Alcohol. It’s more dangerous than it seems.
Surprised to see no one has said cigarettes yet. Not only are you poisoning yourself, it’s harmful to everyone else around you that has to inhale that shit.
Making more than 10x the money of your least paid employee.
This.
I get where you’re coming from, but I think you’d just see companies divide into tiers where one tier would subcontract to the tier below. Think “cleaning services companies” all the way down.
Well I don’t expect the exact phrasing of the code of law to be 11 words.
Simple : let’s make that illegal too
People are allowed to make their own decisions. Heroin should be legalized. /s
This thread: what do you think should be illegal, but isn’t?
Me: Answers, as asked
Everyone: how dare >=(
Hanging the toilet paper the wrong way.
Why does people care how they hang their toilet paper in their own bathroom?
The selling of personal information.
Lobbying.
I get what you mean, but that would backfire increadibly quickly.
Civil rights organizations would no longer be able to talk with politicians directly, possibly never, as demonstrations and manifestations could be classified as lobbying depending on how strict it would be enforced.
Environmental groups could no longer invite politicians to important conferences.
Lobbying isn’t just something that monolithic companies do, take it away, and it will only be something the bad guys does.
Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.
I’d accept such an outcome.
Keep in mind that the person you reply to isn’t wrong: Big corpos would still be lobbying, as they got the resources to hide it effectively and keep everyone trying to sue them over suspicions of lobbying stuck in litigation hell.
Anybody less affluent would however find it impossible to do any lobby work. Environmental agencies etc.
This is one of those situations where just outlawing something does the least affect the very party you would want to hit most.
Then break them down
You’d accept possibly loosing the right to demonstrate or to hold a manifestation or protest.
That is not the world I want to live in.
Wut? It is supremely American to think you can only talk to politicians if you have money… and only because so many other people are willing to purchase a slice of their time.
I can just walk to Peter Julian’s office and, assuming I’m not rude, talk to him about something that matters to me. I’ve had conversations with Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders - I used to board game with a state senator. It it might be hard to get a lunch date with Joe Biden but politicians spend the majority of their time just talking to folks… it’s only when the rich can use their money to monopolize time that shit breaks down.
Those meetings you have had with politicians could absolutely be classified as lobbying, and would be made illegal if lobbying was outlawed.
A company have the resources to make a smokescreen around meetings like that, making it harder to prove lobbyism, the lobbyist just happened to stay at the same hotel as the politician did, they even arrived a week before, and left two days after the politician arrived, it’s not like a meeting was set up on the one overlapping day, that would be crazy…
Those meetings you have had with politicians could absolutely be classified as lobbying, and would be made illegal if lobbying was outlawed.
It’s not just classified as lobbying, it’s litterally what Lobbying is about. Meeting politician to tell them that the environmental law reforms means that the factory will close or that the consumer need better protection regarding toxic chemical in their food is what Lobbyist do. It’s sometimes get even funnier when they change employer and therefore political side
Please what’s the power of NGOs compared to corporations?
Just make an exception for charities and non-profit.
Lobbying is fine. Lobbying with money should be illegal.
ITT: people so used to lobbying that they got convinced it’s a necessary evil so that minorities and common folks can lobby as well.
It’s clearly absurd. Many places call lobbying with its real name: corruption. And there are laws in place to fight it. Are they perfect? No. Is it then more effective to legalyze corruption? OF COURSE NOT ARE YOU INSANE?!?
Lobbying isn’t the same as corruption.
Lobbying is informing politicians about an issue while pushing your agenda.
Corruption is giving a politician an incentive to vote as you want.
In what universe a politician does not have, nevermind intrinsecally in its raise to popularity, but explicitly active tools and relationships that keeps him up to date with the issues and needs of his community?
I guess in a monarchy.
Very few politicians have the time get down and understand the issues enough to make an informed decision, which they have aids and use lobbyists to learn about the subject.
A decision about deciding about subsidiaries for specific crops for instance, lets say that a farmer used to farm wheat, but then realized that he could get more money by farming tobacco, ok, so he switches to tobacco, but the nation still needs a stable supply of wheat, so wheat needs to be subsidized by the government to make it worth it for farmer to farm wheat, most politicians won’t know if there is a need for this or how large it needs to be.
This is where lobbyists come in, they inform politicians about what they believe is needed, show reports and other data, to influence the politician about how to vote and what to argue for. Wheat farmers and baker advocacy groups will argue for high subsidies, tobacco farmers and cigarette companies will argue against it.
