If you want to go to a really fundamental analysis, what we're perpetually rediscovering on a scale of complexity is that centralization doesn't work. Centralization doesn't scale, and when you push any human endeavor to a certain threshold of complexity you rediscover that.
That's quoting the interviewer, but the interviewee agrees. How do we get messages to the Sun and the Galactic Core to get out of the business? How do we tell Bush that the American Empire won't fly? How do we tell Moses that we need to go back to polytheism, when the bunny egg's about to hatch again?
There's an ecological argument here - that complex systems are best stabilized according to ecological principles rather than command and control, which just can't encompass more than a certain degree of complexity. A close kin to that argument is Adam Smith's view of capitalism - that it's wiser on the whole because less centrally controlled.
But in some settings central control still might win. Would you bet on a centrally controlled army, or on a bunch of ESRs with their guns? Depends on the terrain and the degree of motivation on each side (for extra credit compare Nam and Afghanistan). And, would you prefer our current balance of terror, or a future one where ESRs carried their own pocket nukes? Talk about bunny eggs!
____
Yoga Inside could "recognize" that Intel owns the trademark. Intel could grant them a license to use its trademark. That way there has been no lack of defense of the trademark by Intel, and no infringement by Yoga Inside.
Now, this sort of rational resolution wouldn't make as much money for Intel's lawyers; and it would take a bit of ethical compromise from Yoga Inside, since it's silly to pretent that Intel should "own" this - but that's not anywhere near Yoga Inside's central mission; and it _is_ Intel's lawyers' central mission to not just use their relationship to coin money, especially in ways that result in unnecessary adverse publicity for their client.
If Intel has any sense, it will fire these lawyers for this behavior. ____
In New York State you can register you phone number(s) on a Do Not Call list. Any telemarketer (with exceptions for politics and those with whom you have a "prior business relationship") who calls a number registered with the state is liable for fines up to $2000. So Yahoo might be able to get away with calling you, but not some other business you have no relationship with who they've given your number to.
___
I was totally prepared to like these after a review in the NY Times was positive. I read most sci fi and fantasy for fun, and agree with Pullman's angle on religion/science, and yet.... There's not much to save him from just not writing very well, being weak on style and characterization, having evil that's less threatening than Cruella Deville and seemingly directly modeled on her.
Am I the only one who says nice things aloud into the phone while muttering "fscking azzhool" under my breath? How refreshing honest our communications will become!
When Dutch museums feature paintings - many of them showing lustful, drinking, music-playing, partying people - the tags on the wall most often explain how the painting was done to illustrate that people should not live that way! The way life is actually lived and appreciated by the Dutch has long been at odds with what they say about it. This positive use of hypocrisy, once used to lead happy lives while paying lip service to Christian injunctions against happy behavior, is now used to allow not just pot but storefronts throughout the country selling organic psychedelics, while claiming, "Oh yes, this is illegal, we are in keeping with the broader European norms on that!"
Now, how does this fit with file sharing? Well, here creative hypocrisy isn't even needed, since it's clearly within the letter of the law. It's American courts which are going beyond both law and common sense, embracing monopolistic behavior as an extension of the puritan self-constraint we too often perversely pleasure ourselves by.
Nigeria _is_ a rich and corrupt country. Many people there _are_ relatives of government ministers with access to huge, hidden bank accounts. Earthlink, Enron... as far as we've come into the modern world we've got _nothing_ on Nigerians. Those of us lucky enough to be invited into their schemes should rejoice, open our bank accounts wide. The educational experience is priceless.
___
Of course it makes no sense for one person who's lost perhaps $15 by paying too much - and ended up with much worse customer service, but still - to sue. Unless that person becomes lead claimant in a class action suit on behalf of at least everyone who has suckered for this scam, plus perhaps everyone who has wasted valuable business time urgently asking employees or consultants why the renewal hasn't been "taken care of," or assuring bosses or clients that the notice - from the best-known name in the business - is a fraud.
Not to mention that it perpetuates the notion that anything dot.com related is suckersville - but I guess you can't sue for making the neighborhood look bad.
Still, if none of the lawyers reading this can frame it as a rich class action, we need to attract a brighter class of lawyers. ____
"This won't change as long as politicians are in the pockets of the corporations."
