Views (cont'd): Corporations; marriage

I have my doubts about the typical status of corporations. Glossing over the difference between civil and criminal offenses, it unnerves me to protect people from being fully punished for their bad acts. Sure, perhaps most employees and owners ought not be jointly liable. However, ( often some of them should. )

People also come together via marriage to form another kind of entity which again can receive various favorable tax benefits, which often has some legal notion of community property within it, joint liability for debt, etc., though to various degrees and with varying flexibility depending on the jurisdiction. My inclination is to regard the spiritual and emotional dimensions of marriage as being outside the law: let the churches or others have whatever unofficial ceremonies they like for whomever they like, even call it marriage, leaving the less-loaded civil partnership term for the legal state wherein by mutual agreement people become next of kin, somewhat able to act on each other's behalf and jointly face the consequences, be considered together for means testing, etc.

I do not see any particular reason to limit this legal change of status, what I am calling civil partnership, by sex or even group size. ( Worrying cases may be few. )

Of course, how things now seem to have settled is that same-sex marriage is becoming another kind of marriage but among only two people, which at least makes many happy; ( those wanting recognized polygamy must yet wait. )

Speculating wildly: If I am thinking that the corporate veil ought not to have such great power and that the legal side of marriage could be generalized then I wonder if I can workably stretch corporations and marriage enough to become technically the same in law. For example, with the above visa issue, in some circumstances corporations can apply for visas for employees given evidence of adequate support and similar; workers on H-1B visas are permitted even intent to immigrate.

Web-based news aggregators

Not satisfied with maximizing the horror of Google's Groups interface they have now been taking a hatchet to News. I am already used to Google News having issues like not being able to maintain profiles for multiple countries' editions for the same user but recently search options (at least those easily found) have been deteriorating and the interface for managing news sources became dreadful, a significant issue given the default inclusion of niche sources that I would gladly avoid. I have thus been considering other news aggregation websites.

So far I have not been thrilled by the alternatives. I am mostly interested in mainstream non-tabloid news sources that cover the US and the UK, though the occasional item from anything from Haaretz to the Times of India is of interest. I tried World News Network for a while but their UK edition seems insufficiently curated. Some sites have gone rather mobile-tastic but at least Newslookup.com allows plenty of text in the viewable screen area. An alternative to aggregators would be to maintain a list of decent news websites, such as the Christian Science Monitor, and follow just those.

Localizing accents

I was listening to Gary Numan on the radio and he sounded remarkably like Noel Fielding. I mentioned this to mst3kmoxie and it turned out that she had been thinking the same.

Looking at Wikipedia, Gary Numan (then Webb) was born in Hammersmith and Noel Fielding was born in Westminster and lived in Pollards Hill. These places, well within the London Orbital, are not many miles apart. I wonder if they would have sounded more dissimilar had Gary grown up around Romford or Watford or suchlike, or if one has to be out in Reading or Chelmsford before there is an obvious difference.