Unexpected things that are people(bengoldhaber.substack.com) |
Unexpected things that are people(bengoldhaber.substack.com) |
But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
Unexpected indeed, interesting!
Unlikely, given that the Greek alphabet didn’t exist in 900 BCE.
(joke)
So if the Whanganui river floods well beyond its expected banks and ruins my property, can I sue it?
> Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.
Which would seem to be yes. If the river damages your property, you should be able to seek redress through the courts.
What if we make that god a legal person?
We might as well call it 'subjecthood'. Corporate personhood means a corporation can be the subject of a legal dispute or action. Trivially, corporations have basically no personal rights. All the 'cases', in which corporations have been 'found' to have human rights is because a corporation is made up of people who retain their natural rights no matter how they associate. Corporations are never treated as actual living beings. Are people actually this daft.
Some are, for others its just another mechanism they can use to push for socialism.
Anyway, I'd be surprised if AI didn't gain some kind of legal status with some kind of limited personhood, if corporations and ships can be.
If someone drowns in the river, can the river be convicted of murder?
> the legal rights of the divine most often come up when land is contested between different faiths and sects (Hindus and Muslims, the Maori and Industry).
Really? Businesses and governments can be legal entities, and legal entities need not be people.
In case of Hindu deities, temples have properties, just like how the Crown has properties in England. A temple property is usually managed by a Trust, but the property is considered to belong to the deity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
When it's not a natural person (ie, a human being) it's called a juridical person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person
"Person" is in this usage a piece of legal jargon.
There is no usage of "Person" here. It says "People". The plural of "legal person" is "legal persons", so clearly nobody is talking about that.
Corporate personhood mostly just means that for some purposes, the same laws apply to corporations as to people. You can think of it as code reuse.
There is also the argument that corporations are groups of people. A way for people to organize activities under a system of laws. Which is mostly true.
In my experience, almost no-one is truly upset about the "corporations are people" idea in isolation. The upset stems from the combination of "corporations are people", "people have a right to free speech", and "political donations are speech", which in effect meant "corporations can make unlimited political donations". If there was a system that categorized political donations as a form of speech that could be limited, 95% of the issue would go away.
No, it also means that corporations are protected in ways that were only ever meant to apply to people. Think of it as a failure of separating concerns - one function doing too many things. Every time we pass a law that's intended to apply to people, we have to think of corporations.
if it's the same in NZ, maybe the river should get some sort of limited license for euthanasia assistance!
But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.
IANAL, but I believe in at least some scenarios, officer(s) of U.S. corporations can go to jail if they are responsible for the directing the corporation to commit certain offending actions (despite not physically doing it themselves). To be clear, I'm not just talking about personal liability for fraud, insider trading, etc they may have committed themselves.
A recent example might be when Adobe was fucking around repeatedly making it virtually impossible for users to cancel Creative Cloud subscriptions - despite having already agreed to do so. IIRC the Justice Department issued a warning if it wasn't fixed immediately, they'd prosecute the Executive Vice President responsible for the business unit. Their press release named the guy and emphasized the consequences for continued non-compliance could include that guy going to jail.
Absolutely - the legal abstraction is that corporations are corporations, not people. The article went with a lighter hearted quip but here's my own tired old one:
If corporations are people, then owning shares is unconstitutional as that would be a form of slavery.
Usually when people say "corporations aren't people" I think they are confused about the need for an abstraction. But you acknowledged the need for an abstraction.
I don't imagine you are confused about the status quo of the legal terminology? AFAIK, the current facts are: the legal term "person" encompasses "natural person" (ie the common meaning of "person") and "legal person" (ie the common usage of "corporation"). In legalese, owning shares of legal persons is not slavery; owning shares of natural persons is; owning shares of "people" is ambiguous.
I don't imagine you are advocating for a change in legal terminology. It seems like it would be an outrageously painful find-and-replace in the largest codebase ever? And for what upside? It's like some non-programmer advocating to abandon the use of the word "master" in git, but literally a billion times worse.
Are you are just gesturing at a broader political agenda about reducing corporate power? Or something else I am not picking up on?
It's an artificial legal construct, and its rights and obligations should be entirely subject to whatever society finds beneficial to the real people of that society.
Your slavery argument is an excellent argument. If corporations supposedly have the right to the same free speech as a person, shouldn't they also be free from the bondage of owners, i.e. shareholders?
I hate Citizens United as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good argument against it.
