9 ms·

How Will the Golden Age of "Making It Worse" End?

58 points by mindracer 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
As far as I can tell, the whole Boeing situation is a minor and interesting case of a moral panic / groupthink episode. A flight on one of these grossly unsafe Boeing planes still seems to be safer than a daily bus commute to work (and may the heavens help those death-seeking lunatics who travel by car!). As for why products are getting worse, the west appears to be in a multi-decade energy crisis interlinked deeply with our manufacturing processes being uncompetitive. The actions of management in manufacturing companies are being driven by the regulatory environment around energy and production.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >A flight on one of these grossly unsafe Boeing planes still seems to be safer than a daily bus commute to work Not where I live https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykker/faerdselsuheld https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykke...
  - noughtme 3y ago
    ? That’s nearly one 737 Max worth of fatalities per year in your small country, granted buses are probably safer than cars.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      In fairness, what matters is the rate. Although those stats don't include rates so they seem to be not-comparable. Denmark seems to have a Boeing-737 Max accident every year, except using cars. Boeing is at 2x 737 accidents globally in the last 6 years. I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this.
      - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        obviously I was being slightly facetious - especially as I am unable to find stats on bus death but I'm going to assume that rate of death in bus accidents are much less than those in car accidents because not especially serious - but if that were the case and given that there were two serious crashes of the Boeing Max and there are 1160 I guess the rate there is somewhere around .1 whereas there are 3 million cars in Denmark and 154 fatalities is .009 (again, facetiously assuming that every car was driven) But since the statement was it was safer than taking the bus to work and given the very minimal stats shown I think it is a reasonable supposition that probably the bus is safer in Denmark although obviously it would require a significant longer and more in depth amount of analysis than one generally expends on a comment on an HN text box. >I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this. given very minimal stats on car accidents and assuming bus accidents much less than car accidents then it would reasonable to think hmm, probably taking the bus is somewhat safer. But not with the absolute certainty that a year long study and gathering of all relevant stats might establish.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        roenxi 3y ago
        Could you maybe distill the serious parts? I'm not exactly sure what you think is joke and argument here. I'm also sceptical of whether that is a comparable approach. If I'm reading you right, you need to account for the fact that cars have lifespans and all the deaths over a lifespan get summed. Assuming a 15 year lifespan for a typical car that bumps the car figure up an order of magnitude and then the rates are basically the same (0.09 vs 0.10). So the figures you're quoting suggest that a catastrophe in the aerospace industry is business as usual on Denmark roads. Putting aside rather important questions of methodology (eg, 737 MAXs would do a lot more trips than a typical Denmark car). Not only that, but the 737 Max rate has likely dropped because they got a lot of attention and problems were likely remediated. It is easier to raise the engineering standards over 1,000 planes than 3,000,000 cars. You can see in the Denmark case that back in the dark eras past (like 2002) the situation was much worse but they improved quickly. Boeing will be undergoing the same process right now.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  >The actions of management in manufacturing companies are being driven by the regulatory environment around energy and production. Care to elaborate? Because from where I'm sitting the actions of management are driven around quarterly stock-based incentives and a culture of short-term equity price rise by the boards and big investors
  - roenxi 3y ago
    People have been claiming short term incentives for decades. If short term incentives were having long term negative impacts the corporate feedback mechanisms would have picked up on it by now. What I'm focusing on is that there are people who determine what the incentives of the managers are. Those people don't see an issue with short term incentives. They're identifying - correctly in my view - that there are limited opportunities for competitors to come in with higher quality products. Such a competitor would get crushed by a combination of regulation and costs.
    - passwordoops 3y ago
      That's a different issue than the "regulatory environment around energy and production". And "If short term incentives were having long term negative impacts the corporate feedback mechanisms would have picked up on it by now" Tells me you either don't live in the real world or are being purposefully disengenious. Most real decision makers plan to remain in their role for at most 5 years before moving up. That definitely encourages short term success. And much more importantly, if the compensation structure of the CxO is such that 99% of monetary compensation comes from vesting on a quarterly basis only if the stocks price or earnings hit specific targets over that short term, how does this translate to long-term success? Real-world, concrete, linkable examples only, please
      - roenxi 3y ago
