I wouldn't want to hold any Internet-based stocks for "decades". I believe the life span of any public company to be 25 years or less, with Internet service companies being significantly less.
Certainly. There are also many that no longer exist.
From a summary I wrote of "Why Most Things Fail":
Of the 100 largest industrial companies in 1912, by 1995, 29 had gone bankrupt, 48 disappeared (mergers, acquisitions and so on), and 52 survived, but only 19 remained in the top 100. Once you discount the large number of small companies that fail in their first few years, the average lifespan for small companies is similar to that of large firms - and most of them eventually fail.
General Electric is actually over a century old. It was founded in 1892.[1] IBM is just over a century old, founded in 1911 (under a different name, as a merger of three existing companies).[2]
There will always be nation-states. Always. Put ten strangers on an island and they will organically form a hierarchy and political alliances will happen. There will never be a government-less world as long as we're human.
There's a big difference between a government-less world and one without nation-states. Also, for the majority of human existence nation states didnt exist.
A "Lord of the flies" scenario has some costs, and the island scenario set a rules : any of these 10 humans can not move to another island.
As snikto and enki discussed below (great explain guys!) : "using up resources is not valuable by itself. forcing someone to spend on anything, anything at all, does not lead to a good allocation of resources. it might increase GDP, but it does not create value"
I would even say that such a misallocation of resources has a cost - the opportunity cost of the alternative, the proper allocation of resources.
Nation-states existed in Europe before WW2. They may or may not always exist in the future, but now we have something new: countries which borders do not match the ethnic boundaries- the advantage is that citizens are not so strongly bound to a national identity, and thus can start pitting countries against each others.
There is competition between countries for skills. If you are talented and not lucky to have been born in a rich country, you can decide whether to immigrate to Canada, Australia, Germany (etc.) - this is a market.
If you have a european passport, with Shengen rules you freely decided where you are doing to work. Just look at where the talented greeks and spaniards go.
The island scenarios is more like offering people the choice between a german-run island or a greek-run island, each voting with their feet. Sure there still is a cost of having a government, but it's going down, and will go down as fast as new choices are offered.
Identification to nation-states was a limiting factor in the past, but there also seemed seemed to be some kind of network effect where it was harder to be a small country, as it there was some kind of cost (the higher risk of being invaded?)
Now look at Luxembourg and Singapore - it seems than being smaller is no longer a disadvantage.
Certainly there will always be governing structures, of all scales, but the question is: which governence happens at what scale?
The federalism of the United States is a play to push power to a more state-sized scale (taxation, education) while still allowing for powers at a larger scale that need to be there (civil rights, defense, EPA).
Anarchism isn't really about abolishing power structures, it's about pushing more things down into even smaller structures (cults of personality, architectures, local cultural practices, etc).
The idea behind what your OP is saying isn't that nation-states will go away, it's that many of their current roles will be pushed off into larger, global structures whose "muscle" is not military, but cryptographic.
Yesterday I saw a "startup" on /r/startups that was a twitter account that retweets oil prices. People are calling a twitter account a "startup" now. WTF?
Unpopular? In some designer circles maybe, in 90% of working web developers absolutely not. Not to mention that the flow layout techniques are sub-par and worse than tables in every area where they overlap.
It's no coincidence that the w3c finally created a grid layout spec as well as the flex layout to surpass the "flow" mess, or that all desktop UI layout tools use some grid and/or constraint based system for layout.
Plus, content-presentation separation should be at the level of CMS/database/RESTful service where the data come from, not imposed at the level of the published content.
I agree that html tables are used and get the job done, but I would much rather deal with one container div, one 960 div, then 3 section divs for header, content, and footer, then, one or more tables doing the same thing.
It's 2012, and CSS is easy. With a little work, all the problems you can point out can be fixed easily, including flexible grid layouts, and columns, responsive design. Can you even make a flexible table layout?
Also, every site I maintain that uses tables for layout, uses more than one, and it's source is absolutely horrible. While you say that a CMS should level should handle this, that doesn't factor in responsive design, site creation, or massive overhauls to style. Semantics will be an important element in the web soon, and doing html tables for layout, is considered wrong by anyone who cares. http://www.w3.org/2002/03/csslayout-howto
Reverse lottery is a good way to look at it. And for the same reason I don't play the lottery I'm not worried about this. 1/infinity are odds I'm confident I will never hit.
If there were more in-depth documentaries about programmers, you would probably find the same types of personalities reign supreme...emotional, introverted, weird. If you consider yourself "normal" & "emotionally stable", then you probably aren't a very creative programmer.
