[HN Gopher] Institutions try to preserve the problem to which th...
___________________________________________________________________
Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the
solution
Author : walterbell
Score : 1447 points
Date : 2024-02-24 14:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (effectiviology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (effectiviology.com)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It's a good article for those who are unfamiliar with these
| cautionary tales of second order effects and fraud. As someone
| who believes government is a solution to many problems, these
| lessons are critical.
|
| I disagree with the universality of the statement "any
| institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back
| off this in the caveats section.
|
| Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence
| of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight
| is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program,
| asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can
| the problem be eradicated?
|
| A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might
| need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years
| later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such
| organizations should be considered.
| yukkuri wrote:
| Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim
| to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems
| (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater
| wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is
| completely worthless
| christkv wrote:
| If the mandarins salaries and livelihood depend on it they will
| move mountains to sustain the institution. This is human
| nature. The problem with public institutions is that they fase
| few external pressures. A company will eventually die and
| history is littered by the corpses of former industry titans.
| Public institutions on the other hand.
| yukkuri wrote:
| Yeah like all those external pressures that have kept private
| mega corps from polluting, monopolizing, pervasively
| surveiling, brutally exploiting labor, and generating false
| "science" that maintains their dominance even in the face of
| huge global negative effects... Oh, wait...
| christkv wrote:
| In comparison to what? The pristine environmental record of
| the soviet union, north korea, cuba, venezuela, communist
| east europe, cambodia, vietnam, china etc...
| barbarum wrote:
| So, you don't like mega-corps, so we shouldn't have mega-
| corps at all?
| barbarum wrote:
| You don't solve problems by just talking about them you
| internet hero.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think it's when there's no (need for an) exit strategy for
| the people working for institutions set up for solvable
| problems (i.e. reducing the inflated housing prices,
| restructuring other institutions) you get the self preservation
| effect.
|
| That's why for-profit, non-government/community anything is so
| terrible at solving problems. Charities spending 80% of the
| money you give them on marketing efforts. For-profit prisons in
| general. Self-regulation of most industries. The whole plastic
| recycling farce. Unless your institution is built with a real
| intent to solve a problem, and the people put in charge
| actually care, you get a self-serving institute. That doesn't
| just happen in private institutions either, corrupt governments
| accepting bribes and operating on nepotism also tend to set up
| useless institutions that just serve as job mills for friends
| or government officials.
|
| A group created to clean up trash in a city park will exist
| forever if the mayor hires their nephew to run it because he
| was too incompetent to find a job himself.
| yukkuri wrote:
| There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything
| about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be
| prepared to iterate on our efforts".
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's more a criticism of top-down hierarchical control of
| institutions (at any scale) than it is an indictment of humans
| cooperating around some goal
|
| Cui bono makes that clear
| zaik wrote:
| But note how all the examples were private companies or
| enterprising individuals who weren't controlled somehow, but
| simply wanted to protect their profits.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| The political right uses multiple deca-billion-dollar
| megaphones to talk nonstop about this problem as it relates
| to the government while dramatically underrepresenting the
| extent to which it happens in the private sector so that
| they can lobby for privatization as a silver-bullet. I
| think it's fair for the article to shore up the
| complementary point of view. No less fair than what the
| right is doing, at any rate.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Well the difference is, tax slaves are forced at the end
| of a barrel to prop up local governments, and purportedly
| don't do that for free markets
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How much is health insurance compared to local taxes?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Private ownership of land and capital is also enforced at
| the barrel of a gun, lol.
|
| When monopolies are common, every business school student
| openly aspires to rent-seeking moats, and regulators
| snore more loudly every day, the claims that the private
| market is checked by competition frequently ring hollow.
| The big difference between public and private sector is
| that the private sector has _literally_ entitled
| themselves to this rent seeking behavior, while it 's
| only a metaphor in the public sector.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a brilliant
| principle and I think markets are the place to make it
| happen, I just think that strong anticompetitive forces
| are common natural occurrences in free markets and I
| think that the government should play a stronger role in
| checking them.
| jjjjj55555 wrote:
| Often times there's nothing to iterate on because the original
| solution was BS.
| jaystraw wrote:
| you're right. i think that's the difference between cynicism
| and consideration. one immobilizes, one prepares.
| airejtlij wrote:
| This forum seems to be filled with (comments by) people who
| love the "there's no perfect solution so we shouldn't try
| because trying might infringe on my libertarian liberties". I
| need to stop reading the comments.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example,
| even in the context of government. For example, most of the US
| defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media
| complex instead of the uniformed military.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to
| the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed
| military.
|
| Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of
| military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries
| (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll
| expense to employees.
| Footkerchief wrote:
| Looks like you're right -- $551 out of $842 billion, 65%, is
| spent on compensation.
|
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Thanks for looking that up to confirm. My hunch was based
| on Medicare + Medicaid + Social Security eclipsing
| everything else in the US federal budget.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military
| industrial media complex
|
| Even if it were true (which it isn't), most of the money that
| goes to contractors also goes to salaries.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Side topic... but I sure love reading about the MIC from the
| same people that complained about it for decades but now are
| jumping up and down to "Send Help To Ukraine" which is really
| just feed the MIC as a stimulus package.
| jprete wrote:
| This is more or less Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| timmg wrote:
| Ha! I'm sure I've heard of that before -- but didn't remember
| it.
|
| Yesterday I came to this exact conclusion when talking about
| how things work at my job :/
| adbachman wrote:
| This is 100% accurate to my experience working as a software
| developer for the US federal government.
|
| Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and
| refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil
| servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle
| managers.
|
| 18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the
| "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were
| aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were
| never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to
| support the status quo.
| nudgeee wrote:
| Not just institutions, individuals too. I've seen many
| individuals 'dig their heels' into protecting their own pet
| project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
|
| It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively,
| trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions,
| ideas and solutions win, even when it's hard to give up your idea
| or a solution you've worked super hard on.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > It takes maturity and humility to step back
|
| It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of
| which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There
| is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation.
| Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.
|
| This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will
| likely be working hard at the right problem using the right
| strategy.
|
| There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using
| the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to
| accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You don't solve perverse incentives with competition if the
| competition rewards perverse incentives.
|
| Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go
| away.
|
| It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as
| likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go
| away.
|
| Nobody said it did.
|
| I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a
| matter of reality that nobody can predict the future
| perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited
| resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to
| just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not
| "waste" time reevaluating too often.
|
| You can either have one central authority that dictates a
| single direction, and forces all effort down a single path.
| Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the
| solution space in multiple directions simultaneously.
| Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is
| basically just the difference between breadth first, or
| depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what
| motivated the search in the first place.
| soks86 wrote:
| How else can you possibly solve it?
|
| Competition solves everything.
|
| Who gets to mate with who has been answered by competition
| our entire existence.
|
| Striving for non-violent, yet fair, competition is what
| advancing the world is about.
| alexashka wrote:
| You've described cats. Now describe humans.
| breck wrote:
| > individuals 'dig their heels' into protecting their own pet
| project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
|
| Guilty of this.
|
| I worked for about a decade on a pet project to find a new
| family of computer languages designed for both humans and
| machines.
|
| I did not think machines were close to mastering our languages,
| and new languages were needed.
|
| I knew my approach was a long shot, but if I found a way to
| make it work the upside was _huge_.
|
| Then LLMs happened. The possible upside of my approach dropped
| _dramatically_.
|
| I have been trying to "rewire" my brain and re-purpose the
| neurons that evolved over a decade to keep turning my approach
| around from different perspectives. It is very hard.
|
| It is easy to get a sapling to grow into a desired shape. It is
| much harder to reshape a fully grown tree. Just the physic of
| it.
|
| To tie this back to the original article, if you model an
| individual's brain like Minsky's Society of Mind, you would
| have neural agents that create a circuit ("Institution") to
| solve a problem, and some of those agents focus on the task of
| preserving that circuit. Without those Institution preserving
| neurons, you would never keep the circuit going long enough to
| see through a contrarian idea. But the downside is that the
| organization will persist even when it is no longer a good bet.
| User3456335 wrote:
| Tbf, half the linguistics discipline thought that language's
| grammar was somehow hardcoded into our brain, which is
| clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work, so you're
| not the only one who had misconceptions.
|
| Perhaps you can turn your idea around slightly into finding a
| language that finds a balance between formality and
| universality, rather than computers and humans. Because even
| though computers now speak our language they do not use it in
| a logical way at all (arguably because we humans don't).
|
| And while mathematics is very formal it has a lot of trouble
| expressing ideas from different branches that aren't as
| formal. Things like fuzzy logics have been created and many
| things like that but they are still very much on the formal
| side.
|
| Perhaps you could even derive an academic language for a
| specific field, perhaps standardizing between synonymous
| constructions. You could even use LLMs to accelerate the
| process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work
| easier!
| breck wrote:
| > You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe
| LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
|
| Oh I 100% agree. LLMs are amazing. Plenty of neural agents
| in my brain are on board. I use them everyday to work on
| problems in a way not possible before.
|
| I think what I was trying to express is that a contrarian
| idea might require developing a large number of your own
| original solver brain circuits that are very dumb, always
| running, trying to brute force a path for your idea to
| work.
|
| Later you can then develop new circuits that recognize
| there's now a better approach, but those solver circuits
| that you grew are still in your brain, occasionally still
| running (like sometimes when I wakeup in the morning),
| because that's what you trained them to do.
|
| In other words, there's a risk to taking on a contrarian
| idea in that you have to build up lots of brain circuits
| that will stick around for life, even if your idea turns
| out to be wrong. I'm sure people have written about this
| more eloquently. I need to search more.
| User3456335 wrote:
| Ahh yeah I was trying to help you repurpose these
| circuits given the new information. But perhaps that's
| not possible.
|
| It sounds very similar to what happens with love. In my
| experience, at least, when you love someone you build up
| these circuits that care about the other person and you
| cannot break them down, it seems. You can ignore them but
| then there's this part of your brain you're ignoring.
|
| So perhaps you could say you were/are literally in love
| with the idea.
| breck wrote:
| > when you love someone you build up these circuits that
| care about the other person and you cannot break them
| down, it seems.
|
| Ha! My experience as well. Even after many years when you
| see that person again those circuits turn back on (and
| are very strong).
|
| That is a bigger more important thing. But also, on the
| topic at hand, an interesting and probably strong
| analogy!
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > ...clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work
|
| This is well off topic now, but this doesn't follow at all.
| LLMs aren't brains and don't even resemble them that
| closely. LLMs demonstrate that it's _possible_ to learn
| grammar from scratch, not that _humans actually do_. I for
| one think it 's pretty plausible that humans have a little
| bit of neural wetware-acceleration for syntax. In much the
| same way, it's possible to implement AES with just an ALU
| and memory operations, but your CPU probably has special
| hardware anyway.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Don't forget that people in any organisation also need
| opportunities to get some experience which, I guess, isn't ever
| an optimal course of action for the task at hand. Of you have
| an idea and and opportunity to do something that's good to
| actually fit in a bigger picture, paying for a solution that
| does the exact thing might be more efficient, but it does rob
| that ones specific person of an arguably invaluable
| opportunity.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Not just institutions, individuals too.
|
| Individuals and organisations can also be _impostors_.
|
| The impostor as individual cannot usually scale the lies. An
| organisation can be a total imposture or have internal
| structures that are impostor structures.
|
| This is not exclusive to government.
| Lichtso wrote:
| The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky
| principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a
| budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives
| to prolong the problem.
|
| I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help
| vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies /
| institutions.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would
| help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies /
| institutions.
|
| If only more government programs operated this way. Yet instead
| of (for example) a solution to poverty, we get The Poverty
| Industrial Complex.
| malfist wrote:
| Poverty is famously a one time, single solution issue. /s
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| It might be. How can we say when all be get are "solutions"
| that deepen it, perpetuate it, normalize it, etc.?
|
| So yeah, I'm glad we agree. Thanks for proving my point.
|
| Hint: Start by reading Matt Desmond's "Evicted" and then go
| from there.
|
| Also, watch the Rob Redford film "The Candidate". Make note
| of how many of "the issues" - and the associated narratives
| - persist today. Imagine selling a product that promises a
| solution but ultimately only keeps selling you promises.
| malfist wrote:
| I ate lunch yesterday, why am I hungry today?
|
| Clearly there's a lunch industrial complex
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Have you read the Desmond book? A simple yes or no will
| suffice.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Of you had a family crop field or partnership in a
| sandwich company I can tell you you'd forget about hunger
| charles_f wrote:
| There's more to it than that. That's the behaviour of
| protecting your dungeon. See the example of the bus company in
| Ontario.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| Such an important principle when considering the governance of
| and improvement of societies.
|
| I noted that the article didn't mention the War on Drugs;
| probably books have been written about the Shirky principle and
| the US's war on drugs.
| ballenf wrote:
| Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the
| form entrenched players use to preserve their problem.
|
| It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from
| too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the
| certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very
| real.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Maybe governments should provide 'pro deo' certification
| services for new players that wish to enter the market.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's
| the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power
| of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes
| much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact
| the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self
| preservation.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Exactly. You should shape an environment where institutions
| _cannot_ exist if they don't solve the problem. E.g., 'no cure,
| no pay', set and fixed subsidies, under-performance penalties,
| competition.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Or at least put a finite deadline and/or other limits (e.g.,
| budget) on the "project".
|
| Instead we back unproven "solutions" and then keep throwing
| money at them in an insanity sorta way. Boggles the fucking
| mind.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Institutions are composed of people who expect to continue
| to get paid and therefore their incentives are aligned. If
| changing jobs was less costly it might alleviate the
| problem somewhat.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Why change jobs when you can align your self interest
| with your current job?
| CPLX wrote:
| The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that
| carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the
| problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of
| "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common
| carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus
| services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed.
|
| Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are
| worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the
| argument here is a strawman.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems
| that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because
| they're both related to complex wetware systems.
|
| > Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My
| favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on
| the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company
| starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a
| Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the
| company will no longer service your building unless you buy their
| standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on
| their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management
| union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street
| again anyways.
|
| > People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are
| Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in
| reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
|
| This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:
|
| > A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The
| Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old
| male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US
| hasn't had a draft in 51 years.
|
| https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html (one of my
| many blogs)
| electrondood wrote:
| This was exactly what came to mind. Thanks for posting the
| reference
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Great book. I learned from its Wikipedia page that the author
| (John Gall) pitched 30 different publishers, got rejected by
| all of them, and then published it himself. It got discussed
| in academic papers and then the New York Times picked it up.
| And we're still talking about it 50 years later. Given that
| the central theme of the book is "systems barely work" I very
| much like to imagine Gall taking all of the rejections in
| stride because he was able to view the publishers as just
| another system that has its own goals and perhaps isn't
| really working as it should.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the
| trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
|
| Isn't that just free association?
|
| Unless they signed a binding agreement that prohibited striking
| whatsoever, I can't see why they shouldn't be able to.
| brookst wrote:
| I didn't see a moral judgment against striking, just an
| observation that the elaborate systems set up to collect
| trash sometimes end up intentionally not collecting trash.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The union and its member's intentions sure, not the
| intention of the overall 'elaborate system'. Because the
| union and its member are only components of the larger
| system.
|
| i.e. A system that doesn't take into account the free
| association of its components is incoherent.
| brookst wrote:
| I think you're missing the original point. It was nothing
| about unions or free association. In fact, the point was
| that ALL systems become incoherent as they scale.
|
| The existence of unions and free association is _built-
| in_ to the argument that systems designed to pick up
| trash sometimes intentionally do not pick up trash.
|
| It's not a moral judgment that these systems are broken
| and therefore workers should be slaves. It is an
| acknowledgment that complex systems end up having to meet
| conflicting priorities and therefore become, as you say,
| incoherent.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Failure to collect trash during a strike is not "becoming
| incoherent as [it] scale[s]".
|
| Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not
| a failure of a trash collecting system.
|
| Inability to regularly collect trash is the failure mode
| we're concerned about.
| vdaea wrote:
| >Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not
| a failure of a trash collecting system.
|
| Of course it is. If your phone fails to make calls under
| certain conditions, that is a failure of the system, and
| we try to fix it (for example by deploying more antennas,
| or by fixing software bugs in it).
|
| If workers refuse to pick up trash, we can also fix that
| (ask Ronald Reagan).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's no expectation of continuous (24/7) trash pickup,
| unlike your phone where (these days) you expect it to
| work all the time.
|
| If the regular collection schedule is every 7 days, and
| it turns into 14 or even 21, for the most part your trash
| is still being collected within the bounds of "yeah, my
| trash gets collected".
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > even though the US hasn't had a draft in 51 years
|
| That smuggles an assumption that US will never have draft again
| ysofunny wrote:
| maybe the American way to have a draft is to fight a civil
| war?
| babyshake wrote:
| It seems as though there is essentially no scenario where
| the American public would accept a mandatory draft. Times
| have changed.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Seemed that way in 1940 too
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Did it? Every single person who was draft-eligible in
| 1940 was born before WW1 ended.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I've done this arithmetic a few times now and I think
| you're wrong: someone born the week after ww1 ended
| (November 1918) would have been 22 in November 1940, when
| the first draft registration was held for men who had
| reached 21. So there should be about 12 months of births
| in there.
| ysofunny wrote:
| all I'm saying is how mandatorily drafting people to go
| fight a war in another continent is extremely hard
|
| whereas getting people to fight in a way that's happening
| near YOUR (meaning their particular case) state border is
| super easy, barely an inconvenience
| LoganDark wrote:
| Yeah, but no draftee is going to do a backflip, snap the
| bad guy's neck and save the day. Drafting people gets
| them killed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It will happen, and the American people will accept it,
| for the same reasons they accept tons of things today
| that are done against their best interests: Ideological
| divisions and loyalty, propaganda saturation, fear of an
| outside enemy, (possibly) religion, and the general
| desire to use the political system to punish "others"
| rather than help themselves.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _will happen, and the American people will accept it_
|
| America will automate warfare before that happens.
| vajrabum wrote:
| It also maybe implies that the selective service is
| responsible for it's own funding and ignores that it's entire
| a creature of DoD and Congress. It's hardly a bureaucracy run
| amok for its own purposes. The funding in 2022 was $31.7M.
| DoD has a lot of contingency plans and that's not a lot of
| money to spend to fund one of them even if the likelihood
| putting it into action is small.
| opo wrote:
| 31 million dollars is actually a lot of money to waste on
| an arguably immoral program. Multiply those tens of
| millions by the 40 years of the program and you are talking
| about a lot of money that should not have been spent.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft
| again.
|
| The nature of warfare has changed. You can't give someone a
| few weeks of basic and throw them on the battlefield anymore.
| They need to be experts on a variety of technical topics as
| well as how to do combined arms maneuver in large formations.
| You need trained professionals.
|
| If the US is ever placed in a position so desperate that a
| draft is done again, rebuilding a new selective service
| administration overnight will be a trivial problem compared
| to everything else going on.
| lesuorac wrote:
| You don't need to throw everybody onto the battlefield.
|
| The standing armed forces and reserve will need a lot of
| logistical support that can be done with little additional
| training. Plenty of people are forklift drivers and cooks
| in their day jobs.
|
| That said, it's not like the SSA is really needed. If a war
| got bad enough to need a draft I'm sure congress would let
| the IRS fork over a list of 18+ males. Or even say 18+
| males with certain occupations on their tax returns (i.e.
| Doctors).
| stackskipton wrote:
| Like most systems, on the surface it appears extremely
| simple. You start to look at the issue deeper and it
| becomes extremely complex. Start drafting all the
| doctors? Sure, what happens when you draft an
| ophthalmologist? Are they even useful for more than
| TikTok videos? What if they have asthma? How many Doctors
| can we take without crippling the home front?
|
| Furthermore, we start up a draft. We draft the guy who
| does calibrations for Maverick missiles in factory. Come
| to find out, it takes 3 months to train that guy and
| there are very few of them. It's also really important
| weapon system. Now what?
|
| SSA constantly holds mock drafts to try and answer all
| these questions.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a
| draft again.
|
| It's more likely that it will, the longer it exists. Saying
| "it will never", implies a pessimistic view of US
| durability. I think this is a fair interpretation, I can
| agree with. I understand this is not exactly what you
| meant.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The presumption that a draft is inevitable over growing
| time is exactly what I'm saying is nonsense.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I don't know why anyone would believe that, as I implied.
| The future is unknowable, but history has shown it takes
| less than a generation to militarize any nation. Assuming
| it will be different this time around, is not
| "overwhelmingly" likely.
| niemandhier wrote:
| The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. The need for
| human material is so large, that the Ulranians are
| considering forcing citizens that are in other countries to
| return and submit to the draft.
|
| Any war that will be fought between powers that can easily
| destroy each other will be fought in the Clausewitz way:
| Throw bodies at each other until one side is not willing to
| suffer the losses anymore.
|
| Should the US be China ever go to war, that will be the war
| that we will see. And since China would pick a battle
| ground south of the topic of cancer ( NATOs southern
| border) , that bodycount would mostly be US.
|
| FYI Hawai is south the topic of cancer.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've
| run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using
| conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on
| a scale beyond a platoon.
|
| Please explain to me how the trench warfare in Ukraine is
| relevant to a potential war with China, which will be
| fought almost entirely by the Navy and Airforce. In fact,
| the Marines are so convinced of this they gave up all
| their tanks to reorganize as a more agile force that
| could island hop while deploying anti ship missiles.
|
| The idea that a war with China will require an infantry
| draft is preposterous. It's no longer 1940. Attempting
| any form of amphibious landing without naval and air
| superiority is suicide. That means if China ever lands
| boots on Taiwan, the war is already over, and a draft
| would serve no purpose.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Let me design my personal nightmare scenario:
|
| 1. Conservative forces in the southern states continue to
| claim that the Federal Government is trying to change the
| voting dynamics by naturalising immigrants.
|
| 2. Some form of legal argument is made against the
| legality of the vote of naturalised citizens in state
| level.
|
| 3. Hawaiian nationalists, secretly backed by China adopt
| that.
|
| 4. Some form of secession movement in Hawaii is formed.
|
| 5. China recognises independent Hawaii.
|
| 6. The US cannot accept to loose its influence in that
| part of the Ocean.
|
| 7. War by proxy, on US soil.
|
| This is all very unlikely, and would make a good plot for
| a Novel BUT:
|
| Historically the US has a much weaker claim on Hawaii (
| which was annexed agains the will of the population) than
| China on Taiwan and there is already friction with the
| native Hawaiian population e.g. by Zuckerberg
| circumventing traditional local inheritance laws to build
| his mansion.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I don't think there's any reason to talk about a civil
| war in that sense. It's pure fantasy. That's not to say
| I'm unconcerned about right wing extremists but that sort
| of scenario is just nonsense. If anything they'll try to
| capture control of US military leadership instead.
| concordDance wrote:
| Ukraine is a war of attrition because its primarily being
| supplied by other countries which are dripfeeding
| supplies while Russia has to slowly unmothball a lot of
| kit.
|
| If the USA actually went to total war it would likely be
| over long before the average Joe Blogs can be turned into
| a useful warfighter.
| sofixa wrote:
| The Russian invasion of Ukraine implies otherwise.
|
| It's unlikely the US will find itself in such a conflict
| soon due to their technological advantage. However,
| multiple simultaneous engagements can stretch the available
| manpower to such an extent that a draft is needed.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've
| run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using
| conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on
| a scale beyond a platoon.
|
| If the US military stepped into the Ukraine war, and
| there was somehow no possibility of nuclear escalation,
| the Russian military would be decimated within a matter
| of a week or two, and that's not overly optimistic
| thinking on my part. The incompetence of the VKS as well
| as Russia's mechanized formations has been gallingly
| clear.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't know - there were several effective land armies in
| WW2 - Germany, US, UK (though small), Russia from 1942 or
| so. They didn't have it much easier then. There was
| technology then, which was simpler but also more raw. What
| they did have was good officers, NCOs and training. I don't
| see reason to believe that a side in the Ukraine war has
| these.
| brookst wrote:
| It feels similar to the way agile development sometimes
| ossifies into rigid processes that defeat the purpose.
|
| Humans just seem wired to want to find "the solution" and the
| call things done.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in
| reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
|
| This quote applies to more than the people at the top. I
| thought office backstabbing and power plays happened at the
| senior management level when I was young, which left me
| unprepared for how much subterfuge and infighting came from ICs
| trying to be king of their little circle within a company.
| Recognizing and getting away from the people who compete by
| putting others down is a valuable skill in the workplace for
| anyone, not just the king.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Yes, totally applies to everyone within the system. When I
| first read that I immediately started pondering how my actual
| work is different than my stated role. The example of the
| king is just the most quickly grokkable example IMO
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| IMO the most valuable function a manager can perform is to
| quickly identify and fire toxic people.
|
| Unfortunately few managers seem able to do it.
| 121789 wrote:
| These all boil down to "any collection of organisms will act
| the same as one organism". It will focus on survival and self
| interest first. It's an emergent property from the incentives
| of the (potentially well-meaning) individuals
|
| Useful for thinking through questions like "does my
| organization/city/etc need this new team/committee/department
| to exist?"
| gmd63 wrote:
| Human body is made of trillions of cellular organisms, the
| healthy ones know when their time is up and they die off via
| apoptosis
|
| When they stay longer than they're due, and divert blood
| that's better spent elsewhere, that's cancer
| staunton wrote:
| Your point being?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My
| favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up
| on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The
| company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they
| shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying
| that the company will no longer service your building unless
| you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the
| robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the
| waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts
| piling up on the street again anyways.
|
| That analogy is bit weak because strikes don't go on forever
| and trash pickings always resume. The city is not in the same
| state of perpetual trash everywhere it was in before setting
| up/contracting the waste management company.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I don't think Gall would disagree with you. He says "systems
| tend to oppose their own function". He doesn't flat-out say
| "systems don't work." He would probably explain its
| functioning in terms of these axioms:
|
| > A Simple System, Designed From Scratch, Sometimes Works.
|
| > A Complex System That Works Is Invariably Found To Have
| Evolved From A Simple System That Works.
|
| He might also direct your attention to this one:
|
| > The Total Amount Of Anergy In The Universe Is Constant.
| Gall defines anergy as the negative of energy. See also
| clonal anergy. "The sum total of problems facing the
| community has not changed. They have merely changed their
| form and relative importance."
|
| You have reduced the trash on the streets, but where did you
| shift the anergy by reducing the "trash-on-street" issue?
|
| The real fun IMO is contemplating all the other axioms in
| combination with the trash collection system:
|
| > New Systems Mean New Problems.
|
| You started out with a trash problem, and now you've got a
| union problem. Maybe also a powerful mafia-connected monopoly
| problem.
|
| > The Bigger The System, The Narrower And More Specialized
| The Interface With Individuals.
|
| To the waste collection company I am surely just an address,
| 1 trash bin, 1 recycling bin, and 1 compost bin.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The purpose of the waste management company is not to manage
| waste, it is to gain control of waste management. That's the
| difference.
|
| If you have a problem, often your solution just means you
| have the same problem but now lack the agency to control it.
|
| Once the waste management company has control, they can then
| extract the majority of surplus from the problem being solved
| so that if your cost if the problem is unsolved is x, your
| cost if the problem is solved becomes x-e.
|
| The surplus e shrinks as the waste management company gains
| more control of the process. With sufficient control, e can
| even go negative.
|
| The net result is that you have not created surplus for
| yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus
| to.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > The surplus e shrinks as the waste management company
| gains more control of the process. With sufficient control,
| e can even go negative.
|
| > The net result is that you have not created surplus for
| yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the
| surplus to.
|
| That's a good argument for bigger governments instead of a
| governments hiring private entities whose only goals are to
| capture surplus :).
| renewiltord wrote:
| Government departments are not immune to this structure.
| It's a fundamental property of organizations. It's why
| you'll find empire building in private companies too.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Interestingly, this happens even if you remove the profit
| motive, say by making it a government entity or a non-
| profit with fixed pay structure. The surplus just goes into
| diffuse inefficiencies instead of being efficiently
| channeled into someones pocket.
|
| Maybe it's just that people still profit from bigger
| organizations by means of prestige, influence, etc.
| Whatever the cause, most organizations seem to try to grow
| to the size equivalent to the value of the solution, not
| the cost of delivering the solution.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yes! Exactly! I think that's the insight there. It's not
| the specifics of the org structure that manifest the
| behavior.
| InSteady wrote:
| Also weird example because it's basically describing the
| process of improving efficiency.. picking up trash every day
| is a waste of human resources and petroleum. Non-standard
| cans waste the potential benefits of automation. Poor labor
| relations are wasteful by hoarding the benefit of an
| enterprise away from the workers who make it a viable
| endeavor, and shunting responsibility for the workers'
| healthcare, retirement, safety nets, and wellbeing onto
| society.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective. I agree that improving
| efficiency is a fair counterargument.
|
| > picking up trash every day
|
| Yeah, I think that Gall should have started with "twice a
| week" instead of daily (he might actually use "twice a
| week" in the book, and the "daily" reference is an error on
| my part). When you start from bi-weekly to weekly, I'm not
| sure if the improving efficiency argument holds up that
| well. I could see twice a week being as efficient as once a
| week.
|
| Not sure about the automation argument in terms of improved
| efficiency. Brazilian trash collectors work very quickly
| and do not rely on automation. However I think they're also
| subjected to more occupational hazard by personally
| handling more trash. Maybe they're not more efficient. Even
| if you are more efficient, does the "anergy" (i.e. shifting
| the problem) idea mean that your improved efficiency
| essentially enables the community to generate far more
| trash per capita?
|
| Re: unions to be clear, there's no moral judgment intended.
| It's just another example of the system opposing its own
| intended function. The purpose is to collect trash,
| striking workers is one of the ways that the system opposes
| itself. Also it might be relevant to remember that Gall was
| writing back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure there strikes were
| a lot more frequent back then.
|
| You can replace the trash collection example with the US
| federal taxation system if the details of the trash example
| are distracting. Think of all the ways that the taxation
| system is set up to push against its own clear goal of
| collecting tax revenue. It's not really about explaining
| why it is that way, the most profound insight for me is
| this curiously common phenomenon of a system opposing its
| own purpose. One day I dream of coming up with a rigorous
| analysis of this in terms of entropy
| westurner wrote:
| Systemantics (1977, 1986, 2002) > Contents:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics#Contents
| patcon wrote:
| New printing might be coming up! His wife (and heir)
| suggested to a friend that he might be invited to write the
| forward to the next one. He has cases and cases of books in
| his basement, and has given them to all his students for
| years :)
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| That would be fantastic. I was hoping for a new edition.
| westurner wrote:
| Linked Data! IDK YAML-LD for TinaCMS in Git, but then also
| Jupyter-Book because it supports notebooks and Index
| generation with Sphinx.
|
| Aarne-Thompson-Uther ATC character/plot story codes as
| Linked Data would be neat, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...
|
| IIRC I sent an email to a robotics team about cataloguing
| metadata for supported procedures as (JSON-LD) Linked Data;
| there also so that it's easy to add attributes and also to
| revise the schema of Classes and Properties.
|
| Compared to Ctrl-F'ing a PDF copy of an ebook,
|
| Client-side JS to fuzzy search (and auto complete) over
| just the names of the patterns/headings in the book would
| be cool; and then also search metadata attributes of each.
|
| The facts in Mediawiki (Wikipedia,) infoboxes are regularly
| scraped by dbpedia. Wikidata is also a Wikipedia project,
| but with schema.
|
| Dbpedia:
|
| dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm:
| https://dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm
|
| dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms:
| http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms
|
| dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns:
| https://dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns
|
| IIRC there used to be a longer list of {software, and
| project management} antipatterns on wikipedia? It may have
| been unfortunately and sort of tragically removed due to
| being original research without citations.
|
| Anti-pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
|
| Also there's an Antipatterns catalog wiki:
| https://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog
|
| There are probably more useful systems patterns to be mined
| from: the Fowler patterns books like "Patterns of
| Distributed Systems (2022)" [1] and "Patterns of Enterprise
| Architecture", Lamport's "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie
| Lamport", Leslie Valient's Distributed Systems work,
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234304
|
| Perhaps there's also general systems theory insight to be
| gained from limits and failures in [classical and quantum]
| Universal Function Approximation; general AL/ML limits and
| Systemantics.
|
| Universal approximation theorem; simulacra: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
| westurner wrote:
| Whoops, I mixed up the comment forms:
|
| More notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497800
| cratermoon wrote:
| Gall mentions the example of an organization founded to conquer
| polio. With that disease all but eradicated, the foundation
| almost collapsed, but instead changed the goal to conquer
| genetic defects. Very little changed about what the
| organization did, and the new goal is one that isn't likely to
| _ever_ be completely achieved.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| That doesn't seem like an entirely bad thing, though. Once
| you have an organization built up to solve a problem,
| shifting those resources into solving another problem is a
| reasonable next step. This is not the same as TFA, which
| talks about organizations preventing the problem from being
| solved.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > That doesn't seem like an entirely bad thing, though.
|
| Not at all. It's an example of a good pivot. Probably Gall
| thought it rare enough to mention it in a book otherwise
| full of wisdom about how systems go wrong.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I disagree. When you've solved the problem the best thing
| to do is to celebrate, give resources back, and _then_
| organize to solve another problem if you want. Switching
| missions is a bait and switch for your supporters and
| should be avoided.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Organizations are expensive and hard to build. If you
| liquidate an organization, you might free up some modest
| amount of cash in a bank account (and maybe some
| furniture, office supplies, etc.) but the cost of
| rebuilding that same organization will be vastly higher
| than the money freed up. It's like tearing the copper out
| of a working industrial air conditioner and selling it
| for scrap: a huge waste and a loss of value in absolute
| terms. Perfectly reasonable to give back money to recent
| donors who opt out and raise it over again, though.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a classic problem. The best example I have of it is
| probably Mozilla. They went out in the beginning to set up
| the open web. They won. Complete and total success. The web
| is uniformly open and standards based. The major browsers are
| open source and on open source engines.
|
| Unmitigated and total victory.
|
| So what's next? Well, that's what they're struggling with.
| What to do with a non profit that achieves its goals?
| medstrom wrote:
| I'm sure you can find a better example, because Mozilla's
| goal needs continuous maintenance. If they don't continue
| providing a competitive browser, Chrome might start playing
| the role of the IE of old, free to disregard those
| standards you mention.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Selective service is a terrible example because it is designed
| to draft for an unknown future war, not for a current one.
| dweinus wrote:
| > Your city has a problem with trash
|
| ...doesn't that entire problem rest on the fact that the
| unstated goal is to pick up the trash at the lowest cost labor
| will bear? That yields service reduction, automation, and labor
| disputes. When you look at it that way, the organization is
| seeking the goal, not fighting it. I think there is truth in
| the general idea, but a correlary that no one sees value in
| continuing to solve a problem that has been solved once. They
| always imagine it will get cheaper, meanwhile those who create
| expertise in it see themselves as more valuable with time, and
| that creates tension.
| mizzao wrote:
| As soon as I read this, I thought of TurboTax and its mission to
| preserve the crappy system of filing US taxes so that its
| software can continue to profit.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| My first thought was of the 2 major US political parties and
| their mission of promising things they have no intention of
| ever doing to get votes so they can win elections, take away
| more of our freedoms and redistribute more wealth from the many
| to the few. TurboTax is also a great example though.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| This is quite independent of the US. The state functions
| purely to protect the interests of the dominant class. In the
| US, the dominant class happens to be capital owners, but
| that's true in most of the world these days.
| jjjjj55555 wrote:
| I tend to agree, but then I look at Europe and I say, who
| is the ruling class here? In the US it's obvious that
| corporations run everything, but that doesn't seem to be
| the case in western Europe.
| cheschire wrote:
| That's because western europe is the ruling class.
| jjjjj55555 wrote:
| All of the people of western Europe are the ruling class?
| LOL I doubt any of them feel that way. What are they
| ruling exactly?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Just because they occasionally legislate USB-C chargers
| doesn't make them bastions of socialism, lol.
| jjjjj55555 wrote:
| I know they're not socialist, but they're also not
| clearly dominated by giant corporations the way the US
| is. Who is the ruling class then?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Means & motive are still largely governed by whether you
| own things for a living or work for a living. The pay to
| exist vs get paid to exist dynamic is alive and well over
| there and the debates are all quite familiar. After all
| they invented the rules and we just copy-pasted them with
| a few small modifications. The ownership class just isn't
| _as_ dominant as it is in the US at the moment, for
| better and for worse.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Is it possible that they pass USB-C charging and data
| privacy laws in Europe _because_ the companies affected
| are primarily American companies not European companies?
|
| Likewise, I imagine they pass anti-fossil fuel laws
| because there aren't really any major fossil fuel
| producing countries in Europe besides Russia which is
| both a pariah and the continent's gas station.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| Not countries producing but there's huge oil companies
| based in Europe (BP, Shell, Total)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_g
| as_...
| psychoslave wrote:
| I won't say this is a good representation of every
| european country, but in France, basically two bilionary
| own all mainstream private press media, the rich class
| basically built Macron to push their agenda, and most
| important laws anyway come from Europe transpositions
| where only those that can build a perpetual lobby service
| can push a topic into a directive.
|
| So yes obviously Europe is a paradise of direct democracy
| where every citizen bloom thanks to a social structure
| made to help each of them thrive and reach the best
| version of themselves acting everyday for an harmonious
| society free of any anxiety about future that promise
| only bright shiny days for the masses and their children.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| >> the 2 major US political parties and their mission of
| promising things they have no intention of ever doing
|
| > This is quite independent of the US.
|
| Happens less in electoral systems where the 2nd party can
| become 3rd overnight. Politics become less rigid.
| philwelch wrote:
| Multiparty systems can become completely deadlocked as
| well. Belgium has had complete deadlocks because nobody
| can form a coalition, Israel had five elections in three
| years for similar reasons, Britain was effectively
| deadlocked under Theresa May, and Canada has had outright
| minority governments.
|
| I also wouldn't describe US politics as "rigid" just
| because we have the same two parties, because each party
| has different factions and some of the most powerful
| factions were either marginal or completely nonexistent a
| couple decades ago.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The biggest problem with the U.S. system isn't that there
| are only two parties (that's a problem, just not the
| biggest one). It's that both parties need to agree in
| order to pass anything (due to the senate filibuster),
| which as far as I know is unique among democracies.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| I'm not saying that to say that the us is any better, but
| simply for context for what happens when you don't need
| all the parties to approve:
|
| France effectively has that by way of the infamous 49.3.
| the majority party coalition can effectively force all
| others to accept a law, without ever presenting it for a
| vote.
|
| The caveat is that the other parties can start a vote of
| no confidence and dissolve the government with a simple
| majority, but in reality this never happens because
| dissolving the government over [pension reform, the
| budget, insert issue here] is disproportionate.
|
| The current government's lack of caring about their voter
| base because of the Overton windows shifting to the right
| has obviously aggravated this.
| philwelch wrote:
| The filibuster is just a product of the Senate rules and
| could be changed at any time. There's no incentive to do
| so now because the Democrats currently control the Senate
| but they couldn't pass anything even without the
| filibuster because the Republicans control the House. I
| suspect it's going to happen with the next trifecta.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The state functions purely ...
|
| any sentence that starts this way is just walking straight
| into its own falsity.
|
| No human system as complex as "the state" ever functions
| "purely" to do anything. Instead, it's a venue in which
| different interests and power levels sometimes compete and
| sometimes cooperate, sometimes achieving goals and often
| not.
| mgfist wrote:
| Biden passed the most comprehensive climate law in US
| history. The most unbelievable part is that the law was
| nearly unchanged from what was written by climate experts.
| Usually bills start out looking good, then get frankensteined
| by the hundreds of stakeholders that want to cram their shit
| into it. For once, we got a pretty clean bill that will
| actually do good (based on the climate experts I've read).
|
| Form your own opinions, but I had to mention _real_ action
| that happened.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I think the more archetypal example is that _treating_ a
| disease is a lot more profitable than _curing_ a disease --
| would the Epipen manufacturer ever develop and market a allergy
| _vaccine_ that cured an allergy with a one time shot?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is one reason it's essential to have a free enterprise
| system, where _anyone_ can take on such problems.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Why would this happen when it's more profitable not to?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| How do you make profit not doing something?
|
| Right now I'm not doing _billions_ of things, and don 't
| see a cent is coming in!
