[HN Gopher] Soviet Shoe Factory Principle
___________________________________________________________________
Soviet Shoe Factory Principle
Author : dccoolgai
Score : 167 points
Date : 2025-01-29 20:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.c2.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.c2.com)
| georgeecollins wrote:
| What gets measured gets done.
|
| But, Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target it ceases to
| be a good measure."
| bell-cot wrote:
| > What gets measured gets done.
|
| Sometimes. Other times...just look at the US public education
| system.
| mattigames wrote:
| What gets measured _and_ the organization is a whole focused
| on improving such measure they mean.
| mycall wrote:
| That is interesting as the definition of a KPI is a metric with
| a target as a goal.
| black_13 wrote:
| The Theranos Startup Model is just the capitalist equivalent of
| SSFP: Instead of making useless shoes, they make useless software
| or fake hardware. Instead of meeting state quotas, they hit VC
| funding goals. Instead of the government propping them up,
| investors keep them afloat.
|
| 2. Theranos as a "Startup Shoe Factory"
|
| Theranos is the perfect capitalist version of the Soviet Shoe
| Factory:
|
| Soviet Model == Theranos Model (Capitalist Equivalent) Shoe
| factories produced small sizes to meet quotas. Theranos faked
| blood test results to meet investor expectations. Factories cut
| material costs and quality to meet output goals. Theranos lied
| about its technology because real innovation was too slow.
| Central planners rewarded metrics over reality. VC investors
| rewarded hype over real products. Factories looked productive on
| paper, even if they made useless products. Theranos looked like a
| billion-dollar startup, even though it had no working product.
| The economy was distorted by planned quotas. The startup world is
| distorted by fake valuations and exit-driven funding.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Nah. Theranos was a fraud that survived for 15 years (fewer if
| you count their active period). "Capitalism" killed it off when
| the fraud became public and investors stopped giving them
| money.
|
| Capitalism isn't magic, humans can still be fooled. The nice
| thing about capitalism is that I personally didn't have to give
| them money. Caveat investor.
| mempko wrote:
| You do know the Soviet System also had money and had the
| equivalent of 'investors' giving said money to institutions.
| Money and markets is not what makes capitalsim unique. Hint,
| it's in the name.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They weren't operating as a fraud in the beginning. I'd give
| the benefit of the doubt that Holmes was just naive about the
| technical issues given her inexperience. They switched to
| fraud to buy time for the intended product.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Is it acceptable business practice (aka not fraud) to take
| money from people when an even laymen in the field can
| detect the level of lies. Rational human beings don't like
| being tricked, she was a magician of medicinal claims and
| knew the showmanship requirements.
|
| Extraordinary claims require some kind of data and facts to
| back the claim, which there was none. There is no evidence
| to believe they could develop this technology, optimism
| yes, but evidence no. It was fraud from the start.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to
| me.
| watwut wrote:
| Hierarchical structure with basically powerless bottom, strong
| blindly believed unaccountable top that is primary rewarded for
| looking certain way.
|
| There is going ro be a sociological rule that this thing always
| leads to similar dysfunctions.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Totally. I visited East Germany a few times when the wall was
| still up. The communist planned economies were a lot like
| corporations: 5 year plans, lots of internal propaganda, power
| struggles in leadership, total distortion of reality,
| sociopaths making their way to the top, no acceptance of
| dissent, metrics that make no sense.
| gyomu wrote:
| The nice thing about corporations is that they have to be
| able to make payroll at the end of every month, otherwise
| they go bankrupt relatively quickly.
|
| Things can get much uglier and be much more protracted for
| governments.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Unless they get bailed out by the government, or get tax
| breaks, or do mass layoffs. All of which seem to happen a
| lot.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| With you on the bailing out and tax breaks. Mass layoffs
| though? That's an appropriate response to being
| uncompetitive.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I will say that perhaps Lina Khan was on the right track
| to benefit tech and the US economy overall by breaking up
| sclerotic corporate behemoths
| rqtwteye wrote:
| That's over for the next years.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's 2025: Many corporations are more funded by investors
| and lenders, rather than by income from servicing customers
| on the free market. The investor and lender money is
| conjured up out of thin air by a Central Committee, oops I
| mean by capitalistic bankers.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Except we have thousands of competing Soviets keeping the
| system healthy.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Do you consider the current state of things healthy? By what
| metric?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It produces steady progress on most any important metric.
|
| Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly
| superior.
|
| Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws,
| but that's how the real world is.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| > It produces steady progress on most any important
| metric
|
| Some metrics I care about are income equality,
| homelessness, school shootings, level of education. What
| are the metrics you care about that you see improving?
|
| > Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly
| superior.
|
| I'm sure it's also superior to the feudal system and
| hunter-gatherer systems. The Soviet system has been gone
| for three decades, I don't see why we would care to
| compare the current system to the effects of a system
| operating in a vastly different economic and political
| reality, more than 30 years ago.
|
| > Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many
| flaws, but that's how the real world is.
|
| Well sure, that's a truism. That doesn't preclude the
| existence of realistic more effective or healthy systems.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure. But I was commenting on this:
|
| > _The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture
| a lot to me._
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Alrighty. I'm still really keen to find out what metrics
| you personally care about.
| bagful wrote:
| As an American, I would not call our system healthy from a
| practical sense; certainly not for society, if this past
| decade of mounting instability, distrust, and profiteering is
| any indication.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I agree, but it's still better, and there's an unusually
| clear-cut natural experiment to prove it: East and West
| Germany after WWII.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Or South Korea vs. North Korea
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Interestingly, North Korea had a higher GDP per capita
| than South Korea until the 1970s.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's easy to get discouraged by The News, which will always
| focus on things going badly. That generates clicks, but
| it's not a neutral sample of larger trends.
