Why? Why does this kind of culture crop up again and again in human history?
I think because ruthless internal competition offsets some of the natural lethargy of a bureaucracy. It can serve the interests of whoever is on top, at least in the short term. If you have no talent for inspiring people you can at least set them against each other. But you'd be a fool to join such an organization at the bottom, knowing what it is, if you had any alternatives.
I like how you mind works, BTW. It is an interesting question to ask.
In the short term, as you point out, it does serve the personal power of those on the top. The ruthless backstabbing leaves those with real power apparent freedom to make completely arbitrary decisions at any time, by providing ammunition against everyone so there are scapegoats aplenty.
In the long term, the culture of infighting becomes the de facto entrenched bureaucracy, where you re-create approximately all the usual negatives of bureaucracies. In TFA, we apparently have a manager that everyone is too scared to even give a good hard slap on the wrist, because he has played the politics well and has successfully carved out his fiefdom.
Furthermore you fail to achieve the positive advantages of bureaucracies. In physics, inertia is a component of momentum whereby an organization has some degree of certainty that they can continue heading in a direction -- continuing to go sort of in the right direction is usually better than standing still or spinning in circles. That allows a company to make and keep promises, both to themselves and to their customers.
The reported cowed HR, the fiefdoms, the nasty politics, the lying on reviews, the constant fear of re-orgs, the failed projects -- these do not sound like a cooked up list of accusations. They are very much self-consistent and self-reinforcing cultural behaviors that you would expect to find together in the same organization.
Because more often than not lately, peaceful protests very quickly become not-so-peaceful with a lot of illegal activity like vandalism, violence, looting etc.
No. It is just that you do not notice the vastly more numerous peaceful protests, for the reason they get comparatively scant coverage, even if the peaceful protest is much larger.
A thousand people can peacefully march in Berkeley, CA and you would never notice. 50 people hold signs in a financial district like SF, and one of them smashes a window, and it is about 1000X more likely you notice that.
There was something like 5000 people for the anti-Trump Impeach on the Beach rally in SF about a week ago. Did you notice? I would bet you didn't.
That which could be potentially observed or heard by a person standing in a public space such as a sidewalk is usually presumed to be completely unprotected. So, yes, you do not have privacy in your living room if the front of your house is near the sidewalk and you choose to keep the curtains open.
There is some ambiguity about technology like parabolic dish mikes, telephoto lenses, and infrared cameras, used from public locations to delve into private property in a manner that was implausible for a physically normal human to do from a public space -- courts have usually ruled to protect the privacy in those cases.
There are reasonable concerns that modern technology can game the system. Clearly two hundred cameras and a dozen servers with license plate readers and face recognition software can track the populace in a manner that a thousand Stasi secret police officers never could. The answer is to explicitly write the laws on how that information is used and controlled, not hope that the courts create a magic line out of thin air that will probably need to be rewritten every few years.
And yet they are unable to master the English language. Acquiring one's native tongue is not rocket science.
The supreme irony of your comment is that all the best America speakers of the English language are African-American.
In Hollywood, the famously silky, powerfully emotional voices are all black men: Morgan Friedman, James Earl Jones, Samuel Jackson. In music, the fast talking, rhythmic, expressive poetry of rap has taken the globe by storm. (Heck, I personally dislike rap, but its influence is undeniable.) In politics, the best public speaker for making complex topics understandable to general audiences in half a century is Barack Obama.
Racists are so blind that they can be orbiting the planet in a space shuttle and still proclaim the earth flat. Whether it is geology or language, they are fervently stupid.
9000 years ago, the shorelines were quite different. For example, the Indus valley extended hundreds of miles into the Indian ocean, only to disappear over the course of one or two thousand years. The Persian Gulf was 90% land. The Red Sea was cut off from the Indian ocean. There were many places where entire small civilizations could have clustered cities/villages on rich alluvial lands near ocean shorelines, places that are now submerged. If those civilizations failed to build large stone buildings, they are forgotten and all that we have are tidbits in stories. The physical evidence would be too difficult to find.
I would take issue with your first assertion. The memory, record, and threat of our bellicose foreign interactions are a deterrent for all of our adversaries.
