For read-heavy content sites like Yahoo Answers, I wonder why they get shut down instead of getting compiled into pregenerated static HTML and hosted as read-only.
Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out by not keeping it passively online, so it'd be in the company's interest, but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.
By this logic, no collection of people can be considered "people". Indians aren't people, men aren't people, etc etc. As an Indian man, I find that idea absurd.
Unanimity isn't a prerequisite for personhood in the context of whether or not the rights extended to individuals disappear the moment those individuals act as an association/group. Corporations are people because they are groups of people.
This is purely a semantic argument. At least in America, Corporations aren't classified as "persons" in an official sense; rather the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations. In that regard, exactly like Indians and men, the rights traditionally associated with natural persons are also afforded to multiple persons acting as a group. This is just as true for a collection of Indians publishing speech about anti-Asian hate (or Diwali or Bollywood etc etc), just as it is true for a collection of men publishing speech about whatever it is they choose. Under that principle, the SCOTUS has found that Corporations enjoy the same rights to express themselves as an association.
But in the spirit of actually engaging with the comment, Mitt Romney's argument is centered around the debate around whether rights that are traditionally afforded to individuals by American law (i.e. the US Constitution) also extend to individuals acting in a group capacity. That is to say, if I got up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent me from doing that? If you and I decided to create a group and find like-minded people and collectively use our resources to get up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent us from doing that? The Supreme Court found that the answer to both of those questions is "No", and — importantly — that the answer to the latter question is "No" for the same reason that the answer to the former question is "No".
So taking another step back, arguing that "America is a person" doesn't make much sense in that context, because the argument is about whether "America" has collective rights under American law; it's like dividing by 0. But groups within the US are different; a group of communists talking about how dope they think Marxism is, in a legal sense, is exactly the same as McDonalds Inc talking about how dope burgers are, or Google Inc. talking about how dope search engines are...or even groups of Indians talking about how dope Shah Rukh Khan is. They're all protected by the First Amendment.
No, but they can act uniformly if they so choose. That's the entire point. The US Constitution doesn't ascribe group assignments, but the argument is that if people self associate into groups (non-profits, corporations, religions, etc) then the rights that extended to them as individuals also extend to them acting as a group.
In other words, I'm not suggesting that Indians are some sort of hive mind, but if one day all of the Indians in America decided to Neuralink themselves into some sort of a hive mind, the rights that extended to each one of them by the US Constitution also extend to them in their hive mind capacity.
As an Indian, I welcome this freedom!
Corporations are people whenever it's advantageous to those corporations. In all other situations, corporations are not people.
Your argument is logically false.
A group of people is not a person. A group of Indians is not a person. Each of them individually has personhood - the group does not.
I assume they sold Delicious and Tumblr because of outcries. I can’t recall if I am misremembering, but I believe Delicious was going to be shut down according to an early leaked slide show before being sold to the YouTube founders.
It’s probably not worth selling something for 7 figures. when your parent company is the hugely profitable Verizon, no less, if Yahoo was still an independent $2B company.
I assume the web app can’t be sold for too much when it has to get a new domain name and name.
Then either Yahoo has to untangle the code or only sell the database. The latter could easily become negative PR depending on what the new owner’s site is like. The former doesn’t seem worth it.
https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...
And yeah the final sale to Pinboard was for literal 5 figure peanuts. While I think it was 1000x more when YouTube founders bought it.
Edit: my bootstrapped company was acquired by a much larger corporation and produced material EBITDA for 10 years, even in the year when it was shut down. Why was it shut down? Because it was written in PHP and the corporation was not going to support that tech stack anymore.
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Analogy from the automotive world [0]:
> the $10m McLaren F1’s software can only run on a Compaq LTE 5280. The reason being that they run on an installed, bespoke CA card. This CA card is the interface that communicates between the laptop and the car. Of course, since the software was developed in 1992, it should be no surprise that it’s DOS based.
I agree corporations are not people but then why are they taxed instead of just the people? This whole country was founded on the principle of "no taxation without representation". Any people or organization being taxed will try to influence politics to improve their tax bill. There is no way around that.
You can have corporate taxes or you can have politics with no corporation meddling but you cannot and will never get both as people who own these corporations will always try to lobby politics one way or another in favor of the corporations.
Eliminating corporate taxes would not change the fact that corporations want to tilt politics in their direction. There are other suggestions for ways to compensate for the differences between personal income and income to a corporation you own, but they always have to be designed to be cognizant of the way people will game the system.
The reality of it is probably not, actually. Not when you consider the full cost of running it -- not just the engineers maintaining it, but the extra complexity of perhaps outdated technology (can make it harder for other teams to move forward, to migrate servers, etc.), and especially important the time spent by management in managing its continued existence.
And the management aspect is less about their salaries and more about what more profitable things they're not focusing on instead. You might say "well just hire another manager" but that manager has to be managed. Ultimately the CEO and board only have a finite amount of time to review projects and monitor performance, and otherwise even mildly profitable projects no longer become worth it when the cost of them being a distraction to management is taken into account.
But for years now, I've never seen a Yahoo Answers link in my search results. You have things like Reddit now highly indexed which has far less silly answers and questions through actually having moderation.
I doubt its getting much traffic, and if it is, it's probably providing a bad look to the brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!
https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html
It's got 20 years of content. No Javascript, just plain html.
It came in really handy when I wrote the history of the D programming language paper.
I agree: Strange choice. But as is the world of large corporations and decision-making.