You find a group of high risk individuals, give some of them the vaccine and the rest get a placebo. If the vaccinated group has significantly fewer incidences of HIV, then the vaccine is at least a partial success.
So, what are the ethical implications here? Well, I lived in San Francisco this summer, and the local media had some good articles about how the testing is done. They're really careful to drive home the fact that 1) they may not have gotten the vaccine and 2) the vaccine may not protect them. They do what they can to discourage the subjects from engaging in high risk behaviors. Most important, the success of the study doesn't rely on the subjects doing anything they're not already doing.
How is it "whacked," "liberal," or--the word that always seems to follow in these discussions--"activist" for a judge to rule against a defendant who claims to have irrefutable evidence, but is unwilling to present it?
Aw, hell. I've been pwned by a 13-year old Dittohead. I've really got to stop hitting the reply button.
You seem to think that you'll change my mind, and I hate to break it to you, but I'm too damn stuborn. I'm not going to change the way I run my business because of what an employee wants. I'm the one that loses money when a bad decision is made, so I get to decide. You're welcome to ignore my suggestions, after all, I'm just some guy posting to slashdot. The successful business people were the ones that stopped giving reasons for why they couldn't and decided to just do it, but I don't get to tell you which group to be in. Finally, seeing you claim that I can't give advice to people that are less fortunate and that you should be able to tell businesses how they are run seems hypocrytical at the least.
In the spirit of hypocrisy, I would advise your business to teach its CEO how to use a spellchecker.
If only you'd used "congradulations" again.
You run your business exactly as you like. Don't give your employees any authority, and wonder why they don't take responsibility. Only tell them what you think they need to be told, and wonder why they don't seem to understand the realities of your business. Don't pay them more than you absolutely have to, and wonder why they don't go the extra mile for you. Just remind yourself that our society is in a steep moral decline caused by MTV and Internet pornography and kids having no respect for their elders. It can't possibly have anything to do with you.
You admit that you don't know what it's like to be poor, and you seem oblivious to the challenges they face. Yet you claim to know how to solve their problems. I'm sorry, but what worked for you isn't always going to work for people basically like you, so how much less effective is your advice for people whose situations don't remotely resemble your own?
I'm curious. If an employee has practically no stake in his job, if his employer's goal is to get the maximum work for the minimum reward, and if the employee is treated as an object of contempt and mistrust, then where is the incentive for him to strive to make the company better? If the employer is fighting for maximum work for minimum compensation, then why do you blame the employee for fighting for minimum work for maximum compensation? Every person in this world is blessed with only a finite amount of physical, intellectual, and emotional energy, and asking someone making spitting distance to minimum wage to lavish it on an uncaring employer is naive.
Is it the hope of promotion that should drive people? Or the hope that, as the company's profits soar, their employers will hand out pay raises? Hardly. Corporations have fought tooth and nail to keep wages and benefits down, to undermine the labor movement, and to make sure that as much of the nation's tax burden is shoved onto their employees rather than themselves.
Finally, people damn well ought to be able to ask for pay raises for "doing the same work as last year." The employee is more experienced than last year. The employee is therefore more efficient than last year. The employee is working with new technologies that increase productivity that weren't there last year. In short, the employee is generating more wealth for the company, and is just asking for a small fraction of it back. Even the janitor--who is only keeping the building as clean as he did five years ago--is providing a more valuable service, if the building itself is generating more wealth than it did back then.
For the last several decades, hourly productivity has been rising dramatically, while hourly compensation has been pretty much flat. So the fraction of productive work that employees get to keep has been plummeting. This will always be true so long as it's easier for employers to replace demanding employees with pliant ones than it is for employees to find more generous employers.
Finally, you have no right to whine about how the government picks your pockets to promote the general welfare. The U.S. has the lowest tax burden of just about any industrialized nation, and we spend nearly as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. I understand why we need to make sure we can hold our own in the event of invasion by every single other country in the world, but ask yourself, was that true before Bush took office?
Compare our situation to European countries. They spend a much higher fraction of their GDP on social programs and, guess what? People like it that way. That's because their programs are broad enough to benefit everybody, rather than our miserly programs, which benefit only the poorest of us, the people generally assumed to deserve their fates because of their ineptitude, vice, and sloth.
Oh, I'm sure you'll argue that these programs have had a generally negative effect on the EU economy. But Europeans live longer, report themselves to be happier, and they've got all the good restaurants. So which economy is really doing a better job of distributing limited resources in a way that fulfills the most needs?
