7 ms·

A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories. My grandfathe

A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories. My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc. My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management. I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.

garmaine 5y ago
There is in Starbase, Texas. And there are efficient and agile governments in other countries.
nostromo 5y ago
This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true. America did seem to have a golden age. Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the new bay bridge. Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years. Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech. Then they got to see people flying in jets. Then nuclear energy. Then they got to see people walking on the moon. All in a single life. The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged. It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government. This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.
- nicky0 5y ago
  Yes but 11 construction workers died building the Golden Gate Bridge (which was actually pretty low for such a project at the time). How does that factor in to the story?
  - ianhawes 5y ago
    Not at all? Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.
    - addingnumbers 5y ago
      I like to imagine it's possible to build a bridge without getting any of your laborers killed.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bananabreakfast 5y ago
      What do you mean what's the point? Don't be intentionally obtuse. The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Here is what is left out. > Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. 11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers? [0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction-safety-from-the-golden-gate-bridge-to-today/ https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction... I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing. And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.
  - nostromo 5y ago
    Sure, but protecting workers doesn’t make a project cost 10x as much though, or take decades longer.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Protecting workers, considering the environmental impact, overall impact assessments (such as suicide prevention), public consultation, earthquake standards, wind retrofits, etc. There are a lot more things considered now.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Don't forget all the endless nuisance lawsuits that try to stop every single project.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    Honestly NIMBYism and lawsuits slow down things more than any government agency. And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.
- mucholove 5y ago
  The relative status of the US was very high at thr time. Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner. During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution. The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then. This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature. In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.” I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.
  - shrikant 5y ago
    > To this day, no country has better air than the US. Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries. Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!
    - mucholove 5y ago
      Sure. Norway would be fantastic but it is such a different place that it would compare to being in Alaska or Montana. Major cities in the US, like NYC average around a 30-50 (probs more like 30) on the iqAir score. That is nuts. Barcelona has many, many days on 80-90. The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point. Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.
      - 5y ago
- kortilla 5y ago
  > Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly. > The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined. I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog. My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition. Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape). The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100. The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today. We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds. Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s. We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes. Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio. We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet. With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more. There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together. The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...
    - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
      > And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today. Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Yep. Chicago burned down in 1871, and in 1893 it put on the greatest exhibition of science, technology, and art the world has ever seen. San Francisco was largely leveled in 1906 and was restored with a quickness. Contrast that to now, where it took over a decade to rebuild... well, not even rebuild, but sort of replace TWO BUILDINGS destroyed in 2001. It's pretty pathetic. All you heard after 9/11 was harkenings back to an era when "Americans rebuild, 'cuz that's what we do!" Yeah, right. That's bullshit. What we do is bicker and carp over who's offended or how we're not wallowing in enough remembrance or misery for this or that group. The USA is done, people. Sad but true.
- op00to 5y ago
  Yes let’s go back to killing people to make buildings rise faster.
ketzo 5y ago
But, like... that feels defeatist, right? Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things. That is, I would say, not the impression I currently have of the U.S. government; but I do think it's a little overly pessimistic to say that it couldn't get there, or get measurably better, with even a generation or two of sustained effort from really smart people. Right? I guess I don't really know.
- _AzMoo 5y ago
  > Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things. The two aren't mutually exclusive, right? Large groups of people working in tandem are accomplishing pretty amazing things, but they're not doing them in an excellent an efficient manner.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    I guess that's fair. But I have an inclination to say that for an organization to to accomplish amazing things with consistency over the kind of timespan of a government or nation, the organism has to be self-sustaining. Part of that is the capability to attract or create talented new members of your organization, and one way of getting that done is by having a reputation for, among other things, being an excellent and efficient workplace. I've read and heard stories of places and groups like Fairchild Semiconductor, Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project; places where smart people have gotten together to do incredible things very quickly. The one unifying theme is that they all lasted, at their peak, essentially one or two generations at most; they couldn't grow or sustain themselves.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  No, I am saying that excellence and efficiency are not required to accomplish something amazing. NASA achieves amazing things, but it is not efficient as SpaceX has shown, But it has plenty of money, making it not necessary. Plenty of retailers lack any semblance of excellence. But because workers are so cheap and they are efficient about their use, it does not matter.
laurent92 5y ago
> I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and… Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population? Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    That kind of is what we do. But the rest of the population isn't happy just being fed. They want status and luxuries the same as those "IQ120+" or highly productive people, so we have all sorts of politics about inequality and poverty and human rights and what-not. For people that are amply fed without producing much for anyone else.
    - kingkawn 5y ago
      Feeding the poor allows the “iq120+“ to tell their absurd fantasies about superiority in peace
    - smolder 5y ago
      It's not nearly every unproductive person's fault that they're unproductive. There's a lot of useful work to be done and a lot of people capable of doing it who are not currently aligned. It's often a matter of inefficiency in capital allocation, i.e. lack of funding for certain useful work because it's not easy or practical (without intervention, like from the government) to earn a profit doing it. There's also limitations on our ability to coordinate work, regardless of funding. Profitability is a mediocre proxy for the usefulness of work, and so we have only a mediocre ability to allocate labor usefully in our profit driven economy. Some of the best investments of money and labor in terms of profitability are even things I would call counterproductive.

