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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Corporate death is infinitely preferable to Corporate immortality

Maybe for you and even me. But not for the owners and workers of said company. If you were 42 years old, with 3 children to feed would you not mind if your company was dying and suddenly you had to start brushing up your resume, applying for new jobs which you don't even know if will be as good as what you have now?

What I mean is, it's absurd to expect companies not to behave the way they have always did.

Your definition of “always” might be different than mine

There was a time not long ago and for the majority of human life that the modern concept of a equity based corporation with distinct split between owners and labor didn’t exist

So I’m not sure if always is accurate grounding or the base rate that should be compared against

I think a lot of how companies behave is defined by how they are constructed in law. For example, limited liability allows shareholders of companies to to be shielded from the consequences of "externalities" that their companies cause, which drastically changes their risk landscape compared to a counterfactual world where people were still legally responsible for their actions even when trying to make money

Even in this counterfactual world, and likely EVERY counterfactual world, people with lots of money (which equates with power) will always develop a system that will shield them from accountability. Any system like this is self-reinforcing because a few people with more money will always have a greater influence on 'the system' than the larger number of people with less money.

It's inevitable that people with power will use that power to their advantage. But the degree and the ways in which this is possible permit a vast spectrum of degrees, and adjusting this is a feasible problem of mechanism design. Limited liability in its present form is not an inevitability

What happened to the ice delivery workers?

Those who payed attention and had been keeping their options open went on to other jobs.

I don’t think “job stability” is ever really a thing in a changing world, more of a fantasy, and those who invest everything in it are really investing in their eventual discomfort.

Many small companies and businesses don't have growth as their primary mandate but are moreso vehicles to facilitate the exchange of labor and money between their current staff and their customers.

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