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It's not a crime if we do it with an app

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Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#291

Post by gruez »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #285
gruez wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that already the case? For instance Wells Fargo was fined $185M for fraudulently opening accounts customers didn't want[1]. Wells fargo (ie. management) weren't scheming to fraudulently open accounts. They only set aggressive sales goals, and that caused some employees to go rogue and commit fraud themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scan...

How do you know that lacked intent? It just sounds like cover for intent

The point isn't that wells fargo management didn't scheme to intentionally defraud customers, it's that the government was able to punish wells fargo for defrauding customers without having to prove they intentionally schemed to do so.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#292

Post by BowBun »

bdangubic wrote: post #257
amazingamazing wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sherman act in usa

how many companies - lifetime - have actually been charged, convicted and significantly impacted by the sherman act?

You can get this information from google. If you're trying to make a point, just make it!

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#293

Post by steveBK123 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #273
dartos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not Maybe that’s something that should be adjusted by a legislative body. Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written.

DoJ Put hundreds of J6 fools behind bars because they aren't monied and influential enough to drag out the process. Meanwhile, Georgia has a mountain of criminal evidence from four years ago and they haven't gotten anywhere but for a few guilty pleas from the low level stooges.

I had a similar view during the GFC.

Clearly crimes were committed, and clearly layers and layers of management were in on the joke, but only the few little fish at the bottom who were dumb enough to ever put things into writing with a paper trail went to jail.

A lot of the alleged rogue traders were far less rogue than their employers would like you to believe, similar with the LIBOR fixing scandal, etc.

J6 is very similar because there will never be a paper trail of the Orange man sending written orders to storm the Capitol. Everything is a wink and a nod.

The guy at the top never actually says the thing, the next rung down maybe says it but only 1-1 in-person in a secure environment, a few levels down maybe a phone call & hopes not to be tapped, a few more layers down you start to get to the idiots who send a text/email.

Akin to the Mafia.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#294

Post by datavirtue »

lesuorac wrote: post #161
alt227 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody. Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.

What are you talking about?

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#295

Post by arrosenberg »

gruez wrote: post #157
ryandrake wrote: post #17

More like "It's not a crime if a corporation does it." The US treats corporations with kid gloves. They get away with so much, and in those rare cases where a regulatory body does anything , it's often just a strongly worded letter, a warning, a threat to one day send a strongly worded letter, or, in really rare, extreme cases, a company official gets called in to say a few words in front of Congress. Nobody goes to…

>Contrast that to how individuals get the hammer put down on them by the justice system if they so much as fart in the wrong room. The lesson from the last 50 years should be: If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, do it as a corporation. That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not. It's not any diff…

That's true, which is why we should be heavily focused on keeping corporations small, discrete and weak enough to drown in a bathtub when they act up.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#296

Post by asadotzler »

stickfigure wrote: post #152
gmueckl wrote: post #76

This is all a result of a lack of active market regulation. The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states. But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily. If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently.…

[flagged]

Are you willfully misleading here or did you simply not, you know, do the thing you're supposed to do before commenting?

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#297

Post by insane_dreamer »

tomaskafka wrote: post #256
pseudalopex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't blame the potato theives or potato cartels, blame the politicians that built the system to work this way. Blame both.

Oh, and don't forget the voters, who mostly don't care, thus enabling the cartels that extract value from them to grow unchecked.

I'm not sure that the voters don't care -- it's mostly that they don't know. Because they are being constantly flooded with messaging that screams in other directions: "it's the immigrants!!" "it's trans people!" "it's those f*ing libs!!" "it's those MAGA idiots!!" etc. etc.

And because these things are complicated, it's hard to boil them down to a few words that stick with voters, and attempts to do so come off as "West/East Coast Elitism". This is why populism is great for large monopolistic corporations so long as it can be channeled away from them (which they spend a great deal of money on).

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#298

Post by charles_f »

hermannj314 wrote: post #32

This is the way our world works. If you steal a potato, you will be arrested immediately and the case will be resolved in a few weeks or months. If you illegally fix the price of potatoes and steal billions from the market, you will be allowed to operate for years in the open while a lengthy civil procedure eventually may ask you to give 1 or 2% of what you stole back in fines. Don't blame the potato theives or potat…

> blame the politicians that built the system to work this way.

Politicians are only doing what the potato cartel is telling them to, because if they weren't they'd be replaced by big-potato-friendly politicians. You can't blame a single actor. What's to blame is the system itself. As long as what's driving it is capital, whomever and whatever makes it grow most will be rewarded, under the risk of being replaced. There's only one metric that counts in this game, and it's no surprise that everything arranges around its optimization.

World is controlled by big potato.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#299

Post by AutistiCoder »

derektank wrote: post #259
dartos wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's because most crimes "individuals" do are straightforwardly illegal and easy to prosecute, whereas the "crime if a corporation does it" are not Maybe that’s something that should be adjusted by a legislative body. Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written.

>Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process. Take insider trading for example. It would be very easy to simply make selling the stock of a company you work for, or are in any other way part…

You could just say employees get a blackout period each year where they can’t buy or sell company stock.

Re: It's not a crime if we do it with an app

#300

Post by galleywest200 »

Aurornis wrote: post #194
gmueckl wrote: post #76

This is all a result of a lack of active market regulation. The government needs to step in actively to keep a free market from collapsing into one of the natural end states. But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily. If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently.…

> If a single company can sell almost 100% of an essential good, they need to atomatically lose the power to set their prices and margins independently. The fallacy is assuming that the government will make everything cheap for consumers. In practice, government regulation of prices just changes the game. Look at any market with rent control: There are numerous meta-games around building or not building new supply, l…

> If rents get too high, people move to a different city.

With what money? It takes three months rent up-front to move (first+last month rent and a deposit equal to one month rent) up front. People _need_ a place to live and will spend every last dollar to not be homeless.

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