We've passed that sci-fi trope where corporations now wield more authority than governments.
I have a better relationship with corporations more than governments. A corporation has never harassed me at an airport when trying to leave. If I don't like MacDonalds I can... stop eating at MacDonalds. If I don't like the services the state provides I have to physically remove myself.
If you don't like Google and Apple you can't stop using both of them. If you don't like your local ISP you probably can't stop using it. The free market only gives consumers power over corporations when those consumers - through democracy - keep them from amassing too much power via regulatory bodies. Some people act like the government is the threat, but in a democracy the government is the only thing that truly gives you any power.
I was once served eviction papers by Louisville police over going a full winter without gas in my apartment. It wasn't that I neglected a bill, but that thanks to other obligations I knew I couldn't afford it, so I never opened an account. The landlords understood until the badges showed up, and then wouldn't return my deposit. So I was punished, half a week in jail followed by a couple of homeless months, for not being a customer. It absolutely happens.
> I was once served eviction papers by Louisville police over going a full winter without gas in my apartment. It wasn't that I neglected a bill, but that thanks to other obligations I knew I couldn't afford it, so I never opened an account. The landlords understood until the badges showed up, and then wouldn't return my deposit. So I was punished, half a week in jail followed by a couple of homeless months, for not being a customer. It absolutely happens.
You were not evicted for not being a customer. You were (probably, since I don't know any details of your case) evicted under §156.181 of Louisville's code[1] which requires the capability to heat a dwelling to exist in order for that dwelling to be occupiable. If you have gas heat, that means needing to maintain gas service. You can't waive this requirement by agreement with your landlord because slumlords would abuse that power imbalance to skirt their obligations to keep shit working.
Your link on debtors prison is referring to people not paying their government imposed fines, which seems the opposite of your point.
We forgot/neglected to make the last payment to AT&T when we switched to Comcast. I am not so worried about the police sending me to AT&T jail. My unaddressed car registration is a different story...
Not clear what happened in your case, the Gas Company notified the police to evict you? Is the Gas Company following a law in which they are required to tell the police?
> Government and Corps are no different in the end.
The only difference between them is that a democracy, at least in principle, exists to serve the people. Corporations expressly exist only to serve themselves. Democracies may face corruption, but there's not even a principle to be corrupted in the case of corporations; in a free market they have no accountability to society.
I suppose you could call co-ops "democratic corporations", in which case governments and corporations are exactly the same, but from that perspective today's corporations would be analogous to oligarchies; they exist to serve their small circle of shareholders. So forgive me if I choose to put my faith in a flawed democratic government instead of oligarchical corporations.
I'm not sure why you're getting down votes. The police power of the state is multitudes more powerful than corporations (who unless are outright monopolies, will do everything in their power to keep you as a happy customer since you have a choice).
No need to speculate, just look at the past behavior of the era of the East India Trading Company and you’ll see that corporations have fought in wars, applied force, basically ran the Atlantic slave trade, etc.
How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market? Last time I checked, I have many product and employment choices (with the exception of select industries ruled by cronyism). Last time I checked, Stalinist USSR murdered far more people than McDonalds or Ford.
> How would it be in a corporations interest to abuse either their employers or customers in a competitive market?
Ask AT&T and Verizon. Or Facebook. Or Monsanto. Or Nestle why they behave the way they do towards their customers.
You guys have WAY too much faith the benign passivity of publicly-traded companies. There is a LOT of money to be made in price-fixing, cartels and customer abuse.
And I'm not sure why you're bringing the USSR into this. This is almost a Godwin-like reprieve for those with no awareness of the 10-20 million people a year who die as a result of capitalism and capitalist policies, globally.
How about the US itself? It has murdered almost 20 million people since the end of World War 2 in its efforts to maintain its economic hegemony and take revenge on countries that leave the petrodollar.
The US, most aggressive and expansionist nation of the 20th and 21st centuries, is a capitalist country that can't even provide many of its citizens with clean drinking water.
"Capitalism is the worst system, apart from all the others" is a common refrain amongst those capitalism actually serves. They make no mention of the lives destroyed when a capitalist wants what you have.
I'll find sources for my numbers after work, but I recall:
- 8 million due to lack of clean water
- 7.5 million due to hunger
- 3 million from preventable disease
- the millions killed by 'friendly dictators' and their
regimes, like Pinochet.
- the unrecorded deaths as a result of national or global depressions, bankruptcies and debt (don't know where to get the numbers for this though)
Capitalism is a global system at this point, apart from the odd hold-out like North Korea etc. A lot of the deaths from lack of clean water and disease are attributable to things like the privatisation of water supply in Bolivia:
Then we have Chiquita, Coca-Cola etc. hiring miltias to crack down on labour movements in Central and South America resulting in countless murders. How did they get away with it?
Most of the deaths caused by capitalism are due something called 'structural violence':
It refers to a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.
So, clean water, healthcare and access to medicine. Something that capitalism has failed spectacularly at.
If you're going to say the crony capitalism we have now isn't capitalism then that's as much a No True Scotsman fallacy as people who say true communism has never been tried.