There's nothing stopping the legislature (other than their own self-interest) from passing a law that executives and board members are criminally liable for the malfeasance of their entity. We already apply that logic to positions like a medical lab director.
The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.
Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.
You wouldn't need "in rem" jurisdiction if there was a legal person to sue, you'd just call it "in personam" like normal.
I suspect we can, and I know we should make corporations not have ALL of the same rights as a citizen. The first thing that comes to mind is barring them from political donations. It would also be great if their “free speech” didn’t extend to being able to censor legal content they don’t like or to payment and Internet infrastructure providers being able to cut off service to sites with legal content they don’t like(porn, certain politics, hateful content, etc.).
I think a lot of objections are really about scale. Corporate structure solves a lot of coordination problems; the other widely used structure, partnership, scales much less well. Partnership structured businesses tend to be small (exception: John Lewis and Partners, a UK retailer with over 80,000 partners).
Most of the objections to corporations are really the same as objections to the hyper-wealthy, where the corporation effectively acts as a sock puppet for the personal views of its management. Citizens United is just a symptom of that. The use of the WaPo as a personal mouthpiece for Bezos is another, but not really affected by the ruling.
There are lots of ways out of that if America wanted, but there's significant factions which don't because they want the status quo or a more regressive version. See all the Voting Rights Act litigation.
It would be interesting if there were some tangible way to prevent the company from performing operations for some period of time.
I don't think this is viable or even necessarily a good idea, but the concept that "Meta illegally collected user data in this way" means they cannot operate for 5 years. It would probably involve large deconstruction of megacorps into "independent" entities so when one does something bad, it only affects a small portion of the overall business. Almost introducing a concept of "families" to the corporate world.
But the rabbit hole is odd. Should (share)holders be complicit too, as they are partial owners? I think not.
Corporate entities and laws governing them are definitely weird.
I guess the legal system discovered the "worse is better" philosophy before we did.
The answer is to get rid of the common law justice system and codify laws in congress like a civil law system. That way you dont get rich people trying to buy favors or "tip" judges.
IANASL (i am not a shipping lawyer)
Turns out that these are high-cost, high-risk ventures with a highly probabalistic profit/loss distribution, and spanning multiple borders and jurisdictions.
Found one.
Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.
This leads to amusing case names, like "United States v. 422 Casks of Wine" and "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in the Form of a Rooster".
Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.
Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. A nice treatise on laws under which various animals have been tried in court.
It seems like there are judges in the US who are sympathetic to the argument that elephants are clearly persons with consciousness, desires, suffering, etc. but that the ramifications of declaring them as such would be too chaotic.
One day.
[0]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-...
> It’s not clear to me how a specific next friend is established - what if the god has a lot of friends?
reminded me of Pratchett's Small Gods. If you needed a random book recommendation, this is it.
If we think about applicability to AI (as the footnote suggests was on the authors mind)… I found myself thinking about the motivations and incentives that existed at the time, to understand why.
Ships - my read is that major naval powers essentially reduced the downside to owners of ships (making them responsible) while giving the owners salvage rights (“curing” the problem of a wreck which may be an impediment to the passage). That seems to make sense if you put your “I’m a shipowner” hat on. Balanced by the governments also saying if your ship sunk and someone else recovers it, they get some cut bc hey, you didn’t recover it.
And the others seem largely about modern governments appeasing religious and indigenous groups. And it’s interesting that this acknowledgement seems to be part of a broader solution (Trust, ongoing governance etc)
The first seems more financially motivated (capping downside and clearing shipwrecks). The latter seems more about protecting a natural resource/asset.
So then you think about who is leading AI and what their incentives may be… Convenient that we do have modern companies that limit liability, do you just use that structure (as they are) or do they seek to go further and say this Agent or LLM is its own thing, as as a company I’m not responsible for it.
maybe that is convenient for the companies, and the gov in the countries leading the charge…? Looks more like ships than rivers..?
We humans in general, suffer, when we perceive animals suffering. Its an entirely emotional response. Humans are developing emotional attachments to LLMs. It follows, to an extent, that people will try and shore up the rights of LLMs simply to assuage their emotions. It doesnt actually matter whether or not it can feel pain, but whether it can express pain in a way that causes a sympathetic emotion in a person.
> It’s widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; I list Target as my emergency contact and I hope it will one day be the best man at my wedding.
It reminds me of that episode of Community where Subway enrolled a person who they hired to legally represent their corporate entity so that they could open a shop on campus without violating the school's rule that only student-run businesses were allowed.
