[crazygringo]

Individuals can choose which laws to ignore, like when they jaywalk.

Corporations, universities, etc. are very different. They create policies which are documented and which their employees are required to follow. They engage in risk analysis.

"Part of being an adult" has nothing whatsoever to do with the laws and regulations that apply to organizations. You're making a severe category error.

[ndriscoll]

Organizations are made of individuals who I assure you regularly ignore or don't even read the policies they are "required" to follow.

[crazygringo]

I don't know what world you live in. Everywhere I've ever worked, that gets you fired. Real quick.

[ndriscoll]

I've worked at a couple F100s and a startup.

At IBM, vim was specifically banned by legal because of reputational risk because the license asks you to consider donating to children in Africa, and IBM didn't want to be called out for not doing so. Guess which editor pretty much everyone in my org used? We also weren't allowed to move furniture because of some union agreement, but guess how many people cared when furniture mysteriously moved from an empty office room into ours? None.

At the startup, people in our satellite office in Arizona openly mocked the California HR harassment training over lunch. It was also an open secret that one of the managers started dating a report. As far as I know many years later they've both moved on to other jobs and they're still together. Nothing bad happened.

Breaking some policies will absolutely get you fired, but that's mostly around doing things you shouldn't be doing, and even then usually only matters if someone else that has some power might themselves get in trouble/have more work/lose something because of what you did. Others no one will care about. Again, part of growing up is figuring out which policies have a purpose and which came from some busybody.

I also already gave the entire AI industry as an example. We know for a fact that Meta trained on pirated material, and it's pretty obvious that everyone else does too. It's blatant industry wide flouting the law. The realpolitik answer here is everyone knows that enforcing the law here would be the final nail in the coffin for China superceding the West, so it's not going to happen.