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Comment by tenebrisalietum | Hacker News Reader

> A business is group of people building things together.

Disagree. A business is an operation meant to make money for investors. Things that call themselves businesses and don't do that over a period of X are failing, as businesses, for the duration X.

A business is an organization, and organizations don't have to be businesses, even if they share some of the same attributes such as concern for expenses, desire to gather extra resources to protect against uncertain events, etc.

Some organizations that are businesses maybe shouldn't be businesses, but they'd be OK as organizations.

Stable organizations would be great. The name for ones that stick around a long time is "institutions." They need stable physical places and surroundings, which is hard when land and real estate is considered an investment vehicle and the value is constantly increasing.

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> A business is an operation meant to make money for investors.

please stop repeating Friedmannite vacuities as if they are laws of nature. What exactly is a business is defined by contractual arrangements that have nothing inevitable about them. Nothing.

Money did not exist before it was invented. Its a social construct and actually idiotically simple. "Investors" did not exist before the invention of the corporation and the countless legalities, contracts, incentives and behaviors that shape it.

A business is fundamentally a group of (non-related) people building something together (a service, a product, something desirable by others). Obviously some quid-pro-quo is required for them to be incentivized. Everything else in how the business is structured is up for grabs. The employees can be owners. The business can be non-profit. The extent of liability of members varies. The expected lifespan may be "eternal" or "ephemeral". Etc.

I think if/when we start looking at our organizational arrangements with a critical eye instead of being dazed and confused we'll enter a better period of social and economic development. The prime objective is to have as many people be as happy, as productive, as creative as possible, for the longest periods of their lives. We are very far from that.

I would engage in a(n) {name you want} that does not deliver money to its investors.

But I would not buy even a share of {name you want} if it does not deliver profit to its shareholders.

To clarify, I think groups of people building something together is valid and doesn't have to be in the context of a business as per my previous post, and maybe should be done more often.

Your first post sort of conflated "business" and "family" and no ... that's a bad thing. Businesses shouldn't get to call themselves family. I don't want the place I have to go to get money to live (which I wouldn't need to do if I was rich) to impose any emotional/moral obligation like a family. If a job starts treating me badly it's great to able to get another job without dealing with the ethical "is it right to abandon your family" type questions.

> Money did not exist before it was invented.

Inventions are children of necessity.

Money (of some kind) can only not exist if a static group of people are in a perfectly static environment where all their economic needs are met.

When the environment is only a little dynamic, historically enforcement of a "static environment" has been attempted with rigid social rules and hierarchies, but things like the plague, droughts, floods, and natural disasters don't listen to them.

When environments are dynamic and experience changes--drastic or gradual--different skills and tools will be needed to adapt. Markets will pop up. A human-independent store of value among peers in a large enough group of people will always be necessary.

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