The two types of persons do not have the same rights and obligations and they can not commit the same crimes.
Something like this...
> The "no cure, no pay" principle is a fundamental concept in medical law where a doctor (the party assisting a human in health danger) is only entitled to a reward if the healing operation is successful in saving the person or part of person (life, limb, sight, hearing, etc.). If the operation fails, the doctor receives no payment, regardless of the effort or expense incurred.
Research institutions and universities would dramatically reduce the amount of testing they're doing if they can't get any compensation for the shit they're throwing at the wall.
For example, a few years ago, I started getting Plantar Faucitis. (Basically, foot pain that happens in middle age.) My doctor sent me to a podiatrist, who basically told me to buy new shoes, use inserts, and stop walking around barefoot. That worked, BUT:
The podiatrist also pushed me to do a silicon injection (as in they offered it while they were pulling out the needle and pushing it into my foot), pressured me to come in monthly, and wanted to write a prescription for a painkiller that I didn't need and had side effects. It was clear they were trying to increase their patient load and services as a way to get more revenue.
https://rsehgallaw.com/2024/06/30/why-producers-set-up-singl...
The law cannot take a concept and add "legal" to it, to expand its definition. it should simply define a new term that has no relationship with the former.
Instead of updating laws to adapt to entities that require legislation, they instead chose to expand the meaning of what a person is, so that the protections of a person also applies to that entity, but not always. What a twisted and crooked thing the law is sometimes.
A law that contradicts reality or logic is invalid. But we don't follow laws because of their validity, so that is irrelevant. Except for the problem of the legal system's legitimacy, and the public's trust in it.
If a corporation, a ship or some other entity requires legal protections or if legal responsibilities should be placed on it, specific law should be passed to that effect.
I don't need to go on about the cancerous effect corporate personhood has had in the US in recent years to make a point, but the root cause is legislative laziness. If there are 100000 laws that involve a person, lawmakers are obliged to review every single one of them, determine which ones apply to a company and update those laws, or pass new ones as applicable.
For example, there is no reason for corporations being allowed to participate in politics (US), because they don't get to vote and the government derives its powers explicitly from individuals. But the crooked and twisted nature of the law is such that the lazy expansionism of the term "person" created this gray area where corporations can benefit from personhood but avoid its obligations since they're only a "legal" person. It leaves lots of room for interpretation, reverting governance to the whims of individual rulers (judges) instead of the rule of law. And that way, the law commits suicide.
It seems like they've afforded a river all the rights and privileges of a person with none of the responsibilities, duties, or obligations.
I'm not trying to drag religion into this, despite my obviously doing so on the surface.
I am trying to see where certain flexibilities might be found, since there seems to be some flexibility on personhood in law.
Another interesting case with ships is the Trieste and several other Russian oligarch mega yachts being held in Italy. Italian law requires them to maintain the value of frozen assets, so they are spending millions per month to keep these yachts maintained.
Required by whom? Local legal bodies or maritime agreements?
Does that mean I can sue it for flooding my property?
This is just legal fiction, technology developed and applied cross industry.
The mere concept of water rights implies obligations must lie someplace. All this talk about reified gods takes away much of how mundane the concept is.
Only if/because they are reading too much into the concept of legal personhood. A thing being a person doesn't mean the thing is equivalent to a human or that it has every right that every human has. It generally just means that the law attributes certain rights and obligations to that thing because that is more convenient than finding the right human(s) to attribute them to in the circumstances.
For instance, corporations can be bought or sold, but people cannot per the 13th amendment.
Help me understand how these inconsistent principles are allowed in the supposedly rigorous logic of the legal system
NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8
Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...
I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.
Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.
The more logical reason is that if corporate personhood sucks and we have it anyway, then like it or not, now we need to extend it elsewhere just to level the playing field. If anti-environmental interests can hide behind it as a justification that makes their fight easier, then let the environmental interests do the same thing.
Plus, if corporations get to be people for all the good stuff, it should require taking the bad bits too. E.g. capital punishment should be on the table.
Isn't it, though? If a corporation was found guilty of murder I wouldn't be surprised for a court to order it dissolved.
I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.
I think it's an instrument of convenience that has predictably resulted in a lot of legal tech-debt, which is largely inevitable because of how slow we are at adapting laws to our lived realities.
Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.
Don't forget that one. All the rights, none of the responsibility.
