A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Good day, fellow M'arvel enjoyer! I like both DC and Marvel but my girlfriend (FtM) has a very high IQ so is only able to enjoy Marvel. She even got me the Tony Stark Funko to add to my collection!
It's funny how helping your XYZ-neighbour because he's XYZ like yourself is totally okay, unless XYZ=white. Because when XYZ=white you are a nazi/fascist/white-supremacist/extreme-rightwing/hatespeecher/etc; all based off that single comment.
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
I only recently realised why the org is called AutoMATTic
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
It took me quite a while to "get" the "Arby's" restaurant name.
Did you know that Adidas was founded by Adolf "Adi" Dassler?
And Puma by his brother Rudi, in the same town. Great Feud story.
Rudidas would definitely be a worse name. Though I'd be surprised if an Amazon Marketplace knockoff brand is not already using it.
Adolfler would've been even worse.
It was briefly "Ruda" before it morphed into "Puma".
I did not know that. Very good decision!
all day i diss another sibling
Corporate coup survivors: Matt Mullenweg, Sam Altman, Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark. They should form a club.
an esoteric club perhaps, given half of these folks are imaginary?
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>My wife hates that but her boyfriend likes it
?
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Good day, fellow M'arvel enjoyer! I like both DC and Marvel but my girlfriend (FtM) has a very high IQ so is only able to enjoy Marvel. She even got me the Tony Stark Funko to add to my collection!
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Sam Altman is filling out some government form, what’s he picking on the race/ethnicity question:
* American Indian or Alaska Native
* Asian
* Black or African American
* Hispanic or Latino
* Middle Eastern or North African
* Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
* White
Same thing an Aboriginal Australian selects, I guess
Oh, white
I dont care for Sam Altman's color. But, c'mon, how's he not white?
I learned Duck-typing from Ruby: if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck -- it's a duck.
Applying this to Sam: he's white.
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Word.
It's funny how helping your XYZ-neighbour because he's XYZ like yourself is totally okay, unless XYZ=white. Because when XYZ=white you are a nazi/fascist/white-supremacist/extreme-rightwing/hatespeecher/etc; all based off that single comment.
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People can be multiple things.
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What a brave rebel you are
I would enjoy seeing Matt and Sam beating criminals to a pulp with their bare hands.
Dupe/existing discussion from a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660104
I only see the headlines of this drama. All it tells me is to stay far away from any dependency on this company.
So glad I just converted my site to Hugo.. happy to get away from this whole bunch of people.
https://archive.ph/Lr9Pq
What a feckless board.
This sounds like a mistake and a part of Automatic. This is not a good look for the brand.
I really hate how heavily these comments get moderated. In my opinion if a site moderates user comments this heavily then the site should lose section 230 protections and be considered a publisher and be held responsible for any comments that you choose not to moderate. If the site functions as an editor but it tries to present that editorialized section as user opinions then the entire site may as well be astroturffed, your better off going to wikipedia to see what "regular people" think
That’s a weird thing to say about “coup attempts.”
Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
In the world of AI I imagine that Automattic’s core business model is in turmoil.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Ianal but I don't think the laws care about governing structure of corps. You can start a new corp and run it democratically all you want. There are co-ops and other interesting structures out there
Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
It's not one person, one vote, so it's not democracy. It's very explicitly plutocracy (rule by money) as the operating principle of voting power is one share, one vote.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
It's one share, one vote. And you have a choice: You can ask the company to pay you (ie. apply for a job there), or you can pay for a share in the company. Either way, the decisions are made by those who pay. And that can include you — anyone and everyone has the right to start a company and to employ others, anyone and everyone has the right to ask for shares in the company as part of negotiating compensation.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
> It's one share, one vote.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
Indeed, shares can have different voting weights. And that matters, if you care mostly about the corner cases.
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms.
Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy? I think we've seen over an over again which one works and which one doesn't.
> Doesn't this just boil down to planned vs free market economy?
Not at all. Market vs planned economy is about how the economy is set up. Are there businesses that offer products that you can choose between? That's a market economy. You can have that with democratic governance of corporations. The workers can own the means of production and you can have a market economy.
You don't need ownership by idiot dictators with money to have a market.
Democracy in business would be worker co-ops or employee ownership schemes. It would still be fully market-based, not planned.
Is that a settled question? China isn't exactly struggling right now.
China has succeeded so much by moving away from a planned economy when they were fully planned they were one of the poorest nations in the world. Most successful nations are mixed economies and yes, this is a settled question.
Past performance is no indication of future success. It doesn't matter what's been successful in the past, these things can change. Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was), then that changed and so did the narrative.
None of this is settled, because it's a living system that changes over time. What may have been perfectly true in 1850 might not be remotely accurate in 2050.
> Communism was considered more successful than capitalism for a large chunk of the 20th century (because it was) According to whom?
They were very poor before central planning, and the central planning is what got them from being very poor to relatively poor and economically powerful.
If you look on Alibaba or AliExpress and see different companies competing and undercutting each others prices, I don't really see it as a planned economy.
The CCP publishes their primary central planning mechanism for all to see. They just adopted the new 15th Five Year Plan in March [1].
There’s a whole bureaucracy just to coordinate the implementation at the sector, provincial, and corporate level driven by the State Council, NDRC, and NPC. Governments at all levels are involved with coming up with their own implementation plans to execute on the Five Year Plan.
You can trace decades of Chinese industrial development to those plans but the Chinese system is very different from the Soviet central planning mechanism, which is why I think you’re misinterpreting Alibaba’s price competition. The CCP explicitly allows non-state owned enterprises like Alibaba and the manufacturers on it to compete; that’s their whole point within the system, and they operate within the regulatory environment setup to promote the five year plan instead of quotas like the Soviet system. The resolution of the planning is different, but it’s very much there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Five-Year_Plan
I think a better term might be a “steered economy”. You see fierce competition in some very specific and preordained market areas. Lithium batteries, solar panels, electric cars, industrial and autonomous robots, AI.
Now go look at the 5 year plan from Beijing. Green technology, robotics, mature node chips, and AI are the focuses.
In other words, it isn’t a mistake that China dominates in the industries that it does.
> China isn't exactly struggling right now.
Have you asked people in China about this?
Who do you think pays for the political election campaign theater of all theses "democratic candidates" though?
I often have to think of Bane putting his hand on the shoulder of that Ben Mendelsohn character in The Dark Knight Rises while asking if he feels in charge. Reminds me of living in a western democracy.
It's allowed to do a more democratic business in most countries, it's called a:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
There have been some govts that mandated this type of organization for part of their economy; we usually refer to that as communism.
(no value judgement here, there are day's when I'm quite a commie myself)
> Funny that we picked democracy for our government but we just left corporations as little feudal kingdoms. It seems like quite the oversight.
Congratulations you have reinvented communism from first principles! And you are completely correct in your analysis.
Regulation of corporations and the internal/external harms they do isn't communism.
That's a hilarious leap.
Actually you reply to a comment that makes a lot of sense.
Look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
And in Russian I believe such a company is called a "Soviet". They idea that the main part of the economy is run by this kind of organizations is one of the best parts of the USSR's attempt at communism.
Except A) he said none of that B) it's not actually relevant to what he did say.
There is a vast range of ways you can regulate a corporation and only some of them qualify as communism.
Germany has worker councils, it's still not communist.
Several European countries have much stricter regulations on how companies behave that moves them from the absolute power fiefdom internal model, guess what, still not communism.
Maybe the next trial run of real communism won’t end with 145 million people dead.