I think your opinion is very defensible. Certainly the languages bit is a matter of marginal utility: the more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones, and the easier it is to branch out internationally and achieve a global impact. However, the more languages you have learned, the fewer people there will be left that you can’t directly communicate with or media that you can’t access, the smaller the gain in acquiring them. Nevertheless, it is also common knowledge, and my experience confirms it, that the rarer a languages is as second language, the more pleased its native speakers are at meeting someone who actually bothered to learn it. It’s instant brownie points. And if you have actually mastered their language at a level higher than their own, it turns from approval to outright admiration (and they freak out a little too). So, for example, English will practically open the world to you, but you won’t be ingratiating yourself to anyone because English speakers tend to assume you will talk to them in their language.
Aaaah, it’s all a matter of weighting and pondering stuff that is neither quantifiable nor easy to predict. What a headache.
As for “involving as many people as possible”, employing people gives you the kind of leverage that startups don’t. Your decisions, which no-one can stop you from making (depending on how you justify them) can alter the economic status and employment numbers of large population centres. It will not do for the politicians to get on your bad side. If facebook closes, there are other similar services, and their employees are highly qualified and will find jobs in no time. If amazon closes, there are still tons of libraries, both virtual and real.
If Ikea, Wall Mart, El Corte Inglés, Carrefour, or METRO, close down even one office, it’s an entire municipality that will suffer horribly. If they fall bankrupt, it’s a national catastrophe.
And then don’t get me started about banks (you don’t have as many employees, but you have debtors, which is almost the same thing, except they can’t resign until the contract is over).
The point is to become interests that are too big to fail, so that even their enemies will go out of their way to help, because they have become necessary.
I’m not interested in profit so much as in increasing people’s dependency. If having one more employee gives me zero profit (accounting for all expenditures having and handling them may cost) but also costs me zero, I vote in favour of hiring them.
Once you have a large number of people dependent on you not, say, closing your offices, what do you intend to accomplish with that state of affairs? Governments sometimes offer bailout money (for a price, I believe) to corporations about to go bankrupt which are considered ‘too big to fail’, but I don’t immediately see how you could effectively make demands without appearing hostile.
You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
I think your opinion is very defensible. Certainly the languages bit is a matter of marginal utility: the more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones, and the easier it is to branch out internationally and achieve a global impact. However, the more languages you have learned, the fewer people there will be left that you can’t directly communicate with or media that you can’t access, the smaller the gain in acquiring them. Nevertheless, it is also common knowledge, and my experience confirms it, that the rarer a languages is as second language, the more pleased its native speakers are at meeting someone who actually bothered to learn it. It’s instant brownie points. And if you have actually mastered their language at a level higher than their own, it turns from approval to outright admiration (and they freak out a little too). So, for example, English will practically open the world to you, but you won’t be ingratiating yourself to anyone because English speakers tend to assume you will talk to them in their language.
Aaaah, it’s all a matter of weighting and pondering stuff that is neither quantifiable nor easy to predict. What a headache.
As for “involving as many people as possible”, employing people gives you the kind of leverage that startups don’t. Your decisions, which no-one can stop you from making (depending on how you justify them) can alter the economic status and employment numbers of large population centres. It will not do for the politicians to get on your bad side. If facebook closes, there are other similar services, and their employees are highly qualified and will find jobs in no time. If amazon closes, there are still tons of libraries, both virtual and real.
If Ikea, Wall Mart, El Corte Inglés, Carrefour, or METRO, close down even one office, it’s an entire municipality that will suffer horribly. If they fall bankrupt, it’s a national catastrophe.
And then don’t get me started about banks (you don’t have as many employees, but you have debtors, which is almost the same thing, except they can’t resign until the contract is over).
The point is to become interests that are too big to fail, so that even their enemies will go out of their way to help, because they have become necessary.
I’m not interested in profit so much as in increasing people’s dependency. If having one more employee gives me zero profit (accounting for all expenditures having and handling them may cost) but also costs me zero, I vote in favour of hiring them.
Once you have a large number of people dependent on you not, say, closing your offices, what do you intend to accomplish with that state of affairs? Governments sometimes offer bailout money (for a price, I believe) to corporations about to go bankrupt which are considered ‘too big to fail’, but I don’t immediately see how you could effectively make demands without appearing hostile.
You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
You’d be amazed at how much you can get done just by asking nicely, especially once you have something the other person really wants or needs. In comicbook terms, compare Nightwing (who is awesome at all stages) to Batman (who really really sucks at stage 2).
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
My priors are somewhat different on that—since your examples were from fiction, do you have some evidence for the claim in your first paragraph?