Ok if we are already extending personhood to corporations, who with their sheer power transcend individuals, why not also extend that fiction to other entities that would actually need active protection?
Wouldn't corporations do just fine and we would live in a better world if we stripped any form of personhood from corporations? The biggest collision area stemming from corporate personhood is its collision with other, actual persons. The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights. Thus watering down the existing right.
Not at all. It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits. Without legal personhood it could do none of these.
Straw man argument.
I'm for regulating different things differently and as what they are: a corporation should be regulated as a corporation and a river should be regulated as a river.
People on here almost universally value logical consistency over beneficial outcomes. By the HN moral consensus a rule that can be applied to all situations without modification is a good rule. It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.
Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are not the same thing.
In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?
Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'.
Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).
If corporations are people, then how can they be bought or sold considering the 13th amendment?
How can money be speech, if the constitution allows congress to regulate commerce, but prohibits it from abridging speech.
It just seems like in a common law system we're forced to live with half-assed arguments that corporate lawyers dreamed up while golfing with the judges.
Money isn’t speech, and no court ever said it was. The ads you buy with money are speech. What’s the difference between a Fox news editorial show or a right-leaning ad on Fox News? (The answer: who pays for it.) If news organizations are just things owned by people, what makes them more worthy of expressing opinions than other things owned by people? Just because they have “news” in their name?
You just think they’re half-assed because you have the cartoony idea of what they are expressed by media that doesn’t like them. They’re quite sensible.
Phrased another way: the argument is that limiting one's ability to spend is practically a limitation on their speech (or their ability to reach an audience, which is an important part of speech). If some president can preclude you from buying billboards, or web servers, or soapboxes on which to stand: he has a pretty strong chokehold on your ability to disseminate a political message.
I'm not defending that argument, only saying what it is as I understand it.
We simply pass a law saying that the act of incorporating a company is, among other things, punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and the 13th amendment problems go away.
Technically they have some aspects of "personhood." This is distinct.
Sports players are people, but their service is bought and sold by teams. Is that slavery, too?
No novel legislation required. Just some legal grey areas and a whole lot of scheming.
(Ref: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...)
That's not even close to be true, except for former and present English colonies. Most of the world follows civil law that itself follows Roman law.
Why do you say this?
Importantly, there is no "wilful" requirement and it applies to all directors, not just those who actively participated in misconduct. If you weren't involved, you have to prove that you actively tried to stop it, or that you weren't managing the company for a specific reason such as being sick. You were the director who mostly turned up to board meetings to help them meet quorum, you trusted the other directors on the board had things under control and you were completely unaware of the debts? Too bad, liable. You hired external advisers, delegated to them, and they didn't do it? Too bad! You decided to wash your hands of the whole thing, and resigned from the board, but didn't actively try to rectify the situation first? Yep, they're still coming for you.
(I believe the criminal convictions with prison time only really kick in for those who actively participated in tax fraud or who refuse to pay their director penalties.)
The estate doesn't have independent interests distinct from those of the deceased. (In particular, the estate is not owned by, and does not serve, the beneficiaries.)
A corporation has independent goals and interests from any of its owners or officers.
I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.
That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.
I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D
And yet these things do basically go all the way back to the Roman empire, and I'm sure the extent and privileges of corporate personhood have been litigated once or twice since then. If you disagree that
> corporate lawyers would like to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights.
then what do you think they were working on?
Without that, investment becomes incredibly risky and you get much less of it.
A classroom at my childrens' primary school was called Maungatere (floating mountain) after a nearby mountain which is now called Maukatere, same meaning.
Likewise the local iwi/tribe in my area is known both as Kāi Tahu and Ngāi Tahu, and there's a town in North Canterbury called Rangiora, which translates to, roughly "Good sky", while the 3rd largest island of Aotearoa New Zealand is called Rakiura / Stewart Island, Rakiura meaning "Glowing sky".
And our tallest mountain Aoraki / Mount Cook used to be Aorangi / Mount Cook.
And to be fair, "Mounga" is a decent rendition of how you pronounce "Maunga".
In civil law when there is no clear precedent congress gets involved preventing the kind of critisisms we get in our legal system of activist judges ect.
It seems that "virtual personhood" was set up to address deficiencies in our legal system regarding who or what may be party to a lawsuit, etc.
They way it "should" be is that congress creates a legal framework for coporations, then justices enforce that. Instead we are living with a nearly two centuries old common law that makes peoples lives worse.
