As for whether employees should make more money, I'm definitely not against that. Seems to me, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation would be a good start.

The special-charter system wasn't some golden age of corporations being held accountable to society. One of the reasons states abandoned special chartering was because it became associated with favouritism, lobbying, monopoly privileges and corruption. Legislators had something valuable to hand out, so connected businesses could seek preferential charters. General incorporation laws were partly an anti-corruption reform.

By corporations?!? Because that is what we talking about.

Frankly, if we go back far enough we get all the way to slavery and genocide so rose-tinting your glasses about past values doesn't sway me.

McDonald's is already a corporation -- corporatization doesn't apply.

If you don't want corporations to be corporate; I don't what to tell you!

I think computers have made the structure of the present inevitable.

I don't think it's fair to imply that McDonald's is doing anything shady. They have over 2 million workers (although not directly, it's a franchise model). They make a lot of profit but, proportional to the total workforce, it's about average. Hardly something to be outraged about.

If you spread $1 billion evenly among two million workers, that's about $500 per employee per year. That is roughly 25 cents an hour for a full-time worker. Paying 100% health care would be several billion dollars.

The underlying implication here is whether companies should make any profit at all. If the amount of profit allowed is non-zero, what is the correct number? And if there is a correct number, what do you propose to do about it?

People like to believe that enshitifying everything will eventually lead to failure because sucks for us. It does suck for us. But I'm not convinced that karma is coming for them.

For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.

This is exactly the kind of data that every business collects and processes to one degree or another even without an app or loyalty program.

Has anyone thought about building something like this?

How does that work? Are they generating the same project in different languages and comparing the results? What does it mean for the code to be "better"?

https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...

It's almost impossible for a new company to join most of these markets; the major players are so large that they have influence over the retailers, the suppliers, and everyone in the middle.

But every so often successful higher volume/quality/durability products do manage exist for a time but are eventually bought out and the brand destroyed. This has played out over and over.

The market optimizes for profit growth, not for customer satisfaction.