5 ms·

Atlas Shrugged (2024)

37 points by mnky9800n 11mo ago

readthenotes1 11mo ago
I was wondering why HP was buying Compaq and then I read that fiorina was getting a 10% sales commission for making the deal.
- WhitneyLand 11mo ago
  Where did you read that? It’s not true. - Originally she would have got 8 mil if the transaction closed - She had to give that up due to bad press - 10% would have been 2.5B so no way was that ever happening - Her big score was the golden parachute tied to leaving the company. You could say the merger accelerated her exit indirectly, but there was no commission on the deal.
  - BergAndCo 11mo ago
    "was getting" doesn't necessarily imply that she got away with it; "got" implies that.
  - readthenotes1 11mo ago
    I must have read it in the bad press! I'm glad you missed her commission, sorry she got her golden parachute. It should have been made of lead
mnky9800n 11mo ago
How Hewlett Packard destroyed its empire by listening to consultants
- PaulHoule 11mo ago
  I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal. The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it. Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here. The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc. HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive. Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call? [1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs? [2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing [3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared
  - gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
    Jensen... It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!
wduquette 11mo ago
I watched this happen from the outside. I bought a Laserjet IV when it was first released; by the time it started to fail, many years later, USB had killed the older printer interfaces. It was a workhorse. I wouldn’t even look at an HP printer today.
- don-code 11mo ago
  I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of. I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through. I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.
  - i80and 11mo ago
    Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering. We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.
- PaulHoule 11mo ago
  I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today. Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low. I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.
thunderbong 11mo ago
There's a typo in the first line - the author's name should be 'Ayn Rand', not 'Ann Rand'
- Jordan_Pelt 11mo ago
  And the title of the book is "The Fountainhead," not "The Fountain Head."
  - jimnotgym 11mo ago
    And that reduces the length of the title by about 1/10. Something the rest of the book could have benefitted from as well.
    - the_wolo 11mo ago
      Not only 1/10 though. That book's pretty much just a very painful to read piece of propaganda.
      - nopechief 11mo ago
        [dead]
      - yet23 11mo ago
        What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.
        jimnotgym 11mo ago
        A while since I read it, but it hides it's core ideas in an absurd story that goes on rather too long.
        the_wolo 11mo ago
        You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work". My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda. What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners. So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet. In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.
cratermoon 11mo ago
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  Which one is which?
  - UncleSlacky 11mo ago
    "A is sometimes F"
    - markus_zhang 11mo ago
      OK me trying to be funny failed /s
- ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
  ...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals). If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC [•] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA
- aeternum 11mo ago
  I believed this quote when I first read it. I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
  - delichon 11mo ago
DonHopkins 11mo ago
[flagged]
- nopechief 11mo ago
  [dead]
- tt24 11mo ago
  This doesn’t add much to the discussion and is closer to something I’d expect to see on Reddit than here. Dang can we take a look at this one please? Thank you!
airstrike 11mo ago
feels like this really needs a subtitle like "An insider's view of HP's fall from grace" or something to that effect
- dpkirchner 11mo ago
  And a sub subtitle "I didn't read the book, btw".
GMoromisato 11mo ago
I'm sympathetic to the thesis, but I wish there were more details. For example, what could HP have done differently? Buying Compaq seems like "trying to win" to me--it was trying to expand its PC market share. Was that the wrong acquisition? What would have been better instead? Fundamentally, however, we know that the markets HP was in were not growth markets: PCs, printers, enterprise consulting, etc. The growth markets at the time were phones (Apple), software (Microsoft), and cloud services (Amazon, Google, etc.) Could HP have succeeded in any of those businesses?
- compsciphd 11mo ago
  they bought palm. people were pretty happy with webos/hp touchpad. so there was at least some desire to within hp to go into that market. instead they cut bait quickly. sold off WebOS to LG and that was it.
efortis 11mo ago
> Playing to win versus playing not to lose I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels. For example, - We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices. - Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.
Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care. It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd. Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3
- tt24 11mo ago
  > Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care. There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - DangitBobby 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tt24 11mo ago
      This comment doesn’t make any point that I haven’t already addressed in my reply to the parent comment. I’d recommend reading it a little more carefully before downvoting.
      - Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
        While we disagree on Rands work, I do respect a reasoned opinion. I agree down-voting just makes people emotional, and doesn't add anything. Personally, I saw Rands writing as lazy thinly veiled fictional despotism, and targeted peoples need for simple answers in a chaotic world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero This doesn't mean both perspectives can't seem true =3
macintux 11mo ago
> HP’s first product was an audio oscillator... That reminded me that BBN started in acoustics. Any other significant tech companies get started in audio engineering?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 11mo ago
I’m not sure there could be something less like the “shrug” in the book and this comparison to corporate decline. It’s an inversion of quite a bit that was central to the theme. The shrug in the book was people turning their back, walking away— people who thought their talents were either wasted or unequally compensated in some way, or footing an unfair portion of things, and the “shrug” was them walking away. A fundamental individual, not collective and corporate act. The central character felt exploited by the company he worked for. The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.
- roxolotl 11mo ago
  You just described a union. One of the things that’s wild to me about the book is that it’s pushed as a proponent of individualism and libertarianism but Gault’s Gulch is just the wealthy unionizing. There’s nothing individualistic about it. If just John Galt had walked away nothing would have happened.
  - littlestymaar 11mo ago
    The French translator didn't miss the contradiction and as such in the translated title is «La grève» (“the strike”).
- CalChris 11mo ago
  > The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals. So you’re saying Rand wouldn’t have been happy with Citizens United. You may want to inform her acolytes like Clarence Thomas.
teekert 11mo ago
If you’re looking for a link to Atlas Shrugged, there isn’t any, except for the title… and the interpretation of the sentence “Atlas Shrugged” in this piece has nothing to do with the novel.
- romanhn 11mo ago
  By an author who hadn't read the book, no less...
geophile 11mo ago
This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name. https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-1960 https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-... I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote: Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?” OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future." OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose". Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard. Look at this quote from the letter: I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ... why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society .... You can look around and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to give a service—generally to do something which is of value. I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure. And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership. To me, the saddest part of the essay is this: In the last few years more and more business people have begun to recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their true objective. (This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.