Historical examples of a gov't's leaders being willing to accept casualties has some positive deterrent value. But "bellicose foreign interactions" have both positive and negative deterrent value, in the case of the US.
For example, WBush made a big show of talking tough but no one ever backed down an inch in response -- he got walked all over by everyone he did not get around to actually invaded, which is really quite a long list. Furthermore, his legacy set a dangerous precedent that perhaps US military action will have nothing to do with the strategic reality and everything to do with American domestic politics. What is the point of a foreign leader backing down, when US policy is often driven by ideology and polls, which rational negotiations cannot be expected to address?
Yes and no. At this point in history, approximately zero of our fighting has anything to do with keeping American citizens physically safe. America has created a kind of empire. And while it is a much kinder and civilized empire than those that came before, it is still vulnerable to the classic blunders of the old style empire, e.g. the Vietnam War.
There is a Chinese saying: "To love war will ruin the nation; to forget warfare endangers everyone."
IMHO, America suffers for loving war far too much, at this point in history.
People who love war are often quick to accuse any other opinion as advocating a complete forgetting of warfare. Of course, that is just the Black-Or-White fallacy. Arguing for less war in the context of the America of today, does not mean arguing for zero wars or zero warfare.
Which exact structures and whether the most important brain structures could be inspected and measured, those questions did not have an obvious answer. Even this result is only a toe in the door on that topic. Furthermore, the human brain is astoundingly malleable, so how useful a brain scan of a 13 year old could ever be in predicting the personality of the 37 year old is unknown -- the answer might turn out to be "not very, but better than nothing".
STEM professors bring in substantially more grants and prestige to the university. Undergrads and grad students are part of the package of taking advantage of those professors who rake in the grant money.
If the university actually considered the full financial picture, they might well charge more tuition to the English major because the English department is a greater burden per student in the major. But even that idea is foolishness, because a university cannot be a university without a properly staffed English department that serves the entire undergrad student body.
A university can learn useful lessons from the business world, but running a university exactly like a business is idiotic.
There was a nearly ten year period I serviced my car at a dealership, and while I slightly overpaid I did not see any of the other problems you describe.
There may be particular dealerships in the state where you live that hires blind monkeys at minimum wage and charges the customer a premium. The big car companies are probably not too happy about that either, but the state legislature is in the pocket of the dealerships so the car companies have no choice if they want to sell any cars in your state.
I have been drinking out of a bottle wrapped in a paper bag for years, just to be safe. Screaming at people enough to keep them more than 3 meters away is a cinch. What's the problem?
Without layers of defenses and countermeasures, drones could make armored vehicles nothing more than overlarge doorstops. Imagine how well an incursion into Gaza would go for the IDF if drones could pop out from behind any wall and precisely place a shape charge in the optimal location over the engine compartment of an armored vehicle.
They can't win. At this point, no matter what they do, some people will say they are corrupt for not acting like a proper non-profit, and some people will say they are idiots for not acting like a grown up business. With feedback like that, the only rational choice is to do what their "boss" wants -- in this case the CA legislature cares more about shaving costs than a few local jobs.
If generalized beyond patent trolling suits it could severely limit the ability of shallow-pocket plaintiffs to obtain legal council on a contingency fee basis to obtain redress for the torts that damaged, and perhaps impoverished, them.
The result would be that the legal system becomes accessible only to the rich.
It is possible, but there is no reason to expect it to go there.
The problem only arises because of an expansive view of corporations is allowing too many corporations that were designed to fail as part of their business model, thereby privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. These corporate entities are simply not businesses in the pedestrian manner of a restaurant or a tech start up. In a sense, the court is searching for a real person as a plaintiff, other than the fake person which is the corporate entity.
Could this idea be expanded to all contingency fees? I am sure there will be lawyers who will try. And there will be lawyers who will try to clamp that down.
And I am saying, for all practical purposes, you are wrong.
Not seeing the fluctuations is a significant practical positive because it makes a theoretical problem a non-problem, but it is a price that Bitcoin users cannot avoid.