Okay. So how do you propose we set up a serious fund that gets the politicians into our pockets? Consider:
Anne Bingaman, former antitrust chief in Clinton's Justice Department and wife of the New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman, went to work for Global Crossing to lobby the Federal Communications Commission. She reportedly earned an astonishing $2.5 million in less than a year. Tom Daschle's wife, Linda, who lobbies for airlines and aircraft manufacturers, helped design the $16 billion bailout rushed through for the airlines after 9/11--the legislation in which majority leader Daschle stiffed labor's plea for aid to laid-off workers. Ruth Harkin, wife of Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, heads the Washington office of United Technologies and sits on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers.
From Dec. 7th to date Vipul's Razor has caught 1300 spams to two users here, while passing through maybe half that. The only false positives have been a half-dozen messages to the razor listserv itself, which someone was fscking with for a while.
Then setting procmail to put stuff without an explicit To: line with my e-mail on it into a separate mailbox gets most of what gets by Razor, although that box needs to be checked occassionally, since there are legitimate e-mails that end up there. The other stuff is easy to report to Razor through a key assignment in mutt.
If enough people are using Razor, especially with honey-pot type mailboxes feeding reports directly to it, it should only get better.
___
Um, what's the company? What do they make? What other firms are they in collaboration with? How thoroughly can we ostracize them from doing any further business, anywhere, with anyone? Do they have products, or customers, or partners who can be boycotted?
Six months ago, a bit over half of the highly-modded comments on stories like this were scathingly skeptical about global warming. As I read at 4+ just now, the common sense here has shifted to over 95% of moderation favoring statements of prudent environmentalism.
What's changed? Is this one big enough to put denial of evidence - at least for the moment - out of style? ___
"As part of offering and providing personalized information, Logitech uses cookies to store your Country and Language preferences. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. This allows us to provide you with Logitech product and company information relevant to your preferences. In order to use the features of the Logitech site, you must configure your browser to accept cookies and have javascript enabled."
Right, Logitech is willing to bet that I read English - witness the message - but won't say more to me in English unless I let them use my machine to help track me. Too bad. Next time I need a mouse I'll have to find a new brand.
___
I read the press, ran out and bought an early version of OS/2 (at that point in life I ran CP/M with ZCPR, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, Win 3.1 with Norton Desktop, NDOS). The friggin OS/2 desktop was ugly. Now, at that time I did most of my work without a GUI, and DR-DOS + NDOS was just fine for that. But when I went into a GUI it was to do something that really needed it - graphic design work - and why would I do that in a GUI that was ugly? It's a different part of the brain, and it wants to be happy in its workspace.
Then I grew up to Solaris and Linux, and spend most of my working hours in xterm - but will still boot into Win 95 if I really need Pagemaker or Freehand or whatever. But I'll never believe OS/2 was a superior GUI - may have been a superior underlying OS, but the market momentum was about the GUI then. It lost to Windows because IBM actually managed to present something uglier. It's like a really fertile woman who never bathes - great if you're just rating fertility, but do you want her to have your kids? ___
For a text-intensive site that's been around a few years, and that the search engines were informed of years ago, 4 of the top 10 most frequent visitors are Google bots. None of the 10 is from AltaVista. And Google searches send a lot more people our way too.
Now I just don't see how AltaVista can give anyone more current results if their bots are featherbedding.
___
Can /. sigs help google bomb?
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
And what's the optimal ratio of praise to links? (I take it that positive text on the page next to the link is helpful?) Should we offer space in each others' sigs? Can we bargain that space for agreements to mod each other up when possible?
One area of technology where really good repair manuals exist is automobiles. Any standard repair on a standard car is documented right down to the exact foot pounds to apply to the wrench. But do the mechanics who love cars work from the manuals? Mostly, no.
It has not much to do with loving or hating a technology; it's about cognitive mode. Most of us do reasonably well learning by seeing; only a minority handle manuals well. The current generation of computers - despite the GUIs - favor those who do well with manuals. Much of the strength of Linux is in the succinct quality of the INSTALL and README docs in most program tars. RTFM is the mantra of a technological niche built by-and-for those who do well by manuals.
