It highlights the dangers of a mono culture as well.
Most importantly though, I remember my history professor who always said, "follow the money!" Do the CEO and the board have to pay (either in money out of pocket or time served in prison) for these problems (outages / oil spills / global warming / what not)? If not, what incentive do they have to make the likelihood of these problems dial down to zero?
The company does have to use its assets to pay anything it's liable for, yes. It sounds like essentially arguing against the concept of limited liability for the owners and investors? I would regard LL as generally a good thing. Without it, it would be a much bigger ask for anyone to start up a business when they're putting their own house and everything at risk. And I expect it would lead to an even further skew of already-rich people dominating investment and company ownership
> start up a business when they're putting their own house and everything at risk
Every hardware startup founder I've been involved with has used their house and/or their retirement savings to back their operating loan.
I think the advantages of incorporation have been well established by now, and believe that partly removing limited liability would not significantly effect incorporation rates.
Certain people advocate a compromise where a company may be allowed to be limitedly liable until a certain size then it has to transform to unlimited liability.
> It highlights the dangers of a mono culture as well.
The devil is in the detail though. You can have an incredibly stable distributed system with limited failure modes.
lots of examples around, a pretty well known one would be VISA transactions. Each acquirer can fail separately, and even if they're failing, some of their terminals will keep going without any impact.
And the remaining acquirer will also keep chugging along.
It's still objectively a monoculture, as Amex and MasterCard are pretty rare on global scale, while visa is basically everywhere
> It's still objectively a monoculture, as Amex and MasterCard are pretty rare on global scale, while visa is basically everywhere
I can't think of any part of the world I know of where only Visa cards are accepted in 2024 and not MasterCard. AMEX requires a separate contract agreement for the merchant hence why it is not bundled by default, but all acquirers offer Visa/MasterCard as one package. Visa and Mastercard have been a duopoly for far too long to differentiate between the two at the consumer level, and it just doesn't make any financial sense for a financial institution to miss out on interchange and card fees by accepting only one card type and not the other of the two.
I was only thinking about how widespread the card type is. You're absolutely right from the acquiring perspective, MasterCard is basically free to support with the same network as VISA
Your username makes me think you're from Japan (in Kyoto), but your comment history puts you more towards USA. Are you a fellow payment industry dev?
well, maybe not fellow anymore, as I left that industry roughly 3 yrs ago ( θ ‿ θ )
As far as I'm aware, Europe, India and the "western" asian countries (Japan, Korea) has a quasi monopoly with visa, but my only industry experience is in the DACH region of Europe. Our numbers were something around 80% visa
Yes I agree with you, the article and Taleb. These corporations which the whole West depends on sound nice in theory but cause the system as a whole to be brittle. I think there is definitely a market for writing software for very specific areas. Like, I donno, an office productivity suite hyper optimized for the European market. It sounds impossible but if you obsess over quality then I think it’s possible to get (very happy!) customers.
Doing the right thing isn't always aligned with winning.
Shareholders can sue a company for not doing whats in their best interest. Instruments such as public benefit corporations are relatively new. Employee owned corporations aren't very common - almost non-existent in tech / biotech /pharma / energy / transportation.
Customers want cheap services, and a corporation that would employ three times as many QA people would be disadvantaged against the ones that just wing it.
It will take several incidents such as this, before the market starts understanding that some extra cost is tolerable for having some sort of warranty.
I anal so I don't really know what I am talking about but I am hoping for criminal liability as opposed to civil liability. For example, I am thinking if I kill someone with no next of kin, I still have criminal liability even if nobody from the victim's family is there to sue me.
Most importantly though, I remember my history professor who always said, "follow the money!" Do the CEO and the board have to pay (either in money out of pocket or time served in prison) for these problems (outages / oil spills / global warming / what not)? If not, what incentive do they have to make the likelihood of these problems dial down to zero?
I like this article
https://archive.ph/1ekmk