188 karma · joined September 30, 2015
Wouldn't you consider Notion and Coda NoCode?
TiddlyWiki I see as more experimental so that simply might not be a 'sensible' platform in terms of the question.
Because it's one thing when a big conglomerate takes on financial debt in a subsidiary - the banks are sophisticated enough to negotiate whether the corporate parent should also provide a guarantee or to assess whether the subsidiary is a sufficiently good credit risk on a standalone basis.
But in terms of other claims - consumer, labor - the counterparty just sees the corporate brand (in this case J&J) and it isn't viable for them to negotiate a guarantee from the parent.
That's bad enough when the subsidiary does have assets and is a legitimate standalone business. But when you start letting companies split off liabilities and dumping them in companies to then declare bankruptcy, you in practice severely reduce the ability of the court system to function as a mechanism for parties to seek redress.
If this works (I find it incredible that the US legal system would let it work) in the short term great for companies. Though in the long term, making the court system not work as it should could make the economy work less well, as parties become mistrustful of doing business (like in emerging markets where the court system doesn't work well)
The context is that Brazil has high import duties on manufactured goods. Apple doesn't manufacture domestically. Samsung does.
Having said that, I once tried something vaguely analogous and it backfired. I had left my job and was freelancing, looking into businesses to start for myself, but nothing solid yet, and a fairly senior job opening came bouncing around that I thought would give me useful experience even though in the long term I was set on entrepreneurship. it was clear the company wasn't quite sure about me. So I essentially offered them a free trial - I'd come in and just start working for a few weeks for free for us all to see if it was a good fit, no commitments.
Ironically, I think that seemed so bizarre to them at a senior level (or they read it as signalling that I was desperate, which I wasn't) that they passed.
In the end it was all for the best - I started a business, etc.
To be clear - I understand your point and sort of agree with it from a software engineering perspective; I just don't think that's necessarily the right perspective here. Every day we demand that governments and companies in all sorts of different industries do lots of hard, complicated, not-easily-computer-programmable, bug-riddled human processes requiring subjective judgement because they need to be done.
People & organisations aren't entitled to only do the things that need to be done which they can do with near-zero marginal cost with computer software - when they can do that, good for them. When they can't, tough.
Yes, I agree, from personal experience designing good Recommendation Systems is hard. That's a field I'm interested in too - out of curiosity what alt-tech sites have you tried? Would be interested in also trying them and exchanging notes.