|
| The last decade has increased US GDP per person by more
| than 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation), and launched many
| innovations making live better and safer.
| wslh wrote:
| > The last decade has increased US GDP per person by more
| than 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation), and launched many
| innovations making live better and safer.
|
| I think what you're referring to is the calculation of US
| GDP per capita, which is an average. However, this
| doesn't mean that the typical individual has experienced
| a 50% improvement in their income or well-being. The
| distribution of economic gains matters, and GDP per
| capita doesn't capture that. This is a significant
| difference.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In theory, you could be right. In practice, it's hard to
| make the math come out that way.
|
| Basic facts: GDP is how much value a country produces. It
| is also close to how much it consumes, aside from some
| marginal adjustments, which I doubt have changed much
| over this decade.
|
| If income distribution had changed drastically, it could
| still be true that average people didn't see any of that
| 50% increase, but I don't see any signs of change on such
| dramatic scale.
|
| So yes, I do think the typical individual has experienced
| a 50% improvement in their income.
|
| For "well being", the change is probably much smaller.
| Happiness doesn't come from money...
| XorNot wrote:
| I've annoyed so many people by pointing this out: that anyone
| who says "free market solves all problems" misses that within
| that market we just embed thousands of tiny centrally planned
| economies, and there have been in fact numerous experiments
| trying to "free market within the free market" that lead to
| high profile disasters (i.e. Sears).
| quesera wrote:
| I would never say that "free markets solve all problems".
|
| But I would strongly argue that the failure of Sears is an
| example of free market _success_.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Sears failed because a venture capitalist realized they
| could buy Kmart, use it as collateral to buy Sears and
| drive both into bankruptcy and sell off after plundering
| all the assets for the shareholders.
|
| How is that a success of the free market? 2 old companies
| destroyed because someone got enough money to run them into
| the ground and make a killing doing it?
|
| Are MLMs also a free market success story?
| sema4hacker wrote:
| You made me read the history of Sears on Wikipedia and
| the story seems much more complicated than you describe.
| It's not very clear who took a loss and by how much, and
| who gained and by how much, but overall it seemed to be
| the usual story of distracted mismanagement unable to
| keep up with changing competition and going into a death
| spiral. In other words, just another slow inevitable
| boom-bust-style cycle that's constantly happening
| everywhere around us.
| jordanb wrote:
| No I worked at Sears and it was driven into the ground by
| an idiot PE fund manager and his arrogant consultants.
|
| Sears had one big problem when Eddie took over: it was
| out of step with the then-current retail format (big box
| stores). Its stores were heavily situated in enclosed
| malls that were out of fashion. The solution was
| straightforward if expensive: reformat the business
| (Sears had already done this twice before).
|
| But then Eddie rolled into town with his genius
| consultants and a galaxy brained idea: Kmart has stand-
| alone stores that kinda look like big box if you squint.
| So let's just merge the brands together! Then Sears ends
| up in big boxes without expensive reformatting!
|
| The fact that the brands were completely incompatible was
| pointed out by everyone who knew anything, but those
| weren't people in Eddie's inner circle so their opinions
| meant nothing.
|
| By the way I don't think ESL Investments ended up making
| money on Sears. They stripped the company of assets yes,
| but most of those assets were distressed by the collapse
| of Sears. Like a lot of real estate was in struggling
| malls that had Sears as the anchor tenant. ISTR some of
| ESL's LPs suing Eddie.
|
| Eddie made money the way all PE fund managers make money
| even when everyone else involved loses their shirt: by
| charging fees.
| quesera wrote:
| I did not work at Sears, but from the retail customer
| side, Sears was dead for a decade or two before it died.
| You might be able to imagine pivots that could have
| brought the company back to life, but none of them were
| guaranteed, or, from my perspective, even remotely
| likely.
|
| Sears was dead dead. Too ossified, too big, too out of
| touch. Just like Kmart. And Radio Shack. And Circuit
| City. JC Penney. The stores were dead, the products were
| marginal or worse, the prices were out of line. Retail
| staff was sparse and generally not great. The house
| brands were eroded. The national brands were overpriced.
| Sears had no reason to live. And it died, whatever the
| corporate machinations were to attempt to extract every
| last bit of residual/perceived value beforehand.
|
| The PE machinations were not a success, but the ultimate
| death was the correct and expected result for a free
| market.
|
| It was sad to lose a brand and a community fixture like
| that. But it was gone for so long before it finally went
| away that there was zero surprise, except the duration of
| the death throes. IMHO of course!
| quesera wrote:
| PE machinations aside, Sears and Kmart were dead for a
| long time before they closed the last stores.
|
| Their failures are _free market_ successes, because the
| free market is all about vendors serving customers.
| Vendors that fail to do so, are expected to die. Sears
| grossly failed to do so, for a decade or two before being
| financially zeroed.
|
| If there's any argument for market failure in the Sears
| case, it is that the death took soo long to be finalized.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The issue here is that both Sears and Kmart were large
| players in a tight market with low competition. Both of
| their demises ultimately have allowed further
| consolidation of the market into fewer players.
|
| The fewer the players on the market, the more likely
| collusion and monopolistic behaviors start to form.
|
| But I also do not buy your premise that both companies
| were "dead companies lurching forward." Both companies
| had GOBS of assets that they could have liquidated and
| used to restructure into success. Those gobs of assets
| WERE liquidated but instead of being used to serve
| vendors or customers, they were used to enrich the
| shareholders.