Furthermore, Bitcoin has fluctuation that are very large when compared to major currencies. Whether we want to say the USD has small fluctuations and Bitcoin has large fluctuations, or we want to say the USD has large fluctuations and Bitcoin has immense fluctuations, it boils down to the same thing.
If you dislike the instability in the USD, you would hate Bitcoin for being vastly worst. But most Bitcoin supporters have their ideological blinkers screwed on too tight to see the topic honestly.
That is only going to change when a big (evil) bank with cozy connections to all those big bad gov'ts decide to weigh in and help Bitcoin succeed. So far, one of the surest ways to lose you Bitcoin is to trust it to a Bitcoin exchange, where it will likely disappear with all the earmarks of an inside job. Mtgox is the obvious example, but it was far from the first and not the last.
Only if you look at it in very short terms. Over long term it is actually quite stable other then occasional speculative peaks which are easy to avoid. You could see this one coming at Christmas. And today (If you were watching) was the bitcoin sale at $900.
For pretend money, Bitcoin is not so unstable. Compared to real money, it is extremely unstable. It is only ideological blinkers that prevent people from seeing it that way.
Nothing is perfectly stable. We do not even know how to define "perfectly stable" in a manner that economists would agree on.
Most major currencies exhibit less instability over the course of two decades than Bitcoin does over any year. So if we agree that stability is desirable enough to even discuss, then that is a major black mark against Bitcoin.
Correction: The subsidiary in France is literally telling the French gov't whoppers like "Oh, I paid $2 billion to a company in the West Indies for the rights to the intellectual property, plus $1 billion in local expenses, so I have exactly zero profits on that $3 billion in sales."
I am baffled why Americans believe they have a "right" to tax the sale of a product made in China and sold in France.
It is only baffling if you look at the situation superficially.
Specifically, when a highly profitable subsidiary company is created in France that sells products built in China based entirely on key technology invented in the US by a US company, where was the bulk of value for that company created? The US gov't gets told that it happened in France and China. The French gov't gets told it happened in the US and China. The Chinese gov't gets told it happened in the US and France. Or maybe they all get told it happened in the Bahamas and Ireland.
Under that kind of creative gaming of the system, it makes perfect sense to tell Apple, no, it all happened in the US because all your many answers make less sense than that one.
If these American companies were paying big taxes to France and China, then, yes, Americans asking for another piece of the pie is probably wrong. But that is not what we are talking about. The subsidiary in France is literally telling the French gov't whoppers like "Oh, I paid $2 billion to a company in the West Indies for the rights to the intellectual property, plus $1 billion in local expenses, so I have exactly profits on that $3 billion in sales."
I seen a few reports of something weird going on. I am not going to make assumptions that they are wrong or right. But it is discouraging to see such an utter lack of clear incremental improvements in measuring the anomalous effect.
What Watson did is something any intern with time on his or her hands could have achieved by looking at the data, searching in a medical database, and then a long bit of drudgery finding the wheat among the chaff. And if it were an intern, we would applaud that person for surprising tenacity and "vision" in helping a patient when seasoned doctors failed.
Why do you need to denigrate that? Why do you need to concoct a phony baloney different standard when a computer succeeds where humans failed?
My personal opinion is most doctors are probably pretty bad at diagnosing non-obvious issues. We do not actually need Watson to replace the doctors. We need Watson as another opinion who looks at the data in another way, and can usefully point to the long tail of uncommon to rare things that have a statically reasonable likelihood of being relevant. Many of these uncommon things, why would expect a doctor to actually be competent at diagnosing them? When would they have built that kind expertise?
Taking TFA at face value, the doctors were ignoring data right under their noses. Watson found it by simply looking. It is not a matter of Watson have some magical genius. It is a matter of Watson being simply and thoroughly competent at many, many easy things that most doctors can never be expected to learn.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
You live in a bubble, if the difference is so small to you. (1) The USD is backed by assets, even if not directly as it was when we had the gold standard. (2) The USD is also backed by binding explicit and implicit promises that 300 million US citizens will accept it. In comparison bitcoin is explicitly backed by nothing, and no one on the planet has made a binding promise to accept bitcoin.
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Why? Why does this kind of culture crop up again and again in human history?
