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Working with Purpose, Forever

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Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#61

Post by perilunar »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #39
perilunar wrote: post #18

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

If companies and persons are legally equivalent, I'm not sure why this is so perverse to you. There are many people in the world who do not have "purpose", their personal philosophy is that they need/want to go out and "make a profit" so that they can survive. Are they perverse? A company isn't perfectly equivalent to a person, but does exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals. If two people have no calling, ha…

> ... exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals.

Precisely. Companies exist so that people can work together to accomplish goals that are difficult to accomplish separately. I'm suggesting that 'make money' should not be a sufficient goal. Companies are not a natural thing — we decide the laws that govern them.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#62

Post by saltcured »

perilunar wrote: post #61
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If companies and persons are legally equivalent, I'm not sure why this is so perverse to you. There are many people in the world who do not have "purpose", their personal philosophy is that they need/want to go out and "make a profit" so that they can survive. Are they perverse? A company isn't perfectly equivalent to a person, but does exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals. If two people have no calling, ha…

> ... exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals. Precisely. Companies exist so that people can work together to accomplish goals that are difficult to accomplish separately. I'm suggesting that 'make money' should not be a sufficient goal. Companies are not a natural thing — we decide the laws that govern them.

Pooling resources via a corporation is one way that those with less individual wealth have a chance to compete against the very wealthy. Why should they have to meet a higher bar than such wealthy individuals?

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#63

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

PeterisP wrote: post #40
stemlord wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the system is broken

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?

The broken part is that the system overall has negative incentives. We, as humans, want to improve humans’ lives, make technological progress, provide for our needs, etc. and the current strategy of prioritizing profit over any other metric only sometimes aligns with these goals.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#64

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

fsflover wrote: post #35
PeterisP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

If you actually want to dedicate your company to a purpose, it should be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

I’d propose a general rule that no social responsibility can survive corporate scaling. As they get larger more people enter who lack the founders’ vision and the system becomes less driven by personal whims and more driven by things that maintain the system. Profit for a corporation is borderline tautological, like homeostasis for a cell. The most you’ll get out of a larger corpo is whatever appearance of responsibility is required to maintain profits with as little action as possible.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#65

Post by rldjbpin »

perilunar wrote: post #18

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

you can chalk it down to survivorship bias but most companies don't always end up succeeding in their original mission. if the likes of samsung and netflix stuck to their original purpose and stopped operations, we would not see the impact they've created today.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#66

Post by grepmo »

nisegami wrote: post #51
PeterisP wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?

>What is the broken part? The second law of thermodynamics is always at fault

We're in the complex phase between point A of a low-entropy uniform distribution of densely packed particles with strong gravitation, and point B of a high-entropy uniform distribution of widely spaced particles with almost no gravitation.

The second law is unfortunately taking us to B eventually, but it's also responsible for the journey from A to where we are today!

A being the Big Bang and B being heat death (est. 1.7×10^106 years).

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#67

Post by ActionHank »

troupo wrote: post #45
ActionHank wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs only want profitable companies so that they can get that sweet sweet exit payday. CEOs of larger, listed corps are competing in the same markets as startups and so are forced to pursue the same or risk looking like they're failing in the market. Ultimately everyone(customers, employees, the company, longer term investors) loses except the investors who are able to influence the company's direction and priorities.

> VCs only want profitable companies In the US at least this hasn't been true for a very long time. You only have to look at "YCombinator Top 100" to see multiple companies losing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of investor money for years

There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a share in a profitable company, the full line that you quoted fills in the rest of the problem, they want to maximize the "value" so that they can exit.

It's a pump and dump scheme with more steps.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#68

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

PeterisP wrote: post #60
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all natural persons can vote. Despite what Trump says, green card holders are disallowed such. The trouble, I think, is that some people want to keep corporations, but to somehow keep a leash on them so that they're only weaponized against their enemies. If you truly hated corporate personhood, instead, you might start talking about how corporations shouldn't be allowed in any circumstances. You can't keep a leas…

They don't have independent agendas - company owners have agendas, and they have the means and the rights to have the company implement whatever the owner's agenda is.

No, they do have independent agendas. The ownership in an S corp is spread out over many thousands of people, and they are ineffective at exerting their own agenda onto the company. Even those who believe themselves effective at doing so. I think it was Charlie Stross who first said that corporations are actual AIs whose code executes on wetware of its employees. In the execution of that AI code, new agendas are developed that were never communicated or even imagined by anyone who could reasonably be called an owner.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#69

Post by pyinstallwoes »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #63
PeterisP wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?

The broken part is that the system overall has negative incentives. We, as humans, want to improve humans’ lives, make technological progress, provide for our needs, etc. and the current strategy of prioritizing profit over any other metric only sometimes aligns with these goals.

Come up with a different measurement for good that is equally wanted and fungible

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#70

Post by pyinstallwoes »

ActionHank wrote: post #25
perilunar wrote: post #18

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

VCs only want profitable companies so that they can get that sweet sweet exit payday. CEOs of larger, listed corps are competing in the same markets as startups and so are forced to pursue the same or risk looking like they're failing in the market. Ultimately everyone(customers, employees, the company, longer term investors) loses except the investors who are able to influence the company's direction and priorities.

VCs also incur risk. The only reason you're able to use a computer today is because of VCs.
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