Corporate Personhood

Oh say can you see?

With a case before the United States Supreme Court regarding the rights of corporations as persons (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), and with a lot of hyperbole coming from instant experts on the subject, I figured it would be nice to brainstorm some repercussions. Not likely repercussions, but conceivable repercussions for the Supreme Court finding that the 14th amendment applies to entities like Exxon, Starbucks, or Google.

I’ll warm up with some things I’ve heard folks like Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes put forward:

  • With equal protection under the law and money being a form of speech (Buckley v. Valeo), companies will be able to buy political candidates on an unprecedented scale through massive media purchases and such, tipping the scales on the election process.
  • Under the second amendment to the constitution, corporations would have the right to bear arms. Corporate armies come immediately to mind, and certain self-defense principles start getting a little scary.
  • In some jurisdictions corporations could run for elected office. Mayor General Electric?

Depending on where you are in you daily medicinal regimen, the above theories can sound pretty reasonable, scary, or ridiculous. Let’s carry on with some more ramifications:

  • Under the 13th amendment, people cannot be held as property, as slaves. This would make it illegal to be a shareholder in a corporation or compel it to any particular action. This would also prevent one corporation from purchasing or selling another.
  • Corporations are generally thought, as legal constructs, to be indistinguishable from their owners (particularly if a single natural person bears a majority of shares). In regards to elections, this means that any corporation at least partly owned by foreign persons (natural or otherwise) would be subject to regulations regarding foreign interests interfering in our political processes. No more contributions or political ads from any transnational or widely-traded corporation.
  • Corporations would be subject to personal income tax (many at the top bracket)
  • Corporations could be compelled to purchase health insurance under some variants of the current health care reform bills.
  • Corporations could be jailed or even put to death for various criminal acts. I’m not sure how one would administer a lethal injection to a legal entity, but that’s Texas to figure out.
  • In some states, where marriage is defined as a civil union between two consenting persons, perhaps companies could get married. Could this lead to issues with anti-poligamy laws in the case of conglomerates?
  • Corporate board members that run their companies into the ground could be brought up on homicide charges.

I’m certain there are more.

More fun with the DMCA

It falls on me, as part of my job, to field DMCA complaints from time to time on behalf of customers that may or may not have been using their connections to download and share pirated software, videos, and such. While I totally understand that intellectual property is Serious Business, but when you’re hiring a firm to protect your rights to Young Tight Latinas 12, wouldn’t they look more credible if they weren’t based in a town named Cream Ridge?

Infringement Source: eDonkey
Infringement Timestamp: 2009-06-09 03:50:00 PST
Infringers IP Address: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
Infringers Port: 33241
Infringement Title: Young Tight Latinas 12
Infringement Filename: Young.Tight.Latinas.12.CD2.[XXX].[Latinas].[Sexoypelis.COM].avi
Infringement Hash: 3E554F0E5EB855AD9C6FF1A344220A77

You were informed in the notice that your infringing activity violated the U.S.
Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 106, and that, as a result of the infringement, you may be
held liable for monetary damages, attorney's fees and court costs incurred as a result
of any action that is commenced against you. You also were offered the opportunity
to settle the matter but, as of the original transmission date of this correspondence,
you have failed to do so.

Therefore, this correspondence shall serve as our second and final notice to you in
regards to your infringement of the copyright referenced above, and shall incorporate
all the information contained in our original notice to you.

You have ten (10) calendar days from the date of this correspondence to access the
settlement offer listed below and settle online. If you fail to respond or settle within
the prescribed time period, we will refer this matter to our attorneys for legal action.
At that point the original settlement will no longer be an option and the amount will
increase as a result of us having to involve our attorneys.

Nothing contained or omitted from this correspondence is, or shall be deemed to be
either a full statement of the facts or applicable law, an admission of any fact, or
waiver or limitation of any of the RLD DISTRIBUTION LLC's rights or remedies, all of
which are specifically retained and reserved.

The information in this notice is accurate. We have a good faith belief that use of the
material in the manner complained of herein is not authorized by the copyright owner,
its agent, or by operation of law. We swear under penalty of perjury, that we are
authorized to act on behalf of RLD DISTRIBUTION LLC.

To access your settlement offer please copy and paste the address below into a
browser and follow the instructions:

https://www.videoprotectionalliance.com/?n_id=AB-XXXXXX
Password: XXXXXX

Regards,

Bonnie Gadsby
Copyright Enforcement Agent

Video Protection Alliance Services, LLC
PO Box 322
Cream Ridge, NJ 08514-0322
United States
+1-866-251-2631

Then again, maybe folks in New Jersey just have a healthier sense of humor than I do.

