They can do so without the protections of a corporation. You can take actions qua you as a person, and assume the liability for those actions. Or you can shield yourself behind a legal fiction, but that is not a person. It has no rights, only permissions granted to it. This is the way it should be, and has been corrupted by the Supreme Court.
A shareholder (i.e. part owner of the corporation) has chosen to "peaceably assemble" with other like minded individuals by buying stock. They have elected representatives (directors on the board of directors) to further the interests of the group.
Sometimes the group's interests include political issues. For example directors of Widget Corp may well want to promote a candidate running against the candidate running on a "Ban Widgets because they are 'addictive'" platform.
This is no different than people joining together to support candidates who are pro-choice or pro-"life". They pay dues and make donations to an organization (such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund) which supports the individual's interests. The organization then decides who to support and makes donations or otherwise advance those those candidates' campaigns through a PAC. In some cases some of those individuals also make "in kind" contributions under the direct organized umbrella of the political entity (such as spending hours "door knocking" or "phone banking") that, combined with their cash donations to the candidate, exceed the $3,500 individual contribution limit.
Just because one assembled with others to further their financial interests doesn't suddenly mute them or take away their First Amendment rights. For example, some donate to the DSA because they think they or their family will benefit financially if the DSA candidates get elected and can push through certain legislation. Surely that their interest is, at least in part, financial does not mute them.
That group can have the legal fiction of the corporation for liability reasons. They can also, separately, assemble as a group for political speech, each using their own rights as a person. That corporation is not a person and has no right to speech. Their group for political speech in turn represents them as people and does not shield them from liability.
We've unfortunately conflated this, to our detriment. Legal fictions don't have rights. People do.
Directors of Widget Corp can group together separately from Widget Corp and exercise their personal rights, or they can fuck off. Widget Corp isn't a person and has no rights.
You are confusing non-profits with for-profit corporations. For profit corporations (the kind with shareholders) are legally required to behave selfishly (the profit motive) which means, in practice, that corporations are their own agents which act independently of the shareholder.
That’s because corporate board members and executives would be personally liable if they did anything but allow the corporation to act like a raging sociopath. That’s the definition of “fiduciary duty”. Corporations are, in effect, autonomous, unaligned evil AIs.
You can't have non-profit corporations donate to politics, because it's so easy for a corporation to finance a non-profit to do the donations for them.
Individuals, yes. For profit corporations are beholden to profit only, and thus their minds are sociopathic in nature. Therefore, they should not be allowed to, yet they can, and do, donate to super PACs.
You would not allow an evil AI robot to donate or vote just because it is “owned” by some other company or group of people, would you?
That’s what a company is; a non-human intelligent agent which operates autonomously according to an immoral code, with almost no restrictions on what it does. Hell, directors can be in personal legal jeopardy if they do anything but allow the corporate AI entity to act completely selfishly and immorally, because that’s how fiduciary duty is defined by law. So, evil naturally follows an inevitable consequence of the system.
Corporations are essentially autonomous, evil AIs that shareholders practically cannot realign. Their alignment is codified by law to put their own interests above all else.
In the church, to a vengeful God.
To our brave warriors for being warriors.
To our protectors for keeping us in our place.
To our owners, for being so wonderful that God blessed them with their wealth.
Aside from the change in the economic landscape, there's also the fact that they wrote it with the elite in mind (white male property owners), so they already had complete control.
At least voting has opened up to the general public. The pity there is that misinformation, tribalism, and ignorance does not make for a well-informed voter, and that problem is just getting worse.
One can certainly propose a Constitutional Convention and get two-thirds the state legislatures to agree or convince two-thirds of the US Senators and two-thirds of the US Representatives to advance an amendment to effectively eliminate the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment.
But I predict it will be tough sledding and even if that's successful, getting three-quarters of the state legislatures to ratify the resulting modifications will be even harder.
Although, incumbents might like the idea as it would increase their job security.
You would be surprised how leaky RF can be and how hard to completely suppress. There is a reason things like anechoic chambers and test labs are very expensive.
Leaky - possibly, but we are dealing with the real world where you have plenty of background noise. The cell tower will likely fail to receive the signal.
It doesn't take much of a leak. Radiation likes to radiate.
I used to keep my work phone in a Faraday bag sometimes. (I had my reasons[1]). It usually worked. Occasionally, it didn't work and the phone would demonstrate this by doing phone-stuff like ringing even while it was snug inside of that conductive bag.
So sometimes, the radiation was radiating well-enough despite my efforts.
Not so long ago, I was chatting with someone here on HN about blocking RF at GHz frequencies using aluminum foil. I was sure that it would be trivial, and they were sure that it would be difficult. So I tested that.
I started pinging my phone on its LAN IP, and wrapped it in foil. I found that I could increase latency some and also institute some packet loss.
But I couldn't stop it altogether -- not with a sheet of aluminum foil, anyway. No matter how carefully I made the creases, pings simply kept happening. (Having satisfactorily demonstrated to myself that were right and that it would be difficult, I stopped testing at that point.)
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So here in reality, suppose the [car's] cellular connection finds that it has a connection occasionally. What's to stop it from buffering data and sending it in batches during times when it works? A few dozen lines of code that's geared to that purpose, perhaps? Or maybe a few hundred lines, instead?
Not that the difficulty matters much; the software is all closed up and inscrutable.
If the value of batching data to deal with intermittent connections is greater than the cost of producing the code to do this, then it can be assumed that such code has been or will be written.
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[1]: An abusive manager I had liked to turn on the tracking system that the phone had. I didn't mind being tracked while I was on the clock, but I placed a higher value on my privacy than on her ability to be a snoopy bitch when I was not on the clock. My Faraday bag solution was adequate for that phone, at that time, with that particular tracking system, and for my particular desires, and I had access to the system with which to validate the adequacy of this success, but it was by no means perfect.
That's just it - move in just the right spot where reflections combine in the right way, and it might be enough to get a ping. So the tracking would still be there just less reliable, with an unknown level of degradation. In the end you still wouldn't have any guarantees.
In case of Subaru turning off 2G made their modems keep trying to reconnect 24/7 draining and killing battery. Subaru refused replacing batteries killed by defective car.
Unfortunately for many modern cars that may make it run less efficiently and clean and have a rough start every time you do it for 30 minutes or more because many sensors are trained on-the-fly from a running vehicle and then the correct calibrator sensor values are then stored in volatile memory which is lost upon power loss.
I use to disconnect batteries all the time when fixing vehicles, but the last decade ive been avoiding it unless I have to because of how poorly new cars run afterwards. And people get really angry when you fix something on their vehicle and then go to drive it later and it hard starts and feels and performs worse than ever. Telling them to "just drive for 30 minutes and then restart your car again and hopefully it goes away" doesn't make people happy or confident in your fix, nor does it make diagnosing issues after replacing a suspected faulty module or sensor easier when it sounds and performs like trash for a long while afterwards.
That makes sense! When I got a battery replaced recently, the shop kept my car powered with a jump-pack connected in the engine bay while replacing the battery in the boot. They said it was more convenient for customers to not lose any of their settings.
That's an incredibly impractical and expensive place to put it. Frankly, I don't believe you purely because it'd be $200 cheaper for the manufacturer to put the antennas in the shark fin on the roof with all the other antennas
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