Oh of course. It can't possibly be the case that people oppose psychopathic xenophobes who are committing genocide because psychopathic xenophobes committing genocide is something that is rightly opposed. It must be the case that they actually do it because - checks notes - they're jealous.
Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.
So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That's only going to become more the case with time.
What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?
The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.
This isn't rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.
Where is the corporation getting their funding from?
From the sale of goods and/or services.
Duh.
Someone’s got to be paying them.
Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.
Duh.
So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.
Or more likely not.
Here's just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government's), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.
So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.
And that's just one idea, off the top of my head.
I don't blame them.
Neither the US or Israel can be trusted to negotiate in good faith, and in fact Israel can pretty much be counted on to violate any agreement almost immediately. And to assassinate the negotiators.
I just don't make u-turns at busy intersections, specifically because they're problematic.
If I need to go back the way I just came, I make a left into a parking lot, turn around there, then pull back out onto the street, or if that's not possible, I simply go around the block.
My view is that doing unnecessary things that interrupt the flow of traffic is always a bad idea.
All other considerations aside "Thiel-backed" guarantees all by itself that it's technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benefit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.
Of course. Gambling is a hallmark of civilizations in decline.
The Polymarket thing is a bit different though. It's built on a foundation of saps hoping to strike it big, but it promarily benefits insiders, who are turning their knowledge into financial windfalls.
Just another of the privileges afforded the wealthy and empowered few.
Yes.
And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash's predictions was the idea that federal governments didn't get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The "corporations" had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.
Sure.
They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.
I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.
Governments don't monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it's in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.
No and yes..
A business entity that is proactively protected from liability could not exist without government charter.
However, a business entity could employ its own paramilitary and/or hire mercenaries and effectively make itself immune to liability, which works out to the same thing pretty much.
And I'm reasonably certain that that's the future - that corporations will continue to acknowledge and submit to governments only as long as it's to their advantage to do so, and that when the costs outstrip the benefits, they'll simply stop, and instead manage their properties as essentially states unto themselves. And at that point, whether or not they have an official declaration of their corporate identity will be irrelevant.
Serious question - has Israel ever abided by the terms of a ceasefire?
I don't know of a case in which they haven't violated it, and generally almost immediately.
Weird how so many techbro ideas boil down to registering your identification with the tech oligarchs...
That's part of why I've generally been putting quotation marks around the word "corporation."
It's not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the "government" and its "citizens" will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the "government" will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the "government" will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the "choice" of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.
In either event (or any other - this can't possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between "government" and "citizen" will be notably different from any of the ones we've seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).