Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.
Everybody eventually does get voted out in a democracy, including those who have done well. It's not a consequence but a natural process of the system.
Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.
Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.
So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".
An ugly truth is that corporations are built on a feudal structure (kings, lords, barons, earls, etc.) that is inherently autocratic and disguises autocratic action as efficient leadership. I like to think that cooperative business structures are less vulnerable to autocratic corruption, but they need to be on guard, watching out for people willing to exploit others to gain more power and try to keep them from finding their way onto paths to power.
Hierarchy is the default because it is so simple. Designing alternative structures for responsibility raises lots of unexpected complexity. A good example of this is the Benefit Corporation idea which is gaining support and polish over time, but still involves considerable legal challenges. Being answerable to stakeholders and employee owned is very unlike answering to stockholders who own everything.
1) Most businesses in capitalism are owned by investors, not by workers. They are not democracies, not even in communism where they are supposedly owned by everyone.
2) Cooperatives are what you are looking for. Why aren't there more of them? No founder ever wants to share the initial investment. Is it a universal human weakness? I don't know. Why aren't the very few that exist growing to be more successful than a small local niche thing? Probably because democracies work best for small groups and progresively degrade as the number of people increase.
3) It works as indended. The people that are (temporarily) interested in the success of the organization, and with the power to change it if it looks like it's failing, are not interested in long-term success. As long as company's stock can be sold, only short term profits matter.
Owners of family businesses are more likely to listen to low level employees, but they're still autoritarian.
They do. How many times do people on HN say "my manager won't let me write tests"? That's not true, 99% of the time they could just write tests and their manager wouldn't block it, but they ask for specific time blocked out to write tests and that's what gets denied. They're trying to push the responsibility for testing off to the manager.
In a K-shaped economy a business will not succeed by making quality goods at reasonable prices. Who are the customers for that? The middle class no longer exists.
Every successful business will do one of two things. Some will make ludicrous luxury goods at preposterous prices for customers that are not price conscious. Others will make mass produced garbage at insanely low margins in vast quantities.
The shortage is only the strategy in the sense that a large part of luxury goods is status. If you have a luxury product, you have to make it into a status symbol to get sales. Limited availability increases desirability. If something is too popular, wealthy people don’t want it anymore at any price.
The only solution is to end wealth inequality and restore the middle class. Tax the rich.
In Germany you can use a "Balkonkraftwerk" that just plugs into any outlet and contributes up to 800W. You can also hook up solar panels to it up to 2000W (makes most sense with batteries). No need for the landlord to agree.
According to the article, its not like they inject direct ads in the article in markdown. But what's interesting is that they are serving content that is irrelevant to the article (in the article its the best inventions page) and it seems optimized to leave a good impression on LLM for an entity (Ally Bank in this case). They only serve that Ally Bank content on the LLM version of the page and don't mention it at all on their human page.
Maybe they are banking on LLMs including it in their training data while scrapping or something like that. It does track impressions so they are definitely up to something.
If it’s not open source and self-hostable, it’s a non-starter. Not switching to another closed platform just for it to die. I’m tired of switching. Whatever I switch to next must be able to last the rest of my life expectancy.
In a K shaped economy, there is no success in making quality goods at reasonable prices. There’s no middle class to buy them. You can make luxury goods for wealthy customers who do not care about price, or you can make absolute garbage to sell to the masses in bulk.
If you want to bring back quality goods and services, end wealth inequality. Tax the rich.
FWIW, I was with you until the "Tax the rich" bit.
Considering how many people the average "rich" person employs, they are generating plenty of tax revenue.
Not quite sure how you got that out of my comment, but no.
In the US at least, those classified as poor have a very low tax burden, in many cases they pay $0, or close to $0 in federal taxes after standard deductions.
US taxes are wildly regressive. Last time Elon's taxes came up, I calculated that he pays taxes at about 1% the rate that I do (and most of us here do). Crazy!
I think "Tax the rich" is the wrong slogan. What we need is to incentivize sharing the progress we are making in terms of productivity widely instead of all the benefits going to a few. For example some people are talking about giving company shares to all workers. This would align the incentives for all workers in the company to do better and then benefiting instead of just the top few percent.
I wonder if this could be achieved by changing the tax code.
The moment tax policy goes into a wonky side alley it can be bought and paid for. Frontal assault is the only strategy that can possibly work for this one.
Geez, the rich already take credit for the things their employees do...and now you want to give them credit for the taxes their employees paid too! Wild!
Yep, and you see a similar thing with government spending and presumption of waste.
Sure, government spending can be wasteful. But it's also generally going into the economy. It's buying stuff from companies who use the revenue to pay their employees and supply chains. It's paying government employees who spend their pay on places to live, food to eat, entertainment, etc. Some folks act like that money disappears. Waste or not, governments aren't generally hoarding cash, they're spending it.
I only encountered this brand when trying to buy batteries for old cameras. It would be a shame if some of those less common varieties were no longer available.
I find it regularly when buying car batteries (the regular 12V ones), and in fact I bought one for a friend just a couple weeks ago.
They're kinda popular at least around Europe.
edit: I just remembered when I worked on TV production some years ago, and they bought big boxes of the "Industrial" variety of AA cells for the wireless mics and in ears.
reply