We mean different things, we have different definitions. To me it seems, that you look more into structure: is it limited or unlimited liability, is it solo owned or a group owned entity, is it for profit or non-profit, is it publicly traded or privately owned etc.
I look more on the function and need this institution serves. I'd consider a local mafia as a company in this sense, it is a group of criminals conducting illicit activities to earn profit. It's legal structure is immaterial to me, companies can exist absent of state. That is my point with OPs rant about what he thinks companies should or should not do - bad luck, companies are not bitches of states, they are manifestation of underlying reality of human nature.
Also profit is necessary component to me, doing something does not cut it for practical reason. For instance banding together with your wife in order to raise children is not a company, it is a different institution - specifically that of marriage forming a family. I guess we can extend the definition if we know what we mean, there definitely is some overlap especially if there actually is family business etc. But it is unnecessary.
georgioz
17hr ago
But most kids want to go to college because, pay, wages, jobs aside, it looks like a hell of a lot more fun aged 17 than becoming a bricklayer or taking up an apprenticeship as a hairdresser or plumber or carpenter or electrician, or getting a job at a warehouse, or a call center.
There are still some positions even in corporate world where you can land without university. At 18 you can land some lower-end sales job as SDR maybe with tech-sales or similar. If you are technically savvy, you can aim for presales engineer career which is pretty neat. You can land IT support position and farm certifications. These together with work history will be more valuable than some default easy college. All of these work very well especially with some referrals and recommendations.
At its core the company is an entity formed by shareholders in order to generate profit. This is intrinsic purpose of any company, be it modern LLC, East India Company a pirate crew in Caribbean with its own charter, Hanseatic guild in Baltic or mercenary company in ancient Greece. From times immemorial, people banded together and pooled labor, capital and know-how in order to generate profit for themselves.
All of those things you mentioned such as distributing goods, creating markets, creating jobs and whatnot are externalities of certain type of regulated companies. It is a result if you make it easier for strangers to put together capital and create profitable business. But it would in some form work even without that, only it would be more costly and riskier to do that in unstable environment.
I am not sure what these mythical security guarantees should be. They can be anything including ineffective guarantees for South Vietnam ("respond with full force" by Nixon) which broke within months of enacting them. Or as in case of Afghanistan, where USA simply withdrew the guarantees and just asked Taliban to behave for 14 months needed to abandon their security partner.
I am not sure why either of those scenarios cannot happen at any time. Especially if there will be multiple countries doing that - e.g. USA, France, Germany and UK being the security partner. I can imagine a new US administration asking Ukraine for mineral resources rights in exchange of guarantees in 2029 and when denied, they will just say they are withdrawing them in 2 years or some such leaving everything up to France and UK and other countries who may do their traditional Munich Agreement solution to unwanted security guarantees.
I agree, these settlements are absurd. The other thing that I recall is Alex Jones supposedly paying out $1.4 billion with court ordering to liquidate everything he owns be it InfoWars or his personal assets. Mind you there were 15 plaintiffs representing 10 victims and he had to pay from $28.8 million to $120 million. Now I am not defending Jones and his character here, but it seems excessive to me especially because of course Jones is not a billionaire and has only fraction of that money, but at the same time he cannot declare bankrupcy. So he will have to pay damages for the rest of his life. He basically became something like indentured servant to those people.
I am not sure if this is a normal practice in USA especially for verbal crime. But even for some other crime - is it normal for a criminal to be sued for billions thus becoming basically indentured servant for his victim? Surely raping or crippling somebody is much worse than ranting on internet, I guess the damages should be in trillions. It seems insane to me how arbitrary this is, but I guess this is what we get from jury system which is basically a theater where regular people can use state power for their own power trips.
georgioz
6d ago
techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.
It does not even has to be that, you can filter for women who are currently in manic phase of their BPD or who want to get revenge on their boyfriend who literally dumped them an hour ago etc. This is also strategy of various sneaky fuckers who embed themselves in women's organizations - they are there exactly to use any opportunity they can get. It is just game of numbers.