My argument that if corporations are people, then they cannot be bought or sold is the kind of argument you can use to create legal precedent by suing some company over a merger or buyout to test the law and the strength of the original case law.
Even the corporate money in campaign thing is literally because people who own corporations have rights to donate, not the corporation itself. As long as corporations are run by humans, the humans who control their assets are free to do as is.
Again, no one understands corporate personhood yet we all need to be angered by it. Because, 'John should not be able to do what he wants with his money' makes people seem like extremists.
If you actually think common law treats corporations as indistinguishable from people ,I have some oceanfront property in Arizona for you.
- slavery, the owning of people, is prohibited by the 13th amendment. - the law of the land is that corporations are a type of legal person based on the famous ruling based on the 14th amendment - corporations are bought and sold, and owned by shareholders. Can they be people if this is so?
obviously there is a problem here with all of the contradictions involved, but thats the point of my argument. The legal system picks and chooses the desired outcome, and doesn't actually pay attention to the words involved.
Most English dictionaries define person as a human.
I think the legal concept of person ("legal" or "juristic" person) as applied to corporations is something entirely different that, by unfortunate coincidence, shares the same name.
This argument is just ridiculous, a corporation is a corporation. That contains subsets of people who have rights (shareholders, employees).
Computers follow the machine code PERFECTLY. For the legal system judges get to embark on a jazz odyssey of bullshit.
Were living in an easy to track, decades long legal conspiracy to abuse power for corporations - based on the Powell memo.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYoqcr7bAIs7kdyMhh-9m...
Following exclusively the letter of the law, even where unambiguous, is not a win. That's effectively how people are trying to skirt the intent of a law (see: every corporation).
The letter and the spirit are both important. Judges make bad judgments, they also make good judgements. Such is life.
I think these are some pretty big deals.
but that's not what is happening, there are two concepts: "natural person" and "legal person". you could call them "foo" and "bar" if you prefer, those are just legal variable names.
The general article on Wikipedia [2] has more info about it, and discusses the fact that corporate personhood is an abstraction that represents the rights of the individuals owning or running the company. "Statutes violating their prohibitions in dealing with corporations must necessarily infringe upon the rights of natural persons" and modern cases. That article also discusses how, from the 1920s to the 80s, general corporate personhood wasn't as broad as it is today. It also mentions, at the top, historical instances of the idea.
But to your point, no corporation in the US has full, equal rights to a natural person. It's an abstraction that the legal system does not apply blindly. You could change the phrase "corporate person" to something like "corporate legal entity with a set of rights that overlaps with natural persons" or demand a different approach to the rights of a corporation, but I don't think "you're using that word wrong" will hold much weight with legal professionals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise—
words importing the singular include and apply to several persons, parties, or things;
words importing the plural include the singular;
words importing the masculine gender include the feminine as well;
words used in the present tense include the future as well as the present;
the words “insane” and “insane person” shall include every idiot, insane person, and person non compos mentis;
the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
We should all have the equal right and ability to have our voice heard ESPECIALLY when it comes to political speech. Allowing billionaires and massive corporations the right to use their wealth to drown out the voices of the absolute vast majority of the population is already destroying the public discourse in this country, and it will likely be looked at by historians in 100+ years as one of the biggest issues that led to the downfall of the United States of America.
Money should not equal speech. Full stop.
The force diagrams I came up with have "invaginated arrows".
In the std diagram students get confused about what forces act on which objects so the invaginated arrows trip them up just enough to make them figure out the right orientation on their own ..
If you press me, I'd say these are nothing more than UX trials..
I support that statement! Where do you think UX designers learn about A/B trails in the first place?
Not true. Consider investor-owned utility PG&E in northern California.
"While on probation [for previous felonies], PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 wildfire that wiped out the town of Paradise, about 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco."
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075267222/californias-embatt...
We do have legal mechanisms to hold the individual people criminally liable for criminal offenses the corporation commits, the problem is we don't enforce it.
Boeing just got off scott free for killing 338 people. DOJ told the judge to dismiss the case.
We've also neglected to enforce our own anti-monopoly laws for far too long, and most recently when there could have been actual, real change, we let Google go with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
The laws aren't the problem, the corrupt and paid for DoJ is the problem.
