And Asia is mostly peaceful right now while war has returned to Europe on a scale not seen in 50 years. Those crazy Chinese, eh? Massive failure of their foreign policy establishment. Total inability to engage with Russia.
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
And effectively it did: many people are kept in their place by the combined pressure points of debt and employment to stay (barely) afloat.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.
For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.
> if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves
Not at all. The fact that we have practically zero first-hand accounts from the slaves of antiquity speaks volumes to their treatment. My point is on scale (and with that, the institution's effect on the societies that hosted it).
That’s partly true, but it’s also the case that medieval Europe didn’t have any convenient sources of slaves. Conquests had dried up, Europe was effectively surrounded by stronger neighbors, and instead of being able to take their neighbors as slaves many of their neighbors were taking Europeans as slaves.
That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast.
and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.
> There was a time when people wanted to dig tunnels with nukes
The article seems to be about mining rather than tunnelling.
And the issue with the idea being? We also dig using explosives, there isn't an in-principle problem. Reading the wiki article it looks like the yields were excessive, but at the end of the day mining involves the use of things that go boom. It is easy to imagine small nukes having a place in the industry.
See the 'rationale' section of the article. The point of it was to rebrand nuclear weapons as multi-use 'peaceful' tools and drive acceptance for nuclear weapons programs. Which was a pretty standard tactic of military projects during the cold war.
> ...was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist...
That covers everyone. Especially and including the rationalists. Part of being highly intelligent is being a bit weird because the habits and beliefs of ordinary people are those you'd expect of people with ordinary intelligence.
Anyone involved in small-time investing should be considering that they aren't rational when setting their strategy. Larger investment houses do what they can but even then every so often will suffer from group-think episodes.
> ... the important thing isn't the exact language but the intent behind the question ...
If we're not going to assume the input state is known then we definitely can't say what the intent behind the question is - for many engineering applications the compiler is deterministic. Debian has the whole reproducible builds thing going which has been a triumph of pragmatic engineering on a remarkable scale. And suggests that, pragmatically, compilers may be deterministic.
No, it is censorship. IP protection would be punishing the pirates after they do something illegal. I think what you're sensing is that it is censorship in support of intellectual property rather than censorship aiming at political repression.
There's something similar in RealityVoid's comment where it is identified that EU law promotes censorship, but that is discounted because the understanding is it in aid of privacy rather than politically motivated. Although given Europe's rich history of sliding into authoritarianism that does seem like an optimistic take on where the European elite are heading. A part of political censorship is making it hard for people to realise that popular political viewpoints are being censored and providing cover by claiming the censorship is for some good cause would be pretty routine.
> It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that.
Blatant lies have to be legal. Firstly because it isn't philosophically possible to tell if someone is lying, it can only ever be strongly suspected. Secondly because it is a bog-standard authoritarian tactic to accuse someone of telling a blatant lie and shut them down for challenging the authoritarians.
Banning "blatant lies" is pretty much a textbook tell that somewhere is in political trouble and descending into either a bad case of group-think in the political community or authoritarianism. The belief that it is even possible to ban blatant lies is, if it has taken root, itself a lie people tell themselves when they can't handle the fact that some of the things they believe and know are true, aren't.
> if some women absolutely can't find something in their size from a specific brand, that makes the brand even more exclusive, like it being "for fit people only"
The elephants in the room from the raw data is it is very clear some brands do not want average middle aged women wearing their products. Anthropology seems to be the most clear about this in that they have a literal gap between their standard and plus-sized ranges that excludes the adult median woman.
Now some brands might do that out of snobishness, but I expect there is a feedback loop here:
1) Young, attractive women want to make fashion choices that signal they are young, attractive women.
2) They buy from fashion lines that don't fit average adult women.
3) Average adult women detect that the fashionable choice is these brands and feel left out, because a fair number of them would also like to be young and attractive again. And a small but significant fraction feel really left out if some clothing brand calls them a size 20 waist / fat / shaped like a rectangle. Clothing brands detect this in their customer studies and respond appropriately.
4) People who just want clothes buy from H&M or wherever and don't write articles about how hard it is to fit clothes.
"Women" isn't really a homogeneous category when it comes to clothing, there is ongoing fierce competition between lots of different sub-groups of the female population to signal lots of different things. Men have it a bit easier because there is basically a 4-quadrant choice between upper & lower class, formal & casual with a lot of intricacy for people who care a lot about what brand of black leather shoe they own. Young girls are closer to men in that they aren't really trying to signal anything at that age, so clothing fits are a lot easier to manage.