I am also baffled that people do not know this. We had many such cases around BLM riots - rioters were arrested, they sued the local PD for excessive violence and sympathetic government enthusiastically settles. It is now basically accepted way of financing political players on par with "learing center" frauds, US AID frauds, or frauds via other supposed NGOs that are solely financed from government to do party activism.
It is the way how parties are financed in current day-and-age everywhere including in Europe. This type of legal corruption is now baked into the society, it is how business is done and it is inevitable. Your local political activist protests with understanding, that his legal fees will be covered by some leftist activist group who in turn understand that they will get financed from some fake project or settled lawsuit with possible career moves from activism into local, state or federal bureaucracy or maybe some consultant job. This is how millions of people live and do business, it is the same system that was in place in Rome with politicians having their client network attached like leeches on tax systems and monopolies etc.
Refusing to play this game means that you will lose and then get laughed off the stage by cynical progressive wonks as a stupid moron. They can now gleefully claim for decades how the right does not have institutional brainpower and numbers and support network from low level activists to high level people in academia and other institutions. Of course they don't have them, they refused to play the game for decades, and let the opposition entrench deeply into all the systems.
he problem for the pro-gun side is there isn't much of a pro-gun constituency. You've got the 40% hard-core anti-gunners. And then you've got the squishy reasonable-gun-control conservatives, who will never find a bit of gun control they find unreasonable. The Second Amendment people are loud but a distinct minority.
This was exactly the situation of let's say gay marriage where the support in 80s and 90s was only 10% with huge part of the population opposing. The activists were not against using state courts and ultimately in 2015 even SCOTUS decision to ram that thing through many times without gay marriage actually having a popular support. Then all it took was several decades of culture waring and suddenly it is now a new normal. Similar things happened also in Europe, often it was using literal slippery slope such as in Austria where they approved of registered partnership only for Austrian constitutional court to decree that existence of registered partnership was basically unconstitutional and discriminatory and that it should be turned into gay marriage with everything including adoptions etc. No popular vote or law passed specifically to turn this millennia old institution.
Recently I am actually a huge fan of this tactic, the left used it all the time: do not be afraid to be brazen. Ask for ability to privately own tanks and missile systems and then just meet in the middle with the left to allow machine guns and RPGs. I think that there is also additional value there even if you are not that much of a pro-gun person - just by focusing on this topic it takes energy out of other stuff so you can go after other things such as gay marriage or education or some such. Additionally wage open legal warfare by every means possible even on topics that are supposedly settled, and also wage culture war. Do not be afraid to infiltrate and turn around existing movement - e.g. homeschooling movement that started as countercultural hippie thing was basically taken over by religious right by 1990s. Things like that.
It seems like a pipedream now, but I think it can be quite successful. I think something similar happened with COVID - I think that the "antivaxx" supposed extremes really blunted some of the actually extreme things that happened around the world. I believe that the politicians genuinely feared them such as when street riots in Netherlands prevented more fascist vaccine passports, Canadian convoy definitely sped up cancelling lockdowns in some states and it actually even worked in China where they reverted their longstanding Zero COVID policies. These "extremists" and "crazies" are often the unsung heroes of rightist causes, such as recently with multidecade win in Roe vs Wade or pushback against trans agenda. The left realizes that they can accommodate them, and they actually even openly sung songs to them and they turn it to eleven. Crazies are now mainstream and they accommodate even outright terrorist such as Weathermen and find safe haven for them at universities and think-tanks.
I think this is correct observation, however I do not think it as totally wasteful. Even in early days of internet you could have people sending emails only for those to be printed and then put into folders - a common practice in 1980s and 1990s. Many of these had decades old processes and legal requirements behind, including signatures etc. It will take some time of decade+ before AI will be fully integrated in businesses and there will be a lot of work for this combination of AI and old processes/people.