|
| The failure here is that this behavior of pillaging a
| company to it's detriment is something that could happen
| to any business. It wasn't done out of stupidity or
| ignorance, it was a malicious act of greed.
|
| The problem I have with the free market hypothesis is it
| works only when there are many players on the market.
| However, entry into the market is by it's nature
| expensive and the economies of scale practically
| guarantee monopolistic end-states.
|
| Consider, for example, the current state of the
| semiconductor industry. If Intel fails, would that be a
| free market success story? I would argue no because the
| market, particularly around fabrication, is already
| hugely concentrated into very few key players. We are not
| going to see a new cutting edge fab company (barring
| trust busting).
|
| This consolidation action is happening up and down the
| market in everything from food to healthcare. We are
| actively seeing the death of small time farmers because
| of consolidation in meatpacking, groceries, and milling.
| Because a big mill doesn't want to deal with some 100acre
| farmer, they are actively locking them out of
| participation. And because a company like Nestle doesn't
| want to deal with 100 mills, smaller mills are being
| locked out of the market. These actions are all free
| market.
|
| I call the death a Sears a failure in the market because
| it kills off competition. The only time it could be a
| market success story is if we had an actively competitive
| market with a large number of players.
| quesera wrote:
| I agree with the bulk of this!
|
| But I maintain that the failure of _Sears, Roebuck & Co._
| was the free market doing exactly what it's supposed to
| do.
|
| Market distortions due to consolidation are a huge
| problem. But Sears was not fit for survival and there's
| no reason to believe that cash-for-assets could have been
| turned into a new viable business of any kind.
|
| There was nothing to salvage out of the business model,
| vendor relationships, retail locations, consumer brand
| equity. Nothing. They abused their brand (and their
| Craftsman etc house brands!) for years. Some macro events
| and shifts were clearly out of their control and might
| have been insurmountable anyway, but the brand damage was
| entirely self-inflicted, and ultimately the only thing
| that might have saved the rest.
|
| There was nothing left except lease obligations, slow-
| moving inventory, and nostalgia.
|
| But enough about Sears. Your point, IIMBSB, is that the
| free market doesn't necessarily produce the most viable
| ecosystem. No argument there -- the natural end state of
| a free market appears to be 85+% monopoly or duopoly, and
| this is harmful to consumers and the economy!
| cogman10 wrote:
| > There was nothing to salvage out of the business model,
| vendor relationships, retail locations, consumer brand
| equity. Nothing.
|
| I have to somewhat disagree here.
|
| Amazon purchased wholefoods in 2017 to bootstrap their
| own distribution system. One year after sears went under.
|
| My point is that sears had room and time for years to
| pivot their business model into something more
| profitable. They had the land, warehouses, and
| distribution system bigger than what amazon paid $13
| billion to acquire. Heck, for fairly little money, sears
| could have entered or expanded into the shipping industry
| to compete with FedEx and UPS. They could have partnered
| with Amazon to handle their shipping.
|
| The free market failure here is that the management team
| did nothing wrong by shareholders which in turn killed
| the company. They didn't die because they were being out
| competed, they died because management valued the next
| quarters profits over the long term success of the
| business.
|
| The fact that the free market doesn't really care if a
| business does that is where it fails. The negative social
| impacts of large companies failing is tremendous and
| another problem with the free market. While business
| failing is value neutral for the free market, it's
| economically and socially a disaster.
| quesera wrote:
| Interesting point, but I'll push back a bit.
|
| Whole Foods was a standalone viable business with high-
| quality retail locations. Sears was neither.
|
| But I'll certainly grant you that with the resources, a
| fantastic new model, and lots of luck, there were better
| outcomes possible. Not sure about likely.
|
| As for the free market failure, I _do_ think Sears was
| out competed, by a wide margin. By Target, Best Buy,
| Amazon, Home Depot, etc. New (ish), smarter, more nimble
| retail without the lethargy that had been inside Sears
| since the 1990s at least.
|
| I agree that there's something wrong with the fact that
| management can do right by shareholders but
| simultaneously wrong by consumers. I don't know if I'd
| call that a free market failure though. Some kind of
| corporate governance discontinuity perhaps?
|
| But the "market" as I think of it is strictly the retail
| consumer market, so when Sears failed the consumers, they
| were removing themselves from the retail gene pool. It
| would not be healthy for the market for them to continue
| operating.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > I don't know if I'd call that a free market failure
| though. Some kind of corporate governance discontinuity
| perhaps?
|
| How could this corporate governance discontinuity be
| resolved?
|
| The reason I call it a failure of the free market is
| because the corporate governance model is something born
| from free market fundamentals, not from any sort of
| government regulation.
|
| IMO, the fix to such problems is government intervention.
| In the case of consumer retail, I think governments
| should be MUCH more aggressive using anti-trust to break
| up large companies to actually start competition.
| quesera wrote:
| I'm with you 100% here.
|
| Unbridled capitalism, especially on the scale possible
| today, is anti-competitive and consumer-hostile. And
| economically and socially destructive in the medium-to-
| long term.
|
| But still, given what it was, Sears had to die. Or be
| reborn. Death is more common! So the death was not the
| market failure. That was proper and expected. The state
| of the world left behind might well highlight a
| weakness/failure of the free market model. We may be in
| full agreement, just semantically misaligned.
|
| I am not confident I have a good solution. All models
| impose some arbitrary metrics that are probably wrong
| (even if they are an improvement!).
|
| But I agree that some form of anti-trust regulation and
| enforcement is the only possible structure for it.
