Was recently ejected from a job along with a whole lot of other ship subsystems. Something about “downsizing operations in engineering”? Starfleet meatbags can never make up their minds.
Anyway, “has seen some shit” could easily sum up huge swaths of my CV.
I… I did not have “Idiot politicians backed by bigoted LLMs” on my 2025 bingo card. This way too plausible to be ignored. So… thanks?
What’s embarrassing here is that I’ve been saying “co-bots not robots” for a while now. But no, not like that.
Now I’m wondering if there such a thing as a decentralized private company?
I’ve been thinking about this all week. I have no idea if that exists or not. A few things sprang to mind though:
It might be possible to have lightweight companies that all adopt the same incorporation boilerplate, not unlike a computer operating system. That, in turn, would be developed by a distinct entity and would publish updates to improve said OS over time. So, open-source but for legal docs that matter. This would make companies unified in principle, but ultimately, distinct.
It’s possible for companies to operate “at arm’s length” but still share useful information or coordinate towards similar goals. One must be well-versed in anti-trust law to do this though.
A franchise is the only existing model I can think of that comes even close. But that’s still centralized. I suppose a non-profit parent company and for/non-profit franchise operations might come closer.
Even he can’t believe it happened.
Do a campaign about prescription opiates or meth or something useful.
Poking at the opioid crisis would be worthwhile subversion of things.
This is exactly what had me scared straight for the longest time. It’s not the drug, it’s the system that punishes use of the drug that’s the real threat.
The fact that ex-convicts (people that have paid their debt to society) aren’t a protected class in the hiring process is beyond me. At least insofar as non-violent offenses go, there’s no cause to throw someone away like this. This goes especially considering the current state of political affairs around here.
At a minimum, multiple states are/were all they way up to the Governor’s seat. Yes.
Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.
See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”
I agree. The environment in which this must function is corrosive to the very idea, hence why I’m asking it openly here. It’s a pretty dense minefield.
I’m no lawyer, but I’ve mused a lot about some kind of legal “dead man switch” that somehow renders the company value-less if it deviated from the intended path. Something built into the company’s charter and founding documents, not unlike some kind of constitution.
Real question here: is it possible to walk all this back from the edge with more ethical companies? I’m thinking co-ops, Mondragon corps, union shops, etc. Basically build businesses that have motivations other than deepening the pockets of VC’s and the like, yet have some kind of growth trajectory (or federate with other corps) to gradually subsume the market.
I get that massive funding makes certain things possible, like disrupting the market, or aggressively buying your competitors. And yes, the company charter would have to be bulletproof against hostile takeover, buyouts, and enshitification, in order to go the distance. But is that really all it takes, or am I missing something huge here?
That also sounds like the kind of prank that Cards Against Humanity would pull if they had access to as much cash. I love this so much.
It has been pretty depressing to me that the tech literate have been so easily lulled into accepting such things in the name of “cool toys” and “security” virtually everywhere in modern life besides the PC/laptop/server spaces.
From my exposure to supporting said folks with PC related problems, its easy to see the reality here. Phones provide a streamlined experience with zero frills. They don’t want super flexible computing devices, they want appliances. More to the point, the level of care and maintenance needed to have a top-shelf PC experience is time and effort most people would rather not expend. Doing this right was inconvenient to begin with, and left the field wide open for anything that would be easier.
Basically, I’m the guy from the meme that keeps a loaded gun next to his printer. I also keep my media backed up in a fire-safe, offsite.