I actually have done a fair bit of bakery in my life so I know what you mean, but I get the same satisfaction from writing programs. I'm not sure if all "office workers" get this, though.
Is it really "the most ubiquitous font"? I always notice when someone has used Helvetica itself rather than some generic sans serif clone and it's not that often.
Not sure why you got down-voted, as I remember that as recently as the early 2010s some US agencies were still involved in industrial espionage on behalf of US companies. From a 2014 Snowden interview [1]:
> The U.S. National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network. (...) “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to U.S. national interests - even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security - then they’ll take that information nevertheless,” Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.
Outside of company towns in a few industries, and maybe some multi-national resource extraction companies that operate in lawless areas, how is this true?
There aren't too many, but Saudi Aramco, Statoil (until 2007, when it became the multinational Equinor), China Petrochemical, and a few other giant corporations exist (or in the case of Statoil, recently existed). Corporations wholly owned by nations. I think that qualifies.
Although I believe the parent was perhaps making a cynical comment about how e.g. Lockheed is basically a branch of the US military.
It's probably reasonable to consider regulatory capture the same thing, in practice. For instance this [1] was who the former president appointed to a newly created post, which he himself (the president) referred to as 'The Czar of Foods'. He was the effective head of the FDA's food division. He was a Monsanto VP and lobbyist who had argued for such things as allowing companies to knowingly allow at least a minimal amount of carcinogenic material into processed foods. Great guy to be in charge of food safety. It meant that Monsanto was effectively in charge of food safety in the US.
This led to things such as the FDA not even testing foodstuffs for excessive levels of glyphosate until a Government Accountability Report publicized this [2,3], federal legislation prohibiting state labeling requirements for genetically engineered foodstuffs, the FDA opting for no regulations whatsoever specific to genetic engineering instead offering a purely voluntary consultation process and otherwise relying on self regulation, etc. Monsanto's contemporary success was largely a product of government engineering.
The epilogue also feels somehow political. Shortly after Bayer (a German company) bought Monsanto, they suddenly started losing critical court cases in the US. In particular they've now lost two cases in the US with the courts deciding that Monsanto's glyphosate was the cause of the plaintiff's cancer. This, in turn, has now set the precedent and opened the door for some 11,200 more lawsuits against Bayer for glyphosate causing cancer. In something like 3 years we went from 'This product is so safe, we don't even need to test for it.' to 'This product undoubtedly causes cancer and you now owe billions of dollars in damages to thousands of plaintiffs.' The acquisition was a modern day Trojan Horse.
Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company is the largest company in the country by number of employees and revenue. Two of the largest banks here, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Economica Federal are both federally owned and both are larger than their private competitors, thanks to a couple of monopolie they hold (BB has a stranglehold on financing agriculture, and CEF operates the lotteries).
Disney is mostly responsible for copyright in the US being extended to ludicrous lengths. They changed the law so they could keep making money.
Also these copyright companies seem to get special treatment by the government. Notice how they are able to use police to "raid" data centres etc.? In the UK a young guy who ran a torrent site was raided by police in the early hours only to be released without charge months later. These companies have special powers in government, hence practically they are a part of the government.
The Dutch East India Company was the first company in the history of the world to issue shares to the public. They paid an 18% dividend for over 200 years.
Not really, what you see rather is Crony capitalism which is when government and large corporations work together to further their interests, often in what should be considered an illegal way.
There is an article showing how to write git using python called "Write yourself a Git" [0] (HN post here: [1]).
This one shows the fundamentals of git in far less than 700 pages. In fact you can go through it and understand git in an hour or two. For me this seems much more worthwhile than seeing in depth how all the git porcelain commands are done.
I wonder too. I'm completely convinced it will take top-down control by governments or nothing will change. There is absolutely no reason to believe the "will of the people" will do the right thing now for the first time in history.
I went from wanting sex every day in my mid 20s to wanting it only a few times a week in my 30s. I think it's normal. I'm more interested in having sex with more women than the same ones over and over again, though.
Speaking is the only one on that list not generally considered a technology. Every human civilisation we know about has developed spoken language. It seems to be built in to us.
Writing has only been independently invented a few times in history, as far as we know. Some historians reckon that map-making came before written language and it was that which had the largest impact.