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| If it's too free, nobody will do the research because
| they'll get scooped by copycats while everyone will claim
| to have a cure because they'll already have the customer's
| money by the time their fraud is discovered. Freedom is a
| good default and a good guiding principle, but it's a
| terrible absolute principle.
| sitkack wrote:
| Or a system that removes profit from the equation. From the
| article, I don't think any one bureaucratic system is
| immune from the effect.
|
| In the tech sector, we see many examples of the disruptor
| opening a temporary wedge to either get acquired by the
| dominant player or becoming the new hegemonist.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A system where it's not profitable to solve problems
| won't do much problem solving.
| owisd wrote:
| This is just taking the rational consumer model,
| forgetting it's just a model and treating it as a fact of
| life, and then inventing corollaries from it. Plenty of
| people find intrinsic value in solving problems without
| there needing to be a profit. See, e.g. Open Source
| Software, The Apollo Program, Academia, the BBC.
| fallingknife wrote:
| And that only works for problems that are cheap to solve.
| Most aren't.
| rented_mule wrote:
| You are replying to a post that references exceptionally
| expensive efforts. The inflation adjusted cost of the
| Apollo Program was hundreds of billions of dollars[1]. By
| what measure is that cheap? Maybe I'm missing intended
| sarcasm?
|
| [1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Apollo Program, Academia, and the BBC all pay their
| workers, which makes it profitable for them to do the
| work.
|
| I get your point: These are not for profit enterprises
| and they still get important work done.
|
| I'm making a different point: People don't work for the
| benefit of others without being rewarded.
|
| Open Source Software is not a bad counter example. I
| think there are rewards in the joy of programming, making
| a name for yourself, and a few other things, but I'll
| concede that there is some nuance there.
| sitkack wrote:
| Spoken like a true Ferengi.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Free enterprise is not a necessary precondition for
| research. You'll note how much of the last 50 years of
| technological advancements were direct or indirect results
| of government funded research programs.
| fabian2k wrote:
| One of the most successful drugs in recent times was one that
| actually cured a previously chronic and not curable disease.
| It was also a controversial one because it was very
| expensive. But Solvadi, which cured Hepatitis C was certainly
| a huge commercial success and shows that the whole idea that
| pharma companies are never incentivized to cure diseases
| instead of treating them is just wrong.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Nice example, but one exception doesn't disprove a trend.
| fabian2k wrote:
| What trend? In which cases specifically are companies
| avoiding to create a cure that would be possible and
| promising?
| kortilla wrote:
| What trend? You need to show evidence of cures being
| suppressed many times to indicate any kind of trend.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Any trend. I'm not making a claim--simply a logical
| statement. Those making claims need to show evidence.
| pydry wrote:
| Or the carbon/nuclear industries' PR campaigns to foment
| support to maintain their subsidies and keep them away from
| solar + wind.
| gadders wrote:
| Charities too.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| There's a lot of businesses like this that rely on "complexity"
| or "fragmentation" of existing systems, particularly in the US
| where laws and standards differ across all states. Another
| example is a business like Segment---they profit off of the
| complexity and incompatibility of other companies' products,
| and would likely oppose or delay an open standard.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Avalara is another one
| JackFr wrote:
| Healthcare in the United States.
|
| The insurers have somehow created which ensures their survival
| at a real cost. Attempts to rationalize the system have failed
| because of the focus on getting everyone health insurance
| rather than health care (admittedly among other reasons).
| Aurornis wrote:
| It doesn't help that politicians continue to propose dead-in-
| the-water alternatives. The last round of "Medicare for All"
| included a lot of provisions that were very unpopular when
| you asked people about them directly, such as taking away
| people's existing private insurance.
|
| This a common theme in politics: Actually solving the problem
| might remove enthusiasm for your candidate or party, so
| instead they propose things with no realistic chance of
| passing. Their business is being front and center in public
| discourse, not quietly fixing things.
|
| EDIT: I'm getting downvoted because a comment below is
| denying this part of the bill, so I'm adding the exact text
| here:
|
| > SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN
| GENERAL.--Beginning on the effective date described in
| section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for-- (1) a private
| health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that
| duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an
| employer to provide benefits for an employee, former
| employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee
| that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
|
| The comment below is incorrect. The bill would have made
| people's existing insurance plans illegal to offer.
| jerojero wrote:
| No one is going to get elected for solving a problem
| everyone today is going to be dead to see the results of.
|
| Although we all might agree that this is necessary, people
| usually tend to vote for people who promise "real"
| solutions. As in, short term solutions to problems we've
| been carrying for decades (which obviously requires
| policies that also take decades to cement).
| bgoggin wrote:
| This is not correct. There was no prohibition on private
| insurance. Rather, all would have been required to
| participate in the public plan to spread the risk. That's
| the only way it could work. If someone wanted to also pay
| for a private plan, that was allowed.
| Aurornis wrote:
| No, this is incorrect. Here is the actual section from
| the bill:
|
| > SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a)
| IN GENERAL.--Beginning on the effective date described in
| section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for-- (1) a private
| health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that
| duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2)
| an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former
| employee, or the dependents of an employee or former
| employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this
| Act.
|
| You could technically also buy extra insurance for...
| something extra, but your existing insurance plan would
| have become illegal.
|
| This was a huge sticking point, despite how many people
| try to deny it or downplay it.
| jrajav wrote:
| I'm honestly curious what the real meat of the objections
| to this were (I never heard much about this sticking
| point). Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway?
| Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be
| paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the
| public coverage?
| Aurornis wrote:
| I didn't say I had objections to it. I said it was
| unpopular with the general public when you told them the
| details.
|
| This is an example of a situation where people dislike
| _the system_ but when you ask them about it they like
| _their part of the system_.
|
| For example, people generally have an extremely low
| opinion of Congress, but on average they like _their own_
| Congress person.
|
| You get similar results when you poll people about
| healthcare and health insurance: People generally hate
| _the health insurance system_ , but if you start talking
| about taking away _their health insurance_ or _their
| doctor_ and replacing it with an unknown system, they get
| upset.
|
| > Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it
| not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying
| for the extra coverage you want on top of the public
| coverage?
|
| Duplicating coverage is superfluous if you assume the new
| plan would be better in every way and you give up nothing
| in the process, obviously.
|
| However, the fear is that upending the entire system
| would require people to give things up and replace it
| with unknowns. There's a good chance that some people
| would be forced to be reassigned to different doctors
| under a centrally-planned system, or that access to
| things would be reset and need to be re-determined under
| new guidelines.
|
| If this doesn't make sense, consider a situation where
| someone got special approval for off-label coverage of a
| drug (happens all the time) but the new government
| insurance had stricter guidelines about which conditions
| could be treated with which drugs (to keep cost down).
| Those people could lose access to medications or
| treatments that were covered privately.
|
| We tend to think of "Medicare for All" type plans as
| being without downsides, but when you get into the
| details of changing the _entire health care system_ out
| and banning the old ways, it 's inevitable that some
| people would start losing things they liked. And that's
| where people get upset.
| redserk wrote:
| To be fair, there was a log of disingenuous fear
| mongering around the notion of "the government is getting
| rid of your insurance".
|
| It would be extremely difficult to get an accurate idea
| of what the general public thinks about a measure before
| certain interests get involved with publicizing FUD.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > fear mongering around the notion of "the government is
| getting rid of your insurance
|
| But that's literally what the bill said.
|
| Why is it "fear mongering" to state the effects of a
| bill? People truly didn't like this idea.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Because it's being disingenuous. The insurance isn't
| getting removed, just like "the HVAC tech is removing
| heating" is not a coherent statement if the tech is just
| replacing your furnace. You might have opinions about the
| performance of the new furnace, but saying that the
| heating is going to be removed is simply untrue beyond
| discussing the logistics of that change.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't think you understand what people disliked about
| the idea.
|
| They understood that it was being replaced. Nobody ever
| pretended like health care was going away and being
| banned. People weren't assuming that. That would be
| nonsensical.
|
| People thought the bill was going to be about a Medicare
| option for all, but then it came out as forced Medicare
| for all. People didn't like that.
|
| It wasn't fear mongering, people just didn't like that.
| It's demonstrably unpopular, and this isn't news to
| anyone who has been paying attention.
| redserk wrote:
| Your error is assuming that everyone is a rational actor
| and is doing the research to make an informed decision.
|
| This is simply not the case and it's naive to think
| otherwise.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Lots of people want to be able to pay to get faster
| treatment, or pay for better doctors if they can.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway?_
|
| What I have works. It doesn't for everyone. But it does
| for me.
|
| If I'm too busy to read a thousand-page bill, it's
| rational to default to the _status quo_. (Also, Americans
| like competition. Banning duplicate coverage sounds like
| ruling out the competition.)
| ameister14 wrote:
| So that's not true.
|
| They had to prohibit overlapping coverage in order to
| make sure that all private practice physicians accepted
| the medicare system, which has lower reimbursement rates
| than private insurance. You can pay for more coverage,
| because that doesn't compete with the public system, but
| you cannot pay for private insurance that may lead to
| lower access for publicly insured persons.
| bgoggin wrote:
| Yes, I did not read closely enough. You referred to new
| medicare for all plans, while I responded recalling
| similar false accusations against Obamacare. Some of
| these new proposals do not allow duplicate plans.
| Nevertheless, I don't think this particular objection
| makes them DOA. I believe this is an objection that could
| be overcome with discussion.
| sircastor wrote:
| I recall an interview where the interviewers were asking
| the politician if their plan for health coverage would
| raise everyone's taxes, to which they responded yes - of
| course they would. The interviewers tried to move forward
| with that, but the politician then notes that this would
| also mean that everyone stops paying for their current
| health insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > the politician then notes that this would also mean
| that everyone stops paying for their current health
| insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
|
| Unfortunately, not so simple:
|
| 1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at
| least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically
| perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10%
| of costs, all things equal.
|
| 2) The government run system would realistically be
| expensive to run, like any program covering all
| Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would
| just be transferred to a government-run operation. In
| theory it _should_ be more efficient to have single
| payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the
| short term to build and overhaul the system.
|
| 3) The actual cost savings wouldn't come from operational
| efficiency (not the government's strongest ability) but
| from forcing prices down because nobody would have any
| choice but to accept the government insurance. They were
| going to drive costs down by forcing doctors and
| hospitals to take lower payments and, as unpopular as it
| is to say, by limiting the types and amounts of
| treatments available to people.
| ink_13 wrote:
| These points assume that costs would stay the same and
| there's no overhead in the existing insurance system.
|
| Single-payer could be cheaper and more efficient simply
| by returning the massive profits of health insurers
| directly to taxpayers. Part of high cost for healthcare
| in the USA is the huge number of middlemen.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Do they have massive profits? It says here that they have
| very low profit margins of about 3%
|
| https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/inline-
| files/he...
|
| Contrast that with the average of all industry profit
| margins at ~10% and with SaaS type firms of ~80%.
|
| If you want to improve US healthcare costs by getting rid
| of the profit margin of insurers, it's probably a bad
| idea. You wouldn't notice the impact.
| duped wrote:
| > The government run system would realistically be
| expensive to run, like any program covering all
| Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would
| just be transferred to a government-run operation. In
| theory it should be more efficient to have single payer,
| but it would also be extremely expensive in the short
| term to build and overhaul the system.
|
| The government is already the largest health insurer in
| the country, and providers can't turn them down. There's
| no system to overhaul.
|
| The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple -
| if you do not have private market health insurance, you
| can opt in to the health insurance the government already
| provides for about 65 million people.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The government is already the largest health insurer in
| the country, and providers can't turn them down.
|
| This is completely false. Many providers don't accept
| Medicare or Medicare.
|
| I don't know where you're getting the idea that
| Medicare/Medicaid can't be turned down by private
| practices.
|
| > The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple
| - if you do not have private market health insurance, you
| can opt in to the health insurance the government already
| provides for about 65 million people.
|
| Again, that's not what the "Medicare for All" bill
| _actually said_.
|
| People just assumed it was an optional thing, but the
| bill said something else entirely.
|
| Your post is a great example of how people had their own
| ideas about how things work or would work under new
| bills, but when you actually read the details it's a
| different situation altogether.
|
| I'm also amazed at the confidence with which people will
| deny the basic facts of "Medicare for All", as evidenced
| by many comments in this thread. I posted an actual
| excerpt from the bill above, yet people are still trying
| to argue that it said something else.
| duped wrote:
| You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep
| quoting. As well as equating the notion of Medicare For
| All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
|
| While sure, providers could choose to not accept
| Medicare, practically all do because the people that need
| the most healthcare are all on it. That would be akin to
| not treating anyone over the age of 65.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep
| quoting.
|
| I don't think I am. You haven't provided any specifics
| and your claims above were easily disproven, so I'm not
| sure what you think I'm doing wrong.
|
| > As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a
| policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
|
| See above: My parent comment was _specifically talking
| about the Medicare for All bill_. You are the one trying
| to substitute a different concept into the discussion.
|
| > While sure, providers could choose to not accept
| Medicare
|
| This is the exact opposite of what you claimed two
| comments up.
|
| This discussion is a perfect example of what I'm talking
| about: When it comes to these discussions, people like to
| substitute their own facts and pretend like we can just
| ignore the reality of of what goes into bills. Once you
| start looking at _actual legislation_ these things aren
| 't as popular as people think because it doesn't match
| their imaginary ideal.
|
| Hence my original point: Politicians have an incentive to
| keep these concepts as far from reality as possible,
| because it allows people to cling to their own idealized
| versions of what it would look like. The closer you get
| to reality, the more people realize that tradeoffs and
| compromise are necessary in the real world.
| chime wrote:
| > 1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at
| least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically
| perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10%
| of costs, all things equal.
|
| All things remaining same, yes. But all things won't
| remain same because the incentives would be completely
| different. The 10% rule has incentivized the entire
| industry to raise their prices so that 10% will be worth
| more each quarter. Private insurance would rather have
| insulin at $1000/mo instead of $10/mo so that they can
| take $100 instead of $1 and they would rather collect
| $2000/mo in premiums than $200/mo. Medicare, on the other
| hand, can and should negotiate prices down:
| https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-
| medicare/med...
| ttymck wrote:
| Most establishments in the United States.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Obamacare was an absolute unfiltered gift to the insurance
| companies and to this day I can't understand how no one saw
| this or cared.
|
| Yea... things were going to get _better_ when more people
| were being ripped off.
| michtzik wrote:
| That's literally the first example in TFA.
| mizzao wrote:
| Teach for America?
| Chinjut wrote:
| This is in fact the first example in the article.
| userabchn wrote:
| Indeed, however at least TurboTax has competition so that the
| experience, while unnecessarily complicated, is not as
| unpleasant as it could be. I have recently been thinking about
| this as I have just filed my taxes, which, in the country I am
| living in, can be done only using the government's website.
| This website is dreadful. It hasn't changed since the early
| 2000s at the latest, provides no help or guidance, contains
| typos, and even requires that you manually copy a number from
| one page to the next. I also don't think the tax system is
| noticeably easier than the one in the USA (where I used to
| live) even though there is no direct analogue of TurboTax
| lobbying for complexity (although there probably are still
| accountant lobby groups).
| a1o wrote:
| I don't understand why saying institutions and focusing on
| government, the current example I have in mind for this is Google
| relationship with search and Ads in the AI era.
| zaik wrote:
| Not one example given in this article was a government
| institution.
| a1o wrote:
| It's the second paragraph and when I stopped reading.
| ptx wrote:
| That's what I thought was weird. It starts and concludes with
| "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government
| agency [...]", but all the actual examples in-between are of
| private companies causing problems, not government agencies.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Counter example: WHO and smallpox
| supertrope wrote:
| Also the March of Dimes. When humanity miraculously fixed their
| core issue they expanded their mission.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Good point, let's hope Polio is not coming back though and it
| gets eradicated completely eventually.
| unglaublich wrote:
| True, but smallpox is just an aspect of health. Solving
| smallpox leaves a lot of health related issues for WHO to focus
| on.
| newman8r wrote:
| I have to leave the example of police and police unions - which
| have very powerful lobbyists who try their darnedest to keep as
| many things illegal as possible.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Our firefighters, who also do ems, are currently battling a
| bike lane plan. I guess in places like Amsterdam with bike
| lanes huge swaths of city must burn down routinely if you
| believed the bull pedaled by our fire dept.
| falserum wrote:
| Id we are being charitable to firepeople, I assume, that
| bikelane will reduce width of auto part of the road, thus
| making difficult: for firetruck to drive on it or make turns,
| other cars can not allow through the firetruck.
|
| (Maybe amsterdam bikelanes were not an afterthought and took
| all this into the design)
|
| Diclaimer: I have no idea, just speculting
| paulsutter wrote:
| This explains a lot about the effectiveness of San Francisco's
| $600M in spending on drug addiction/homelessness, the spend and
| problem seem to increase together
| electriclove wrote:
| Homeless Industrial Complex
| malfist wrote:
| Please tell me, what companies are involved in the "homeless
| industrial complex" and what industrial product do they
| produce?
| reeboo wrote:
| https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/02/22/city-will-
| scrap-2...
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| They produce wealth for their executives. The Colorado
| Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021,
| the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a
| year. All of this from a non-profit.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/84
| 0... https://kdvr.com/news/problem-solvers/colorado-
| coalition-for...
| gruez wrote:
| >The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in
| 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make
| over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit.
|
| What's the typical salary for a CEO of a for-profit
| company that has 122M in revenues? While I can understand
| why people are outraged at the prospect of people getting
| money from a non-profit, it's unrealistic to expect
| everyone to be volunteers. Besides the question of how
| they'd financially support themselves, you have the
| problem of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
| toomim wrote:
| You're losing the point. It's not outrage at the amount
| they are paid. It's outrage at the Shirky Principle--
| they are incentivized to keep the homelessness problem
| going and growing.
| fragmede wrote:
| I don't know that high executive salaries are evidence of
| anything other than theres an executive class which
| exists, even in the non-profit world. You'll need to come
| up with better arguments that there's a homeless-
| industrial complex, which there very much is, but
| complaining that the leader of a 700-person organized
| doesn't deserve more than a low end FAANG shows a very
| naive understanding of how the world works. $313k is
| _cheap_ for that kind of work. A CEO for a 700-person
| strong tech company makes well into a million dollars a
| year, counting equity. Complaining that executives make a
| lot of money at a non-profit is like complaining that
| things cost money in the first place. there is a need for
| someone to do job X. people who do job X cost $xxx /hr.
| it doesn't matter the context of that job, whether it's
| running a business, managing armed forces, saving the
| homeless, or writing a web browser, that's what that job
| pays.
|
| A better argument for there being a homeless-industrial
| complex would to say there are incentives for
| organizations to expand operations rather than fix
| problems, and then give examples where organizations
| didn't fix problems because it would result in their
| lowered funding.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| The question posed was what companies are involved as
| part of the homeless industrial complex and what do they
| produce.
| pierat wrote:
| HN users are superb at "Moving the goalposts approaching
| infinity". Doubly so if it's a political humanitarian
| issue (homelessness).
| nindalf wrote:
| It goes something like this. Well meaning people join
| government to solve the problem (homelessness). They can't
| do it on their own so they allocate money to local
| charities that run services for homeless, like soup
| kitchens and shelters. Two things happen
|
| 1. if homeless didn't exist anymore, these kitchens and
| shelters would have to shut down. The volunteers are fine
| with it, they'll volunteer elsewhere. But the permanent
| employees would be laid off. Understandably, they want to
| remain employed. So they're incentivised to not search for
| a durable solution to the homelessness problem.
|
| 2. The people in government realise the problem isn't
| getting solved, so they leave government and form their own
| think tanks/charities or institutions to solve the problem.
| They have connections in government (their former co-
| workers) which they use to get funding. Now there's another
| company in the homeless industrial complex.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Shelter beds for half a million dollars a pop and lucrative
| service contracts surrounding that pile of money. LA county
| did an audit and some units they paid north of 830k.
|
| https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-
| to-837000-t...
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| "The Thirteenth Voyage" of Ijon Tichy is quite an amusing read on
| the topic
| johngossman wrote:
| "The planet had once been beset by burning winds, which--the
| scientists said--threatened to turn it into one enormous
| desert. Therefore a great irrigational plan was adopted. To
| implement which, appropriate institutions and top-priority
| bureaus were set up; but then, after the network of canals and
| reservoirs had been completed, the bureaus refused to disband
| themselves and continued to operate, irrigating Pinta more and
| more."
|
| By the time Tichy arrives, people are being encouraged to
| breathe underwater.
|
| -- The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
|
| I'm surprised the Soviets didn't suppress this story
| nindalf wrote:
| The UNRWA, the UN Agency for helping Palestinian refugees has
| been accused of perpetuating their misery - (The real problem
| with the UN's agency for Palestinians, The Economist
| https://archive.is/c7Pop).
| jfengel wrote:
| Unfortunately that is a deep and complex problem. There are a
| lot of forces that are using the Palestinians as a stick with
| which to harass Israel, in part to deflect from their own human
| rights abuses.
|
| The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An
| intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Accused by who? The ones that need to legitimize the massacre?
| nindalf wrote:
| Accused by the Economist in this case. But they quote
| Palestinians who say the same.
| enterprise_cog wrote:
| They quote one Palestinian and his quote can be interpreted
| as a call for a two or one state solution. It is an empty
| statement without more context.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| This phenomenon (institutions helping to preserve their nominal
| enemy) has been omnipresent on both sides of the Israel-
| Palestine conflict. For example:
|
| > Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian
| state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to
| Hamas.
|
| - Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015
|
| > The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the
| international playing field in this game of delegitimization,
| think about for a second, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an
| asset. It's a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it,
| nobody will give it status at the ICC [International Criminal
| Court] and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN
| [causing us to] need an American veto. ... I'm not sure at all
| that given the current situation, given the current fact that
| the central playing field we're playing in is international,
| Abu Mazen (Abbas) is costing us serious [PR or political]
| casualties and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. I
| don't think we need to be afraid of [Hamas].
|
| - Bezalel Smotrich, 2015
|
| https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-sup...
| ksherlock wrote:
| UNRWA was created in 1949 to help displaced Palestinians from
| the 1948 Palestine war. That was 76 years ago. Today the
| Palestinian life expectancy is 74. (In 1948, it was under 50.)
| Almost everyone they're supposed to be helping is dead.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Until their descendants are citizens of a state, until they
| have land they can call fully their home, they remain
| refugees.
| gmerc wrote:
| Ah yes, the US Healthcare industry in a nutshell
| pjdesno wrote:
| Spam email is another example.
|
| There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where
| they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-
| generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like
| the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground
| spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the
| ultimate source of their revenues.
|
| There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and
| it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's
| because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced
| the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments
| for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of
| banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was
| coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...
| gruez wrote:
| >There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where
| they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-
| generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks
| like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the
| underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut
| off the ultimate source of their revenues.
|
| This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget
| than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them.
| Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric.
| For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are
| basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal
| networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-
| spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
|
| >There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
|
| Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams
| instead.
| fragmede wrote:
| Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok scams too.
|
| People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say
| they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI
| voice changers, it even sounds like them.
| rvba wrote:
| Your example doent make sense. Those who spend spam for profit
| will do it anyway - they dont care if tools that detect spam
| exist or not. In fact those tools limit the ability of script
| kiddies to enter. It is a cat and mouse game.
|
| A homeless person can steal some electic wires and pipes and
| fixing it will cost a lot of money. So you say that we shouldnt
| fix it?
| pjdesno wrote:
| The root problem is not that I'm receiving spam emails, but
| that _people are sending them_.
|
| Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to
| stop sending spam emails. In the case of the
| pharma/counterfeit emails that were so common 10-15 years ago
| the fix was quite simple, but didn't come from the anti-spam
| industry - it required finding an aggrieved party (brand
| owners) with enough clout in the financial world.
|
| As you point out, fighting spam is an asymmetric game of
| whack-a-mole, where spammers can easily adapt to
| countermeasures. Forcing spammers to get a new merchant bank
| to handle their credit card transactions flips the asymmetry
| and makes them do all the work; as a result you no longer see
| spam advertising viagra.
|
| Getting rid of ransomware would be quite easy, in theory, if
| you could tank the value of bitcoin, since few ransomware
| gangs are able to collect ransom the traditional way in bags
| of cash. And a large fraction of other phishing attacks could
| be prevented by putting stricter controls on gift cards.
| verisimi wrote:
| Of course institutions preserve the problem - that is the reason
| for their existence - so they are in a fight for survival to keep
| a systemic problem going. It is even better for them if the
| institution has managed to enshrine its position in law, creating
| huge barriers to entry for any upstart that tries to come up with
| better solutions. Taxis, medicine, banking - there are so many
| examples.
|
| If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention,
| allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is
| to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has
| the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a
| common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the
| "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an
| "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the
| right thing' to facilitate legal changes.
| analog31 wrote:
| Ah, but a "freer market" is itself an artificial institution,
| subject to the same inescapable law.
| psychoslave wrote:
| The so called free market tends to engender monopolies or
| oligopolies that will do their best to destroy any concurrency
| though.
|
| Free market is the myth that can be thrown at plebeians to
| ashame them on their inability to compete with establishment,
| whatever the form it takes.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Sounds like a lack of competition. Multiple entities should
| compete for providing the best solution, and the entities should
| be rewarded or penalized accordingly.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I'll give the Canadian telecom market as a counterexample:
| Multiple large providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, Videotron to
| name the top four) instead of competing for customers and
| driving prices down, they have effectively colluded into an
| oligopoly - to the point of matching prices and plan details.
|
| In this case we have multiple entities working together to
| maintain the existing problem, so they can collectively
| maximize profits.
| forgot-im-old wrote:
| One solution is to keep these organizations so lean and
| understaffed that they would love to eliminate tasks and reduce
| the scope of their responsibilities.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Literally what Ivan Illich was saying 50 years ago when he talked
| about counterproductivity in institutions
| mistrial9 wrote:
| credit to California's Jerry Brown and his media outreach for
| championing the work of Ivan Illich
| jakearmitage wrote:
| Hello ATF.
| alexwhb wrote:
| Really interesting read. I've had this exact thought but not in a
| well defined sentence before. Especially regarding entities like
| turboTax or DoT (Departments of Transportation) where they will
| expand highways even though it's a well known empirical fact that
| this typically causes induced demand or more traffic.
|
| It's really nice to have such a well defined principle to this
| idea.
| Valid3840 wrote:
| Exactly what I had in mind. In the case of the DoT, I wonder
| what could be the solution there, some exterior safeguard?
| reducing fundings?
| thegrim33 wrote:
| I don't understand how people perpetuate that induced demand
| stuff. It absolutely falls apart if you think about it at all.
| So we shouldn't expand highways because it "induces
| demand/traffic"? So all of our cities and states should have
| kept their original one lane dirt roads and never improved on
| them, because expanding the dirt lanes would have induced
| demand and caused more traffic? Our transportation system would
| have been better / more effective with a couple of dirt roads
| and never expanding? It doesn't even remotely make sense.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Most times they don't need to preserve the problem as the problem
| always slowly evolves and so does the institution. Another reason
| they cannot easily preserve problem is because there is
| competition. I do think this could be happening for medicine, and
| most likely place for it to happen
| HashThis wrote:
| Corporations do that also by keep hiring lobbyists to get
| congress to sell out, to keep the problem in place.
|
| Like TurboTax & H&R Block not wanting the IRS to automate
| personal taxes. ...and their lobbyists got congress to pass a law
| to block the IRS.
| kazinator wrote:
| I'm on a Committee (Phong Ngo) Oh, give me a
| pity, I'm on a committee Which means that from morning to
| night We attend and amend and contend and defend
| Without a conclusion in sight. We confer and concur,
| we defer and demur And re-iterate all of our thoughts
| We revise the agenda with frequent addenda And consider a
| load of reports. We compose and propose, we suppose
| and oppose And the points of procedure are fun! But
| though various notions are brought up as motion There's
| terribly little gets done. We resolve and absolve, but
| never dissolve Since it's out of the question for us.
| What a shattering pity to end our committee Where else
| could we make such a fuss? Copyright Phong Ngo
| RG APR99
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Very fun poem! But do you know who Phong Ngo is? I'm having
| much trouble finding on the Web any other works attributed to
| such an author.
| kazinator wrote:
| I found two posts of this poem to Usenet, dated 1998, one of
| them claiming that the author is unknown. Thus it wasn't
| written in 1999, making the entire Phong Ngo copyright claim
| inauthentic.
|
| It looks like it appears in the _fortune_ program 's
| database. Search for the word committee in the following
| file:
|
| https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-
| mod/blob/master/fortune-m...
|
| It is attributed to Leslie Lipson, possibly this one, a
| political scientist who died in 2000:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lipson
|
| That attribution seems credible.
|
| I also found an old file of quotes (evidently from the
| alt.quotations newsgroup) where it is also attributed to
| Lipson, and additionally a "Michael J. Irvin
| <IRVINMJ@WSUVM1>" is credited as having submitted it. It
| could be because of Irvin that it ended up in the fortune
| program.
|
| ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/alt.quotations/Archive/c.txt
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Ngo may be a play on NGO.
| spacebacon wrote:
| A wise man once said. You doin too much, gah.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Turbo Tax. Southwest Airlines lobbying against high speed rail.
| divan wrote:
| Interesting links in the article and comments, but it seems like
| two different concepts are mixed here - the nature of
| bureaucracies and wrong incentives. I struggle to understand how
| cobra and rat cases are "institutions trying to preserve the
| problem".
|
| Cobra effect, in particular, is an immensely interesting topic of
| how rewarding the metrics can distort the system, otherwise known
| as Goodhart's effect. I highly recommend reading these two papers
| on the subject for anyone interested:
|
| - Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law [1]
|
| - Building less-flawed metrics: Understanding and creating better
| measurement and incentive systems [2]
|
| Adding the "Cognitive Surplus" book to the to-do shelf, but it
| seems like Shirky principle is mostly about institutions and the
| nature of bureaucracies. Now, a good question would be - when and
| why Shirky principle does not apply to the institutions. My first
| thought is the difference between bureaucracies that have "owner"
| and ones who lost it.
|
| When a bureaucracy has an owner (person or group of people) who
| can change the bureaucracy in response to external events, then
| it's probably unlikely to have Shirky effect (WHO and smallpox
| example in comments). However, bureaucracies that have lost their
| owner will most likely have this effect.
|
| The best thing I read on this subject (how bureaucracies work) is
| Samo Burja's "Great Founder Theory" [3]. If anyone can suggest
| something along these lines on the fundamental principles of
| bureaucracies, I would appreciate a lot.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585
|
| [2]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638992...
|
| [3] https://samoburja.com/gft/
| hyperthesis wrote:
| The ones that don't no longer exist. _Survival of the
| Obstructionest._
|
| Some institutions obsolete themselves. Though I can't think of
| one as they are arguably not "institutions".
| charles_f wrote:
| > municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at
| deratisation [extermination of rats] had actually increased the
| rodent population
|
| I live in a complex of town houses. We have lots of rats and
| mice. This is seemingly an unsolvable problem, and our pest
| control company keeps adding poison traps, but the problem does
| not go away. They blame government, because the poison they are
| allowed to put in their doesn't kill the mice, (as this could
| kill eagles or other animals eating the mice).
|
| We ended up buying our own standard issue traps lately that
| either slap them to death, or drown them, and the problem is
| getting better. Makes you question why the pest control company
| didn't do that. Or not, we know why.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| I've always had a gut feeling that if the best solution to a
| pest problem is to buy a $10 spray from Home Depot and spray it
| around your house in 10 minutes, a pest control company is
| never going to do it because it doesn't make them _look_ like
| pros.
|
| I wonder then which other processes are "held back" at a
| certain level of complexity only because if made simpler, the
| _optics_ of the process would devalue the people who charge
| money to do it. Oil and filter changes?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Software, websites
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I'm gonna have to play advocate here for The Institution over
| The Individual. The jobs you mentioned (pest control, basic
| car maintenance) exist because a lot of people can't be
| bothered to learn how to do it properly.
|
| (Or, to put it more cynically: a lot of people are idiots.
| Like, a lot. Cue the quote about the average man and the
| thought that half of humanity is dumber than that...)
|
| A lot of things can go wrong with the $10 spray you bought
| from Home Depot. You could end up spraying it where you're
| not supposed to and at best you end up poisoned in the ICU,
| at worst you contaminate your area's water supply. You could
| spray it on a lazy Saturday afternoon but you forgot about
| your dog who loves to lick the floor; at best you end up with
| a very expensive vet bill, at worst your dog then licks your
| kids in the face and you end up with a dead dog _and_ a dead
| kid.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying your gut feeling is wrong; I'd
| probably do the same, honestly. But it most certainly doesn't
| apply to everyone.
|
| Further, oil and filter changes might be super easy, barely
| an inconvenience but you could end up not resealing and
| tightening a valve or a nut enough and the worst time to find
| that out is when you're doing 100KPH on a highway. Don't even
| get me started about people who think they could save money
| by using olive oil where they are supposed to use a specific
| type of coating grease or lubricant; after all, they buy
| olive oil from the grocery once every month so, as a car
| maintenance item, it's "basically free".
|
| These people are not only a danger to themselves. They are a
| danger to everyone they share a road (or a residential area)
| with.
|
| Of course, having an industry around these tasks doesn't
| eliminate the possibility of these dumb outcomes but having
| "professionals" who are have read the fabulous manual and are
| _regulated_ put them head and shoulders above J. Handyman
| Smith when doing said job. Emphasis on _regulated_ , we give
| that far less credit than it deserves. You might have also
| read the fabulous manual but if you are not regulated, not
| beholden to a specific standard or process, how do I even
| check you didn't cut corners? If you mess up somewhere, how
| can you and everyone else even begin to assess the magnitude
| of your fuck-up and thereby respond appropriately?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| This is true but kind of tangential. My point was even _for
| the pest control company_ if it were a 10 minute job, they
| wouldn 't do it that way because the "spectacle of
| professionalism" that justifies the prices they charge (and
| perhaps recurring revenue) is lost.
|
| For oil changes it is completely conceivable for a user-
| serviceable system to be built in, making it not much more
| difficult than filling air in your tires at the gas
| station. But the manufacturers have a perverse incentive to
| not build it.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If that was the best solution then the pest control
| companies would do that, except they'd try to buy the
| spray in bulk straight from the supplier and use their
| own permanent spraying devices instead of buying a series
| of cheap disposable cans that force them to bend over all
| the time.
|
| To some extent our notion of what's "professional" is
| dictated by past experience of professionals using what
| works best for professionals. If that changes, an
| unofficial pest control business has a pretty low barrier
| for entry considering there are literal DIY solutions at
| retail.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I used to believe that any organization who takes morality
| seriously must fund it's equal and opposite organization. It
| would serve as a foil, collecting unhappy customer stories and
| potentially turning them into lawsuits. The second organization's
| stated goal is to end the first organization. But after a
| moment's thought, the Shirky Principle clearly makes this
| unworkable - both orgs want to survive, so the second org will,
| in general, tend to shirk its duties (so to speak) and function
| merely as a private welfare scheme and a cloak of respectability
| for the first.
| intrepidsoldier wrote:
| IT and Kubernetes
| gumby wrote:
| The most general form of this is Upton Sinclair's: "It is
| difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
| depends on his not understanding it".
|
| Though often the causes are not cynical or nefarious.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| not wrong but - notice that this states a principle from the
| point of view of a single individual only. Certainly other
| "lenses", frameworks or mission statements are relevant?
| mechhacker wrote:
| I didn't see any mention of Robert Conquest's 3 laws of
| bureaucracy:
|
| 1 Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
|
| 2 Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later
| becomes left-wing.
|
| 3 The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic
| organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its
| enemies
| Georgelemental wrote:
| French sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of the supposedly
| "anti-racist" French NGO "SOS Racisme":
|
| > Every society must designate an enemy, but it must not seek to
| exterminate it. This was the fatal error of Fascism and the
| Terror, but it is also the error of the soft, democratic Terror,
| which is in the process of eliminating the Other even more surely
| than the Holocaust. The operation that consisted in hypostasizing
| a race and perpetuating it through internal reproduction, which
| we stigmatize as a racist abjection, is now being carried out at
| the level of individuals, in the very name of man's right to
| control his own process genetically and in all its forms. SOS-
| Racism. SOS-whales. Ambiguity: in one case, it's to denounce
| racism, in the other, it's to save whales. What if, in the first
| case, it's also a subliminal call to save racism, and thus the
| anti-racist struggle as the last vestige of political passions,
| and thus a virtually doomed species?
| serial_dev wrote:
| I thought this was going to be an article about the Agile
| Industrial Complex or Clean Architecture.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| bingo
| zubairq wrote:
| I guess the principal "Institutions try to preserve the problem
| to which they are the solution" can apply to almost anything
| though, as really it is talking about "incentives"?
| germandiago wrote:
| Exactly. It is about incentives. Always. Every time. Any time.
| bpiche wrote:
| Illich talked about this. That's what Medical Nemesis was all
| about, and Deschooling Society.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any
| bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
| First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the
| organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an
| educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch
| technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural
| scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
| farming administration. Secondly, there will be
| those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of
| the administrators in the education system, many professors of
| education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA
| headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in
| every case the second group will gain and keep control of the
| organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
| within the organization.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Another great related insight from Systemantics (see other
| thread below)
|
| > For Every Human System, There Is A Type Of Person Adapted To
| Thrive On It. There are some attributes that are probably
| necessary for survival in any system, but each system has some
| uniqueness in the sense that it attracts different traits. It's
| hard to tell what traits any given system attracts. The traits
| do not necessarily align with successful operation of the
| system itself e.g. the qualities for being elected president
| don't necessarily align with the ability to run the country
| effectively. Systems not only attract people who will succeed
| within the system but also people with parasitic traits that
| thrive at the expense of the system. "Efforts to remove
| parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees,
| review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new
| job categories for such people to occupy."
| osrec wrote:
| Does the second group also end up skewing remuneration in their
| favour? For example, a tech company where managers are paid
| over the odds, while the passionate engineers who do a lot of
| the technical heavy lifting are paid less.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If not directly, they skew it by expanding their headcounts
| by the year
| vrosas wrote:
| Naturally. I'm being hyperbolic but barely. It's middle
| management's entire job to squeeze as much productivity out
| of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything
| they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is
| just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in
| the system. And it's not my belief - I fight it where I can
| but it's literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody
| gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted
| last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why
| have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?)
| and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff
| flung to prod, quality need not apply).
|
| Source: am middle management.
| mathattack wrote:
| I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders
| are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you
| explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy
| your organization by promoting mediocre people.
| jedberg wrote:
| Sounds like you work at a pretty toxic org if this is the
| case. Even at Amazon a big component of management
| promotions is how many people did you get promoted this
| year and what are the highest levels of people reporting to
| you.
|
| The fastest way to go from Senior Manager to Director is to
| get as many people as possible promoted to Principal
| Engineer, or hire more PEs. Or better yet get your
| Principal Engineer promoted so that they have to become
| your peer.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| And you can guess what shenanigans result from such a
| strong incentive. People should be promoted when they are
| ready, not when their manager's empire-building
| aspirations will benefit.
| jedberg wrote:
| People were promoted after they were ready, because they
| had to convince a promo committee that they were ready.
| The manager was your advocate but did not have a say in
| if you were promoted beyond being your advocate.
|
| So the incentives were aligned. The manager was
| incentivized to put you up for promotion as soon as they
| thought you might be ready, not the other way around. The
| toxic part was actually that your manager didn't have
| final say.
|
| Even when they thought you were ready they had to
| convince others in an overburdensome process.
| vrosas wrote:
| I'd be inclined to believe you if the company in question
| wasn't legendary for being an awful, toxic dumpster fire
| of a place to work for SDEs.
