This doesn't seem in agreement with the parent comment, and is a much better analogy than a mere 'government as something that will eventually die'. Sure, gove

This doesn't seem in agreement with the parent comment, and is a much better analogy than a mere 'government as something that will eventually die'. Sure, governments are organizations that will eventually 'die' in some form, but how is that a useful observation? The British government has a lot of 'legacy code' going back to the deep middle ages, and yet (in its current 'state of the codebase', which can improve or worsen over time) it is much further away from 'death' than many newcomers in the third world who had no codebase to speak of 60 years ago. Theirs are badly maintained forks and occasionally the whole thing blows up and needs to be monkey-patched to keep creaking on in some fashion. Age is thus no impediment at all to having a well-functioning, efficient government, and 'startups' are often in the most disadvantageous position of all. So even the software analogy fails us at some point, and cannot be taken any further.