That’s part of why I’ve generally been putting quotation marks around the word “corporation.”

It’s not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the “government” and its “citizens” will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the “government” will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the “government” will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the “choice” of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.

In either event (or any other - this can’t possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between “government” and “citizen” will be notably different from any of the ones we’ve seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).

Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.

So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That’s only going to become more the case with time.

What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?

The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.

This isn’t rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.

Where is the corporation getting their funding from?

From the sale of goods and/or services.

Duh.

Someone’s got to be paying them.

Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.

Duh.

So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.

Or more likely not.

Here’s just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government’s), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.

So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.

And that’s just one idea, off the top of my head.

Whoever wants in on it really.

Primarily I presume it’d be the corporations themselves, but banking is certain to change to accommodate the growing independence of the “corporations,” and I expect that to some notable degree, the two will merge - that the largest “corporations” will have their own banking sibsidiaries and will handle most everything internally.

There’s a broad point underlying all of this - all that’s really necessary is that enough executives/owners at enough institutions have a desire to divest themselves of associations with governments and establish their own “states.” Once the will is there and they possess enough wealth and power to enforce their will, the rest is just details. They have entire staffs who are employed to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, and they will figure it out.

Of course. Gambling is a hallmark of civilizations in decline.

The Polymarket thing is a bit different though. It’s built on a foundation of saps hoping to strike it big, but it promarily benefits insiders, who are turning their knowledge into financial windfalls.

Just another of the privileges afforded the wealthy and empowered few.

So?

In the first place, a “corporation” could set up a legal system easily - draft some laws, build some facilities and appoint some officials, and done.

But they wouldn’t even need to do that. They likely would, because an impartial system wins voluntary compliance and thus promotes stability, but the only really necessary part of a legal system is sufficient power to enforce its dictates, and with enough armed professionals, that’s relatively easy, at least within secured borders.

Yes.

And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash’s predictions was the idea that federal governments didn’t get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The “corporations” had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.

Sure.

They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.

I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.

Governments don’t monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it’s in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.

No and yes…

A business entity that is proactively protected from liability could not exist without government charter.

However, a business entity could employ its own paramilitary and/or hire mercenaries and effectively make itself immune to liability, which works out to the same thing pretty much.

And I’m reasonably certain that that’s the future - that corporations will continue to acknowledge and submit to governments only as long as it’s to their advantage to do so, and that when the costs outstrip the benefits, they’ll simply stop, and instead manage their properties as essentially states unto themselves. And at that point, whether or not they have an official declaration of their corporate identity will be irrelevant.

That’s my reaction broadly to hate.

Even beyond the fact that it’s destructive and ugly, it just seems like a pointless waste of time and energy. I don’t get why anyone invests that much time and energy into being miserable, and especially over something that can’t possibly really matter in their lives.

Imagine that all of the instances existed first - before federation even existed.

So imagine dozens of little, independent message boards - this person created one at this address, and this other person created this other one at this other address and so on.

Okay - then imagine that federation came along, so then all of those individual bosrds started sharing content with all the other boards.

So you were on this one board called lemmy.world. You never moved - you still have the same account at the same board. But now you also see, for instance, content from some other board called lemmy.ml.

Now here’s the important bit - you aren’t actually looking at lemmy.ml. You’re looking at a mirror of it - literally, you’re looking at lemmy.ml@lemmy.world. So like this community we’re on right now - neither one of us is actually on AskLemmy@lemmy.ml. You’re on AskLemmy@lemmy.ml@lemmy.world and I’m on AskLemmy@lemmy.ml@sopuli.xyz. But every few seconds, all three of those actually separate communities sync up with each other, so it acts as if it’s just one community.

Does that help?

It appears that every action is a reaction (or to use the more customary terminology, every action is an effect of some number of causes, and is in turn a cause for some number of effects).

However, it must either be the case that there was a first action, which would necessarily be an uncaused effect, or that time is either a loop or is infinite in extent, such that there is no beginning and thus no need for an uncaused effect.

And none of those possibilities is really intellectually satisfying, so it’s an open question (which doesn’t stop people from insisting on the nominal truth of one or another of them).

US elections

Live action anime

McDonalds

Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.

Discworld, no contest.

It’s those roughly squared off, dirty, slushy heaps of packed snow that were plowed out of the way after the snowfall and are the only thing left after the rest of the snow has melted.

And so on, and so on…

If my government the government that’s managed to weasel its way into power over the land on which I happened to be born proposed an initiative to tackle fraud, I would look for the catch, because it’s guaranteed there would be one.

Yes.

The dirty little secret of the DNC is that they don’t even really care about winning elections. They only want to keep the soft money flowing, and that requires never actually enacting any progressive policies, and if that means that they alienate voters and lose elections, that’s fine by them.

In fact, they sort of prefer to lose. If they win, then they’re stuck having to go through all sorts of bizarre contortions to somehow manage to continue to fail to do the things they promise their supporters they intend to do and they’re the ones stuck with the blame when the policies they enact on the behalf of the donor class inevitably make things worse for everyone else. Bit if they lose, they don’t have to actually do anything, and they get to fundraise on the need to stop the Republicans.

private Senate Democratic luncheon

And that pretty neatly sums up the whole problem right there.

All they can think to do us sit around and talk to each other, alternately lamenting the fact that the hicks in flyover country can’t seem to understand that they know what’s best for them and wondering what’s wrong with their "messaging "

Or an assembly line worker.

Or, quite possibly, it just struck me - a fruit picker or meat packer or motel maid or any of the other jobs that have traditionally been filled by undocumented immigrants.

Wow…

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that before, but that could well be why Trump is seemingly unconcerned about the economic impact of deporting the millions of people who have traditionally held the shitty, underpaid jobs nobody else will take - because the plan is to replace them with the new generation of private prison slaves…