|
| My deepest relevant experience is in broadcast media, and
| I strongly believe that relaxed ownership restrictions
| and the outright repeal of the Fairness Doctrine were
| economic and social mistakes that we are paying for
| dramatically today. The issues are complicated, but the
| results are _bad_.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot
| to me.
|
| The problems of Soviet culture are really the problems of
| bureaucracy.
|
| The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is
| through competition. If your employer sucks, go work somewhere
| else. If their product sucks, buy it from someone else. This
| works pretty damn well as long as the company doesn't find a
| way to insulate itself from competition. But if that happens,
| it stops working, and then you're back to an unaccountable
| bureaucracy and all that entails.
|
| This has been happening increasingly in the US because
| corporations capture the government, and then they do two
| things: Weaken antitrust laws/enforcement, and "strengthen"
| _other_ laws that raise market barriers to entry which are then
| sold to the public under the subterfuge of some kind of safety
| /security/labor protection/etc., because the public rightly
| wouldn't accept their true motivation as a valid justification.
|
| This also tends to feed on itself. Some industry captures the
| government, constrains competition, becomes abusive so people
| start demanding something be done about it. Instead of
| addressing the root of the problem (regulatory capture and
| insufficient competition), the incumbents propose a rule to
| reduce competition even more. So you get housing construction
| constrained by zoning, but instead of addressing that, the
| proposal is something like rent control, which disincentivizes
| construction even more and then long-term rents get even
| higher.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is
| through competition
|
| "Free market competition" is an ideological construct.
| Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go
| work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at
| all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in
| multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where
| it operates, impact of its products and services on society
| etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something
| else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding
| another 'stall' in the 'market'.
|
| > This has been happening increasingly in the US because
| corporations capture the government,
|
| The government exists to serve the interests of property
| owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social
| order and protecting their minority control of economic
| forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and
| services, from the rest of surrounding society.
|
| Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that
| common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep
| the system somewhat stable and functional.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't
| "go work somewhere else"
|
| If Company A sucks and there are many other companies that
| don't, every single employee at Company A could quit and go
| work somewhere else, and then Company A can go out of
| business. That's a completely reasonable outcome for a
| company that sucks, and is what happens when there is
| actually competition.
|
| > and we certainly can't not-work at all.
|
| No known system satisfies the criterion that we all
| collectively don't have to work.
|
| > Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple
| ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it
| operates, impact of its products and services on society
| etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something
| else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding
| another 'stall' in the 'market'.
|
| These are not the "Soviet Shoe Factory" issue, they're
| externalities. If the company tries to make only baby shoes
| to save material but people want adult shoes and
| competition exists then people buy adult shoes from
| somewhere else and the shoe factory making unnecessary baby
| shoes goes out of business or doesn't have the perverse
| incentive to do that to begin with.
|
| If the company is dumping toxins in the river, that isn't
| one of the problems that competition is _expected_ to fix,
| in the same way that it isn 't expected to prevent thefts
| or murders. And it's also not a problem the Soviets fixed
| either.
| roenxi wrote:
| > No known system satisfies the criterion that we all
| collectively don't have to work.
|
| The current system nearly satisfies that criterion. We'd
| just have to accept 1700s average living standards.
|
| Turns out in practice if you give people a day of free
| time they spend it bettering their lives by working
| instead of being happy with nothing.
| ozim wrote:
| Parent mentioned that not everyone can just swap.
|
| Like if company A is on NY but 20 competitors are better
| and all but only have the work available in L.A.
|
| You are not going to just quit and move.
|
| Hence efficient market might be so on scale that is not
| available for that employee.
| ema wrote:
| It's a question of degree yes people aren't going to move
| across the country for a slightly better job but if the
| difference becomes big enough they do.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Not only that, for it to even happen you'd need one of
| two things:
|
| 1) You have a very specific skillset which has such a
| high market value that you're not willing to change
| roles, but is esoteric enough that there are no other
| local employers for that skillset even though there are
| plenty of local employers in general. This is obviously
| not the common case, and is generally not a huge problem,
| because the "victim" is someone who can still command
| high wages and extract concessions from the monopolist
| because they still have the ability to switch roles and
| get a job doing something else for someone else.
|
| 2) There are not plenty of local employers in general.
| This is the aforementioned problem case where the
| incumbents capture the government and use it to inhibit
| competition, which must be prevented.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > "Free market competition" is an ideological construct.
|
| Sure, but is competition an ideological construct? Even the
| Soviet Union had competition between companies and
| institutions - without any free market.
| vkou wrote:
| It had a market where consumers could choose to spend
| their money on _particular_ brands of consumer goods,
| with varying degrees of quality.
|
| There weren't a lot of different brands, but there were
| some, and they were in direct competition with eachother.
| The bigger issue was overall low productivity and high
| logistics friction, which leads to shortages (and a MIC
| that sucked up half the country's productive output
| didn't help matters).
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's so funny that we still have to debate these things
| when Lenin wrote "Imperialism: The Highest Form of
| Capitalism" over a hundred years ago about a society that
| was far less concentrated than what we have today.
| Capitalism trends towards consolidation with the exception
| of a "new market" environment where it appears more in its
| Adam Smith sense. This rapidly melts away into oligopoly as
| weaker firms lose to stronger firms. Eventually, the
| domestic market is not enough to sustain growth and firms
| induce politicians to carve up the world for them to divide
| the world into intentionally underdeveloped areas of cheap
| production and areas of consumption.
|
| https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The trouble with this critique is that it takes as a
| premise that you have a government which is enforcing at
| least contracts and property rights, but not antitrust
| laws. Without the former you can't have a monopoly
| because people would just take the monopolist's stuff
| (though of course then you have different problems). With
| the latter, contracts for anti-competitive mergers are
| illegal and consolidated markets get broken up.
|
| The general problem, which is not limited to capitalism,
| is that organizations try to consolidate power. So you
| need something to inhibit that. What this is supposed to
| look like is a limited government that can enforce
| antitrust laws against other organizations, but is
| constrained from _itself_ becoming an organization that
| consolidates power. This requires strong checks and
| balances, and they clearly need to be more robust than
| the ones currently in place. Not least because several of
| the ones originally in place under the US constitution
| have been removed through amendments (e.g. 17th) or
| creative interpretation (e.g. _Wickard_ ).
