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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to be overlooking that a total count + percentage gives you the number of active users. That’s generally not something broken down at a product level. So you can give percentage or absolute. If you only ever give percentage then you don’t have a problem and it gives you a sense of scale. If you give absolute numbers it doesn’t + you might accidentally give percentage out in a different venue allowing competitors to have a sense of how well your product is doing.

At least, that’s my generous interpretation of the incentives at play. I don’t think it’s as simple as “those engineers are dumb” / “corporations are evil”

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Corporations can safely be assumed to be evil until proven otherwise.

Innocent until proven guilty is a bedrock of American justice, no?

> Innocent until proven guilty is a bedrock of American justice, no?

When someone keeps violating their parole you start asking them to justify why you shouldn't send them back to jail.

We're past the trial phase. The guilt of corporations has already long been established over the past 100+ years. Furthermore, I am not the government and am not required to give them the presumption of innocence.

On a personal note, my great-great-grandfather didn't die shooting Pinkertons for nothing.

Corporations aren't people.

No they’re not. Which means you’re willing to color a group of people as guilty by default. Is that better?

Absolutely. When a corporation has a track record of being guilty and engaging in anti-consumer behavior (which, let's face it, is most of them), they lose the presumption of innocence in the court of public opinion.

> When a corporation

That’s not what was said which is that ALL corporations should be presumed to be doing this unless proven otherwise.

Groups of people aren't people by that logic

That’s right, the group itself isn’t. It s a collective action.

Ultimately, the legal fiction was created to avoid having to create new rules but it creates all sorts of problems because corporations and groups in general are more like political parties and governments where they’re made up of subgroups with their own agendas and those subgroups have their own individuals with their agendas.

For example, if a corporation mass poisons people, no one typically goes to jail and instead the corporation pays a fine, very similar to what would happen if the government did that (see Flint and what PG&E did in Hinkley). You can put people in jail. You can’t put a corporation in jail and the corporate veil is insanely strong against getting pierced which causes all kinds of moral hazards.

Only when physically in the court room.

Everywhere else it's pretty much guilty once accused.

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