This is just constructing a narrative to suit your assumptions. Yes, the Southern Italy was much more stable compared to the North It did not see as much of a direct conflict but it experienced more of a silent subjugation. But this does not explain anything. Northern Italy was fractured and constantly at war as battleground of Great Powers especially during Italian wars which was also the time of renaissance. So conflict supposedly helped?
Interestingly enough tight next to Italy we have Balkans which was also literal battleground between Ottomans and Habsburgs with armies moving around, endless rebellions and revolts and betrayals - and it did not make them center of science and prosperity. Plus there is also one other place which was also safe from any direct conflict except devastating civil wars and literal Game of Thrones power struggles, centralized and ruled by foreign rulers. It was endlessly exploited to finance their continental war adventures against Holy Roman Empire and France in futile and disastrous Hundred Years War and beyond. This place is called England. And they seemed to end up okay moving to modernity.
georgioz
18d ago
It will get worse. As of now preteen girls gulp on content of youtube beauty influencers, and they are all-in when it comes to beauty products and the rest of it. Including the usual extremist pipeline from here is a night procedure for soft skin to > use homemade creams for early teenage girls to prevent aging. In fact the trend is so strong that it seeped over to the male side of social media with looksmaxing influencers like Clavicular who practice "jaw smashing" - hitting oneself with hammer to create the chiseled Chad square jaw and other nonsense.
The problem is that nations are not games of civilization with some benevolent player moving things around. Totalitarian states solve for one thing and one thing only: accumulation and protection of power. The power is then exercised mainly in these self-centered ways and sometimes on insane projects like Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament or Castro’s "Ubre Blanca" icecream parlor and related diary projects or of course Deng's One Child policy in China.
To that extent your post is just a general screed against failed states. Well, so far every state is a failed state. Except N-Korea, of course. So what is the point? Are we pretending that the course of human history hasn't been dictated by authoritarian leaders?
Yes, I actually would posit such an argument. In a sense even modern democracies are much, much more authoritarian than even medieval states. The level of taxation and control over information and communities is absolutely insane, there never was such a domination before even in dreams of absolutist monarch such as Louis the XIV, where his orders took weeks or months to get somewhere, often only in distorted manner that was implemented only partially.
By the way something similar happens also in socialist and fascist countries, but the distortion is more deliberate corruption
georgioz
26d ago
Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.
Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.
By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.
georgioz
27d ago
This is nothing controversial, you can find many articles regarding this. For instance here is the article about how government cuts disproportionally affect women and especially black women
Actually there was the New Stateman article recently that found such a radical shift. It is paywalled but the shift even between Millennial and Gen Z women was staggering when it came to basic attitude of women toward men. I think 21% of women said they have strongly negative attitude toward men compared to 7% of men saying the same. It is hard to imagine that there will be meaningful pairbonding between these groups.
I do think that individually you can get away from it - what else is there. But there is a strong trend that is hard to overcome. Women attitudes and political leanings are shifting en masse, it will have macro impact on society, there is no ifs or buts about that. Maybe it will be passport bros or some other shift, but there will be one.
You had these ideas all the time, in fact this shift to nationalism is how the original socialism evolved right after Lenin's death. This is how it worked everywhere since the beginning - be it Stalinism or Maoism, or different strains of socialism with nationalistic characteristics including Chavismo, Pol Potism etc. Some of them were also more pragmatic and more friendly toward capital such as Titoism or Dengism or Đổi Mới in Vietnam. You also have extremes such as in North Korea with outright ultranationalist Juche ideology and cult of personality which looks closer to absolute monarchy. This is the horseshoe theory in practice - socialist states evolve into fascist states by market reforms and fascist states sometimes evolve toward more outright socialism such as with Peronism or Ba'athism. They all gravitate toward this petty corrupt tyranny.