I think because ruthless internal competition offsets some of the natural lethargy of a bureaucracy. It can serve the interests of whoever is on top, at least in the short term. If you have no talent for inspiring people you can at least set them against each other. But you'd be a fool to join such an organization at the bottom, knowing what it is, if you had any alternatives.
I like how you mind works, BTW. It is an interesting question to ask.
In the short term, as you point out, it does serve the personal power of those on the top. The ruthless backstabbing leaves those with real power apparent freedom to make completely arbitrary decisions at any time, by providing ammunition against everyone so there are scapegoats aplenty.
In the long term, the culture of infighting becomes the de facto entrenched bureaucracy, where you re-create approximately all the usual negatives of bureaucracies. In TFA, we apparently have a manager that everyone is too scared to even give a good hard slap on the wrist, because he has played the politics well and has successfully carved out his fiefdom.
Furthermore you fail to achieve the positive advantages of bureaucracies. In physics, inertia is a component of momentum whereby an organization has some degree of certainty that they can continue heading in a direction -- continuing to go sort of in the right direction is usually better than standing still or spinning in circles. That allows a company to make and keep promises, both to themselves and to their customers.
The reported cowed HR, the fiefdoms, the nasty politics, the lying on reviews, the constant fear of re-orgs, the failed projects -- these do not sound like a cooked up list of accusations. They are very much self-consistent and self-reinforcing cultural behaviors that you would expect to find together in the same organization.
Because more often than not lately, peaceful protests very quickly become not-so-peaceful with a lot of illegal activity like vandalism, violence, looting etc.
No. It is just that you do not notice the vastly more numerous peaceful protests, for the reason they get comparatively scant coverage, even if the peaceful protest is much larger.
A thousand people can peacefully march in Berkeley, CA and you would never notice. 50 people hold signs in a financial district like SF, and one of them smashes a window, and it is about 1000X more likely you notice that.
There was something like 5000 people for the anti-Trump Impeach on the Beach rally in SF about a week ago. Did you notice? I would bet you didn't.
That which could be potentially observed or heard by a person standing in a public space such as a sidewalk is usually presumed to be completely unprotected. So, yes, you do not have privacy in your living room if the front of your house is near the sidewalk and you choose to keep the curtains open.
There is some ambiguity about technology like parabolic dish mikes, telephoto lenses, and infrared cameras, used from public locations to delve into private property in a manner that was implausible for a physically normal human to do from a public space -- courts have usually ruled to protect the privacy in those cases.
There are reasonable concerns that modern technology can game the system. Clearly two hundred cameras and a dozen servers with license plate readers and face recognition software can track the populace in a manner that a thousand Stasi secret police officers never could. The answer is to explicitly write the laws on how that information is used and controlled, not hope that the courts create a magic line out of thin air that will probably need to be rewritten every few years.
And yet they are unable to master the English language. Acquiring one's native tongue is not rocket science.
The supreme irony of your comment is that all the best America speakers of the English language are African-American.
In Hollywood, the famously silky, powerfully emotional voices are all black men: Morgan Friedman, James Earl Jones, Samuel Jackson. In music, the fast talking, rhythmic, expressive poetry of rap has taken the globe by storm. (Heck, I personally dislike rap, but its influence is undeniable.) In politics, the best public speaker for making complex topics understandable to general audiences in half a century is Barack Obama.
Racists are so blind that they can be orbiting the planet in a space shuttle and still proclaim the earth flat. Whether it is geology or language, they are fervently stupid.
9000 years ago, the shorelines were quite different. For example, the Indus valley extended hundreds of miles into the Indian ocean, only to disappear over the course of one or two thousand years. The Persian Gulf was 90% land. The Red Sea was cut off from the Indian ocean. There were many places where entire small civilizations could have clustered cities/villages on rich alluvial lands near ocean shorelines, places that are now submerged. If those civilizations failed to build large stone buildings, they are forgotten and all that we have are tidbits in stories. The physical evidence would be too difficult to find.
I would take issue with your first assertion. The memory, record, and threat of our bellicose foreign interactions are a deterrent for all of our adversaries.