        > That's a different issue than the "regulatory environment around energy and production". The incentives are being set to take best advantage of the realities on the ground. Apart from Apple, no-one is taking over markets by fighting the general quality decline. You're arguing that there is a lot of shortermism going on. Fair enough. But shortermism is proving to be a good long term strategy, because the alternatives failed. Not for lack of interest, but because the regulatory state and harsh realities of energy constraints crushed them. > Most real decision makers plan to remain in their role for at most 5 years before moving up. I'm glad we've managed negotiate up from quarterly stock prices to 5 years. But note that China is run on 5 year plans - executing complex long term strategies is possible in 5 year steps with a reorientation every so often. 5 year time horizons can be compatible with long term planning. Note that this is in line with what the investors are comfortable with - they don't think there is an advantage to be gained from keeping CEOs long term. And they're right I expect, getting involved int he money printing exercise that the central banks have been pushing is generally much more important than focusing on technical outcomes and you don't need long-term incumbent CEOs for that. > ...how does this translate to long-term success? Unless you're 108, Boeing is older than you are. This has been their routine operating procedure since ... the 1980s? Sometime around that era. They're doing pretty well.
- happymellon 3y ago
  Completely disagree with essentially everything here. If you look at distance, then planes win. Because if a plane makes it then it gets a big boost from lived distances. If you look at the quantity of journeys or per hour on a mode of transport then planes look a lot worse. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/rail-journeys/trains-are-better-than-planes/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/rail-journeys/trains-are-... And as for why things become worse, it's because of enshittification. Not because of magical "energy limits", not because of "manufacturing competition". Getting the next quarterly bonus by firing everyone works better than having a cut bonus this quarter to fix manufacturing and ensuring a bonus next quarter.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Planes in general win - if you take out Boeing though, Airbus win by a much larger margin over the last 20 years.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      I'm not sure where you get that from, I gave you links so [citation please] Deaths per billion journeys: Bus: 4.3 Rail: 20 Car: 40 Plane: 117 Every time I get on a plane I have less chance of making it than on other modes of transport, even cars. Rail and bus are much safer per trip, amount of time spent, and are in the same ballpark as flight when using the per distance travelled metric.
      - jen20 3y ago
        Per billion journeys is an idiotic way of measuring. Per passenger mile is the correct way.
        roenxi 3y ago
        That seems extreme, why aren't those measures reasonable? Although if we're using journeys; notice that a daily commute will clock in around 500 journeys a year. So while a Boeing 737 MAX plane flight could be called unsafe, unless someone is continuously flying around the risk is still at levels that people find acceptable. Even for the pilots, who are flying a 737 MAX as their day job, they're still at levels of risk consistent with someone who drives around on a motercycle. I can see why they wouldn't like that and want something to be done, but we're still not at crazy levels here. This is just lower than the standards the airline industry usually works to.
hyperhello 3y ago
They used to tell stories about breadlines in Russia where there was no bread, and I think we’re getting to the point where if we had no bread because capitalism said there would be none, we’d still be waiting in line to preserve the illusion. When the system is a farce that doesn’t reflect its own justification, the problem keeps spreading. The trash doesn’t get picked up because the Trash System is more efficient when it runs lean and mean. But, the trash doesn’t get picked up.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  The problem with russia was, that everything was centrally planned, and if that one "central planning location" failed, there was no bread. Even if you have two or three central "locations", one failing means 1/3 less supply and breadlines, since the others can't fill the gap so fast. In capitalism, there were many private companies (bakeries if we continue with the bread analogy), and if one of them fails, noone even notices, since there are so many alternatives. So capitalism is great! ...until amazon buys all the bakeries (well bookstores), and then fscks up something.... Or if walmart outcompetes small stores and then burns down. Or if you have a duopoly on mobile phone markets. Or if a few investment groups buy all the housing..... oh wait...
  - p_l 3y ago
    Except central/distributed planning is orthogonal to capitalism itself. Capitalism loves centralization and monopolies, it makes rent extraction easier. But different forces kept competition going, with cartel busting added to the mix to stop capitalism from circling the wagons too much against competition.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    I think the problems with the Soviet economy were much too complex to reduce them to „central planning is bad“.
  - indigochill 3y ago
    To extend the argument, one of the original military motivations for the design of the internet was resilience of the network (relative to radio, IIRC, where relying on a central broadcaster would be prone to failure if the broadcaster was taken down). If one node goes down, even if it's bad news for that node's consumers, the network itself remains resilient. If we shift that analogy back into the economic discussion, then instead of three places controlling bread production you break up large bakeries (or make running large bakeries untenable) and incentivize a plethora of small bakeries so that when some fail, others can organically fill the gaps. Both G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien were proponents of distributism back in their day, but it's not as well known today.
Mindwipe 3y ago
It's pretty amusing the article rather undercuts it's own point by having an ending that makes no sense as the writer didn't bother to fact check who said the closing quote until after publication. Journalism and the commentariat are in a pretty consistent state of always being so bad there's nowhere left to fall to.
