Lvxferre [he/him]

[unfunny guy analysing the whole thing]
The case with “with all due respect” is a lot like Japanese 貴様 kisama: misplaced respect is interpreted as ironic and sarcastic, thus rude.

Because, like, there are a few cases where “with all due respect” is genuine, but they all involve someone in a hierarchically inferior position contradicting a superior; student/teacher, underlying/boss, etc. In those situations the expression is there to convey “I acknowledge my position, and I’m not questioning it, but I need to say my honest views”.

On the internet, though? Hierarchy? Mpfffffft. [/unfunny guy]

inb4 I got the OP, on “all due respect” + no respect = “this is how much respect you deserve: ZERO!”. I’m just nerding out with language.

It depends a lot how you use both words. For me:

• colloquialism - anything you wouldn’t use in a higher register of the language (e.g. when speaking with a judge, or when writing to a formal-ish audience)
• slang - colloquialisms allowed only in specific settings and associated primarily with a subculture

So one is a subset of the other. Some colloquialisms are not slang (e.g. EN gonna, tryna, wanna), but slang is always colloquialism (e.g. big dick energy, skibidi, bussy).

Note: that’s how I use both words. But not even linguists agree on their definitions, so don’t see yours as incorrect.

How so?

A bigger business:

• has more capital at its disposal to invest capturing a nascent market, created by changes in the economic landscape caused by tech?
• has better chances to buy smaller businesses in other markets, so it’s ready in case its main market dies tomorrow due to technological disruption?
• can survive temporary losses for longer than a smaller one, while it’s adapting itself?

The replacement rate is shorter than in recorded history (1) (archive link)

Data contradicting my claim would show that smaller businesses have a similar or better rate of survival in comparison with bigger businesses. Your link does not show that, it does not even compare smaller vs. bigger businesses, as it focuses solely on the S&P 500 bankruptcy over time.

Note that your link confirms what I said here, as it shows big companies being eaten by biggER ones:

• Increased buyout activity beginning in the 1980s certainly had a hand in shortening that life span
• Rather, the report said, there will be an increase in M&A [merger and acquisition] as more of them team up to compete with the disruptors.
• “We argue that disruption is nothing new but that the speed, complexity and global nature of it is,”
• “but the increased pace of the disruption by companies like Amazon, Alphabet and Apple [i.e. GAFAM] today is causing the trend to accelerate even more.”

It also went bankrupt.

And the war totally had nothing to do with this, right. Nope, the VOC “just” went bankrupt, the UK snatching its stuff was totally irrelevant, and the VOC’s fate can be totally generalised for the sake of your “ackshyually, big biz also go bankrupt, see VOC.” /s

Of course you have to place it in historixal context: both in world population

If you did the maths beforehand, to know if your argument is sensible or bullshit (it’s the later), you’d know that Walmart is ~twice the size of the VOC in number of workers, even when normalised for the world pop. (500M back then.)

But odds are you ain’t bringing context up because the context would be relevant here; you’re only grasping at straws.

and in respect to other contemporary companies

There was barely any global market back then, almost all companies would stick to their country of origin. The VOC was the anomaly, being the first multinational and being rather government-like. You got an elephant and 503499398988989387349 ants.

Nowadays a Walmart or Unilever or Alphabet or Apple or Nestlé is not an exception. Those companies seised the economic activity of the world. You got a handful of blue whales, and most ants got the DDT.

inb4 “then this shows that VOC was hueeeg for other companies lol lmao” - refer to what I said about it being extremely government-like, and fighting a literal government.

Given that you brought up exactly zero relevant counterpoints, I’m not wasting my time further with this discussion - it’s simply unproductive.

>When Big Data meets horror movies

That’s untrue? The big ones also go bankrupt.

The likelihood of the company going bankrupt decreases with its size. It’s a gradient, not categories, so saying “big companies can also go bankrupt” does not falsify what I said at all. (Note that I outright listed some of the reasons why this risk decreases.)

to keep adapting as the world changes

And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.

Even the VOC [Dutch East India Company], at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.

You’re now aware that the VOC would look like an ant in comparison with modern megacorporations. For example, Walmart is around 350 times larger than the VOC was in its prime*.

Also note how poor of an example the Dutch East India Company is, given that it was effectively a vassal state of the Dutch government, not an independent group like the megacorpos of today. And it didn’t simply go “bankrupt”, it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).

*Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers (source), and its annual operating profit was estimated to be equivalent to US$ 80 millions (source). In the meantime, Walmart controls 2.1 million workers³ and its operating income for 2025 is around US$ 29 billions (source for both).

Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.

