Iteration speed is sometimes an effective substitute for deep product insight. If you are a Steve Jobs you can go off and spend a few years building something in secret because you know people are going to love it when you show it to them. For everyone else, being able to ship stuff quickly offers a chance to maximize the number of spaghetti strands they can throw at the wall until they find one that sticks.
If you are paying people on a schedule you need to have at least a rough understanding of what they can produce on a schedule. The best illustration of this is client work that is paid "by the job" -- you need to understand what you can produce to have any idea how to bid.
The numbers I used were inflation-adjusted. I gave total income because that's what the parent comment referenced, but per capita income has grown too, although not as much (US population is up 60%, compared to total income growth for this group of 223%). Also, "please familiarize yourself" is a slightly rude way of putting it.
No, when businesses were owned primarily by single individuals, their priorities were much more aligned with the goals of a single individual. The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community, influence over politics, etc. and made choices that today’s publicly traded companies would and do not.
> The owners cared not only about profits but respect in the community
I think you need to read a little more history. People haven't changed their core nature in the past 40 years. Look at Carpetbaggers, the Triangle Shirtwaist company, and William Hearst for relatively recent examples. Further back you can look at The Dutch East India Company, the Knights Templar, and the various and sundry monopolies that have arisen throughout history.
People are driven to acquire capital initially to meet their own needs, then for power. There always have been people and groups of people who strive for the latter, not being satisfied with the former. Romanticizing long dead business owners may play well in movies and books, but it isn't reflective of human nature.
And a lot of people don't need that. There are a lot of applications that are highly cost sensitive but where losing some data or having some unavailability isn't a deal breaker.
The problem with the question is that it reduces an infinite dimensional space (all the things you could have thought about the movie) into a single scalar value. Your mind is likely to be preoccupied with performing that projection which is fundamentally uninteresting.
It’s like asking “Is the pharmaceutical industry good or bad?” vs. “How should the pharmaceutical industry participate in society over the next 20 years?”
People just don't know the Eastern Bloc all that well. It is shady as the OP says. It's a mentality and a way of life that the more polite-class citizens of those countries there are trying to unwind and return to some bastion of civility, but it's hard when the modern-day mafia runs the governments and does it's best to stay in power.
At least here, the corruption isn't as obvious. Over there, they wag their tail right in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it.
People emigrate from these countries to say, North America or Western Europe or UK in search of a better life.
I'm not saying that all countries are equally corrupt. I'm saying that the angry citizen's rant at the government, in broad-brush terms, is pretty much equally applicable anywhere.
Also a way around price gouging laws. Many vendors cannot raise wages to attract more couriers since they are legally barred from raising prices. So they position this as a new service.