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't think what you wrote and I wrote are at all in
| conflict. I said managers are incentivized to promo
| people and that it's super hard for them to do so, which
| means people don't get their promos when they should. But
| it still contradicts what OP wrote about managers being
| incentivized to not promo.
| aprdm wrote:
| I suggest you look for another job, and don't know how you
| can work in such toxicity
| vrosas wrote:
| I've worked for several companies of various sizes and
| industries in my career and I can't say any of them have
| been remarkably different than what I described. Being a
| manager now explained the confusing behavior and outcomes
| I experienced earlier in my career, in fact.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Start your own tech company. Let us know how it goes.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| I've heard this stated in a simpler form: that every
| institution eventually evolves to serve and protect its own
| interests first and foremost. My dad always used the term
| "petty fiefdoms".
|
| I like to think it was the awful "Type II" people who insisted
| that "wasn't a thing", but it was probably the innocence and
| naivete of the Type I's.
| aeturnum wrote:
| My favorite way of thinking about this is that every
| undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical
| demands. The people who do the work ('technicians') are focused
| on accomplishing the specific goal, they are often poorly
| suited to secure resources for the entire group. On the flip
| side, those who focus on logistics ('administrators') are
| isolated from the underlying goal. They invest their time into
| work that, by necessity, relies on an abstracted notion about
| the details of the work.
|
| This creates conditions where the administrators are always at
| risk of self-dealing and of mis-understanding self-dealing as
| supporting the underlying work. The technicians can self-deal
| as well, but because they are not in charge of coordinating
| resources across the org, the impact is smaller. It's easy to
| accuse any particular technician who disagrees that it's the
| technician who lacks a sufficiently wide view (and in fact this
| is always a danger). Selfish people who want to secure
| resources for themselves thrive in this area - but the
| situation does not require selfishness to become degenerate.
| derefr wrote:
| Another way to say that is:
|
| * The first group sees something in the world as wrong / broken
| / requiring change, or just "could be better"; they see
| _themselves_ as a force for that change; and they see any
| organization they 're a part of, as infrastructure to
| enable/multiply their force. To these people, the organization
| is only relevant/valuable as long as it is providing leverage
| for individuals like them "on the front lines" to accomplish
| change. To these people, "everything staying the way it is" is
| an awful concept -- if they were willing to accept things as
| they were, they wouldn't have bothered to become $profession!
| They will consider their life wasted if things don't end up
| _changing for the better_!
|
| * The second group sees nothing wrong with the world, because
| (in part) they see those frontline people working toward
| positive change, to be an _inherent part_ of the equilibrium-
| state of the world. They do think the problem is a problem
| worth solving! (That 's probably why they gravitated to this
| _industry_.) But they think that "things are going great" in
| addressing the problem, insofar as there _are_ these other
| people who are willing to "fight the good fight." They don't
| think it matters much whether any _particular_ individual is
| involved in that fight, as long as in aggregate "people who
| are motivated to solve the problem" are minted faster than they
| burn out. People in this group don't feel motivated to be
| directly involved in solving the problem; and they _also_ aren
| 't much concerned with "losing" people who _are_ directly
| involved -- since they believe that there will always be new
| "new blood" coming in with a fresh reserve of morale.
|
| The first group ("vocationals") will focus on the work to the
| exclusion of maintaining the organization. In a crisis, they
| will let the organization fall apart so that the work can
| continue happening.
|
| The second group ("professionals") knows this, and thinks this
| is silly -- to them, the work will always get done soon enough
| (because, if vocational A can't do it, vocationals B/C/D will
| feel compelled to pick up their slack, at their own expense.)
| But _the organization itself_ might become paralyzed or fall
| apart -- which these people believe would prevent the work from
| happening for a much longer time. So they dedicate themselves
| to keeping the organization functioning -- which often involves
| _cutting costs_ (i.e. making the first group 's lives harder),
| _imposing regulations_ (i.e. punishing the first group for the
| times they go above-and-beyond to get the work done at the
| organization 's expense), etc.
|
| These groups are rarely aligned, because their world-views are
| rarely aligned.
|
| It can happen, though. If it becomes clear that the number of
| people in the first group _is_ declining over time, such that
| the organization _cannot_ simply rely on "new blood" -- then
| the second group's behavior toward the first group changes
| dramatically.
| wisty wrote:
| That's a charitable take on the "professionals" (and arguably
| also on the "vocationals"). Both your model and the more
| pessimistic one can happen, but I think the pessimistic model
| is what happens more often as an organisation fails.
|
| I'd say that often the "professionals" are "vocationals" who
| failed upwards. They're the teacher who can't teach, but got
| transferred to the department. It's the engineer who "failed
| upward". It's the people who liked the idea of being a
| teacher or nurse or doctor or rocket scientist, but couldn't
| hack it in the front lines. Sometimes it's cheaper or easier
| to transfer a hack into management (or some non-core admin
| role) rather than firing them. Sometimes it's the least
| essential person who ends up nominally in charge (the
| "Dilbert Principle"). Sometimes people go hard for promotions
| because they are sick of their job (because it's hard for
| them, because they're incompetent or lazy). An org might want
| a super-hero for a leadership role, but there's no super
| heros so they only get bullshitters ticking all the boxes.
|
| There's a few "professionals" who genuinely think that being
| in charge is more important than working at the front. Maybe
| they see a good boss resign, and want to fill their shoes. Or
| they have a bad boss resign, and think they'll try to make a
| difference. Or they've seen stupid but well-meaning
| "vocationalists" tear things apart because they have a dumb
| idea that they're pushing, and think "a good boss wouldn't
| let these well-meaning idiots do harm rather than good".
|
| But true professionals (either professionals at heart, or
| vocationalists who see the need to be professionals) are
| often not going to be as numerous as burnt-out, lazy, failed
| vocationalists falling upwards. And once there's too many
| burnt-out, lazy, failed vocationalists in management, the
| organisation is going to suffer.
| dheera wrote:
| > The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will
| gain and keep control of the organization.
|
| It depends a lot on whether you own the organization in
| entirety or not.
|
| I could have a business that operates for 5 years, own 100% of
| it, then shut it down because of loss of market interest and
| not wanting to pivot it to a direction that I personally
| disagree with just for the sake of keeping the business alive.
|
| I could consider it a 5-year success and just be happy with
| that.
|
| If investors are involved it's a totally different story.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > If investors are involved it's a totally different story.
|
| Well, when you take their money, they'll want a return on
| their investment.
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah totally. Just saying that TFA's thesis doesn't
| necessarily apply if the founder is mission-driven and 100%
| owns the organization. They might actually value the
| mission over the organization and be content when the
| mission is fulfilled.
|
| As a founder mindset person if I could bootstrap a business
| that gets me $50 million by curing cancer I'd be MORE THAN
| HAPPY to just retire on that $50 million, and open source
| all the IP so that anyone can make the drugs. I don't have
| a desire to be a billionaire over curing cancer.
|
| However, if you give up ownership during the process,
| things change. You have fiduciary duty to investors that
| would be violated if you just gave up all future revenue
| and open sourced everything. It would have to be a
| bootstrapped business in order to do the above.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You might change your mind if/when you reach $50m.
| Whatever one has becomes one's "new normal" and the goal
| posts just move.
|
| BTW, I open sourced my IP :-)
| georgeecollins wrote:
| What you are describing is not a bureaucracy. The Iron Law is
| the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, not the Iron Law of personal
| projects.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Almost all the examples discussed are government or social
| institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large
| corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A
| more general word instead might be "systems".
|
| If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras
| of national economies of the US and China, some of the most
| productive eras were early on when large scale systems
| (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. In the
| primary build phase, growth was huge even though the
| investments and actual tasks required were huge. But as the
| 50s/60s US Economy, and the 90s/00s China economy filled in
| with existing systems there is a phase transition. Productivity
| slows. Even when you have more resources, and more solved
| problems, more skills available, productivity slows. And IMHO,
| it directly relates to this inversion of administration vs
| actual work.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The most productive eras corresponded to when the economies
| were most free market.
| iambateman wrote:
| This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder
| if it's not causal?
|
| There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which
| were marked by almost no growth at all.
| lazide wrote:
| There has to be unrealized economical potential for
| growth. And there has to be shifts either in that
| potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change.
|
| Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well,
| or a food source in biology.
|
| Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and
| no new game changing things like new technology, new
| ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis
| at that level.
|
| If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong
| _closed market_ forces to keep it from spreading, then
| you'll have change (in this case growth) faster with open
| markets. It will equalize the potential faster.
|
| Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There has to be unrealized economical potential for
| growth.
|
| Free markets have always found that potential.
| lazide wrote:
| Free markets help, but are not by themselves sufficient.
| Equalizing that potential is also not always in the
| interest of many parties.
|
| You don't have to go back very far in history to find
| plenty of examples.
|
| Recent history has had massive and rapid technological
| development, and it's been relatively easy to find
| win/win trades, so it's easy to think it is.
|
| But the Caribbean slave trade, or US Deep South cotton
| trade, or Indian spice trade? Eh.... A little less clear.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Free markets help, but are not by themselves
| sufficient.
|
| Example?
|
| > Caribbean slave trade
|
| And yet the free market in the US buried them, and the
| Caribbean remains poor.
| lazide wrote:
| I don't think you have the history here.
|
| Technological development - decent ships, actually good
| and reliable navigation, and knowledge of exploitable
| opportunities (sugar markets, and later cotton).
|
| Energy gradient - cheap labor (in the form of slaves) in
| Africa, cheap arable land (Caribbean, US, South America),
| hungry markets with excess wealth in Europe.
|
| First, the Caribbean got exploited (with open markets!)
| rather brutally, until the slave rebellions starting in
| 1790, and further escalating.
|
| Haiti in particular, won their rebellion - and then were
| completely economically isolated (by closing the market!)
| by the European powers. They still have not recovered
| economically, same for most of the Caribbean.
|
| Around this time is when the US markets (less ideal to
| exploitation, but larger and more controllable) in both
| sugar cane and cotton started to take off using the same
| sources.
|
| Which fueled significant tension between the northern
| states (no crops easily amenable to slavery, rather being
| capital manufacturing, livestock, and secondary goods
| like weaving/textiles) and the southern states (many
| labor intensive crops, amenable to slavery).
|
| Attempts at controlling the open markets in these crops
| by dissimilar interests (by either banning slavery or by
| blockade) is what led to the civil war.
|
| The south couldn't ban slavery without bankrupting their
| economy. The north couldn't allow free trade/slavery
| continue without making themselves less competitive, as
| Europe has more developed textile mills and heavy
| manufacturing. So them getting the goods directly was
| undercutting northern US competitiveness.
|
| Notably, the British, being the first into the Industrial
| Revolution and the furthest along, were also the first
| major European power to not just ban slavery in their
| country - but all their colonies, and everywhere else
| they could reach.
|
| To cut off the 'energy gradient' of cheap labor, and make
| their products (more capital intensive manufacturing)
| more competitive.
|
| The Caribbean is poor because they rebelled against
| exploitation, but couldn't capture the economic engine
| that was exploiting them - they got bypassed by a
| competitor.
|
| And by the time their competitor (US Deep South) also got
| broken, the underlying energy gradient that led to them
| being exploited at all was cut off.
|
| So all they had left was ruins, debt, and disease.
|
| Sucks to be them.
|
| So, depending on how you measure 'good', they'd have
| probably been a whole lot better off with a _closed
| market_ that would never have let the initial energy
| gradient be formed to begin with, eh? Or at least not
| allowed the extremely rapid and rapacious exploitation.
|
| Think of open markets as a full open floodgate, and
| closed ones as having a valve at various degrees of
| closed off.
|
| Flooding is very 'profitable' if you can somehow harness
| it (very difficult to do), but can be very unpleasant and
| destructive for those caught in its path. It's nearly
| impossible to die of thirst in a flood.
|
| Restrictive flow doesn't product as much 'profit' but has
| the potential to produce more desirable outcomes if used
| effectively. As long as the dam doesn't burst of course.
| If the valve is misused or turned off, it's easy for some
| (or even all) to die of thirst.
|
| Pick your poison.
| WalterBright wrote:
| And yet the free Northern economy buried the slave
| Southern economy. How does that fit into your theory? And
| how the entire country boomed after slavery was
| abolished?
|
| Free economies always outperform slave labor, by a large
| margin.
|
| > Technological development
|
| Oddly enough, happens first in free market countries.
| Turns out, you can't build a technological economy using
| slaves.
|
| The Caribbean countries would be prosperous if they'd try
| free markets instead of socialism and communism.
| lazide wrote:
| Huh?
|
| The northern economy was MORE CLOSED than the South. For
| one, they banned slavery first. They had more
| import/export controls.
|
| The south was as free and open* as you could imagine -
| anyone with the Capital could buy a slave, or sell goods,
| etc.
|
| Trade was minimally restricted.
|
| (* Notably, if you were a "free man". Slaves, Women,
| Children, and sometimes Indentured Servants all had
| significant restrictions on rights across the board in
| both locations that were very similar - both de jure and
| de facto).
|
| The North were the ones blockading the South, not the
| other way around.
|
| [https://history.state.gov/milestones/1861-1865/blockade]
|
| The current Caribbean countries are also currently free
| markets? At least from what I can see.
|
| Plenty of 'international banking' in many of them too.
|
| Haiti _finally_ paid off the restitution the French have
| been making them pay since the slave revolt back in 1947
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt],
| and seem to be slowly gaining ground again.
|
| The Dominican Republic (on the same island, other side of
| the fence, different government due to a revolt in the
| ~1850's) has been doing quite well for a long time, I
| think partially because they don't have to pay that debt
| back, being a "different country" and all. And they
| generally don't have the various travel blacklists that
| Haiti has had.
|
| I suspect the argument you're trying to make is that
| mechanization/automation (and it's helpful companion,
| Capitalism) beats slavery.
|
| Which I definitely agree with. One beneficial advantage
| being that it frees up people to do more thinking (and
| less, well, slaving away) and benefits significantly from
| economies of scale - both for the Capitalists, and
| everyone else. Which is why inventing is so useful (when
| it won't get stomped on by monopolies, anyway).
|
| So it's mostly a beneficial cycle, as long as monopolist
| tendencies get reined in and someone is watching things
| to ensure it doesn't get too abusive. Unlike Slavery.
|
| Slavery is also despicable in general, so I personally am
| glad to see it gone.
|
| Free/Open/Closed/Restricted markets are not necessarily
| good or bad, independent of the circumstances - same as
| guns, IMO. They do have predictable outcomes, if used in
| predictable ways though.
|
| The more closed, the more problematic IMO, but I have yet
| to see a truly open market (aka a black market, perhaps?)
| without some really nasty abuses of it's own. So YMMV.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You keep trying to equate slavery with freedom and
| prosperity. It doesn't work. Forced labor is not free
| labor, and slaves are significantly less productive than
| free labor, for obvious reasons.
|
| The Southerners used slaves for cotton and tobacco
| farming. It was the only industry that could eke out a
| profit with them, and even that was failing by the 1850s.
|
| The Northern economy BURIED the Southern one. That's why
| the South wanted to secede. It wanted to protect itself
| from the North. The North also won the war because they
| enormously outproduced the South in arms, uniforms,
| railroads, food, everything needed to fight.
|
| The reason for the Gettysburg battle was Lee was headed
| for Harrisburg to loot the shoe factory there, because
| the Confederate army was barefoot.
| lazide wrote:
| Except I'm literally not?
|
| Maybe you should actually read my comment?
|
| They were fundamentally different, that's the point. Just
| not in the way you seem to keep trying to say it is.
|
| Industrialization and automation wins over slavery.
|
| Which is a good thing! And literally what I said in my
| comment.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Free markets win over slavery even in a pre-industrial
| society.
|
| Consider that no country that had slave agriculture has
| ever been able to feed itself. Even with tractors.
| lazide wrote:
| The Roman Empire? [https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-
| Roles-Of-Ancient-Roman-Sl.... ]
|
| Spartans and the Helots?
| [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots]
|
| Plus a dozen other examples from antiquity and recent
| history - including the Confederate states before the
| blockades and sanctions due to their use of slavery.
|
| What are you even talking about?
| sfink wrote:
| > Open markets where markets have been open for awhile
| (and no new game changing things like new technology, new
| ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis
| at that level.
|
| I think "homeostasis" is overselling it, even if I agree
| in the short to medium term.
|
| Any growth potential leads to pressure to take advantage
| of it, which leads to runaway growth until some sort of
| scarcity sets in, where one entity's ability to exploit
| the potential is decreased by other entities'. This leads
| to competition, which results in pressure for each entity
| to take advantage of more of it than other entities,
| which leads to entities evolving ways to restrict others'
| consumption even at the expense of their own. Free
| markets expand consumption of potential to the point of
| scarcity, at which time they produce evolutionary
| pressure towards non-free markets (via monopolies,
| regulatory capture, or whatever else is available).
|
| It's like a nutrient-rich drainpipe getting so clogged up
| with algae that the water stops flowing. Or fishing,
| where it's all good until you start making a serious dent
| in next year's breeding stock.
|
| Free markets in times of plenty can produce massive
| benefits. They raise people out of poverty, dramatically
| improve healthcare and education and opportunities, etc.
| AFAICT, they're the most powerful mechanism for doing so.
| And then eventually, they consume themselves.
|
| I take back the complaint about using "homeostasis".
| After all, it applies to systems that will eventually
| die.
| lazide wrote:
| When a creatures homeostasis gets too out of whack, yes -
| it dies. Notably, I have yet to see any system that won't
| die eventually. The giant Communism experiment died in
| the 90's, for one.
|
| Luckily, most have mechanisms to adjust - if they're
| willing and able to do so.
|
| Cancer, notably, is one such situation that hijacks that
| mechanism. I'd argue that culturally, we have such a
| cancer forming right now. And it's not capitalism, or
| communism, or politics, or guns or anti guns, or
| whatever.
|
| It's our inability to focus on and care about what we, as
| individuals, actually need and want, and push for it.
|
| An inability actively being grown and reinforced by a
| number of entities - and allowed because we refuse to
| acknowledge our weaknesses too.
| imtringued wrote:
| The problem isn't scarcity actually. If you have
| scarcity, "it just works".
|
| It is in fact the opposite. Capitalism fails due to
| inevitable relative abundance. At some point you reach
| market saturation. Present abundant resources should be
| allocated to the future. This doesn't happen. When
| abundance happens, you no longer need full employment to
| produce all present consumption needs. However, the
| principle of hiring the most productive employees and
| letting them work full time results in the redundancy and
| unemployment of less productive people, because hiring a
| single employee has less fixed costs than hiring two
| employees assuming they both perform the same amount of
| work. The paradox is that the more productive person is
| producing the consumer goods of the person that was let
| go. That unemployed person can't afford to buy his own
| consumer goods since he doesn't get paid to produce them,
| because it saves the employer fixed costs. You could
| think of this as a greedy knapsack algorithm. This
| algorithm works while there is scarcity, since you can
| just hire all workers. It doesn't work when there is
| abundance, since workers have to earn enough income to
| buy their own products. Note how this relates purely to
| the structure of the economy. Now the classical objection
| to this is that the workers who produce but don't consume
| will save instead, which lowers the interest rate. This
| is supposed to happen even if the interest rate is
| already at zero or even negative. The capital market
| signals that present resources are supposed to be
| allocated to serve the future. This allows employers to
| hire the unemployed workers and let them work to satisfy
| future demand, such as interplanetary travel and
| colonization of the moon or building pyramids that last
| more than four thousand years.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's true for the last thousand years at least. A
| thriving middle class appeared in northwestern Europe a
| thousand years ago, a middle class of merchants and other
| businessmen.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Which middle class would that be, in 1024? The merchant
| princes came later, centuries later in fact.
|
| The only that would remotely qualify would be guild
| organized professions, and even those rose to prominence
| in the high and latr middle ages.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If I recall correctly, it was most apparent in the
| Netherlands with the textile industry. It wasn't princes,
| it was commoners setting up shops etc.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The funny thing about all those guilds, as those were
| necessary to create something of a non-peasant class in
| the cities, is that zhey were absolutely not free market.
| They fixed prices, limited output, set salaries, limuted
| the number of workshops. In a sense, they were as much
| labor union as they were oligopols.
|
| What we consider free market came with the industrial
| revolution and colonialism and the national companies
| created to exploit those colonies. The first signs of
| that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with
| Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse. Those
| were still subserviant to nobility and aristocratic rule
| so, while the industrial revolution capitalists and
| colonial companies were much less so.
|
| Fun fact: The workers building cathedrals were fully
| unionized, with all the benefits that's with that:
| limited work hours and days, health care, social
| security.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| The last two hundred years saw the amount of energy
| available increase 50X.
|
| The US is into free markets because historically it's
| interests were anti-mercantilist.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The amount of energy available hasn't changed in a
| billion years, only the activities of humans has.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Please don't make silly comments like this.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You don't think the social context in which the energy
| was made available has anything to do with the fact that
| the growth occurred?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Also when currency was backed by commodity that made limits
| by sources. With fiat money, there are no limits and
| companies / governments crippling free market. (or natural
| resources like environment etc.)
| dimal wrote:
| Define "free". Most modern Asian capitalist economies have
| never been very "free" in the American sense of "free
| market". They've always been heavily guided by government
| policy.
|
| I think the most productive eras are really when everyone
| is picking low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit
| only seems so low because there's been a burst of newly
| available mechanical technology. Then everything is picked
| clean, productivity drops, and the economy shifts to
| prioritizing useless consumption.
| WalterBright wrote:
| "The free market is an economic system based on supply
| and demand with little or no government control. One of
| the central principles of a free market is the concept of
| voluntary exchange, which is defined as any transaction
| in which two parties freely trade goods or services."
|
| -- google "free market"
| thefaux wrote:
| Voluntary is carrying a lot of weight there. Do we
| voluntarily trade money for bread or freely choose
| starving as an alternative? What is to prevent those who
| control the bread from coercively taking every penny you
| have?
|
| A free market without government control is an adolescent
| fever dream. Nothing like it has ever existed or ever
| will. The question is not whether there will be
| government control, it is how much?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The purpose of government in a free market is to prevent
| use of force & fraud in transactions, and to enforce
| contracts and property rights.
|
| > Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will.
|
| The free North in the US.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Doesn't this depend on how you define productive? If GDP is
| your metric, I think it probably correlates well - despite
| the fact that the 50s and 60s weren't particularly free
| market (wage restrictions, high taxes, etc.) when compared
| to say 1930 after the free market collapsed.
|
| But my larger point is that I think "free market" eras also
| correspond with worse quality of life for the majority of
| citizens. I'm thinking things like pre-safety-regulations
| industrialization in the US; the environmental catastrophe
| that was the 60s (so bad that it led _Nixon_ to create the
| EPA); the affordable housing catastrophe that has been the
| past 15 years.
|
| We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry
| about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to
| afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets
| create conditions where externalities aren't as important.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| "Free Market" here refers to "free from economic rent"
| fieldcny wrote:
| That is not a common definition of free market.
| imtringued wrote:
| Whenever I hear people talk about free market it is
| usually not in the sense of economic freedom or free
| software. So you are correct. It generally refers to free
| as in free beer aka the government is supposed to
| subsidize the private sector and average citizens are
| supposed to pay for it. I'm not talking about socialists
| here, I'm talking about neoclassical economists and
| neoliberals in business and politics.
|
| Almost nobody wants to pay for the pollution they cause
| via CO2 taxes. Meanwhile income taxes are considered
| efficient despite their dead weight loss. Everything is
| upside down on this planet when it comes to economics.
| scarab92 wrote:
| I've literally never heard of someone defining a free
| market as a market with government subsidies.
|
| It's usually defined as a market free from (excessive)
| government control.
|
| I think you might be trying to shoehorn domestic policy
| concerns into a broader definition of free markets.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 1930 after the free market collapsed
|
| What collapsed were the banks, due to mismanagement by
| the Fed (the government). In particular, it was trying to
| maintain a fixed (government specified) exchange rate
| between gold and money while inflating the money 2:1.
|
| Like all such pegging schemes, the result was a run on
| the banks, leading to their collapse. This (finally)
| stopped when FDR made it illegal to exchange gold for
| money.
| mort96 wrote:
| Man why must Hacker News be so chock full of the most
| devoted followers of right-libertarianism
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry
| about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to
| afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets
| create conditions where externalities aren't as
| important.
|
| You're conflating two different things here.
|
| Pricing externalities is part of a functioning market,
| but most of those things aren't _externalities_.
| Pollution is, but free markets where emitting pollution
| is priced can still be competitive, they just take into
| account the cost of internalizing the externalized cost
| into the market price of the end products. Environmental
| regulations can be inefficient if they 're poorly
| conceived or impose excessive administrative burdens, and
| that's a problem, but you can have simple rules like "no
| leaded gasoline" and "no dumping mercury in the river"
| without destroying the free market.
|
| Whereas the reason _housing_ is expensive isn 't any
| market externalities, it's regulations that restrict
| where and how much of it can be built, and the supply of
| trade labor with which to build it.
| newsclues wrote:
| The Soviet Union was very productive in some areas without
| a free market.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Like what?
| newsclues wrote:
| Typically raw materials required by military.
|
| They built up a massive industry of mining and processing
| raw materials like aluminum, titanium and steel.
|
| Slave labour can be highly productive.
| mc32 wrote:
| Private companies, I think, have some limits. Governments can
| always raise taxes or print more money to sustain their
| otherwise insolvent organization.
|
| In other words they can be wasteful and top heavy without
| having to periodically pare things down through layoffs.
|
| And definitely organizations that teach their initial goals
| will reinvent themselves to milk more money.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Monopolies and regulatory capture sustains insolvent
| organizations.. see Boeing.
|
| This really isn't a private enterprise vs govt split. It's
| the system in place of how decisions get made, how
| resources are allocated. Our current system of the world
| has elements split in both private enterprise and gov't
| that as a system, exhibit Pournelles law.
|
| This theory of division between private enterprise and
| gov't doesn't in practice limit the negative effects - in
| fact in think we live in a modern world where we should
| recognize that there are many many examples of this split
| failing to administer a solution to meet the needs of
| society & humans.
| mc32 wrote:
| Boeing can still go bankrupt or become so financially
| strapped it needs to sell itself off, merge, split, etc.
| Governments rarely try to become more efficient. By and
| large they keep adding to their bureaucracies.
|
| The ex Gov of Texas was made fun of for saying he'd
| eliminate parts of the executive and when asked couldn't
| even remember which ones, never the less, there is a
| kernel of a good idea to retrench bureaucracies on a
| periodic basis -something when younger I'd dismiss out of
| hand because I though more govt always equals better.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Private enterprise in our current system stands in the
| way of government being more efficient. It's a prime
| example of administrators (in the form of capitol
| holders) standing in the way of better functioning.
|
| Intuit / Turbo Tax standing in the way of better tax
| admin.
|
| Pharma companies standing in the way of negotiated drug
| prices for medicare.
|
| Power utilities standing in the way of rules allowing
| distributed power production.
|
| The list goes on and on...
| mc32 wrote:
| Do you think the VA hospitals run better than private?
| dv_dt wrote:
| I know that private medicare advantage plans are coming
| to be worse than gov't medicare plans and the private
| healthcare fights many improvements in medicare
| administration. Including wierd lobbied divisions between
| what the private plans are allowed to cover in areas that
| the public plans are not.
|
| And on a system wide scale, US private healthcare is
| broken in both cost and performance when compared to
| comparably advanced nations.
|
| I'll rephrase what I said in a different comment, and
| that the public/private division and arguing about which
| is "better" on an exclusionary basis is a big distraction
| on the failing of systems which include elements of both.
| "Free market or not" is mostly an immaterial distinction
| imho.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > "Free market or not" is mostly an immaterial
| distinction imho.
|
| I don't think this is the right conclusion.
|
| What you need is a _competitive_ market. An uncompetitive
| market doesn 't work. But a government is going to be a
| monopoly, which is the thing that doesn't work, whereas a
| market has the _possibility_ of being competitive even if
| it is possible to screw that up.
|
| US healthcare is a case in point. The healthcare system
| is highly regulated and the regulators are captured by
| the incumbents, so the regulations are designed to
| inhibit price competition between providers and keep
| costs high because those costs are the incumbents'
| profits.
|
| In order to achieve the benefits of competition you would
| need rules that actually facilitate it. For example, if
| providers were required to publish pricing and then
| insurance would deposit into your HSA 90% of the median
| cost of a procedure among every provider within 100 miles
| of your address (equivalent to a 10% copay), and then you
| can choose where to go. Now there is no such thing as "in
| network" anymore and the patient has the direct incentive
| to be price sensitive, which in turn requires providers
| to publish competitive prices. But we don't do that,
| because it might work.
| dv_dt wrote:
| To be a bit glib there is no competitive market to give
| me an emergency surgery if my appendix has burst.
|
| But in a sense I think we have some agreement that it's
| much more interesting to discuss a set of characteristics
| than can make markets work to deliver value. I just think
| "free" isn't a useful distinction because it's approached
| usually a shorthand for free of regulation. I think that
| all markets are artificial and require rules to form a
| functional marketplace of exchange.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > To be a bit glib there is no competitive market to give
| me an emergency surgery if my appendix has burst.
|
| This is what everybody resorts to when trying to claim
| that this can't work, but it's really more an excuse to
| not even try.
|
| The large majority of medical spending _isn 't_ emergency
| care. You can't shop around for an appendectomy doesn't
| mean you can't shop around for a joint replacement.
|
| > I just think "free" isn't a useful distinction because
| it's approached usually a shorthand for free of
| regulation. I think that all markets are artificial and
| require rules to form a functional marketplace of
| exchange.
|
| There are a couple of different dimensions along which
| you can measure this. One is the _type_ of regulation
| that exists.
|
| Markets need externalities to be priced, otherwise
| companies will dump industrial waste in the river. That's
| one type of regulation.
|
| Another is paternalism. You can't buy a huge soda because
| it will make you fat. That's not an _externality_. You
| 're the one choosing to buy and drink the soda and you're
| the one who gets fat. You're the one who buys the poorly
| insulated house and you're the one who pays the heating
| bill. This isn't Alice doing something that hurts Bob,
| it's Alice doing something that hurts Alice. It's a
| different type of thing, and we could do without it
| entirely and still prohibit companies from polluting the
| rivers.
|
| Likewise, some regulations are, shall we say, petty. Some
| might say illiberal. You can't put an addition on your
| house or finish your basement because then more people
| might live in it. You can hypothetically frame this as an
| externality, because then there might be more traffic or
| something, but the underlying premise would have to be
| that this is something other people have a legitimate
| right to prevent and that interest should override
| another person's interest in having somewhere to live. We
| could do entirely without this type of regulation too.
|
| The other dimension is that regulations of actual
| externalities can be unnecessarily burdensome. You can
| pass a law against dumping mercury in the river and then
| fine anyone caught dumping mercury in the river. Or you
| can pass a law against manufacturing products without
| testing each and every one of them for the presence of
| mercury, even if you don't use any mercury in your
| manufacturing process, and then fine anyone who doesn't
| pay for testing, coincidentally by a testing company
| owned by a legislator's brother which employs a lot of
| people whose unions made some generous campaign
| contributions. Or just establish administrative agencies
| with too many bureaucrats who run out of anything
| legitimate to do and start to micromanage everything.
|
| Regulating externalities efficiently is a hard problem
| and claiming that you can't have a free market unless you
| can remove externalities without any inefficiency is
| basically claiming that you can't have a free market. We
| could certainly do better than we do right now, and there
| is value in the attempt, but it's never going to be
| perfect.
|
| Whereas the rules that are purely paternalism and
| politics? If the claim is that a market with those kinds
| of rules isn't a free market, that's a fairly legitimate
| claim.
| dv_dt wrote:
| I'll add a separate comment, because I don't feel I
| specifically addressed your observation that Boeing can
| go bankrupt, split, etc.
|
| Boeing is today, the conglomeration of previous companies
| that did become distressed enough to be consumed or split
| and acquired. That actually exacerbated the systemic
| problems of the current Boeing. So this idea that private
| enterprise can't accumulate systemic issues seems like an
| optimistic concept that is invalidated by Boeing's
| current circumstances.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| The current issues with Boeing are largely blamed on a
| merger with McDonnell Douglas that was forced upon Boeing
| by the US government. Now the US government gives many
| favorable conditions to Boing with regards to lucrative
| defence contracts as well as the US govt goes after
| Boeing would be competitors on their behalf (see
| Embraer). At this point it may make more sense to
| consider Boeing a for profit arm of the US government
| than any kind of normal business.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| - Governments can always raise taxes or print more money.
|
| Fiat money basically cripple the free market. We need
| decentralised currency for healthy free market that has
| limits in commodity.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Companies can be _very_ efficient at keeping themselves in
| the market rather than providing real value. Rent seekers,
| mono /oligopolies, etc. examples are abundant.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Addl note on the phase change: administration might also be
| thought of as capital ownership in a economic or capitalist
| context where an inefficiency is protection or
| "administration" of large pools of existing wealth and
| profits becoming more important than the continued building
| of the creation of value and identification and solving of
| social problems through economic activity.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| In particular, this would be capital ownership by
| _independent investors_ who are only interested in
| abstractly making money and not being personally involved
| in business operations, and then hire managers afflicted
| with the principal-agent problem to handle the details.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Individual investors are actually pretty disenfranchised
| compared to concentration of financial parties like
| institutional investors and private equity. This those
| more collected interests which are happy to install a
| Professional Managerial Class that are only interested in
| the abstract financials and ignore principal agent
| mismanagement of long term interests. But concentrated
| fictionalization agents and PMC they appoint preserve
| their control above their ability to manage healthy
| growth. And our system is unable to check them.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Large corporations should be included, and even whole
| economies. A more general word instead might be "systems".
|
| For example Davita actively lobbies their patients not to get
| transplants [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_nqzVfxFQ
| ajross wrote:
| > If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity
| eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the
| most productive eras were early on when large scale systems
| (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist.
|
| I really don't think that's correct. In fact GDP per capita
| was historically flat in most of the world, even through the
| early parts of the industrial revolution. It took off like a
| rocket only after WW2 in the pax americana era. I think
| that's an interesting argument to have, but I'm not going to
| believe that statement for an instant without numbers.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I agree with you that this law applies to any large
| organization.
|
| But I disagree with the idea that the 50s/60s represent the
| end of an "early on" era of the US economy. Many large US
| corporations were already decades old the time WW2 started -
| John Deere was founded in 1843, GE in 1892, Castrol in 1899,
| Texaco in 1902, Ford in 1903, Chevrolet and IBM (under a
| different name) in 1911, Boeing in 1916. The biggest boom in
| the US economy happened during and just after the war, when
| much of the giants of today (except big tech, of course) were
| 30+ years old companies (and there were many .
|
| I don't think bureaucracy was the problem with any slowdown,
| or if it was, it wasn't as inevitable as the law suggests.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there will be those dedicated to the organization itself_
|
| The Iron Law holds. The article's title does not. The way
| bureaucracies survive is by mutating their goals.
|
| The examples are numerous: the March of Dimes [1], every
| successful referendum movement, every country with clean
| drinking water. The author's mistake is in interpreting
| opposition as preservation.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes
| m12k wrote:
| In 2015, Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) talked about
| the same concept in an interview he gave about the graphic
| novel he was making as a sequel to Fight Club[1]
|
| > my dream, or idea was that Project Mayhem and the whole
| organization would work to create empowered individuals who
| would go off to create their own visions. And that the
| organization itself would disappear. People weren't meant to
| stay in it; the organization wasn't meant to sustain its own
| power. Which was my experience with doing [Werner H. Erhard's
| self-improvement training] EST. A lot of people who had a
| vision, who were empowered by EST -- including myself -- then
| went off to become the person they dreamed of being. That's how
| I started writing. But a lot of people who didn't really have a
| vision became part of EST. They really couldn't bridge out of
| it. They just kind of perpetuated the power of the
| organization, because they didn't have their own personal
| vision. And so what we're seeing in Fight Club 2 is that
| Project Mayhem has crossed the line where it's no longer about
| empowering people. It's about maintaining its own power in the
| world.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8660881/fight-club-
| sequel...
| pimlottc wrote:
| To be clear, the Fight Club 2 limited comic series was indeed
| published in 2015 and concluded in 2016 after 10 issues,
| which have been collected into a graphic novel:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_2
| seer wrote:
| I think the "Mars" books (red mars, blue mars, green mars)
| proposed an interesting economic idea.
|
| In a world where automation and AI allowed physical stuff to
| be organized and built almost as easy as software, you didn't
| really _need_ huge organizations (employee wise) to
| accomplish goals, so Mars came up with an economic setup that
| did not allow you to join an organization, unless you got
| hard equity in it, and the amount of equity you could have
| had a minimum of 1%.
|
| So everyone worked for their own organizations and were
| incentivized for their success, and organizations couldn't
| grow too big (100 people at most).
|
| So you had lots of small organizations with well developed
| interfaces between them, because there were so many of them.
| And you could still acquire huge wealth, just couldn't be a
| monopoly.
|
| I mean its just sci-fi thought experiment, but it got me
| thinking maybe there are better economic systems out there,
| both equitable and free market based ...