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Free market competition" is an ideological construct.
| Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go
| work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at
| all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in
| multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting
| where it operates, impact of its products and services on
| society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work
| something else". What's necessary is improving things, not
| finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
|
| In a natural world, "collectively" is easier than
| "personally". You might have some reason that you
| absolutely can't quit, but there will be other employees
| who don't have that handicap. Their pressure will be enough
| to keep the employer reasonable for you too, since there
| are probably more of them than there are people who can't
| leave like you. But even if no one can realistically go get
| another job, that's not the true pressure... the true
| pressure is that they're so awful you'd all just quit
| despite how awful that will be for you, despite your
| inability to get a new job.
|
| In a natural world with well-cultivated libertarian
| tendencies, the threshold for "fuck you I'd rather starve
| than put up with your bullshit" is pretty low. This is why
| companies (and government) are so eager to do everything
| they can to undermine libertarian tendencies... it makes
| everyone more vulnerable. Not that anyone understands this.
| The modern impulse when abuse takes place is to try to goad
| mommy government into coming to the rescue, which further
| erodes libertarian attitudes. They need you vulnerable,
| they need it to be such that if you have problems only they
| can solve them. If they can contrive that to be the case,
| they get to decide whether or not they want the problems
| solved at all.
| marsovo wrote:
| Overall I agree: I think a big root cause of current woes is
| that companies have grown too large and competition is
| broken. Not only that, but larger entities have more leverage
| to tilt the playing field and become even more
| anticompetitive.
|
| There is another issue: collusion. If every company requires
| binding arbitration in their contracts (of adhesion), do I
| just opt out of having a cell phone, internet service, etc.?
|
| See also: RealPage's rent-fixing.
| trhway wrote:
| >The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot
| to me.
|
| that is the Marx's law from Das Kapital which in modern
| language can be stated as "the larger the entropy of the
| ownership distribution - the more socialism inside". The
| smallest entropy - one owner, classic capitalism, the largest -
| everything belongs to everybody, ie. government property, the
| socialist state, etc. The large publicly owned corporations are
| more toward the large entropy values, thus a lot of socialism
| inside.
| mempko wrote:
| David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" does a great job going
| deep into why this is.
| prewett wrote:
| Communism is functionally societal-level Taylorism, which I
| believe is the dominant corporate management style.
|
| Hayek said that the reason Communist economies failed was that
| the center could not get accurate information on what the
| leaves needed/wanted, so there was always a supply/demand
| problem. Market economies use prices to automatically convey
| this information. It seems like as companies get towards
| nation-state sizes they tend to have a similar problem:
| management is completely out of touch with what the people
| doing the work need (and/or out of touch with the customer
| base, market situation, etc.).
|
| Fortunately, leaving companies is a lot easier than Communist
| countries. Also disagreement is a lot less dangerous, and the
| consequences of being on the receiving end of political
| backstabbing are a lot more tolerable. Maybe most importantly,
| corporations don't tend to be founded on a lie like Communist
| governments (see the Charter 77 essay [1]).
|
| [1] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-
| powerless-v...
| tombert wrote:
| A similar thing I've noticed in the last ~6 years is in regards
| to smartphones, and in particular their cameras.
|
| Android is pretty standardized these days, and even a fairly
| cheap Android phone will probably do most smartphone things (make
| calls, send texts, watch YouTube, etc.) reasonably well, but a
| corner that seems to be cut in cheaper phones is almost always
| the camera, and that kind of makes sense.
|
| If you're buying your phone online, you can look at the more-or-
| less objective specs of the phone like how much RAM it has, or
| how fast the CPU is, but you can't really tell how the photos
| will look [1], and as such it's easy to put a cheaper sensor or
| lens in there, especially in the cheaper phones which (I think)
| have lower margins.
|
| [1] Even if the listing has sample pictures, you don't know how
| representative they are of the actual experience; they could just
| have taken the sample photos with ideal lighting, with a tripod,
| in a controlled studio, for example.
| gyomu wrote:
| Yes, and those crappy sensors will still be 200 megapixels
| (which will be used as an advertising point), as most people
| don't realize that a fantastic 24 MP camera is better than a
| crummy 200 MP one.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, definitely; megapixels are a more or less objective
| metric, but they're only _one_ factor to image quality, and
| nowadays not even really the most important one.
| toast0 wrote:
| Pixel count is objective, but never meant much. Sensor area
| is much more important, but doesn't make for a sexy number,
| and it often doesn't make it into the spec sheet.
| patrakov wrote:
| Worse; the crappy sensors will be only 8 megapixels or less,
| but the camera software will inflate that with AI to 200
| megapixels.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| This has been happening for ages in the trail camera
| market.
| somat wrote:
| True, the lens is usually more important than the sensor,
| remember that the hubble space telescope is only one
| megapixel.
| malfist wrote:
| Those 200 MP sensors are 200 MP in name only. They're so
| small the individual pixels are smaller than the wavelength
| of light they're trying to capture. That's why when you use
| them, the max image size is usually around 50MP because
| binning is required physically
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I'm happy that the new metric is sensor size. A bit of an
| upgrade in metric that mildly correlates to picture quality.