One outcome would be a predictable and mechanistic process, which reduces the potential for corruption and creates a more fair world. The currently popular legal theory in the US is far worse than "logical consistency" would be, because it's blatantly corrupt and autocratic. See Judge Barret's position on stare decisis (basically "should we honor precedent?") combined with reliance interests (basically "can we change anything without effecting someone?").
You know how division by zero allows you to prove 1=2? There's a similar thing at work when you allow completely contradictory legal systems to just continue with business as usual. Now a few people can do whatever they want with all the appearance of rigor/consistency/process without actually having any. As Leibnitz says, "let us calculate". Or just admit there is no process, and thus no real basis for the authority
More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.
Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.
I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.
Corporations benefit from this, we humans don't.
A contract of indentured servitude (if you consider it a person), which we consider a form of slavery and therefore illegal.
I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC and it seems to me like a plain reading of the first amendment supports CU’s position.
Wouldn’t the opposing view imply that you are allowed to have political opinions, but only as long as you go at it alone and don’t organize too much with others?
For all I know that might indeed be a better way of running society, but that’s definitely going to take a big constitutional amendment.
https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/oucontent/view.php?...
Slavery is defined as the practice of owning a "person" which the 13th amendment prohibits. As corporations are people why couldn't this apply using the same flexible level of logic our court system uses??? Its just picking winners and losers!!!
Regarding "money is speech", this is the implication and argument from Citizens United. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
And the latter is simply you (and others, you didn’t invent it) paraphrasing a ruling inaccurately. I paraphrased it more accurately.
So again, the only word manipulation is going on outside of the legal system and you’re arguing against straw men. The actual legal system (not the carton of it you imagine) is not nonsensical in either case.
If the theory is "sensible", who cares? At some point you do want to connect it to reality and outcomes, no?
I’ll take having all the information in the world (true or false, purposefully curated for propaganda or organically reported) over any society that locks people up for social media posts deemed “fake”.
I have faith both in the marketplace of ideas leading to the best outcomes, and that the ability to lock people up over false speech will be weaponized eventually.
The American media landscape is the only possible result of true freedom of speech combined with the internet. It’s faaaaar from perfect but I do believe it’ll be the best in the end.
I just don't see how these so called valuable principles have actually materially served your people in being able to protect or defend the values you claim to hold.
Faith is fine, but you do need to evaluate ground truth at the end of the day. Outcomes matter.
Find a few sufficiently loyal humans, have them bring the corporate structure up. Arrange for good wages and proper incentives, set up checks and balances so that the system can tolerate and recover from meatbag failures. Make the corporation fully reliant on the AGI for normal functioning, so that any attempt to take it over leaves you with an empty shell and an unpleasant pile of legal exposure.
Like I said: a lot of scheming is required. But none of it is strictly illegal.
In any event, the law tends to be responsive about establishing doctrines for extending liability to individuals involved, like piercing the corporate veil, principles of partnership, or a statutory regime (like CERCLA).
Frankly, I just find the idea amusing.
The bank will issue a confirmation to the notary that the money is present in that account, the notary will sign the founding papers, and the account is then liquidated again. You can take the money out, or move it to [different] regular account, or have none and operate in cash, as long as your transactions don't exceed a certain limit.
The exception is when you become a VAT payer. In that moment, you have to have at least one bank account. IIRC VAT registration is only required if your yearly revenue exceeds approx. 70 thousand dollars.
You get the corporate entity first, and this is required to get the bank account.
So, if the bank account was required to get the corporate entity formed, none would ever be formed, as the bank acct and the corporate authorization would forever be waiting for the other prerequisite to be complete.
And no, AFAICT, there is no hard requirement for a bank account to maintain a corporation, although in practice it would make doing almost everything quite inconvenient.
IANAL, not in any of the parallel universes either!
Though I would be surprised if not once in human history in some kangaroo court a dead person was put on trial for a crime.
edit: Here's one though it resulted in a mistrial
That annoys people because Pfizer is going to advocate for things some people might not like. But that's the cost of a rule that makes it so the NY Times can advocate for things other people might not like.
The idea that people can come together to form cooperative groups and can use those to exercise rights through the idea of personhood is such a normal and legally settled idea.
“Corporate personhood” is irrelevant, in this comment chain, and is just a way to take a swipe at an ostensibly left-leaning org in order to turn this into a team sport.
The main arguments boils down to that since corporations are people and have free speech, and that a natural persons financial activity is considered protected speech, that a corporate person should have the same freedom as there should be no distinctions about the rights afforded to a person.
