The likelihood of the company going bankrupt decreases with its size. It's a gradient, not categories, so saying "big companies can also go bankrupt" does not falsify what I said at all. (Note that I outright listed some of the reasons why this risk decreases.)
to keep adapting as the world changes
And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.
Even the VOC [Dutch East India Company], at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.
You're now aware that the VOC would look like an ant in comparison with modern megacorporations. For example, Walmart is around 350 times larger than the VOC was in its prime.
Also note how poor of an example the Dutch East India Company is, given that it was effectively a vassal state of the Dutch government, not an independent group like the megacorpos of today. And it didn't simply go "bankrupt", it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers (source), and its annual operating profit was estimated to be equivalent to US$ 80 millions (source). In the meantime, Walmart controls 2.1 million workers³ and its operating income for 2025 is around US$ 29 billions (source for both).
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.
So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn't work well. It's more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]
In capitalism, each business is trying to maximise its own margin of profit. And to do so, it needs to produce more for a cheaper production price, and sell it.
Technology makes each worker output more production, but it also makes their labour more expensive. So to produce more, better tech is not enough; you need more workers.
And to sell more of your production, you need more people buying your stuff, because there's a limit on how much each will buy.
This means each business needs an increasingly larger number of workers and customers. At the start they could do it by venturing into other countries, and killing local businesses; but eventually you reach a point where you have megacorporations like Unilever, Google, Faecesbook, Nestlé etc. Where do they expand into? Where do they get more customers and workers from?
That reminds me my grandma. My family is not exactly wealthy, even for Latin American standards; and even in times where women were not supposed to work, my grandpa was doing grunt work while grandma worked as a hotel maid.
And as I was getting older, I often visited my grandma. Drink some yerba together, chitchat, smoke some cigs together, this kind of stuff. And she told me some shitty stories about my mum and her three siblings when they were kids. In plenty of those, one of the four muppets almost died. (Including my mum. Hoooooly fuck - eating berries known locally as "horse destroyer", rolling inside a tire into a high traffic road, perhaps she likes cats so much because she identifies herself with them, they both have nine lives?)
Well. Turns out that they weren't supposed to be four children, but six. My mum wasn't the oldest one - her two older brothers died before she was born. My grandma once mentioned that once, but in no moment she showed a change in expression; it was a fact of life.
Even as a man I could not picture myself being so stoic. If I had a child and they died, I'd probably lose my marbles.
This is dated from 207 or so. It was found near Hadrian's wall. And it isn't even noteworthy because every bloody where you see Roman graffiti with this sort of shitpost.
(I'm not sure if I should spoiler the pic as NSFW.)
I think that globalised megacorporations make this sort of chainsaw growth less feasible over time, since you can't extract surplus value from dead people. That wasn't a big deal before because corporations were mostly restricted by country/government, but now they're basically everywhere.
[inb4: this does NOT mean that globalised megacorporations are against genocide. Far from that - it's just that they'd rather order their governments to engage in genocide in other situations. Such as megacorpo turf wars.]
The issue is not the lower fertility rate itself. The issue is
capitalism assuming the impossible - infinite pop growth
governments with a tribal mindset trying to outcompete each other in number of heads, so they force their populations to murder or subjugate each other
If it's for fish-and-chips lemon juice is a good sub. Otherwise white wine vinegar; note however that depending on the amounts the taste difference will be noticeable.
This topic is not for me as it's clearly focused on USA alone, but the mention of ambrosia salad reminded me a dessert with the same name:
Made with caramelised sugar, eggs, milk, citrus juice. Iberian in origin, still fairly popular here in southern Brazil.
On chicken Kiev: I know that the dish is supposed to be fancy and all of that, I've seen Marco Pierre preparing it, but frankly? The idea of a deed-fried dish filled with butter definitively does not please me.
And, as usual, advertisers are to be blamed: they're the ones interested on "engagement", and indirectly siccing platforms to artificially inflate their engagement numbers.
To make Reddit faster, simpler, and easier to use, we needed to unify our messaging platforms. This consolidation helps us focus on improving one system instead of maintaining multiple. Plus, Reddit Chat's infrastructure is built for the future, unlike the PM system which is about as old as Reddit itself.
We’re sharing this change early because we want your feedback! We've spent months talking to mods, developers, and users to ensure this migration works for everyone (shoutout to u/RemindMeBot fans). But there might be scenarios we've missed, and we need your input to address them. You can share feedback directly with the team working on this project in the comments below.
My sides went into orbit. They aren't even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?
If the concern was to make Reddit "faster, simpler, and easier to use", they'd ditch chat and keep DMs
"muh futchure" fallacy (appeal to novelty)
pretending that they want/care for user feedback
...I think that the reason is twofold: 1) it's easier to plug advertisement into the new chat system, and 2) chat only works in new.reddit so they can use it as an excuse to deprecate yet another old.reddit system.
Cordwell and Barker expect user growth for Reddit to stall in 2025 and, as a result, see revenue growth becoming more reliant on making the platform’s proposition more attractive for advertisers.
This won't be even remotely fun for the people still using that platform. Because "making the platform's proposition more attractive to advertisers" boils down to either more ads or ads that are more obnoxious, more disguised as content, more targetted.
Etymologically "agent" is just a fancy borrowed synonym for "doer". So an AI agent is an AI that does. Yup, it's that vague.
You could instead restrict the definition further, and say that an AI agent does things autonomously. Then the concept is mutually exclusive with "assistant", as the assistant does nothing on its own, it's only there to assist someone else. And yet look at what Pathak said - that she understood both things to be interchangeable.
...so might as well say that "agent" is simply the next buzzword, since people aren't so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more. They've used those dumb text gens, gave them either a six-fingered thumbs up or thumbs down, but they're generally aware that it doesn't do a fraction of what they believed to.
I do nothing. I went through QM classes in my Chemistry times and I still don't get it. If I do nothing at least nobody can blame me for fucking everything up.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
When Big Data meets horror movies