"Let them eat cake?" You sound like somebody who has no idea what it's really like at the bottom of the wage scale. Why don't you try going up to a middle-aged Wal-Mart clerk who has to spend 60% of her paycheck just to make rent, and ask her why she doesn't just go into business for herself? Better yet, rather than making a public spectacle of yourself, why not just recognize that the people on the margins don't have the expertise or access to capital that they'd need to go into business?
You seem to think that the "entire reason" for the increasing dominance of employers over employees and the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-squats has something to do with the average person's intense desire not to have a business of their own. The simple fact that the vast majority of small businesses fail should put a rest to that lie. A small business takes a lot of effort, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of money. What I'm hearing from you is that those who lack any of those three ingredients should be content with jobs where they have no say in what their company does or how the company treats them.
You and I have totally different definitions of "risk". You seem to take my question as "who is going to lose the most money?" when what I'm really asking is, "which would you rather have happen to you?" So I ask you, would you rather A) lose out on three months rent from an apartment you own, or B) be thrown out of your home and have to either move in with a friend or spend some time in a homeless shelter?
What you ignore is how desperately important it is for a wage slave to always be investing his or her time. You make it sound like employees are whistling along, stuffing their time investment into a mutual fund, which they cash out when they depart from a job. In fact, for a large number of people, the money is going out at least as fast as it's coming in, so the moment the ability to trade time for money is interrupted, you've cut off their financial air supply. A wage slave doesn't "cash out," because the cash is already gone, most of it to pay for things that only a truly heartless bastard would recommend they do without.
This tends to make employees very compliant. If the idea of losing your job is scary enough, you don't complain about sexual harassment or dangerous working conditions or abusive co-workers. You learn to shut up and take it. You get used to feeling powerless. You get used to having your opinions ignored. You learn to accept a completely subservient role, and make the best of it. What a wonderful way to train up citizens of a democracy-in-name-only.
Ultimately, that's why I don't share your sympathy for business owners and landlords. I understand their motivations, their need to bring in money to keep their businesses afloat. But they're living with risks that they chose, and that ability to choose grants them mastery over their own fates that their low-level grunts don't share. "Should I invest my money in an apartment complex, or throw it into a mutual fund" is a much more rewarding choice than, "Should I be a waitress at TGIFridays or Denny's?" and a hell of a lot more rewarding than "should I take this construction job or sleep in the street for another week waiting for something better?" The first choice is a satisfying, empowering one. The second one is a meaningless one, because the results will be basically the same. The third one can hardly be said to be a choice at all.
We're apes, and therefore keenly aware of our own place in the social hierarchy. Recent studies are showing that--beyond the problems caused by lack of access--the perception of being on the bottom rung of the social ladder is itself a major source of stress and ill health for people. That's why I'm constantly harping on the need for greater equality, for a world where everyone gets to feel like they have some control over their lives. Instead, our society seems hell-bent on continuing to expand the gulf between the rich and poor, ripping apart any sense of shared risk, shared obligations, or shared society, all in the name of "personal liberty."
I disagree. Most capital is controlled and directed by people who have very little risk of falling from the ranks of the upper class. Most labor is performed by those who are either locked out of the middle-class lifestyle, or are working their assets off trying to hang onto it. They don't have the choice to diversify away their risk, as owners do, and they generally have far fewer choices about how and when they exchange their labor for money.
An example showing owners having great control over their investment and laborers having very little is far, far more representative than the converse. Just because you can appear to flip the situation around by ignoring certain economic realities, doesn't mean that the two situations are actually equal.
Open source software doesn't work because of subsidies. Everyone who contributes to a software project does so because they feel that the benefits outweigh the costs, whether those benefits come in the form of intellectual pleasure, geek cred, or (increasingly common) direct financial contributions by those who stand to benefit from the software. Open source works because the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and because there is a large community of people who enjoy developing software.
You argue that the current style of business organization has developed and thrived because the efficient have driven out the inefficient. I would argue that it's because of self-reinforcement: those who start with more power tend to be able to maintain and reinforce that power in ways that the powerless cannot. The system you describe isn't about ensuring that a business is necessarily as efficient as possible, but about ensuring that as much benefit as possible accrues to those who own it. If this requires causing great human suffering to the workers to get a small increase in the amount of capital controlled by the owners, what stops the owners from playing that negative-sum game?
Traditionally, the answer has been "labor." But those who side with owners point out that labor can get overly demanding, become corrupt, stop listening to its members, and a whole host of other ills. To the extent that it's true, I would say it's because labor has the same motivations as owners: to get as much for themselves as possible, while offering as little as possible in return. Labor cares more about its workers than about the company's profitability, and labor organizers care more about themselves than the people they represent. That's not surprising, and I think that more transparent practices by both sides could help, but the fundamentally antagonistic relationship would remain.