By destandardising sizes. It isn't that hard to standardise if an industry thinks it'll help them; the article suggests there is already a relevant standards body. These companies are probably doing it for a reason. My guess would be maybe someone doesn't want to be an XXL 18 at J Crew so they can go to Reformation where they are more of a Regular 14.
> Signal what?
Age, health and status for women. Group membership too although that is generally to a lesser extent.
> I can understand age. But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
Yeah, but generally not with fashion. Male fashion tends not to go to the same sort of lengths to showcase legs/torsos/arms/chest that women's fashion does. For men if they want to signal status they tend to buy a car they can't afford or something.
And male health is one of those areas where it is very complicated. A fat, balding man who smells funny can make up for that with a high income. A fat balding woman who smells funny might be able to do the same thing but I can't help feel sceptical at the idea.
Anyway, long story short, the people who aren't using fashion as signalling can just buy a shirt that fits and move on. It's a shirt. They aren't complicated.
There's also the fact that most men aren't very healthy - you'll often see very fit men wearing "revealing" and tight-fitting clothes that show off their muscles etc, whereas everyone else wears less revealing clothes because whatever they may reveal isn't very flattering.
The same is true for most women of course but a lot of them seem to wear revealing clothing regardless of how flattering it actually is.
People with bad health, low status being able to wear the same clothes as young women with good health and status removes the signalling benefit of those clothes.
> But wouldn't everyone want to signal good health and high status?
The thing with people is that they are all different. There are a lot of people who don't want to be of high status or signal it. There's lots of people who don't really care for health and value other things higher.
Some want to carry X sportswear with prominent branding, others take pride in high-price tag items without any explicit branding.
The "I identify with this athlete", "I identify with this musician", "I dgaf what you think of me" groups probably don't intersect much, with brands and offering catering to these and multiple others...?
If you are in taller than 95% for men, and reasonably fit, you might need a bigger waistline (think 36 or more), which is still the same length for pants (up to 34) with your socks showing even when standing (depending on your individual proportions), but much wider around hips and legs than you need. I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Some brands will carry slim and extra long trousers, but if I find a model that fits (not all models from the same brand do), I immediatelly buy a few. Otherwise, I try to get tailored stuff, but that's slow and annoying.
For shirts, it's even worse: unless you can find an extra long version, you are going to be wearing a sail and your underpants/ass will pop out when you sit down. But these are easier to get sewed for you as you can just have a single tailor make many of them as needed.
So it's probably easier for median men, but sizes scale exactly the same without regard to actual proportions for simply bigger people.
> I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Not really, as a quite short guy, many shops will offer me to have the clothes fitted, and if not it's pretty trivial to fit them myself. Maybe on the most extreme end of short it's more of an issue, but in general I suspect shortening pants and shirts is signficantly easier than lengthening them.
I'm a 5'5", 110lbs man. I shop at the teens section and get larges. I may not get the trendiest looks, but I get cheaper clothes that fits and looks good on me!
I also tried Stitch Fix, they had a surprising amount of stuff that could fit me (both fashionably and size wise), albeit not as cheap as kids' clothes.
I might grab something like sweatpants from kids section, but for normal clothes I generally prefer a bit more quality. I work remotely so a good pair of pants can last me more than half a decade, so I don't mind buying quality and having it fitted. But yeah, I feel as a short guy there's actually more than plenty of options for us, I never felt that clothes were an issue. Well, there was a shop once that put the smallest sizes on the highest shelf, I don't know if they thought it was funny, but I didn't go back.
That's fair. I work remotely as well and to be honest I just cycle through the same two pants I got from Stitch Fix and a few collared shirts, and some concert merch for more casual outings.
I was speaking more to waistline — I have a 28 inch waist and the smallest I usually find is like 30 or more, so even a belt can't fix that.
Thanks both for the perspective: yeah, even if simply scaled down proportionally, you are left with too long garments that you can fold/shorten, so a much better situation than tall men who can end up looking like cartoon caricatures if dressed with widely available garments.
And don't get me wrong, tall girls (my sister is 6'1") have it even worse.
It is also worth noting that US management is notoriously bad at the actual management. Toyota v. US car manufacturers did not look like a fair fight when Deming was in the ascendant, and it is hard to tell given the scales involved but it looks a lot like the US has been outmanoeuvred in all aspects of industry by the Asians.
US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.