- antonvs 3y ago
  This article is trying way, way too hard with its prose, and not hard enough with its content. A lot of it is "argument by adjective" with phrases like "small, sad, thwarted" having the responsibility for making the case that the author is trying to make. You could replace all the adjectives with positive ones and change nothing else, and it would make an equally good case for the opposite position.
- ttt11199907 3y ago
  > I'd also submit that he and his cohort has no idea—no idea how much anger there is about what he and his cohort have done to make every aspect of life flatter and crueler and riskier and worse, and no idea how lucky he is that all that rage is still being pointed in, and not up. This is pretty loud and clear to me!
bsenftner 3y ago
There is a fundamental issue with our civilization and species: we have a scant few actual adults. I mean non-immature, non-self exclusively serving individuals who both care about others and have the capacity to do so beyond their immediate family. Until this issue is recognized en masse, it is going to continue, and as our AI and related automation technologies advance, life is going to significantly degrade for anyone not within the elite economic class.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  Is this really the core issue? Or is it just that we reward the reckless egoists, so they float to the top?
  - bsenftner 3y ago
    Rewarding the reckless egoists is immature, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the larger system, and by not addressing or acknowledging this issue we get our current situation. Knowing and not fixing is immature.
    - raziel2p 3y ago
      The problem is that the rewarding is systematic and can't really be attributed to a single person (or persons), so calling it immature is really just hitting at strawmen.
      - bsenftner 3y ago
        You disregard too quickly. Just because immaturity is systematic does not erase the fact that immature behavior is radically short sighted and a personal failure to navigate reality.
  - dirtybirdnj 3y ago
    The problem is that we have allowed "social skills" to be regarded higher than actual intelligence or technical skills. Social violence is not only tolerated, but encouraged and celebrated. This in my opinion is the most successful terrorist action of our modern era. There was no "cold war" it happened under our noses and we are all living in socially nuclear fallout every day. By allowing the bullshit to float to the top we have excluded any intelligence from the decision making process. Basically we're almost to the point where the computers start firing everyone in Idiocracy.
ycdxvjp 3y ago
Finance innovation has outpaced technical and creative innovation. So most companies are dominated by financial engineering. Any firm with offices located across the world are making cash just moving it around faster than you can make it with a product. And profitably. Taking advantage of exchange rates, interest rates, tax rates, subsidy, tariff differences etc etc is a more sophisticated process these days than anything you see in a factory.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
The "Ugh, Capitalism"[0] articles always seem to assume that capitalism started in the last 20 years or so. Which is obviously false. If the company lost its culture of safety that's definitely bad, but of course that culture developed under capitalism in the first place. How does a constant factor (capitalism) explain a change? The finance industry is a much larger part of the US economy than it has been in the past [1], which does seem like a problem and likely the cause of many of these issues. I'm not sure about the right solution, but it's definitely not to end capitalism. [0] https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism [1] https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-the-u-s-economy-harms-workers-and-their-families-threatening-a-strong-recovery/ https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-t..., Figure 1
- raziel2p 3y ago
  A simple answer may be that capitalism used to be more regulated than before. Not in all areas/industries, but overall - and if not in theory, at least in practice. Maybe the art of lobbyism, legal work, and public relations has gotten more advanced, for example, or company profits have become large enough that they can blatantly break laws and just pay the fine.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jpadkins 3y ago
    The federal register (sum of all US federal regulations) is orders of magnitudes larger than it was 40 years ago. I don't think a quantity argument is interesting (there is definitely more regulations). Possibly there is a quality argument to made: Due to the regulator capture process (large corporations have seized control of the federal government), the effectiveness of regulations have decreased a lot while the volume has increased. This also serves as a barrier to entry for competition, while also profits for compliance.
    - raziel2p 3y ago
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
MOLOCH -> "It is, in its way, a statement of purpose: not just the assurance that every person, place, and thing is now or will become food for its rightful devourers, but that those doing the eating also think of it as junk food." Funny, in history, people fed children to Moloch. Now Moloch has become a symbol of capitalism. And now, in the analogy, people are junk food. Because life is cheap, people aren't worth enough to spend money on their safety.
- baq 3y ago
  > people aren't worth enough to spend money on their safety. this is a very nice way of saying that regulators are necessary to have a fair market. (but definitely not sufficient!)
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Maximize shareholder value, they said… (as well as my quarterly bonus - if it goes wrong, there’s always my golden parachute ;)
sudden_dystopia 3y ago
How can it be both a duopoly and a free market?
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Good Question. Maybe what is 'good for business' would be to split some of them up, to create a market where competition exists. And stop approving mergers that reduce competition -> see Ticketmaster