What we have now is capitalism by the very definition of the word. The cronyism inherent in it isn't some transforming influence, it's part of the core.
I was going to write up a massive post but this guys seems to sum it up pretty well if you fancy a read:
The first step would be admitting that capitalism is far from perfect and that we should start looking to change it.
Of course, a sustained decades-long propaganda campaign has been waged to portray capitalism as not only 'the natural way' but also as being 'simply the only option', as if it is axiomtically good and natural.
Some have even tried to spin it as capitalism being a core part of the human condition, and fighting against it resulting in things like the millions dead under communist economic mismanagement.
I personally think you'd have to be a moron to believe that capitalism is the same as simple trade which humans have been doing for millenia, especially considering capitalism is a man-made economic concept that originated in the 1700's and has an actual dictionary definition; but it seems we are surrounded by the gullible.
I don't have an alternative system ready for you. I'm not a political scientist or a revolutionary. That doesn't mean I can't see when something isn't working for everybody and needs improvement.
The biggest disservice we have done to ourselves is to believe free-market fundamentalists like Hayek, Friedman, Thatcher ansd Reagan when they told us that there is simply no alternative.
Friedman's monetarism has been widely discredited as bullshit by now. It's time to question the rest of the neoliberal ideology.
I don't know how you managed to turn a story about a gun massacre in New Zealand - a country with strict gun control laws - into a critique of Americas loose gun control laws.
It comes from China, was developed in the republican era. It's based on a shorthand modification of seal script - though Japan was very influential on the elite of China at that time so it's possible Katakana played some role.
I'm simply not interested in where laptops are going. I'm a healthy adult male, so a few hundred grams of weight is not an issue. I also find thin laptops very uncomfortable to use in certain positions where you balance it against your body.
I really should buy a 'clunky', 'heavy' laptop before they all disappear and all that's left are wafer thin machines with soldered-on everything.
If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.
And if my business was turning over $115k/Month I'm not sure I would let that keep me awake at night.
> If you own a house before marriage, perhaps a prenup would be prudent. Otherwise, it wasn't really your house, it was the family home.
I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Poland, all your assets from before marriage remain exclusively yours after you marry. They're not subject to split in the case of a divorce.
In Brazil there are three modes you can choose: the full one in which all assets are common, the partial one in which the assets from before marriage are separate but the assets from after marriage are common, and the separate one in which the assets are kept separate. A quick web search tells me that the default was full for marriages until 1977, and since then the default is partial (https://lucenatorres.jusbrasil.com.br/artigos/450042665/os-d...).
Not in places like California, where many HN commentators are. Everything by default becomes common ownership unless you explicitly take steps to establish otherwise, with only a few exceptions (e.g. certain retirement accounts). It’s a state level thing though, so there isn’t one story for the whole US.
>If you own a house before marriage, perhaps a prenup would be prudent.
If you're worried about losing a significant sum of your assets as a result of marriage, the only solution is to not get married. Prenuptials are generally considered to be worthless and any decent lawyer will find a way to get them thrown out. According to point 5 here [1], a case could easily be made that the plaintiff wasn't prepared for having to find a house after divorce, their quality of life is significantly worse than the standard they've come to adapt to after marriage, etc.
Or marry someone trustworthy, and make an informal agreement about how to split assets upon divorce. And if you don't trust them to keep that agreement, should you really be marrying them?
Because not everything is possible without marriage. Marriage gives a legal framework to so many facets of life that is can be tricky when one doesn't. For example, medical care. If you aren't married, a "spouse" may not be able to make decisions for your care.
And that's just for folks already living in the same country. I couldn't live with my spouse before marriage because we lived in different countries. While one allowed a fiance visa, it was only good for 6 months, during which the fiance not only couldn't work, but couldn't open a local bank account.
People can't control how they feel, so it's unreasonable to expect someone to stick to something they're no longer enjoying. But people can control whether they stick to their word in financial dealings.
People's feelings change, but how much integrity somebody has (whether they keep their word) is a part of their character, and people's character changes less frequently.
Especially when there’s even a financial incentive to getting out of a relationship you no longer enjoy. Everybody has a price, and seeing your marriage failing and a financial bonus to getting out of it changes opinions and convictions pretty fast.
This is especially true in countries that openly favour one of the spouses. For exaple ones where the legal framework doesn’t consider the contribution each spose had to the marriage, and one of them will invariably receive financial aid.
Integrity doesn't change, it's either there or it isn't. If you start a business with somebody, then after 10 years they suddenly backstab you and take your business, we don't say "they changed", we say they had no integrity to begin with. Integrity that somebody won't stick to is almost by definition not integrity, as "keeping one's word" implies keeping it unconditionally.
My first marriage ended in divorce, and we settled entirely amicably, out of court, because we both thought it would be pretty horrible to drag the other through the court system just because it turned out we wanted different things in life.
To assess integrity, it's not enough to look at how someone treats you, the person they love. It's also important to look at how they treat things they don't care about, how they treat things they hate, how they approach things they don't want to do but have to do anyway, how they treat people under their power like employees or serving staff. How they treat the promises they don't have to keep. Because if the love dies, that may be how they'll treat you.
