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*Updated: Mr. Guillot AKA yankprintster (4225) responded and is interested in answering some questions. Ask him your questions below in the comments*
B.J. Guillot is one of three candidates currently seeking to represent Washington's 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Guillot is also a reader of SoylentNews. In a recent interview with CoinTelegraph about his enthusiastic support of cryptocurrency, Mr. Guillot was asked "When did you first hear about Bitcoin, and when did you get into it?" He explains that he got turned on to Bitcoin while reading a certain news for nerds site, and then mentions:
Since I have the floor, let me just state for the record, the new Slashdot web design and user experience is really poor. I've since moved on to SoylentNews.org for my daily science and tech news.
Perhaps Mr. Guillot would be kind enough to answer a few questions about his positions on topics of particular concern to the SN community. I invite him to answer directly in the comments below, or if he would prefer, I will collect and forward the highest-modded comments to Mr. Guillot, and then submit a new story with his responses.
According to his campaign website, Mr. Guillot holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, and has software development experience.
The Crypto Crimson reports that while many politicians are "quick to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon" following the U.S. Federal Election Commission's recent opinon declaring that political committes may accept contributions in the form of Bitcoin, unlike these other politicians, Mr. Guillot is an active miner who "currently achiev[es] a hashrate of five Terahash per Second - certainly the fastest bitcoin mining politician".
The top item to appear in the "Issues" section of Mr. Guillot's campaign website is "NSA Spying". Mr. Guillot's stated positon on this issue is: "The Federal Government needs to immediately stop its spying and metadata collection of its citizen's phone calls and emails. It's also time to discontinue the Patriot Act. No more extensions!".
On his campaign website, Mr. Guillot also states his positions on: "Internet Freedom", "Patent Reform", "Bitcoin", "National Debt", "FairTax", "Military", "Second Amendment", "Energy", and "Education".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jackb_guppy on Monday July 07 2014, @05:07PM
If corporations are "persons", why are corporations not prosecuted and jailed when found guiltily? Instead of the current method of buying their way out and still doing business in the same area, they could not do without cheating before. If not the corporation, then the board and senior management be the ones held for the corporation's misdeeds. Examples of current issues: Home Loan "Fraud" and High-Speed "Insider" Trading.
On that same vain:
Per resent court ruling, a corporation can have religious views, who actually has to have those views, if a corporation is deemed has them? I have yet to see a corporation in church. :) All the shareholders? Just the board? CEO only? Should then public be blocked taking a job in that corporation, if they do not hold the same views? Or should the public be a second class citizen not getting what they believe in because they live in area where all/major of corporations have the same view?
When does a corporation "talk"? As in the 1st Amendment or is all speech by a corporation always advertising (marketing), so truth in advertising laws kick in?
When is the CEO speech (or any top management), NOT corporation speech? When the CEO is not announced as the CEO. Can Bill Gates ever have free speech again since he is tied so tightly to Microsoft and Bill and Melisa Gates Foundation?
Why does the government (for the people and by people - both cases humans) not step in and control boil-plate and click-though agreements? Since these agreements are now "ALL" made out to prevent the public from helping reform the corporations, by blocking the use of the courts and class-actions, let alone the ability to change the agreement at will without input from the other party (us, humans). Voting with your dollars do not help when all telco/cable do the same time. So, no choice but to accept.
Are the wires (last mile) owned by the people or telco/cable corporations, which seem to be also content provider? Should the last mile or actually all wires, be owned by not-of-profit companies that do not provide any content, but working for the public to insure we have good, if not better, service? In this way, we can choice who want to interconnect to different ISP and/or content providers.
Should the providing company also be liable for false or misleading things, if they are verifying that they work and user is forced to download from the company's "wall garden" for their devices. Example here is could be a blood pressure app that is not reviewed by the FDA but if they fail or give wrong readings can affect the costumer badly.
Sorry... getting off soap-box now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Tuesday July 08 2014, @03:57AM
If a corporation misbehaves badly you should jail the people responsible for the decisions. Then only will you see people in corporations start making decisions differently. Otherwise it just becomes "cost of doing business" and "Government taking its cut via fines".
People often say it's unclear who is responsible, but in many cases once people realize they might go to jail they start providing hard evidence that someone else is really responsible. Because ultimately someone is responsible for making the corporation do X. Where X could be laundering _billions_ of USD for drug lords, or illegally transferring customer $$$ to other accounts, or publicly saying something is fine when the engineers don't think it is.
If you fine or jail a billionaire's _company_, it may hurt, but he is likely to have other sources of income.