But when the workers are also the owners (the sort of system Ted is describing) that antagonistic relationship disappears. The hope is that it is replaced by something where both managers and workers can feel more loyalty to the organization itself, rather than something to be fought over in order to direct as much of its profitability into a given pocket. Because the benefits of any gain in productivity are spread widely, few people have strong incentives to fight real improvements.
You seem to be of the opinion that laborers, left to themselves, would stumble around mired in their own lazy inefficiency. Therefore, they need management to help them overcome the vices inherent in their lower-class nature. I think that attitude is both paternalistic and ignoring where people's self-interest would really lie in such a system. Slackers would be less of a problem, because there is more incentive for "owner-workers" to keep each other in line than there is for "owned-workers." If you're working for a company you hate and whose performance doesn't seem to affect your bottom line, and you discover your co-worker has found a clever way to slack without getting caught, you're less likely to pressure him to stop, and more likely to join him in his slackery. If you work in a position where you know things could be done more efficiently, but reporting the inefficiency will either be ignored or lead to the elimination of half your department, what is your incentive for coming up with a better solution?
The information flow also fails to flow in the other direction. You say that workers will invariably make stupid decisions because they don't see the whole picture. But this is at least partly by the design of the owners. Information is power, and so long as the goal is to maintain as much power over workers as possible, information will only be shared when management thinks it will help them. Giving the employees a deep understanding of the company's workings is risky, because they are the enemy and will treat you as such.
It's hogwash to claim that traditional companies are necessarily more efficient. The easiest way to make your workers productive is to convince them that it is in their interests to do things that benefit the company. The easiest way to convince them of that is to make it true, by giving them a share of the company.
Your answer reminds me of the standard Dilbertesque logic: "If this proposal is a good idea, why aren't our competitors doing it?" There are lots of reasons for the existence of heirarchal business organizations, many of which have nothing to do with economic efficiency. I think that many of the reasons for
While I would urge this guy to start small (and have a clear idea of what he wants to accomplish, which he seems to lack at the moment), I would also encourage him to start implementing his organizational ideas from the get-go. If he tries the normal business first, he'll probably lack the passion to make it succeed. Also, if he really believes that the standard business is doing things "the wrong way," then focusing his energies on that could end up teaching him all the wrong lessons. It's sometimes good to start out not being immersed in the current understanding of the impossible.
I'm not sure I'd do it that way, because it undermines the ideals that I'd be striving for. Once you start contracting out services, you create a class of people who are working for your company's benefit, but who aren't participating in the democratic aspects of the company. In other words, there are still people in your organization that you're pretty much obligated to screw.
But I do recognize that (especially for a small company) it may well be impossible to have all your expertise in-house. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.
Consensus-based decision making doesn't sound easy to me, nor does it seem strictly necessary. In fact, it might be a case of the good being driven out by slavish devotion to an ideal.
My arguments: it's not easy, it's time intensive, and it doesn't scale well beyond small groups of relatively like-minded individuals. In any noteworthy organization, there are going to be things about it that individuals don't like, and yet the message of consensus-driven decision making seems to be that these things are anomalies which need to be eliminated.
To me, it seems more pragmatic to do the following:
1) Demand transparency in all business processes (especially decision-making). 2) Use committees to study issues in depth, then either give them the power to make the decision, or (for more important decisions) ask them to present their findings and a proposed plan of action to the wider membership. 3) Use condorcet voting, so that multiple variations of a plan can be presented without splitting the vote. 4) Demand supermajority voting for really far-reaching decisions. 5) Foster a culture where things are debated in a constructive, non-adversarial way. 6) Avoid institutionalizing the power of any individual or group of individuals.
I think this overcomes my primary objection to consensus, which is that people start expecting decisions to always agree with them. Doubtless the people who have been experimenting with consensus-based decisions have found other ways to overcome my objections, and I'm interested in hearing them.
I think the problem is greater in most Open Source projects, because it's hard to provide incentives for the grunt work. If a company that is making money sees that it's being harmed by a lack of bugfixes or a lack of documentation, the solutions are obvious enough: pay someone to do it.
In a communal-style business, people might decide on a system for ranking the importance of bugs (some combination of severity and required skill and effort), then use that to decide how big a bounty to offer. For example, you could say that bug X is worth 25 points, and each point gets you $2.00. Then just keep increasing the dollars-for-points exchange rate until somebody wades in and fixes the bugs, or it's realized that the bugs aren't really worth fixing.