37 points by mnky9800n 11mo ago

I was wondering why HP was buying Compaq and then I read that fiorina was getting a 10% sales commission for making the deal.

WhitneyLand 11mo ago
Where did you read that? It’s not true. - Originally she would have got 8 mil if the transaction closed - She had to give that up due to bad press - 10% would have been 2.5B so no way was that ever happening - Her big score was the golden parachute tied to leaving the company. You could say the merger accelerated her exit indirectly, but there was no commission on the deal.
- BergAndCo 11mo ago
  "was getting" doesn't necessarily imply that she got away with it; "got" implies that.
- readthenotes1 11mo ago
  I must have read it in the bad press! I'm glad you missed her commission, sorry she got her golden parachute. It should have been made of lead

mnky9800n 11mo ago

How Hewlett Packard destroyed its empire by listening to consultants

PaulHoule 11mo ago
I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal. The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it. Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here. The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc. HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive. Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call? [1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs? [2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing [3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared
- gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
  Jensen... It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!

wduquette 11mo ago

I watched this happen from the outside. I bought a Laserjet IV when it was first released; by the time it started to fail, many years later, USB had killed the older printer interfaces. It was a workhorse. I wouldn’t even look at an HP printer today.

don-code 11mo ago
I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of. I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through. I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.
- i80and 11mo ago
  Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering. We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.
PaulHoule 11mo ago
I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today. Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low. I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.

thunderbong 11mo ago

There's a typo in the first line - the author's name should be 'Ayn Rand', not 'Ann Rand'

Jordan_Pelt 11mo ago
And the title of the book is "The Fountainhead," not "The Fountain Head."
- jimnotgym 11mo ago
  And that reduces the length of the title by about 1/10. Something the rest of the book could have benefitted from as well.
  - the_wolo 11mo ago
    Not only 1/10 though. That book's pretty much just a very painful to read piece of propaganda.
    - nopechief 11mo ago
      [dead]
    - yet23 11mo ago
      What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.
      - jimnotgym 11mo ago
        A while since I read it, but it hides it's core ideas in an absurd story that goes on rather too long.
      - the_wolo 11mo ago
        You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work". My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda. What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners. So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet. In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.