So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn’t work well. It’s more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]

Capitalism requires a growing population.

How so?

Sloppy/oversimplified explanation:

In capitalism, each business is trying to maximise its own margin of profit. And to do so, it needs to produce more for a cheaper production price, and sell it.

Technology makes each worker output more production, but it also makes their labour more expensive. So to produce more, better tech is not enough; you need more workers.

And to sell more of your production, you need more people buying your stuff, because there’s a limit on how much each will buy.

This means each business needs an increasingly larger number of workers and customers. At the start they could do it by venturing into other countries, and killing local businesses; but eventually you reach a point where you have megacorporations like Unilever, Google, Faecesbook*, Nestlé etc. Where do they expand into? Where do they get more customers and workers from?

*call me childish, I can’t help but misspell it.

That reminds me my grandma. My family is not exactly wealthy, even for Latin American standards; and even in times where women were not supposed to work, my grandpa was doing grunt work while grandma worked as a hotel maid.

And as I was getting older, I often visited my grandma. Drink some yerba together, chitchat, smoke some cigs together, this kind of stuff. And she told me some shitty stories about my mum and her three siblings when they were kids. In plenty of those, one of the four muppets almost died. (Including my mum. Hoooooly fuck - eating berries known locally as “horse destroyer”, rolling inside a tire into a high traffic road, perhaps she likes cats so much because she identifies herself with them, they both have nine lives?)

Well. Turns out that they weren’t supposed to be four children, but six. My mum wasn’t the oldest one - her two older brothers died before she was born. My grandma once mentioned that once, but in no moment she showed a change in expression; it was a fact of life.

Even as a man I could not picture myself being so stoic. If I had a child and they died, I’d probably lose my marbles.

Here’s some evidence of that (mildly NSFW):

This is dated from 207 or so. It was found near Hadrian’s wall. And it isn’t even noteworthy because every bloody where you see Roman graffiti with this sort of shitpost.

(I’m not sure if I should spoiler the pic as NSFW.)

I’ve been doing it for ages! I should show someone my paintings. (No, I won’t.)

I think that globalised megacorporations make this sort of chainsaw growth less feasible over time, since you can’t extract surplus value from dead people. That wasn’t a big deal before because corporations were mostly restricted by country/government, but now they’re basically everywhere.

[inb4: this does NOT mean that globalised megacorporations are against genocide. Far from that - it’s just that they’d rather order their governments to engage in genocide in other situations. Such as megacorpo turf wars.]

The issue is not the lower fertility rate itself. The issue is

• capitalism assuming the impossible - infinite pop growth
• governments with a tribal mindset trying to outcompete each other in number of heads, so they force their populations to murder or subjugate each other

deleted by creator

Correctly highlight when a programmer is being assumptive as a brick, even when assumptions are one of the biggest sins in programming. Done, you’ve triggered a lot of programmers.

The meaning kind of clicked to me the first time I’ve seen the word and tried to pronounce it - it ended as [ẽ.'ʒĩ 'ʃis], the first part is close enough to English [ˈɛnd͡ʒɪn] ⟨engine⟩ that the association was obvious. ([ʃis] is just the Portuguese name for ⟨X⟩.)

I know that URL.

No, I only saw it after I solved the problem.

It got to be Goat Simulator for sure:

• Top notch graphics.
• Full of features, even some not intended by the developers.
• You can hurt and get hurt, so it’s BDSM-friendly.
• Open sandbox.
• It’s more recognisable than Tetris. Tetris is easy to confuse with some Tetris knock-off, Goat Simulator is instantly “yup, this is Goat Simulator”.
• It’s deeper in lore and philosophy than Chrono Trigger.
• Zelda’s worldbuilding pales in comparison with Goat Simulator’s.
• Requires more strategy than Diablo and FFA combined.
• You play it as a goat dammit. Everything else is just fluff.

If by “a little toxicity” you mean a little bit of aggressiveness, sarcasm, etc., I agree with you. It depends a lot on the community though - in some, allowing it will be counter-productive.

If however you mean harassment and hate speech, as the author of the text, I strongly disagree. If the mod doesn’t curb down those things, they might not be “lording” over the discourse, but other users are - because

• users shut each other up through harassment
• hate speech silences whole groups, as they leave the community

Another detail is that you don’t need to control the discourse to curb down harassment, since it’s only behavioural and not discursive in nature.

So IMO when it comes to those two things the problem is not overzealous mods, but dumb ones not doing due diligence, who are a bit too eager to falsely accuse their own users to be voicing hate speech or harassing each other when it is not the case.

[Sorry for the wall of text.]