58 points by mindracer 3y ago

As far as I can tell, the whole Boeing situation is a minor and interesting case of a moral panic / groupthink episode. A flight on one of these grossly unsafe Boeing planes still seems to be safer than a daily bus commute to work (and may the heavens help those death-seeking lunatics who travel by car!). As for why products are getting worse, the west appears to be in a multi-decade energy crisis interlinked deeply with our manufacturing processes being uncompetitive. The actions of management in manufacturing companies are being driven by the regulatory environment around energy and production.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>A flight on one of these grossly unsafe Boeing planes still seems to be safer than a daily bus commute to work Not where I live https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykker/faerdselsuheld https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykke...
- noughtme 3y ago
  ? That’s nearly one 737 Max worth of fatalities per year in your small country, granted buses are probably safer than cars.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    In fairness, what matters is the rate. Although those stats don't include rates so they seem to be not-comparable. Denmark seems to have a Boeing-737 Max accident every year, except using cars. Boeing is at 2x 737 accidents globally in the last 6 years. I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this.
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      obviously I was being slightly facetious - especially as I am unable to find stats on bus death but I'm going to assume that rate of death in bus accidents are much less than those in car accidents because not especially serious - but if that were the case and given that there were two serious crashes of the Boeing Max and there are 1160 I guess the rate there is somewhere around .1 whereas there are 3 million cars in Denmark and 154 fatalities is .009 (again, facetiously assuming that every car was driven) But since the statement was it was safer than taking the bus to work and given the very minimal stats shown I think it is a reasonable supposition that probably the bus is safer in Denmark although obviously it would require a significant longer and more in depth amount of analysis than one generally expends on a comment on an HN text box. >I'm not sure what conclusions we were expected to take from this. given very minimal stats on car accidents and assuming bus accidents much less than car accidents then it would reasonable to think hmm, probably taking the bus is somewhat safer. But not with the absolute certainty that a year long study and gathering of all relevant stats might establish.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - roenxi 3y ago
        Could you maybe distill the serious parts? I'm not exactly sure what you think is joke and argument here. I'm also sceptical of whether that is a comparable approach. If I'm reading you right, you need to account for the fact that cars have lifespans and all the deaths over a lifespan get summed. Assuming a 15 year lifespan for a typical car that bumps the car figure up an order of magnitude and then the rates are basically the same (0.09 vs 0.10). So the figures you're quoting suggest that a catastrophe in the aerospace industry is business as usual on Denmark roads. Putting aside rather important questions of methodology (eg, 737 MAXs would do a lot more trips than a typical Denmark car). Not only that, but the 737 Max rate has likely dropped because they got a lot of attention and problems were likely remediated. It is easier to raise the engineering standards over 1,000 planes than 3,000,000 cars. You can see in the Denmark case that back in the dark eras past (like 2002) the situation was much worse but they improved quickly. Boeing will be undergoing the same process right now.
passwordoops 3y ago
>The actions of management in manufacturing companies are being driven by the regulatory environment around energy and production. Care to elaborate? Because from where I'm sitting the actions of management are driven around quarterly stock-based incentives and a culture of short-term equity price rise by the boards and big investors
- roenxi 3y ago
  People have been claiming short term incentives for decades. If short term incentives were having long term negative impacts the corporate feedback mechanisms would have picked up on it by now. What I'm focusing on is that there are people who determine what the incentives of the managers are. Those people don't see an issue with short term incentives. They're identifying - correctly in my view - that there are limited opportunities for competitors to come in with higher quality products. Such a competitor would get crushed by a combination of regulation and costs.