But that particular sort of verbal (supplemented by diagrams) intelligence isn't the only smarts people have; it's not even the only sort of smarts that might serve a tech-lover well. For instance, do you want your high-tech battle system manned by nerds-with-manuals or by those with a good seat-of-the-pants feel for the system and quick reflexes? Some folks have both, but for the most part those good with manuals are in the ground crews, and the kid in the cockpit is smart about - and loves - tech in a different way. ___
Instead of giving these taxes to the content pimps, the Canadian government should directly support Canadian artists, who do not get a fair shake in the current pimp regime. With the money distributed to all three Canadian recording artists - Joni Mitchell, Neal Young and Leonard Cohen - the quality of world-wide artistic output will be raised a notch (by the first two) and become less depressive (on the part of the last). As a bonus, Mitchell and Young will spend their bonus largely in their state of residence - California - lessening the US demand for trade retaliation.
A machine that was Linux-based, AOL-optimized, and could run a subset of Windows apps would about do it. Considering the cost-of-acquisition of a new customer for AOL, it could sell these machines at a loss and still come out ahead as compared with spamming the world with coasters. If it can also run AOLindows-compliant games and apps (particularly some of the Adobe and Macromedia stuff, as well as Quicken and tax software) - without requiring those companies to do much more than be sure their stuff installs cleanly under Wine - then it's like: Do you want to pay $1000 for a new Windows machine; or would you rather pay $600 for the same hardware (that's -$200 AOL loss leader, -$200 Microsoft licenses) and still be able to run everything you, average home user, could need?
And the next time Microsoft is selling a Windows upgrade, offer an AOLindows conversion kit for free, and offer some cool new AOL features that don't work under Win. ("We're sorry, but feature X can't be separated from the OS.")
With the AOL user base, companies would pay to have their stuff certified AOLindows compliant. It's a sure win if it gets out of the starting gate.
Freetype 2.0.8 also compiles from the tar with no dependencies, and just installed cleanly for me on Debian stable after enabling the patented bytecode interpreter. Instructions for doing that are in README.UNX in the base dir after untarring. Then, for KDE 2.1 (back from when that was available for Debian stable), Control Center | Look and Feel | Style - go there and uncheck "Using Anti-Aliasing" (it appears to be set but in some versions of KDE it has not in fact been enabled in the user's control file until reset), press Apply, recheck it, press Apply, exit KDE, restart, and there you are.
It lowers the effective contrast and looks slightly blurry, but I find I can read it faster, taking in more words per glance.
So you have a great page that can only be ignored by search engines. Not that this is the way most sites get known....
I wonder if that's true. I just spent the weekend closely analyzing the logs for site where a bunch of jazz critics have articles posted, and at this point about 4/5's of the traffic enters the site from Google searches. So when I look at another jazz site that's gone all to Flash (I tried to talk her out of it), I can only guess that all the folks searching for info on their favorite musicians (most of the Google searches are that) are totally missing the musicians' pages on that other site - which the musicians are paying for - so it's pretty totally a disservice unless the business goal is just to have something that looks cool when the musicians show their friends.
I was really surprised at how much Google has become the approach-of-choice to the Web. Thought it was just/. types who realized how good it was. Turns out it's most of the world, if the logs I've just been reading through are any indication - and a couple years ago they looked entirely different, people entering from bookmarks or links at sister sites. This has prompted some adjustments to the site, so people coming in sideways will still find the other resources easily.
Flash consists in removing yourself from the Internet, and only makes sense if you have a captive audience, at least until the search engines can all digest it and drop people in precisely.
____
But Enron and Global Crossing were _un_regulated
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If a lack of government regulation allowed Enron to engage in large-scale criminal acts - which it did, the favors that politicians did for them consisted entirely of removing regulations - then the Enron argument is backwards.
Unless you take the stance that corporations should be well-regulated and individuals should be free. But even then, government could come to the wrong conclusion and regulate the hardware manufacturers rather than regulate to restrict the legal claims of the content pimps.
Now if you say, "Corporations should be well-regulated to protect the freedom of the individuals," that's getting closer, except what about the freedom of individuals to invest in pyramid schemes like Enron?
How about, "Corporations should be regulated to assure the transparent and abundant flow of information in every sphere"? - That would both require Enron-like scammers to open their books fully, and require content pimps to let their artists get off the street and into the loving arms of their admirers.
__
How much is the economy losing to bad management?
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are some good managers out there, and I've worked for a few. Being a good manager means they recognize the talents of their staff and deploy them effectively. It also means they find ways to lubricate the politics with others at and above their level (a rarer skill perhaps). Anyway, there are such animals.
