EU Parliament Passes Articles 11/13

[Gez]

The important thing to realize is that the executive and corporate officers are not technically the ones who make the decisions. The decisions are made by the corporation itself. In effect, a corporation is an artificial intelligence:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... uture.html

And it doesn't matter who its bosses are. What their personal morality and integrity are. They will, eventually, "act corporate".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corpo ... 2003_film)

Remember when Google was a plucky startup whose motto was "Don't Be Evil"? Yeah. Corporations are not people. They are not even their executives and major shareholders. They are emergent intelligences of a cold, alien type that we cannot really comprehend, that we cannot even grasp that they exist separately to the people they are made out of.

The same can be said of other groupings of humans. Whether it's a formal and codified thing like a "nation-state" or an association; or whether it's an informal and fluid thing like a "community". But they don't have the same goals. A corporation's goal will be to generate as much money as possible by whatever means -- and if the best means to generate money are not legal, then part of the plan will be to make them legal somehow, or otherwise escape the reach of the law.

[Apeirogon]

Mmmmmm....Im not sure that current rulers of microsoft/google/hugo boss/etc., though "yeeeessssss......our empire of evil grow.....soon, all moneys of the world ours, OURS!!! MVAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAAH!!!!!!1111ONEONEELEVEN" and viciously rubbing their hands in the gothic looking office.
Or you think they are taken to work with a questions like "can you destroy entire city populations to increase enterprise profit for the year by 0.01 percent?" Yes? Welcome aboard. No? We call you back.
They are just people who do their jobs, increase stock rating/image/etc of its company, and so on until retirement.

[JadedLexi]

I don't think anyone's suggesting they're acting like the cartoon villain rubbing their hands together like you think people are.

[Apeirogon]

This time I exaggerated a little.

[Gez]

They are just people who do their jobs, increase stock rating/image/etc of its company, and so on until retirement.

Exactly, and that's what makes the whole thing insidious.

Keep in mind that people will commit evil acts if they believe it is their job.

[Chris]

They are just people who do their jobs, increase stock rating/image/etc of its company

Exactly. When you can make $500 million in a weekend from a single video game release, and have it be considered a failure because it's not more than the last release of the game's series... there's a problem. When you see a perceived need to strengthen psychologically manipulative gambling mechanics in your games (including those sold to kids and people with addiction and compulsion problems), to ensure your company stock goes up... there's a problem. When you need to strip away ownership rights from consumers, or prevent works from entering the public domain after their copyrights expire while they're still lucrative to you, by pushing laws that benefit your company over the general public... there's a problem.

[Apeirogon]

Again, Im I dont condone corporations and their actions. I just says that treats them like root of the evil is silly. Yes, they do something bad, but also they do something good. So yes corporations are evil, but are necessary evil.

Keep in mind that people will commit evil acts if they believe it is their job.

That experiment only shown principles of how human consciousness, I would even say subconscious, work "obey to the another human whose abstract "rank", by hit OWN opinion, higher than his own". Note, in experiment to the "teacher" did not apply anything more than simple verbal "please continue", using different words for this each times.
So this is bug/feature/hack/backdoor/etc. in human psyche. Or just a magical power of word "please" in action.

Exactly. When you can make $500 million in a weekend from a single video game release, and have it be considered a failure because it's not more than the last release of the game's series... there's a problem. When you see a perceived need to strengthen psychologically manipulative gambling mechanics in your games (including those sold to kids and people with addiction and compulsion problems), to ensure your company stock goes up... there's a problem. When you need to strip away ownership rights from consumers, or prevent works from entering the public domain after their copyrights expire while they're still lucrative to you, by pushing laws that benefit your company over the general public... there's a problem.

That problem with game industry itself, not with people who work in it. And a laws, of course. And it need to be fixed, but instead it just silencing and ignoring, which can bring next 1929/2008 year.

[Rachael]

That problem with game industry itself, not with people who work in it. And a laws, of course. And it need to be fixed, but instead it just silencing and ignoring, which can bring next 1929/2008 year.

No no no no ... no.

People have a choice and can say no. Someone in the higher up had the idea to do the loot boxes. If it takes a group of people to approve that idea, that group of people can still say no. It's their problem, too.

Don't pin a fault on a pure abstraction when there's still flesh and blood controlling the process. Those people are evil - they know what they do is wrong with all the bad press it gets - but they do it anyway.

[Gez]

Corporations aren't the root of all evil; that's the love of money. It just so happens that corporations are built to love money above all else. So they aren't the root of evil, but they are an embodiment of that root.

Please read the links I've given you about how corporations behave, independently of the persons who act as their decision makers, like an amoral artificial intelligence. That's an emergent property of the system.

[Rachael]

The corporations themselves might not be the root of all evil - but corporations still do awful and evil things - particularly when it comes to our environment and our ability to live on this planet. And at the heart of all that are still board members and executives who make the decisions.

Could we, at Exxon Mobil, stop fracking and causing earthquakes in the Midwestern states? Sure - but that would hurt our bottom line. And the fact that the bottom line matters more than the lives of the people affected, even to executives, even to shareholders, is still the issue. As I said, shielding your responsibility behind some embodiment of hundreds of people doesn't automatically make you not evil. At that level, you have the ability to resign and pick another job if it bothers you. Guess what? Not enough people feel that it bothers them. So the cycle continues.

Blaming it on something you can't control is just shedding yourself the responsibility of dealing with it. In the end, our shore lines get a lot tighter though, because no one stood up for what was right at the crucial moment and they just said it's Exxon's fault and forgot about it and did nothing about it.

[Trance]

Relevant:

[InsanityBringer]

I kinda like how despite the staggered release dates killed hype for the game at all and made everything more confusing probably leading to this "lack of sales" (heh) in the first place, EA's gonna be doing it again with future titles! I guess some companies don't learn.

[Matt]

Stock exchanges were a mistake.

[Enjay]

While I get that the EA figures are disappointing to them and (far more importantly, their shareholders), and the gaming community seems to be celebrating getting one over on EA and screaming about how it is the beginning of the end, they still sold 7.3 million!

OK, the shortfall on the prediction was still 1 million sales - but that's only a 7th of what was sold. There were still over 7 million sales. Now, making the almost certainly erroneous assumption that these were all sales to private individuals, that's still over 7 million people who were happy to shell-out for an EA game. I think it's a little too early to call time on EA.

[Trance]

That's the gist of what Jim was saying in the video. More focus on the absurdity of 7.3 million units being a "disappointment" to a company, though. Barefaced, voracious greed is back in style.