinds are restricted), deliberately making materially false statements to the government in the course of, and in order to influence, a government proceeding is prohibited. Firmly drawing the line between those things is a good thing.
No fine has ever been a threat to any company. The entire system is such a joke.
More consequences are due.
Justice was served.
It's a great way to drown out the public's actual comments and drum up fake support.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...
There's other situations like community meetings for land use that are far more democratic. Although, those are mostly bad, because it means only people with lots of free time can attend them!
I haven’t lived in some of the alternatives, but I have visited some, and I feel fortunate to have been born in New Zealand.
Just make sure you don't have the wrong opinions. Such as not going with the medical coercion and banning of civil rights that occured from 2020.
Oh, my bad, that authoranianism is good and they deserved it - Signed, Mr G.
Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?
Yes. Many places including new Zealand did unthinkable authortiarian things. Easily could be classified as torture.
> Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?
How on earth did you arrive at "move away from democracy"?
Also, the coercive and sometimes violent authortiarianism perpetrated by govs with media/big tech collaboration (who saw massive profits from lockdowns) had little to do with democracy. In fact, extreme powers that go against different constituinal documents were enacted in the most damaging security theater ever.
The bad news is that they did this. The good news is that they thought this would help, so writing your representative perhaps isn't entirely useless?
Clearly democracy is better than the alternatives.
I agree, that fine is a joke and cast doubt on western democracy, but what I want to say, is like Chircill's:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.[1]
In practice absolute level of your belief doesn't matter, only a relative one when comparing with alternatives.
[1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
Were fined a few hundred thousand.
Why isn’t every individual involved in jail? Why haven’t all the company assets been seized?
Also, given that they were impersonating real living people, can we please get a list of those people? Or at least have the victims of identity theft, fraud, and I think for many on HN defamation?
The _only_ reason those details should not be available is to further protect these shit stains.
So while piercing the LLC veil seems unreasonably hard, putting every individual involved in jail seems not unreasonable.
I mean, you kinda are talking about visiting a colonoscopist on hacker news, so there's that.
Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.
We can and should improve society.
Looking deeper I see you're likely correct, but honestly I disclaim responsibility for misunderstandings caused by Poe's law when I'm on this end. I see this trip people up all the time, so I know it's not just me. I see the sincere version of this statement made, defended, and doubled down on regularly, so no, I can't reliably tell the difference without a sarcasm marker (/s). I admit this is a weakness on my part, but I don't really feel responsible for it.
Yes, Poe's Law and all for sure…
Also: https://mimiandeunice.com/2011/06/08/status-quo/
> We can and should improve society.
We should, but what makes you think that we can?
That's not to say it isn't possible, but that it's unlikely should we continue the same way.
I think people are starting to understand that our relationship to work and to resource extraction is untenable and that momentum is building. Of course this has been understood for a very long time, but anything remotely opposed to capitalism has been demonized and had almost no role in mainstream discourse (at least here in the US). I think that's changing pretty quickly.
On a long enough timescale, my confidence we can build a utopian society approaches 1. I think the trick is surviving long enough to get there. I suspect that a more just society is an attractor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor). It may not be the only attractor, there may well be a totalitarianism attractor, but if we can get sufficiently close to the just society attractor we can get caught up in it's influence & remain stable in that state for a long time. Not by magic, it would take lots of work to maintain that society at it does to maintain ours, I'm saying society would reliably produce the people and conditions that allow it to maintain and improve itself. My diagnosis would be that our current society can create people with the ability to improve it but can't reliably create the conditions for them to succeed - but just because it isn't reliable doesn't mean it doesn't happen every now and again, so the trick is being able to make the best of whatever cards you're dealt and to stay in the game until you get a good hand.
This is mostly speculation based on my experiences and observations, I can't prove to you this is true (I can't, beyond a shadow of a doubt, prove it to myself). But it gives me hope, and I believe it reflects a truth about human nature rather than being a vain hope. So I offer it to whomever it may be useful, and if that isn't you, that's okay, feel free to discard it.
We've had something like social progress from then until, when? Reagonomics? 1981.
So maybe 50 years of socially progressive government. Out of 250. Pretty dismal.
Can you source this? Here's the closest I can find[1], an event in 2017 where a homeless person stole the wallet and wedding ring from a dead man after someone else murdered him.
1: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/06/homeless_man_now...