Yes, and everyone thinks they're a great judge of character and integrity and they won't get backstabbed. Just the unenlightened and unwashed masses around them who don't know how to really look at a person and determine how trustworthy they are.
Then life goes on and someone who they thought was decent goes through a difficult time in life and backstabs them.
Even ignoring the very simple fact that people do change, there's the undeniable fact that the circumstances around a person change and it can and does push people to do things that they typically wouldn't do.
People who've lived comfortable lives and never had money troubles think they'll always be fine, but the minute their finances take a slight dip, they panic. It's a problem they never expected and it's probable they'll make some irrational decisions. Or maybe that person you've trusted all your life found out their brother has cancer and they're desperate to do anything to pay for the bills.
Shit happens. People try to adapt to it however they can. Thinking you'll avoid problems just by judging their integrity with a firm handshake and getting to know them is setting yourself up to be screwed over by people who know how to find an easy target, if not setting yourself up to be one of those virtuous people who screws over other people because your motives are good and theirs aren't.
Integrity, like any human characteristic, is a distribution; some people have more of it than others. If you just view everybody as the same, you're more likely to end up with somebody with average integrity, as opposed to if you actively searched for people displaying greater integrity. Similarly, assessing people is a skill that varies greatly among people, and if you just take the view that everybody is the same at it, you'll have no motivation to develop that skill yourself.
Will you vet them for a decade before committing for a few decades? if not, how would you know the agreement will be honored after longer time than you know them? Can you be sure of that with anyone?
As anecdata, I remember getting the same legal advice as well years ago: prenups get thrown out by the judge all the time, so you might as well not bother having one.
The biggest impediment for me would be finding clients. IME most programmers dont meet a lot plant potential clients when they are maintaining internal software. Even if they work for a consulting company, you can't use them due to restraint of trade clauses.
So how would you get the first customers? I'm just some guy off the street, no one is going bet money on me performing a function for their business.
Go to meetups, talk to colleagues who have quit your current company, try to attend or speak at conferences, start a blog and post at the bottom that you’re available for consulting...
There’s no rule that says you can’t pitch projects to people, if you think you could help make a company better call them up and pitch them on it.
1. What kind of meetups? I'm guessing developers are inclined to go to developer meetups, but it seems unlikely that potential clients would be there.
2. How have you managed to get hired by technology companies as a consultant? My clients are mostly folks that are non-technical and need someone to build them custom software. I'd love to work with tech-focused companies but am not sure how to find/pitch those opportunities.
Living in SF helps. I meet people at meetups, on Twitter, through Github, I reach out to people I think are interesting...
You could try finding a company you’d want to work for and take one of their engineers to work, or try to target companies that need your skill set. “Hi you really need a Go client library - I can build that for you” etc.
That's actually really helpful. It's tempting as a consultant to be reactive, but these are a few ways of being proactive that I had not considered. Thanks!
Any meetup that could have you next potential customer. For me it's meetup about Marketing, Sales, pure networking, Developer conf, .... Force youself to 1 to 2 meetup a week, this is not a one off thing but a long term investment if you want to be on the call when someone you've met hear about a project within their company.
> How have you managed to get hired by technology companies as a consultant?
For me, it's not really technology companies but companies that sees IT as a cost center, the usual scenario being they need a solution for a problem and don't have the know how to make it all work because IT isn't part of their core skills and the IT guys are only there to manage the network and debug their window machines
Dang, two meetups per week is quite a commitment, but I can see it being valuable over the long term.
My interest in technology companies is that, presumably, they have more interesting technical challenges and are willing to spend the time/money to build optimal solutions from a technical standpoint.
When recruiters inevitably try to recruit me (because software dev) I tell them I exclusively do contract work. My profile also mentions this. Some of them have clients that are open to this. They pitch the client to me. If I'm interested we discuss skills, rates and they pitch me to their client.
I've also reached out to a few recruiters that have seemed reasonable and gotten work that way.
LinkedIn noise/signal ratio isn't the best. Other sites have been better. But I've found work that way.
To deal with traffic you almost have to 'give up' on the notion of doing something quickly and resign to the reality of it, which is what happens if you have to deal with it daily.
That's the only way to treat driving IMO. If you let yourself get upset at 'delays', you will drive rashly to make up for it, and eventually you will cause an accident.
Every time you get in a car you should expect delays, and expect dangerous driving from others.
Try being a white New Zealander. You technically don't class as European but sort of get described as being of European descent and then on a technicality you are from an island in the Pacific Ocean so you could claim you are a Pacific Islander only that's not what a Pacific Islander is as they are all brown and from Fiji, Samoa, Tonga etc.
So I dunno... sometimes categorization is complicated.
We just refer to the lot of us as Kiwis after the small and the flightless native bird. What the hell does that have to do with anything I don't know.
I have a better relationship with corporations more than governments. A corporation has never harassed me at an airport when trying to leave. If I don't like MacDonalds I can... stop eating at MacDonalds. If I don't like the services the state provides I have to physically remove myself.