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| > came up with an economic setup that did not allow you to
| join an organization, unless you got hard equity in it, and
| the amount of equity you could have had a minimum of 1%.
|
| Wow... we're so deep into capitalism that worker
| cooperatives is a sci-fi concept now.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I don't know if this is really true, but it does feel true. And
| I worry there are no easy paths for the first kind of person.
| One option is to persist devoted to the cause, and try to put
| up with the pain of being in that organization, potentially
| changing the organization's path after much effort. Another
| option is to quit and go it alone / start a new organization,
| but that's quite hard too.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Corollary: we have to kill these organizations off every now
| and then so that the herd doesn't get too ossified.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Now define "we" "have to" and "kill."
|
| What mechanism, that is not a system vulnerable to the same
| ossification but with far more unilateral power, will
| actually execute such a directive?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Imagine a union which forms in secret, strikes once, hard
| enough that the misbehaving institution cannot continue,
| then disbands.
|
| Now imagine a culture which habitually does this. You don't
| need continuity of leadership if the only reason your
| organization exists is to rid the world of a problem. Once
| the problem goes away, so does the organization that solves
| it. (And if you fail, well, disband anyway and try it again
| next time as a differently composed group).
|
| It would be like agriculture, but instead of selecting
| plants for drought resistance we're selecting institutions
| for human-friendliness.
|
| Perhaps there's a holiday, and a crypto thingy that handles
| voting. If there's not sufficient consensus, nothing
| happens, but if it turns out that a sufficient majority
| voted to disband the same institution, then on the next
| such holiday you meet in person with some algorithmically
| chosen subset of people who voted similarly to you (to
| verify that they're real people and not sybil accounts).
|
| If validation succeeds, then we generate proofs that
| indicate that yes, there are enough of us--this isn't
| radicalism--this is the will of the people. Then you spend
| the _next_ such holiday orchestrating the demise of your
| target. Then you disband, problem presumably solved. If
| not, you 'll have to try it again with a new union on the
| next cycle.
|
| It would create incentives for the bureaucrats to not let
| their organization be chosen. It's more or less what labor
| day should have been. Let's do it quarterly.
|
| As for "have to", you don't "have to" breathe, but you
| "have to" breathe _in order to_ stay alive. It 's a
| conditional, not an imperative.
|
| So I mean that if we want our institutions to be
| continually useful to us, then we have to practice some
| kind of hygiene of this sort. Evolution does not act on
| organisms or organizations which don't occasionally die.
|
| Perhaps this too would ossify and eventually have to take
| itself out of the meme pool, but I think it could do us
| some good along the way.
| neycoda wrote:
| Also the 2nd group will game the system to funnel a bigger
| percentage of the income to themselves while raising prices on
| students.
| marmaduke wrote:
| This seems like a great argument that bureaucracy is a just
| another kind of biological organization. It follows from
| Maturana's theory of autopoeisis, any version of homeostasis,
| or more recent ideas from Friston on self-evidencing.
| airejtlij wrote:
| I was a NASA federal employee in 2017 at Johnson Space Center
| and I saw this exactly. There were people like me who joined to
| be a part of a particular project and who maybe would follow
| that project when it got separated and sold off to some
| contractor, and there were the die-hard NASA fanboys (and
| girls) who just wanted to "be a part of NASA" and who maybe
| spent years singularly focused on getting hired and displayed
| little concern about which role they inhabited. Project-level
| managers up through department heads appeared to be people who
| started in the first group and slowly transitioned to the
| second group.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The second group is just impossible to beat: people interested
| in playing office politics, unburdened by objectives like
| "achieving anything great as an institution," and motivated by
| a need to find a niche to survive. Always seemed like an
| argument for Basic Income to me; at least rob them of some of
| their motivation, and remove some of the incentive for others
| to ally up with them.
| mitchbob wrote:
| Related: The purpose of a system is what it does. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
| sitkack wrote:
| The Clay Shirky talk, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models"
| is play on "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter
| (as mentioned in the post).
|
| Another great person to study in systems and complexity is Jane
| Jacobs.
|
| One parallel is see is people "warning" about the impending
| population collapse (which we desperately need), but what we need
| to do is actively restructure our society to handle it
| gracefully.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archae...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
| shakesbeard wrote:
| Also see https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws?tab=readme-ov-
| file#th...
| Georgelemental wrote:
| NATO and its system of related organizations is another great
| example. Built to defend against the USSR, when the USSR fell it
| made sure to repeatedly provoke Russia so that the threat from
| the east would be preserved.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Many here will see connections to The Innovator's Dilemma. So I
| want to ask, are you aware of any business that recognized it had
| become an impediment to further innovation and "consciously"
| applied the suggestions from TID? Has anyone done a review of
| their own business trying to see if they had become part of the
| problem rather than the best solution to the problem?
| gloryless wrote:
| The systems people are just nodding
| exabrial wrote:
| I can think of no better example of than the US Postal Service.
|
| They're literally is zero reason in 2024 why are we cutting down
| trees using diesel fuel to ship paper to a mill using coal to
| make it into paper using more diesel fuel to ship it to my home
| to be trashed picked up by a dump truck, using more diesel fuel
| to be thrown in a giant pile on what it would've been otherwise
| pristine piece of land.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I don't think the US Postal Service is responsible for the
| quantity of paper people are shipping to your doorstep, neither
| for the disposal of that pile of paper in a giant pile etc.
| Angostura wrote:
| To be clear, you believe that everyone in the US is
| sufficuently digitally savvy and well equipped with digital
| technology that paper is no-longer needed? Have you tried
| volunteering with your local town's digital champion/digital
| mentoring programme, if they exist? Yoiu may find it it
| interesting
| dambi0 wrote:
| What proportion of your trash is made up of mail?
| fragmede wrote:
| The existence of Amazon's shipping department, UPS, FedEx, DHL,
| among others, says that people still want to ship physical
| items around, despite is living in a digital age.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The AMA is an amazing example of this, even though most doctors
| do not belong to the AMA.
| mrandish wrote:
| The TSA is also miraculous in it's ability to suck up billions
| of dollars in hidden fees added to every plane ticket and annoy
| tens of millions of people while performing a "service" which
| has been proven (many times, including by the TSA's own
| studies) to be completely unnecessary since cockpit doors were
| hardened and pilot procedures updated in 2002. Even if it _was_
| needed, their "service" has also demonstrated itself to be
| completely ineffective based on the number loaded handguns
| accidentally included in carry-on luggage and missed by TSA
| screening every year.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This seems reductive. For everything TSA misses they've
| caught plenty of other weapons that have no place in the
| cabin of an aircraft. No security can be perfect, so
| tradeoffs are inevitable. We can disagree about the
| thresholds, but it's not just theater.
| derefr wrote:
| But it's not the TSA's job to prevent murders in the air.
| (We already _had_ a service specifically for that -- the
| Air Marshals!)
|
| The TSA's _only_ job is to prevent planes from being
| _hijacked_ or _destroyed_ in a way that results in massive
| collateral damage.
|
| And as the GP says, if you can't get in the cockpit, there
| become relatively few ways of doing this. (And the ways
| that do remain -- e.g. binary explosives -- are addressed
| by the more-limited carry-on regulations and security
| checks that _every_ country does, and which the US already
| did _before_ the TSA.)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| An air marshall on a flight has one gun. If a determined
| group could reliably bring multiple guns into the cabin
| they're much more likely to overpower the marshall. From
| there they could open exterior doors and throw debris
| into the engines. Or perhaps their weapons could breach
| even armored cockpit doors.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Obviously the solution is just to allow concealed carry
| on planes and let law abiding citizens defend themselves,
| and keep the cockpit locked. Yee-haw!
| kortilla wrote:
| It's a plug door, you can't open it at altitude.
|
| Also, throwing debris into the engines would just result
| in an emergency landing.
|
| The TSA is ridiculous and there isn't a need to try to
| contrive examples to justify what they could prevent
| outside of hijacking.
|
| If their goal was to prevent killing just a plane load of
| people, they would have to setup perimeters far around
| the airport to prevent people with a 50 caliber rifle
| from shooting up the cockpit during takeoff roll.
|
| They would also need to block private air access to the
| airport because someone could just drive a truck of
| explosives underneath a plane load of people taxiing.
|
| Put differently, it their job was just mass casualty
| prevention in transit caused by other people, they would
| need to be near every bus station, controlling road
| access near buses, guarding all railroad tracks with
| passenger routes, etc.
| lamontcg wrote:
| TSA lines are an obvious soft target and if someone
| wanted to take a lot of people with them, they could just
| use a suicide vest in the security lines. It would have
| the same chilling effects on the air travel economy and
| spread terror.
| mech422 wrote:
| Yep - and it has been done already [0]. Stadiums, malls,
| and water supplies are other extremely soft targets. I
| tend to consider TSA to be 'make work' at this point...
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International
| _Airpo...
| derefr wrote:
| I would hypothesize that the goal isn't preventing mass
| casualties, but rather preventing _mass casualties that
| shift popular sentiment toward making war with certain
| countries_. (The government calls these acts
| "terrorism", but citizens being _afraid_ isn 't quite
| what they have a problem with!)
|
| The US government doesn't want a repeat of Sept 11. By
| which I don't mean "planes crashing into buildings"; but
| rather "operatives of some other country doing something
| on US soil, that results in US citizens becoming enraged-
| enough toward a particular other country, that --
| sensible realpolitik or not -- any president that _didn
| 't_ declare war with that country, would be immediately
| impeached and replaced with one that would."
|
| The US government, despite being a nominal democracy,
| wants to "the head to control the heart" when it comes to
| deciding when to go to war -- because the heart is very
| easy to manipulate, and because there are always tons of
| realpolitik things going on that the heart knows nothing
| about.
|
| I would guess that the government thinks that US citizens
| won't get too angry if terrorists bomb a bus, or a plane
| taking off/landing, or a line full of people. All these
| things are _bad_ , but they don't strike me as being
| _offensive to the American spirit_.
|
| The TSA, meanwhile, _is_ very concerned about the
| airspace above... football stadiums. Which tells you
| about their thinking re: what would "offend the American
| spirit."
| WalterBright wrote:
| > throw debris into the engines
|
| Good luck with throwing debris into a 400 mph wind at
| -30F while passing out from lack of oxygen.
| notact wrote:
| Yup, and also not getting sucked out the door if you were
| able to open it (which you couldn't at cabin pressure
| anyway).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Burt Berlin, my mentor at Boeing, got his start working
| on the B47 (first jet bomber). They discovered that the
| pilot could not bail out into the wind stream, the force
| would just push him back in. Hence the development of the
| ejection seat to force him out.
| swells34 wrote:
| I'm getting the impression you don't know much about
| aviation.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This really doesn't say anything about the benefits though.
| Just because people had "weapons" (some of which are
| basically harmless, like fishing tackle, or drinks),
| doesn't mean they prevented a threat. Yes, maybe the
| theater of it has dissuaded some from even attempting.
| Many, including myself, feel that many of the rules and the
| penalties for them are extreme.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Yes but many other countries do this same service with
| private companies for much less money.
| gcheong wrote:
| "For everything TSA misses they've caught plenty of other
| weapons that have no place in the cabin of an aircraft."
|
| How do you know? They seem very tight-lipped about how
| effective they are at catching things vs things they miss
| and at least one test done by the TSA itself resulted in a
| 95% success rate - for the terrorists (https://www.schneier
| .com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a...). But hey now
| you at least have the "right" to pay a fee to be labeled
| not a terrorist and go through security as if it was pre
| 9/11.
| ttymck wrote:
| Yet most Americans would vote to maintain the TSA and its
| mandate.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Most Americans seem poised to vote for either Biden or
| Trump also. Sometimes the majority is a mob of idiots.
| vacuity wrote:
| There's no amount of informed argument that will sway the
| extremists, so when it comes to politics, people are even
| bigger idiots. For the rest, it's more that they feel one
| candidate or the other is a necessary evil to avoid
| letting the worse candidate be elected. I don't think
| that's an issue on their part, at least as pertains
| directly to who they should vote for.
| ttymck wrote:
| I am not quite sure what point you are trying to make, as
| it pertains to the TSA
| vacuity wrote:
| I was going off-topic.
| ttymck wrote:
| Perhaps that was my point exactly?
| nojvek wrote:
| There's a notion of creating jobs that is seen in many
| economies.
|
| People are much happier if they are paid to do a "job" even
| though it is sometimes more efficient to not have that
| person.
|
| You could directly give them the money but it would drive
| people to depression and addiction without a job.
|
| It's interesting how we all have this innate drive to "do
| something to keep us busy and be appreciated for it".
|
| That's how I feel going through TSA. Millions of jobs to keep
| people busy.
| cortesoft wrote:
| There are so many actual useful things that need to be
| done, though! Can't we make work for those instead?
| alexashka wrote:
| Yes, but that would involve people who make decisions
| admitting there are people _much_ more capable of doing
| what they do and stepping aside.
|
| Do you foresee that becoming the norm within your
| lifetime? :)
| giantg2 wrote:
| If I remember right, there are multiple types of leaders.
| One type is leader by necessity - basically you don't
| want to lead but do if you feel you're the best option.
|
| I can say from experience that the scenario of these
| types of people becoming the dominant leadership style
| isn't possible as it's self-defeating.
|
| I filled the role of a tech lead and had great feedback
| from it. We had a more senior dev join the following
| year. I told them they should ask for the official title
| and we could share the responsibilities that I had been
| performing on my own. 10 years later and im not even a
| senior dev... sucks for me I guess.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| No, no one wants to do the useful things that need to be
| done, such as fixing my sewage pipes. Not even me, even
| if I was paid SWE salaries.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Fixing sewer pipes for SWE salaries sounds pretty good to
| me.
| anotheruser13 wrote:
| TSA is more like what Graeber would call a bullshit job.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There's tons of trash to pickup everywhere if the goal is
| to give people a job.
| latchkey wrote:
| I wouldn't say "completely unnecessary" because I believe
| that preventing another "shoe bomber" [0] is important. But,
| the way the TSA goes about doing that, doesn't seem to be
| worth the cost.
|
| [0] https://www.fbi.gov/history/artifacts/richard-reids-shoes
| montjoy wrote:
| I would argue that the main function of the TSA is to ensure
| the public feels safe flying. As long as the public perceives
| that the TSA is making it "safe enough" to fly it has value,
| regardless of its actual effectiveness.
| ericfr11 wrote:
| So do most oil companies: money goes to the top cigar-smoking
| high -level directors, and ground-level engineers work for
| peanuts
| kortilla wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "peanuts". Eng for oil generally
| puts you in top 5% of incomes in the US, it just has a crap
| location.
| WalterBright wrote:
| So start your own company. Then you get to keep all the
| money.
| supafastcoder wrote:
| There's no such thing as a broken system, every system is
| perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.
| advisedwang wrote:
| "The purpose of a system is what it does." See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| By that definition if I crumple a ball of paper and throw it
| and it goes 7 feet, I've engineered a physical marvel of an
| object that goes exactly that distance.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| While absurd this is accurate. Incidentally, in the 5th grade
| I won (and was disqualified from) a school-wide paper
| airplane contest. The rules as presented prior to the
| contest:
|
| - No design constraints specified, your paper airplane could
| be any style that suited you.
|
| - paper airplanes must be constructed from a single sheet of
| paper (no size limit specified)
|
| - weighting was allowed (no weight limit specified)
|
| The day of the contest I walked out into the middle of the
| school gym with a single large sheet of construction paper
| and a dollar and fifty cents in quarters in my pocket. I
| placed the quarters in the middle of the paper then carefully
| crumpled it into a ball in such a way to ensure the coins
| were trapped. I then threw it the full length of the gym and
| out the gym doors, tripling the closest best distance. I was
| immediately pulled aside by several teachers and informed I
| was disqualified, with no reasons for the disqualification
| given. Moral: none that I can discern.
| diracs_stache wrote:
| Independent thinking like that could never be encouraged or
| rewarded in a place designed to produce just smart enough
| replacement labor. Hell, equivalent stunts in places like
| university or the workplace wouldn't necessarily end up in
| your favor (similar arbitration resulting in the
| organizations desired outcome likely being the case).
| jogjayr wrote:
| The rules, as you gave them to us, didn't define an
| "airplane". So you have to go to a dictionary for that.
| Which means ball of paper isn't an airplane because an
| airplane has to have wings.
|
| I understand why it felt unjust to you at the time. But
| even if you go 100% rules lawyer, the disqualification was
| correct.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Nope. Airplane was undefined as specific questions
| regarding design requirements and defining features where
| asked, the response was: there are no limitations other
| than it must be a shape made out of paper.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Another book that covers the topic - Quigley's the Evolution of
| Civilizations. Taken from a summary:
|
| "Quigley defines a civilization as "a producing society with an
| instrument of expansion." A civilization's decline is not
| inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is
| transformed into an institution--that is, when social
| arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into
| social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real
| social needs."
|
| He spends some time defining institutionalization, when groups
| transition from being a group that was formed to accomplish a
| goal, to being a group whos goal becomes to preserve the group,
| the various stages involved, and the points where there's
| opportunities to rectify the situation via reform.
| seventytwo wrote:
| ...duh? I thought this was common knowledge.
| sdeframond wrote:
| Luncheon vouchers systems are run by private entities that take a
| fee on it. I believe the fee is pretty high (a shop owner told me
| 8%, but I am not too confident).
|
| I definitely believe this system is outdated, that the tax-cut is
| eaten by said companies plus the extra burden and that the world
| would be a slightly simpler place without meal vouchers (at least
| as I know them in France).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher
| gruez wrote:
| Any source that companies are actually paying a premium on
| this? Given that gift cards are sold at par or even at a
| discount, I'm skeptical that companies will pay a premium for
| what essentially are gift cards.
| sdeframond wrote:
| Companies don't pay a premium but merchants pay a transaction
| fee.
|
| Reading from Swile's website, it is a flat 3.85%, quite lower
| than what I initially thought. I am not sure how it compares
| to credit cards.
|
| Source https://www.swile.co/en/merchants/meal-vouchers
| jmilloy wrote:
| I tend to think that this isn't inherent to institutions (or
| individuals), but rather that institutions that have this
| behavior tend to grow and last, whereas institutions that do not
| stay small and eventually disappear. A kind of survivorship bias.
| jl2718 wrote:
| True, but then how do problems actually get solved? Perhaps only
| by agents that would benefit if the problem were solved.
|
| For instance, send UNICEF into nations with extreme poverty, and
| you will get back a bunch of sad stories, a bigger UNICEF, and a
| larger population to feed. Send a cigarette company, and
| magically the people will find a way to create an economy to fund
| their nicotine addiction. There are other solutions to the
| plagues of poverty, such as civil war, narco-states, natural
| resource extraction, and refugee migration.
|
| Not your intent? Well, you probably didn't actually want to solve
| the problem; you just wanted to feel good about your intent to
| solve the problem, and now I ruined it for you, so I'm the
| problem.
| mikelitoris wrote:
| No you didn't solve the problem. You just traded one problem
| for another one.
| jl2718 wrote:
| This is actually the point, and is analogous to convex
| optimization, in that systems always evolve along the
| boundary of constraint, and in the linear case, it will
| always be an exchange of active parts of the problem.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I'm always thinking about that when I see various homeless
| shelters in my city.
|
| Yes I dont doubt that people there work from their goodwill...
| but... if homelessness disappear, they will be out of business?
| From some point of view, homelessness is GOOD for them?
|
| Same thing with all those African charities I guess, but I dont
| have any direct experience with poverty in Africa while I see
| homeless daily
| prabhu-yu wrote:
| Police system wants criminals to persist. Justice system wants
| litigations to persist. Medical system wants diseases to prolong.
| Religious leaders don't want to us to reach our own god.
| Political and military leaders want the country to be threatened.
| Education system don't want us to learn on our own. So, they
| create artificial pressure to get educated. Even top
| technological companies pay legal bribes to users not to use
| competatiors product. so on.
|
| Only solution to all this is: Think how would we live if such
| entities did not exist. Then develop necessary skills and use
| them in daily life.
| Spivak wrote:
| > Police system wants criminals to persist
|
| It's not actually police most of the time, it's for-profit
| prisons. They are by far the biggest lobby for keeping minor
| drug offenses illegal. Police don't actually benefit a whole
| lot from there being lots of crime, at least where I live -- it
| makes them look bad.
| prabhu-yu wrote:
| Sorry, I generalized it too much. I was expressing the
| general tendency, not the exception, forgot put a star mark!
| Yes, you are correct. There are good people in every system.
| Even I have seen top doctors in top hospitals who wished
| patients who had surgeries to return home as soon as
| possible. I have seen (some you tube videos) some police
| persons who wished less crime. I have seen engineers fixing
| bugs once for all!
|
| This adage can be seen in the Neitz-sche's statement -
| "exploitation is a basic function of life".
| 65 wrote:
| It's funny too because it applies to almost every industry, and
| to almost every individual in those industries.
|
| I wrote and maintain the codebase for a government ETL pipeline
| that an entire analytics team relies on. It would in no way
| benefit me to have good documentation, or tests, or a readable
| codebase. I put those things in because I'm not a sociopath.
|
| The difference is that corporations behave like sociopaths, not
| most individuals.
| 343242dfsdf wrote:
| I know
| alok-g wrote:
| A story from a physicist friend working in a mid-size high-tech
| company:
|
| There was a director-level organization of about 50 people trying
| to solve a technical research-level problem. The physicist found
| an innovative solution that was too simple and just worked. When
| he demonstrated it to everyone, he thought everyone would be very
| happy. On the contrary, his manager started having unexplained
| issues with him and he was shortly let go.
|
| He has ultimately given up on corporate politics and is currently
| a physics teacher at a usual local college.
|
| As the physics teacher, he found that the students in his class
| barely knew basic stuff (vector addition, etc.) from the pre-
| requisite courses. He tried to teach to cover up. He diligently
| and fairly checked the answers/solutions from the students in the
| mid-term exams, and found that practically no one passed.
|
| He was shortly called by the college dean and heard back. The
| dean's primary concern was that irrespective of whether students
| actually learn or not, if so many fail the exams, the college
| would get shut down.
|
| He is now forced to pass the students even while he realizes that
| by passing them now, he's setting them up for failure in the
| future if they actually pursue physics.
|
| I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting, say
| 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should.
|
| ----
|
| In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake
| problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of
| course never solve them.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a
| streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations. On the
| other hand, after many years of life experience, when I hear a
| (first or second hand) account that takes the form "of course I
| was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations
| were clearly behaving like idiots", I've learned to consider
| the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult.
| The larger the value of N, the more seriously I consider it.
| And I've learned this the hard way.
| mturmon wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Besides "N", another indicator you alluded to is the degree
| to which the aggrieved person is willing to take any
| responsibility for the outcome.
|
| Sometimes gifted people can negotiate problems with a nervous
| college dean or engineering manager, so that their solution
| gets adopted. These problems exist in the world, and
| successful engineers will hopefully learn to cope with them.
| ip26 wrote:
| Not to mention the unrecognized genius trope. In more
| familiar terms, the _"I could do that in a weekend"_ guy
| (https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/amp/)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Ironically Stack Overflow is one of the best-functioning
| sites I know of. Community issues, sure, but the pages load
| really quickly and the UI highlights exactly what it
| should.
|
| But then there are some big sites which truly suck: massive
| load time and basic UI issues. Like outdated
| government/university sites, job application sites,
| Kroger's online store
| (https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-
| struggle/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345309).
| And I know some of these organizations suffer from
| inadequate funding, legacy systems, and/or compliance rules
| which make their sites' issues legitimate, and I'm certain
| no developer could recreate them in a weekend. But I'm also
| convinced many of them have issues because of carelessness
| and/or inefficiency, and a few may be actively trying to
| emulate bad UX (probably to deter people from using them).
| markerz wrote:
| I think both sides are true. On the one hand, dysfunction
| exists in all organizations. On the other hand, it takes
| effort to maintain a high functioning organization and most
| people don't want to put in the real hard work. Not only are
| most people resistant to change, but the gratitude/reward
| probably won't be there. It's far easier to complain and
| wallow in a stuck situation than to sit through the
| discomfort of pushing for change. Schools, non-profits,
| government programs, corporations, they all experience it.
| While I can't say I support this way of life, I can
| definitely understand why it exists.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > gratitude/reward probably won't be there. It's far easier
| to complain and wallow in a stuck situation than to sit
| through the discomfort of pushing for change.
|
| That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded
| for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad
| management.
| Xylakant wrote:
| "managing" their workspace and surroundings is the jobs
| of every senior person in a workplace. Having a line
| manager that cares and is good at their job helps, but if
| technical folks believe they can just care about the
| technical part of a job, they're setting themselves up
| for failure and frustration. Getting a solution adopted
| needs much more than technical excellence, it needs
| communication, an eye for human factors, an idea of costs
| and tradeoffs.
|
| Complaining about "bad management" is a symptom of a lack
| of awareness. There's a lot of bad management, but
| there's about as many technical people that just ignore
| all of those non-technical factors and then constantly
| complain that their solutions never make it anywhere.
| generic92034 wrote:
| In my eyes there is a good deal of victim blaming in that
| view. Time and again engineers pushing for changes,
| ignoring borders of teams or (sub-)orgs and the
| management hierarchy are met with highly toxic reactions,
| usually by managers who are seeing some kind of dangerous
| insubordination.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I'm a tech person by trade and spent more than a decade
| in operations - the ones that need to deal with the
| results of it all. And I can tell you that I've met a
| fair share of developers and ops people that would just
| ignore all constraints, to the point of blaming
| management that they required developers (and ops folks)
| to implement legal requirements. as an example: I've
| worked in an environment that managed sensitive (and
| legally privileged) data and people would rather
| circumvent security measures that made their work harder
| than take security up on the explicit offer to figure out
| better measures that would put less burden on ops. And
| the same people complained about the crackdown that
| followed. Yes, the rules made work harder. Yes, they
| could have been changed to make things less onerous. But
| security was reasonable, they were willing to invest time
| and money to work with the ops folks - so going around
| the because you know better is a stupid move. Yet people
| did.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I believe you. No doubt that this also happens. But I
| have also experienced developers pushing for
| simplifications (think customer service UI, extremely
| convoluted process for testing corrections, etc.) being
| put into their place, leaving no doubt that they were
| seen as "troublemakers". So I just wanted to point out
| that aspect. Of course, things like that are showing a
| significant degree of organizational dysfunction, but
| that is big corp today.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I don't believe we're in disagrement. Yes, there's bad
| management which will resist all attempts to improve
| things. Quit, move on. You won't fix the place.
|
| I'm specifically pushing against the stance of
|
| > That's the job of management, that's why they get
| rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of
| bad management.
|
| It's just not. And with that stance, you won't get things
| moving forward because it displays a major disregard for
| other peoples motivations, priorities and constraints. It
| displays the assumption that technical solutions can be
| judged on purely technical merits while real-world
| tradeoffs are so much more complex. If you want to be
| able to move things forward, you need to work with the
| organizational structure, not shunt off work to them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| N here is only 2. It's pretty plausible.
|
| "Streak" and "series" are overstating 2 by a lot.
| coldtea wrote:
| You can go to N=1000 schools and see the same attitude.
|
| It's an "unspoken understanding" that a big chunk of the
| students shall graduate even if most know shit, else there
| will be trouble from parents, the state, management, and so
| on.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Literally every organization I've worked (probably 10 or 12
| so far) for has had some glaring example of this principle.
| alok-g wrote:
| I align. We note that N is only an indicator. To actually
| answer, one needs to seek and analyze a detail after detail
| of facts.
|
| >> And I've learned this the hard way.
|
| I would like to hear more to learn from your experience.
|
| For the said physicist, I understand the situation well
| already.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > the speaker is just unusually difficult.
|
| "Your actions are making it _unusually difficult_ for us to
| continue rent seeking! "
|
| I bet the Mafia considers that young police officer that
| actually wants to stop crime "unusually difficult" as well.
|
| Generally when everyone is corrupt, non-corruption is seen as
| bad and evil.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who (by the words of a collegue) put a lot of
| skill points into diplomacy: there are many clever people who
| just suck at communicating their solution to the right people
| in the right way.
|
| And then when things don't work out they think it is about
| the facts (and granted: often it is) and not about the
| communications.
|
| Institutional politics means it matters what you propose in
| front of whom in which order and in which way. This is
| especially true if you are not surrounded by idealists but by
| oportunists.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The mistake I made when I was younger was thinking that
| good communication was about being able to clearly and
| concisely convey the information in your head into another
| head.
|
| I eventually learned that this was necessary but not
| sufficient, because "the right way" to communicate varies
| significantly based on social / political / cultural /
| emotional / institutional dynamics.
|
| As a young man I simply didn't understand enough of those
| dynamics to be able to model the when and the why of
| communication (meta-communication?), even if I was good at
| the idea transmission part.
|
| Life experience helps immensely here.
| navane wrote:
| Or you became "one of them", and now you too have an
| agenda.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| No it's not about that. I've seen this failure case over
| and over again. When you communicate, it's not enough to
| explain a solution. You have to painstakingly help others
| internalize the problem. Once you've done that, and
| gained enough critical mass, you find that the solution
| almost communicates itself. It's almost like magic when
| you see an organization shift its thinking like this
| atoav wrote:
| No, you can be a good communicator without being a
| manipulative asshole with an egoistic hidden agenda.
|
| This is more about how communication works. Communicating
| ideas and intentions is always about shaping the words
| that leave your mouth in such a way the other side
| understands the thing you intended them to understand.
|
| Inexperienced communicators will say what makes sense to
| them and be surprised when someone else in a completely
| different frame of mind doesn't pull the same meaning
| from those words. Wanting people to understand you and
| shaping what you say in such a way they get it is not a
| bad thing. You would also talk differently to your kid,
| than say to your co-worker. This requires to a certain
| degree that you can see things from their perspective.
| Now surely you could use this for manipulative reasons if
| you are a soul-less bastard, but that doesn't say
| anything about about the practise.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I completely agree with your sentiment, but I think whether
| or not you did vector arithmetic correctly at a first-year
| undergraduate course level is not subjective.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I matured a different, if not opposite viewpoint: every
| entity acts in it own self interest, so if the incentives are
| not aligned, things will tend go south. It may work for a
| long period of time because of sheer will power and
| commitment to a greater good from the people involved in the
| organisation, but over time, everything will follow market
| incentives.
|
| Public health care seems to be a primary example (and my
| family has been in the sector for more than 40 years); HC was
| good for a long period of time then it got progressively
| worse and nowadays it's just an item in your tax bill. If you
| literally don't want to die you better know someone on the
| inside which can push the right buttons or go private.
|
| The money spent on law enforcement had a reverse effect on
| crime rate, the police actually got less efficient the more
| money they manage to extract from public funds. They got
| really good at getting more money from ridiculous speed
| limits and automated systems though.
|
| Looking in the private tech sector my experience has been
| similar: the larger the organisation the more it resemble a
| government and the more inefficiency is tolerated. Within
| layers and layers of middle management it's easy to waste
| plenty of investors' money - albeit not indefinitely, like a
| government would.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a
| streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations._
|
| I've seen the same play out in several organizations,
| including the public sector. You don't even need to be
| cynical to know this is the case...
|
| > _when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes
| the form "of course I was the reasonable one in every case
| and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots",
| I've learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is
| just unusually difficult._
|
| Probably based on different experiences, with different
| context.
|
| Because in the context described (e.g. the educational
| example) this is par for the course - and any number of
| teachers and professors can attest that if you do your work
| too well and apply rigid standards, you're out of there in no
| time, or at least make enemies very fast.
|
| > _the speaker is just unusually difficult._
|
| Of course, if the baseline is complacency, profiteering, and
| lack of standards, anybody who stirs those waters is
| "unusually difficult.".
| simonh wrote:
| The college example doesn't seem likely though. Exams are
| set by central authorities and independently adjudicated.
| It's not up to teachers whether students pass or not, and
| parents and education authorities look at exam results to
| judge colleges, not teacher assessments.
| coldtea wrote:
| Not sure if you have in mind entrance exams or something
| that's not set by professors (he mentions mid-terms). Or
| perhaps you have your local example in mind.
|
| This however is absolutely the case in my country, exam
| questions are set by the teachers, and are graded by them
| (well, often also by postgraduates given this task by the
| teacher so they can slack).
|
| As for the US, I did a quick search now, and found this:
| "Unlike final exams, which are scheduled by the
| university's Registrar, midterm exams are typically
| scheduled during class time by the professor. Some
| classes may have two midterm exams, in which case they
| are spread further throughout the semester. Professors
| outline these exams in the course syllabus, so they will
| not come as a surprise. The weight of each midterm exam
| on the final grade is also usually provided in the course
| syllabus. Many instructors are open to telling students
| about the format of the midterm exam, as well as the
| topics or themes that the exam will cover."
|
| So looks like it's on the instructors, as the grandparent
| says there too.
| gammarator wrote:
| Virtually all of this is false in the US.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Oh, you really think this doesn't happen. Where I (in
| Australia) the conditions you paint were accurate for
| most of my life. In fact they remain accurate for
| Australian's attending Australian educational
| institutions now for the most part.
|
| But about 20 years ago, Australia decided to adopt the US
| model for education - educational institutions should
| compete for student dollars, just like your local coffee
| shops compete for customers. This boiled down to allowing
| educational institutions to charge students what they
| wish for educating them and the money the government used
| to give the educational institutions would go to instead
| low cost loans, and upfront payments for enrolling
| students so the they didn't pay full price. It sounds
| reasonable on the surface, well worth a try.
|
| But it was insane to try it in Australia because it has
| already been tried in the USA where the result was the
| student debt fiasco. The end result in the lower levels
| was exactly the same as in the USA, with educational
| institutions preying on student naivety giving away
| laptops in return for signing up to very expensive long
| term courses. Very few completed the courses, so they
| didn't get that long term money, but they didn't incur
| the expense of educating anyone either. They got the bulk
| of their income by getting the government money for
| signing up the students. The cost was advertising and the
| giveaways like the laptop. To your point, when the
| government attempted to clamp down by paying only for
| graduating students, they simply graduated them
| regardless of their grades. The model has since been
| abandoned, of course.
|
| This predatory approach didn't work in the Uni's. I think
| Uni students and their parents are in general too smart
| to fall in a long term debt trap, and rendering Uni
| Bachelor certificate meaningless scared too many people -
| business and governments alike. But they could and did,
| and do play the same game with overseas students.
| Professors are under immense pressure to graduate them,
| so they get the degree they paid for. There I've seen
| first hand Professors (Professors in Education no less),
| sit down with an international student and re-write their
| assignments for them so they could pass them. They
| despised it. But the government had reduced funding of
| local students to force them to become "lean and mean",
| so to survive they had no choice.
|
| You don't hear about this a lot because everyone involved
| on the education side is literally trying to keep their
| job. Broadcasting the educational institution they work
| for hands out worthless grades undermines that, so it's a
| conspiracy of silence.
