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How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no o

How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.

irq 3y ago
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care. Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath. I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
- nceqs3 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but what nation-state or billionaire is fighting against the EFF? In fact, the EFF is funded by billionaires and nation-states.
  - radlad 3y ago
    https://www.eff.org/legal-victories https://www.eff.org/legal-victories
ryandrake 3y ago
Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
- callalex 3y ago
  What about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
  - advael 3y ago
    All change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Perhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked? Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad. Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component. You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.

How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.

irq 3y ago

> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care. Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath. I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.

nceqs3 3y ago
I'm sorry, but what nation-state or billionaire is fighting against the EFF? In fact, the EFF is funded by billionaires and nation-states.
- radlad 3y ago
  https://www.eff.org/legal-victories https://www.eff.org/legal-victories

ryandrake 3y ago

Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!

callalex 3y ago
What about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
- advael 3y ago
  All change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Perhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked? Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad. Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component. You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.