You would have to have an incredible grindset to become a decent engineer without actually enjoying any of it. You could become a shitty one just by passing tests, I guess. (And probably many people do)

Shit, I wrote that wrong. Trying to do too many things at once.

Wow, I’ve never had this problem. The tricky one is Australia vs. NZ.

I mean, every dialect is just a bastardised version of an older dialect, including your own.

The name might well have come from the community, since the whole app store model is as old as the modern smartphone, and downloading a different way is new, while possible, was always for power users.

If there had been a more normal software ecosystem from the get-go that would have been nice. Actual regulation to enforce device freedom would also be good.

That Russian сок birch sap drink. It’s super hard to find in Canada but nothing hits me quite the same way.

Do people still do that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it IRL, but then again I don’t live somewhere that’s known for it.

Because I maintain that if the US govt disappeared, all the entities you currently consider “US-based corporations” would not disappear.

Publicly traded corporations wouldn’t really make sense or exist anymore, but certain private ones in the right industries might manage to go oligarch, and become/set up a new government. Most would be hopelessly unprepared and would be overrun, though. In my own answer there’s an anecdote about this.

People know what the Sinaloa cartel is, and might not know about the nuances of corporate structures, or even what a share is, but do have a vague idea corporations are complicated, and very dependent on law enforcement and litigation to function. I won’t argue semantics.

This is an arbitrary list of things and I don’t agree that all corporations have all of these

I’m curious why you’re willing to call them businesses but not corporations.

It’s definitional, a corporation is a specific legal structure. A single trader is not a corporation, but is a business. Ditto for Rome, which I’ve never heard called a corporation even though it was all about money.

They compete with rival cartels in all the same ways corporations would if they could (or already do when they can get away with it).

Civil war. In case you aren’t following the relevant news, the Sinaloa cartel is fighting with itself. A corporation can never do that - government laws set out very clearly who controls what.

And, that makes a huge impact on what kind of people run a corporation, and how they go about managing their business. Managing the loyalty of underlings is of little concern, while it’s about the only concern for a warlord. If a VP tried to run their own business with company assets, they’d just be jailed for breach of trust.

Drug cartels aren’t really corporations. There’s no formal structure, shares or board meetings, and sometimes they do just descend into civil war (like in Mexico right now). They’re businesses, but in some ways Rome was as well. The thing that makes them a funny historical edge case is that their primary business is transport rather than theft, and that’s down to the massive US/Canadian demand, the wealth behind it, and the inability of any recognised state to join the drug trade in their place and get away with it.

I mean, not as anything like a corporation. If they have to protect themselves with force, they’re a state or warlord, and will end up solving the same problems the same way.

Meaning no shareholders and no contracts, but on the other hand violent internal coups and endemic corruption (in the narrow sense of taking organisation money for yourself).

Edit: Funny story about this - a lot of big corporate guys don’t seem to get the distinction. They go and buy a bunker in New Zealand and think that will do them, but if you talk to the guards in charge of the bunker, they’ll say their plan when the apocalypse happens is to just kill their boss and move in themselves. Because there’s no state to stop them, and they’re better at violence than Mark Zuckerberg or whatever.

And letting the US government spy on you helps with that?

In reality, people are built for the stone age and a little out of their depth with 21st century technology. Unless there’s some visual indicator of the spying their normal social instincts don’t kick in.

Well this feels like bait.

Somehow, people seem to find it plenty clear.

I was agreeing with you, FWIW. They’re not puppets run by some shadowy group, and what they actually do is very public (if you bother to look). My country televises parliament, and publishes all legislation. The US does something similar. It’s also easy to get facetime with representatives, if you’re willing to knock on doors and attend boring meetings.

Over the long run, conditions have improved, in spite of representative democracy being a cluster-fuck in the short term.

Then that’s not a problem with the law, but with enforcement.

If there was whatever glorious socialist revolution tomorrow, that law would stay.

Yup. I actually know and work with politicians. It’s a sales job alright; the legislation is pretty secondary regardless of who it benefits. You can see laws that fuck everyone rich or poor being passed sometimes, if they sound good in a speech.

Is that what the point of the meme was? You can read it as being about how much lower the stakes are, too.

This is my backup instance while SDF is down, if that’s what you’re talking about. It has good blocked/blocked by.

A fish in water doesn’t know it’s in water, right?