bit-anarchist

Brazillian law, for instance, defines the crimes of passive and active corruption:

  The Penal Code, in Article 317, defines the crime of passive corruption as "soliciting or receiving, for oneself or for others, directly or indirectly, even if outside the function or before assuming it, an undue advantage, or accepting a promise of such an advantage." [0]

  Active corruption, committed by an outsider, who offers or promises an undue advantage, is provided for in Article 333 of the Brazilian Penal Code. [1]

But, granted, revieweing US and UK law, it seems they don't define "corruption" as a crime (albeit some of the act names do mention corruption). So let's fallback onto the dictionary: [2]

  a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers) : depravity

  b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery)

  c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct

Both definition a and c are too ample and, as you put it, "a smorgasbord". Definition b, specially when combined with a, describes something pretty specific: inducement of a powerful agent to wrong by improper or unlawful means, such as bribes.

Embezzlement is better typified under theft. Same goes for most of the others: fraud is fraud, blackmail is blackmail. They may acquire a "corrupt" character when they are done in direct exchange of personal material gains. There are discussions about whether insider trading should be illegal.

Generally speaking, corruption is primarily a crime against public administration because it involves the government, which (supposedly) represents the people. Private companies represent themselves, so they get to (more) trivially decide who is on the line or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_corruption

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_corruption

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/corruption

> Whether they are extremely useful or just some tool that has its uses depends a lot on your lifestyle.

The "useful" then didn't refer to the individual value judgments of all individuals, but the presence of material affordances that a sufficiently big mass of people would find useful. I admit this was not the best wording, but I forgot (and can't find it right now) the formal term that encapsulates the material qualities that others may see usefulness.

> What "best (tools)" means for you, depends a lot on your values. For example, if you value privacy, mobile phones and in particular smartphones are incredibly bad tool choices.

Agreed, but this misses the point. I didn't mean to imply that the value of things are objective (this is a misesian perspective, SToV is implied), but that some people would find smartphones useful, adopting themselves, and that would further expand the opportunities smartphones are useful to others, creating a positive feedback loop.

My bad, then. If I may suggest something, give a small acknowledgement and avoid words such as "cancer", which is pretty loaded.

Still, people (as in most individuals in the economy) can't simply be stopped, even less so to plan, specially in a free system such as enjoyed by most of the west. That requires a high degree of coordination and coersion that I think only Cuba and NK are currently capable of, slightly. Otherwise, people will just do their own thing, leading to a technological revolution again, given the material means.

A more practical approach is to continuously nudge the direction of change towards a better direction, constantly reevaluating approach, but avoiding having to stop everyone else.

> My point is that the tool which was meant to augment one particular aspect of life, has metastasized into being a cancer on many other aspects of our lives, and that has downstream consequences on society as a whole.

This is true of all important tools in history. From computers, to electricity, cars, steam, even agriculture. They reshape society and its practices. This has been documented multiple times. One I can remember on top of my head, but is not limited to, is historical materialism.

From an misesian perspective, this seems fairly obvious:

1. smartphones are extremely useful (being miniature computers and all);

2. people tend to optimize their actions with the best tools available (i.e. smartphones in this case);

3. people will see others using smartphone increasing and will try to leverage that for their own goals, thus further adopting smartphones (even if indirectly);

4. the economy is the sum of human action, so this progressive adoption changes the economy and the culture.

> A problem that impacts people is a problem that deserves attention, especially if an absolute terms the number of people impacted are in the tens/hundreds of millions.

The real issue with your post is that you seem to be trying to fix smartphones addiction by getting rid of phones, ignoring the benefits they brought and the previous problems they fixed.

Also, every problem impacts people.

For social systems, yes.

That said, in long run, there's both a tendency for most growth to fall and for basically nothing to be sustainable.

The property of preserving/sustaining itself.

At the same time, I think you are ignoring how diverse people really are. There's no consensus to be had when dealing with mutual exclusives, no matter what method is chosen.

Perhaps the solution is to lean further into fractionalization, but in a peaceful and constructive way. That might mean the destruction of democracy, but I think this just points to democracy not being a good inclusive system to begin with.

You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.

Also, capitalism doesn't need perpetual growth either (anymore than other system, that is). Independent and worker-owned media are still facets of capitalism, for starters.

I agree that corporations aren't just shorthands for their shareholders. That's why I think the qualifiers "towards a unified goal" and "under a binding normative instrument" are important. Specially the latter one.

LLCs, in particular, are just one type of corporation and tend to have a well defined set of laws and agreements backing them, with the primary purpose of limiting liabilities towards the owners. Personally, I'm favor of revising the way these liabilities are limited as to internalize externalities.

That being said, the corporation's liabilities not being, necessarily, the constituents' isn't inspired solely on LLC law, but also organic theory.

But, yeah, my approach is pretty philosophical because it is a "philosophy-first, pragmatism-second" one.

1. Why only humans are people? Why not other species, even if they were as sentient as us?

2. What is murder? Why is killing justified in certain cases (e.g. self defense, death penalties, abortions, etc.) and not in others?

3. What is the piece of paper of a corporation? What makes it different any other piece of paper? I don't think USA's agents are harming people through pieces of papers.

4. What is harm? Consider when someone puts fire into one of Meta's unoccupied buildings who gets harmed.

There are conflicts that always produce harm to one of the sides, regardless of legal system (these emerge from mutually exclusive situations). Thus, by your statements, there are only broken legal systems.

Also, mentioning in the "Citizens United v. FEC" case along with "Piercing the corporate veil" concept is a bit funny, because if you pierce the corporate veil of Citizens United in that court case, and look at it as "the shareholders behind Citizens United v. FEC", you will actually strengthen the majority opinion of the Court.

