democracy dies because people couldn't be bothered with the "mundane technical details".
its like this is a flaw of intelligent civilization that Carl Sagan didn't think about. it's not global nuclear warfare, it's not climate change, it's not some mad virus...
it's that the species becomes disinterested in performing maintenance because maintenance tasks don't produce a dopamine rush. the civilization becomes too incompetent to perform even the most basic upkeep on the structures they set in place - whether physical like roads and bridges, or social-political, like election systems.
nobody becomes famous or wealthy for performing upkeep.
to me it seems as though there is no precedent for it.
Compare to IBM. IBM created the somewhat open "PC" platform in the 80s. Within ten years there were dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies making "PC Compatible" computers. IBM stopped making PCs. Their platform "won" the marketplace but they, as a company, left the marketplace. IBM is still in business because their primary business was not making or selling personal computers.
Another comparison might be Google. Its a stretch because android is not a hardware platform as such, more of software. However Android phone is relatively open. As a platform Android has 'won' the marketplace. But Google's primary business is not selling phones or phone OSes. They make a handful of phones, and might stop at any time.
There was the 3d printer company. Makerbot. They were theoretically supposed to be open. However they, well some of them in the company, wound up deciding it was not possible because of clones. So they went closed. They also sold out to a huge conglomerate whose primary business is not personal 3d printers. I am not sure if you could say their 'platform' has 'won'....
So if I am right, then if System76 creates an 'open platform' then there will be Compatibles springing up all over. System76 'platform' might win the marketplace. But what will happen to them as a company? What is their primary business.
Without Compaq reverse engineering the BIOS and doing it in such a way that IBM could not release their lawyers on them, there would not be an open PC, regardless where those parts came from.
We would all be using variants of Atari, Amiga, Mac, Archimedes by now instead.
Which ironically is what laptops, 2-1 and mobile platforms have become.
> if System76 creates an 'open platform' then there will be Compatibles springing up all over...
The open platform already exists, they are merely a player in it. Perhaps they've brought some new hardware, but unless it is x86/64 legacy compatible there is little chance it will succeed.
finance is a different culture than hackernews, and the people speak different languages with different philosophy and assumptions about the world.
maybe this is not a technical issue, maybe its a subculture interaction issue that involves a lot of technical details.
i dont think its easy to 'understand' unless one group spends time with another, and i dont mean half an hour meeting, i mean like, shadowing someone for a week.
wouldnt it be true that, basically, every boom bust cycle is "caused" in part by 'traditional' investments having low returns which makes investors look for something with higher returns? which by definition is probably riskier?
the 'cheapness of capital' seems to me to be relative to the times that one lives in, in that the cheapness is only cheap in comparison to what investors believe they can profit from it.
dear young people who are reading the above comment.
IMHO dont be afraid to take it with a grain of salt. don't expect to be rewarded for saying no. don't expect a light feather ruffling. don't expect light consequences. be prepared to get fired. be prepared to get demoted. be prepared to lose your health insurance. be prepared to change your industry. be prepared for the realities that most people face.
if you say no to something that really is important, then there will, the vast majority of the time, be major consequences. dont expect it to be easy. dont expect a reward. dont expect anyone to even understand or care why you are doing it. dont expect to be respected. dont expect anything. be prepared.
when you are living in poverty or are homeless, that no wont really mean much. only say no when you have the ground to stand on that can catch you when the inevitable smack in the face comes.
and dont feel ashamed if you have to say yes to survive once in a while. its actually what most people do. every day. even people you respect as heroes. sometimes especially the people you respect as heroes. when a really big no comes, there will be many people chanting it together, and many others behind them silently backing them up, all of whom had to say yes, in ways large and small, at some time or another, in the past, just to survive long enough to be together in that space, building that critical mass, and supporting each other.
Maybe if you work in the Land of the Free™ and live in constant fear of getting fired for some inconsequential reason, you have to have to abase yourself daily to your manager and act like a wage slave supplicant. Is that a life anyone can really be satisfied with, deliberately allowing oneself to be downtrodden for the sake of a few shekels?
Do you have a job where you simply do as you are told, like a private being shouted at by a drill sergeant, or do you have a career where your expertise and contributions have some significant value?
Work is full of compromises. No matter how hard you try, at some point you're going to end up giving advice or information to people which runs counter to what they would have preferred to hear. "No" is rather absolute. What would be more typical is suggesting that a course of action might be unwise, and suggesting possible alternatives along with the tradeoffs for each approach, i.e. criticise but in a constructive way. And let others decide which pros and cons are most important. You bring specific expertise and insight, and provide that to the group and decision makers, along with qualified recommendations, maybe very strong recommendations if the situation warranted it. Your recommendations and advice might well be ignored, but it's still important to make them in the first place so that they are at least known and considered.
You don't just live your life to satisfy your boss. You also have to live with yourself. Sometimes, for example, companies make very short-term decisions at the expense of their own longer-term viability and at the expense of their existing customers. Who internally acts as the voice of those customers and the future company if not you? If you didn't at least raise questionable design tradeoffs so that the consequences were well understood and informed decisions could be made, you are doing your employer a disservice (in my opinion). It doesn't matter what the ultimate decision is, but that you act professionally and provide all the necessary information for others to work with. If you get fired for trying to do your best for the company, you're well out of a bad company.
then wouldn't we would be able to correlate rates of lower toxic behavior, like harassment and conflict, with the practice of 'cultural fit'? like doing some kind of empirical study?
ironically i would wager that the people who can pass a 'cultural fit' test with the highest score might actually be Sociopaths, since they are the world experts at being charming to complete and utter strangers.
Note I'm not defending a "cultural fit test" here. I don't even know what that means, it's an amorphous concept with few specifics, everybody defines it how they want.
My point is that from day 1 you have to protect your group from outsiders who are unprofessional, toxic, and will sink morale and productivity. How you do it is up to you, but the issue cannot be naively framed as "companies are bad and sexist, while pure, good-natured, kind human beings are rejected from positions they deserve unfairly".
That's a nice fairy tale that falls apart once you yourself spend a few years hiring.
Every single sentence you wrote above is factually wrong, demonstrated not only by the study of the history of economics and society, but also empirically in something as simple as a genetic algorithm evolution inside a computer.
so i wonder if its like sports... they aren't paying for workers to be or stay healthy. like a football team, they are paying a handful of superstars until their bodies are used up and broken, then they can discard them for the next generation.