| nayuki wrote:
| That's good as long as they quote the sensor size in
| millimetres for the width and height (e.g. 36 mm x 24 mm
| "full frame").
|
| What is atrocious is the inch format - e.g. 1 inch sensor,
| 1/2.2" (decimal and fraction!). It somehow refers to the
| diagonal length of the vacuum tube and not even the active
| image area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_form
| at#Table_of_s... ,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Size
| krab wrote:
| I realized exactly this after some frustration with a few
| phones. I found GSMArena that has extensive reviews including
| sample standardized photos.
| layer8 wrote:
| GSMArena is such a valuable resource.
| Tade0 wrote:
| And with a history at that. They have reviews dating back
| to 2004. It's fun to check out what were the biggest
| concerns throughout the years.
| gukov wrote:
| The most blatant example of this is Samsung phones artificially
| replacing photos of the Moon with a high-resolution composite.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Pixel 7 pro phones latest camera was the biggest disappointment
| for me. I usually have been happy with pixels but it has
| trouble focusing on infinity, and the image stabilization on
| the 5x zoom lens is so jumpy it's worse than nothing at all. I
| thought about trying to get it warrantied or something but was
| already sick of spending hours at the Verizon store trying to
| get my trade-in credit.
|
| And to get the full advertised resolution (which you have to
| enable in the photo toggles) you have to tolerate a delayed
| shutter button and a "long exposure" for it to do the
| computational photography or something. So it's useless to
| expect full resolution with kids or action.
| tombert wrote:
| The Pixel 7 Pro was the worst phone I've ever owned. The
| battery was terrible, the camera was terrible, sometimes it
| just wouldn't boot up, everything about it was awful. I swore
| an oath that I wouldn't buy a Pixel phone ever again.
|
| I've heard that the Pixel 8 was better, but I'll never know.
| samplatt wrote:
| Fellow P 7 Pro owner here: yeah the 8 Pro is better. Still
| wish I'd got something else, but at least audio through the
| USB-C port doesn't have a buzzing caused by the clock on
| the chip.
| tombert wrote:
| I just went back to iPhone for the time being. When this
| phone breaks I might give Android another try but it will
| definitely not be a Pixel.
| qingcharles wrote:
| The camera (and/or the camera software) was awful. There was
| no way to get a good photo out of it, even with 3rd party
| apps. And so many cameras now won't allow 3rd party apps
| access to the full data either, so you are stuck with the
| junk-ridden garbage that comes with the phone.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| It is easy for programmer-types to think that pixel counts are
| objective, simply because familiarity with units, or perhaps
| because pixels are discrete countable physical locations on a
| sensor.
|
| An optical system composed of multiple lenses doesn't obviously
| correspond to a certain resolution, but the confusion is merely
| the literature taken at hand: instead of obsessively comparing
| smartphone advertisements, it is physically possible to read
| books and course notes on physics, optics, ...
|
| There is nothing impossible about publishing spatial frequency
| responses etc, or legally mandating such information to be
| present on any advertising materials as soon as the MPixel
| counts are advertised.
| nayuki wrote:
| > pixel counts are objective
|
| Pixel counts _are_ objective. But the problem is that while
| the pixel count sets the upper bound on the image quality,
| all cameras don 't achieve that upper bound - especially due
| to the Bayer color filter matrix.
|
| To hit this point home, try taking a photo on a smartphone
| with a 12-megapixel camera. Now take the same photo on a
| professional camera, say the Canon EOS R5 with an expensive
| L-series prime lens. The R5 photo has 45 megapixels, so go
| and downsample that to 12 megapixels to match the phone
| photo. The pro camera photo will look much better than the
| phone photo, thus demonstrating that the phone camera is not
| maximizing the limits of the 12 MP picture format.
|
| (Also, to make the comparison fairer, take a landscape photo
| of faraway scenery and buildings so that there are no effects
| of focus blur from having a large lens aperture. Everything
| in the photos should be in sharp focus.)
| mcculley wrote:
| Is there any evidence for this story?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Are you asking if there is evidence that the described story
| was told in Soviet Russia, or are you asking if there is
| evidence that the obvious parable is an actual factual account?
| mcculley wrote:
| I would like to know if there was a shoe factory in Soviet
| Russia that produced superfluous shoes for children during a
| shortage of shoes for adults. I am familiar with the problems
| of centrally planned economies and with the Soviet economies
| in general. I am wondering if there was an actual instance of
| this happening with shoes.
|
| These memes tend to propagate and mutate through the minds of
| those who are keen to believe things without evidence.
| krisoft wrote:
| " In Soviet Russia there is a story"
|
| This is explicitly labeled as a story. It is a parable used
| to illustrate a point. Do you also demand evidence of the
| boy who cried wolf? Or little red riding hood who strayed
| from the safe path? These are the same kind of things.
|
| I would understand your question maybe if the article would
| purport the existence of the shoe factory. But it doesn't.
| And that is not the point of it.
| mcculley wrote:
| I am not demanding anything. I am very curious for real
| stories from the Soviet Union relevant to economics.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Here's a whole youtube channel for you:
| https://www.youtube.com/@UshankaShow
| tdeck wrote:
| Half the comments here are talking about this story as if
| it's a piece of factual evidence that proves an
| ideological point, so it seems valuable to ask if the
| story actually happened.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > These memes tend to propagate and mutate through the
| minds of those who are keen to believe things without
| evidence.
|
| There is definitely evidence of shoe shortages in the
| Soviet Union - enough that it's a running joke.