garmaine 5y ago

There is in Starbase, Texas. And there are efficient and agile governments in other countries.

nostromo 5y ago

This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true. America did seem to have a golden age. Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the new bay bridge. Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years. Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech. Then they got to see people flying in jets. Then nuclear energy. Then they got to see people walking on the moon. All in a single life. The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged. It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government. This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.

nicky0 5y ago
Yes but 11 construction workers died building the Golden Gate Bridge (which was actually pretty low for such a project at the time). How does that factor in to the story?
- ianhawes 5y ago
  Not at all? Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
    I like to imagine it's possible to build a bridge without getting any of your laborers killed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bananabreakfast 5y ago
    What do you mean what's the point? Don't be intentionally obtuse. The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Here is what is left out. > Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. 11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers? [0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction-safety-from-the-golden-gate-bridge-to-today/ https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction... I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing. And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Sure, but protecting workers doesn’t make a project cost 10x as much though, or take decades longer.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Protecting workers, considering the environmental impact, overall impact assessments (such as suicide prevention), public consultation, earthquake standards, wind retrofits, etc. There are a lot more things considered now.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Don't forget all the endless nuisance lawsuits that try to stop every single project.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Honestly NIMBYism and lawsuits slow down things more than any government agency. And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.
mucholove 5y ago
The relative status of the US was very high at thr time. Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner. During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution. The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then. This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature. In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.” I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.
- shrikant 5y ago
  > To this day, no country has better air than the US. Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries. Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!
  - mucholove 5y ago
    Sure. Norway would be fantastic but it is such a different place that it would compare to being in Alaska or Montana. Major cities in the US, like NYC average around a 30-50 (probs more like 30) on the iqAir score. That is nuts. Barcelona has many, many days on 80-90. The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point. Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.
    - 5y ago
kortilla 5y ago
> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly. > The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined. I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog. My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition. Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape). The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100. The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today. We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds. Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s. We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes. Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio. We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet. With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more. There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together. The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...
  - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
    > And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today. Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
Yep. Chicago burned down in 1871, and in 1893 it put on the greatest exhibition of science, technology, and art the world has ever seen. San Francisco was largely leveled in 1906 and was restored with a quickness. Contrast that to now, where it took over a decade to rebuild... well, not even rebuild, but sort of replace TWO BUILDINGS destroyed in 2001. It's pretty pathetic. All you heard after 9/11 was harkenings back to an era when "Americans rebuild, 'cuz that's what we do!" Yeah, right. That's bullshit. What we do is bicker and carp over who's offended or how we're not wallowing in enough remembrance or misery for this or that group. The USA is done, people. Sad but true.
op00to 5y ago
Yes let’s go back to killing people to make buildings rise faster.

ketzo 5y ago

But, like... that feels defeatist, right? Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things. That is, I would say, not the impression I currently have of the U.S. government; but I do think it's a little overly pessimistic to say that it couldn't get there, or get measurably better, with even a generation or two of sustained effort from really smart people. Right? I guess I don't really know.

_AzMoo 5y ago
> Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things. The two aren't mutually exclusive, right? Large groups of people working in tandem are accomplishing pretty amazing things, but they're not doing them in an excellent an efficient manner.
- ketzo 5y ago
  I guess that's fair. But I have an inclination to say that for an organization to to accomplish amazing things with consistency over the kind of timespan of a government or nation, the organism has to be self-sustaining. Part of that is the capability to attract or create talented new members of your organization, and one way of getting that done is by having a reputation for, among other things, being an excellent and efficient workplace. I've read and heard stories of places and groups like Fairchild Semiconductor, Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project; places where smart people have gotten together to do incredible things very quickly. The one unifying theme is that they all lasted, at their peak, essentially one or two generations at most; they couldn't grow or sustain themselves.
MattGaiser 5y ago
No, I am saying that excellence and efficiency are not required to accomplish something amazing. NASA achieves amazing things, but it is not efficient as SpaceX has shown, But it has plenty of money, making it not necessary. Plenty of retailers lack any semblance of excellence. But because workers are so cheap and they are efficient about their use, it does not matter.

laurent92 5y ago

> I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and… Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

MattGaiser 5y ago
> Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population? Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  That kind of is what we do. But the rest of the population isn't happy just being fed. They want status and luxuries the same as those "IQ120+" or highly productive people, so we have all sorts of politics about inequality and poverty and human rights and what-not. For people that are amply fed without producing much for anyone else.
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    Feeding the poor allows the “iq120+“ to tell their absurd fantasies about superiority in peace
  - smolder 5y ago
    It's not nearly every unproductive person's fault that they're unproductive. There's a lot of useful work to be done and a lot of people capable of doing it who are not currently aligned. It's often a matter of inefficiency in capital allocation, i.e. lack of funding for certain useful work because it's not easy or practical (without intervention, like from the government) to earn a profit doing it. There's also limitations on our ability to coordinate work, regardless of funding. Profitability is a mediocre proxy for the usefulness of work, and so we have only a mediocre ability to allocate labor usefully in our profit driven economy. Some of the best investments of money and labor in terms of profitability are even things I would call counterproductive.