  - passwordoops 3y ago
    That's a different issue than the "regulatory environment around energy and production". And "If short term incentives were having long term negative impacts the corporate feedback mechanisms would have picked up on it by now" Tells me you either don't live in the real world or are being purposefully disengenious. Most real decision makers plan to remain in their role for at most 5 years before moving up. That definitely encourages short term success. And much more importantly, if the compensation structure of the CxO is such that 99% of monetary compensation comes from vesting on a quarterly basis only if the stocks price or earnings hit specific targets over that short term, how does this translate to long-term success? Real-world, concrete, linkable examples only, please
    - roenxi 3y ago
      > That's a different issue than the "regulatory environment around energy and production". The incentives are being set to take best advantage of the realities on the ground. Apart from Apple, no-one is taking over markets by fighting the general quality decline. You're arguing that there is a lot of shortermism going on. Fair enough. But shortermism is proving to be a good long term strategy, because the alternatives failed. Not for lack of interest, but because the regulatory state and harsh realities of energy constraints crushed them. > Most real decision makers plan to remain in their role for at most 5 years before moving up. I'm glad we've managed negotiate up from quarterly stock prices to 5 years. But note that China is run on 5 year plans - executing complex long term strategies is possible in 5 year steps with a reorientation every so often. 5 year time horizons can be compatible with long term planning. Note that this is in line with what the investors are comfortable with - they don't think there is an advantage to be gained from keeping CEOs long term. And they're right I expect, getting involved int he money printing exercise that the central banks have been pushing is generally much more important than focusing on technical outcomes and you don't need long-term incumbent CEOs for that. > ...how does this translate to long-term success? Unless you're 108, Boeing is older than you are. This has been their routine operating procedure since ... the 1980s? Sometime around that era. They're doing pretty well.
happymellon 3y ago
Completely disagree with essentially everything here. If you look at distance, then planes win. Because if a plane makes it then it gets a big boost from lived distances. If you look at the quantity of journeys or per hour on a mode of transport then planes look a lot worse. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/rail-journeys/trains-are-better-than-planes/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/rail-journeys/trains-are-... And as for why things become worse, it's because of enshittification. Not because of magical "energy limits", not because of "manufacturing competition". Getting the next quarterly bonus by firing everyone works better than having a cut bonus this quarter to fix manufacturing and ensuring a bonus next quarter.
- jen20 3y ago
  Planes in general win - if you take out Boeing though, Airbus win by a much larger margin over the last 20 years.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    I'm not sure where you get that from, I gave you links so [citation please] Deaths per billion journeys: Bus: 4.3 Rail: 20 Car: 40 Plane: 117 Every time I get on a plane I have less chance of making it than on other modes of transport, even cars. Rail and bus are much safer per trip, amount of time spent, and are in the same ballpark as flight when using the per distance travelled metric.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Per billion journeys is an idiotic way of measuring. Per passenger mile is the correct way.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        That seems extreme, why aren't those measures reasonable? Although if we're using journeys; notice that a daily commute will clock in around 500 journeys a year. So while a Boeing 737 MAX plane flight could be called unsafe, unless someone is continuously flying around the risk is still at levels that people find acceptable. Even for the pilots, who are flying a 737 MAX as their day job, they're still at levels of risk consistent with someone who drives around on a motercycle. I can see why they wouldn't like that and want something to be done, but we're still not at crazy levels here. This is just lower than the standards the airline industry usually works to.