But there are plenty more cases where management is bad. That's why there's such a rise in chain and franchise operations in retailing - there's such a shortage of people with real management skills at the local level that a cookie-cutter approximation of a solution can actually perform better on average than a solution based on intimate knowledge of a particular market - the franchise operation retains the cookie-cutter while cutting down on peer-level conflicts between managers. If management talent were thick on the ground local ownership would do best, followed by larger organizations with good internal communications and local autonomy, and franchises would be dead last.
Bad management is also rife in non-profits and educational settings - it's not just the profit motive that brings it out.
Is there an "as above, so below" aspect to it? Are so many people bad managers of other people because they are not doing so well at "managing" themselves? In my experience, the best managers are the least neurotic; and we're in a society, as Freud noted, in which most everyone is neurotic (although there's a shift to borderline disorder since his time). Can our culture increase the numbers of capable managers without somehow finding a way to increase the incidence of psychological roundedness that's required to be a capable person, period?
And would shifting the culture out of the prevalence of neurotic incapability threaten social systems which somewhat depend on neurosis as a point-of-leverage for social control?
Slashdot Mirror
There's an ecological argument here - that complex systems are best stabilized according to ecological principles rather than command and control, which just can't encompass more than a certain degree of complexity. A close kin to that argument is Adam Smith's view of capitalism - that it's wiser on the whole because less centrally controlled.
But in some settings central control still might win. Would you bet on a centrally controlled army, or on a bunch of ESRs with their guns? Depends on the terrain and the degree of motivation on each side (for extra credit compare Nam and Afghanistan). And, would you prefer our current balance of terror, or a future one where ESRs carried their own pocket nukes? Talk about bunny eggs!
____
Yoga Inside could "recognize" that Intel owns the trademark. Intel could grant them a license to use its trademark. That way there has been no lack of defense of the trademark by Intel, and no infringement by Yoga Inside.
Now, this sort of rational resolution wouldn't make as much money for Intel's lawyers; and it would take a bit of ethical compromise from Yoga Inside, since it's silly to pretent that Intel should "own" this - but that's not anywhere near Yoga Inside's central mission; and it _is_ Intel's lawyers' central mission to not just use their relationship to coin money, especially in ways that result in unnecessary adverse publicity for their client.
If Intel has any sense, it will fire these lawyers for this behavior.
____
A: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Q: But isn't imitation also the sincerest form of mockery?
___
In New York State you can register you phone number(s) on a Do Not Call list. Any telemarketer (with exceptions for politics and those with whom you have a "prior business relationship") who calls a number registered with the state is liable for fines up to $2000. So Yahoo might be able to get away with calling you, but not some other business you have no relationship with who they've given your number to.
___
I was totally prepared to like these after a review in the NY Times was positive. I read most sci fi and fantasy for fun, and agree with Pullman's angle on religion/science, and yet.... There's not much to save him from just not writing very well, being weak on style and characterization, having evil that's less threatening than Cruella Deville and seemingly directly modeled on her.
Am I the only one who says nice things aloud into the phone while muttering "fscking azzhool" under my breath? How refreshing honest our communications will become!
When Dutch museums feature paintings - many of them showing lustful, drinking, music-playing, partying people - the tags on the wall most often explain how the painting was done to illustrate that people should not live that way! The way life is actually lived and appreciated by the Dutch has long been at odds with what they say about it. This positive use of hypocrisy, once used to lead happy lives while paying lip service to Christian injunctions against happy behavior, is now used to allow not just pot but storefronts throughout the country selling organic psychedelics, while claiming, "Oh yes, this is illegal, we are in keeping with the broader European norms on that!"
Now, how does this fit with file sharing? Well, here creative hypocrisy isn't even needed, since it's clearly within the letter of the law. It's American courts which are going beyond both law and common sense, embracing monopolistic behavior as an extension of the puritan self-constraint we too often perversely pleasure ourselves by.
Nigeria _is_ a rich and corrupt country. Many people there _are_ relatives of government ministers with access to huge, hidden bank accounts. Earthlink, Enron ... as far as we've come into the modern world we've got _nothing_ on Nigerians. Those of us lucky enough to be invited into their schemes should rejoice, open our bank accounts wide. The educational experience is priceless.
___
Of course it makes no sense for one person who's lost perhaps $15 by paying too much - and ended up with much worse customer service, but still - to sue. Unless that person becomes lead claimant in a class action suit on behalf of at least everyone who has suckered for this scam, plus perhaps everyone who has wasted valuable business time urgently asking employees or consultants why the renewal hasn't been "taken care of," or assuring bosses or clients that the notice - from the best-known name in the business - is a fraud.