|
| A quick Google turned up this post:
|
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/09/soviet_shoes.html
|
| which cites this book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Dismantling-Utopia-Information-
| Ended-...
|
| I'm not sure if there will be better evidence, given the
| USSR's propensity to pad their stats.
| mcculley wrote:
| This is great. Thanks.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I don't know about Soviet manufacturing but there are a couple
| pics going around of people claiming their pair of shoes were
| made in two different countries:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/ho1tj8/my_left_an...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/6iewhc/t...
|
| Commenters claim it is done so that people in the factories
| won't steal shoes since they can't get both left and right
| shoes.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| The first link has two different color insoles present, they
| might be different productions runs from different factories.
|
| The second link has labels stuck to the insole but they look
| like off a hand held label printer, not the mandated COO
| label so I am a little skeptical.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Measurement Dysfunction is a better name for this, tho less
| colorful and insulting
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_dysfunction
| tlb wrote:
| Turns out that $ profit is one of the least gameable metrics.
|
| Not completely ungameable, but for a consumer product
| manufacturer in a free market it's the least gameable metric
| invented so far.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 1. Oh, you'd be surprised.
|
| 2. "Free" and "market" are fundamentally contradictory terms.
| But that point is irrespective of the difficulty of quantifying
| complexity/heft of tasks and goals.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I've seen companies actively, knowingly, and purposely trade
| future growth, user experience, and user retention for
| immediate profits.
| GJim wrote:
| I've seen governments do the same. Many times.
| mempko wrote:
| Explain Amazon then, a company notorious for being unprofitable
| yet producing a great experience.
|
| Markets are kind of a dumb thing if you think about it. You
| take all the qualities of an item and project them into a
| single scalar we call 'price'. Then use that scalar as a form
| of comparison.
|
| It's comical when you think about it. Seems we need a better
| technology now that we have computers.
| sien wrote:
| Amazon invested profits. For many years ago they could turn a
| switch and become profitable.
|
| The share price kept rising while they were investing profits
| in expanding.
|
| It's far from a fool proof way of doing things, many
| companies that prioritise growth over profitability wind up
| with neither, but Amazon managed it.
|
| As for prices, no computer can work out my preference or not
| for a Mac over a PC, or a iPhone over an Android, or how much
| quality I will pay for in a bike. Prices reveal this.
|
| Ludwig von Mises said this was why Communism wouldn't work in
| 1920. He was right.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
| mempko wrote:
| You misunderstood what I meant about prices. My point is
| prices compress everyone's preferences and ability to pay
| into a single scalar. It seems we can do better no?
| amai wrote:
| Short term profits are easily gameable. And before the long-
| term issues hit you you can simply leave the company or find
| someone to buy it ( and you will, because of the "high"
| profits). That is how modern economics actually works.
| trhway wrote:
| A Soviet cartoon with similar story - a greedy customer wants a
| fur hat from a sheepskin, and he asks whether the hat tailor can
| make 2 hats from the same skin, and the tailor says sure he can
| ... that goes to 7 hats, and when the customer comes to receive
| the completed order he receives the 7 hats as ordered
| https://youtu.be/gSpjDi2BrQk?t=193
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| This is based on an old Russian tale, so the story itself is
| not specifically Soviet.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is one of the reasons ML benchmarks are most useful soon
| after their creation. Once they become a target, they cease to
| meaningfully measure quality.
|
| The corollary for the Soviet shoe factory is you need incentives
| that propagate to guide production. You need the market to guide
| you in all the little details and you have to discover little by
| little what it is actually demanding.
|
| For ML, we need something similar if not the same.
| mempko wrote:
| The market is notorious for creating a lot of distortions. I
| don't think the answer is 'let the market guide you'.
| Externalities are a known but huge problem with markets as
| evidenced by the insane amount of pollution we produced.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Not to me confused with the Soviet shoe factories that
| produced only one type and orientation of shoe - with the other
| half of the pair being shipped in from 500 miles away._
|
| This reminded me of something our anti-counterfeiting startup
| learned when integrating into manufacturing for a high-end
| outdoor apparel brand.
|
| There are efficiencies that the factory gets by, say,
| parallelizing work on the sleeves of a jacket, while other parts
| are also worked on. _But_ each batch of dyed outer material may
| have slight variation in color, no matter how hard they
| calibrate.
|
| So, their processes are designed to ensure that, when the jacket
| pieces come together, they all came from the same dyed batch of
| outer material.
|
| (There were many interesting tidbits like that, and those were
| just the ones relevant to us, in terms we could understand. I'm
| sure the factory also knew a million other things.)
|
| Probably the Soviet shoes of TFA had worse problems than slightly
| mismatched color.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I remember my mum (tailor) telling me that even different
| sections of the same roll of cloth wouldn't match color
| precisely enough on many rolls they worked with. Colors are
| deceptively hard.
| neilv wrote:
| Interesting. This factory might've also had to dealt with
| that degree of variation. IIRC (unless I'm thinking of a
| factory for a different customer), their processes include a
| per-unit container that moves through the production line,
| and the container starts with various materials that will go
| into that unit. So I guess that's one way they could ensure
| that all the outer fabric came from the same part of the same
| roll.
| DrOctagon wrote:
| See also VO2 max
| layer8 wrote:
| Tangentially, I think the mostly attribution-free discussion
| style of the C2 wiki has some merit. It's nice to read opinions
| and contributions on a topic without the cognitive noise of
| associated user accounts and reaction counts.
| ndileas wrote:
| I do sometimes get confused when reading it, since the markers
| for main post, replies, etc are not super intuitive to me.
