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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

#421

Post by cycomanic »

arcbyte wrote: post #182
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.

Most crimes done by individuals are intentional. That is most often not the case with corporations. Intentionality is an important requirement in most crimes. That doest mean that there isn't plenty of room for more centralized civil protections against negligence and recklessness.

That's a big assertion to make without any evidence. There's a lot of individual crime which is not intentional (e.g. driving related) and there is a lot of corporate crime where someone clearly made a decision. In particular corporations employ lawyers so they have people qualified to decide if a crime is likely being committed.

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

#422

Post by namaria »

brookst wrote: post #261
namaria wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one master plan tho: might is right. It gets pushed back, but it seeps through every contention wall we have put up so far.

A flaw in human nature, but not a plan . There was no board meeting where people came up with it and set out a roadmap and had milestones and KPIs. It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.

The owning class everywhere has always gotten together trying to figure out how to keep things the way they are.

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

#423

Post by FireBeyond »

gruez wrote: post #366
Volundr wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expecting uber to continue allowing unlimited amount of drivers to be "online", when they have to pay for them is absurd. I don't recall anyone demanding that. Maybe things have changed since then, but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and…

>I don't recall anyone demanding that. That's seemingly what OP was demanding, given the displeasure he was expressing at uber for the practice. >but back when I worked in restaurants if things were slow I'd be sent home and know when I was expected to be back be that the next day or in time for the dinner rush. I wasn't randomly clocked off for 15-30 minutes, and expected to hang around, then suddenly told I'm back…

> It's the difference between employment vs working as a contractor.

That's absolutely NOT the difference between employment and contracting. The general expectation from the IRS is that if you are setting someone's hours (and Uber is, the driver chooses to be available, but within that availability window, Uber can arbitrarily define them as unavailable), then they are an employee.

Contractors don't just hang around your job site because you tell them you don't have work for them now but "stick around 5 minutes or 2 hours, we might have some then".

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

#424

Post by nroets »

The central message of this article is that huge companies are bad because they make large profits.

But there are many countries were companies cannot grow huge because the underlying economy is small and not part of a large trading block. (Georgia, where I'm currently living, is a good example).

People are worse off in these countries: Wages are lower in dollar terms. Locally produced products are of poorer quality and cost more.

So, although huge companies make big profits, their economies of scale do benefit their customers and staff.

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

#425

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #205
pwg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP did not mean "individual crimes". The meaning was: "most crimes that an individual will commit turn out to be easy to prosecute". I.e., shoplifter steals candy bar, surveillance camera has clear view of the shoplifters face, and of the theft, and security camera in parking lot gets license plate of car they drive away in. Easy conviction for prosecutor, as there little question of who committed nor of what cri…

That does not refute their main point: > They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way. It’s difficult to prove intent but we make that necessary to prove when it doesn’t have to be. It could be that negligence is enough for it to be a crime.

Negligence has the same problem as intent.

The difficulty with corporations is that demonstrating anything about their behavior at all (negligence, intent, ignorance, malice, stupidity...) requires doing so for a corporate body, in the sense of that word that refers to a thing visibly composed of many other distinct things.

What does a corporation want? What does that question even mean? Was a corporation negligent? Does that refer to its officers? Its employees? Specific employees? A written plan?

It's not that hard to come up with a definition of what you mean by a corporation for the purposes of defining a specific type of behavior. For example, you may regard negligence as being a property of the board, exhibited by the decisions the board makes. However, any given definition likely misses cases where a reasonable person would still tend to feel that "the corporation was negligent".

This doesn't come from the for-profit aspects of a corporation, or its existence as part of a capitalist economy. It comes from the aggregate nature of a corporation, and talking about any sort of intent-ful behavior in the context of an aggregate is challenging.

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

#426

Post by ddtaylor »

gruez wrote: post #356
DasCorCor wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re colluding to fix prices. That is a cartel. It is facilitated by a middleman app. Still unethical, and should be illegal.