Not to mention that it perpetuates the notion that anything dot.com related is suckersville - but I guess you can't sue for making the neighborhood look bad.
Still, if none of the lawyers reading this can frame it as a rich class action, we need to attract a brighter class of lawyers.
____
Okay. So how do you propose we set up a serious fund that gets the politicians into our pockets? Consider:
Then setting procmail to put stuff without an explicit To: line with my e-mail on it into a separate mailbox gets most of what gets by Razor, although that box needs to be checked occassionally, since there are legitimate e-mails that end up there. The other stuff is easy to report to Razor through a key assignment in mutt.
If enough people are using Razor, especially with honey-pot type mailboxes feeding reports directly to it, it should only get better.
___
Um, what's the company? What do they make? What other firms are they in collaboration with? How thoroughly can we ostracize them from doing any further business, anywhere, with anyone? Do they have products, or customers, or partners who can be boycotted?
To further complicate things, some universities claim the IP rights to anything developed by students there.
___
Six months ago, a bit over half of the highly-modded comments on stories like this were scathingly skeptical about global warming. As I read at 4+ just now, the common sense here has shifted to over 95% of moderation favoring statements of prudent environmentalism.
What's changed? Is this one big enough to put denial of evidence - at least for the moment - out of style?
___
"Cookies Required
"As part of offering and providing personalized information, Logitech uses cookies to store your Country and Language preferences. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. This allows us to provide you with Logitech product and company information relevant to your preferences. In order to use the features of the Logitech site, you must configure your browser to accept cookies and have javascript enabled."
Right, Logitech is willing to bet that I read English - witness the message - but won't say more to me in English unless I let them use my machine to help track me. Too bad. Next time I need a mouse I'll have to find a new brand.
___
I read the press, ran out and bought an early version of OS/2 (at that point in life I ran CP/M with ZCPR, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, Win 3.1 with Norton Desktop, NDOS). The friggin OS/2 desktop was ugly. Now, at that time I did most of my work without a GUI, and DR-DOS + NDOS was just fine for that. But when I went into a GUI it was to do something that really needed it - graphic design work - and why would I do that in a GUI that was ugly? It's a different part of the brain, and it wants to be happy in its workspace.
Then I grew up to Solaris and Linux, and spend most of my working hours in xterm - but will still boot into Win 95 if I really need Pagemaker or Freehand or whatever. But I'll never believe OS/2 was a superior GUI - may have been a superior underlying OS, but the market momentum was about the GUI then. It lost to Windows because IBM actually managed to present something uglier. It's like a really fertile woman who never bathes - great if you're just rating fertility, but do you want her to have your kids?
___
Now I just don't see how AltaVista can give anyone more current results if their bots are featherbedding.
___
And what's the optimal ratio of praise to links? (I take it that positive text on the page next to the link is helpful?) Should we offer space in each others' sigs? Can we bargain that space for agreements to mod each other up when possible?
Satan, lead the way!
____
One area of technology where really good repair manuals exist is automobiles. Any standard repair on a standard car is documented right down to the exact foot pounds to apply to the wrench. But do the mechanics who love cars work from the manuals? Mostly, no.
It has not much to do with loving or hating a technology; it's about cognitive mode. Most of us do reasonably well learning by seeing; only a minority handle manuals well. The current generation of computers - despite the GUIs - favor those who do well with manuals. Much of the strength of Linux is in the succinct quality of the INSTALL and README docs in most program tars. RTFM is the mantra of a technological niche built by-and-for those who do well by manuals.
But that particular sort of verbal (supplemented by diagrams) intelligence isn't the only smarts people have; it's not even the only sort of smarts that might serve a tech-lover well. For instance, do you want your high-tech battle system manned by nerds-with-manuals or by those with a good seat-of-the-pants feel for the system and quick reflexes? Some folks have both, but for the most part those good with manuals are in the ground crews, and the kid in the cockpit is smart about - and loves - tech in a different way.
___
Instead of giving these taxes to the content pimps, the Canadian government should directly support Canadian artists, who do not get a fair shake in the current pimp regime. With the money distributed to all three Canadian recording artists - Joni Mitchell, Neal Young and Leonard Cohen - the quality of world-wide artistic output will be raised a notch (by the first two) and become less depressive (on the part of the last). As a bonus, Mitchell and Young will spend their bonus largely in their state of residence - California - lessening the US demand for trade retaliation.
