Um, the positions of the parties have been shifting more authoritarian, on average.

The USA was kind of founded on radical individual liberty and freedom. Today you can't find a party wanting to touch the war machine, drug laws, social security, or other massive programs that the Framers couldn't even have dreamt about.

Go back and look at the conflicts that the two parties fought over back then. It seems like a joke now. There was a time we actually fought over a centralized banking system? Light houses? Slavery?

What legal shenanigans? It's much simpler just to say "Hey, I can form a corporation that can make contracts and conduct business just like a sole proprietor can". You know, instead of having to write into the law "An individual or civil union or LLC or LLP or corporation or..." every time you want to refer to the concept.

It can't be a false dichotomy, it has a yes or no answer (or maybe "sometimes").

Would you go to work knowing you could become liable for a botched order, or if your employer went bankrupt? Possibly losing your second car, maybe have to sell your house? Didn't think so. (That can and does happen to sole proprietors.)

The ability to enter into a contract necessarily implies you have rights to own property, and trade that property with whoever you wish. Corporations have just as much right to buy or sell bananas or advertisements or widgets as I do.

In the US, votes aren't given to persons, but to individuals who are citizens of a certain age, and possibly other restrictions depending on state. Do mind the semantics, because corporate persons obviously don't fit in here.

If a different standard for voting was used, e.g. "Property owners cast votes proportional to how much land they own", then yes, corporations would cast votes. This is how it already works for voting for membership of corporate boards, so I don't see a problem with this. Obviously, that's a big "if".

I'm not sure what you mean here. Marriage means you and your wife are considered a single person for certain purposes. Even if you have an LLC, you can't commit fraud - that's criminal, and you could be individually found guilty.

Regular individuals can't bring a lawsuit against property ("John Doe v. Three gallons of milk" makes as much sense as "John Doe v. 60 shares of Acme, Inc."). Hence, corporate personhood.

How much commerce do you think we do without the ability to enter into high-value contracts? Virtually none.

How do you think we enforce contracts against corporations? Corporate personhood.

They aren't Common Law states (countries), but nonetheless it's handled roughly the same.

That's how criminal negligence already works, when's the last time a corporation was tried in court for murder?

I'm talking about enforcing contracts. My company orders a million dollars of widgets from Acme and they're never delivered. Who's responsible? I don't want to sue an individual, I'm never seeing my money back if that's the only option available. And if I did, some poor employee for Acme is going to lose their second car and probably have to sell their house.

You actually think a single person would be able to pay all the damages asked in many of today's lawsuits against corporations?

You think most people are willing to accept liability on behalf of their employer, with the potential to lose most all their property if found guilty?

Corporate personhood refers to the ability to hold a corporation liable for debts and crimes. Are you suggesting I should be able to sue chimps but not corporations?

It didn't need to, the study was on twins. Further, testing on both identical and fraternal twins allowed researchers to calculate how much genetics plays into it, because the genetic makeup for both kinds of twins is highly predictable.

Don't confuse ethical for moral.

People do A/B testing all the time, that's perfectly legitimate and therefore ethical. What's any different when Facebook does it?

That's called "dedicated". You can ask for it, but it's ridiculously expensive.

As in, two to three orders of magnitude more expensive, depending on the SLA that you want.

Failed projects are unusual enough that that's why they make the news. Do you have some data to the contrary you'd like to share?

Contributor to three successful and delivered Kickstarter projects speaking (one late by a year, but for an awesome reason), and backer to another handful, all delivered or on schedule (so they tell me).

Commerce is either interstate or intrastate.

Many of their business operations might be interstate - and thus subject to federal law - but a sale in Iowa from Iowa to Iowa is not.

The vulnerability is that a string that looks like a function definition can be constructed to be immediately executed prior to execution of the bash script. (This is to support truly ancient bash scripts back when functions were defined as VARIABLE()="() { body }".) However, a bug in that code means the entire value gets executed as a bash script, and so it's possible to append code to the function definition, and it'll get executed as bash code.

Essentially, it's lesson #1 why not to use eval() in your programs.

The danger is that user inputs in Web programs are frequently passed as environment variables to programs. This is especially true in CGI, where the request URI and HTTP headers are passed as environment variables.

This means if you use bash in your CGI, you can execute whatever command you like, as "apache" or whoever you're executing your CGI as. Remotely.

You can't say that because we're assuming ceteris paribus and we've already defined our control as the productivity of food on a given plot of land.

Our food production per plot of land has gone up; or, our required size of land to produce the same amount of food has gone down.

We can't say for sure if one person's profits will go up or down, at least not without additional information about the particularities and price elasticity stats of the market, because both their costs and their revenue have changed. But markets change all the time, people (and farmers especially) know they have to change produce from time to time, depending on what's profitable. Overall, though, lower costs are a good thing. Always. That's exactly what's happening here.

Societies where most people are in agriculture tend to be societies where most people are poor, and this is a causal effect: Their costs are so high for farming they can't afford to have industry elsewhere. Reducing costs means fewer people have to be in agriculture, and this is good.

This isn't even a feedback loop, although sometimes people will make a similar argument around other phenomenon assuming all feedback loops must be a positive feedback loop that never decays, incorrectly reaching the conclusion the economy will eventually collapse. (E.g. "Prices went up, therefore the cost of producing/refining oil/gas will go up, therefore the cost of producing many products will go up, until all products cost infinity!")

If you have literally nothing to spend, then your elasticity of demand is undefined. It's a division by zero error.

However in general, the law of diminishing marginal utility necessarily implies that as your income shrinks, your elasticity of demand becomes perfectly elastic (i.e. -infinity).