4 ms·

Because it’s regressive. We need to fix the issues, not throw the whole thing out.

rglullis 4y ago
These "issues" only exist because of the scale and reach of Corporations. You can not fix "too big to fail" issues unless you stop letting these institutions to grow too big in the first place. I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument of why we need to have organizations of such a large scale nowadays. Could you make a case of what we would be missing if we just "threw the whole thing out"?
- mcny 4y ago
  I propose another option: unless you can show clear written instructions, the ceo and the board are personally criminally responsible for the acts of their agents, contractors, and employees at the course of their duty. If your branch manager incorrectly adds your teller to an industry wide list of do not hire, the board and CEO are personally criminally responsible for it. No hiding behind the corporate veil. I don’t know how to prove whether someone acted in their own and not on the instructions of the employer though. What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees. I'd argue that if the split child company ends up only working for the parent, it is easier for the governments to prosecute them. So the child company would have to get other customers and act as a real independent unit or would have to shut down altogether and the parent company would have to go back to the market to find a proper "web service" provider. I'd also argue that there is no way that a company like Equifax would be able to exist only with 150 people. The whole national level corporation would simply be broken down into many localized offices. Their databases would no longer be shared. The damage that each unit could make would be reduced, and their customers would be much closer to the managers responsible in ensuring that their data is managed properly. In other words, my argument is that Capitalism and market forces do work. We just need to have these systems deployed in the correct scale.
  - 9dev 4y ago
    Wouldn’t that result in the CEO and board being literal scapegoats, employed by the people actually in charge, to be beheaded if something goes wrong? They would even sell it as „giving control to the employees“ or something. I don’t believe in measures to radically change the world. That’s both a direct example of the Chesterton fence, and applied game theory - CEOs, board members, or investors, they are all gamers. Give them any set of rules, they will analyse and subsequently game them.
- deelowe 4y ago
  Because scale breeds efficiencies. It should be obvious why WalMart is a better business model than the previous experience of shopping at 15 different stores to get the same stuff.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    "Efficiency" is not a goal in itself, and it does not pass as an argument here. 1) Walmart may be a better "business model", but is it a better model for a society that we want to live? I surely don't want to live in a place where big box stores are the norm, and the only alternatives are crazy expensive "niche" stores. And I surely don't want to live in a world where the quality of my food is determined by Walmart's weight, who will favor products that can last longer, are cheaper to produce and are easier to store and transport - i.e, ultra processed crap. If the price to pay to have better groceries is the "inconvenience" that I will have to go to 2-3 separate shops, it's absolutely worth it and I'll gladly accept the "inefficiency". 2) Optimizing for efficiency is a recipe for systemic, catastrophic failures. Just as an example: think of the semi-weekly github outages that are happening. Everyone is convinced that the cost of paying for a SaaS is negligible compared to the cost of operating your own, so they don't even try to set up their own CI and code repository and have to pray everyday to make sure that will be able to work with it. Meanwhile, my self-hosted gitea/drone/docker repo has been running for almost 4 years already with no issues and it requires minimal maintenance. It took me some time initially to set things up in a way that I was satisfied, and it probably doesn't save me any money compared with a off-the-shelf solution, but thanks to my initial investment and willingness to accept these costs I am more resilient than any competitor. 3) Taken to an extreme, focusing on "efficiency" could be used to justify authoritarian governments and the most dystopian worlds. I really do not share this techno-utilitarian worldview that thinks that maximizing economic output can justify the existence of corporations that reduce us to nothing but consumers that can be placed in a segmented box. It's this worldview that is brought us Big Data, the invasion of our privacy, the "gamification" of everything, and so on. Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon may all be trillion-dollar companies and may have built incredible products, but the societal/environmental/civil cost is just too much to be worth it. If I knew in 2004 that by accepting the invite to 1GB of Gmail I would be contributing to the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, I'd never had done it. Anything else you'd like to try?

These "issues" only exist because of the scale and reach of Corporations. You can not fix "too big to fail" issues unless you stop letting these institutions to grow too big in the first place. I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument of why we need to have organizations of such a large scale nowadays. Could you make a case of what we would be missing if we just "threw the whole thing out"?

mcny 4y ago
I propose another option: unless you can show clear written instructions, the ceo and the board are personally criminally responsible for the acts of their agents, contractors, and employees at the course of their duty. If your branch manager incorrectly adds your teller to an industry wide list of do not hire, the board and CEO are personally criminally responsible for it. No hiding behind the corporate veil. I don’t know how to prove whether someone acted in their own and not on the instructions of the employer though. What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees. I'd argue that if the split child company ends up only working for the parent, it is easier for the governments to prosecute them. So the child company would have to get other customers and act as a real independent unit or would have to shut down altogether and the parent company would have to go back to the market to find a proper "web service" provider. I'd also argue that there is no way that a company like Equifax would be able to exist only with 150 people. The whole national level corporation would simply be broken down into many localized offices. Their databases would no longer be shared. The damage that each unit could make would be reduced, and their customers would be much closer to the managers responsible in ensuring that their data is managed properly. In other words, my argument is that Capitalism and market forces do work. We just need to have these systems deployed in the correct scale.
- 9dev 4y ago
  Wouldn’t that result in the CEO and board being literal scapegoats, employed by the people actually in charge, to be beheaded if something goes wrong? They would even sell it as „giving control to the employees“ or something. I don’t believe in measures to radically change the world. That’s both a direct example of the Chesterton fence, and applied game theory - CEOs, board members, or investors, they are all gamers. Give them any set of rules, they will analyse and subsequently game them.
deelowe 4y ago
Because scale breeds efficiencies. It should be obvious why WalMart is a better business model than the previous experience of shopping at 15 different stores to get the same stuff.
- rglullis 4y ago
  "Efficiency" is not a goal in itself, and it does not pass as an argument here. 1) Walmart may be a better "business model", but is it a better model for a society that we want to live? I surely don't want to live in a place where big box stores are the norm, and the only alternatives are crazy expensive "niche" stores. And I surely don't want to live in a world where the quality of my food is determined by Walmart's weight, who will favor products that can last longer, are cheaper to produce and are easier to store and transport - i.e, ultra processed crap. If the price to pay to have better groceries is the "inconvenience" that I will have to go to 2-3 separate shops, it's absolutely worth it and I'll gladly accept the "inefficiency". 2) Optimizing for efficiency is a recipe for systemic, catastrophic failures. Just as an example: think of the semi-weekly github outages that are happening. Everyone is convinced that the cost of paying for a SaaS is negligible compared to the cost of operating your own, so they don't even try to set up their own CI and code repository and have to pray everyday to make sure that will be able to work with it. Meanwhile, my self-hosted gitea/drone/docker repo has been running for almost 4 years already with no issues and it requires minimal maintenance. It took me some time initially to set things up in a way that I was satisfied, and it probably doesn't save me any money compared with a off-the-shelf solution, but thanks to my initial investment and willingness to accept these costs I am more resilient than any competitor. 3) Taken to an extreme, focusing on "efficiency" could be used to justify authoritarian governments and the most dystopian worlds. I really do not share this techno-utilitarian worldview that thinks that maximizing economic output can justify the existence of corporations that reduce us to nothing but consumers that can be placed in a segmented box. It's this worldview that is brought us Big Data, the invasion of our privacy, the "gamification" of everything, and so on. Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon may all be trillion-dollar companies and may have built incredible products, but the societal/environmental/civil cost is just too much to be worth it. If I knew in 2004 that by accepting the invite to 1GB of Gmail I would be contributing to the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, I'd never had done it. Anything else you'd like to try?