lkrubner

67 ms·

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Simple math says a winning politician must advocate for unpopular policies(demodexio.substack.com)
2 points by lkrubner 5y ago|1 comments
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by lkrubner 5y ago
" A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose " You make it sound like that is a long time. In Britain, the Fixed-term P
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by lkrubner 5y ago
" the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely " That does not follow at all. The benefits of democracy have been well-documented -- as well documented as the fact that the voters don't understa
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by lkrubner 5y ago
The advice I give to startup CEOs, regarding their business, is exactly the same advice that I would give to every citizen regarding their government: " Take, for instance, money. A small team of highly ethical individuals can generall
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by lkrubner 5y ago
If legislators need long terms to provide good government, but they have unfair advantages at re-election, then the solution would be very long terms that are also single term. Perhaps a legislator is elected for 18 years (the amount of tim
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by lkrubner 5y ago
Designing a new architecture should also be a goal, otherwise we will end up in that limbo where the old system has been destroyed but the new system has not yet been built. From what I've read in history books, such transitions are un
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by lkrubner 5y ago
Of course, it would be possible to solve this particular problem (multi-issue voting lacking a 51% equilibrium) if voters had one vote for every issue. Not that there is any way to know how many issues a voter might regard as important, but
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by lkrubner 5y ago
The risk of losing power could potentially happen every month, if you have elections every month. Electing 3 people a month for 15 years would give a legislature of 540 people, the size of the combined houses of the USA Congress and close i
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by lkrubner 5y ago
The research on this has built up over the last 120 years and Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels survey most of that, starting with the critics of Progressive Era reforms, and moving up to modern studies of situations where the publi
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by lkrubner 5y ago
If we want good government, then we need civil servants who are willing to work their whole careers in government. If we want good military officers then we need people who will devote their whole life to the military. If we want good park
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by lkrubner 5y ago
" we get government even more detached from the popular will " Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not
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by lkrubner 5y ago
I think I’d get bored just working 10 hours a week. I’m drawn to ambitious adventures. I like working on insanely bold ideas. But because of this I’ve ended up at a few deeply dysfunctional startups. I wrote about one, a spectacular failure
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by lkrubner 5y ago
True, though the ratio of 15 to 45 is better than the ratio of 2 to 45. I'm assuming there is some law of diminishing returns here, that hasn't set in at 2 or 4 years, but has set in by 15 years. In other words, a politician who h
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by lkrubner 5y ago
That's just it though, once we start considering how to fix one issue, we realize that a particular design decision is part of a wider architecture, and it's impossible to change the one design decision without undermining the who
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by lkrubner 5y ago
I'd ask you to consider the possibility that it doesn't matter how long an individual serves, what does matter is whether that person's party can lose power. It's an argument explored by Achen and Bartels, and I wrote ab
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by lkrubner 5y ago
Which could be a good thing. See the book "10% Less Democracy": https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...
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by lkrubner 5y ago
Term limits shift power away from the representatives that the public has democratically chosen and instead empowers those bureaucrats who serve in government for 40 or 50 years. Please see: "Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do No
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by lkrubner 5y ago
If you've been CTO for 8 years, there is a good chance that it's time for you to delegate more of the technical work to some team leads, while you focus on the wider needs of the company. Depending on how large the company is, you
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by lkrubner 5y ago
The wages for software developers were basically stagnant from 2001 to about 2014 or 2015. The big surge in pay is relatively recent. While this is a complex subject, I have written about a few examples, and can offer more. But take this as
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by lkrubner 5y ago
" What gives is that the Fed isn't printing money and lacks the authority to do so. " The Feds only job is to oversee the creation of new money. It was given that power by Congress in 1913: https://en.wikipedia.org
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by lkrubner 5y ago
This is related to an issue I've studied a lot and recently written about. In "Don't make a fetish of having a flat organization" I try to address this in the context of business, making clear that a well-designed bureau
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by lkrubner 5y ago
DuckDuckGo relies on results from Bing, so it is possibly Bing that has gone downhill.
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by lkrubner 5y ago
It's important to balance this analysis with the fact that the human population of the Earth, in absolute terms, grew more during the last 60 years than at any other time in history. Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on th
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by lkrubner 5y ago
Another pattern I've seen is the software developer who is promoted to high level manager, but they remain focused on the work being done by the software developers. On this front they are very good: mentoring, teaching, removing obsta
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Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm(demodexio.substack.com)
1 points by lkrubner 5y ago|0 comments
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by lkrubner 5y ago
I addressed this issue directly on page 151 of How To Destroy A Tech Startup. I've just posted some photos of 151/152, if you'd like to read that: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/psychopaths-versus-good-
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by lkrubner 5y ago
The use of the anger was very manipulative. I find it interesting that it was then the beginning of a long partnership. They worked together at several startups for the next few years. I'm not clear that anger was the only way to estab
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by lkrubner 5y ago
I've known some leaders who feel that yelling at employees can get better performance out of them. Most of the time, I think this is the wrong way to proceed, but I admit, I've seen cases where the strategic use of anger did seem
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by lkrubner 5y ago
" Today I own one drill press as a capital for my manufacturing business. Tomorrow the .gov prints 1 quadrillion dollars. Tomorrow drill presses aren't any harder to come by nor harder to make nor any more or less useful for indus
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by lkrubner 5y ago
"buying less and less real assets" What is a real asset? If by "real" you mean "adjusted for inflation" then, again, you are double counting the inflation. If by "real" you mean "an object with a

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