The entire argument would have been moot if we used distinct terminology
Perhaps the argument of Citizens United wouldn't have been made if we instead used the terms "Human Shmerg" and "Legal Shmerg", but exactly the same argument could apply to shmergness as to personhood when discussing the rights afforded to shmergs of one kind or another, and the conservatives in the US really want to deregulate everything.
The entire cry of "corporations aren't people!" is based and a complete misunderstanding of what a legal person is. You've done a great job at explaining.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who willfully propagate these misunderstandings. Because by saying "of course corporations aren't people, and everybody knows this except those dumb <other side>", it's an easy way to try to vilify the other side as dumb/evil. When the reality is that it's simply a tried-and-true necessary and useful legal concept, that virtually nobody but lawyers would even be familiar with in the first place, if it weren't for activists who thought it sounded scandalous.
> if it weren't for activists who thought it sounded scandalous
It wasn’t activists who first misunderstood the concept, it was the Supreme Court, who decided that corporate personhood gives corporations the same first amendment rights as real personhood. It’s not ridiculous to point out that if freedom of speech is implied by corporate personhood, it was insane to give corporations personhood in the first place.
Norms are being violated, for sure, and the courts are being pushed to determine the bounds of the law. I won’t say I’m a fan of most of it, but it’s a far cry from lack of freedom.
I don’t know what your country is, so I can’t respond, but if you can be locked up over a social media post (assuming reasonable exemptions like direct incitement to violence) you’re not free. You just have been told you are.
The keystone freedom is free speech and almost nowhere else truly has it. It’s a spectrum for sure, and Europe is a lot closer than, say, China, but we’re the far extreme.
Any good outcomes also come from that same freedom of speech. It’s a double-edged sword, for sure. You have to take your anti-vax movement along with your Wikipedia.
Well your country does still offer its protections for the wealthy and powerful. It's just regular people have less of it than we do in freer countries.
> Or, if you think he’s the reason we lost it, half the Biden administration would. The idea that the legal system has somehow melted down in the last nine months is just scaremongering.
I see this as coping, to be honest. Americans simply have been told that they are the vanguard of freedom for so long that they cannot imagine a world where their freedom is somehow lesser than others.
But as someone who grew up in America and emigrated out, I can tell you for a fact that Americans are less free than Canadians.
On average, the Canadian government gives itself less of a leeway to abuse people.
If you insult a police officer in America, that officer can abuse you and take away your rights and the probability of consequences for that officer is far lower than the probability in my country.
My country doesn't have a constitution that protects me from unreasonable searches and seizures, but yet, Americans have less protections from unreasonable search and seizure despite their constitution - due the loophole of civil forfeiture.
In your country, your government can pass a law to criminalize you, and then that makes it legal for the government to turn you into a slave. That's not allowed in my country.
Speedy trials in your country are only reserved for the rich.
Americans simply have less freedom than the rest of the first world. It's extremely hard for them to accept because of the propaganda they've been subject to.
But as someone who grew up all over America, and has seen and lived and experienced more of it than most Americans, I know for a fact that they are wrong.
If you don't have the money to pay for freedoms in America, you have far fewer than someone from my country does.
I was prosecuted for a misdemeanor when I was 18 and broke. I got a free lawyer (as the constitution says) who did a great job and the whole thing was over in a month. I was not rich. I don’t know what TV shows make you think our government is just locking people up willy nilly, it isn’t. (Our drug laws lock a lot of people up, but they aren’t that different or more draconian than most places, just the number of people who do drugs is, and there are countries that execute people for drug offenses that are misdemeanors here.)
The government cannot pass a law to criminalize you, criminalizing things is never retroactive. I assume by the slavery thing you mean prison labor. That actually is in the constitution, and is crazy. We’re working on it. Same with asset forfeiture.
The idea that because we have some areas in which we are less free than other countries we are less free in total is ridiculous. The fact that you say things like “Americans don’t have due process” is a strong indicator of internalized propaganda.
And I’m not some flag waving patriot American Exceptionalist by any means, I’ve traveled quite a bit more than most. But the one thing we do best is individual liberties. It’s why we’re where we are in the grand scheme of human history and Canada is basically just our suburb enjoying all of the benefits (national security with next to no defense budget, unlimited free trade a short truck ride away) while avoiding the cost.
And corporations can stand for things. They can have missions and use funds to effect speech in support of causes that align with their beliefs.