All of them to the single one are unable to solve shit, not to even talk about issues you are pointing out. This is the feature, not a bug of all the socialist systems. It is in their DNA that they will never achieve their purported goals.
Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.
I think that the issue with women and jobs is even more pronounced. For instance in USA women are overrepresented among government and government adjacent workforce such as education or healthcare. We are talking 70% of government workforce being women, with government employing close to 50% of all working women. Another chunk of women work for various NGOs, often also financed by government - NGOs have 75% female employees - although there is of course significant overlap between healthcare and education there. But there is also a lot of activism and lobbying for women to keep it all going.
As for the rest, there is also huge transfer from men to women through welfare and pension systems and other benefits. In the British study, men contribute twice as much as women toward social welfare with women drawing a lot more being net beneficiaries. It is now a meme of women being married to the state, but I do think that it is hugely important. It is not only that women who are employed by the government & adjacent sectors, they are also major beneficiaries of taxes & welfae, but they also benefit from private arrangements as child support, alimony and other wealth transfers related to divorce.
In a sense a lot of the problems are at the same time insanely complex but also very easy to solve. Just limit the welfare state, gut the government, stop government from meddling in marriages and divorces in terms of wealth transfers. You will find that as soon as men and women touch the grass without government forced adult kindergartens indulging fantasies, you can improve the situation quite a lot. Absent government, people turn toward family as basic unit for social welfare. Of course good luck with that in current populist democracies that know only how to increase welfare and public spending. In France, the government distributes 57% of all production and it is still not enough. Marxists have it correct, destroying family and state redistribution goes hand-in-hand.
I think this whole thing is on the precipice of collapse. I see a lot more people outright refusing to participate - the tax system got so bad that even high-earners find it hard to rationalize certain purchases. When it starts to make more sense for a professional to do basic work such as cooking as opposed to go for a lunch in restaurant, you have a problem. But this is inevitability with insane taxes especially facing private sector people. It reminds me how toward the end of Western Roman Empire people just turned into private villas and surrounding villages creating protofeudal autarkic economies, as the taxes for trade got insanely bad to the extent that economic exchange made no sense with so many parasites sucking the lifeblood of the few productive people left.
georgioz
1mo ago
I think that in a sense pro-war side achieved some stuff already:
- Delay of nuclear program by destroying more infrastructure and killing scientists.
- Calling Iran's bluff on Hormuz, restoring credibility to threats of force on personal and strategic level
- Aligning at least some Gulf states toward USA. At least Saudis and UAE are calling for more "conclusive action" vis-a-vis Iran.
- Chaos for Iran proxies such as Hezbollah and Houthis. This is double edged sword of course, it is hard to see.
- Chaos in Iran by fragmenting leadership between Iranian Guards, civilian governments and the rest of it. Again, double edged sword.
In a sense Iran also shot itself into a foot by claiming to shadow mine the strait as well as by damaging refineries, so it is impossible to return to pre-war oil supply. This makes it hard to negotiate but it also relieves all sides from blame. I think it also means a very good position for Democrats as they may lay into Trump without actually doing anything notably wrong. There is not much more Trump can do at this point, a lot of options are out of his hand.
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time. Sure, it would help to know "if I hesitate, the robber will shoot a 9mm JHP through my left eye" for certain instead of being unsure if the gun is even loaded, if the robber has the willingness to kill and so on. But even a rough estimate of the damages (he will probably shoot someone, but is unlikely to reach a double digit body count) is usually enough to narrow down courses of action.
Sure, the problem is that actions have costs. In case of climate change the costs are astronomical in terms of money but also opportunity cost and culture. To use your example, somebody will ask cashiers to buy bulletproof vest and helmets and wear it to work every day. Is it a reasonable ask for cashiers or not?
By contrast, "Climate change in the next 100 years will significantly contribute to the early deaths of at least 100M people" seems likely. "If LLMs can be scaled up to ASI, they will be unaligned" seems also very plausible.
