5 ms·

Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws d

Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis, nothing from the government, in fact the government is systemically complicit. But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared. It's sickening to watch.

mysterydip 4y ago
Amazing how quickly the justice department works for certain interests.
- 206lol 4y ago
  Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
  - CapstanRoller 4y ago
    >Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad. How nice can you really be if you sign up for, and continue to work within, such a awful institution?
    - mindslight 4y ago
      The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley? If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
      - CapstanRoller 4y ago
        >The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley? Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference between being an engineer working with systems that can be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack people's skulls (especially since those people are usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities, marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder them. Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between participating in society (which is mandatory) and being at the tip of the spear of violent repression. Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder and received paid vacations for it.
  - all2 4y ago
    What's the solution, then? If central authority is Bad (TM), is it decentralized authority that is the solution? IE, everyone gets a gun, everyone is deputized, everyone is responsible for upholding the law as citizens and enforcers.
    - cbozeman 4y ago
      Yes. That's how it was done prior to the 1800s.
      - vaidhy 4y ago
        Only in the wild west. There were other parts of the world that were civilized.
    - 206lol 4y ago
      Offload most police duties to civilian organizations who are specifically trained to do them. Traffic enforcement doesn't need a gun. Mental health crisis intervention is made worse by cops. (A yelling homeless man doesn't need a cop, they need someone trained to help with this specific issue.) Retain a small number of cops to deal with serious crimes (homicides, etc) and disarm them except in emergencies. We also need to tackle criminal justice reform - ensure we have sufficient public defenders, ensure people have speedy access to trials, don't lock everyone in jail while awaiting trial, don't pressure people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just so they can keep out of jail. Reprioritize minor offenses - who cares if someone has pot, why are we spending any time on it?
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell should law enforcement get involved at all?
theyeenzbeanz 4y ago
There’s a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES. Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright struck the original video. So they don’t even do anything to corporations ripping of people’s works.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems insufficient. The document is filled with language such as "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government to sanction other countries that have better things to do than police imaginary american property. Sickening doesn't even begin to describe it.
hgs3 4y ago
Its called crony capitalism [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
- CapstanRoller 4y ago
  That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism, not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony capitalism. The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    It's funny how communists and capitalists both make the same point and counterpoint, just inversed.
    - CapstanRoller 4y ago
      The most honest capitalists (e.g. some AnCaps, some neoliberals) do make this point, but it's not very common. As much as I disagree with their views, I respect their blunt honesty about the system they endorse. What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if only we just Do It Harder. "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. It prevents us from discussing actually-existing capitalism.
      - hgs3 4y ago
        > "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc... Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
hn_throawlles 4y ago
let corporations exist without human participation... ahahahah interesting times
nceqs3 4y ago
Piracy is wrong. The amount of coping people will do to justify it is incredible to watch.
- kwere 4y ago
  paywalling art & culture is wrong, imagine paying a license fee on the use of the italian pizza culture, on the catholic bible, on songs and works of arts like images of paintings bcs people could/should go to the museum and pay to see the paintins. Obviously commercial uses of third parties intellectual propriety should be regulated and enforced.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally acceptable" digital library? * You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others. * You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason. * You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those. * You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that. The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.
- sneak 4y ago
  There's nothing wrong or bad about copying digital information.
quadrifoliate 4y ago
It's because we as the general public don't do anything to counter-lobby. When was the last time you wrote to your congresspersons about this overreach?

mysterydip 4y ago

Amazing how quickly the justice department works for certain interests.

206lol 4y ago
Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
- CapstanRoller 4y ago
  >Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad. How nice can you really be if you sign up for, and continue to work within, such a awful institution?
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley? If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
    - CapstanRoller 4y ago
      >The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley? Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference between being an engineer working with systems that can be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack people's skulls (especially since those people are usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities, marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder them. Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between participating in society (which is mandatory) and being at the tip of the spear of violent repression. Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder and received paid vacations for it.
- all2 4y ago
  What's the solution, then? If central authority is Bad (TM), is it decentralized authority that is the solution? IE, everyone gets a gun, everyone is deputized, everyone is responsible for upholding the law as citizens and enforcers.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    Yes. That's how it was done prior to the 1800s.
    - vaidhy 4y ago
      Only in the wild west. There were other parts of the world that were civilized.
  - 206lol 4y ago
    Offload most police duties to civilian organizations who are specifically trained to do them. Traffic enforcement doesn't need a gun. Mental health crisis intervention is made worse by cops. (A yelling homeless man doesn't need a cop, they need someone trained to help with this specific issue.) Retain a small number of cops to deal with serious crimes (homicides, etc) and disarm them except in emergencies. We also need to tackle criminal justice reform - ensure we have sufficient public defenders, ensure people have speedy access to trials, don't lock everyone in jail while awaiting trial, don't pressure people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just so they can keep out of jail. Reprioritize minor offenses - who cares if someone has pot, why are we spending any time on it?
snickerbockers 4y ago
I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell should law enforcement get involved at all?

theyeenzbeanz 4y ago

There’s a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES. Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright struck the original video. So they don’t even do anything to corporations ripping of people’s works.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems insufficient. The document is filled with language such as "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government to sanction other countries that have better things to do than police imaginary american property. Sickening doesn't even begin to describe it.

hgs3 4y ago

Its called crony capitalism [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

CapstanRoller 4y ago
That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism, not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony capitalism. The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.
- user3939382 4y ago
  It's funny how communists and capitalists both make the same point and counterpoint, just inversed.
  - CapstanRoller 4y ago
    The most honest capitalists (e.g. some AnCaps, some neoliberals) do make this point, but it's not very common. As much as I disagree with their views, I respect their blunt honesty about the system they endorse. What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if only we just Do It Harder. "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. It prevents us from discussing actually-existing capitalism.
    - hgs3 4y ago
      > "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc... Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.

hn_throawlles 4y ago

let corporations exist without human participation... ahahahah interesting times

nceqs3 4y ago

Piracy is wrong. The amount of coping people will do to justify it is incredible to watch.

kwere 4y ago
paywalling art & culture is wrong, imagine paying a license fee on the use of the italian pizza culture, on the catholic bible, on songs and works of arts like images of paintings bcs people could/should go to the museum and pay to see the paintins. Obviously commercial uses of third parties intellectual propriety should be regulated and enforced.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally acceptable" digital library? * You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others. * You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason. * You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those. * You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that. The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.
sneak 4y ago
There's nothing wrong or bad about copying digital information.

quadrifoliate 4y ago

It's because we as the general public don't do anything to counter-lobby. When was the last time you wrote to your congresspersons about this overreach?