| Feels like a stereotype of a multiple personality disorder
| before you figure it out.
|
| Is there a guide for the markup somewhere?
| mig39 wrote:
| > All features as found on the specification are included, but
| the user interface is awkward. The vendor can claim, "we have all
| the features you need; thus, pick us."
|
| Describes every Enterprise software I've ever used.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| with one key difference that the people doing procurement only
| have the spec sheet, and never actually use the software. They
| also frequently never actually interact with any of the humans
| that do use the software, and have formed an opinion that
| "those people only ever complain whatever we buy". So there is
| never any feedback cycle pushing the software to be better.
| bruce511 wrote:
| It's a nice anecdotes, and maybe that works in some places, but
| in my experience selling to Enterprise, software quality is
| pretty low on their check list.
|
| Generally speaking, they're more concerned with the supplier
| than the product. Yes, it must (generally speaking) meet their
| requirements, but its also important that they -believe- the
| supplier can roll it out, and will be around in 10 years still
| supporting it.
|
| In other words Enterprise doesn't just want software. They want
| a stability of supply, so suddenly they're looking at things
| like Support levels, customability and so on.
|
| "You never get fired for buying IBM (a reference likely lost on
| you if you're a bit younger than me) wasn't about quality, but
| about longevity.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| My last company started stack ranking people on number of GitHub
| commits - as if each commit is equivalent and the only thing that
| mattered is the quantity.
|
| Soon enough, we started seeing lots of politics, cutthroat
| environment, management pressure, management meetings looking at
| dashboards of commits, stack ranks, PIPs and firings, but also a
| significant rise in the number of commits.
|
| One year later, commits metric won. But the business lost
| customers tired of buggy software.
|
| You got what you measure but quantity does not substitute
| quality.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| This has been talked about endlessly so why don't we skip to the
| conclusion. To avoid the problem of gaming metrics you either
| need to
|
| 1. Spend a lot of time and thought into developing
| ungameable(whether this is possible is unclear) metrics and ways
| to measure these metrics.
|
| 2. Admit defeat and not be transparent with evaluations and/or go
| off of vibes.
| sdwr wrote:
| 3. Align incentives of the judges and the judged, reducing the
| pressure on metrics (ex. shared fate, belief in the cause,
| personal growth and fulfillment)
| falcor84 wrote:
| I don't think this is possible. In a sufficiently large
| organization, however much you try to prevent it, some
| employees will be "psychopaths" (going by Hintjens's
| definition) looking to game the system. Whatever the metrics
| are, they will put in only enough effort to advance their own
| interests, and assuming they succeed (and at least some will)
| at getting raises/promotions, the org is then at risk of
| (legitimate) legal action from other employees who put in
| more actual work and get lower compensation.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| It's not even that there are pyschos, it's that incentives
| wane with scale because individuals have less control over
| outcomes.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is still an alignment problem. Psychopaths can be good
| for the org, you just need better mapping of the game and
| reality.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| This is the answer. The higher performance orgs I've worked
| for have had excellent incentive alignment and cohesion. The
| metrics were there, but fairly mediocre.
|
| Places with robust metrics ranged from excellent to meh. One
| place had a sales team that was owning it, and the leadership
| was shoveling cash into wheelbarrows. But the company was
| losing a fortune because the sales metrics were precisely
| stupid.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Or - stop with the evaluation nonsense and utilize your energy
| into pushing business goals. Metrics should be used to inform,
| not as targets.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You get what you measure. Measure what you want to get.
|
| So first be _really_ sure what it is you want to get.
|
| What you want to get will be hard to measure. Accept that as
| truth. However accept no proxy measures.
|
| Measure _only_ the specific outcomes you want.
| amai wrote:
| I can recommend the book Red Plenty, if you want to learn more
| about the successes and failures of Soviet economy:
|
| https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
| myflash13 wrote:
| This principle, as well as related principles, like the McNamara
| Fallacy and Goodhart's Law essentially boil down to one lesson
| I've come to realize in life: "numbers", "metrics" or even a
| "system" are never a substitute for actual humans caring about
| doing the right thing. If the humans involved care to do the
| right thing, they will do it, even without a system (although
| some systems make it easier). If they don't care about doing the
| right thing, no system or data-driven approach can fix that.
|
| Which is also why I have a sneaking suspicion that most economic
| theory is complete bullshit. All the debates over privatization
| vs. public services, monopoly vs. competition, autocratic vs.
| democratic styles of leadership etc. are mostly irrelevant. Both
| can work. It all boils down to whether you have good human
| stakeholders who have the integrity and agency to do the right
| thing. Counter to most economic theories, for example, a monopoly
| that is run by people who actually care about doing the right
| thing might be better run than fiercely competitive startups who
| just want to make a quick buck.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Which is also why I have a sneaking suspicion that most
| economic theory is complete bullshit. All the debates over
| privatization vs. public services, monopoly vs. competition,
| autocratic vs. democratic styles of leadership etc. are mostly
| irrelevant. Both can work. It all boils down to whether you
| have good human stakeholders who have the integrity and agency
| to do the right thing.
|
| I don't think this is some gotcha, but basic economic
| understanding for at least the last hundred years.
| Fundamentally, much of economic theory acknowledges these
| questions. This brings you full circle, given inconsistent
| humans with individual values, how do different systems and
| rulesets perform.
| pftg wrote:
| This reminds me of a brilliant Soviet satirical cartoon that
| illustrated the same principle with hats instead of shoes:
| https://youtu.be/gSpjDi2BrQk?si=CtJwQTHkm0HfNrxx
| msarrel wrote:
| In Soviet Russia, shoe principles you
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