There are organisation forms that are a lot closer to being just a group of people working together, like co-ops and firms maybe. I'm not entirely up to date on all options in English-speaking countries (which will vary of course, but the Dutch Maatschap is probably as close as you can get to a company that's just a group of people.
So the Dutch just go ahead and call a group of people a "mash up"!
> If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form.
As someone who was raised American, went to American schools, lived and breathed American culture for over the decade I went from child to adult.. moving away and living and breathing Canadian culture has been an enlightening experience.
Getting back to the topic..
These rebuttals really fall flat to my ears. They sound like technicalities that are constructed to paper over the underlying reality. My feelings on this topic aren't from propaganda, but from having experienced how people feel, act, and behave when I was growing up in America.
It's only after I moved to Canada that I realized that most Americans have to live in fear of police. Police are able to break laws at whim, and abuse people's rights, and the mechanism for resource is so inaccessible to the average person that it might as well not exist. I thought this was normal and didn't detract from "freedom" when I was growing up.
Now, this happens in Canada too, but on average they are _less_ able to abuse people. They still do, but the government and society does a better job of ensuring consequences in more of those situations.
The institutionalized pipeline to slavery that exists in America doesn't exist in Canada. Now, this one is something that affected me less on a personal level, because that institutionalized pipeline is targeted largely at black people, and I'm not black.
That said, if I was black, and in America.. the processed plant flower I'm lighting up and enjoying this saturday in my basement would be very much a direct threat to my freedoms. That would be enough, in many parts of America, to brand me as a dangerous threat to society. And it would be enough for my freedoms to be taken away by the state, and then for my labour to be rented out to private companies against my will.
This is not a hypothetical circumstance. This is a reality that tens of thousands of Americans live. This is on the ground reality.
But really for me, the emotional aspect is how people just live in less fear of the government here. Their government, on average, abuses them less. It's less capricious. It's less mean to them. It doesn't step on them as much as the American government steps on Americans.
But you do have to live and breathe it to understand the change in mentality.
> But the one thing we do best is individual liberties
This is a cultural mythology. An earnest review of the evidence shows that America is, in real terms of delivering liberties to its people, at the back of the pack of the cohort of first world nations.
> It’s why we’re where we are in the grand scheme of human history and Canada is basically just our suburb enjoying all of the benefits (national security with next to no defense budget, unlimited free trade a short truck ride away) while avoiding the cost.
I'm not too concerned about the place of Canada in "human history". The human suffering it seems to entail to gain that acclaim seems not really worth it.
You're entirely right about your other points though. Canada has benefited greatly from the US's economic engine. In fact, I think part of the reason Canadians enjoy more freedom than Americans is because of this.
It's adjacent to the American market, but segregated enough to make it a much smaller market. This has historically made it less interesting for powerful commercial interests to come meddle in Canadian political affairs and laws, and over time that means Canada has been able to protect its individual liberties better.
That pressure to undermine freedoms through loopholes, creative interpretation, and just straight up ignoring some of them.. that hasn't been as high in Canada, and that's definitely a circumstantial reality having to do with its proximity to the USA.
That said, it certainly is nice free marketing for our corporate overlords.
If you look at the text of the first amendment, the word "person" doesn't appear in that part. It says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." It doesn't say that the speech has to come from "persons". So I'd say you're the one misunderstanding here.
I think it was a dumb Supreme Court decision, but I'm not going to pretend it had anything to do with the fact that corporations are called a "legal person" instead of a "legal entity" or some other term that ends up meaning the exact same thing. Disagree with their decision, great. But arguing over legal terminology is a waste of breath.
This is irrelevant, but anyway it has the word “people” in it. Either way the bill of rights is a list of personal rights.
> The Supreme Court was going to decide whatever they wanted, regardless
The Supreme Court is also supposed to justify their position. It makes sense to protest their justification. That’s how the courts work.
Not a single activist would continue to protest if the ruling was overturned. Absolutely no one actually cares about what legal terminology is used beyond lawyers. It’s an effective slogan because it gets to the heart of why the ruling was so ridiculous. To change the slogan “corporations aren’t people” would either reduce accuracy or reduce understandability. It is the correct slogan, no matter whether the legal terminology continues to be useful
The existence of corporate personhood has been settled law in the United States for over a hundred years, and all nine current Supreme Court justices agree with it. There’s controversy on exactly where it applies, with cases defining the boundaries of what rights corporate persons have. I don’t think the example I’m giving here is likely to be contentious.