3 ms·

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

by alt227 2y ago

lesuorac 2y ago
Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody. Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  What are you talking about?
brookst 2y ago
While the lack of accountability for corporations is crazy, I’m a firm believer in the Cube observation: there is no master plan.
- namaria 2y ago
  There is one master plan tho: might is right. It gets pushed back, but it seeps through every contention wall we have put up so far.
  - brookst 2y ago
    A flaw in human nature, but not a plan. There was no board meeting where people came up with it and set out a roadmap and had milestones and KPIs. It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Then what is coordinated lobbying
    - namaria 2y ago
      The owning class everywhere has always gotten together trying to figure out how to keep things the way they are.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    Countries with might is right systems don't have corporate ownership, they have personal fiefdoms.
contingencies 2y ago
IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery. AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures. IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy). It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

by alt227 2y ago

I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.

Sure, the plan (of LLCs) was always to limit liability but initially _who_ could incorporate wasn't literally everybody. Like the founding fathers ran their business as themselves. There isn't some Monticello LLC that Thomas Jefferson was CEO of so if TJ did something bad then he's personally liable for it. This is what's changed and is the problem, people get LLCs in situations they really don't deserve them in.

datavirtue 2y ago
What are you talking about?

brookst 2y ago

While the lack of accountability for corporations is crazy, I’m a firm believer in the Cube observation: there is no master plan.

namaria 2y ago
There is one master plan tho: might is right. It gets pushed back, but it seeps through every contention wall we have put up so far.
- brookst 2y ago
  A flaw in human nature, but not a plan. There was no board meeting where people came up with it and set out a roadmap and had milestones and KPIs. It’s an emergent property and it sucks, but there’s no conspiracy.
  - wahnfrieden 2y ago
    Then what is coordinated lobbying
  - namaria 2y ago
    The owning class everywhere has always gotten together trying to figure out how to keep things the way they are.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Countries with might is right systems don't have corporate ownership, they have personal fiefdoms.

contingencies 2y ago

IIRC the modern corporation as a legal entity was created in response to the high capital and high risk requirements embodied in early western shipping ventures. The first stock exchange ("bourse") for this was actually French(?) (hazy here, possibly Belgian or Dutch, and probably roots in Hanseatic League financing if not beyond). FWIW there's a whole subset of the antiques world which deals in share notes - promissory notes issued to people funding capital intensive ventures like new railway lines, often beautifully decorated and serial numbered for nominal security against forgery. AFAIK the follow-on concern of manipulation of the modern legal environment as a tool for unencumbered multinational greed really began with entities like the East India Company being empowered by pontificating rulers back home granting because-I-said-so immunity for arbitrary actions outside their borders, thus establishing the ground work for industrial scale opium trading, piracy, slavery, and banana republics. We're in a period of relative reckoning now where the cash-piles thus accrued are facing some popular scrutiny, but there'll never be recompense. As we've reached the ends of the earth and new wealth to seize has become scarce, we've turned to speculation and beyond earth to mars, the metaverse, and media in general. Stock markets are largely society's greed temples and in some cases designed for money laundering (eg. Singapore stock market for the Burmese junta). Even small companies on the public markets are worth orders of magnitude more than you can earn in a lifetime, leading to an intellectual drain toward speculative systemic value extraction instead of productive ventures. IMHO a naive hope of crypto was a reckoning, instead we received the opposite: increased speculation, libertarian multinational economics and now abject political profiteering. No action on critical issues like climate. Less international trust and diplomatic potential than we've had since WWII - truly, we are lost. But it's less a conspiracy than a back-scratching piggy trough of reverent greed-inertia, in which all pigs are created equal but a cabal of investment bankers are more equal than others. Meanwhile everyone else slave for their locally dangled currency carrot, backed primarily by golden handcuffs of mortgages, an inertia of ignorance, a charade of democratic process, increasing global population dependence on multinational trade to meet quality of life expectations, and conveniently captured choke points like identity (The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies), food (Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), regulation (Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It), international logistics (The Outlaw Ocean, International Shipping Cartels), energy (Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy), education (Privatizing the Public University), media (Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship) and weaponized finance (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Mortgaged Democracy). It is perhaps not overly hyperbolic to state that the challenge of our era is to determine a mode of capturing the power of emergent technology to undo this situation, and nothing less than the fate of the planet rests on doing so.