___
A machine that was Linux-based, AOL-optimized, and could run a subset of Windows apps would about do it. Considering the cost-of-acquisition of a new customer for AOL, it could sell these machines at a loss and still come out ahead as compared with spamming the world with coasters. If it can also run AOLindows-compliant games and apps (particularly some of the Adobe and Macromedia stuff, as well as Quicken and tax software) - without requiring those companies to do much more than be sure their stuff installs cleanly under Wine - then it's like: Do you want to pay $1000 for a new Windows machine; or would you rather pay $600 for the same hardware (that's -$200 AOL loss leader, -$200 Microsoft licenses) and still be able to run everything you, average home user, could need?
And the next time Microsoft is selling a Windows upgrade, offer an AOLindows conversion kit for free, and offer some cool new AOL features that don't work under Win. ("We're sorry, but feature X can't be separated from the OS.")
With the AOL user base, companies would pay to have their stuff certified AOLindows compliant. It's a sure win if it gets out of the starting gate.
____
Freetype 2.0.8 also compiles from the tar with no dependencies, and just installed cleanly for me on Debian stable after enabling the patented bytecode interpreter. Instructions for doing that are in README.UNX in the base dir after untarring. Then, for KDE 2.1 (back from when that was available for Debian stable), Control Center | Look and Feel | Style - go there and uncheck "Using Anti-Aliasing" (it appears to be set but in some versions of KDE it has not in fact been enabled in the user's control file until reset), press Apply, recheck it, press Apply, exit KDE, restart, and there you are.
It lowers the effective contrast and looks slightly blurry, but I find I can read it faster, taking in more words per glance.
____
I wonder if that's true. I just spent the weekend closely analyzing the logs for site where a bunch of jazz critics have articles posted, and at this point about 4/5's of the traffic enters the site from Google searches. So when I look at another jazz site that's gone all to Flash (I tried to talk her out of it), I can only guess that all the folks searching for info on their favorite musicians (most of the Google searches are that) are totally missing the musicians' pages on that other site - which the musicians are paying for - so it's pretty totally a disservice unless the business goal is just to have something that looks cool when the musicians show their friends.
I was really surprised at how much Google has become the approach-of-choice to the Web. Thought it was just /. types who realized how good it was. Turns out it's most of the world, if the logs I've just been reading through are any indication - and a couple years ago they looked entirely different, people entering from bookmarks or links at sister sites. This has prompted some adjustments to the site, so people coming in sideways will still find the other resources easily.
Flash consists in removing yourself from the Internet, and only makes sense if you have a captive audience, at least until the search engines can all digest it and drop people in precisely.
____
Unless you take the stance that corporations should be well-regulated and individuals should be free. But even then, government could come to the wrong conclusion and regulate the hardware manufacturers rather than regulate to restrict the legal claims of the content pimps.
Now if you say, "Corporations should be well-regulated to protect the freedom of the individuals," that's getting closer, except what about the freedom of individuals to invest in pyramid schemes like Enron?
How about, "Corporations should be regulated to assure the transparent and abundant flow of information in every sphere"? - That would both require Enron-like scammers to open their books fully, and require content pimps to let their artists get off the street and into the loving arms of their admirers.
__
But there are plenty more cases where management is bad. That's why there's such a rise in chain and franchise operations in retailing - there's such a shortage of people with real management skills at the local level that a cookie-cutter approximation of a solution can actually perform better on average than a solution based on intimate knowledge of a particular market - the franchise operation retains the cookie-cutter while cutting down on peer-level conflicts between managers. If management talent were thick on the ground local ownership would do best, followed by larger organizations with good internal communications and local autonomy, and franchises would be dead last.
Bad management is also rife in non-profits and educational settings - it's not just the profit motive that brings it out.
Is there an "as above, so below" aspect to it? Are so many people bad managers of other people because they are not doing so well at "managing" themselves? In my experience, the best managers are the least neurotic; and we're in a society, as Freud noted, in which most everyone is neurotic (although there's a shift to borderline disorder since his time). Can our culture increase the numbers of capable managers without somehow finding a way to increase the incidence of psychological roundedness that's required to be a capable person, period?
And would shifting the culture out of the prevalence of neurotic incapability threaten social systems which somewhat depend on neurosis as a point-of-leverage for social control?
____