With reference to the GP about awkward people, if an adult hiring manager is intimidated by an professional applicant wearing a suit to an interview in good faith (after all, it's widely seen as mark of taking the interview seriously), I think it is perhaps not the applicant who need to learn the social skills.
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.
Depends very much on the assembly line. Some are quite reasonable, especially in smaller firms where you don't have a completely detached management in their ivory tower passing efficiency edicts for grinding through disposable anonymous minions. You can't abuse your staff too much if you have to sit next to them in the canteen! It's not exactly stimulating work and obviously not a rockstar salary, but it's comfortable enough indoor work and you don't have to pee in bottles and have a psychopathic delivery schedule every day.
The more governments and corporations try to shove AI into everything the worse this problem is going to get. Blindly trusting computers was always a terrible idea, and now computers are getting even less reliable.
The main problem is the lack of responsibility all along the chain.
25 years and people who shifted blame and were OK with people going to prison so their bonus would not be impacted are still enjoying life out of jail.
Seeing this lack of consequence how can you expect people to behave ethically?
I still can't believe that no-one in the Post Office leadership has been prosecuted for perverting the course of justice or fraud. They "reclaimed" lots of money from the falsely accused postmasters, so I don't see why that isn't treated as fraud.
Cancer treatment is bad for health too, but it's worth it to cut out and kill cancer before it kills the host. Not everything that is "bad for the economy" is bad for the humans who have to live under it.
I've had cancer, I have the scars and the lifelong effects from the surgery and chemo. Don't try that emotional shit on me. I'll make whatever comparison I damn well want.
In fact you're right that it's an inappropriate comparison, because the cancer didn't do what it did on purpose.
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising.
While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".
And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?
For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.
But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts.
You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively.
Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
> But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable
So you get the main company with salaries from $1m-10m, they subcontract their operations to a company with salaries of $100k-1m which manage the cleaning contracts, and the people doing the work are just gig workers on less than $10 an hour.
But the main company doesn't have the CEO:worker imbalance
I like the direction but some things are difficult to imagine happening at all without extremely large companies.
I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.
For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.
The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).
Is it really that hard to imagine "large companies not diversifying"?
Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.
Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.
I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.
It's better to limit companies by number of employees, not worth. That way, you break up the economy into modular components that humans can more easily understand (and whose outputs can be used by other companies). Also, it pushes for more efficiency. And it lowers barriers to entry.
> I don't need the same ad repeated 20 times to know that Ford sells cars and trucks.
Not only that, but the Ford ad of a vehicle driving cinematically across a landscape before disgorging a laughing and implausibly photogenic family does nothing to inform you about the relative merits of the vehicle. Anything specific mentioned in the advert is as likely to be flimflam or only technical truth as not, so nothing mentioned in the advert can be taken as useful purchase-informing fact without further research.
Exactly. There's an economic negative to advertising, particularly in the US, because "puffery" is legal. That gives advertisers nearly complete free reign to lie about stuff (especially if they put in a small white text disclaimer that says the things you are seeing and hearing aren't really true.)
Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".
On the face of it it sounds somewhat sensible point by point, but the more you did in, the more it just boils down to finding excuses, any excuse at all, for NIMBYism, often from rich urbanites who moved to the country and want it to be an episode of Downton Abbey, and fret about their house price more then anything else in the world.
This one tries a particularly hamfisted and tendentious "but Ukraine", neglecting that the fucked domestic energy situation is heavily impacted by Ukraine right now.
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.