| skyde wrote:
| We are talking about university teacher. They are
| definitely the one writing and grading the exams.
| itronitron wrote:
| In the case of the college professor and the dean, who is
| being the reasonable one?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Two is not a large value of N for the phenomenon you're
| talking about.
|
| Also... is it really that hard to believe that a manager
| would defend their headcount and a community college would
| let standards slide in their hardest courses? You also have
| to consider the plausibility of the stories at hand before
| writing off the person who's complaining.
|
| I don't think your skepticism is at all warranted.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In some cases, it's even worse -- Institutions invent fake
| problems that they allege to be the solution for and then of
| course never solve them.
|
| Why is that worse? In scenario A, you have an institution that
| fights to prevent a problem from being solved. If you ignore
| them and their politics, you'll have the problem that they
| protect.
|
| In scenario B, you have an institution that fights to convince
| you that you have a problem. If you ignore them and their
| politics, you won't have the problem.
|
| But scenario A is better?
| alok-g wrote:
| Consider how the reasoning proceeds if we do not take solving
| a problem as a Boolean. Also let's measure not just by
| whether the problem exists or not (or to what degree) but
| also by how much overheads or missed opportunity the society
| is having with the institutions even just existing.
|
| In the scenario A, knowingly or unknowingly, they would tend
| to solve the problem partially. The others around would see
| their contributions so far and foresee their value for the
| future. If others discover or perceive that the institution
| is not holding any promise for the future, the institution
| could struggle to survive.
|
| In the scenario B, the institution existing is entirely a
| lost opportunity for the society.
|
| Hence the scenario A is typically better (for making progress
| with given amount of resources).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In scenario A, the problem is already solved, and the
| institution exists to prevent that solution from being
| implemented. That's the whole point of this comment thread.
|
| Surely that is not better than lying about an imaginary
| problem?
| alok-g wrote:
| >> In scenario A, the problem is already solved, and the
| institution exists to prevent that solution from being
| implemented.
|
| In my understanding, that's one way.
|
| Another may be to keep making slow progress to solving so
| that those around see the contributions and the relevance
| of the institution but not fully solve.
|
| Another way may be to show their relevance even if the
| problem is not getting solved by convincing that the
| situation would be worse without them.
|
| And so on.
| jongjong wrote:
| This sounds similar to my own story in the blockchain sector.
|
| I joined a major crypto project which was under-delivering on
| their promises to investors. In my own time, I built a
| prototype which would have allowed them to meet their promises
| and would have appeased regulators whom I presumed were
| breathing down their necks.
|
| Win-win right? Perfect plan! What a genius move it was to use
| my skills in the most optimal way possible to wedge myself
| between this very cash-rich company and a large group of
| dissatisfied investors... with the backing of regulators of one
| of the wealthiest, most trusted nations on earth to add even
| more pressure! Surely, the company would be overjoyed, adopt my
| project, offer me a salary increase and a bonus package...
|
| WRONG. They tried to cancel the project. I had to quit my job
| in order to pursue the project outside of the company... Then
| they spent years gaslighting their own employees and community
| to keep everyone away from my project to ruin my prospects...
| The tech worked perfectly; that was several years ago and it's
| still running. Never encountered any bug or hack which is very
| unusual for this kind of tech. That company I used to work for
| essentially ended up abandoning their own project (after
| spending many years wasting millions of dollars on like 30
| engineers). With 15x the engineering capacity, they couldn't
| deliver in 3 years what I and a friend built in 1 year.
|
| Now I'm demoralized from the entire tech industry and basically
| gave up on my career (until there is a complete political
| system change?). If this epic plan which was executed almost
| perfectly didn't work and there is no legal recourse for me due
| to institutional corruption, then what chance do I have in the
| future in such system? I will never get such opportunity
| again... And even if I do and it's executed perfectly, it's not
| going to work out in my favor because bad actors can
| essentially get away with everything.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Your physicist friend solving the "technical research-level
| problem" should have evaluated whether it was a real problem,
| or a problem the company artificially created for themselves.
| If it was a real problem, and the company ignored his solution,
| then take the solution to market and become a competitor. If it
| was an artificial problem only found at that one company, then
| be very stingy about any effort you put into solving it. Give
| no free thought to the problem outside of work. Find some real
| problems to work on instead.
| alok-g wrote:
| >> Your physicist friend ... should have evaluated whether it
| was a real problem ...
|
| I do not have the facts around this, however knowing him, I
| would guess that it was a real problem.
|
| >> ... and the company ignored his solution, then take the
| solution to market and become a competitor.
|
| As you know, this is not so straightforward in practice:
|
| * Not everyone is a entrepreneur, for whatever reason that
| is.
|
| * Not everyone has a brand to be able to raise money.
|
| * It may not be wise for investors to fund a project
| completing with an established/powerful mid-size company that
| owns a wide range in that space.
|
| * Some projects may require large investments and teams
| especially when the other side is a big company.
|
| * The big companies deploy all kind of schemes if they see a
| threat.
|
| * One of the threats is the existing intellectual property
| rights in that space that the company would already have.
|
| * As the invention was already made when the person was
| employed at the company, the invention as such likely already
| belongs to the company (as per typical employment agreements
| that most do not care to read), and this already forms a
| threat falling in the above bullet point.
|
| * The corporate politics would start at the newly started
| company itself becoming an internal threat.
|
| * And so on.
|
| Hopefully you do not see all above as unreal, a fake problem.
| :-) Not to say there aren't successes -- We hear about those
| so often.
|
| [Edit:] Well, someone cited a story like that right here in
| this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500316
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Yes. I said he _should_ do this and that. That 's more
| forceful and judgemental than I intended. I meant it only
| as a philosophy to consider, but didn't know how to soften
| my message while keeping it succinct.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Addressing the second situation because it's easier to bike
| shed about, I feel like your friend went to the dean with a
| problem rather than a solution.
|
| You said it yourself, the dean's primary concern was keeping
| the school running, which in contrast to letting some loser
| kids pass a physics class seems very reasonable.
|
| It's also the reason why trusting straight-A students is using
| a flawed metric, there are A students and then there are
| students with A grades. We have more complex inspection
| processes to deal with this.
|
| A better solution (full bike shed mode now), would be to help
| address the deficiencies in the class at an earlier level. Talk
| with previous teachers, get them feedback about what it is that
| kids are missing when they get to his class. Help them address
| the root cause of the problem.
|
| "Dean, I've found X, fed it back to teachers Y and began to see
| a yoy improvement in the pass rate of class Z."
|
| Beautiful.
| alok-g wrote:
| I do not have all the facts of the situation at hand.
| However, I have no reason to believe that my friend would not
| have done all that. I do know for a fact that he is actively
| trying to teach the students those pre-requisite concepts
| himself.
|
| The dean should have talked about digging into the problem as
| needed (my friend also could have been doing something wrong;
| knowing him, I know he would have readily accepted his
| mistakes if that were the case) and help solve, instead of
| forcing him to pass the students.
|
| I do recognize that this story is not a good example of the
| Shirky principle. An educational institute is likely
| genuinely trying to solve the problem, which is to educate
| the students. That problem continues because fresh students
| keep coming in, not because the institute itself is
| preventing the solution. An educational institution cannot be
| expected to pursue inventing a solution that disrupts the
| education sector altogether.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yep, as an engineer I always put on my business cap before
| opening my mouth or setting priorities. The systems' inertia
| will steamroll an individual without thinking.
|
| I have end-users that I think about every day when building my
| products, but then I have my customers that are ultimately
| prioritized.
| specialist wrote:
| > _...found an innovative solution that was too simple and just
| worked._
|
| Yup. For years, the big boss exalted us to find the next
| generation solution. Mr big boss was original programmer,
| founder, and majority owner.
|
| We had an Illustrator/CAD style program (ScenicSoft's Preps)
| for designing print production plans. My office was right next
| to big boss, to facilitate my efforts. I kept him in the loop
| on my progress.
|
| It took a while, but I did exactly that. Reduced the majority
| of the design (image positioning) work to a simple form. Two
| views; fields on left and live preview on the right. What could
| be easier?
|
| (These kinds of things almost write themselves once you find
| the correct mental model, which is typically the really hard
| part.)
|
| I started demoing my solution to my peers and SMEs. Wow, Bravo,
| Amazing. Then I demo'd for big boss.
|
| Big boss said nothing. Walked out. Never spoke to or even
| acknowledged me again. Ghosted.
|
| --
|
| I've been noodling on a novel SQL JDBC wrapper thing. For ages
| now. Input stock SQL and output typesafe wrappers. I use it for
| all my own work. It's stupid simple and easy.
|
| Every single person whose seen a demo just doesn't "get it".
| They expect an ORM or a template or a fluent API.
|
| The reactions have really unsettled me. From my prior
| innovations, I'm used to pushback, debate, rancor, battle
| lines.
|
| I just don't know what to do with blank befuddlement.
|
| (Yes, I'm slowly working towards a FOSS release, as able.)
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > I've been noodling on a novel SQL JDBC wrapper thing. For
| ages now. Input stock SQL and output typesafe wrappers. I use
| it for all my own work. It's stupid simple and easy.
|
| Just wanted to say this seems like how I imagine using SQL.
| It's well-known that ORMs are a bad abstraction. Although
| given that it's well-known, there's already a lot of
| alternate solutions, so I'm interested what yours is and why
| people may be "befuddled".
| lippihom wrote:
| Have a few engineering professor friends that have said the
| same thing regarding have to pass a certain % of their
| students, regardless of if they know the material or not.
| Generally it seems like colleges are just kicking this lack of
| learning / understanding down the line to prospective employers
| to vet.
| dustingetz wrote:
| tell him the world's eigenstates are discrete and aligned to
| vectors that maximize local cashflow
| silexia wrote:
| "I surmise that if the Shirky Principle were to stop acting,
| say 80% of projects/institutions may just go away and should."
|
| This describes almost all government institutions.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| [delayed]
| onos wrote:
| Perhaps our institutions could be replaced by finite lifetime
| endeavors, similar to vc funds.
|
| Reminds me of us vs Japanese tv shows. Theirs often last only a
| season or two and the stories are good. Ours go on and on till we
| are sick of them.
| cs702 wrote:
| ...because solving the problem would make them unnecessary.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| "To oppose something is to maintain it. To be sure, if you turn
| your back on [Rome] and walk away from it, you are still on the
| road [to Rome]. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar.
| You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you
| walk a different road." - Ursula K. Le Guin
| codingclaws wrote:
| the left hand of darkness, read it recently
| magpi3 wrote:
| Yes, and I think I really see this with authoritarianism and
| authoritarian impulses, both in politics and in organizations.
| The people who oppose authoritarianism often end up recreating
| it in their own image & ideology.
| karmakaze wrote:
| It also happens at a larger scale where an entire industry
| maintains the status quo. I think of this every time I read "the
| $x B ____ industry"
|
| > In addition to mentioning the key quote that is now known as
| the Shirky principle, Kelly also says the following in his blog
| post:
|
| > "The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a
| company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem
| they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently
| perpetuate the problem."
|
| I would drop the 'inadvertently' though.
| lawxls wrote:
| It's funny that nobody mentions such an institution and how it
| was fixed. Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter's employees, and it's
| better than ever.
| sidibe wrote:
| > it's better than ever
|
| As a product, I think you're in the minority if you think that.
| As a business, you are delusional if you think that.
| bilsbie wrote:
| It seems to then follow that every organization started to fix a
| problem should build in an expiration date.
| osigurdson wrote:
| It does seem that the incentives are pretty aligned with keeping
| the organization in place and thus not solving the problem. The
| incentive structure would have to change to fundamentally fix the
| issue.
| siglesias wrote:
| A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering
| high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the
| math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate
| whatever workout you had just done (assuming your goal was
| calorie deficit)...thus prolonging the need for the gym.
| semitones wrote:
| I see your reasoning but disagree with it being an example of
| the shirky principle.
|
| Even once you get "really fit" you don't stop needing the gym,
| so I don't think "prolonging the need for the gym" is something
| a gym can actually do, or would want to do. If anything, it's
| the most fit people that have the most consistent gym habits.
|
| On the contrary, to go off on your example, it might actually
| be _against_ the gym's interest to serve high calorie
| smoothies, the reason being that those pursuing a calorie
| deficit are likely to become discouraged by the lack of results
| over time, and would be more likely to abandon the gym
| altogether.
|
| Gyms are usually optimized for weightlifting and equipment-
| based exercises, which typically lean more towards performance
| and hypertrophy/strength training, in which case you need high-
| calorie nutrient-dense foods to be able to actually see
| results.
|
| However, yes, if you go there for a Zumba session to try to
| lose weight and then you have three smoothies, you are still
| gonna be gaining weight. (I'd argue this is still _not_ in the
| gym's best interest)
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Eh plenty of people are trying to bulk and those things are for
| them. I doubt that's a conspiracy, gyms want people who either
| pay and don't go, or if they do go they're probably more likely
| to stay if they get results than if they don't.
| Animats wrote:
| This appears in the biggest way in the financial sector. The US
| financial sector is now about 12% of employment.
|
| The US used to have a much simpler financial sector, due to
| strict regulation.
|
| * Banks could not do brokerage, and brokers could not do banking.
| (Glass-Stegall)
|
| * Banks could only do boring stuff - transactions and loans.
|
| * Utilities were mostly rate of return regulated, paid dividends,
| and had stable stock prices.
|
| * Utility ownership was simple - there was a limit of 3 on
| ownership tree depth. (Utility Holding Company Act)
|
| * Stocks traded much more slowly. There were no hedge funds,
| leveraged buyouts, private equity (which is leveraged buyouts
| under another name), or high frequency trading.
|
| * Major companies could have only one class of voting stock, a
| NYSE rule. (Ford Motor was grandfathered in, being older than the
| NYSE).
|
| * Home loans came mostly from savings and loan companies, which
| could pay higher interest rates than banks.
|
| All that held from 1940-1980, arguably one of the greatest
| periods for the US. Then came financial deregulation.
|
| The big effect was that if you wanted to make money, you didn't
| go into finance. You went into manufacturing.
| logicchains wrote:
| You missed a key thing: before the 70s there was a limit on the
| amount of cash in the system, but after the US jettisoned all
| ties to gold there was no limit on how much money the financial
| system can create. That's why the US dollar has seen more
| inflation in the past 50 years than in the 150 years before
| that.
| pama wrote:
| Why has the US seen so little inflation in the last 30 years?
| Spivak wrote:
| Like ~100% inflation since 1994 sounds bad until you look
| at the 30 years prior to that which was ~380% inflation.
| pama wrote:
| It also doesn't sound bad if one calculates that 2.4%
| annual inflation would exceed 100% over 30 years, and one
| considers that below about 2% is often harmful to the
| economy.
| BirAdam wrote:
| It saw tremendous inflation, just less than the 70s and
| 80s, and this due to two different things.
|
| First, companies just began making shitty products. Use
| glued and compressed pulp instead of wood, use fructose
| instead of glucose, use bleached and desiccated wheat, use
| chips instead of anything mechanical, use cheaper less pure
| and thinner metals, etc. in the realm of food there was
| also shrinkflation.
|
| Second, the USA exported much of its inflation as dollar
| imperialism.
|
| Today, making products of less quality is nearly impossible
| without sacrificing sales, and the USA has run out of
| countries to add to its empire while simultaneously having
| sanctioned enough countries that they've now formed their
| own trading bloque. All of this means that dollars are
| staying at home after printing and that dollars are
| starting to come home from the rest of the world. This
| follows after the government shutdown parts of the economy
| and concomitantly printed trillions. So, there's now rather
| high inflation once again.
|
| Deregulation actually played less important a part of all
| of the financialization of the economy than did the
| transition to debt-based economics. The inversion of time
| in money is a dance with the devil, and the devil usually
| wins that dance.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| Wonder if anyone's written anything about the
| inevitability of the decline of profit.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| They have, extensively, but it's not a story the Jedi
| would tell you.
| NhanH wrote:
| Can you please share some authors or sources from the
| Empire that I can read?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut
|
| I may have exaggerated slightly, but it's a touchy
| subject because investment is the legitimate way by which
| rich people get paid for being rich, which is how class
| works in capitalist societies. The long term
| sustainability of investment supply / demand dynamics
| have deep implications for the legitimacy of this
| enterprise, its winners and losers, and the policies that
| prop them up (or don't).
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Because everyone wants to bank/invest with the US. The
| money is being pushed in, not pulled in. If it were being
| pulled in, rates would have to be relatively high to pull
| it in, but they are not, so it is being pushed in.
|
| Why is money being pushed in? Put yourself in the shoes of
| a wealth-weighted non-US citizen. Wealth weighting is
| critical for understanding many aspects of economics yet
| systematically under-discussed to make the economy seem
| more altruistic than it is, but that's another story. So
| you have a bunch of money and you're outside the US. You
| want to preserve or grow your wealth, but your local
| government keeps devaluing the currency to pump the real
| economy, or hiking taxes, or there's a labor party that you
| think might get in power and do those things, or your
| government is literally called the Chinese Communist Party
| and is ideologically predisposed to confiscating your
| wealth tomorrow. Where do you put your savings? Some of it
| you still keep locally, for practical reasons, but the rest
| you invest abroad. Where? A peer country with the same
| issues? A developing country where investment never comes
| back? A small banking haven that will fold at the first
| sign of hard power? Or do you send it to the rabidly
| capitalist country with a 50 year track record of
| delivering investor returns and dozens of aircraft carriers
| and nuclear submarines to put between your bank account and
| the New Workers Collective of Yourlandia? That's right. You
| send it to the USA.
|
| What happens when the money lands in the USA? It pumps
| assets, because that's what the money buys, and it dumps
| exports, which now must compete with a literal money
| printer for access to talent and resources. Asset holders
| do great. People who sell services to the asset holders do
| OK. People who build shit for export, though, oof.
| Software, chip designs, and movies might be lucrative
| enough that they don't have to care (thus far) but in
| general, oof.
|
| "We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all
| we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - The Wire
|
| That's exactly right, but it's extremely important to
| understand the macro that drives this so that you can
| understand how the macro affects you and make informed
| guesses about where it is headed. For example, I wouldn't
| bet on this dynamic collapsing tomorrow.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| And all we have to show for it is a 1600% increase in GDP.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| And vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet,
| leading to ecological and likely societal collapse. Thanks,
| capitalism!
| platformdecay wrote:
| GDP ... denominated in fiat currency
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Inflation adjusted the US GDP grew from $5.30 trillion in
| 1970 to $22.67 trillion in 2023.
|
| Which is about a 4x increase in real terms.
|
| https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-
| adjusted/table/by-ye...
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| why would you adjust for inflation, what we are talking
| about would mean adjusting for M2.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Why would you adjust for M2? Inflation exaggerates GDP
| growth. M2 doesn't.
|
| If you measure a country and M2 and GDP go up together,
| that's important to know, but you don't "adjust for M2"
| and pretend that GDP didn't actually go up.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Hmm, let me ask you this. It we double the money supply
| because say, banks are allowed to loan more to each
| other, but that money doesn't make it to the average
| consumer, does CPI go up and does GDP go up?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| We're not changing anything else with businesses? I
| wouldn't expect those numbers to change very much then.
| Certainly far less than 2x.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| ok, maybe too abstract an example. If a bank makes a loan
| (creating new money) to loan to some rich guy, who
| decides to pay 1B to buy a bunch of Microsoft stock, that
| counts as growing the GDP, even if the majority of the
| money just stays in the financial sector and never drives
| up the price of anything measured by CPI.
| rvba wrote:
| There would be nothing wrong if money wasnt created out of
| thin air to cover the GDP increase. It's basically the
| central bank stealing from people and claimimg that low
| inflation somehow helps. It doesnt. Its's a hidden tax on
| everyone, that eats GDP growth.
| dlp211 wrote:
| We (mostly) don't create money out of thin air. We borrow
| it. This obligation acts as a limit on money supply
| inflation.
|
| Also, slight, but mostly consistent inflation is far
| better for everyone than what the US went through in it's
| first 150 years as a country.
|
| The average American household is worth more than $1MM
| and the median is close to $200k. All time highs, even
| adjusting for all the inflation.
|
| https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/
| rvba wrote:
| Why would small inflation be good for anyone bar the
| centtal bank? Small inflation is ignored by everyone. If
| there was no artificial inflation (central bank racket)
| you could ignore it as well.
| dog_boxer72 wrote:
| Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit
| on your money it gets eaten away by inflation. Once
| you're Oprah-rich inflation is the rate at which you're
| losing net worth. This is my non-economist understanding.
| kelnos wrote:
| I do wonder if this conventional wisdom is actually true,
| though. Somewhat relatedly, there was once an idea that
| if you lower taxes for rich people, they'll invest more,
| and those tax savings will trickle down to the middle and
| lower classes and be a boon for them. But we know it
| doesn't actually work like that.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Inflation affects the value of currency, not assets.
| Oprah isn't sitting on billions in cash, presumably.
| Those billions are invested in assets, which typically
| inflate at a rate similar to inflation. This is why one
| of the best hedges against inflation is owning things
| like real estate and equities. The value is separate from
| any currency you can denominate it in.
|
| The benefit of mild inflation, to phrase what you wrote a
| little differently, is that it encourages people to
| create assets with substantial intrinsic value as a way
| to dispose of currency. Everyone wants to own as little
| currency as possible. There are many positive
| externalities to asset creation.
| rvba wrote:
| People still work with a low inflation (say 2,5%). You
| claim they would stop whrn inflation was 0%?
|
| I disagree.
|
| This 2,5% is just pocketed by yhe central bank.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > We (mostly) don't create money out of thin air. We
| borrow it
|
| This is the same thing - when you go to the bank to get a
| loan, the money is created out of thin air. It simply
| appears in a database. It is not the money someone has
| deposited in the bank. The only reason the bank has to
| keep reserves is for stability in case of bad loans.
| csomar wrote:
| > This is the same thing
|
| It is strictly not. All money is borrowed. This seems
| like free/unlimited printing when the interest rate is
| 0%. But when the interest rate rises, this has real
| consequences and you can't print your way out of a 5.5%
| interest rate.
|
| This is why US politics got heated about finance as of
| late. If inflation doesn't come down, the US will have to
| "print" that money. Essentially rendering the Fed to the
| likes of Pakistan, Turkey and Argentina.
| user90131313 wrote:
| Problem with inflation in every country is not that it
| needs to be above 0. It's actually much higher than they
| publicly say. With not giving you real numbers, they lie
| officially to get richer. Intentional
| samatman wrote:
| Number go up!
| huytersd wrote:
| Money doesn't buy happiness!
| briantakita wrote:
| Lawyers & economists contribute more to GDP than
| farmers...yet most lawyers & economists are a net negative
| in real terms while farmers provide food, essential for
| life.
|
| If GDP was the end all be all of measurements, why is
| Russia winning the war despite having a fraction of GDP
| compared to its western opponents?
|
| Sure seems like the wrong things are being measured...and
| rewarded.
| brankoB wrote:
| GDP is a good measure of how the wealthy are doing, not
| so much your average citizen.
| zerbinxx wrote:
| Well sure, but in Russia's case, the average income is
| incredibly low and their wealth disparity is even more
| extreme than in the USA. I don't know how any of that
| relates to the war point
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Why is Russia winning the war despite having a fraction
| of GDP compared to its western opponents?
|
| This was a huge eye-opener for me, the fact that we are
| spending 20x more on the military industrial complex and
| yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the
| war, to me, indicates that all of our posturing is a bad
| joke.
|
| Either there is huge waste and abuse in the system, or
| we've literally set Ukraine up to lose.
| kelnos wrote:
| Throwing money and war materiel at Ukraine doesn't ensure
| victory. Clearly the lack of it will ensure failure. But
| weapons are mostly only as good as the training of the
| people wielding them.
|
| On top of that, there's fear of nuclear weapons taking
| the stage. If the US military went head to head with the
| Russian military, and we didn't have to worry about MAD,
| I think it's reasonable to assume that the US would win.
| But is the Ukrainian military, supplied with Western
| military supplies (and even Western military advisors), a
| better fighting force than the Russian military, even
| with a home-field advantage? Unclear.
|
| And on the other hand... when the war started, a lot of
| people assumed Russia would achieve their objectives
| within a few weeks, or at most a month or two. Ukraine
| has turned out to be much more capable than initially
| expected.
|
| > _...and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets
| for the war_
|
| It absolutely can, but politics, as usual, gets in the
| way. And, as I said, shells and bullets are necessary,
| but not sufficient.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The object was to break Ukraine's toys. Mission
| accomplished. Putin attacked Ukraine to prevent being
| eclipsed by it.
|
| Zelenski became, rich, powerful AND popular much faster
| than Putin. He was insanely jealous. Consumed. Ukraine
| was on a path to eliminate corruption and join NATO and
| then easily become far more wealthy than Russia. It would
| have consumed Russia by the will of the people on both
| sides of the border.
|
| Zelenski created his own media empire before he was
| thirty years old. Then he created a new political party
| and it beat all the others. He is preferred by the
| people. He accomplished more in a quarter of his life
| than Putin could in all of his and was going to help
| Ukraine achieve prosperity. Putin just wanted to stop
| that. Period.
| dxhdr wrote:
| That's some hallucinated nonsense.
|
| Putin gave an "explicit warning that Russia perceived
| NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its national
| security" as early as 2007 in his Munich speech [0]. The
| Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 with the ouster of
| Yanukovych, who was pro-Russia and opposed closer ties
| with the EU [1]. Zelensky became president in 2019 and
| initially promised to end the Russo-Ukranian war, but
| instead continued to pursue NATO protection and in August
| 2021 "urged NATO members to speed up Ukraine's request
| for membership" [2]. Russia escalated the Russo-Ukrainian
| war and invaded Ukraine for a second time in February
| 2022 [3].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Munich_speech_of_V
| ladimir...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
| datavirtue wrote:
| I see that you bought into it.
| csomar wrote:
| GDP was a good measure for a while (or reasonably good
| enough). This ceased to be the case in the last 10-15
| years; and I think it can be said now that it has become
| completely useless.
|
| There are the edge cases (heavily financed/resourced
| countries) like Ireland, Singapore, Qatar, etc... and
| then you have Western countries "manipulating" the
| numbers. For example, your rental payment goes into the
| GDP; even if you are not renting -__-. So if you are
| sitting on your ass doing nothing in your own home that
| because of the financial bubble is now worth $2.5 million
| and $10k of rent, you are adding $10k/month to the GDP of
| said country.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| That's right. Because the productivity of the capitalist
| system has absolutely zero reason to be tethered to one or 2
| elements on the periodic table that is mostly for jewelry.
| arp242 wrote:
| Not just US, seems to have happened fairly broadly across many
| countries. It's what I like to call "the financialisation of
| everything". "Everything" is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it
| sounds nice.
|
| On a lot of these issues I feel we're all stuck on some
| rollercoaster ride that almost no one really likes, but also no
| one really has the courage to stop. Stopping would mean large
| changes, and our political systems have become so risk-averse
| and voters have become so unforgiving that nothing ever gets
| done.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Right. Because it's exuberant margins. Starbucks and Delta
| both operate with their core businesses as adjacent to their
| financial business in accruing customer deposits now.
| Multiple corporations are now bundled loyalty programs -
| Amazon Prime, Uber One, Lyft Pink
| financypants wrote:
| I want to recommend two books on this subject, of contrasting
| if not tangential subject matter. "Debt: the first 5000
| years" by David Graeber and "This time is different" by
| Reinhart and Rogoff. They differ drastically in perspective,
| but both discuss capitalism with a very long- term view. To
| respond to the posts above, I want to say that it almost
| always feels like a rollercoaster ride when up close, and
| that financial "innovation" and liberalization usually leads
| to corrections of varying degrees.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Specific to the 1940-1980 period [and Debt: first 5k], I
| also really enjoyed _Generation of Sociopaths_.
|
| Lots of charts/graphs, which will leave you in doubt
| [regardless of your age]. _The math checks out..._
| crotchfire wrote:
| > On a lot of these issues I feel we're all stuck on some
| rollercoaster ride that almost no one really likes, but also
| no one really has the courage to stop.
|
| As Will Emerson says in _Margin Call_ :
|
| "Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your
| life you have to believe you're necessary and you are. People
| wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin' houses
| they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only
| reason that they all get to continue living like kings is
| cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take
| my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair
| really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They
| say they do but they don't."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31300922
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2kGHcdJYU
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1615147/characters/nm0079273
| pyuser583 wrote:
| 1979 was a terrible year. My parents moan about it every
| Christmas,
|
| There was a widespread belief that things needed to change, and
| economic growth had to be a part of that.
|
| In the US, Reagan pushed deregulation. in the UK, Thatcher went
| to war with state owned industries. The USSR began
| experimenting with open policies. China embraced capitalist
| style economics.
|
| This was a world wide change.
| roenxi wrote:
| That isn't addressing the most obvious causes.
|
| * Since 1970 the US has been printing money and dumping it into
| asset markets. This makes it easier to make money in finance
|
| * US industrial policy has been to squeeze manufacturing
| talent, especially with environmental policy, which means it
| moves to foreign industrial hubs.
|
| Those 2 factors alone mean that manufacturing can't compete as
| a cash cow. It is rather obvious at this point that the big
| winners in the US are not going to be manufacturers. What is
| necessary to achieve success is to have a good-enough story for
| why the Fed should give you money, be that access to the bond
| market and the Fed's belief that pumping money into the bond
| market generates wealth or a good reason why the Fed should
| bail you out when you go bankrupt (Silicon Valley bank, the '08
| crisis, etc). How is a manufacturer supposed to get in on that
| in the same way the banks do? This has surely been clear enough
| to the people involved since the mid 90s.
|
| You're also looking at a period (1940-1980) when every other
| industrial power had just had their factories demolished in
| WWII, so the US was in an unusually advantaged position to make
| money from manufacturing.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Most of the rest of the developed world had to rebuild from the
| ashes of WW2 during that period as well, giving us a massive
| advantage in exports. We also didn't have those pesky
| environmental regulations weighing everything down.
| dnissley wrote:
| Not sure I understand how this relates to the article? Which
| problems are banks attempting to preserve that they are the
| solutions for?
| nmca wrote:
| Cowen has a counterpoint that whilst finance has grown as a
| proportion of GDP it has remained very close to 2% as a
| proportion of wealth, which honestly seems pretty reasonable.
| Animats wrote:
| "Proportion of wealth" - What does that even mean for
| finance?
| abigail95 wrote:
| this is a bunch of spooky correlations and conspiracy style
| "just pointing out facts" thinking.
|
| show me a causal relationship between the depth of utility
| ownership, the percentage of employment being in the financial
| sector, and the problem described in the article. please.
| crotchfire wrote:
| > All that held from 1940-1980
|
| ...right up until the Nixon Shock
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
|
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
| rsp1984 wrote:
| Accountants, tax consultants, (many types of) lawyers, real
| estate agents and other useless middlemen, all examples of
| professions that shouldn't exist, given that there are cheap,
| easy and efficient technical solutions for the problems they
| solve.
|
| Why are they still in business? Because the law prevents more
| efficient solutions. Why are laws made in such a fashion? Because
| said industries offer lucrative deals to lawmakers if they give
| in to their lobbying.
|
| The corruption in the western world is deep and pervasive. It's
| just one level removed from the public perception s.t. the price
| we all pay for it is hidden.
| intalentive wrote:
| The problem is money and the way it is allocated. Institutions
| can't ossify if the funding dries up first.
|
| In a market system, an institution that fails to serve a purpose
| goes out of business.
|
| In a command system, too, bad management gets the axe.
|
| In the hybrid system we have had since the early-mid 20th
| century, institutions can be both 1) insulated from market
| discipline; and 2) influence their own funding through lobbying
| and legislation. The former does not occur in a market system,
| and the latter does not occur in a command system.
|
| What is missing is negative feedback. Systems without negative
| feedback are typically unstable.
| cchi_co wrote:
| As I understood, this principal has two sides of different
| behavior. The Institute do not understand that they solve the
| problem and behave like they do not know how to solve it. And the
| Institute do it specifically postpone the solution just to show
| that they do some work but in reality they do not do nothing to
| solve the problem...
| miga wrote:
| It would be better to submit the paper for peer review verifying
| the claims.
|
| It is great to have opinions, but it is even better to rigorously
| check them against reality.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's a glaring omission that the word "capitalism" doesn't appear
| once in this because is at the heart of what the real problem is.
|
| To borrowo another commenter's example: waste management. The
| town starts picking up the trash daily. It may cut back services
| and standardize waste bins to streamline the process and cut
| costs. But here's where it really goes awry: the waste management
| gets privatized, usually in some kind of "public private
| partnership". Or it and other municipal functions may be
| delegated to private insitutions, namely HOAs, which historically
| have been quasi-government actors that were created primarily to
| exclude people (ie systemic racism, segregation [1]).
|
| Now HOAs are menat to be resident bodies but the actual
| management gets privatized to management companies. A government
| is accountable to its people. HOAs typically aren't accountable
| to their residents. They are filled with tinpot dictators, self-
| interested NIMBYs and corruption. Contracts go out to a company
| controlled by the HOA president's family, etc.
|
| Some of this happens through innocent delusion like the myth of
| small government being good but usually it's because of
| corruption and/or lobbying by the beneficiaries of said policies.
| For public-private partnerships, it's even worse because, to make
| the prospect attractive, the government assumes all the risk and
| the private "partner" captures all the profit. This is one way
| that train companies are run into the ground: in the search for
| ever-inreasing profits, prices are jacked up and services are
| cut.
|
| As soon as the stakeholders are separated from who the solution
| is for, you see exactly what's mentioned. This has been known for
| centuries and can be analyzed as the workers' relationship to the
| means of production.
|
| The best internet is municipal internet. Why? Because it's by and
| for the residents. There are no shareholders who need to be
| constantly appeased with higher and higher profits.
|
| Capitalism just promotes and rewards rent-seeking. That's all
| this is.
|
| [1]: https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/how-hoas-can-
| shape...