Is that a government for ants?!?
No dude there’s experts, specialists, entire departments within any (?) human government that knows shit, talks with experts, calculate and runs stuff.
They don’t just wait for farmers to walk up and explain what vegetables are.
And why would you think it’s normal that cigarette companies are at this whymsical table? Why put cancer inducing products in a debate with food with baby politicians that knows nothing and wait for the “debate” to play out?
Is that a government for ants?!?
No this is normal.
No dude there’s experts, specialists, entire departments within any (?) human government that knows shit, talks with experts, calculate and runs stuff.
Yes there are departments for healthcare, having reports full of stats, that no politician will ever read, lobbying can bring attention to demetia and bring some context to the data.
They don’t just wait for farmers to walk up and explain what vegetables are.
Correct, but they want farmers to come up and talk to them about problems that they see that might be missed, for example, how young people can be encouraged to go into farming, or if there is something killing the crops that they can see faster than the governments experts can write a report about.
And why would you think it’s normal that cigarette companies are at this whymsical table?
Because they are a huge industry.
Why put cancer inducing products in a debate with food with baby politicians that knows nothing and wait for the “debate” to play out
Because farmers need money, and if tobacco pays more than wheat, then the farmer will farm tobacco.
You are blind to so many options…
They ignore the reports? So why would they not ignore the “people”? Because money? Then it’s just corruption and the policy won’t reflect any genuine need.
Why being a “huge industry” has any political weight? Drugs cartel move tons of money, do they get a say in the matter too?
Guns
Already illegal (without proper licence) in most first world countries. Or at least not as unregulated as as in Murica
They shouldn’t be illegal, but heavily regulated.
I mean, hunting and harvesting meat is far more ethical to the normal meat industry.
Yes. Every hunter is ethical and will absolutely nail every shot to make sure the animal doesn’t suffer and die a slow death. A hunter missing the killshot and instead wounding the animal? Never happens.
/s
Of course it happens, but for the absolute majority of it’s life, even a wounded animal has lived a life in freedom and nature, a proper hunter would absolutely track and deal with a wounded animal to reduce suffering and preserve the meat.
Most people in countries where guns are regulated would not get access to a gun for hunting, mind you. Unless your job is to be a forester, which over here includes selectively shooting animations to balance populations if something goes out of balance.
“I want to get my own deer meat from the forest” is not a valid reason to get a gun. Or even a bow!
I like the theory of gun laws in Sweden.
You can only get a gun if you are actively in need of one, there are only two legal way to be in need of one, hunting and competition.
You need to get a hunting license from a school, join a hunting society and be an active member to get a permit for gun, or you need to actively compete in a shooting club to get a competition permit. You also need to demonstrate competence and skill before you get a permit regardless of if you are a hunter or a competitor.
Getting a gun for personal safety is not permitted, and to be frank, it isn’t really needed here, we have few dangerous animals, and despite the rise of gang violence, Sweden is still a safe country.
Factory farming
Insane rent hikes. Landlords and corps shouldn’t be able to raise rent from $1,700 mo to $8,000 mo in a single period, let alone a handful of years.
To piggyback off that: the concept of rent.
It’s fine as a concept, it allows you to live somewhere without making a commitment long-term.
But there needs to be more regulations in place, like maybe making it illegal for corporations to buy residential property and requiring by law that any new residential building must have the option to buy as well as rent, with regulations to ensure it’s a fair price.
Housing shouldn’t be gatekept. Rent as we know it is broken. Someone owns a property, while you pay the mortgage. But you’re not paying down to own, you’re paying it down for someone else to own. Sure, renting is fine for people who move a lot, but that money shouldn’t be flushed down the drain every month—from the position of the renter. Rental credits, to where that money you’re putting down acts as a credit toward getting the opportunity to own. This would take a massive restructuring of the way we behave as a society, but it’s desperately needed.
making it illegal for corporations to buy residential property
It’s not quite that simple though. What do you mean by “residential property”? Single-family homes? A duplex? Okay, that sounds fine, but what about an apartment high rise? That’s a residential property, and there’s not a great way to have it all be rental property without being owned by a corporation of some kind. Even when you talk about renting far few units–such as an owner-occupied apartment building with 4 units in total (these are fairly common in Chicago, which is the rental market I’m most familiar with)–a “corporation” may be something like an LLC in order to shield the owner from personal financial liability in case of catastrophic loss. (And yes, I’m aware that incorporating as a small business can and does get abused. In theory there are checks against that, in practice they don’t help in many cases since there’s too much going on for any municipality to go after every single case of business fraud.)
