A corporation is a bunch of people cooperating to achieve a common goal.
There is a very important factor that heavily influences (perhaps even controls?) how people act to achieve that goal, and sometimes even twists or adds goals.
Is that corporation publicly quoted in the stock market or is it private?
Look at how steam behaves, it's private and more ideological VS how many other publicly quoted companies, whose CEO often sacrifices his own corporation's long term survival for the benefit of short-term profiteering and some hedge fund manager's bonus.
Both need profit to survive, but the publicly quoted company is much more extreme.
When people say corporations only look to profit, what they really mean is that publicly quoted corporations will do everything possible to maximise short term profit at any cost. Is there a CEO caring for long term? Either he will be convinced to change or kicked out. It's almost impossible for someone to resist these influences in publicly quoted companies. It's just how Wall Street works and if that doesn't change neither will corporations.
The people running the world of finance and their culture are what causes enshittification and pushing a zero-sum game to extremes.
Agree with everything, but would add a small detail : publicly quoted corporations might as well sell dreams and if they are very good at doing that have no profit because of some future potential pay off (of course I am writing this from my fully self driving car that I own since 10 years ago, that might transform in a robot soon).
> corporations will do everything possible to maximise short term profit at any cost. Is there a CEO caring for long term? Either he will be convinced to change or kicked out.
While public companies are more likely to be short term focused, even this is not true. There are plenty (ie. thousands) of executives and public companies that are long term focused and tell investors to pound sand and sell the stock (or mount a shareholder challenge) if they don't like it.
Elon Musk is the most extreme example of this. He wants to go to Mars. He is turning Tesla into a robot company and discontinuing or curtailing the growth of some of his most profitable products.
Mark Zuckerberg is another one. He is losing $20 billion a year on VR, and even with recent cuts, will still be doing that. He's spending $50 billion on AI. None of that has anything to do with short term profit. Don't like it? Sell the stock.
Wall Street doesn't necessarily force companies into short term gains: they hold you to perform to what you say you will perform. This is often the trap that leads to poor management decisions, as they overpromise and underdeliver, leading to the enshittification spiral.
All of this depends on the governance structure and ownership structure, and how competitive the business is.
Many public companies for example have only common shares available while a family or an individual retains preferred shares with more voting power. This is how Zuck, or Larry Page or Larry Ellison etc can do whatever they do. Elon just has a reality distortion field so the board gives him a trillion dollar pay package.
Wasn’t trying to dodge, I misunderstood the premise.
If this was in person, then no I likely wouldn’t fail them. However, In all my in person interviews I’ve conducted, I’ve never seen that even from the best candidates, that’s why I also find it odd over video.
That short-term individual success is at the expense of the wider long-term success.
If 10 people live in a lake and I fish more than everyone I will be better off that others. But then everyone else will seek the same individual short-term success because my first step in being an asshole was not punished. We will all end up starving in this scenario. A central authority agreed by all to manage this situation fairly is the way out. Rules agreed to in common beforehand and enforced by a neutral party.
You're missing the key next step where after you get yours you start figuring out ways to deny others from getting theirs either through bullying, state-supported violence or legal means :)
Tragedy of the Commons is bullshit. Just one pessimistic, selfish asshole penning out a manifesto on how everyone is just as miserable and awful as he is. It assumes that individuals, left to their own devices, will inevitably over-consume shared resources out of selfishness. But this narrative ignores centuries of evidence to the contrary: communities around the world have sustainably managed commons through norms, trust, and mutual accountability.
And he wasn't just wrong for the hell of it. He used it to argue against immigration and for coercive population control, not to promote environmental stewardship. His model erases the role of governance, culture, and cooperation, reducing human behavior to a simplistic race to depletion.
In reality, the commons don’t fail because they’re shared. They fail when they’re mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them.
I would go so far to say that the only way this concept has ever come close to being "correct" is the culturally inert modern Western world which has replaced everyone's souls with aimless desires for products and cheap dopamine hits, far from anything approaching our natural state.
History bears out the truth of what you say. Native Americans managed the commons in communal ownership so well that some of their permaculture existed through to today, untended.
They have demonstrably not - they have generally failed until introducing capitalism-eseque cooperation. "They fail when they're mismanaged, privatized, or stripped of the social fabric that sustains them" - yes, these are obvious natural consequences of scale.
Not really. It didn't happen in syndicalized Spain. It didn't happen for millennia in ancient cities.
Scale being necessary seems to be unique to capitalism and state capitalism (Marxist industrialization requirements).
Maybe it was necessary before, I don't know but it's moot. We certainly have achieved post scarcity now and there should be no issues leveraging the tools our ancestors have given us to ensure it's distributed well.
Yeah but that would make all the people who are rich because they own things very sad, so instead we're just gonna starve shitloads of people to death next to piles of food daily and call it rational.
If you reach out to them you're risking validating that the data they already have is somewhat accurate, plus they might demand more information from you.
> If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bicycle.
That's irrelevant here, that was someone trying to convert one dish into another dish.
> your mind must perform so many contortions that it defeats the purpose
I disagree, what contortions? The only argument you've provided is that "LLMs don't have senses". Well yes, that's the whole point of an analogy. I still hold that the way LLMs interpret tokens is analogous to a "sense".
> while one can't control the company's behavior, a person can control their own behavior. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to criticize them when they choose to act without integrity.
That leads to a society where people are punished and corporations are not, simply because they are too big to be criticised.
Much more often than people, large and publicly quoted corporations end up becoming inherently evil.
The total self-serving lies made by individuals will always be a drop in the ocean when compared to the self-serving lies of a single S&P500.
They're both wrong, but the real issue here is to start by criticizing and correcting the corporations, not the people. Once it feels like a drop in a glass of water, we can start thinking of criticizing the people.
If your competitor is lazy and grows to accept more money for less quality that is immoral. The moral thing to do is to compete against that company so that you provide better products and services for lower cost. That is the moral thing. Communism is neither here nor there, it's a completely different thing. Happy now?
The Bible explicitly states that judgment is immoral, and is the sole duty of God. If someone is committing a sin, it is not your job to fix them of that sin - and actually by doing so, you yourself are sinning.
If your competitor is lazy, the moral choice is to do nothing, and let God handle it. You do not know what is or is not a sin, because you are not the arbiter of morality - God is. Casting judgement on your competitor is sinful.
Really, no matter how you cut it, I think it's obvious Jesus Christ was a communist. He would absolutely not be happy with capitalism. Are we helping other's out of the goodness of our heart? No. Are we giving to the community? No.
In an ideal world where everyone follows the golden rule, the only outcome could possibly be communism. And, there would never be any problems, ever. Because nobody would be greedy - there would be no grounds for capitalism to even form. A revolution could not occur.
Sounds like kids are rediscovering fun and socialization in the outdoors.
Isn't this an unintended byproduct of what Australians wanted and legislated for?
They really could have added some bike lanes though.