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| One of the reasons defense spending in the US is so high and why
| programs like the F-35 have gone $183 billion over original cost
| estimates, is because of the Shirky Principle.
|
| I'm convinced that earned value management (EV), which is a
| requirement of contractors to follow under the Federal
| Acquisition Regulations (FAR), is a very subtle form of
| regulatory capture that serves the needs of the managerial
| professional class over that of the warfighter, workers, and tax
| payers.
|
| EV, at its surface, appears to be a tool for the government to
| ensure contractors provide honest work and control costs. Because
| it's essentially waterfall, it incentives raw task execution and
| disincentives managing risk, fixing bugs, and satisfying non-
| functional requirements.
|
| We have acquisition programs that follow the systems engineering
| process, with discrete execution steps of design, development,
| integration, etc. with people's careers focused on fulfilling
| those stages of development. The later in this process an issue
| is discovered, the more expensive it is to fix [1].
|
| The kicker is that a good manager, under EV, will work to
| _exceed_ performance, get a task done ahead of schedule, and
| under budget. This manger has every reason to _not_ solve bugs
| and to pass them on later in the process.
|
| There is no reason for anyone in this process to change it,
| because careers depend on it continuing to exist, and
| contractors, as institutions, really benefit from it.
|
| In the bad old days of defense contracting, contractors would
| seriously underbid contracts. As soon as they got the award,
| because they underbid everyone, the contractor would immediately
| send a series of change requests to increase the budget. The
| government has ways to eliminate this risk, such as hiring two
| contractors to do the same job, then drop a competitor who
| attempts the change request ramp. Though this is expensive.
|
| With EV, contractors get a ramp up and further contracts, without
| having to directly engage in shenanigans. EV incentivizes the
| development of brittle and incomplete solutions, like aircraft
| that give their pilots hypoxia and melt holes in the decks of
| carriers. The genius of EV is that contractors effectively get
| change requests and follow-on contracts, and everyone in the
| system can act honest and honestly say they are acting honest.
|
| What I would do instead is change these perverse incentives by
| amending the FAR by adding alternative oversight mechanisms, such
| as a knowledge point framework to develop risk modeling or use
| economic modeling such as cost-of-delay. The problem is that
| everyone benefits from the current system and you would need
| strong leadership by many in congress on an obscure issue.
|
| [1] https://deepsource.com/blog/exponential-cost-of-fixing-bugs
| EchoReflection wrote:
| "Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell is a very good
| book that talks a lot about this (indirectly).
|
| https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...
| sdsd wrote:
| They don't need to intentionally try. Institutions that do things
| to solve problems compete against ones that do things to survive.
| Even if everyone, in their mind, is trying to solve problems,
| over time the institutions that survive are the ones that "solve
| the problem" in a self-perpetuating, self-empowering way.
| FpUser wrote:
| People trying to protect their cushy feeder? No shit Sherlock. It
| starts with a single individual and goes up to highest level of
| Government / Corporations
| quantum_state wrote:
| The weapon producers are the most obvious group.
| infotropy wrote:
| It's like the old consulting adage: "If you're not part of the
| solution, there's money to be made by prolonging the problem."
| voiper1 wrote:
| It seems many of these - e.g. turbotax - are more specifically
| regulatory capture. The capitalistic business that makes a profit
| on tax preparation surely opposses the government giving it away
| for free.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This is a classic example of "show me the incentive and I'll show
| you the outcome".
|
| I could also see how this same incentive might apply to nonprofit
| groups as well. i.e. nonprofit groups might actually have an
| incentive to perpetuate the existence of problems they purport to
| attempt to solve, because the folks who work there would be out
| of a job and might lose their prestigious titles as authorities
| on whatever their chosen problem is.
| LunicLynx wrote:
| Did someone say Agile Coach?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Since I don't see anything in the comments about lawyers or
| barbers:
|
| Lawyers don't want to _solve_ problems. They just want to add
| them to their practice areas.
|
| Try asking an IP lawyer, "Does software need to be patentable?"
|
| That will be like asking a barber, "Do I need a haircut?"
| worik wrote:
| "Shirky principle "?
|
| Do "perverse incentives" really need another name?
| analog31 wrote:
| Related to this principle, and other ones mentioned in this
| thread, while they're entertaining and gratifying to read about,
| they're also largely un-testable hypotheses. This is not to
| dismiss them, as there are many ways of thinking that might be
| useful or comforting in certain situations.
| newsclues wrote:
| This is a massive problem with the homeless and drug rehab
| industry.
|
| It's too profitable to fix, despite the massive cost to society.
| taion wrote:
| This feels "truthy", but I wonder how much of this is selection
| bias. Organizations that do solve their problems tend to cease to
| exist or be relevant. In that sense you would expect only the
| organizations that have not (yet?) solved their problems to
| persist. It may not exactly be an incentive in the sense that
| most organizations behave in this manner, depending on how you
| sample across organizations.
| devit wrote:
| This is very interesting when applied to thoughts and
| interiorized beliefs, as well as belief systems that purport to
| free you from those thoughts and beliefs.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| nice take. I wonder if my ADHD brain is just a mental
| 'institution' that perpetuates problem so it keeps existing.
| undershirt wrote:
| Poverty Inc[1] makes the case that NGOs helping developing
| countries become incentivized to keep them in poverty.
|
| [1]: https://www.povertyinc.org
| lisper wrote:
| Fifteen years ago I made a documentary about homelessness
| (https://graceofgodmovie.com/) and one of the things that many
| of my subjects talked about was the "homeless industrial
| complex". These were organizations who ostensibly helped
| homeless people, while also advocating for policies that
| created more homelessness and more problems for homeless
| people, like restrictive zoning to prevent development, and
| laws against sleeping in public places. I never dug into the
| extent to which this was true, but it certainly seems
| plausible. The cost of actually fixing the problem would be
| putting yourself and everyone in your organization out of work.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It could be simple dissonance with their beliefs as city
| residents (NIMBY, keep cities clean etc.). Same way a priest
| can be against abortion and divorce while daily helping
| victims of abuse and runaway kids.
| nomdep wrote:
| That is why they really hated it when Mr. Beast actually helps
| them without giving them their usual 90% "management fee".
| thr0way120 wrote:
| I had same experience at a large company.
|
| Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for
| "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving
| that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done
| in two weeks.
|
| When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to
| me and wanted nothing to do with me.
|
| It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to
| work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people
| (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months
| later they released the solution and had a giant party.
|
| Everyone got credit, high fives all around.
|
| AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large
| corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that
| "spreads the credit far and wide."
|
| Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
| Nathanba wrote:
| Yes I was going to say something similar because articles like
| this make it seem like a mysterious problem. In reality the
| reason this happens is because people want profit and the most
| profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a problem out.
| This literally happens even with individuals, you can give
| someone a task and he will try to explain to his teamlead that
| he has to research this all day even though he already knows
| the answer and he might do another hour on it. In general we
| have a problem that solving things quickly and permanently is
| not profitable for the individual/company.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Thankfully there do exist situations closer to reality. When
| at an early stage startup it's either fast or die.
|
| Although I also like to remind my co-workers that _what_ you
| 're doing is way more important than just going fast.
| jrumbut wrote:
| The institutional preservation instinct can cause perverse
| incentives but it is useful and allows large organizations
| to be trusted to do things that can't be addressed by
| startups.
|
| If you have work that requires something to exist in more
| or less its present form for years or decades at a time it
| would be a disaster if one of your key vendors pivoted or
| went bankrupt halfway through.
| BrandonMarc wrote:
| > the most profitable thing to do is unfortunately to drag a
| problem out
|
| ... which is why our medical intitutions would rather manage
| chronic conditions than cure or prevent them
|
| ... and also why our "defense" institutions would rather
| manage chronic, unwinnable conflicts rather than see any side
| achieve victory (Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen,
| Afghanistan) ... and also why our weapons / aid keep
| appearing on both sides of various conflicts
|
| Because that's where the profit is.
| thr0way120 wrote:
| It is also why nothing ever gets built (trains etc)
| code_runner wrote:
| You can use open ai to solve your LLM needs (if you
| legitimately have LLM needs) but an in house solution may be a
| whole lot more future proof, even if it's more expensive up
| front
| jancsika wrote:
| > Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
|
| Unless you were solving world hunger or fast homomorphic
| encryption, this guy's promotable event sounds like it's way
| more impressive than whatever technical desiderata you were
| helping them to solve efficiently.
|
| Seriously, the guy sounds like some kind of corporate
| Robinhood.
| rz2k wrote:
| Causing a net loss to the economy through waste and
| inefficiency is ultimately the same as contributing to world
| hunger.
| Arainach wrote:
| There's no net loss to the economy here. If billionaires
| could own the means of production, fire all the humans,
| replace them with robots/LLMs, and keep all the money, they
| would. Paying those funds to workers instead of stock
| buybacks is one of the only ways those megacorps contribute
| to the economy.
| concordDance wrote:
| > There's no net loss to the economy here.
|
| Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net
| loss to the economy? Do you have some odd definition of
| "value to the economy" that is not the sum of the
| efficient market price of the goods and services?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Depends what the alternative use of that capital is. What
| "value" led Elon to buy Twitter and flush it down the
| toilet? When people have enough money, they stop valuing
| money much when they make decisions.
|
| Having more and more money in the coffers of a tiny group
| of billionaires is actually deeply anticapitalistic
| because it prevents market forces from working.
| dcow wrote:
| More people I know use Twitter now than ever before...
| I'll admit I wasn't expecting it, but "down the toilet"
| is not where Twitter went.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Single-handedly taking your stock from 70 down to 30 is
| not something you can do if you can't afford it. It's
| bumped back to 53 or whatever, and lots of external stuff
| has happened too...but I think it's hard to deny that his
| actions caused a massive dive in the stock price.
|
| Anyway, my point was that Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. can
| afford to act freely in ways (constructive or
| destructive) that violate all the behaviors that
| economics textbooks posit as being universal.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm confused; what stock are you referring to? Twitter
| doesn't publicly trade anymore, and has no stock price.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| You are correct.
| kelnos wrote:
| My experience is the opposite: while the Big Exodus
| didn't seem to happen, anecdotally the people in my
| online chat circles post fewer Twitter links than before.
|
| I'm actually curious about HN posts: has the frequency of
| Twitter submissions changed since Musk's acquisition? Or,
| probably more usefully, has the average number of points
| per Twitter submission (or maybe number that make the
| front page) changed?
| Arainach wrote:
| A dollar in the stock market is not the same as a dollar
| spent on goods. Money back to billionaires becomes the
| former, money paid in workers' wagers predominantly
| becomes the latter, and is significantly more effective.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't wholly disagree with you, but I think it's more
| nuanced than that.
|
| A dollar returned to investors and re-invested in a new
| technology that ends up saving everyone two dollars seems
| like a pretty effective use of that dollar, much more
| than putting that dollar in an employee's pocket who
| intentionally didn't do the most efficient thing.
|
| Now, I'm not sure of the odds of that outcome. Maybe most
| of the time that dollar ends up getting wasted on funding
| Theranos or buying Twitter.
|
| Regardless, I wouldn't fault an employee for doing
| something that's maximizes their own interest over the
| company's. Just means the company is bad at setting
| incentives properly. Not saying it's easy to do that, but
| none of us should value a company's welfare over our own.
| Sometimes the company's welfare aligns with ours, but not
| always.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net
| loss to the economy?
|
| You mean unproductive labour like running a casino,
| producing tobacco, building superyachts, etc?
|
| > In 2017, clothing worth PS28.6 million was incinerated
| by Burberry to maintain their brand's exclusivity.
|
| There is a term, "Real Economy". playing on the stock
| market is not real economy, producing steel is. In the
| last 30 years, a huge change took place - we had
| something called Financialization, now the 'real economy'
| is only a small fraction of actually economy, and is
| dwarfed by financial markets and various bullshit.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| That is some purity test thinking right there. I'll play -
| posting on HN is diverting your time and attention from
| helping feed the hungry, ergo posting is ultimately the
| same as contributing to world hunger.
| fragmede wrote:
| the time you take solving world hunger means you're
| spending that time not curing cancer.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Posting on HN may be a vice but what that guy did was
| akin to a scam (crime). Also posting on HN is not doing
| good due to inaction where what that guy did was doing
| bad due to direct action.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that's a little harsh. What the guy did was
| create a lot of value for himself and the team of 50
| under him. That was all at the expense of the company,
| but so what? It's just a company. Companies don't matter,
| people do.
|
| I think the real issue is why did that company's culture
| and reward structure allow this to happen? It should be
| more "profitable" for an employee to come up with the
| most efficient solution. The fact that it wasn't is the
| company's failing.
| lobocinza wrote:
| > That was all at the expense of the company, but so
| what?
|
| If somebody steals a plane or burn a building, so what?
| Insurance will pay.
|
| > I think the real issue is why did that company's
| culture and reward structure allow this to happen?
|
| It would be a positive outcome (for society) this kind of
| company (that rewards inefficiency and poor of work
| ethics) going bankrupt.
|
| But it's complicated because there is a lot we don't see.
| Companies matter to, they are made of people and people
| depend on them to provide goods/services or income.
| concordDance wrote:
| Sorta? Less wealth probably does mean less effective
| altruists giving half their earnings to AMF and governments
| giving less in foreign aid, but it's a rather indirect
| effect with a fairly large divisor.
|
| Its definitely very bad though, something like this is much
| worse for the economy than a few welfare queens.
| kelnos wrote:
| The company in question could set incentives so the two-
| week-one-person solution is rewarded much more than the
| nine-month-fifty-person solution. If they are incapable of
| doing so, then perhaps the best outcome for the economy is
| for that company to collapse under the weight of its own
| inefficiencies and incompetence, and be replaced with
| companies that can do the job better.
| datavirtue wrote:
| At that point they are already a government supplier of
| something the government needs (products, jobs,
| narratives).
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I have seen similar forces at play in different organizations.
|
| I used to view them with disdain but at some point I had the
| idea that social and organizational engineering is also
| engineering and that wielding the system for one's benefit is
| actually a skill.
|
| I am not good at it but I need to call mastery where I see it.
| hhhAndrew wrote:
| Exactly. I have the same thought about Conway's Law aka "the
| software structure will end up matching the company's org
| chart".
|
| Conway's Law is not a code smell to be avoided. Avoiding it
| is sisyphean, a band-aid, and nearly impossible.
|
| Instead, Conway's Law is a way, indeed the only sustainable
| way, to choose the software structure.
| regularfry wrote:
| Applying the intended software architecture to the org
| chart is often known as the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre.
| crotchfire wrote:
| Weapons engineering is also engineering but I don't want to
| work for arms dealers like Anduril.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I do have a sense of morality and know where I stand in
| terms of power dynamics.
|
| These however exist and function, with or without my
| consent, and are less black and white than the weapons
| dealing metaphor. For example, a single mother in such an
| organization, if able to operate with influence, creates
| opportunities for her family and for her children's
| futures. Nothing to do with the morality of arm dealing.
| crotchfire wrote:
| On the contrary; it's the essence of ethics.
|
| _Character is what you are in the dark._
| murrygawhround wrote:
| What's old is new again: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-
| seeking
|
| We can change the language but human biology is tethered to
| meat space and has not evolved beyond the same old obfuscation.
| We raise functional illiterates who can only relate to the
| world through learned helplessness and pandering to supply side
| to solve their last mile problems.
|
| Large scale infra projects, internet, sure, I get that. Making
| every fruity drink and sandwich for us? Come on what is this,
| high school? This cultures economy is rooted in infantilizing
| Disney vibes. Mush some berries and strain them; assembly lines
| for drinks is a huge resource wasting low effort economic idea.
| Sell plain seltzer and let people figure it out.
|
| We're way over industrialized and coddled to insulate brand
| investors. Pseudoreligious belief in unreal things to
| arbitrarily compute values from. None of this is divine
| mandate. Just the result of propaganda.
| underlipton wrote:
| "On the count of three, I want everybody to take care of
| their own damn kids!"
|
| It would be nice. I'd love to make my own kombucha, but I
| have no idea where I'd get a SCOBY. Someone else might not
| have the space - too much stuff, in this consumer-driven
| economy, or not enough dwelling, starved of missing-middle as
| we are - or time (working those 2 jobs to afford rent, or
| private school, or insurance of one form or another). These
| are fixable issues, of course. I would really like to fix
| them. We have to convince people to buy less stuff, let
| people live near them without paying exorbitant housing
| costs, reverse the giving-up-on public institutions, abolish
| private insurance for universal risks, etc., etc.
|
| I would like that. The problem is that so many people will
| fight tooth and nail for the devil they know. They've even
| convinced themselves that this is the best of all possible
| worlds (that propaganda).
| skidd0 wrote:
| For the kombucha, you can grab a bottle of your favorite
| brand and use a bit of it to start your own culture. You'll
| also need some tea for flavor, sugar to feed it, and some
| cups to ferment in IIRC. It's been years since I've done
| it, but it is pretty straitforward and low effort. Go for
| it!
| megamix wrote:
| I understand everything you wrote.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Best comment I have read in a while. Thank you
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I've noticed this much more with east coast companies than west
| coast companies. YMMV and take my anecdote for what it is.
| kelnos wrote:
| That shouldn't really be surprising at all. And in some cases
| I'm not even sure it's a bad thing.
|
| Not sure what level of management/responsibility this guy was
| at, but if we wasn't executive level, he probably stands to
| personally benefit more from engaging in these sorts of
| shenanigans than if he were to do the thing that's best for the
| company.
|
| And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel ethically
| bound to be efficient and do what's best for the company? It's
| not like the company cares about you. If it's "efficient and
| best for the company" to kick you to the curb, the company will
| do that. Why should the rank-and-file show loyalty?
|
| The company executives almost certainly have it in their power
| to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-for-the-
| company thing is what's going to give each employee the biggest
| reward. If they're not doing that, that's their problem.
|
| But on a higher level, where we have a big societal problem
| that needs to be fixed, I would agree that optimizing for your
| own profit, at the expense of solving that problem, is selfish
| and immoral. I just don't think it's worth any hand-wringing at
| a low-level company-inefficiency level.
| hx8 wrote:
| If we take the story at face value I think this is unethical
| and antisocial behavior. The person was dishonest, claiming
| to be working on a problem but actually was avoiding the best
| solution. The person was wasting resources, taking
| significantly more time and money than what is required to do
| the job. By wasting them on nothing-work we are robbing the
| actually big and important problems from access to those
| resources.
| concordDance wrote:
| > And really, in that situation, why should anyone feel
| ethically bound to be efficient and do what's best for the
| company?
|
| They should do what is best for society. Companies with lower
| parasite load operate more efficiently, allowing higher
| production of goods and services for lower price, leading to
| a wealthier society.
|
| > The company executives almost certainly have it in their
| power to set incentives so doing the most efficient, best-
| for-the-company thing is what's going to give each employee
| the biggest reward.
|
| They do not. This is a ridiculously hard unsolved problem.
| The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem we
| have.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > Companies with lower parasite load operate more
| efficiently, allowing higher production of goods and
| services for lower price, leading to a wealthier society.
|
| This may be true. But I think it would be wise to consider
| an alternative:
|
| Companies with lower parasite load operate more
| efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from
| society at large to the owners and leaders of the company,
| leading to a more unequal and poorer society.
|
| Probably not all companies are in the second way, but to
| think all are in the first way sounds naive to me.
|
| > The alignment problem may actually be the hardest problem
| we have.
|
| Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand
| that your assertion about companies operating efficiently
| is false. Yet you wrote it...
| concordDance wrote:
| > Companies with lower parasite load operate more
| efficiently, allowing higher extraction of wealth from
| society at large to the owners and leaders of the
| company, leading to a more unequal and poorer society.
|
| Only in a non-competitive environment where there are
| substantial barriers to entry. While this may describe
| many corporations I suspect it describes very few tech
| companies (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and a dozen others
| perhaps).
|
| > Hah, reading this makes me think you already understand
| that your assertion about companies operating efficiently
| is false.
|
| I don't recall saying they operate efficiently.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I got invited to an enterprise architecture brainstorming
| session and they wanted to know my opinion about the multi-
| cloud, multi-repo, ETL-pipeline-driven reporting solution they
| had cooked up.. with two separate Kubernetes clusters included.
|
| I suggested that a column store index and a PowerBI report is
| literally all they needed.
|
| Didn't get invited to the next meeting, all further
| communications were silently ignored.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Engineers. Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I have a similar story while working at a large well-known tech
| company many years ago. A major project in my group had a
| critical dependency on an important project owned by a VP in
| another group, who had several engineers working on it for many
| months with no delivery date in sight.
|
| Me and another guy replaced that external dependency with our
| own complete implementation, created over a two-week marathon
| coding session. It worked great, met all the acceptance
| criteria, and we shipped it. My VP was quite pleased, as it was
| a big win for the company.
|
| This precipitated one of the ugliest and most out-in-the-open
| political battles I have ever witnessed in a large company.
| When the dust settled, we were allowed to use our own
| implementation, begrudingingly, but no one else was. I did not
| stick around long enough to know if the other VP ever actually
| managed to ship anything. It was quite the farce.
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| Oh he's "solving the problem efficiently", just not the problem
| he purports to be solving. It's all about misaligned incentives
| in large orgs: people act out of their own self interest, and
| if the incentive mechanisms are designed incorrectly (or
| evolved over time into a misaligned framework), you get
| situations like these. The higher-levels in big orgs typically
| do play an outright zero-sum game for positions of power, with
| the object-level problem/domain being mostly a nuisance.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > work is a huge scam at large corporations.
|
| I think it might depend to some degree on what the corporation
| does. Engineering companies that produce actually necessary
| hardware (transformers, generators, transmission lines, large
| machines, etc.) seem to me to be less susceptible to quite this
| sort of boondoggle in their _core_ operations.
|
| No less susceptible to bribery and corruption though and their
| ancillary operations like IT do seem to suffer as you describe.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the
| credit far and wide."
|
| See also: Congressional allocation of defense contractor
| contracts. Spread the jobs far & wide.
| bandrami wrote:
| Having had a career mostly in non-profits and NGOs (on the tech
| side of them), holy crap does this ring uncomfortably true. There
| are a few exceptions (de-mining NGOs actually do remove land
| mines rather than placing new ones, etc.) but the temptation for
| a whole lot of them to just become permanent fixtures of the
| problem can be overwhelming. It's how you get situations like
| where San Francisco spends what amounts to $28K per homeless
| person in the city per year to "address homelessness", and it get
| absolutely devoured by a giant NGO-industrial complex.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address
| homelessness"
|
| Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for
| other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a
| breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
| fragmede wrote:
| That sounds low.
|
| https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-
| spending-11-billion-....
|
| says $57k per person.
| johnloeber wrote:
| It's actually more than twice as high haha
|
| $57K, https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-
| spending-11-billion-...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Surely it would be just as effective to pay the homeless
| that money directly!
| mynameishere wrote:
| If you are trying to expand the number of homeless, then
| it would work even better.
| opyate wrote:
| It's never that easy. You'd be surprised the number of
| homeless folks being in that situation because of things
| like addiction, mental health issues, etc. Just giving
| them the money is mostly not helpful.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Even if a percentage just burned through it on drugs, it
| definitely would be that easy for most of the situational
| homeless. It would also help to prevent others from
| falling down the addiction/mental health rabbit hole.
| Being homeless on the street is a highly stressful
| endeavor, that constant stress exacerbates the mental
| health issues, motivates drug use, etc.
|
| Just handing over that money to people about to be
| homeless would do far more than paying administrators to
| badly run a shelter that homeless avoid because they get
| all their shit stolen regularly.
| candiodari wrote:
| The problem is what San Francisco already experiences: it
| will attract more homeless from elsewhere for 2 reasons,
| one bad, one horrible
|
| 1) homeless will want this, and move by themselves
|
| 2) other state and city governments will dump homeless on
| San Francisco as a cheap way to "solve" the problem in
| their city.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| If you just gave me 57K in cash, could I afford to live
| there?
|
| Take away the stigma of the homeless and ask, if any
| regular normal person, drop them in SF with 57K, can they
| live?
|
| Or would they become homeless too?
|
| Because it is expensive.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The problem with those silly numbers represented by bad
| faith actors is they're akin to counting your bugs at the
| end of the year, dividing those into your annual budget
| and claiming you spent $/bug.
|
| Think about what they're claiming and how it would change
| if they were more successful - e.g. if by some
| breakthrough at the same budget level, they cut the
| number of homeless people in half --- their cost/person
| would look much worse...
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| That 57k would provide a huge runway for people to get
| their footing. Say 5 months of expenses, where they can
| maintain their address, phone, shower regularly, have a
| safe place to keep food, etc.
|
| Once you lose your residence, those things snowball. How
| do you apply for a job without a permanent mailing
| address? Where do you keep your nice interview clothes?
| How can you be contacted when your phone was stolen from
| your locker at the shelter for the second time that
| month?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| It's more or less the same in NYC. DHS budget is about $2.2
| billion to serve 90K people in shelters, and that doesn't
| count all of the service spending from agencies not directly
| responsible for housing and feeding them.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the
| most efficient thing, giving people money to go find
| housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to
| manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole in
| the idea of how our society works. Why should someone grind
| away barely surviving when they could become homeless and
| get UBI instead? Now you need to pay UBI for _way_ more
| than just 90k people.
|
| Not that I think we shouldn't try to solve the problem,
| shouldn't work towards UBI, etc. Just saying the shortest
| path from status quo to the ideal will break the system.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think some studies have refuted this and found that
| most often if you house people they become productive.
| But those are very small studies and I am skeptical they
| could scale that well or persevere long-term, it will
| just bother too many others who are not benefiting from
| it, and people will find ways to manipulate the system
| and steal from it. But UBI is inevitable, we will have to
| figure it out or watch our civilization fail.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > it will just bother too many others who are not
| benefiting from it
|
| The bit this comment misses is that the people who are
| not getting anything from it would be the people who pay
| for it. You can't create such a strong incentive for
| failure and not expect failure to increase.
| kelnos wrote:
| The thing that frustrates me about that is that the
| people who pay for it _will_ get something from it. They
| get cleaner, safer streets. This leads to more
| sustainable street-level businesses (because there 's
| more foot traffic), which leads to more choice and better
| prices. Overall it's just a higher quality of living.
|
| Now, as a well-off person who can afford to (perhaps
| sometimes grudgingly) pay more taxes, it's not hard for
| me to see that. But I can see how it might be difficult
| for someone who is barely scraping by to adopt my
| perspective.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The basis of your premise is correct. If people are
| sufficiently deprived, some non-trivial portion of them
| will become highly anti-social, often violent, often
| criminal, and otherwise just disruptive to society. Even
| if it's entirely their own fault for ending up that way.
| But you're missing a couple of things.
|
| Firstly, if you reward people for failing, you're
| incentivising more people to fail. So the problem isn't
| that a poorly conceived welfare program wouldn't manage
| the anti-social aspect of society properly, it's that it
| would create more of it.
|
| Secondly, the people in the middle who pay for everything
| have a choice about how to manage this problem. They can
| take the big social safety net approach like an idealised
| Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed
| law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi
| Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places
| in the world.
|
| So yes, managing depravation at the bottom has a benefit
| for society. But the threat of "give us money or we'll
| just rob you all the time and otherwise ruin society as
| much as possible" isn't specifically a good argument for
| the type of policy you're advocating.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Or they can take the heavy handed law and order
| approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even
| Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.
|
| I feel like you are conflating two things here that are
| not related. These places can take the heavy handed law
| and order approach they have _because_ they are some of
| the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least
| in Japan, it's nearly impossible to not have some form of
| housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store
| job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a
| one-room apartment.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| This just seems like a completely insane take to me.
| Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime
| approach with an actually effective police force has
| incredibly low crime rates.
|
| Singapore is the most expensive city in the world, has no
| minimum wage, and doesn't have a universal welfare
| program. It also routinely hands out prison time and
| caning (which is rather gruesome if you weren't familiar
| with it) as punishments for crimes as minor as graffiti.
| That combined with an effective police force, a very high
| police to resident ratio, very low corruption, and
| there's no question at all why their country is so clean
| and safe.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Every country that manages to combine a hard on crime
| approach with an actually effective police force has
| incredibly low crime rates.
|
| You have a source for that? And a theory that shows what
| is cause and which is effect?
|
| Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we
| definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So
| even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other
| methods.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > You have a source for that? And a theory that shows
| what is cause and which is effect?
|
| Out of the top 10 lowest crime countries in the world,
| you have two micro states, Armenia (which has its own
| unique problems), and 7 rich countries that are either
| overtly authoritarian and very hard on crime, or are far
| more authoritarian than most westerners would be
| comfortable with (especially with regards to their
| justice system) and also very hard on crime (those being
| UAE, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore).
|
| What is the cause and effect? If people think they are
| likely to be caught for committing a crime, and that the
| punishment will likely be severe, then they are less
| likely to commit crime. This is simply common sense.
|
| > Anyway, crime is fairly low here in Norway too but we
| definitely do not have Singaporean style punishments. So
| even if 'hard on crime' works there appear to be other
| methods.
|
| I'll just directly quote my parent comment.
|
| > the people in the middle who pay for everything have a
| choice about how to manage this problem. They can take
| the big social safety net approach like an idealised
| Scandinavian system. Or they can take the heavy handed
| law and order approach
|
| Though I will add that the social safety net approach
| seems to only work in rather limited circumstances. I
| doubt Singapore for instance would be able to implement
| such an approach, even if they wanted to.
| jart wrote:
| The government cleans the streets regularly, so
| relocating unclean people into places the city doesn't
| clean isn't going to make the city any cleaner. You
| probably haven't had much experience being around people
| who can't take of themselves and haven't got anyone
| caring for them. Whatever properties they inhabit will
| become blighted and swarms of insects like cockroaches
| will infest everything nearby.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> The thing that frustrates me about that is that the
| people who pay for it will get something from it. They
| get cleaner, safer streets._
|
| At what price? What alternatives exist to them?
|
| As I have gotten older I have slowly been getting tired
| of supporting people who not only do not pull their
| weight, but also whine and demand even more from those of
| us paying for the services they receive. Not only they
| are not grateful for receiving social services that their
| taxes are unable to fund, they also have the stones to
| blame those of us paying for everything for all their
| problems.
|
| Sorry for the rant.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I think we already allocate enough money to solve the
| problem. Spending more will likely just reinforce the
| industrial homelessness complex. We need to change how
| the money is spent.
|
| But also, clearly what we spend money on isn't fixing the
| problems. The homeless know that better than we do.
| They're right to complain.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You don't have to house the people in very desireable
| locations. If becoming homeless means that you instead
| get relegated to a massive concrete block, most
| productive members of society would do their hardest to
| leave as soon as possible. Those that don't (for a
| variety of reasons) are at least off the streets.
| Maxion wrote:
| > Part of the problem is that if you actually just do the
| most efficient thing, giving people money to go find
| housing and food (and I understand some won't be able to
| manage that and need help) then you end up poking a hole
| in the idea of how our society works.
|
| This is a cultural thing that is harder to change - but
| it does not result in this.
|
| I live in Finland and the only reason someone is actually
| homeless here is because they refuse to take the aid
| that's given to them.
|
| I can assure you, that no one who doesn't have severe
| mental issues WANT to live on social wellfare.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In the US, the homeless commonly refused aid too. Mark
| Laita, who runs the large yt channel where he talks to
| the homeless, has spoken at length about this.
| wyager wrote:
| If you try to take Finnish cultural norms around work and
| apply them to the entire American population, you're
| going to have a bad time.
|
| There are a lot of people in America who want to live on
| social welfare.
|
| I don't think this is something you can change
| intentionally without extreme and politically unviable
| interventions.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I don't know how many people that is. Understanding the
| quantity would be very useful for shaping policy.
|
| I do think in the US there could be much more multi-
| generational trauma from our cold heartless system.
| Honestly some people are owed a lifetime of relaxation.
| rincebrain wrote:
| A lot of Americans think they want to sit around doing
| nothing all day, but having done that on medical leave,
| and observed other people, my remark is, people hate
| ennui.
|
| And most people can't get enough stimulation just from
| social media or TV, so given infinite leisure time, a lot
| of them are going to go stir-crazy and want to do
| _something_.
|
| Look at all the elderly people who are constantly craving
| _some_ stimulus in their lives.
|
| People think that the natural state of others if given no
| challenge in their lives is indolence, but having met a
| number of people looking for social safety nets, most of
| them just want the ability to get out of the pit they're
| in...and even the ones who think they want to just not
| care forever, everyone I've ever met who ended up in
| situations like that, had to find _something_ to
| stimulate themselves, sometimes including developing
| crippling addictions to feel _something_ for a moment.
| bandrami wrote:
| It becomes a question of what you count as spending and who
| you count as homeless so it gets difficult to pin down
| something everyone will agree on. A couple of posters already
| linked the Hoover study but obviously not everybody is going
| to run with Hoover. San Francisco's annual budget includes
| (these are all approximate) $420m for permanent housing, $60m
| for immediate shelter, and $120m for homelessness prevention,
| so we're talking roughly $600m plus a large chunk of the
| $250m that's budgeted for mental health interventions. So
| we're talking close to a billion dollars a year out of a $14
| billion city budget.
|
| The denominator becomes tricky too, in that SFO has an
| estimated given-night homeless population of about 8000,
| about half of whom are rough sleepers (people literally
| camped out on the street/under bridges). Note that this is a
| high proportion of rough sleepers compared to most cities
| where it's about a quarter of the homeless population. That
| translates into about 32000 people experiencing homelessness
| at some point in a given year (at least that's the rule of
| thumb I remember from -- wait for it -- working at a
| homelessness NGO years ago). So the most naive calculation
| shakes out to $850m spent on 32000 people, or just north of
| $27K.
|
| Obviously this has some problems, in that at least _some_ of
| the homelessness prevention money is hopefully preventing a
| non-zero number of people from becoming homeless (though in
| my more cynical moments I wonder). But then again somebody
| who 's only homeless for a month shouldn't need a full year's
| spending.
|
| TL;DR: it's complicated and there's not a single answer
| everybody agrees on, but in terms of orders of magnitude it's
| "tens of thousands of dollars per person per year" in most
| large US cities, with SF as an outlier on the high end.
|
| (If you _really_ want to get depressed, look at European
| cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness rates
| approaching double most US cities ' and even higher
| expenditures.)
| generic92034 wrote:
| > (If you really want to get depressed, look at European
| cities like Amsterdam or Berlin which have homelessness
| rates approaching double most US cities' and even higher
| expenditures.)
|
| Could you please provide some links to those figures? The
| last figures about homelessness in Berlin I know were below
| 2000 individuals [1], which does not strike me as
| shockingly high. But things might have changed.
|
| [1]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1097522
| /umfra...
| noema wrote:
| I take it you have not been to Amsterdam or Berlin. I live
| in the latter and, while there certainly are homeless
| people, it is absolutely nowhere even close to SF per
| capita.
| kelnos wrote:
| If it's only $28k/person/year, that sounds like a bargain. Most
| decent housing in SF costs more than that.
|
| Granted, it's only a bargain if it _works_ , and it clearly
| isn't...
| afpx wrote:
| Reminds me of MADD (Mothers against drunk driving)
|
| https://reason.com/2007/10/30/prohibition-returns/
| jokoon wrote:
| Yeah that's one reason I don't like volunteer stuff.
|
| That's not up to good intended people to fix things, that's the
| role of government.
|
| You often find righteous people in NGO, those people often have
| the motivation to change the habits of homeless people and the
| poor, like it's a crusade to re-educate them to a virtuous path
| or something, that's religious in a way.
|
| Those people actually reinforce stereotypes, and poor people
| who need help, become even more sensitive and stigmatized.
| silexia wrote:
| Government agencies are usually the worst of all for the
| Shirky problem. At least nonprofits and for profits have
| competition. Government agencies are impossible to get rid of
| once created.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> A well-known example of the Shirky effect in this context is
| the cobra effect. It describes a case where British colonial
| officials in Delhi (India), set a bounty on dead cobras, in order
| to reduce the cobra population. However, this led citizens to
| breed the cobras for profit, and eventually to release them when
| the bounty was canceled._
|
| Human nature FTW!
|
| That's like the Dilbert cartoon, where engineers wrote bugs, and
| fed them to the QA people for the bounty.
|
| I understand that was actually based on a real event.
| zoltrix303 wrote:
| The IT at the company I work for recently launched their own
| version of ChatGPT. Basically a chat interface that only covers
| the text generation. (Not image generation, OCR, etc.) When they
| saw nobody was using their version, they straight out blocked the
| domain of OpenAI altogether and the page now show a message
| directing users of their solution. It's a 80k + employee
| organization, so imagine the impact of such decision.
| ejb999 wrote:
| Big pharma company by any chance?
| spixy wrote:
| That actually can make sense. Public version of ChatGPT shares
| your company private data with third party (OpenAI), your own
| version does not.
| TaurenHunter wrote:
| Reminds me of a recent post about getting a message in Slack with
| a link to another app about a meeting in Zoom, ... and a number
| of steps involving a bunch of other apps each costing
| $15/month/user. In the end nobody does anything but move small
| amounts of data through those apps.
| subroutine wrote:
| e.g. every pharmaceutical company.
| romusha wrote:
| The same as companies and politicians, why put only institutions
| into the spotlight?
| pizlonator wrote:
| I believe this is true. And I wonder wonder what the limiting
| principle is.
|
| Is this a bias we all have all the time?
|
| Or is this a bias that folks fall into under certain conditions?
| crabmusket wrote:
| This is rhetorically fascinating.
|
| All the concrete examples in this post refer to _companies_
| trying to prolong the problem they _benefit from_ , but the
| summary at the top says "For example, the Shirky principle means
| that a government agency that's meant to address a certain
| societal issue..." They took a bunch of examples about
| _companies_ and used them to imagine a problem of _government_.
|
| Kelly does the same in his blog post, where he opines, without
| citation, that _unions_ "inadvertently perpetuate the
| continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to
| because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need
| management to offset them". Which to me is very amusing, but it's
| written in a style that encourages you to take it completely
| seriously.
|
| Even the use of "institutions", which at least to me implies
| government more than it does the private sector, is not
| technically wrong, but I would argue is subtly misleading.
|
| _Hmmm._
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's telling that most commenters for whom this resonated,
| refer to their experiences in the corporate world.
|
| My current job is the first thing I thought of when reading
| this.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I could believe though that far more HN commenters work in
| the private sector than in government.
| samatman wrote:
| Both the cobra effect and the Hanoi rat massacre were
| government initiatives. They are mentioned in the article.
|
| This problem is utterly pervasive in governance, in fact, has
| been for many generations.
| crabmusket wrote:
| But neither are examples of the theorem the article is about.
| They were simply misleading.
|
| I don't actually doubt that the problem exists in
| government... But why not provide any actual examples of it?
| Just endlessly re-hashed stories from a hundred years ago?
| walterbell wrote:
| Perhaps someone will forward this article to government
| employees or public sector organizational game theorists.
| intended wrote:
| There are most certainly some papers out there which look
| into the issue.
|
| The OP though, opened with a point on the rhetorics of
| the piece. As is usual, such conversations are tricky,
| evidence by this sub threads where we are discussing
| govt.
|
| Rhetoric is a pretty interesting topic.
| hawthornio wrote:
| These examples are based around the idea of profit motive and
| these examples show a profit motive is rarely able to achieve
| the desired effect--these examples in no way speak to
| government agencies.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Neither were an example of the shirky effect though. Both
| were examples of misaligned incentives, or if you like the
| law of unintended consequences.
|
| The lesson though is clear and useful. Be careful what you
| -measure- because people will optimize to improve the
| measure. When the measurement is a proxy for what you
| actually want, you won't necessarily get the outcomes you
| were hoping for.
|
| For example what makes a good driver? I'd suggest patience
| and consideration. How many driving incidents are fueled by
| impatience or inconsiderate? Yet those are impossible to test
| for, so despite passing the driving test (operate the
| machine, know the rules) we end up with roads full of
| terrible drivers.
| dcow wrote:
| Perhaps it's easier to study isolated corporations and draw
| generalizations than it is to study a large interconnected
| bureaucratic blob? I don't generally see why problems of human
| nature wouldn't present similarly across the public and private
| sector. If anything, finding a problem in supposedly efficient
| environments would imply the problem exists in less efficient
| environments.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I'm sure it is. But surely there would be some examples that
| could have been cited?
|
| I'd suggest that in government, it's not so much human nature
| that's different as incentive structures.
|
| I don't mean to argue that government is all sunshine, roses
| and enlightened altruism. Just that even if Shirky's theorem
| is just as true of governments, this article doesn't support
| that conclusion, despite being written as if it does.
| dcow wrote:
| I get what you're saying and it's a fair point (ack that
| it'd be nice to have a gov't example) but I am just saying
| that I don't think lack of citing a domain-specific case
| study implies a problem is irrelevant in a given domain.
| It's rather strong of a statement to say that this article
| does not support the conclusion that government
| institutions or systems or entities are susceptible to the
| Shirky principle when it presents supporting evidence that
| is reasonably applicable to _all_ types of institutions,
| systems, and entities.
| crabmusket wrote:
| My original post wasn't so much to suggest that the
| problem is irrelevant to government. I was just pointing
| out the interesting ideological maneuver: show evidence
| of a problem in companies, then ask the reader to imagine
| a problem in government. Kelly's post struck me
| similarly.
|
| > supporting evidence that is reasonably applicable to
| all types of institutions, systems, and entities
|
| I don't agree, but this verges into my own opinion
| lacking any supporting evidence. It just seems clear to
| me that publically funded institutions must have very
| different incentives in some areas than privately funded
| market institutions.
|
| Again, I'm not saying this effect doesn't exist in
| governments. But it does need demonstrating, if one wants
| to actually argue that.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > supposedly efficient environments would imply the problem
| exists in less efficient environments.
|
| Efficient at what? At making money.
|
| Private enterprise wants to sells you a product that causes
| you to need more of their product. They all want to be drug
| dealers - that's the perfect business model.
|
| Goldman Sachs analysts have asked whether curing patients is
| a sustainable business model.
|
| Tobacco companies, management consultants, Apple creating
| 'ecosystems' of products that only work with each other,
| walled gardens, planned obsolescence. It's all kind of the
| same thing.
|
| how does this translate into work of an average government
| department? I am sure you could make some parallels with
| clandestine activities by CIA, but outside of that - for
| transport, or healthcare?
| dcow wrote:
| I think consumerism is orthogonal (but a fair subtopic to
| explore nonetheless). Not all corporate institutions are
| producers of consumer goods. Not are all consumer products
| designed (insidiously or not) for a recurring revenue
| stream. Furthermore efficiency usually refers to the cost
| required to achieve a desired outcome. Corporations are
| notoriously good and finding local cost minima in providing
| goods and services in ways that bureaucratic system aren't.
| This isn't controversial.
| ETH_start wrote:
| And what are government bureaucracies efficient at?
| Manipulating the political system to get sweetheart
| collective bargaining agreements that minimize the
| accountability their members face while maximizing their
| compensation?
|
| "Investigation: New Records Reveal What It Takes to Be One
| of the 75 NYC Teachers Fired for Misconduct or Incompetence
| Between 2015 and 2016" source:
| https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-
| tried...
|
| New York: "114,041 Public Employees With $100,000+
| Paychecks Cost Taxpayers $14.6 Billion" source: https://www
| .forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/24/why...
|
| "At $140,000 Per Year, Why Are Government Workers In
| California Paid Twice As Much As Private Sector Workers?"
| source: https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-
| are-governme...
|
| And early retirement at 55.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Thank you, I came here to post exactly this!
|
| _None_ of the examples in the article actually support the
| hypothesis described, that "institutions will try to preserve
| the problem to which they are the solution".
|
| The very first one is about how tax-filing companies don't want
| the government to make filing taxes easier, but that's because
| tax-filing companies aren't non-profits dedicated to making
| taxes easier to file -- they're corporations dedicated to
| making a profit.
|
| The same with the bus company wanting to eliminate competition.
| The story about the cobras is a tangent about unintended
| consequences that has nothing to do with the supposed Shirky
| principle (it's actually an example of perverse incentives
| [1]), and so forth.
|
| If you peel the layers back, you realize that this is
| essentially just the age-old conservative ideology that
| government intervention is bad because it never solves the
| problem but just makes government bigger.
|
| And then you realize that counterexamples _abound_. Did the
| history of vaccines in the 20th century just wind up sustaining
| the ravages of smallpox and polio? Of course not. Does
| investment in a military lead people to attack you? Of course
| not. Do incentives for solar power actually play a role in
| preserving fossil fuel usage that otherwise could have been
| eliminated? Don 't be ridiculous.
|
| And guess what? The IRS is currently piloting programs to make
| filing taxes simpler. Despite the lobbying efforts of tax-
| filing companies.
|
| The "Shirky principle" is something that sounds really clever,
| and it's so cynical you almost think it _must_ be true... but
| that doesn 't mean it _is_ true. The evidence that seems to
| support it doesn 't, and the massive evidence against it seems
| to be ignored.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
| ars wrote:
| The unrwa is an example of this. An agency created to help
| Palestinians ends up perpetuating the conflict by generating
| ever increasing numbers of refugees who can't work in their
| country of birth (Lebanon, Syria, etc) because they are
| denied citizenship.
|
| More reading: https://pij.org/articles/1168/the-
| discrimination-against-pal...
