The differences between governments and megacorps are dwindling and the two are becoming much more alike one another. We already live in global technofeudalism.
Alas, no. By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations. MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
MNCs are like local governments levying property taxes.
e.g. you need a phone much like you have to live somewhere. Your "Tech Government" is determined by a highly constrained choice like your local civil government is determined by your zip code. Maybe you can move at great disruption and cost but it's only to the jurisdiction of another government and some variation of autocratic laws and taxes.
However, you have no vote and there is no pretence at serving your interests. You are not a citizen but cattle to be farmed... just maximal exploitation to please the mighty Mammon.
this. also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison. Only you don't even get a public service for it, however bad it might be. For taxes, at least some of them are used for public services.
The less local the government, the less likely I am to see any material benifit from the taxes I pay. Local and state taxes fund roads and other infrastructure, public schools, social programs, etc. Federal taxes fund military adventurism, pure corrupt waste like SLS and worst of all ""aid"" for shitty foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel so they can wage wars on their neighbors, for which America's international reputation suffers greatly.
But you are right that more local government has advantages over more centralised government. For example, it's easier to change your local government, if you don't like it: just move to the next town over.
You elk of America's international reputation and foreign fiscal affairs is ironic as you are only inconvenienced a fraction that the hundreds of third world humans endure daily to prop up our unsustainable standard of living.
You have definitely maimed and killed a non-zero amount of humans indirectly by the stochastic math that tallies the bodies on your Luxury products.
We are bias. Your gas wouldn't be less than $10 a gallon if we didn't drop $10b a year policing the Canals, Gulfs, and ports.
The higher your standard of living, the more dependencies, the more complexities, the more abstractions, and more susceptible to changes/perturbations until the "millionaire if not for taxes" thinks he can go without the "taxation without representation" route.
> also any profit margins sure are a "tax" in that comparison.
No? If your local government runs a surplus, that's sort-of equivalent to a profit (but not quite). Profits aren't equivalent to taxes. That's just silly.
So wrong. Every dollar that $FOO_COMPANY shovels to Google and Apple to spend on advertising is a dollar that you, the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
The advertising industry itself is a tax on the price of everything.
That's not a tax. That's just a payment they make for goods and services (in this case, ad services).
> [...] the consumer, end up footing the bill for; a dollar that does not go towards improving the product you receive in any way whatsoever.
Huh? You could make the same argument against providing free coffee for employees. Every dollar the company spends on coffee is one that they didn't spend on anything else..
And, obviously, ads go towards improving the improving the product I receive: without ads, I might have bought a different product or none at all.
Not all ad spend improves my experience, obviously, but neither does all spend on everything else. And I don't have to buy a product, if I don't like the ads.
> Megacorps are adopting the level of competence of governments.
Any sources for that? From all the studies (and anecdotes) I've seen, MNCs are vastly more competent that most local companies, and the latter are also _usually_ still more competent than government.
You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
> You are "forced to pay taxes" to have schools and roads and rescue services and law and everything else that makes the United States still a mostly habitable place to live.
In any case, I grew up in Germany and have adopted Singapore as my home. And in comparison I am very happy that my overall tax rates here are perhaps a third of what they would be in Germany, while the services provided here are at least three times as good. (But the latter is subjective.)
Not incidentally, Singapore is perhaps the most well run city on the globe, and the place most run like an MNC.
> Corporations do not force you to pay taxes YET. When the corporations get in total control and you cannot even vote just wait to see what a slave you are.
Huh? That seems about as relevant as making an analogous argument against current real world governments by pointing out that someone might clone Stalin.
Yes, theoretically possible, but rather far-fetched.
"Some of the biggest sectors domestically — shipbuilding, electronics, banking, and now they're very involved in private banking — got their start because Lee Kuan Yew and the government specially directed state funds into those areas," Kurlantzick says.
The government also provided social services like housing and health care, in a way liberal economists applauded."
"He understood the politics of this very diverse place, and put together the laws, including the labor laws, that created a stable, peaceful place that multinationals were looking for," Lim says.
And it is good for you, but what about people who are not you?
"People live well, but the per capita GDP conceals a high level of inequality, so that is definitely a major issue in Singapore today and one of the things that the current prime minister has focused on," he says.
MNCs get governments to force you to buy their products. I've dealt with governments where the only way to send or receive docs was MS Word. Sometimes saving in MS Word format works (LibreOffice), sometimes not.