Historical examples of a gov't's leaders being willing to accept casualties has some positive deterrent value. But "bellicose foreign interactions" have both positive and negative deterrent value, in the case of the US.
For example, WBush made a big show of talking tough but no one ever backed down an inch in response -- he got walked all over by everyone he did not get around to actually invaded, which is really quite a long list. Furthermore, his legacy set a dangerous precedent that perhaps US military action will have nothing to do with the strategic reality and everything to do with American domestic politics. What is the point of a foreign leader backing down, when US policy is often driven by ideology and polls, which rational negotiations cannot be expected to address?
Yes and no. At this point in history, approximately zero of our fighting has anything to do with keeping American citizens physically safe. America has created a kind of empire. And while it is a much kinder and civilized empire than those that came before, it is still vulnerable to the classic blunders of the old style empire, e.g. the Vietnam War.
There is a Chinese saying: "To love war will ruin the nation; to forget warfare endangers everyone."
IMHO, America suffers for loving war far too much, at this point in history.
People who love war are often quick to accuse any other opinion as advocating a complete forgetting of warfare. Of course, that is just the Black-Or-White fallacy. Arguing for less war in the context of the America of today, does not mean arguing for zero wars or zero warfare.
Which exact structures and whether the most important brain structures could be inspected and measured, those questions did not have an obvious answer. Even this result is only a toe in the door on that topic. Furthermore, the human brain is astoundingly malleable, so how useful a brain scan of a 13 year old could ever be in predicting the personality of the 37 year old is unknown -- the answer might turn out to be "not very, but better than nothing".
The other half of the story are revenues.
STEM professors bring in substantially more grants and prestige to the university. Undergrads and grad students are part of the package of taking advantage of those professors who rake in the grant money.
If the university actually considered the full financial picture, they might well charge more tuition to the English major because the English department is a greater burden per student in the major. But even that idea is foolishness, because a university cannot be a university without a properly staffed English department that serves the entire undergrad student body.
A university can learn useful lessons from the business world, but running a university exactly like a business is idiotic.
There was a nearly ten year period I serviced my car at a dealership, and while I slightly overpaid I did not see any of the other problems you describe.
There may be particular dealerships in the state where you live that hires blind monkeys at minimum wage and charges the customer a premium. The big car companies are probably not too happy about that either, but the state legislature is in the pocket of the dealerships so the car companies have no choice if they want to sell any cars in your state.
I have been drinking out of a bottle wrapped in a paper bag for years, just to be safe. Screaming at people enough to keep them more than 3 meters away is a cinch. What's the problem?
Without layers of defenses and countermeasures, drones could make armored vehicles nothing more than overlarge doorstops. Imagine how well an incursion into Gaza would go for the IDF if drones could pop out from behind any wall and precisely place a shape charge in the optimal location over the engine compartment of an armored vehicle.
They can't win. At this point, no matter what they do, some people will say they are corrupt for not acting like a proper non-profit, and some people will say they are idiots for not acting like a grown up business. With feedback like that, the only rational choice is to do what their "boss" wants -- in this case the CA legislature cares more about shaving costs than a few local jobs.
it has no downsides I can imagine.
If generalized beyond patent trolling suits it could severely limit the ability of shallow-pocket plaintiffs to obtain legal council on a contingency fee basis to obtain redress for the torts that damaged, and perhaps impoverished, them.
The result would be that the legal system becomes accessible only to the rich.
It is possible, but there is no reason to expect it to go there.
The problem only arises because of an expansive view of corporations is allowing too many corporations that were designed to fail as part of their business model, thereby privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. These corporate entities are simply not businesses in the pedestrian manner of a restaurant or a tech start up. In a sense, the court is searching for a real person as a plaintiff, other than the fake person which is the corporate entity.
Could this idea be expanded to all contingency fees? I am sure there will be lawyers who will try. And there will be lawyers who will try to clamp that down.
And I am saying, for all practical purposes, you are wrong.
Not seeing the fluctuations is a significant practical positive because it makes a theoretical problem a non-problem, but it is a price that Bitcoin users cannot avoid.