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's actually quite the opposite. There's a great recent
| analysis in the Economist that disagrees [1] -- it claims
| the problem isn't with the UNRWA at all (as Israel has been
| claiming), but rather with neighbor states actively
| blocking solutions that would therefore allow the UNRWA to
| disband. Key quotes:
|
| > _Some Israeli officials have wanted to shut down UNRWA
| for years, accusing the agency of helping to prolong the
| conflict. They have seized the moment to press their case.
| For its supporters, meanwhile, the agency is above
| reproach, a group of selfless humanitarians doing vital
| work. As ever, life is more complicated than a morality
| play. The continued existence of UNRWA is a problem--but
| not for the reasons its critics think..._
|
| > _This is a problem--but not one of UNRWA 's making. Blame
| instead the Arab states that have refused, for decades, to
| offer citizenship to the Palestinians in their midst. The
| 1.7m registered refugees in Gaza (or their ancestors) lived
| under Egyptian control for almost two decades until 1967.
| Instead of offering them rights, Egypt left them in
| squalor._
|
| Similarly:
|
| > _In many ways, UNRWA was the government. Hamas officials
| have all but admitted this in interviews over the past few
| months. They said Hamas's role was to build up its military
| capabilities, not to care for their people--they had do-
| gooders for that. Israel, too, relied on UNRWA to mitigate
| the consequences of the draconian blockade that it (along
| with Egypt) imposed on Gaza. Even today, as Israel tries to
| abolish UNRWA, it still relies on the agency to prevent
| mass starvation in Gaza._
|
| It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself. It
| is the actions of several countries that force the
| continued status of refugee on the Palestinians, Hamas not
| taking over basic governmental services, and Israel not
| providing humanitarian services in Gaza. The UNRWA is doing
| its best to do necessary humanitarian work when others
| aren't stepping up.
|
| The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible for
| perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore
| perpetuate its existence, couldn't be further from the
| truth.
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-
| africa/2024/02/15/...
| ars wrote:
| That's a creative way of explaining things, but if you
| were correct the unrwa would have long since disbanded
| and all the refugees handed over to the unhcr for
| integration into their country of birth.
|
| That this has not happened is the clearest proof against
| what you wrote. Tell me: If what you said is correct, why
| does the unrwa even still exist as a separate entity?
|
| The unrwa has a policy of always expanding the number of
| refugees, the unhcr has the opposite policy.
|
| Yes, it's true the Arab states have not made things easy,
| but the unrwa is not even trying - it's simply not part
| of the mandate. It is however the mandate of the unhcr.
|
| Do you think host countries want to admit refugees as
| citizens? They never do, but the unhcr manages to make
| things work. If the unrwa would try as hard they would
| cease to exist, which is a perfect example of this
| article.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > The unrwa has a policy of always expanding the number
| of refugees
|
| That's a very specific claim. Where can we find support
| for it?
| ars wrote:
| "UNRWA re-opened its new inscription process in 1992.
| Palestine refugees who were not registered in the early
| fifties can now apply for registration, provided that
| they approach any UNRWA registration office in person and
| are able to produce valid documentation proving their
| 1948 refugee status. Since 2006, husbands and descendants
| of registered refugee women, known as 'married to non-
| refugee' (MNR) family members, have also become eligible
| to be registered to receive UNRWA services."
|
| https://www.unrwa.org/what-we-do/eligibility-registration
|
| And this nice graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T
| otal_number_of_Palestini...
|
| There is actually no mechanism to take someone off of
| UNRWA membership roles! Once a member, always a member,
| and so are all their kids. Forever.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _There is actually no mechanism to take someone off of
| UNRWA membership roles! Once a member, always a member,
| and so are all their kids. Forever._
|
| This is silly.
|
| It's just registration to receive services. You don't
| need to "take someone off of UNRWA membership roles" --
| just stop using the services.
|
| You make it sound like an organization that's trying to
| sinisterly enroll everyone it can find for nefarious
| purposes, even their children, with no escape! It's a
| humanitarian aid organization for goodness sakes. If you
| don't want to use its services, then just don't.
|
| I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided
| services to people but _not_ to their children, that
| seems like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I 'm
| baffled how you can think that providing services to
| children is a bad thing.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It's so much more than that. It's a political
| affiliation; it's a status; it's a stigma in some
| circles.
|
| We can all easily imagine wanting to distance ourselves
| from certain organizations. To find you cannot
| disentangle yourself, that anyone can look you up and
| draw conclusions from your affiliation, is an problem.
| Not 'silly'.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can you provide a reputable source for those claims?
|
| I can't find anything in the (extremely long) Wikipedia
| article that suggests anything like that, or anything
| from a quick Google search.
|
| It's _not_ a political party. It 's an institution -- a
| UN agency -- that provides education, social services,
| and health care, that someone may or may not be eligible
| for.
|
| If you attended a school run by them as a child, or
| received health care from them, I'm having an extremely
| difficult time trying to imagine how that becomes a
| "stigma" that you need to "disentangle" yourself from, or
| why anyone would ever describe that as an "affiliation".
| It's just where you went to school and got medical care.
| (Which, you know, is usually better than _not_ going to
| school or _not_ getting medical care.)
| ars wrote:
| The so called, and very badly named, "Right of return" is
| what you want to look up.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
|
| UNRWA registration puts people into that status.
| ars wrote:
| That's not true though, the UNRWA is the organization
| that holds the list of people that Palestinians demand to
| be allowed into Israel. Despite that those people have
| little connection to Israel, they were not born there,
| and have never been there. All they have is some ancestor
| who lived there a long time ago.
|
| > I mean, if a humanitarian aid organization provided
| services to people but not to their children, that seems
| like it would be a pretty big problem, no? I'm baffled
| how you can think that providing services to children is
| a bad thing.
|
| At the very minimum they should hold two lists: Actual
| refugees and poor people who might need help.
|
| But worse, they are perpetuating permanent refugees -
| because it's against the UNRWA policy to pressure host
| countries to give citizenship to people who were born
| there, if those people are registered with the UNRWA. The
| country in turn is quite happy to let the UNRWA pay for
| services for them.
|
| The easiest way to understand this is to compare to the
| policies of the UNHCR. There are no permanent refugees
| with the UNHCR.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > neighbor states actively blocking solutions that would
| therefore allow the UNRWA to disband
|
| UNRWA though is what enables them to do so. If a state
| has 1m refugees on your soil that don't have any support
| mechanisms, it's this state's big problem and they'd be
| soon forced to find some solutions, as it routinely
| happened with other refugees. To be clear, not all of
| these solutions are very good, but at least there would
| be a pressure on the host country to find one. With
| UNRWA, it is taking care of the "refugees" - who aren't
| actual refugees for 2 generations already, btw - so no
| pressure on somebody else to do anything. In fact, it's
| an established policy - when one of the prominent Hamas
| leaders was asked, why don't you work to take care of
| Gaza population, he answered - it's not my business, my
| business is to fight Israel (he didn't use the word, of
| course), and UNRWA business is to take care and feed
| people. Without UNRWA, this wouldn't be possible - no
| people would tolerate a government that doesn't bother to
| provide even minimal care to them. But UNRWA provides
| this safety net that enables the perpetuation of that
| situation. Hamas can be 100% full time terrorists,
| because they know the population wouldn't revolt - they
| have UNRWA to supply their basic needs.
|
| > It's not the UNRWA that is trying to perpetuate itself.
| It is the actions of several countries that force the
| continued status of refugee on the Palestinians
|
| UNRWA certainly isn't doing anything to stop it or voice
| any objection at all to it, as far as I know. They never
| asked or acted in any way to make anybody except them to
| step up.
|
| > Israel not providing humanitarian services in Gaza
|
| Israel provided a ton of humanitarian services to Gaza.
| Of course that was before people from Gaza murdered over
| 1300 of people from Israel and kidnapped over another
| 200. Then the idea kinda lost its attraction for a bit.
| One of the most cruel parts here that many of those who
| were murdered were of the most active participants in
| providing those services, and in fact for many of them
| that was exactly the reason they went to live so close to
| Gaza - because they wanted to help.
| intended wrote:
| Hey - let's call out Hamas as opposed to the people of
| Gaza. I get the inclination to do so, but missing a
| chance to call out perpetrators and organizations in
| favor of a broad population benefits the perpetrators.
|
| Actually - Hamas and Netanyahu are apparently an example
| of the Shirky effect aren't they? I havent followed this
| that deeply, so maybe there is some nuance lost here -
| but Netanyahu's and his party kept Hamas alive, so that
| their position would be strengthened.
| rendall wrote:
| > _Netanyahu's and his party kept Hamas alive_
|
| Sounds suss, like a "Jews created the Holocaust,
| actually" narrative. Extraordinary claims require
| extraordinary evidence, but whenever someone presents
| their "evidence" of things like this it's invariably
| something like a badly shot 4 hour lecture from a "Bible
| scholar".
| ang_cire wrote:
| It's not suss, it's a well-known fact. Netanyahu has
| lobbied within Likud to support Hamas as a way to prevent
| the PA from making inroads in Gaza.
|
| Here's a Times of Israel article about it:
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-
| propped-up...
| smsm42 wrote:
| > Netanyahu's and his party kept Hamas alive
|
| That's some bullshit right here. Nothing like that
| happened.
| ang_cire wrote:
| No, it's a well-known fact. Netanyahu has lobbied within
| Likud to support Hamas as a way to prevent the PA from
| making inroads in Gaza (which is seen by most in the West
| as the only way for a Palestinian state to occur, since
| Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization).
| Basically, keep the terrorists running Gaza, and no one
| will make a serious effort to pressure Israel into
| recognizing or allowing Palestinian statehood.
|
| Here's a Times of Israel article about it:
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-
| propped-up...
| smsm42 wrote:
| What this article describes is that Netanyahu treated
| Hamas as de-facto government of Gaza - and cooperated
| with them in certain things. This is, btw, exactly what
| Israel has been accused of _not_ doing - e.g. not letting
| Gazans work, not letting them receive goods and money,
| etc. But in reality, Netanyahu has been doing all that -
| under the mistaken impression that Hamas can be,
| eventually, converted from purely military genocidal
| terrorist group to kind of hostile, but manageable
| government of Gaza. This wasn 't done because he liked
| Hamas, but because there's no other option in Gaza, and
| the alternatives would be very costly and politically
| untenable - you can't blockade million-sized territory
| for long before "international community" cries out, and
| you can't re-occupy it. All that changed on Oct 7, of
| course, where this policy has proven to be a colossal
| failure - and that's what Netanyahu and others who pushed
| this policy will have to answer for, after the war has
| ended. But none of this makes the claim that Netanyahu
| actually preferred Hamas as a partner any of a fact - he
| had a choice, either cooperate with Hamas, ignore them or
| destroy them. All the world screamed at him "cooperate
| immediately!". He cooperated. This turned to be a
| catastrophically mistaken choice. But ironically, now
| everybody screams at him "how dared you to cooperate!
| It's all your fault now!". Not that he had much choice -
| if he chose anything else before Oct 7, what occurred
| would also probably be listed as his fault, because how
| dared he not to cooperate? If only he cooperated, nothing
| like that would happen!
| intended wrote:
| It is somewhat rare when our intuition is found wrong,
| however this is one of those times. The fact that a known
| hawk supported their ostensible enemy, is a weird
| situation.
|
| However-
|
| https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-
| article-op...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/netanyahu-israel-gaza-
| hamas...
|
| > A year later, Netanyahu was further embarrassed when
| photos of suitcases full of cash going to Hamas became
| public. Liberman finally resigned in protest over
| Netanyahu's Hamas policy which, he said, marked "the
| first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself."
|
| By the looks of it, this was going on for years.
|
| But I am more interested in understanding if this had any
| impact on you? Do you still think this is BS? Are you
| cautiously looking for more evidence? Is the evidence
| sufficient to have changed your position? If so how?
| smsm42 wrote:
| These articles are quoting one of Netanyahu's fiercest
| opponents - the guy that right now says they need to wage
| campaign destabilize the government to topple him - as if
| these were established facts. And, btw, one of the
| architects of the completely failed "peace process", who
| let's say has a bit of an agenda to push here.
|
| Yes, Israel had to cooperate to some measure with Hamas
| as the de-facto government of Gaza, absent any other and
| absent any desire to re-occupy Gaza. That included, yes,
| sending them goods and money, or allowing the money to be
| sent by other parties (note that Israel still is charged
| with making Gaza "open-air prison" simultaneously,
| because nothing has to make sense anymore). Because if
| Israel didn't do that, the whole world would cry out
| "Israel is blockading and starving Gaza" - there would be
| no way to pay the salaries of any civil servants (and not
| like there's much thriving business, except for
| contraband and drug trade, that can sustain Gaza economy)
| and deliver any goods. So yes, Israel was allowing money
| and goods to come to Gaza, and sometimes supplying them,
| because the only alternative was either to remove all the
| population there, or let them starve, or re-occupy them -
| and neither of these options were attractive. This is
| very far cry from "Netanyahu kept Hamas alive" - that's
| bullshit framing, Hamas was very much alive by itself,
| there wasn't a choice of not keeping them alive short of
| starving the whole population of Gaza or killing all the
| Hamas members. The former wasn't acceptable, and the
| latter is what Hamas eventually forced to happen, but
| Israel was hoping not to go there. Now when it's forced
| to go there, everybody is crying "how dare you!". Truly,
| damned if you do, damned if you don't.
|
| > Do you still think this is BS?
|
| Absolutely, it's complete and utter BS, and it's not news
| for me either - I know about the history of it much more
| than you'd ever hope to learn from occasionally reading a
| terribly biased article or quickly googling for a hot
| take. I lived there, I witnessed all the history of it
| happen, and I have read tons of materials about it for
| decades. What for you is a deep and profound revelation,
| for me is something that I knew for years, and unlike
| you, I know the full picture, I also know the context of
| it, the reasons for it and the consequences of it. That's
| why I say the idea that Netanyahu dreamed of Hamas never
| going away is complete and utter bullshit. Netanyahu and
| his policies leave a lot open to criticism, but this
| thing is on "doctors cause disease because that's how
| they get paid" level of conspiracy bullshit.
|
| > Is the evidence sufficient to have changed your
| position? If so how?
|
| There's no realistic "evidence" possible to change my
| position in such a question, because it goes contrary to
| decades of knowledge and context that I learned and
| witnessed. That would have to be evidence on the level
| that the whole Middle East history for the last 50 years
| has been some kind of staged conspiracy aimed at
| deceiving me, Truman-show style. It's on the level of
| proving with evidence that the Moon is actually made of
| Swiss cheese and you can get to it by jumping really
| hard, and that's actually how Swiss cheese is made - by
| going to the Moon and mining it there. If you can provide
| such evidence, go ahead, but I'm pretty sure no such
| evidence exists or can exist, because I don't see how
| it's existence is possible given what I know about the
| world around us. Maybe I am just crazy and we all live in
| simulation and anything is possible, but that's not
| likely. Much more likely is that some folks have read
| some biased bullshit - produced in part by people with
| very clear agenda - and decided they now know everything
| about the question.
| khokhol wrote:
| _Now when it 's forced to go there, everybody is crying
| "how dare you!". Truly, damned if you do, damned if you
| don't._
|
| This is a gross (and bizarre) distortion of why people
| are taking issue with the current operation in Gaza, of
| course. In a nutshell: no, they are very obviously not
| simply taking issue with the IDF "being there" in some
| form in response to October 7.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| It's not that UNRWA creates the problem as in maintaining
| people in refugee status, but that in order to operate in
| Gaza they have effectively become part of Hamas.
| rendall wrote:
| Even that Economist opinion piece has this line: "That
| was the role of UNRWA: to preserve the status quo."
|
| > _The idea that UNRWA is the primary party responsible
| for perpetuating the situation, in order to therefore
| perpetuate its existence, couldn 't be further from the
| truth._
|
| The article elides much. The reason for neighboring Arab
| nations not really trusting Palestinians, for instance.
| The work of UN Watch in exposing UNWRA as being too cosy
| at best with Hamas, for another. "... couldn't be further
| from the truth" is quite a stretch.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The Shirky principle is: "institutions will try to
| preserve the problem to which they are the solution".
|
| I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to
| maintain the status quo.
|
| Rather, _other_ parties are trying to maintain the status
| quo, and UNRWA is providing humanitarian aid until things
| change, to alleviate misery.
|
| I think it's quite obvious that if a peaceful solution
| were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA would very
| quickly wind down its operations. With a lot of its staff
| possibly being hired by the local government.
|
| The full situation over there is extremely, astonishingly
| complex. But the "Shirky principle" tries to posit some
| kind of simplistic answer. And it's just wrong.
| rendall wrote:
| > _I see no evidence that UNRWA is the one trying to
| maintain the status quo._
|
| You are one of the rare few. UNRWA is losing funding
| precisely because this evidence exists and is compelling.
|
| UNRWA could not have been ignorant of the terror tunnels
| beneath its HQ. UNRWA school curriculum has taught anti-
| Israel rhetoric to children for decades. UNRWA telegram
| channel promoting and celebrating terror attacks. Not to
| mention Hamas employees working at UNWRA.
|
| This is all beside the main point of the number of
| Palestian refugees ballooning from 500K in 1948 to 5.6
| million today.
|
| > _I think it 's quite obvious that if a peaceful
| solution were found in Israel and Palestine, the UNRWA
| would very quickly wind down its operations._
|
| Indeed. That + Shirky's Principle goes far to explain
| UNWRA's behavior.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Please don't say I'm one of the "rare few" -- that
| presupposes that there's some kind of broad consensus
| here, which there absolutely is not.
|
| And the things you're saying have nothing whatsoever to
| do with "Shirky's principle", whether they are true or
| false.
|
| I'm not taking any kind of political position on UNRWA.
|
| But what I am saying is that they don't hold any kind of
| power to change the situation here. They're not any kind
| of major player in the geopolitical situation. There's
| not a state actor that has the power to be negotiating
| over the status of the Palestinians with Netanhayu.
|
| The idea that, if it weren't for UNRWA, there would be no
| more refugees because they'd all have gone back home or
| been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd. To
| suggest that _they_ are the ones _creating_ the sitution
| -- rather than the actions of Israel, Hamas, and the PA,
| together with neighboring countries and the US -- is
| totally at odds with all historical fact.
|
| It's like saying that the Red Cross foments war so that
| it can have wartime casualties to treat. It makes no
| sense.
| ars wrote:
| It's pretty simple: The UNRWA should refuse to provide
| services that the local government is obligated to
| provide. For example in Gaza the UNRWA has the role of
| government, instead of Hamas. If UNRWA refused, then
| Hamas would have had to do that, and they probably would
| drop this idea of perpetual war with Israel, because they
| have obligations to their citizens.
|
| In Lebanon Lebanon refuses to give even basic services to
| the people who were born there, because the UNRWA does
| it. If Lebanon was on the hook for schooling and other
| basic services they would probably grant work permits to
| the parents.
|
| This would eventually lead to integration with the host
| country.
|
| But instead the UNRWA does it, leading to perpetual
| refugee status.
| rendall wrote:
| > _The idea that, if it weren 't for UNRWA, there would
| be no more refugees because they'd all have gone back
| home or been peacefully resettled elsewhere, is absurd_
|
| And yet this is exactly what the UNHCR does. A refugee
| settles, and they are no longer a refugee.
|
| > _To suggest that they are the ones_ creating _the
| sitution_
|
| You're arguing against a strawman. The Arab war on Israel
| in 1948 created the refugee crisis. No one argued any
| different.
|
| There is evidence that UNWRA is perpetuating the
| situatiyon, your personal incredulity notwithstanding.
| This is but a single example, but it is enough to
| demonstrate that they intentionally exacerbated it.
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/unrwa-textbooks-still-
| include-...
| crabmusket wrote:
| From the conclusion of that article, emphasis mine:
|
| > The Palestinian refugees have been forced into abject
| poverty _by the Lebanese government 's denial of their
| rights_ to remunerated employment, social security, public
| health care, public education and property ownership. The
| argument that Palestinian integration into Lebanese society
| would either cause them to lose their right of return or
| would upset Lebanon's sectarian balance is just a pretext
| the Lebanese government uses to discriminate against the
| Palestinians, whom many Lebanese blame for causing the
| Lebanese civil war.
|
| Nowhere could I see how the UNRWA is "generating ever
| increasing numbers of refugees"? Do you have any other
| sources?
| ars wrote:
| I replied to you in a different part of the thread.
|
| What you are missing in that conclusion is that the UNRWA
| has no mandate to even _try_ to get their members full
| citizenship in Lebanon. It 's easy to blame Lebanon, and
| you should, but UNRWA is utterly complicit be encouraging
| this status.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Right, I think I see the point you're getting at.
|
| The issues around the UNRWA are a lot more complex than
| what's presented in the article. I appreciate you
| bringing documentation to back up your posts when I've
| asked for it.
|
| I've realised from reading most of what you've brought so
| far that I'm not going to be able to develop a sensible
| opinion on the matter. It requires a lot more background
| and understanding of the region than I have. With that
| said I'm going to let this thread go. You may be right-
| I'm not convinced yet, but I think I've gone as far as I
| care to for the sake of an HN thread.
| dcow wrote:
| The article isn't as hyperbolic as you're suggesting it is.
| It admits that there are cases where the benefits of solving
| the problem outweigh sustaining it. The existence of a
| generalizable pattern does not imply the wold reduces solely
| to the pattern. It is not conservative to say institutions
| try to preserve themselves nor to suggest that government
| institutions, systems, and entities are equally susceptible
| to the plight of preservation, even inadvertently.
| Traditional conservatives are allergic to change and the
| conservative mindset may be at fault for institutions
| behaving conservatively... but we won't have that discussion
| if you write off a rather wise observation as politicized
| anti-government propaganda.
| barrysteve wrote:
| So you want to preserve a problematic principle to keep
| talking about it's contents? How terribly meta.
|
| The shirky principle is not needed. Shirk is already an
| English word meaning 'avoid or neglect responsibility'.
| dcow wrote:
| Or, you're preserving the HN community by finding some
| absurd hyper reductionist way to turn an interesting
| subject into a problem. We could go on...
|
| There are numerous and quite normal unproblematic
| examples of how self-preservation is unwanted and
| destructive. I for one am interested in learning how and
| why these incentives evolve and how to structurally
| combat them so that we never have to talk about harmful
| examples of the Shirky principle ever again. Concretely
| apropos and not one whiff of meta.
| da_chicken wrote:
| The only real counterexample I can even think of is the
| Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, which disbanded when
| it had achieved success.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Somewhat amusing bc American bathrooms would be so much nicer
| if they all had paid attendants in them and requirement
| payment to use.
| kaibee wrote:
| Yeah, the actual outcome is now that many businesses close
| their bathrooms to the public unless you're buying
| something.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Or they just say that they are out of order
| alexb_ wrote:
| I have only seen this happen in big cities. Outside of
| big cities this just doesn't happen.
| BrandonMarc wrote:
| Unless clean free toilets are a big part of their
| advertising. See: Buc-ee's locations.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I think that's a definition of "nice" that undermines the
| utility of public bathrooms, which I think is a lot more
| essential to the public good.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of
| the best in town would be falling over each other to be a
| toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the
| finest toilet experience one can have.
| jdlshore wrote:
| That wasn't my experience in Europe, where pay toilets are
| common. First, they're not all attended. Second, the
| nastiest toilet I've ever seen was a pay toilet at a train
| station in Norway.
|
| Although I prefer the floor-to-ceiling stalls of Europe, I
| find it _much_ easier to find a usable bathroom in the US.
| llamaLord wrote:
| To be fair, there's something about the Scandinavian diet
| that makes any kind of toilet you encounter literally the
| most disgusting experience possible.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| well, at least it wasn't The Worst Toilet in Scotland
| tycho-newman wrote:
| Or worse, The Worst Toilet in Scotland, but Covered in
| Bullet Ants.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| In my experience, public pay toilets in southern Peru are
| worse than any public toilet I have ever seen in the USA.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It is extremely common that in most of Mexico, the pay
| toilets have such bad plumbing that everyone knows to not
| flush any toilet paper at all, it all goes in the bin no
| matter how dirty it is.
|
| I prefer USA toilets.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Pretty fascinating to hear the counter-examples here.
|
| Admittedly, I based this comment on my recent experience
| in Munich, and it definitely sounds like it wasn't as
| representative as I assumed.
| gbear605 wrote:
| I've been in Europe a lot recently, and the running joke
| has been how much worse the toilets in Europe are than in
| the US. Even worse, the pay toilets seem to be of
| consistently worse quality than the free toilets in Europe!
| umvi wrote:
| Yet somehow Japan achieves both free and clean bathrooms...
| In the biggest city in the world, no less!
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| The new Wim Wenders movie, Perfect Days, is an account of
| how that's done (the story is about a toilet cleaning man
| in Tokyo who is paid by the city)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Except the thing is... if you put Japanese officials in
| charge of the policies of any other city, the toilets
| would be as bad or likely worse.
|
| The example isn't just one thing, it's a ton of things
| with the side effect of a strong culture of
| responsibility.
| callalex wrote:
| However public toilets have multiple objectives. The more
| accessible they are, the less likely you are to smell or
| step in excrement, which also makes being in a city a nicer
| experience.
| harikb wrote:
| And they had a sense of humor
|
| > Membership in the organization cost only $0.25, and members
| received the Committee's newsletter, the _Free Toilet Paper_
| hypothesis wrote:
| There was also National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) [0]:
|
| > The NCLC is a rare example of an organization which
| succeeded in its mission and was no longer needed.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Child_Labor_Comm
| itt...
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Both of these occur to me as extremely focused problems
| with a clear demarcation of success. The DEA? Ehhhh... less
| so.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The March of Dimes was founded to try to eradicate polio.
| When it effectively did so, it changed its mission.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes#Change_of_missi.
| ..
| causal wrote:
| One example I've seen in government/non-business settings is
| needing to spend all budgeted money in order to avoid budget
| cuts. It's an incentive to look for problems in order to keep
| their funding as the solution.
| pstuart wrote:
| In some cases it doesn't even require creating "problems",
| the budget just needs to be spent to justify keeping it for
| the next round. I believe the military excels at this
| practice.
|
| Incentives drive behavior and it would be wonderful to find
| incentives to minimize budgets _reasonably_ and to ensure
| they can be properly increased _when justified_.
| llamaLord wrote:
| This is one of those things that seems amazingly dumb to me
| in business and in government.
|
| If I run a department in a company that is responsible for
| say, customer service, there are a million ways I could
| improve customer service by doing things like increasing
| efficiency in "back of house" areas and the reallocating
| those funds to customer facing areas.
|
| Problem is... I can't do that, because if I drive
| efficiency in the BOH area I don't get to keep the surplus
| resources I just created, it gets gobbled back up by the
| organisation at the next budget cycle... So there's
| literally a NEGATIVE incentive for me to optimise.
|
| Now, I understand why the organisation feels the need to
| capture that surplus, there might be other areas of the
| business that leadership thinks needs those resources more.
| But what they're failing to understand is they're actually
| hurting both the team making the efficiency AND the team
| who needs the extra resources because now everything is
| just going to remain exactly the way it was.
|
| This seems like a ridiculously easy problem to solve
| though... Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends
| to retain say half of the benefit they generate.
|
| The company still gets a chunk of resources back to
| redistribute the way they see fit, AND the team generating
| the efficiency are able to implement the rebalancing of
| resources WITHIN the team that incentives them to make the
| changes in the first place.
|
| I would bet serious money that the NET divided returned to
| the central pool would actually be HIGHER even though they
| only get half of each block of surplus, because you would
| be providing SO MUCH more incentive to individual teams to
| find and implement these efficiency gains now.
| pstuart wrote:
| > Just allow teams that drive efficiency dividends to
| retain say half of the benefit they generate.
|
| I think that's a good start but like in the article,
| could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if
| they keep the savings where does it actually go)?
|
| The whole issue of incentives is fascinating to me and I
| think it would be wonderful to have a "Department of Game
| Theory" that could model and verify these behavioral
| assumptions.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I think that 's a good start but like in the article,
| could somehow create perverse incentives (for example, if
| they keep the savings where does it actually go)?_
|
| Is that really a problem, though? The other half of the
| savings still gets returned to the rest of the business
| to allocate as they see fit. Even if the half retained by
| the money-saving team gets lit on fire, that's still a
| net positive, overall.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| > now everything is just going to remain exactly the way
| it was.
|
| Consider it's not dumb. Then what is it? Perhaps
| management knows full well everything you say but they're
| also subject to the same incentives.
|
| My hypothesis is the status quo makes the system more
| predictable all the way to the top, which in turn enables
| them to confidently pull the levers they want to pull
| without surprises.
|
| If that hypothesis holds, it seems entirely rational to
| let support be.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| You are right. Not only do you lose the resources you
| saved but you are now less resilient against changeable
| circumstances as you approach a natural maximum
| efficiency based on resources and circumstances. A fat
| inefficient department can pluck low hanging fruit at
| need a lean efficient one may fail under pressure even if
| more resources are provided late in the game because it
| may not be able to efficiently turn money into
| productivity without a significant ramp up in terms of
| recruiting and training.
| meeech wrote:
| This 100% happens in businesses. Not just gov/non-business.
| HKH2 wrote:
| We don't/shouldn't have to pay businesses though.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| We certainly do have to, at least for certain values of
| "we". An example in the US is the current legal
| obligation to procure private health insurance. (There
| are exceptions to this obligation, generally lack of
| means, and in turn may qualify one to procure private
| insurance with tax subsidies.)
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| There hasn't been a legal obligation to have private
| health insurance since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,
| which was 7 years ago.
|
| But still, your point stands, despite the specific
| example no longer being true.
| dataflow wrote:
| There are still some states that require health
| insurance.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I had to refresh my memory, so I looked it up. What I see
| now is that the mandate is technically still law, but the
| tax penalty was eliminated. Not that it's a meaningful
| distinction, just an odd legal artifact.
| xav0989 wrote:
| Some things like car insurance are a legally mandated
| purchase from a private business.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| No, but we already do. Huge amounts of public money is
| spent by government on consulting firms, private
| contractors and industry grants/incentives.
|
| Yet the public doesn't generally consider these firms to
| be publicly funded organizations, despite taxpayer money
| being the primary revenue source for many of them.
| Jensson wrote:
| The government switches external firms as soon as another
| firm seems to be able to do it better, that isn't true
| for the governments own parts. That makes the two
| fundamentally different, one can accumulate bloat forever
| the other will get renewed from time to time. Private
| profit seeking adds overhead though so which one is
| better depends on the domain we are talking about, in
| some cases private are better in other government are
| better.
| dcow wrote:
| Yes but the challenge is that the article is rhetorically
| lax because it doesn't provide a domain specific case
| example of the Shirky principle playing out in government
| yet submits the hypothesis that the principle supports
| backwards government behavior. It's a fair point and it's
| why people are presenting (the somewhat obvious but
| missing) government examples.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| That's because we as humans like predictability. And hence,
| stock market rewards predictability. So, a large company's
| finance department allocates, say, travel budget, to all
| divisions based on their past year's travel spend +/- some
| margin. So, now, if you are division head, you are going to
| make sure your travel spend for the current period is at
| least as high as last cycle to ensure your travel budget
| for next cycle doesn't shrink. This means you may encourage
| your employees to use that travel budget by traveling even
| if such travel wasn't absolutely necessary. This happens
| all the time with all sorts of budgets in all sorts of
| organizations.
| Jensson wrote:
| In businesses that is kept in check via competition.
| Startups can beat old companies that gathered too much such
| bloat, the same is not true for governments since they
| don't get competed out. Even in democracies most of the
| government bureaucracy stays even when the opposite party
| gets elected, you need a total revolution to flush that out
| and those happens very rarely.
| 725686 wrote:
| This has always driven me crazy. Its just amazing how much
| $$$ is wasted because of this.
| dgfitz wrote:
| "I promise to feed you as long as you eat all of it."
|
| "Ok sure, I'll eat all the food all the time."
|
| "If I don't eat all the food they're going to feed me less,
| that isn't an option"
|
| What exactly do you propose? All companies are micro-
| utopias? Maybe it drives you crazy because you haven't
| tried to see the other point of view. I imagine if you do
| try, it will make sense, for loose definitions of "sense".
|
| I'd also like to note that I agree, it is wasteful.
| campbel wrote:
| Seems like an issue with how budgeting is managed. Its always
| important to find the correct incentive structures.
| chii wrote:
| no such corrective structure can exist, since the
| organization will cease to exist if the problem is fixed
| for eternity.
|
| For example, homelessness. There's hundreds of different
| programs, all trying to "fix" homelessness, using different
| methods. Ultimately though, they do not make progress - not
| deliberately, but as an aggregate.
| campbel wrote:
| If the organization is solving the problem, removing the
| organization would result in the problem returning
| though, right?