A simple admonition

Dear, phishermen trying to fleece the webmail passwords off of a credulous population, do not send your crap to addresses starting with “abuse” or “support” or “helpdesk,” or anything else that would clearly indicate that you are sending to people who both know better than to fall for your oh-so-clever scam and are probably in a position to prevent others using their mail server to actually reply to you with their passwords. This is stupid. You should feel stupid for having done it.

From somers@pei.sympatico.ca  Sat Aug 29 04:13:33 2009
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Assholes.

Evil Government Bureaucrat

Do or die

With all the talk about “health care reform” going on these days, I figured I would eventually weigh in. Nobody is seriously proposing the adoption of a british-style health care system where the federal government owns the hospitals and employs the staff there. This isn’t health care reform, it is health insurance reform. If you are currently happy with your health care, that probably means you are either healthy or like your doctor. Nobody’s assuming control of your doctor.

My online tovarisch kcmeesha described the current push for health insurance reform as “hasty.” Hasty as in we’ve been arguing about the particulars since the early 1990’s when Clinton tried to get something done? Hasty like maybe we should let this situation simmer for another twenty years or so, when Medicare overruns are so ghastly that a trillion-dollar pricetag will look cheap? Politicians are not instrisically brave creatures. They act when pressured. They expose themselves to risk only when doing otherwise is more risky. Somebody has to apply pressure to them to get any real progress. Telling a congress-critter he has to act “or else” means nothing without a deadline. See how far the religious right has gotten with telling the Republicans to protect unborn babies; the pro-lifers enforce no deadline and get no action.

16-23% of private insurance premiums get eaten up by corporate bureaucracy, executive compensation, lobbying, and corporate profit (depending on the company in question). 97% of medicare’s revenue goes to patient care. If the government is inherently wasteful (generally this is true), then private insurance is six to thirteen times as wasteful. The health care reform act should consist of revising the existing medicare act to remove the phrase “over 65.” It would be more efficient and save billions of dollars. But that isn’t going to happen because, as I mentioned, congressmen are cowards.

Some of us would rather pay some honest taxes than fritter away a huge portion of our insurance premiums to a bunch of faceless vampires that primarily make their profit margins by denying care to sick customers.

HR3200, which nobody ever seems to honestly reference.

Skill Challenges in Practice

Explosives as an option

I rather like the general idea of skill challenges; they encourage a DM to reward players for solving problems without resorting to combat. This encourages players to see each other’s characters outside their combat roles and fosters a more rich, varied, interesting, and thus entertaining play experience. The general idea is lovely, a welcome addition to Dungeons & Dragons.

In practice, skill challenges as presented in the rules are a mess. I’m not talking about the math of target difficulties. Whether you need to roll a 5 or a 15 to advance the challenge is immaterial. The problem is that poor rolling necessarily results in failure. The tactical combat system of Dungeons & Dragons when implemented as suggested in the rules assumes player victory. Take 600xp worth of bad-guys from the Monster Manual and throw them at five 2nd level adventurers and you will almost always see the adventurers succeed. Repeat this two more times without allowing the player characters to reset their daily abilities and healing surges, and things can get a little hairy but victory is still the most foreseeable outcome. Skill challenges as presented in the DMG and the errata introduce a significant chance of defeat without a mechanical means of building up player tension.

Some assumptions I work with when doing prep-work for a campaign:

  1. The characters will be advancing through levels during the course of the story.
  2. As characters advance in level, they become more competant.
  3. Players generally prefer to have their characters succeed overall.
  4. It is important that the characters be competant enough to have a reasonable chance at success.
  5. Success that comes too easily is rarely satisfactory.
  6. It is important that the characters not be so competant as to make success trivial.
  7. When preparing for play, some preparation for the players bypassing or failing in regards to certain xp-yielding challenges should be taken to address points 4 and 6.

If I am to incorporate one or two skill challenges per game session, each worth the experience points rewarded for a level-appropriate tactical engagement, I face the very real possibility of the players failing several encounters. If I pepper in skill challenges every second fight or so, the player characters will advance a level after six fights. That tends to take two to three game sessions for my group. Fail one of those skill challenges and the rhythm gets broken up. Instead of doing the character advancement busywork at the beginning or end of a session, maybe the XP threshhold is broken mid-session. No, thank you, but I still want to use skill challenges.

Does this mean I should force the players to succeed their skill checks? Oh Lord, no. When players roll badly they know it. Just as they expect their characters to be awesome when they roll a 20, they expect their characters to suck when they roll 1. Rather than stonewall on a skill failure (or series of failures), I add complications and require that everbody gets in on it.

Skill can be fun, too

“Everybody grab a d20, somebody give me a Nature check, somebody else give me a Perception check, everybody else give me either an Endurance or Athletics check.” The players pick who’s responsible for which end of things. If most of them succeed, a consequence is avoided. Consequences could involve the passage of an undue amount of time: you found a good route through the swamp, but Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck about a half-mile in.