cratermoon 11mo ago

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers

markus_zhang 11mo ago
Which one is which?
- UncleSlacky 11mo ago
  "A is sometimes F"
  - markus_zhang 11mo ago
    OK me trying to be funny failed /s
ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals). If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC [•] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA
aeternum 11mo ago
I believed this quote when I first read it. I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
- delichon 11mo ago

DonHopkins 11mo ago

[flagged]

nopechief 11mo ago
[dead]
tt24 11mo ago
This doesn’t add much to the discussion and is closer to something I’d expect to see on Reddit than here. Dang can we take a look at this one please? Thank you!

airstrike 11mo ago

feels like this really needs a subtitle like "An insider's view of HP's fall from grace" or something to that effect

dpkirchner 11mo ago
And a sub subtitle "I didn't read the book, btw".

GMoromisato 11mo ago

I'm sympathetic to the thesis, but I wish there were more details. For example, what could HP have done differently? Buying Compaq seems like "trying to win" to me--it was trying to expand its PC market share. Was that the wrong acquisition? What would have been better instead? Fundamentally, however, we know that the markets HP was in were not growth markets: PCs, printers, enterprise consulting, etc. The growth markets at the time were phones (Apple), software (Microsoft), and cloud services (Amazon, Google, etc.) Could HP have succeeded in any of those businesses?

compsciphd 11mo ago
they bought palm. people were pretty happy with webos/hp touchpad. so there was at least some desire to within hp to go into that market. instead they cut bait quickly. sold off WebOS to LG and that was it.

efortis 11mo ago

> Playing to win versus playing not to lose I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels. For example, - We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices. - Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.

Joel_Mckay 11mo ago

Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care. It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd. Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3

tt24 11mo ago
> Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care. There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- DangitBobby 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tt24 11mo ago
    This comment doesn’t make any point that I haven’t already addressed in my reply to the parent comment. I’d recommend reading it a little more carefully before downvoting.
    - Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
      While we disagree on Rands work, I do respect a reasoned opinion. I agree down-voting just makes people emotional, and doesn't add anything. Personally, I saw Rands writing as lazy thinly veiled fictional despotism, and targeted peoples need for simple answers in a chaotic world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero This doesn't mean both perspectives can't seem true =3

macintux 11mo ago

> HP’s first product was an audio oscillator... That reminded me that BBN started in acoustics. Any other significant tech companies get started in audio engineering?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

ineedasername 11mo ago

I’m not sure there could be something less like the “shrug” in the book and this comparison to corporate decline. It’s an inversion of quite a bit that was central to the theme. The shrug in the book was people turning their back, walking away— people who thought their talents were either wasted or unequally compensated in some way, or footing an unfair portion of things, and the “shrug” was them walking away. A fundamental individual, not collective and corporate act. The central character felt exploited by the company he worked for. The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.

roxolotl 11mo ago
You just described a union. One of the things that’s wild to me about the book is that it’s pushed as a proponent of individualism and libertarianism but Gault’s Gulch is just the wealthy unionizing. There’s nothing individualistic about it. If just John Galt had walked away nothing would have happened.
- littlestymaar 11mo ago
  The French translator didn't miss the contradiction and as such in the translated title is «La grève» (“the strike”).
CalChris 11mo ago
> The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals. So you’re saying Rand wouldn’t have been happy with Citizens United. You may want to inform her acolytes like Clarence Thomas.

teekert 11mo ago

If you’re looking for a link to Atlas Shrugged, there isn’t any, except for the title… and the interpretation of the sentence “Atlas Shrugged” in this piece has nothing to do with the novel.

romanhn 11mo ago
By an author who hadn't read the book, no less...

geophile 11mo ago

This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name. https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-1960 https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-... I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote: Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?” OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future." OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose". Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard. Look at this quote from the letter: I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ... why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society .... You can look around and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to give a service—generally to do something which is of value. I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure. And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership. To me, the saddest part of the essay is this: In the last few years more and more business people have begun to recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their true objective. (This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.