> By and large, governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations
Is this something you know firsthand or something you think you know because a huge amount of money has gone into spreading that message for political purposes? Anyone who’s worked for or with a multi-national knows that they’re hardly as efficient as the marketing would have you believe, and anyone who’s looked at libertarian media knows that it’s almost entirely funded by rich people seeking tax & regulatory reductions, banking on you confusing their interests with your own.
Roads should be privately provided: they aren't even a public good.
How they are financed is up to the operators. Perhaps they want tolls, perhaps local stores want to chip in to improve their business? Perhaps something else that would take someone more than 30 seconds to imagine?
(In any case, roads being provided by local government isn't all that bad. It's relatively easy to change your local government by moving from one town to the next. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)
> governments are still vastly less competent than multinational corporations.
Speaking of competence devoid of context misses the point. They are resembling each other greatly in the sense of misaligned incentives with their "users", which supersedes run-of-the-mill competence in terms of importance in this context. I'm not going to give points to some moron who is swimming competently in the wrong direction.
> MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
An oddly naive comment given all that has been written about how Amazon operates, to give one example.
I never got this sentiment. Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent—and that's before you consider profit inefficiency. I suspect this would be a lot more obvious if it weren't for the last seventy years of intentionally hampering government from competing with the market players directly. Once a product hits enshittification it benefits everyone (but shareholders, who contribute nothing to society) to nationalize the production and provide it at zero margin.
> Corporations as viewed from the inside are wildly incompetent [...]
Corporations have varying levels of efficiency. MNCs are by and large _fairly_ competent.
Of course, if you see them from the inside, there's still enough weird and incompetent stuff going on.
Compare to how western militaries have their fair share of screw ups, but they still wipe the floor with non-western militaries, whenever there's any conflict.
>MNCs also don't force you to pay taxes or buy their products.
yeah, because the only kid bigger, told them to knock it off, as to not hamper their own racket.
If you think a mega-corp won't go AWOL and attempt a Banana Republic/Dutch East India Company again, but with more proxies, lawyers, SAM's, and corrupt officials to "YAS" them into integration, then you really haven't been paying attention to what globalization is really about.
The US had to ask for money back from the oil barons.
Bezos/Musk/Zuck/{untold billionaires} will have much better bargaining chips when they possess the monopoly on surveillance, money, and influence, and have proxy chairs at the U.N.
And I bet those countries would be better run in every way.
>"they fail to see the systematic risks"
Or they also fail at providing a solution.
Apple has no incentive to improve Safari. "It just works" is what their cultists paid to have the honor to parrot, and they enjoy the majority of web market share of people with actual wages and disposable income. That's why the sell culture, not their people's data (directly, yet).
Since it's not "Safari" that's broken (since iPhones cost a lot of money, they cant break), the users will lie blame at the fault of the web developers, since they had gotten cozy within the comfortable, flexible, expected behaviors of Chrome, having enjoyed a hiatus from IE11 EOL pollyfills and jquery.
Apple then made it easier to roll out an app than to grapple with the pitfalls, nuances, foot-guns, and gabbling documentation that Safari has carefully mal-compiled to shepherd both developers and their users into the Walled Garden.
It's just the browser wars, but with higher stakes. And Microsoft already won.
If you’re referring to people as “cultists”, consider that your point might not be as strong as you think. If you have a non-emotional argument about a browser, try making it with logic and data rather than emotion. For example, demonstrate awareness of where the browsers rank on the features which web developers really need (Google’s devrel team likes to highlight PWA features almost nobody uses even on Chrome) and show why the “walled garden” metaphor applies more to a niche browser than the dominant one by a large margin.
> Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead
what kind of answer is that exactly?
I would much prefer they fix the issue, yes, the stuff I'm using is provided by Apple and it's been paid off in full, I don't know what made people believe that it's ok if software sucks...
If a train company causes an accident they are considered liable if a software company leaks my data they should be considered liable, it's as simple as that, no need for this anti government stands that frankly make adults look like angry teenagers with a bad bladder
The complaint was the governemnt does nothing, because they lack a clear solution, to the non trivial problem of todays megacorps and their Power since they control our gadgets. Do you happen to have a concrete solution?
Or they also fail at providing a solution. Would you prefer diletantic government intervention in this area instead?