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's not a department maintaining the problem they were
| designed to address though unless it's a watchdog on
| government waste.
| bruce511 wrote:
| It's a predictable outcome though. Budgets, by implication,
| imply that resources are limited. Someone, somewhere is
| deciding winners and losers.
|
| A good budgeter will ask for input to determine the next
| budget. They will treat savings will delight, and not
| penalise those who created them. They'll find out if the
| saving is permanently, or temporary. They might ask for
| suggestions with how the budget might be allocated.
|
| As the org gets bigger and bigger though it becomes
| impossible to do this on a individual-level basis. So next
| years budget is formed with incomplete data from this year.
|
| Some savings are because on lack-of-need, some are because
| not everything happens every year, some are because of
| incompetence. But the bigger the organisation the less likely
| this individual variance can be taken into account.
| beached_whale wrote:
| At least some governments have put in controls to stop end of
| year spending at least. Only part of the issue though.
| Centralization of common services has aided in this too.
| gxs wrote:
| It does bug me when I see less than precise language, though
| I'm sure somewhere in this comment I'll be less than precise
| and someone will point it out.
|
| If you look up the definition, the spirit of the word is
| definitely not to convey companies or businesses.
|
| In fact, sometimes the word is used to denote an especially
| popular or longstanding restaurant with a strong, devout
| customer base, "this hot dog joint had become a New York
| institution". Stuff like that is usually said in jest and/or as
| hyperbole.
|
| It's possible for some companies to actually become
| institutions I think, but I can't think of one off the top of
| my head. I don't think size or date of founding matter, as I
| certainly wouldn't call companies like Apple, Google, Walmart,
| or US Steel institutions.
|
| Funny enough, though, sometimes you can use it to describe
| something, such as institutional knowledge.
|
| Anyway, the article didn't give off a pretentious vibe that
| some do with pseudo rigorous language etc, so it didn't cause
| me any indigestion, lol.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I value your post, but this sentence is ironic:
|
| > Which to me is very amusing, but it's written in a style that
| encourages you to take it completely seriously.
|
| Because you expect me to take you seriously but instead of
| making a valuable assessment you instead resort to saying you
| find it amusing, as if the reason you find it amusing is
| obvious and implied. It isn't.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Fair point. To be specific, I find the idea that management
| only exists to combat the influence of unions ridiculous. A
| claim so surprising really begs for at least a fig-leaf of
| justification.
| samirillian wrote:
| a) agree b) Reads like chatgpt wrote it. Something about
| needing some stilted conjunction every other sentence. c) If
| the lab leak theory for covid is true, that'd be a good
| government example. The whole anthrax thing was weird as hell
| too.
|
| edit - actually I guess it's fuzzy. Where's the line between
| prolonging a problem and inventing a problem
| elliotec wrote:
| Are you implying that government institutions _don't_ preserve
| problems to which they're the solution?
| clevergadget wrote:
| don't know if he is but the point stands regardless. the
| space around this question private v public is more than
| active enough for the writer to know better than skip past it
| and assume they are identical. personally i think they are
| basically identical but it is a little dirty.
| zadokshi wrote:
| No. The point is the examples don't directly support the
| contention.
|
| Observing that the examples don't directly support the
| contention doesn't by itself validate or invalidate
| contention.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin
| Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting
| using examples from the private sector.
|
| (Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together
| in comparison to the private sector.)
| intended wrote:
| I think he's pointing out what your question is a victim of -
| rhetorical devices that ensure a certain point of view is
| reinforced.
|
| The opening line is about institutions, while the examples
| are about firms. The point being that this will focus people
| on government behavior, while the examples are anything but.
|
| As we can see in the comments, it is somehow effective even
| when we are discussing the structure of the argument.
|
| The conversation naturally generates poles, which end up
| reinforcing the govt wastefulness argument - without the
| underlying article itself supporting those comments.
|
| This is pointed out by people who see the device, but this
| counts as an indicator that they are "pro-government".
|
| Discussion ensues in the comments, entrenching the rhetoric,
| without having to resort to valid examples.
|
| I love such constructions, like stingers that dig deeper if
| you try to pull them out.
| kelnos wrote:
| Government institutions may well do that (and I personally
| expect they do), but the (private sector) examples presented
| don't actually support that conclusion.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Case in point: the UN Committee to eradicate smallpox was
| successful and then self-disbanded. They were not a company.
| tw04 wrote:
| Which is odd because every government program torn down in the
| last 50 years has almost immediately resulted in a resurrection
| of the bad behavior by private corporations it was meant to
| stop.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Doesn't imply the opposite isn't true either. Spending on
| "fixing" the homelessness crisis in SF has ballooned as
| expected and a lot of nonprofits and agencies well positioned
| to take advantage have benefited from the unhoused bull
| market
| lisper wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495635
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The fault here lies with the SF electorate, who
| collectively wants their housing investment to be protected
| and homelessness to be fixed.
|
| Actually, I would argue that this isn't even a conflict,
| because SF homeowners probably do not want a durable
| solution to the homelessness crisis. That would require
| bulldozing the suburbs. They instead want SF to sweep the
| homeless under some proverbial rug so that their presence
| does not tarnish the value of their homes. House them, but
| house them _somewhere else_. This isn 't even an instance
| of the Shirky principle, it's just people using words in
| confusing ways.
| moneywoes wrote:
| examples for illustration please
| csomar wrote:
| I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the
| writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to
| everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll
| affect governments, unions, companies, etc...
| crabmusket wrote:
| I think that's a fair and charitable reading, that maybe
| they've just overgeneralised a bit, or maybe just haven't
| chosen the exact mix of examples they "should" have.
|
| The ideological lean, though it may have been completely
| innocent or accidental, stood out to me.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle.
|
| The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to
| self-perpetuate.
|
| The comments are just blaming any government program that might
| be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of
| reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky !=
| Government.
|
| Any organization can underperform for many reasons.
|
| There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives.
|
| or
|
| "multipolar traps"
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think the broadest definition of the role of government is to
| regulate. With that in mind, it would mean that the government
| (and its agencies) would be intentionally failing to regulate
| well so that there is a perceived continued need to regulate?
|
| As asinine as that sentence sounds, it actually seems to be
| exactly the state we're in right now. We have tons of
| government and tons of regulation, and yet we still see
| corruption and criminality everywhere, and people begging for
| more regulation to undermine it.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| This is also the perfect example of survivorship bias: all the
| institutions which effectively solved a problem don't exist any
| more today, as they were shut down or repurposed and renamed.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| huh, yeah it implies that without unions companies wouldn't
| need any of that pesky management, just like without traffic
| lights cars wouldn't need brakes.
| dfee wrote:
| How does this relate to entrepreneurship? I've considered that
| wielding this problem to your advantage is a predicate of
| success. But I've never seen it spelled out in that context.
| j45 wrote:
| Learning about navigating topics like these helps with innovation
| and disruption.
|
| I'd be happy to learn any reading; be it related, complimentary,
| or tangential
| donretag wrote:
| This behavior is pretty much the state of the American two party
| political system. For example, Democrats had countless attempts
| to make abortion a constitutional right, but if they did, they
| could no longer count on using that subject for fundraising
| against the "enemy". Using Democrats as an example, both parties
| are guilty.
| motohagiography wrote:
| There's a word for this, it's called "managing," which means, "to
| extract value from." Anything that manages a problem exists to
| extract value from it - not to kill the golden goose by solving
| it.
|
| It's why there is an entire class of people who benefit from
| creating chaos and disorder, because it creates opportunities for
| them to manage, or extract value, from it. If you build
| something, they are the ones who arrive to "problematize" and
| wreck it.
| mberning wrote:
| In some cases sure, but some things require management due to
| the nature of reality, and there is nothing to be done about it
| other than manage the problem. Take something banal such as DLP
| tools. There is no way to "solve" people stealing data, so
| tools were created to manage the problem. Then comes the team
| of people to manage the tool. Then the management structure to
| oversee the team. And so on. It would be nice to believe that
| this seemingly small problem could be "solved" once and for
| all, but that remains to be seen.
| k2xl wrote:
| Turbo tax comes to mind
| est wrote:
| There's an ancient saying in Chinese: "Yang Kou Zi Zhong "
| basically means the same thing. Keep the bandits alive so kings
| would finance & arm you handsomely.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this a lot as the root cause of where "bullshit jobs"
| come from. This pattern happens all the time:
|
| 1. Government passes a law to try to improve some problem. All
| laws in a democracy are the result of a lot of horse trading, so
| the law itself generally includes a lot of tradeoffs.
|
| 2. The new regulations bring up a need for a whole host of people
| to understand and implement these regulations, who sell their
| services to other companies and the public at large. Of course,
| these jobs exist to make it easier for others to follow the
| regulations, which means that people in these jobs have no
| incentive to make the regulations simpler in the first place.
|
| For example, a lot of people in the US are familiar with flexible
| spending accounts, FSAs, which let you spend money on health-
| related items without paying the income tax on the money for
| those payments. But the rules for FSAs can be notoriously
| complex. As one example, many products/services are "dual
| purpose", so you can spend FSA money on a massage if a doctor
| prescribes it, but not if you just want a massage to feel better.
| So a whole host of "wellness services" have popped up that will
| essentially write you a dubious "letter of medical necessity"
| (literally nobody is ever turned down) so you can buy these items
| with an FSA.
|
| But the real kicker is FSA is "use it or lose it" - you set aside
| money from your paycheck at the beginning of the year, but if you
| don't spend it on medically-approved items, it reverts back to
| your employer at the end of the year. And 25% of all FSA funds
| are forfeited every year! So the end state is that all of this
| complexity was set up to create and manage FSAs, but, on average,
| it's essentially a wash for participants as a whole due to the
| forfeited money.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| A solution only exists if you have a problem. A problem is every
| opportunity for a solution. Uber existed to address the limited
| amount of taxis in a city and address the pricing problem they
| produce. How they themselves became more expensive, they also
| became more of a problem. Then more solutions were added like
| regulation...
|
| The issues are compounding. The phrase is, "The road to hell is
| paved with good intentions.".
|
| A good example is also how some open-source business models moved
| away and started charing their services. The unintentional
| consequences of society and businesses making descissions
| hastedly would out throughly reviewing and executing their
| strategy.
|
| Often businesses that make these underhanded tactics receive
| massive negative publicity and loss. A good example is how Unity
| announced that it will start charging per installation of a users
| game. This became problematic because in turn it was taking an
| already fairly licensed product and tacting on additional fees
| which caused it to become unfairly priced. Their initial goal as
| a platform for game development was to be the better competition
| to major studios eventually becoming the problem they swore not
| to be after becoming established.
| richrichie wrote:
| Imagine the horror of applying this principle to various climate
| change groups!
| ideashower wrote:
| The war on drugs is a great example of this. It's led to high
| incarceration rates in the US, particularly for minor drug
| offenses, without significantly reducing drug abuse rates.
| There's plenty of evidence that treatment and decriminalization
| strategies are more effective than incarceration, and yet
| localities in the US continue to prioritize punitive measures
| over reform. And so: a high demand for law enforcement and prison
| systems which continues to recycle the problem.
| richrichie wrote:
| What is well supported by research (across domains) is that moral
| hazard is real and not a conspiracy.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| African liberation movements. The successfully fought
| colonialism, got into power and instead of dispanding and letting
| technocrats run the countries to improve things like roads,
| healthcare, access to water. They continue to "fight" imperialism
| and other ills that are literally impossible to define.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| antimalware / antivirus companies are another example.
| pushedx wrote:
| Big IPv4 space holders renting their IPs for $25/month instead of
| investing in IPv6 adoption. Is that another example of this?
| bunnie wrote:
| I like to state this in the inverse, as the engineer's paradox:
| "A good engineer believes their purpose is to solve their problem
| so effectively that their position is no longer relevant to the
| organization".
|
| Which leads to the corollary that, over time, all good engineers
| are eliminated from an organization (or are re-homed to a new
| position where they aren't as effective, until they do become
| effective, in which case they are re-homed again).
|
| An alternative resolution of the paradox is that if every
| engineer solved their problem such that there were less problems
| than when they started, there would eventually be no more need
| for engineers.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Intuit re tax complexity comes to mind.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| The first examples that come to mind are, of course, private
| prisons, and companies that benefit from war
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The cobra and rat examples are examples of _perverse incentives_
| and the charitable interpretation of the tendency for
| institutions to preserve the problems to which they are solutions
| is that the "obvious" answer, such as "pay people to bring us
| cobras," may involve perverse incentives which didn't occur to
| the person who was like "I want this gone. I have a simple and
| direct solution: I will pay people to make it go away."
|
| I am usually speaking of homelessness when I talk about the
| Shirky Principle. Programs to "help the homeless" are often well
| meaning but require there to continue to be homeless people to
| keep doing their work. So tying help to their current status can
| actively help keep people stuck.
|
| It can be quite hard to decide you want to "help the homeless" or
| "decide to do something about homelessness" and find some way to
| mentally get yourself out of that box. It took me a long time to
| get to where I wanted to be mentally on that issue.
|
| Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes
| means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific
| problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go
| mentally and emotionally for most people.
| cbau wrote:
| > Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes
| means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific
| problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to
| go mentally and emotionally for most people.
|
| Can you give an example? I feel like there is a really key
| insight here but I'm having trouble parsing it.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Government intervention -- beyond the core government
| responsibilities of prosecuting fraud and enforcing contracts --
| is the principal source of harm in society. To take one of many
| examples: the SEC's centralized gatekeeping of securities
| offerings has resulted in the public being denied direct access
| to a growing proportion of investment returns:
|
| > _Note that the number of publicly listed companies has
| decreased slightly over the past twenty years to around 4,000
| while private equity-backed firms now number roughly 10,000_
|
| source: https://diversifiedtrust.com/blog/the-dominance-of-
| private-e...
|
| To summarize, the number of companies that members of the general
| public are permitted by the SEC to invest in slightly decreased
| over two decades, while the number that only wealthy accredited
| investors can invest in grew 50 fold -- going from a small
| fraction of the number of publicly listed companies to more than
| doubling their number.
|
| To take another example, local governments have been the primary
| force restricting housing supply expansion over the last 60
| years:
|
| > _" We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor
| across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises
| because high productivity cities like New York and the San
| Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new
| housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who
| have access to such high productivity. Using a spatial
| equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find
| that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent
| from 1964 to 2009."_
|
| source: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
|
| This has profound negative effects on society beyond the
| devastating harm to productivity cited above. Rising rent is the
| primary cause of capital's share of income growing at the expense
| of labor's, and not any of the other usual suspects (e.g. tax
| cuts, IP law, technological disruption, regulatory barriers to
| competition, corporate consolidation, etc) (see Figure 3):
|
| source: https://brookings.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognl...
|
| In automobiles, government regulations have for years prevented
| carmakers from adding adaptive headlights:
|
| > _US auto safety regulations enacted in 2022 were supposed to
| finally allow ADB headlight, something for which the auto
| industry and safety groups had long been asking for. But,
| according to automakers and safety advocates, the new rules make
| it difficult for automakers to add the feature. That means it
| will probably be years before ADB headlights are widely available
| in the US._
|
| source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-
| adap...
|
| In healthcare, regulatory restrictions are the primary cause of
| this disastrous trend:
|
| > _Here 's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the
| United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in
| keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare
| administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period._
|
| > _Yes, that 's 3,200 percent in 35 years, a statistic derived by
| Physicians for a National Health Program using data from the
| Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Health
| Statistics, and the United States Census Bureau's Current
| Population Survey._
|
| source: https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-
| manageme...
| margalabargala wrote:
| I don't think anyone is arguing that government is perfect, and
| you've shown some examples of it being imperfect for sure. In
| particular the restriction of housing by local governments is
| near and dear to my heart.
|
| But to call these things "the pricipal source of harm in our
| society"? If the sorts of things you listed are the greatest
| harms you've seen, I envy you. You've never seen a company dump
| pollution in a river near you, never been unable to breathe the
| air in your own home from local emissions, and must be too
| young to have been negatively affected by the housing crisis in
| 2008.
|
| By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused the
| most damage to societies are individual persons seeking power
| for themselves (Putin etc), and organizations seeking to enrich
| themselves (companies behaving in ways that should've
| regulated). Those are orders of magnitude beyond everything you
| listed.
| ETH_start wrote:
| The government not fulfilling its core responsibilities, of
| preventing pollution, assault, fraud and other private acts
| that victimize people, would allow for all sorts of private
| harms, it's true.
|
| But that is generally not a problem in the advanced
| economies. In those societies, the major problem is the
| government going beyond its core responsibilities and
| consequently causing most of the major problems facing
| society.
|
| This includes the 2008 financial crisis, which was entirely
| created by the government. The two largest actors in the
| residential mortgage market in the US are both government
| sponsored enterprises and collectively guarantee 50% of the
| market. In 1999 they moved into the subprime market in a big
| way:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-
| eases...
|
| The Federal Reserve did the rest, with its low interest rate
| policy that Krugman himself suggested be used to "create a
| housing bubble":
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-
| di...
|
| > _By amount of harm caused, the two things that have caused
| the most damage to societies are individual persons seeking
| power for themselves (Putin etc),_
|
| The harm caused by government is primarily due to individuals
| seeking power for themselves. The harm caused by the Russian
| state is due to Putin and company's personal ambitions. The
| same applies to the harm caused by public sector unions. It
| is due to self-serving people working in government. Bad
| actors are every bit as capable of exploiting society through
| government as they are through the private sector. And the
| damage from the former has very few limits due to the state's
| monopoly on violence.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| The advanced economies you so cherish require government
| oversight to get to where they are, otherwise you would
| have a country suffering from the tragedy of the commons a
| few orders of magnitude worse than anything seen today.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Those interventions I am referencing did not get the
| advanced economies to where they are. They are causing
| stagnation in housing, healthcare, etc.
|
| The US didn't become an advanced economy due to
| government restrictions -- what you euphemize as
| "oversight" -- on building houses, investing in companies
| and providing healthcare.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| Financial crisis was caused by:
|
| "widespread failures in financial regulation and
| supervision", including the Federal Reserve's failure to
| stem the tide of toxic assets
|
| "dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk
| management at many systemically important financial
| institutions" including too many financial firms acting
| recklessly and taking on too much risk.
|
| "a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments,
| and lack of transparency" by financial institutions and by
| households that put the financial system on a collision
| course with crisis.
|
| ill preparation and inconsistent action by government and
| key policy makers lacking a full understanding of the
| financial system they oversaw that "added to the
| uncertainty and panic".
|
| a "systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics" at all
| levels
|
| Note how government is only named in failing to _prevent
| and fix_ the issue, hence the root cause lying absolutely
| with corporate /private greed.
|
| Blaming government for not better regulating and preventing
| corporate/private greed is a weird criticism for
| government. It's like saying the government causes domestic
| violence by not putting a camera in everyone's house.
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_financ
| ial_cr...
| Ray20 wrote:
| For 20 years before the crisis, the American government
| promoted numerous policies to lower mortgage lending
| standards. The 2008 crisis is a natural price for such
| policies. "Corporate/private greed" - is an explanation
| aimed at children, I don't understand how a mentally
| capable person can seriously listen to this BS.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| > the American government promoted numerous policies to
| lower mortgage lending standards
|
| Again, where do you think these reforms come from,
| exactly? Grassroots movements? Where do you think the
| standards were before they were _lowered_ and why were
| they initially higher? Do you think these ideas are voted
| into effect by individual citizens well informed on the
| facts of how it would affect the economy? Or based on
| advice by experts who did the same?
|
| If corporations and private firms were so appalled by the
| government lowering the standards, they could've easily
| formed internal agreements to simply _not lower their own
| standards_ or lobbied against it. But they didn 't, did
| they?
|
| Again and again, companies exert enormous effort to
| create and find loopholes and weaknesses in law,
| abandoning all ethics in the process and causing massive
| problems for society. And somehow this is blamed on
| government? It's ridiculous.
|
| A cat and mouse game between legislation and reckless
| behavior is not a moral equilibrium where both sides are
| responsible for the outcome.
|
| Sometimes an explanation aimed at children is the right
| explanation, and all the adults are just shifting the
| blame and hiding behind the status quo.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > If corporations and private firms were so appalled by
| the government lowering the standards, they could've
| easily formed internal agreements to simply _not lower
| their own standards_
|
| Wouldn't that have been illegal on multiple grounds?
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| No, quite the opposite. It's almost always possible to be
| safer than what is lawfully required, instead its hard to
| be riskier than what is lawfully required.
|
| Refusing to sell mortgage backed securities based on
| subprime mortgages is unlikely to cause you to be
| prosecuted. In fact, I do it every day.
|
| The strawman that supposedly justifies taking the risk
| anyway (everybody else is doing it and we would lose to
| the competition) is coherent but equivalent to "Billy was
| also doing it, and he's getting all the girls" when you
| got caught smoking cigarettes at school.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >Again, where do you think these reforms come from,
| exactly?
|
| From the federal government. That's the whole point.
|
| >they could've easily formed internal agreements to
| simply not lower their own standards
|
| No.These policies were literally designed to make it
| illegal.
|
| >Again and again, companies exert enormous effort to
| create and find loopholes and weaknesses in law,
| abandoning all ethics in the process and causing massive
| problems for society. And somehow this is blamed on
| government?
|
| Yes.
|
| >Sometimes an explanation aimed at children is the right
| explanation
|
| But this is not the case
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| No, the financial crisis was created by private financial
| institutions securitizing sub-prime mortgages, without
| considering that failures can be highly correlated, which
| is what happened when the bubble burst and prices fell
| across the board at the same time.
|
| The main contribution of government to the crisis was that
| they didn't do anything to pop the bubble at an earlier
| time, when it would have caused less damage.
|
| I can't read the Krugman opinion article you linked because
| it's paywalled, but I found that Dean Baker wrote about
| claims like yours about exactly this article, and he titled
| his article "When Someone Says Paul Krugman Called for
| Greenspan to Create a Housing Bubble Back in 2002, They are
| Trying to Say That They are Either a Fool or a Liar".
|
| http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/when-
| some...
|
| > The same applies to the harm caused by public sector
| unions. It is due to self-serving people working in
| government. > And the damage from the former has very few
| limits due to the state's monopoly on violence.
|
| It depends... I don't see an issue with say teacher's
| unions, but police unions can be highly problematic and
| often work to protect police officers who deliberately
| broke the law from consequences.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents or into
| ideological battle, and especially not with pre-existing
| talking points.
|
| This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497752.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective
| change in large organizations when no amount of exhortation on
| the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out
| to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the
| ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a
| result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their
| own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change
| because of that. This is the Shirky Principle embodied in
| individuals, and small groups some times too.
| pzs wrote:
| And what was the rest of your response? How could you get
| effective change based on this understanding?
| lucisferre wrote:
| I think it is implied that they showed people what the change
| would look like and that it did not threaten their jobs.
| ctrw wrote:
| The easier solution to is remove them.
| error_logic wrote:
| It's always easier to assume that the fault lies with the
| listener rather than the speaker. That doesn't mean it's
| the most effective bias to hold.
| ctrw wrote:
| If the speaker can convince the listener they should find
| a job where they don't need to speak as part of the job
| description. Dishwashers and janitors give pletnly of job
| stability for people like those.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sure, and the best optimization of any bottleneck is to
| cut the feature, doing nothing is O(1) after all.
|
| As you can imagine, it's a solution that kills the
| product (or the company) in the long term.
| ctrw wrote:
| A company is like a rose bush, keeping it civilised means
| constant aggressive prunning.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Surely the bush itself cannot be responsible for its own
| pruning, that would be a conflict of interest. Anyway,
| it's always best to start pruning at the top.
| ctrw wrote:
| At the tips actually.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What if the top's singing "Feed Me, Seymour!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNHrzZUascE
| worldsayshi wrote:
| But the point would be to change their job so that they can
| produce more value? Otherwise nothing is won. It's
| supposedly hard to convince people that they will have a
| fit in the new organisation if they have been doing things
| the same way for ten years; or that there is magically
| other valuable things to do when their job becomes more
| efficient.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think my problem is that the people that have little
| enough imagination that they cannot see what their job
| might look like after are maybe better replaced?
| regularfry wrote:
| Fear cuts in before the rational mind can process, and it
| conditions subsequent actions - including the ability to
| visualise and appropriately weight potential positive
| outcomes. You need to apply energy to boot people out of
| the local minimum they've fallen into so that they can
| end up in the right place.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It doesn't really matter how well you can imagine your
| job afterwards, if the powers that be are more likely
| than not primarily imagining reduced labor costs.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Guess you'll have to illustrate the vision to them,
| probably using pictures. Like slides in a presentation.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| In the US where healthcare is tied to employment, the
| possibility of being replaced can literally be life or
| death.
|
| Especially with efficiency culture where labor is often
| the first to be cut in the name of profit.
|
| The fear is perfectly rational because managerial and C
| levels have made it clear that the person does not matter
| in the slightest. It would be foolish to outright trust
| management and is often how people are taken advantage
| of.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Here is a fun book for you, if you want: "Who Moved my
| Cheese?"[1] An HR person shared it with me in the dot.com
| era as things were exploding around us and I found it
| pretty informative. Basically it seems humans see "bad
| outcomes" as more likely than "good outcomes". It could
| be an evolved survival trait or it could just be a
| tendency to be pessimists, but even WHEN you explain how
| someone's job will exist/improve/change with the change,
| they will not actually fully believe you.
|
| For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, I tend to
| be pretty analytic about this sort of thing and until my
| role started including the need to help people understand
| change it had not occurred to me that fear would
| overwhelm some folks rationality. But once you can see
| it, it is really clear that that is where their head is
| and the anxiety is consuming them.
|
| [1] "Who Moved my Cheese" by Dr. Spencer Johnson --
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6AM4/
| cosmodisk wrote:
| This is very true across all businesses layers. I remember some
| years ago implementing a CRM system for a small training
| company. The result was great and they successfully use it even
| today, however at the time we needed one the junior
| administrators in some of the discovery sessions so we better
| understand the processes they do,etc. She was absolutely
| petrified. Even though the system was meant to make her life
| much easier,instead she only saw it as her replacement. It took
| quite a bit of effort to convince her that she's staying. I had
| similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some
| processes could be completely automated. Instead of
| excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced
| that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of
| excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.
|
| That seems like a perfectly rational response. I think the
| problem is that we think of process improvements in abstract,
| aggregate, terms; but on the ground they affect real
| individual people and they are often forgotten in the
| excitement of saving the company money.
| jakewins wrote:
| One of my first tasks at Equipmentshare was automating
| invoice generation, and we did a lot of that basically pair
| programming with one of the back office specialists that did
| that work manually - it was super, super fun, we made really
| good friends, and now, ten years or something later, she's a
| manager overseeing whatever systems replaced what we built.
|
| But it was driven by both sides being made clear from the
| beginning: nobody is losing any jobs here, the goal is to 10x
| the number of accounts we could do per back office person;
| their new jobs will be overseeing the software and dealing
| with edge cases.
|
| I'm not sure this would've been possible to do in such a way
| if the company wasn't rapidly growing though.
|
| Makes me wonder: what are things that are easier like this in
| orgs that aren't in growth phases?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That is a great example. And yes, if you're in an org where
| things are "tight" it gets much harder because people will
| assume the worst outcome is most likely. I've always been a
| fan of being honest with people, not everyone I've worked
| for or with shared that point of view. But being
| consistently honest helps when you're explaining things
| because it is more likely someone trust you enough to try
| the change you're proposing. Sometimes that means having
| the conversation of "Once we're done with this change, the
| thing you're currently doing won't need to be done. But
| since we want everyone to have a place after this change,
| these are the areas that will need help once the change is
| in place, and we're hoping you would help in one of them
| ..."
|
| I had an engineer tell me once that the reason they wrote
| really obtuse code was because "when the layoffs come I'll
| be the only one who understands it so I won't get laid
| off!" They were quite pleased with that strategy. I pointed
| out that they would also never get promoted if their
| manager couldn't get anyone else to learn their code. This
| was something they hadn't really considered.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > how I was able to get effective change in large organizations
|
| You only told us the problem I think. What is the solution?
| Tell the resisting people what their job will look like after?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes. In many situations that has resulted in me having
| additional conversations with the folks who are asking for
| the change to be clear about headcount goals.
|
| If they are trying to reduce staff (usually coded as
| 'increase operational efficiency') I want them to be up front
| about that in their messaging because I will be up front with
| that with the people who will feel that impact. It is often
| possible to actually increase efficiency without laying
| anyone off, to make sure that senior staff understands that
| you need to have a common way of evaluating efficiency
| (what's the baseline, what's the goal, what are the
| indicators, Etc.) because getting more done with the same
| people is often better than laying people off because of the
| latent effect of loosing institutional memory about things.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >exhortation
|
| I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as
| "extortion".
|
| It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun
| executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their
| behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and
| employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
|
| http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
|
| I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told
| everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
|
| After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I
| never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but
| me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
|
| So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with
| about how _badly_ Sun did changes. It really pissed me off
| that Sun wouldn 't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were
| allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate
| to Solaris."
|
| I would say I was not particularly successful at being a
| 'change agent' there.
| Intralexical wrote:
| > As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to
| their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the
| change because of that.
|
| It applies in some personal relationships too. Foster
| dependence, sabotage and discourage growth, maintain control.
| Yeah, ditch those people.
|
| For organizations, you'd think that explaining the benefits for
| everyone, and making sure that everyone is on-board and can see
| themselves thriving under the new conditions (...or isolating
| and removing those who can't), would be the obvious first step,
| though.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| "Ain't no money in the cure, the money's in the medicine. That's
| how you get paid."
|
| -Chris Rock
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7P4iFg048k
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Institutions "want" to survive first and grow sexond.
|
| Doing this is a very effective way of achieving that
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Something I have noticed along the same line is that the
| importance of actions within a company is mapped from the work
| roles people have, not from the work to be done.
| whalesalad wrote:
| tl;dr job security - is this not a widely understood concept?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Pharma is the prime example. A 'good' drug does not cure, it
| temporary mitigates and 'idealy' makes you even more susceptible,
| requiring recurrent future consumption.
|
| This requires no great conspiracy or planning. Time and the
| market will disappear companies that eradicate the disease they
| solved, while persisting and elevating those that stumbled upon
| the dependency route, and inside those companies teams pursuing
| platforms resulting in success of the latter kind will rise to
| prominence and at that stage the company will protect the goose
| that lays the golden eggs even if that means mothballing internal
| research that finds a real cure or aquiring outsiders to do the
| same.
|
| None of the pharma products raking in billions upon billions
| actually _solve_ a condition. All require perpetual consumption
| to at best stay in the mitigated state.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Looks at the complexity introduced by programmers over the last
| 20 years :-)
| andai wrote:
| Tangential but hilarious: back in the day, the British were
| buying fragments of dinosaur fossils from China. Unfortunately,
| they paid per fragment, so it was much more profitable to break
| the specimens into bits before sending them.
|
| There's also the case of a dolphin that was trained to collect
| plastic trash (they paid it in fish). The dolphin realized that
| it could get more fish by tearing the plastic into shreds.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| effin' dolphins, _just genius_.
|
| "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" --Douglas Adams
| tonis2 wrote:
| War is another thing, that's artificially created for that reason
| I think.
|
| New jobs are created, creating battle equipment, cause stuff
| always gets destroyed in war.
|
| Governments buy guns, choppers tanks, so those who produce them,
| are swimming in money now.
|
| Why would those institutions be interested in a time, where there
| is no major war ?
|
| I also feel like there's some kind of dynamic between US and
| Russia, like good cop and bad cop.
|
| Russia is an aggressive lunatic, and US sells guns, offers
| protection services for rest of the world from this crazy guy.
|
| But what would happen if Russia would be gone, or not aggressive
| anymore, who would buy the guns then ? World order would be
| totally different and US would lose customers.
| hcfman wrote:
| Well. What happened when Afghanistan went, might give a clue.
|
| Nice points.
| timeon wrote:
| When I saw the title I knew this topic would be good ground for
| conspiracy theories.
|
| Was there peaceful time before these two countries existed?
| cutemonster wrote:
| No, there's always been wars and fighting between men from
| different tribes.
|
| See my sibling comment.
| mlinhares wrote:
| We had that brief period after the end of of the cold war and
| the US just found other places to blow up in the middle east.
| The gun lobby will never stop. And, unfortunately, you might
| become a "peaceful nation" but if your neighbor decides to wage
| war against you, you either bow or buy more guns to fight as
| well.
|
| It's unfortunate but I don't think human beings will be able to
| coexist without wars for the foreseable future. There's just
| too much you can win by violence if the other side doesn't have
| the same firepower.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Humans need conflict to find meaning. No conflict, no story.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Defense contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have
| large incentives to promote conflict and intervention, but
| how much business do American gun manufacturers even do with
| militaries?
|
| I can't find numbers, but my intuition is that individuals
| consume over 90% of their output. There's too few militaries
| rich enough to equip soldiers with US-made guns, and too many
| US gun buyers.
|
| ChatGPT tells me there are about 20 million soldiers
| worldwide. That includes roughly two million Chinese, 1.4
| million Indians, a million Russians, 1.2 million North
| Koreans. Of those only India has a small deployment of
| American small arms from Sig. For the sake of argument, let's
| say each is issued a rifle and a sidearm, 40 million guns.
|
| It's difficult to estimate gun sales, but in 2020 there were
| 40 million background checks run for gun purchases in the
| United States. Each check could represent multiple sales.
|
| And arms purchased by the military can remain in service for
| decades.
| totetsu wrote:
| You're describing the military industrial complex?
| qbbbauiisj wrote:
| Don't forget somebody has to pay for all the reconstruction
| that follows.
|
| For the US at least, over the last 110 years or so, every war
| we've been in was initially strongly opposed by the populace.
| Most (modern) wars are the result of relatively small groups of
| elites working to create the conditions in which a peaceful
| populace will be ok with war.
|
| If Russia was gone, the US has a host of "enemies" to replace
| them with. Additionally, when you have such control over the
| world economy, it's very easy to create conditions that create
| new enemies.
| cutemonster wrote:
| It's not artificial. It's always been a trait of this animal
| species to get weapons, go kill the men in the other tribe,
| ra*e the women.
|
| Read about massacres by (some not all!) Russian soldiers, or
| about what Hamas did. Artificial? No, it's how things have
| always been.
|
| Combined with Machiavellian dictators, always hungry for more
| power (including m2 land) and you should see that what Putin
| and his soldiers do is (unfortunately) pretty natural and
| common across the ages.
|
| Seems to me you've bought a bunch of conspiracy theories and
| possibly Putin's manipulation when you apparently think the
| reasons lite elsewhere.
|
| Companies make money from war, but don't confuse that for that
| being the underlying reasons for wars.
| tonis2 wrote:
| Not taking my side with Russia or Hamas on this, by saying
| that US is actually "aggressor here".
|
| But the militaries in every country, probably won't throw
| away blood money, I think it matches pretty well with the
| topic of
|
| "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are
| the solution"
| theGnuMe wrote:
| We don't need war, we could just continually rebuild things.
| The reason for wars are mostly acquiring resources even if
| power is that only motivation.
| yonatron wrote:
| "We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of
| diplomacy is to prolong a crisis." -- Spock
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I've been struggling with a clients SaaS third-party integrations
| so much lately everything I read describing counterproductive
| outcome gets compared in my imagination.
|
| Marketing says they support your integration, but in practice
| there are gaps--somebody made a business decision about what was
| "good enough" and the company's investment in development stoped
| there. Anything that is not served by this limit becomes a
| "product improvement" request.
|
| Maybe this is a related principle I'm discovering now---same
| fracked up family of underperformance and unexpected outcomes.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Another example is the Hanoi's rat massacre.
|
| In 1902, Hanoi, Vietnam was plagued by rats. The French colonial
| government, in an attempt to control the rat population, offered
| a bounty for each rat killed. However, this plan backfired
| spectacularly. People started breeding rats to collect the
| bounty! And the rat population exploded. This led to a surge in
| the bubonic plague, which killed thousands of people.
|
| This event is a perfect example of the Shirky principle. Once a
| solution becomes institutionalized, it may perpetuate or even
| exacerbate the problem to secure its own existence.
|
| [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-
| massacre-190...
| navane wrote:
| But it wasn't the institute who started breeding. This sounds
| more like "paying your programmers by the line" who then
| flatten their for loops.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| That example is in the article.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Oh, I just skimmed the article to find an antidote and didn't
| know it was there!
| turboaspie wrote:
| That's an example of the Cobra effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
| fosk wrote:
| Look no further than the San Francisco homeless industrial
| complex for a modern version of this phenomenon.
| jokoon wrote:
| I have heard things about this, but I wish there could be a
| better documentary with proper accounting done to point out
| those numbers and why they are so high.
| fosk wrote:
| In a nutshell, San Francisco's ultra-liberal policies fight
| for the right of doing drugs and potentially dying on the
| streets, because they believe that actually helping these
| people would be akin to penalizing them because they are poor
| or jobless, or would be an infringement to their freedom.
| Helping them really means detaining them and/or forcing rehab
| for their benefit and the benefit of the community. Many of
| them suffer from mental illness, often induced by drug
| consumption, or that leads to drug consumption, but
| apparently detaining or forcing treatment is considered to be
| more cruel than letting them die, and so nobody does nothing
| with huge negative externalities in the community (besides
| the actual people involved and their families).
|
| In San Francisco there are open-air drug markets that nobody
| shuts down, where illegals are selling "death" 24/7. Of
| course San Francisco is a "Sanctuary City" so they don't
| collaborate with immigration services to deport the drug
| dealers, let alone shut down the drug trade.
|
| Of course keeping to feed their addictions with public money
| doesn't actually help them and they eventually die on the
| sidewalk by over dosing or other drug-related complications.
| Hundreds of them die every year, it's really despicable.
|
| San Francisco has a large network of no-profits that exists
| with the sole purpose of trying to "help" the homeless
| population by encouraging "clean" use of drugs (they
| distribute needles and other drug accessories), and they are
| the recipients of 1B+ of funds every year from city hall [1].
|
| Many of these no-profits are plagued with corruption [2], the
| Mayor itself and people in her circle have been
| investigated/arrested [3], but nobody does nothing because
| they are afraid to lose the ultra-liberal vote. Now that the
| tide is starting (very slowly) to shift, we are seeing
| politician's big talk to clean up the city, so far with poor
| results and no action.
|
| Of course with more than a billion dollars on the line every
| year, some people started to wonder if these no-profits
| really want to solve the problem (they don't) to keep the
| money flowing, and the pockets of corruption ongoing.
|
| An interesting book to read is San Fran-Sicko [4] which
| analyzes this phenomenal in ultra liberal cities. It's so bad
| that kids are accidentally ingesting Fentanyl at the park
| [5].
|
| Even being a moderate democrat acting rationally will earn
| you the label of "fascist" by the ultra progressives.
|
| Ultimately, this will be remembered as a very dark era in the
| history of San Francisco and everyone involved has blood on
| their hands, including the voters and supporters of these
| ultraliberal policies that lead to death and desperation.
|
| [1] https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-
| spending-11-billion-...
|
| [2] https://sfist.com/2024/02/23/scandal-plagued-sfpd-
| partner-no...
|
| [3] https://www.ktvu.com/news/former-sf-official-agrees-to-
| plea-...
|
| [4] San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
|
| [5] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-
| Francisco-au...
| jokoon wrote:
| what's awful is that often, people argue that closing loopholes
| and improving things are not good, they will use a fallacy of
| nature or say it's idealistic and impossible to fix because of
| human nature.
|
| cynicism is a drug for some people.
| tappio wrote:
| Institutions try to preserve themselves.
|
| Sometimes it leads to suggested outcome, sometimes they evolve
| into something else.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >"You cannot teach a man anything, when his livelihood depends on
| [you?] not understanding."
|
| >[failure to attribute, citation needed]
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Start
|
| -> The "Shirky Principle"
|
| -> Then it escalates to the "Godwin's Law"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
|
| -> Then ends with "Brandolini's Law"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
|
| -> Meanwhile, most of the problems in this thread are not
| nefarious at all, and can be explained by plain old fashioned bad
| middle management and the "Peter Principle".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
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