If enough failures amass over multiple passes through the group (let everybody have a chance to roll at least a second time; people love a chance at redemption), they fail the skill challenge and are faced with an additional combat encounter to make up the XP gap and slap them on the wrist a little. After Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck, Mr. Smartypants Wizard picked the wrong path, and Ms. Stabbity Rogue didn’t notice the Gnoll ambush before it was too late. Oops.

Depending on the nature of the challenge, it may be more or less easy to come up with a narrative justification for this. How does haggling with a merchant over the price of apples result in fisticuffs in heroic fantasy? Pretty easily, really, but in many of those cases there’s really no reason to pick up dice in the first place or give an experience point reward for a success.

Longbox Digital Comics

Longbox Digital Comics

Ages ago comic books graced the shelves of newspaper stands across the United States. When I was a child, the local 7-11 had about eighteen shelf-feet of Marvel and DC comics right up front near the cash register to lure young shoppers in the door. The world has moved on, and the comic book publishers and distributors have had trouble keeping up. They switched over from cheap newsprint to glossy high-quality paper, improved their printing techniques, and saw their production costs go through the roof. The $3.99 cover price of Dark Avengers #6 isn’t primarily due to the jet-setting lifestyle of Brian Bendis and Mike Deodato, but rather due to an ailing business model, which has a lot to do with why 7-11 doesn’t stock it. Can Longbox be the answer?

Continue reading →

More Barriers to Entry

I’ve heard a lot about these new-fangled Facebooks and My Spaces and Twitters and such. They’re basically variations on the old-timey bulletin board systems I used to frequent before the world wide web hit. That 2400 baud Hayes modem was big pimpin’. But I digress. I know a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time an energy on Facebook. The CEO of the company I work for has a facebook page. So does my wife. And my sister. But not me.

Why? Well mostly because of how I was first introduced to it. Somebody comes across something interesting, publishes his thoughts about it and maybe a picture onto his page, and sends me a link. Or tweets about it. Or posts to a web forum. Doesn’t matter. I know the person, and am pretty numb regarding nonsense like duckrolls and rickrolls, so I follow it. When it lands on Facebook, the link provided invariably takes me to the following:

Thank you, come again!

No, thank you. I won’t be signing in or signing up to view what amounts to a random blog post. My opinion of the poster takes a hit every time I run across this error, particularly when the link was put somewhere open to the public. This is somehow even more obnoxious than CAPTCHA systems, as those are most frequently employed to deter automated spam.

The Sound of Drums

elections have consequences

It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. Listen. Here come the drums. Here come the drums.

As you may have heard, Iran had their presidential election last Friday. This would come as a surprise to most people who base their knowledge of Iran on the news coverage they receive in the United States, because President Ahmedinejad is frequently referred to as a dictator in the press. We also get the impression that the president of Iran would be in a position to authorize military attacks against other countries. We also get the impression that Iran has been exceptionally belligerent since the 1979 islamic revolution.

None of those impressions are particularly true, but that hardly matters. When the official results were announced, the leading opposition candidate Mousavi cried foul. Credulous bloggers and tweeters around the world stood at attention and immediate cries of election fraud were echoing through the Internet. Ahmedinejad couldn’t have won! 75% of Iranians are under 27 years old! The youth hunger for reform! Mousavi is the great hope for democracy in Iran! Where is my vote! Holy shit, people got shot at the riots!

I’m a knee-jerk skeptic at heart, so I took all of this with a grain of salt and a bit of caution. When storefronts are being vandalized in the midst of a massive political protest, there’s going to be teargas. There are going to be policemen in scary riot armor. People are going to get beaten. This happens in any country over any issue. In most parts of the world, when protests of this scale and character take place, somebody gets shot. Unfortunate, but true.

The main problem I see with the outside world’s reaction to Iran’s election results, whether on blogs or Twitter or CNN or my local newspaper, is that we’re getting the same echo chamber effect I’ve seen before. This is the kind of coverage we got about Panama before we invaded to snatch up Noriega. This is the kind of coverage we got about Iraq before each time we invaded there. This is the kind of coverage we got about Serbia before we started bombing Belgrade and putting soldiers into Kosovo.

Step away from your keyboard for a second. Take a deep breath. Count to ten slowly. Exhale. Think for a second about the tone you’re adding to the public conversation of this matter. Are you being constructive? What are the foreseeable consequences of what you’re contributing to? Are you speaking to the facts, or echoing and amplifying rumor and propaganda?

“Where is my vote?” is a question asked by many in Tehran this week. It was asked by many in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 and Texas in 1960. In modern democracies we vote anonymously to avoid undue pressure, but anonymity removes accountability and requires some element of trust. Let them work it out.

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