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Part of this comes from executives being taught to think of employees as expenses rather than assets. "Less money to employees = more money to me." This attitud

Part of this comes from executives being taught to think of employees as expenses rather than assets. "Less money to employees = more money to me." This attitude is part of a larger systemic problem: A great deal of American business is now more about gaming the system than about building products. Take the VC money, build nothing, and cash out. Sell customer data to ad networks and cash out. SEO the hell out of that thing and cash out. Cook the books and cash out. Sell bundles of subprime loans and cash out. Buy your competitor, harvest its assets, kill their product, and cash out. Pump and dump and disappear. "What, you still have seed corn? Eat that shit!" It's all just bullshit short-term arbitrage. It has nothing to do with adding value, which is what sustainable business is based on. It works well in an environment where such behavior is not punished, and where business executives are rewarded for "maximum profit in minimum time" and penalized for long-term thinking. It's certainly not sustainable, but alas, that's exactly where we are in the U.S.

BoiledCabbage 9y ago
An underrated comment. It sounds harsh, but It's institutionalized get-rich-quick. A lot of it is the hyper-focus on efficiency. Which gets interpreted as efficiency of time, which turns to "get money back out as quickly as possible". And as people look for faster and faster ways to get money out at some point the only route/scheme that can keep up is "create an illusion of value and sell that." And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.

BoiledCabbage 9y ago

An underrated comment. It sounds harsh, but It's institutionalized get-rich-quick. A lot of it is the hyper-focus on efficiency. Which gets interpreted as efficiency of time, which turns to "get money back out as quickly as possible". And as people look for faster and faster ways to get money out at some point the only route/scheme that can keep up is "create an illusion of value and sell that." And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.