> Engineers are never fired? Not even when the company shuts down?
Engineers never lose assets because their work doesn't produce value, or destroys value. Engineers aren't liable for the success of their work. Engineers don't have to return their salary if they don't produce value.
> Sometimes yes, with their (and mine) taxes.
This is an argument for everyone capturing the value produced by companies, not the employee. If you want to argue for harder taxation of corporations, or fewer business incentives, then sure. But this is unrelated to the relationship between the engineer and the company.
> Courts don't operate on technicalities. The intent is pretty much all that matters, as long as you prove that someone intended to pirate stuff, doesn't matter what rube goldberg machine they use to actually pull it off.
You are absolutely right.
This is what enabled prosecuting the founders of the pirate bay, among other things.
The fact that files are hosted elsewhere, mangled, encrypted, cut in pieces is entirely irrelevant to the court.
Hoping that a technicality gets you off the hook is exercise in shortsightedness.
Life and the universe don't owe us anything. This concepts of "deserve" comes from some monotheistic religions and it's been called Just World Fallacy.
> I seriously doubt that most people today would feel like someone with a 2nd grade education or even an 8th grade education deserves a job
Thankfully, a large number of people in the world support the idea of feeding the hungry in a way or another.
I am currently homeless. I have, in fact, eaten at soup kitchens. I do everything in my fucking power to stay away from the free meal sites. They are so uniformly shitty and expose me to crazy people who are dirty and germy and a threat to my health and welfare to stand next to. Any dive eatery is vastly better for my health and welfare than the soup kitchens.
I desperately want to figure out how to establish an adequate earned income. I am not pro Basic Income. You can keep your charity. It is almost never anywhere near even the very average, middle of the road quality of the cheapest fast food places.
When free food is as good as what you relatively rich people are eating, then you can talk to me about how wonderful this impetus is. Until then, I would like a fucking adequate earned income, thanks. And I would like to see that standard applied more generally.
People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people that they don't really believe deserve a real life, like they have. If they believed that, instead of giving charity, they would create jobs and build affordable housing. But, no, we can't do that. And fuck you all to hell to the poor schmucks ending up homeless because of the incredibly shortage of affordable housing. Y'all all must just be losers. It couldn't possibly be that society as a whole is all kinds of fucked up and you just happened to draw one of the excessive number of short straws.
> People who imagine they are generous, good people are very, very often just justifying incredibly bad treatment of other people
To be honest, I find that people who genuinely believe that about themselves are oblivious to how utterly hypocritical and inconsistent they are as human beings.
Some of the worst people in history have acted out of perceived righteousness.
Engineers are never fired? Not even when the company shuts down?
> If the company goes bankrupt, will the engineer be willing to bail the company out?
Sometimes yes, with their (and mine) taxes.