Think in terms of a dynamic system. Or in terms of "selfish gene", as I've observed it to be easier to talk about.
Any single person or group in a corporation is expendable. You can swap out the sales department or a CEO, and the corporation will continue on its course without a pause or major change of direction. No single person or group of people is in total control of the direction - what directs the corporation is the sum total of ideas, vibes, internal influences, bylaws, operating practices, assets, and external environment of competitors and markets and regulatory landscape. The people that make up a corporation may be diverse and have conflicting goals, but if there's one thing they're all aligned on, is that they all want to keep their jobs and increase their pay or influence. I.e. they want the corporation to go on, to survive at least to their next paycheck.
The end result is, a corporation can be seen as an independent entity - kinda like an animal (or a super-colony for more accurate comparison) with a survival drive independent of the people that form it.
If there is a single owner, could shut down the place, for example.
As I said, in my experience, the humans - interchangible or not, as customers, competitors, owners etc - determine what happens, not the corporation itself.
Can look at a corporate as "living thing" itself, but I think that underestimates the human side.
Then again, there are 100 billion highly interconnected neurons without a CEO, a CFO, a CTO, a COO, etc. Thinking that from 50, 500 or even 5000 barely connected people with exterior motivation some higher intelligence can emerge is naive. Do not anthropomorphize.
5000 barely connected people isn't a corporation, it's a mob. A corporation has more to it.
In fact people aren't much more important that the software that runs on them. Because that's what all the bureaucracy is - all those rules and bylaws and contractual obligations and checklists and playbooks and regulation - software running on a runtime made of meat, one form letter or internal memo at a time.
Most of the time, losing people is to corporation what clipping a toe nail is to an adult, or a bit flip to a modern computer - a non-event you barely notice and carry on.
> higher intelligence can emerge
Nobody said "higher intelligence". I mentioned animals, ant supercolonies, but the same patterns of behavior is visible in even most basic multi-cellular and single-cellular organisms.
> Do not anthropomorphize.
Nobody says you need to.
(Except with LLMs, where refusing to do so means you'll just remain confused about what can or cannot, should or should not, be done with them.)
I meant that in the sense that a typical SaaS company has no reason to be formally thinking about risk adjusted returns and therefore has no need of a CRO. If anyone cares product can do a guesstimate or something. Most companies shouldn't have a CRO.
If you’re a B2B SaaS with no CRO, good luck with vendor assessments. B2C you can skip it before reaching a critical mass where regulatory pressures will mandate it.
If it were to get closer to war (i.e., Spannungsfall, let alone the Verteidigungsfall) a set of laws would unlock that allow control of various areas of life and the economy anyway.
Germany participated in the NATO military campaign/occupation of Afghanistan, including ground forces, naval activities and special operations units. Its seems a total of 150,000 German soldiers (and police officers?) were deployed overall (not at the same time of course); of them, 62 were killed and 249 wounded:
Struggling to see the relevance, but, thank you for teaching me this:
The U.S. Army is the permanent, professional standing land force (Regular Army, Reserves, National Guard),
while the Army of the United States (AUS) was a temporary, authorized component used primarily during major wars to rapidly expand forces through draftees and volunteers.
There’s multiple corporations. When you have state level central planning there’s no adversarial check or feedback mechanism. Nothing challenges it to see if it’s actually doing a good job.
Of course this is also a strong argument for antitrust. In some markets today there is basically one corporation or a few that seem more interlocked than competing. That starts to be indistinguishable from Soviet bureaus.
Nuclear reactors make awful targets in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea if conflict is a risk and there are alternatives.
Exactly right. Who wants to live any where near a nuclear reactor in a conflict between countries or general war. Despite a country not having nuclear weapons, targeting the nuclear reactors of other countries, is almost as good.
It's very clear now that infrastructure of all kinds are increasingly fair game. Nuclear reactors, data centers, water processing plants, hospitals... Both sad and ridiculous, but that's the level of insanity reached.
That's a big if, though. Solar and batteries require globalisation, based on fossil fuels.
I feel like nuclear reactors are a better choice.
> in a conflict, not sure having many around is generally a good idea
On the other hand, blowing nuclear reactors could be considered a big escalation. We see with Iran and Ukraine that it's not exactly the first thing one wants to target.
My point was that photovoltaic is "an alternative" to nuclear reactors, but an alternative that relies on globalisation. Nuclear reactors... much less.
For many nations that is really not the primary reason to choose infrastructure. And even if that is your goal. Then building a 500MW reactor you can drop in the ground is likely a pretty decent solution.
I think that is too little credit to previous humans: people objecting to slavery were around four hundred and more years ago. Similarly, concerns about environmental destruction are also old.
In my experience, it is always people.
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