Excellent. According to EA, the global cost of life is between $3,000 - $7,000. Lets round it up to $10,000. So The climate change is a problem on a scale of let's say $1 Trillion over 100 years, if we use insurance, we are getting somewhere around $10 billion a year problem. Even if we scaled it up to level of let's say workplace safety level of $100,000 invested to prevent one fatal accident, we are talking $100 billion a year problem. According to global climate finance the current investment is around $2 trillion a year and it is not enough, we have to invest $10 trillion a year. And it is assuming that it will actually help and completely prevent or at least cover such a loss.
When has a country of this size been bombed to submission in purely an air war?
Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"? If such a thing hypothetically existed then what, will you update your example request to a country of this size but which is also mountainous, speaks Farsi and it happened during last ten years? Okay, it never happened, you are correct and you win this battle of analogies.
Plus again: just hold your horses, I was literally reacting to a claim that
- More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient.
I put it as a quote in my original post. I did not claim that air war in "country the size of Iran" is always efficient or this specific air campaign is efficient. I posit that the claim about inefficient air war is a myth. That is all.
Sure, of course current war in Iran is different from any other war. That is the nature of analogy and examples. I specifically responded to claim, that air wars are inefficient. And I just pointed out that it is a myth, air wars can be and historically were very efficient.
In the end Trump will be more screwed as selling that he won a war in the middle east by killing large numbers of people will never impress the voters as much as pancaking the economy.
I don't know why not, it already happened for instance with the Gulf War. USA caused massive number of casualties - tens of thousands of killed and over hundred thousand injured Iraqis. And still it caused massive spike of patriotism and pride about how USA is technologically and militarily light years ahead of everybody. In fact it was the point of large number of articles about how Gulf War was the first real time televised war, where people saw fireworks from tomahawks and gun cameras from bombers. It did not cause any major pushback, it was received with cynical glee, something like current videos of Ukrainian drones destroying Russian tanks.
And it was even without the actual objective of Gulf War being something super important or moral - most people did not know where Kuwait was or why it was necessary to go to war for it. They just vaguely knew that USA flexed her muscles in oil region and won easily or something like that.
More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient.
This is often repeated, but not necessarily true. Even in the context of Middle-East, you had six day war of 1967 that was predominantly about air attack and that resulted in Israel victory. First Gulf War can also be recognized as such - it was a military operation conceived and brought to action within 6 month of Iraq occupying Kuwait, so between August 1990 - January 1991. The air campaign was so decisive that it took only 100 hours for land forces to bring Iraq and its fourth largest army in the world at the time to their knees. First Gulf War was considered as unmitigated success, even most optimists did not conceive of so few casualties and such a smooth ride. General Schwarzkopf projected 5,000 casualties, Pentagon expected up to 30k. The actual number was 292 dead (145 of those were nonhostile deaths mostly vehicle accidents, plane crashes and even 30 heart attacks) and 776 wounded (467 wounded in action).
There were also other precedents, such as bombing of Serbia which resulted in peace from Milosevic or operations in Libya, which resulted in its narrow goal of removing Gaddafi regime from power. There is also Operation Inherent Resolve that resulted in defeat of ISIS without boots on the ground just by using local forces and strategically helping them with air strikes, economic blockades, intelligence operations etc.
I think it is more than that. If you are a successful doctor, everybody wants to be your friend just in case they need you to get preferential treatment, and maybe even save their lives. You will be invited to parties and so forth. If you are a a techbro, then your status is related to your ability to fix their slow computer and maybe for an off-chance that they need you to vouche for their niece to get a job in your company - but knowing somebody from HR or at least somebody who can help with nepotism friendly bullshit job such as marketing manager would be better. Nobody will need you in case they need to setup their Vertical Pod Autoscalers or some such.
Sure, but I commented on the context that the OP introduced of economic relationships. Not about people grouping together to form a bowling league or moderating Culture Wars online forum etc. That is also an intrinsic social need, but of a different kind.
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