hyperhello 3y ago

They used to tell stories about breadlines in Russia where there was no bread, and I think we’re getting to the point where if we had no bread because capitalism said there would be none, we’d still be waiting in line to preserve the illusion. When the system is a farce that doesn’t reflect its own justification, the problem keeps spreading. The trash doesn’t get picked up because the Trash System is more efficient when it runs lean and mean. But, the trash doesn’t get picked up.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The problem with russia was, that everything was centrally planned, and if that one "central planning location" failed, there was no bread. Even if you have two or three central "locations", one failing means 1/3 less supply and breadlines, since the others can't fill the gap so fast. In capitalism, there were many private companies (bakeries if we continue with the bread analogy), and if one of them fails, noone even notices, since there are so many alternatives. So capitalism is great! ...until amazon buys all the bakeries (well bookstores), and then fscks up something.... Or if walmart outcompetes small stores and then burns down. Or if you have a duopoly on mobile phone markets. Or if a few investment groups buy all the housing..... oh wait...
- p_l 3y ago
  Except central/distributed planning is orthogonal to capitalism itself. Capitalism loves centralization and monopolies, it makes rent extraction easier. But different forces kept competition going, with cartel busting added to the mix to stop capitalism from circling the wagons too much against competition.
- adrianN 3y ago
  I think the problems with the Soviet economy were much too complex to reduce them to „central planning is bad“.
- indigochill 3y ago
  To extend the argument, one of the original military motivations for the design of the internet was resilience of the network (relative to radio, IIRC, where relying on a central broadcaster would be prone to failure if the broadcaster was taken down). If one node goes down, even if it's bad news for that node's consumers, the network itself remains resilient. If we shift that analogy back into the economic discussion, then instead of three places controlling bread production you break up large bakeries (or make running large bakeries untenable) and incentivize a plethora of small bakeries so that when some fail, others can organically fill the gaps. Both G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien were proponents of distributism back in their day, but it's not as well known today.

Mindwipe 3y ago

It's pretty amusing the article rather undercuts it's own point by having an ending that makes no sense as the writer didn't bother to fact check who said the closing quote until after publication. Journalism and the commentariat are in a pretty consistent state of always being so bad there's nowhere left to fall to.

antonvs 3y ago
This article is trying way, way too hard with its prose, and not hard enough with its content. A lot of it is "argument by adjective" with phrases like "small, sad, thwarted" having the responsibility for making the case that the author is trying to make. You could replace all the adjectives with positive ones and change nothing else, and it would make an equally good case for the opposite position.
ttt11199907 3y ago
> I'd also submit that he and his cohort has no idea—no idea how much anger there is about what he and his cohort have done to make every aspect of life flatter and crueler and riskier and worse, and no idea how lucky he is that all that rage is still being pointed in, and not up. This is pretty loud and clear to me!