Of course, you don’t want individuals owning vast tracts of residential properties either; that takes all the problems of corporations owning property, and concentrates them into the hands of one person.
I think that there might be a way to regulate and incentivize behaviour through tax policy, but I’m not sure what it would be. Perhaps a system that put a hard cap on profits, and required certain percentages of rent to always go into maintenance and improvements? You’d probably also want to exempt corporations that owned or had control over 6 or fewer units.
This would be a fun (read: complex and challenging) area of public policy to get involved in, because you want to make housing affordable, but you also don’t want to disincentivize development.
Ninja edit: I’m saying all of this not because I’m pro-corp, or pro-gov’t, but because any time you try and fix a problem, you’re going to have bad actors that are going to try and break your system in order to get as much personal profit out of it as they can. Trying to find the weak points and then reinforcing them makes it harder for good ideas to be abused to a negative end.
Nutrition information based on unrealistic serving sizes.
I’ve seen an individually wrapped muffin “servings per pack: 2”.
Then there’s that Tom Scott video on how “zero calory” sweetener can be 4 calories.
Canada passed ‘rational servings’ laws a few years ago to this exact end. No more cases where a single-portion package would contain 1.6 servings, or whatnot.
There’s a great video by Vihart about how even when accounting for servings per unit it can still be manipulated to fit their marketing goals.
Thank you! That had6 given me much more to be outraged about!
Europe has “per 100g”
Copyrights
We only really run into trouble when we start treating corporations like people and copyright as a commodity in it’s own right.
Non-transferable copyright for the life of the author would be perfectly acceptable.
Not for something like medicine or crops that people will die if the copyright holder abuses their copyright. In that case we have to act for the greater good and make medicine first, compensate creators later, if at all.
the statute of Anne was the first copyright law and it was written to stop printers in London from breaking each others’ knees over who was allowed to print the world of Shakespeare who was already long dead.
copyright is a bill of goods when packaged as a protection for creatives.
Nope, copyrights isn’t the issue, they enable people to earn money from their creativity, the issue is rather that they are way too long.
Back in the 1780s copyright lasted 14 years after the work was created.
This is fine, the current obscene legnth of copyright is terrible.
I’d be fine with copyright being like 20 years or so, that’s plenty of time to make a good amount of money from your work IMO. But yeah the current system where some corporation gets to keep cashing in on something half a century after the author is dead is pretty ridiculous.
people have always been able to earn money from their creativity. copyright is just corporate greed.
Copyright provides the legal framework to ensure the copyright holder has their rights protected.
it’s a fictional right.
Technically every right and every prohibition is fictional…
oh shit. now you’re on my level
easily accessible and affordable Psychedelics and dissociatives for depression and getting out of ruts
Are you saying what should be legal but isnt?
Whoops my bad, curse this episodic dyslexia
From my industry: Perhaps the purchase of chemicals for the manufacture of fireworks. It’s surprisingly easy to order pounds and pounds of different oxidizers and fuels.
The one I need is highly controlled. I need to make my own strike anywhere matches since Uco quit, need red phosphorous, don’t want to scrape it off of match strikers for hours, want a big ol’ jar. Apparently it’s also used to make “MeTh” so I can’t buy it.
Powdered aluminum though no problem, go figure.
The employer-employee contract
It violates the theory of inalienable rights that implied the abolition of constitutional autocracy, coverture marriage, and voluntary self-sale contracts.
Inalienable means something that can’t be transferred even with consent. In case of labor, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for production, so by the usual norm that legal and de facto responsibility should match, they should get the legal responsibility i.e. the fruits of their labor
I think that it depends on the nature of the contract. Sure, most of them are terrible.
On the other hand, NDAs are a form of employment contract that are often a necessity. Non-compete contracts can serve a legitimate purpose, in preventing unfair competition or using company secrets for person gain. They’re usually written in an overly broad manner though, or prevent legitimate employee activities.
Make employment contract toward all company members, not “the company”. Workers are working for each other, not owned by share holders. They are the company.
This would be joint self-employment as in a worker coop