Furthermore, Bitcoin has fluctuation that are very large when compared to major currencies. Whether we want to say the USD has small fluctuations and Bitcoin has large fluctuations, or we want to say the USD has large fluctuations and Bitcoin has immense fluctuations, it boils down to the same thing.
If you dislike the instability in the USD, you would hate Bitcoin for being vastly worst. But most Bitcoin supporters have their ideological blinkers screwed on too tight to see the topic honestly.
That is only going to change when a big (evil) bank with cozy connections to all those big bad gov'ts decide to weigh in and help Bitcoin succeed. So far, one of the surest ways to lose you Bitcoin is to trust it to a Bitcoin exchange, where it will likely disappear with all the earmarks of an inside job. Mtgox is the obvious example, but it was far from the first and not the last.
Only if you look at it in very short terms. Over long term it is actually quite stable other then occasional speculative peaks which are easy to avoid. You could see this one coming at Christmas. And today (If you were watching) was the bitcoin sale at $900.
For pretend money, Bitcoin is not so unstable. Compared to real money, it is extremely unstable. It is only ideological blinkers that prevent people from seeing it that way.
Nothing is perfectly stable. We do not even know how to define "perfectly stable" in a manner that economists would agree on.
Most major currencies exhibit less instability over the course of two decades than Bitcoin does over any year. So if we agree that stability is desirable enough to even discuss, then that is a major black mark against Bitcoin.
Correction: The subsidiary in France is literally telling the French gov't whoppers like "Oh, I paid $2 billion to a company in the West Indies for the rights to the intellectual property, plus $1 billion in local expenses, so I have exactly zero profits on that $3 billion in sales."
I am baffled why Americans believe they have a "right" to tax the sale of a product made in China and sold in France.
It is only baffling if you look at the situation superficially.
Specifically, when a highly profitable subsidiary company is created in France that sells products built in China based entirely on key technology invented in the US by a US company, where was the bulk of value for that company created? The US gov't gets told that it happened in France and China. The French gov't gets told it happened in the US and China. The Chinese gov't gets told it happened in the US and France. Or maybe they all get told it happened in the Bahamas and Ireland.
Under that kind of creative gaming of the system, it makes perfect sense to tell Apple, no, it all happened in the US because all your many answers make less sense than that one.
If these American companies were paying big taxes to France and China, then, yes, Americans asking for another piece of the pie is probably wrong. But that is not what we are talking about. The subsidiary in France is literally telling the French gov't whoppers like "Oh, I paid $2 billion to a company in the West Indies for the rights to the intellectual property, plus $1 billion in local expenses, so I have exactly profits on that $3 billion in sales."
I seen a few reports of something weird going on. I am not going to make assumptions that they are wrong or right. But it is discouraging to see such an utter lack of clear incremental improvements in measuring the anomalous effect.
What Watson did is something any intern with time on his or her hands could have achieved by looking at the data, searching in a medical database, and then a long bit of drudgery finding the wheat among the chaff. And if it were an intern, we would applaud that person for surprising tenacity and "vision" in helping a patient when seasoned doctors failed.
Why do you need to denigrate that? Why do you need to concoct a phony baloney different standard when a computer succeeds where humans failed?
My personal opinion is most doctors are probably pretty bad at diagnosing non-obvious issues. We do not actually need Watson to replace the doctors. We need Watson as another opinion who looks at the data in another way, and can usefully point to the long tail of uncommon to rare things that have a statically reasonable likelihood of being relevant. Many of these uncommon things, why would expect a doctor to actually be competent at diagnosing them? When would they have built that kind expertise?
Taking TFA at face value, the doctors were ignoring data right under their noses. Watson found it by simply looking. It is not a matter of Watson have some magical genius. It is a matter of Watson being simply and thoroughly competent at many, many easy things that most doctors can never be expected to learn.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
You live in a bubble, if the difference is so small to you. (1) The USD is backed by assets, even if not directly as it was when we had the gold standard. (2) The USD is also backed by binding explicit and implicit promises that 300 million US citizens will accept it. In comparison bitcoin is explicitly backed by nothing, and no one on the planet has made a binding promise to accept bitcoin.