Comment by jongjong
11 days ago
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system.
At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.
You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.
I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material.
Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.