Your notion that corruption is normal might exist in some places on earth. Do politicians go to jail in your country? Because they do in mine.

Cruelty to animals doesn’t have anything to do with the Constitution. Many things are not listed in the Constitution. There are laws anyway.

There is no Animal Torture License anywhere in the United States. Torturing animals is illegal. Can’t believe this needs to be stated. I think some other license qualifies by this description in your head, but I can’t imagine what it could possibly be. For example, a medical testing license is not a torture license and I have to believe you are capable of understanding that.

My counterpoint about trade unions is completely misstated in your comment. Nobody said unions are not corrupt; sure, some unions engage in corruption. They all engage in lobbying, even the ones that do not commit crimes. They are in fact lobbying organizations, they are advocacy groups. That is why they exist, to advocate.

Corruption is errant[0] in a system. That sentence is completely valid English. “Errant” is an adjective, yes. I am using it as an adjective to describe corruption. Please learn to read.

Trade unions are just like everyone else in America: they are in America. Therefore they get a voice whether they are corrupt or not. Engaging in corruption can put you in jail; advocating for your opinion (lobbying) is protected by the 1st Amendment as it is considered free speech, and furthermore still has nothing to do with money by definition.

No, we cannot both agree on your closing statement. It just repeats your position which I clearly and blatantly disagree with. Corruption is errant and you can tell because people who do it and get caught go to jail.

[0]: “Errant is an adjective meaning straying from the proper course, behaving wrongly, or moving about aimlessly” - Merriam Webster

Did you not call everyone else naive at the end of your comment? It seems to me you have exhausted your position.

Or did you want to substantiate why lobbying to prevent cruelty to animals is bad?

Sometimes you’re just wrong. Stand there in your wrongness and be wrong and get over it. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can be correct.

Popular belief is not a defense for ignorance. Just because the practice of lobbying is misunderstood by the public does not render it illegal or wrong.

> highly undesirable to the regular guy

On the contrary, the “regular guy” (whatever that is) has many interests, and most, if not all of those interests, engage in some form of lobbying, even if that is just a letter or email sent to your legislators. The “regular guy” benefits greatly from many of these lobbying efforts: the American Cancer Society lobbies so that the “regular guy” gets cancer less often and has more choices in responding to it. As I shared in another part of this thread, warning labels on cigarettes are (partly) a direct result of their lobbying work.

Plus, the “regular guy” can just engage in lobbying. So your point makes no sense.

> It is your choice to focus on the language instead of the phenomenon

Really, did you read anything I wrote? Maybe about the part where I registered as a lobbyist myself and became an expert on FPPC filings? I gave a TED talk about it, actually.

> I am lucky I have been afforded […] sway

Well it sure seems to me that you are a “regular guy” on hckrnews. Or are you a titan of industry incognito? A maharaja of some kind? If not, please refer to your own argument about you being a “regular guy” and yet sustaining the ability to “sway” government “workings.”

You are essentially proving my point as a byproduct of your weird brag here.

> though I do not [sway the government in my favor]

Well that is nice of you but everyone else does all the time. So you should, too. It’s a little strange to ask for honor points for not engaging in what you just described as corruption.

> This HN discussion […] the naive […]

Truly! I can’t believe people walk the earth whom think the American Cancer Society or American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are somehow evildoers. Wild thing to argue

Lobbying and corruption are different things. Sometimes one involves the other, just like commercial enterprise also sometimes involves or creates corruption.

I wasn’t taught this in school, by the way. I was the youngest registered lobbyist in California state history, at age 16, because I lived nearby and decided to go lobby my state senator about vocational education law.

Hardly the spitting image of corruption, or the bleak fantasy in your head about American life.

- The American Cancer Society lobbies against big tobacco. Warnings exist on cigarettes because of their lobbying work.

- Associations of students are distinct from associations of administrators or institutions. All of them lobby government. There are associations of this kind at every level, including for public city colleges, some of which don’t charge tuition at all.

- The simple practice of lobbying your legislators does not imply or require money. Donations to campaigns are a totally separate thing and are regulated tightly as well. For example: hosting a dinner for legislators to learn about some topic is lobbying; donating to a campaign so they can buy ads is campaign finance. Both are tracked and regulated and the data is public.

- Local cities/counties: yes, those are governments, obviously. They are still stakeholders in the process of making policy just like anyone else.

- In the US, a state government is distinct from a local government. So a local city informing the state of impacts on policy, and the state factoring that in to new or changed policy, is totally normal and reasonable and also a feature, not a bug, of a healthy democracy.

- ASPCA = American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

- Trade unions are affected by policy and law, and therefore deserve a voice at the table just like everyone else. Whether unions are a good or bad thing is entirely outside the scope of lobbying as a concept.

Every single one of these is normal and not necessarily corruption. Corruption is errant in a system; lobbying is the system working as intended.

Policy should be made by people who are aware of what their policies will do to other people. Simply put, lobbying is American democracy’s solution to that problem.

If you live in America, work in America, or have interests in America, you can lobby, too. You don’t need to register or obtain permission or a license. Just call your representative and set up a meeting.

Here are some organizations that lobby:

- Cancer Society

- ASPCA

- Associations of students

- Local cities and counties

- Trade unions

- Regular every-day people (you can literally just go schedule a meeting with your representation. That is lobbying.)

Of course, if everyone gets to lobby, corporate interests can too.

Without this function, legislators would largely be blind during policymaking.

Lobbying does not, on its own, imply corruption or involvement of money. In California and federally, money spent for lobbying is tightly tracked and publicly released.

It also takes a lot to do anything with a 1T+ parameter model. Arguably there is still an immense capital moat. So I'm not sure it would even have the effect the author intends.

Somehow this plan manages to lean into every single bad outcome

HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium.

In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

[1]: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp

[2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.

Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.