bsenftner 3y ago

There is a fundamental issue with our civilization and species: we have a scant few actual adults. I mean non-immature, non-self exclusively serving individuals who both care about others and have the capacity to do so beyond their immediate family. Until this issue is recognized en masse, it is going to continue, and as our AI and related automation technologies advance, life is going to significantly degrade for anyone not within the elite economic class.

raziel2p 3y ago
Is this really the core issue? Or is it just that we reward the reckless egoists, so they float to the top?
- bsenftner 3y ago
  Rewarding the reckless egoists is immature, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the larger system, and by not addressing or acknowledging this issue we get our current situation. Knowing and not fixing is immature.
  - raziel2p 3y ago
    The problem is that the rewarding is systematic and can't really be attributed to a single person (or persons), so calling it immature is really just hitting at strawmen.
    - bsenftner 3y ago
      You disregard too quickly. Just because immaturity is systematic does not erase the fact that immature behavior is radically short sighted and a personal failure to navigate reality.
- dirtybirdnj 3y ago
  The problem is that we have allowed "social skills" to be regarded higher than actual intelligence or technical skills. Social violence is not only tolerated, but encouraged and celebrated. This in my opinion is the most successful terrorist action of our modern era. There was no "cold war" it happened under our noses and we are all living in socially nuclear fallout every day. By allowing the bullshit to float to the top we have excluded any intelligence from the decision making process. Basically we're almost to the point where the computers start firing everyone in Idiocracy.

ycdxvjp 3y ago

Finance innovation has outpaced technical and creative innovation. So most companies are dominated by financial engineering. Any firm with offices located across the world are making cash just moving it around faster than you can make it with a product. And profitably. Taking advantage of exchange rates, interest rates, tax rates, subsidy, tariff differences etc etc is a more sophisticated process these days than anything you see in a factory.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago

The "Ugh, Capitalism"[0] articles always seem to assume that capitalism started in the last 20 years or so. Which is obviously false. If the company lost its culture of safety that's definitely bad, but of course that culture developed under capitalism in the first place. How does a constant factor (capitalism) explain a change? The finance industry is a much larger part of the US economy than it has been in the past [1], which does seem like a problem and likely the cause of many of these issues. I'm not sure about the right solution, but it's definitely not to end capitalism. [0] https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism [1] https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-the-u-s-economy-harms-workers-and-their-families-threatening-a-strong-recovery/ https://equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-t..., Figure 1

raziel2p 3y ago
A simple answer may be that capitalism used to be more regulated than before. Not in all areas/industries, but overall - and if not in theory, at least in practice. Maybe the art of lobbyism, legal work, and public relations has gotten more advanced, for example, or company profits have become large enough that they can blatantly break laws and just pay the fine.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jpadkins 3y ago
  The federal register (sum of all US federal regulations) is orders of magnitudes larger than it was 40 years ago. I don't think a quantity argument is interesting (there is definitely more regulations). Possibly there is a quality argument to made: Due to the regulator capture process (large corporations have seized control of the federal government), the effectiveness of regulations have decreased a lot while the volume has increased. This also serves as a barrier to entry for competition, while also profits for compliance.
  - raziel2p 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

MOLOCH -> "It is, in its way, a statement of purpose: not just the assurance that every person, place, and thing is now or will become food for its rightful devourers, but that those doing the eating also think of it as junk food." Funny, in history, people fed children to Moloch. Now Moloch has become a symbol of capitalism. And now, in the analogy, people are junk food. Because life is cheap, people aren't worth enough to spend money on their safety.

baq 3y ago
> people aren't worth enough to spend money on their safety. this is a very nice way of saying that regulators are necessary to have a fair market. (but definitely not sufficient!)

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Maximize shareholder value, they said… (as well as my quarterly bonus - if it goes wrong, there’s always my golden parachute ;)

sudden_dystopia 3y ago

How can it be both a duopoly and a free market?

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Good Question. Maybe what is 'good for business' would be to split some of them up, to create a market where competition exists. And stop approving mergers that reduce competition -> see Ticketmaster