I don’t know, but somebody is going to have to keister some glitter for it.

Wow, I’ve never had this problem. The tricky thing is Australia vs. NZ.

I mean, every dialect is just a bastardised version of an older dialect, including your own.

I mean, it is really big and looks like it’s in the way, although I wonder if it’s also parked wrong.

Maybe the owner needs a large pickup, but relatively few owners of large pickups do. For the rest it’s conspicuous consumption, which is always gross, and in cars seems to correlate with antisocial behavior.

It’s not like it’s a unique offering at this point either. Everyone and their dog has complicated syrupy coffee/tea drinks on their menu.

I don’t know, maybe the busy-but-nicer-than-McDonalds ambiance is worth it to some people. If it’s anything like Tim Hortons, lots of people just buy out of pure habit as well. Either way, that’s their business, not the person selling it.

Flew over the may day rally in San Francisco.

Don’t take the bait.

TBF the only people that have to answer for it are the ones still buying them.

Like, he may literally have been thinking “because you dumb bitches will pay that”, but obviously couldn’t say it.

That Russian сок birch sap drink. It’s super hard to find in Canada but nothing hits me quite the same way.

Do people still do that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it IRL.

Because I maintain that if the US govt disappeared, all the entities you currently consider “US-based corporations” would not disappear.

Publicly traded corporations wouldn’t really make sense or exist anymore, but certain private ones in the right industries might manage to go oligarch, and become/set up a new government. Most would be hopelessly unprepared and would be overrun, though. In my own answer there’s an anecdote about this.

People know what the Sinaloa cartel is, and might not know about the nuances of corporate structures, or even what a share is, but do have a vague idea corporations are complicated, and very dependent on law enforcement and litigation to function. I won’t argue semantics.

This is an arbitrary list of things and I don’t agree that all corporations have all of these

I’m curious why you’re willing to call them businesses but not corporations.

It’s definitional, a corporation is a specific legal structure. A single trader is not a corporation, but is a business. Ditto for Rome, which I’ve never heard called a corporation even though it was all about money.

They compete with rival cartels in all the same ways corporations would if they could (or already do when they can get away with it).

Civil war. In case you aren’t following the relevant news, the Sinaloa cartel is fighting with itself. A corporation can never do that - government laws set out very clearly who controls what.

And, that makes a huge impact on what kind of people run a corporation, and how they go about managing their business. Managing the loyalty of underlings is of little concern, while it’s about the only concern for a warlord. If a VP tried to run their own business with company assets, they’d just be jailed for breach of trust.

Drug cartels aren’t really corporations. There’s no formal structure, shares or board meetings, and sometimes they do just descend into civil war (like in Mexico right now). They’re businesses, but in some ways Rome was as well. The thing that makes them a funny historical edge case is that their primary business is transport rather than theft, and that’s down to the massive US/Canadian demand, the wealth behind it, and the inability of any recognised state to join the drug trade in their place and get away with it.

I mean, not as anything like a corporation. If they have to protect themselves with force, they’re a state or warlord, and will end up solving the same problems the same way.

Meaning no shareholders and no contracts, but on the other hand violent internal coups and endemic corruption (in the narrow sense of taking organisation money for yourself).

Edit: Funny story about this - a lot of big corporate guys don’t seem to get the distinction. They go and buy a bunker in New Zealand and think that will do them, but if you talk to the guards in charge of the bunker, they’ll say their plan when the apocalypse happens is to just kill their boss and move in themselves. Because there’s no state to stop them, and they’re better at violence than Mark Zuckerberg or whatever.

Somehow, people seem to find it plenty clear.

I was agreeing with you, FWIW. They’re not puppets run by some shadowy group, and what they actually do is very public (if you bother to look). My country televises parliament, and publishes all legislation. The US does something similar. It’s also easy to get facetime with representatives, if you’re willing to knock on doors and attend boring meetings.

Over the long run, conditions have improved, in spite of representative democracy being a cluster-fuck in the short term.

Then that’s not a problem with the law, but with enforcement.

If there was whatever glorious socialist revolution tomorrow, that law would stay.

Yup. I actually know and work with politicians. It’s a sales job alright; the legislation is pretty secondary regardless of who it benefits. You can see laws that fuck everyone rich or poor being passed sometimes, if they sound good in a speech.

This is my backup instance while SDF is down, if that’s what you’re talking about. It has good blocked/blocked by.

A fish in water doesn’t know it’s in water, right?

Alright.

To answer your question before you go, no, I don’t think you’re trying to convince anyone of anything. Which is the problem; what are you doing, and how can anyone engage with it? I read what you wrote, it’s just not relevant to what’s going on in this thread.

Like what, was I supposed to fly off the handle and say “politics doesn’t effect anything”, or agree and say “yes we’re both very woke, much better than most people”? That would definitely be a waste of time.