The decision that remorseless, logistical apparitions, that exist only to make money should have the same rights as US citizens was the single most destructive court decision in the last 50 years.
Yeah this needs to be the left wing "abortion" fight. Something we need to fight for 50 years before its finally overturned. Dont stop talking about it.
The problem is that Citizens United directly derives from a few straightforward concepts that are much more entrenched. The summary that "corporations are people" is kind of a misframing that makes you think the decision could have easily gone the other way, but that refrain is actually disempowering because there isn't much that could be changed at this level of abstraction.
I'm nothing close to a scholar on the topic, but that CAP article does not at all make it sound like Citizens United was inevitable. It does make it clear that the ruling builds on other old and bad rulings, but it's still quite a leap.
It made it to the Supreme Council, so obviously there were good arguments on both sides and it could have been decided the other way. But fundamentally the rationalization of how it was decided is rooted in this deep seated assertion that people working for companies are doing so personally-voluntarily, ultimately stemming from the US's broken legal conception of rights in terms of a "negative" framing. While it would be great to reframe individual liberties in a positive sense so conflicts could be weighed equitably, I don't see that happening any time soon. Hence, focusing on regulating the government-created liability-limiting legal structures that encourage such scale in the first place.
Yeah but again, none of that is inevitable, it's merely convenient. We have seen justices go through astounding contortions of logic to design a case along certain ideological lines, many times. The availability of a chain of reasoning does not mean that the decision had to be decided the way it was decided.
This'd be a valid analogy if all compiled / interpreted languages were like INTERCAL and eg. refused to compile / execute programs that were insufficiently polite, or if the runtime wouldn't print out strings that it "felt" were too silly.
It depends from which vantage point you look at it. The person directing the company, let's imagine it was Bill Gates instructing that the code should be bug free, but its very opinionated about what a bug is at Microsoft.
> I don't know what it is, but trying to coax my goddamn tooling into doing what I want is not why I got into this field.
I can understand that, but as long as the tooling is still faster than doing it manually, that's the world we live in. Slower ways to 'craft' software are a hobby, not a profession.
(I'm glad I'm in it for building stuff, not for coding - I love the productivity gains).
Man, I just want to point out how different programming has become in 2 years.
We are literally having to play mind games with our tooling now to convince and coax it into doing certain things. I swear we are not far off from having to call in sick to work because your LLM "is going through a lot right now and just needs a mental health break".
In my experience, "you don't need *MQ, just use Kafka" is a way worse problem.
Trying to explain the distinction between an event streaming platform and a distributed message queue to your enterprise architect is an exercise that no one should have to go through.
Finding out that one of the world's largest economic forces aspires to burn out their workforce and spend more time shooting from the hip is depressing.
The problem is that deciders are almost always picked for their ability to kiss management's ass as opposed to their technical savvy.
I would agree with you if companies started embracing workplace democracy and electing the decision makers.
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