Honestly, I don't think it's me who has a broken world view, but you. I keep two perspectives in regards to corporations: an individualistic one (which backs the "pierce the corporate veil") and a organic one, inspired by system theory and emergent properties, and I try to not mix them without appropriate care. On the other hand, you seem to hold grievances that are only related, but not directly connected, to corporate personhood. In particular, no offense, your perspective about the law seems rather reductive.

> We don't know how much higher the drug usage would be if all drugs were legalized.

Given what we know about the prohibition era and insights about the success in the fight against drug abuse, it's a pretty safe bet.

> That's an extremely general statement which is almost certainly wrong.

Is it? Even the most successful countries, like Japan and Singapore, seem to have low drug usage despite of criminalization, not because of. Even then, the data is murky, because criminalization of usage incentivizes low self-reporting.

It's a bit reversed, labor unions are cooperatives, not the other way around, as cooperatives are more flexible in arrangement than unions.

Don't disagree with the rest of the comment though.

EDIT: also, I wouldn't consider coops an anarchist victory over traditional private companies anymore than democracy over monarchy. The corporation > worker hierarchy is still there, even with the different share distribution. It's a good demonstration of an alternative and underappreciated corporate structure, tho.

Certainly not on the US, or any country where the criminalization is in full force.

I had the same logic as you previously, actually. But, eventually, I realized the terminology is not as misleading as it appears.

Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.

Is the piece of paper a collective of people? Does the piece of paper have agents to enact the decisions of its rulling body? You seem to be forgetting the primary reason why corporations have rights in this perspective.

There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.

And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.

That's still not proof of victimhood. Only that's imprudent to consume drugs.

Also, due to politization of the topic, part of the data is distorted to help sell the war on drugs, which had a much more destructive effect overall, aside from failing in its main goal.

Because the another personin question is one the constituents acting in behalf of the corporation itself. Perhaps it's closer to suicide, but still, it's not just "another person", but, in a sense, a part of the corporation itself.

I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.

Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.

But they are.

The usage of the term "will" isn't unwarranted nor simply an anthropomorphization for the sake of it. Long story short, it's the recognition that both individuals and corps (through their agents, not to be confused by their members) can enter into conflict. A legal conflict can only emerge between entities that have a "will". This isn't something I ascribed onto them, this is something I observed in them given the definitions I'm working with. I suspect our conflict lies in them.

The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.

> What is "the one that backs the law"?

Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.

On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).

Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.

Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.

That's a lot of statements, so I'll dissect them.

> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.

How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.

> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.

There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.

> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.

Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.

> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.

We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.

> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.

Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.

You have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together).

Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."

However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.

Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.

The one that backs the law, for instance. But, more broadly, corporations, specially ones ruled by shareholders/contracts, tend to have a will of their own, and "people" in ethics is more about will and desire than biology.

Taiwan is like Texas, if USA suffered a coup and the original ruling government took residence in Texas. In other words, not like today's Texas. Underpinning your comment is the notion that terrorities that once belonged to a nation should always belong to them forever more. That's textbox imperialism. You are also overselling US influence over Taiwan's politics, specially in regards to separatism. US isn't interested in an actual independent Taiwan, nor unification under the ROC.

In regards to the occupation argument, actual military occupation requires a hostile army, in which US's didn't qualify, even with their outlawing of PCs (which don't serve as actual represention for the Korea's populace, specially in the North, after the Soviets' actual colonialist meddling over them). We can agree that US's attempt to reestablish order was poorly done (by incompetence and/or constraints), but it objectively doesn't fit the criteria for military occupation. We can relax the conventional definition to include US's control, but that would include the USSR over the North.

In the Korean War, while USA may have provided troops, this was done by the ROK's request. In multiple times, USA was more than willing to leave ROK should it ask (or even let them). Even your citation shows this. You also use the phrase "There weren't even any elections under the occupation until the late 80s" as if USA was responsible for this. USAMGIK was already gone, replaced by ROK proper. Also it's wrong. ROK had two de facto republican regimes (five de jure) prior to the current one, but they were plagued by coup. Still, they had elections. And that's only considering presidential elections. Also, none of this, aside from the organization of the first democractic election, involved the US. So it wasn't a singular dictatorship (specially in comparison to NK), much less one US-controlled.

Even the "de facto" current occupation is wrong. Did you mean to say "de jure"? CFC might give a US general control during wartime, but that hasn't been the case since December 1994, and this might change relatively soon, as noted by the article you linked. UNC only has enough legitimate authority to facilitate diplomacy and keep the armistice and, as far as I can tell, US hasn't abused it. Finally, the existence of a military base of a foreign country isn't an indication of de jure occupation, even less so de facto. Only when this foreign country uses it as pressure and that results in visible policy changes it becomes evidence of occupation. Has that happened?

Where did the "therefore" come from? From OP's comment it didn't, that's for sure.

To the extent that is relevant to law and ethics, they are. Juridical people, as it goes.

For starters, Taiwan wasn't invaded nor occupied by the US. South Korea wasn't invaded by the US either, unless you want to say the Soviet Union invaded the North. Even so, that would be, at least, an innacurate description of the events.

Furthermore, the technical definition for "military occupation", according to Hague Convention, S.3 Art.43:

  Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
  The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

US is not a hostile army nor has established authority over SK's government and/or territory. In fact, US only controls the SK's army during wartime, which is not the case currently. The link you cite says US and SK are meeting together to negotiate the transition of wartime OPCON to SK as well, and US seems willing, even with Trump in power.

I suppose they never specified the wager. But, given the topic is prediction markets and the topics of the bets, I thought it was implied that the wagers would be exclusively in money. With that in mind, is there any example of a law against specific topics being betted on?

It isn't misleading. It's plain wrong.