In contrast jail time is a huge opportunity cost for a billionaire - he can't be partying on his yacht, he can't fly to the Bahamas, he can't be working on his latest exciting project, he's stuck in prison.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @11:51AM
The problem with this is that the legal fiction of corporation is specifically intended to obscure individual responsibility.
Example, imagine it's company policy to amputate the left hand of everyone entering one of their stores. In that (ridiculous) case, it's pretty clear that a security guard who actually performs such amputation is criminal, because Nuremberg established that "just following orders" is not a defense. But what about the committee that drafted the policy? Members of the committee who voted against that specific line? The CEO and board of directors, who are nominally responsible for all company actions? Middle management who failed to question the policy?
If there's no written policy supporting the illegal behavior, then it's very hard to prove that bad actions are not the result of one malicious or fraudulent individual, thus absolving the company of any culpability at all.
Financial penalties are about all you can meaningfully impose on a company, but the penalties imposed so fare are generally trivial in magnitude. Example, BP has paid about $4B for the Macondo oil spill and may face further payments of $4-24B. Their profit last year was $45B on revenue of $350B. In contrast, fines for drug trafficking, criminal negligence, and other "personal" crimes frequently exceed individual annual revenue, leaving them in debt for years. Impose criminal fines on companies that are more than a small fraction of their profits, more that a trivial percentage of their revenue, and restrict their freedom to pay bonuses, and you will see companies pay more attention to internal ethics and policing.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:28PM
The committee may get away with it, the boss might get away but once word gets around that the "corporate veil" is being pierced and bosses, employees and guards risk going to prison rather than only the company getting fined; people would be more likely to refuse to do stuff that might cause them to end up in prison AND/OR get lots of stuff in writing. If I'm part of a committee I might even start making sure that my dissension to dubious/illegal stuff is recorded just in case. Even if committees still issued illegal orders and got away with them, more employees would disobey so companies would be doing less bad stuff (or it costs them more to do so) - I'm not going to go to prison for your illegal order, if you sack me, I might give an anonymous tip somewhere. In contrast if there's little/zero chance of me going to prison, I might be tempted to go along with it and reap the benefits along with everyone else. If the company gets a big fine later on, it's unlikely to affect me as much as going to prison would.
So I still disagree with your reasoning and conclusion that financial penalties are all you can impose. Once people start going to prison you'll see a change. Till then why the heck should anyone care that much? Companies make losses and go bust every now and then. The people responsible usually get to keep their bonuses from the "good years" where they were doing risky, bad or even illegal stuff.
If you want to make it fair and maybe more effective you make a big announcement that you're going to start doing this, maybe even require companies to inform employees of these new laws. So when you start putting people in prison, you can say everyone's been warned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:01PM
You are absolutely right that it is the threat of going to jail that will actually change things.
Think about this: You're some underling in HSBC, and you're told to take part in their multi-billion dollar money laundering scheme for drug lords. And this went on for years. Why would you not tell the appropriate authorities? Almost definitely because to do so would be to lose your job, that's why. And once your name got in the paper, you would probably also be unable to work in the banking industry again as well. I mean, losing your career is a big deal, and I wouldn't be surprised to see ordinary people avoiding that fate.
That is, unless you threaten them with something more serious. You have to make it more risky to not say anything, to protect bosses, etc than it is to rat them out.
Fines will never work: Even if you fine the corporation more than the profits they made from the criminal activity (which has not been happening), the managers who made the choice to commit the crime are not directly affected by it and thus have no disincentive to repeat the behavior.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:46PM
Things change once people start going to prison.
If you're going to put small fry in prison for money laundering, then when HSBC is caught doing it, someone should go to prison too (it's bullshit that billions of dollars can be transferred so easily without anyone knowing about it - so I'm pretty sure you can get enough names if you really bothered to look). If some individual would go to prison for doing X, then when Large Corp does X the people/person responsible should go to prison too.
As I said, this is just "The Government taking its cut". And it's more evidence that the War on Drugs is bullshit. The billions of laundered dollars is blood money. Without those billions, the drug lords would find it much harder to fund their wars and armies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:15PM
And if you jail a natural person, you also affect a lot of people who may not be responsible for what that person did. This might include
Note that this is not an exhaustive list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @03:00PM
a) Jailing one person - X people affected
b) Jailing a corporation - X * number of employees in corporation affected.
Why jail an entire corporation when you can get similar or better results by jailing only the ones responsible and thus affect far fewer people?
Now do you see why it's stupid to do b) when you could and should do a)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08 2014, @08:27AM
The only reason why corporations are considered 'people' is to enable the IRS to slog hardworking Americans even more in taxes.