Sunder wrote: > > but all this is hypothetical, since I'm not talking about industrial > > power of 1900 or 1940, but of corporate power in 2000, and especially of > > the years yet to come. > > Ok, so give us some documentation. How many people did Bill Gates & Co kill > and what are the details of their deaths? oh, come on. that's a weak excuse of an argument. how many people did stalin and hitler kill? probably none, at least not personally. most people of power are bright enough to not get their own hands dirty, and/or not do it in a way that you could prove. now if you rephrase the question to "how many deaths have resulted from the activities of ..." it becomes a lot more interesting. for starters, people die because companies save money in safety precautions. extreme cases are forced labor in nazi germany during the war, and a lot of companies were glad to get these cheap workers, and most didn't exactly try hard to give them acceptable working conditions. I'm sure other countries have cases in their own history that aren't much better. also, don't forget that an important part of my argument is that corporations are currently held in line by a bigger bully (government) pushing some rules. "industry-self-regulation" is a myth. anyone on this list should know better, just by looking at the example of how well privacy "self-regulation" works. it's no surprise that europe - which has extensive laws on privacy - has a privacy foundation so much stronger that it is seriously debated whether or not to outlaw automated data exchange with the US (unless the owner of the data ok'ed it) ?