The thing is, the Toyota methods relies on people on every level to work to improve processes. If you're an employee and know you'll be there 10 years down the line or even until you retire, you have an incentive to improve said processes.
Now check most Western companies: since the 70 / 80, everything is about reducing headcount. Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream. So why would an employee try to improve things for the company when they know there is no future for them there? Better improve their own career and future prospect. So yeah, things like Kaizen are doomed to fail until things change.
> Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream
You are missing something here imo, very few companies actually increase pay (or to be more clear, show a clear way to get there) enough to make it attractive enough to stay there for long periods of time.
From my experience here in Germany the people staying at companies for a long time are those who don't focus on their career.
This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:
- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)
- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)
- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)
Where does someone like Rover fit in to your matrix?
If I can respectfully recommend. If you can go have a read of "We sell our time no more" by Paul Stewart.
Tory governance and fiscal policies had all the responsibility for Leyland, Hillman and more importantly Rover.
I have to admit it's not that deeply researched. That book sounds interesting.
For Rover in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Venture_Holdings stands out. Similar to Maplin and Toys R Us, an example of the owner-management taking a large amount of cash out of a business that was declining.
What's particularly interesting here is that one of the success cases (BMW era Mini) was built on a Rover design. They picked it up and ran with it - basically gutted the electrics and power-train to match their existing systems and supply chains - but it was already in flight when BMW came on.
That factory was fascinating to work in, looking back on it I saw a lot of Deming-compatible stuff going on that I wasn't equipped to recognise at the time. There was strong German representation in factory management, lots of interaction with people coming and going from Munich all the time. But the production line staff had a large agency contingent so it didn't have the "job for life" ethos that the Toyota Way would say is essential.
That's too arbitrary, and you say that as if a billion dollars is a lot of money.
It's not.
There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!
It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.
Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.
An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.
I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"
You write:
> The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".
We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.
We might presume that was the goal, yet it wasn't explicitly stated. And many have a goal of generic wealth redistribution, and will inject such into any conversation about large companies.
One might note the unrestrained concern about fluid capital acquisition, in the post I replied to. It's not having billions in infrastructure that was cited, nor having a large number of employees, both metrics of size, but instead having fluid, unused capital.
If we wish to constrain upon size, there needs to be nuance, conjoined with the specific industry, and even sub-industry. Some capital equipment costs can be enormous. Should we work to prevent financing such via stored profit? Should we work to force companies to finance, then pay off, just to feed the banks, rather than store and then spend?
Should we tax so that "big ideas" may never occur?
I think far more would be gained by ensuring taxation just stays fair between smaller and larger company structures. There's a lot of book-keeping that can be done as a large company, to hide profits, that cannot be done when you're a small mom and pop.
Tax is not only that, it's a way of incentivizing growth in the "correct" areas (areas that build long-term value), and correcting inevitable distortions in the market. One of the problems with money is that it's both extremely important for some people (on the edge of poverty) and a complete plaything for others (investor class).
So? People are starving to death in the US and so many are homeless. Because a bunch of Bay Area retirees are millionaires doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wealth tax them. For every dollar over median wealth they should face a 10% wealth tax so that we can fund universal healthcare. There are many studies that show healthcare is more important than wealthcare.
> For every dollar over median wealth they should face a 10% wealth tax so that we can fund universal healthcare.
A ten percent wealth tax would put most investment returns into the red. Savings and investment would plummet. Capital would flee the US, interest rates would skyrocket, the US dollar would become worthless, the housing market would collapse. You wouldn’t be able to fund roads, let alone universal healthcare.
I don't think the problems of US corporations are due to being over-capitalized, they're all to do with interactions with the political and media sphere plus unnecessary conflict with the staff.
If no corporation is allowed more than 1 million dollars (10 years of median income) then 10 average people can counter a single corporation. That’s a good ratio.
It's also impossible to have a larger business than a restaurant, or almost any kind of technological or manufacturing industry. The limited liability corporation has existed for hundreds of years for a very good reason.
Heck, even things like shipping, the oldest insured industry, become impossible. Corporations used to have minimum capital requirements that were roughly in the region of a year's average income. https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/medi...
("corporation has too much money" and "individual has too much money" are different problems; Elon Musk is a problem in the way that Apple isn't)
And has life gotten better in those years? These days Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai are stealing all of our work. Back in the day, a father could take his kids on a grand tour of Europe and discuss philosophy in the cafes of Vienna all on a single income.
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
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