Right, but "companies raise prices more than inflation based cost increases in production would allow for" non-sequitur. There's plenty of ways that prices can raise faster than input costs, that doesn't imply price fixing.

The author is doing some extra work to connect dots that might otherwise be better left connected by the readers.

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

#427

Post by miltonlost »

greyface- wrote: post #125

> Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade > Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL Algorithmic price fixing is certainly a not-insignificant part of the issue. But it's strange to see zero acknowledgement of the massive increase in money supply over the same time period. When doing causal analysis, we need to examine both the private sector and…

ok, but does the increase in money supply explain the price collusion that businesses admit to doing? You're bringing up an issue that's not pertinent to companies criming.

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

#428

Post by araes »

gruez wrote: post #201
regularization wrote: post #176

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. I Yes, but why are individual crimes easy to prosecute and corporate crimes not. These are not things that just popped into being like a thunderstorm. They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way.

> They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way If you're trying to imply such crimes are hard to prosecute because The Powers That Be™ deliberately made it that, how does that explain the difficulty in prosecuting long firm fraud (and other white collar crimes)? You can argue that price fixing being hard to prosecute helps "corporate America" or whatever, but basically everyone is un…

At least a portion of this question from personal opinion goes towards how "united" the general "everyone" is against fraud.

The idea is similar to Tragedy of the Commons issues. The collective community, or aggregate view is "fraud bad", yet the individual, provided opportunity and anonymity, acts in the their own self interest, especially where punishment is viewed as difficult or low plausibility.

Similar issues occur with the general concept of honesty, and views of social honesty. Surveyed, personal belief is that most respondents would state that other humans should reply honestly, with accurate information. However, many, in personal action and isolated opportunities are quite willing to embellish, neglect to correct a mistake, or outright lie.

Neglecting to correct a mistake is one of the most difficult, and shows up quite frequently in markets. With the markets often congratulating recipients for taking advantage of fools who priced something "wrong." Lots of various rationalizations that then get used. "Its their own fault", "they won't notice the difference", "I'm just more clever", "we deserve it because of our status", ect... Usually, seems more frequent the further away, the less personal, and the more abstract the lie or theft. Much like the article title. Office Space did this joke a long time ago.

  Peter: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
  Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of money, right?
  Peter: Yeah.
  Joanna: Right. It's not yours?
  Peter: Well it becomes ours.
  Joanna: How is that not stealing?
Mileage may vary on the comparison, yet I found similarities with a lot of entertainment media, that eventually made me pull away. Personal belief is most respondents are opposed to their own suffering and torture, yet quite happy to read / watch media that often amounts to systematic character torture. Laugh happily eating popcorn while miserable people on screen suffer, yet would not want to be transposed into the same situations. It's ok, its abstract, and not especially personal. It's just entertainment.

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

#429

Post by ddtaylor »

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 can be shared. They lobbied to have and keep the systems. The concept or argument that someone accomplished this in this way on accident or without understanding the ethical repercussions is laughable.

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

#430

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

layer8 wrote: post #112
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to start seizing IP into the public domain and sending shareholders to jail when their companies misbehave. I'm on the hook if my dog bites somebody, it should be no different if the role of my dog is played by a company. Monetary risk is not a real enough risk.

While I’m sympathetic to the sentiment, I don’t see how “sending shareholders to jail” could possibly work, given how many people own shares. It’s like your dog would be collectively owned by a million people. Maybe you mean the board?

I figure the sentence would be something like:

> 5 years of jail time distributed across the top 20 shareholders proportional to their stake

Ideally a judge wouldn't hand out such a sentence if it involved punishing people who didn't have a controlling stake, but I don't think we should rule such things out. I can be held criminally liable for negligence when my dog does something that I wasn't even around for or aware of, there's no reason that shareholders couldn't also. If you don't have enough control to prevent your property from committing crimes, you should probably change that.

I don't know enough about where corporate structure norms stop and where the law starts to know if "the board" is something that is always going to be available for prosecution, which is why in general I mean the shareholders.

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