Your arguments only make sense in a world where business owners and laborers come to the table with basically equal negotiating positions. For the vast majority of employees, it's not a matter of voluntarily agreeing to exchange labor for a 'risk-free' reward. Instead, they come from a position of "I have to find some job somewhere, in order to avoid starving to death or being eaten by coyotes." Therefore, they take pretty much whatever terms the owners of capital are offering.
Nor is the exchange as "risk free" as you claim. Employees can be injured or killed on the job, which degrades or eliminates their ability to generate revenue in the future. Employees can have their wages cut, their jobs eliminated, their duties increased, or their working conditions degraded. Any one of those events changes the amount of reward that employees get for their efforts, which means it's absurd to talk of waged employment as a risk-free endeavor. Finally, once they have a job, they cannot back out of it without losing the initial investment that was required in finding the job in the first place.
Honestly, who is really facing the greatest risk? The venture capitalist who invests a few million in a startup, knowing that his other, less risky investments guarantee him high income for life? Or the person who takes a minimum wage job knowing that she could be fired in a couple of weeks and be unable to make rent, or spend the next two years working for a manager who likes to feel her up, or injure herself on the job and have to fight her employer tooth and nail to get her medical bills paid?
The business practices you're defending make the world a far suckier place for everyone, including the companies that practice them. Congratulations on that.
Can you name some examples of companies that went out of business because the employees had too much say in how the company was run? You say "Look at all of the companies..." but frankly most of the people who are nodding their heads in agreement with you probably couldn't name one company organized this way, much less one that follows the pattern you describe.
Also, I take issue with your "runny noses" barb. Frankly, this smacks of the same sort of paternalism that neo-cons are constantly accusing liberals of. Only, instead of saying "only government can competently manage the affairs of the infantilized lower classes," conservatives have decided that only the brilliant, noble capitalist can run anything more complex than a lemonade stand properly.
You're right when you say that six people can't decide where to go for lunch. But if "lunch" is a daily event, they can certainly figure out that their current system isn't working, and choose a more efficient decision-making process. I'd start off with a rotating benevolent dictatorship. That is to say, "it's Monday, so Bob gets to decide." You're a bit lacking imagination if you think that every person needs to be directly involved in every decision, and even moreso if think a janitor shouldn't be involved in IT decisions.
Here's how it ought to work: The IT people ask the janitors what they need to do their jobs more efficiently, then work with them as they would work with any customer to get those needs filled. Meanwhile, while the janitors might not have any say in the architecture of the software the company sells, they might have worthwhile input about other aspects of the business, like how the company treats its customers. They'll also have contacts in the community that could be valuable.
The simple fact is, if you treat labor like a commodity where all you do is provide it certain inputs (mops, brooms, and wages) and expect certain outupts (a clean building and no pesky opinions) then these are the only outputs you're going to get. If you treat them like adults who have eyes and ears and powers of observation, and provide means and incentives for collecting that knowledge and spreading it around the rest of the company, then you get invaluable information about the company. Possibly more important, you get an employee who is less likely to treat his job like a commodity where all he does is provide certain inputs (time and effort) in exchange for certain outputs (money).
You make it sound like school would be an absolute impediment to learning. I would argue that your characterization is too simplistic, and that your advice is harmful.
First, while degrees don't guarantee jobs, the lack of one guarantees that some jobs will be forever outside your reach. So for someone making this decision, the best advice is to look at the market, see what employers really are demanding, and decide whether it's a good move.
Second, when this discussion comes up, lots of people argue that school doesn't provide any "real world experience." I think it would be more accurate to say that a university program and an entry level tech job teach orthogonal skills. It's the real-world stuff that employers think they need, and it's what they're actually paying for. But school can train your brain to take totally different approaches to solving problems, ones that rely on principles that almost nobody picks up on their own. This isn't due to laziness or incompetence, but a simple lack of exposure to people who are well-versed in them.
Lastly, programming isn't something you master in a couple of weeks, or a couple of years. I think it takes at least a decade before you can look back on the code you wrote a couple of years ago without wincing. I think that formal CS programs are a good way to start rewiring your brain into a lean, mean coding machine. The real world, despite its advantages, lacks one important thing: guaranteed, systematic exposure to an organized body of knowledge. It's a good thing to have done. For example, whether you actually remember DeMorgan's Law five years after you graduate, having once learned it leaves behind traces of how to work through logic problems, which comes in handy. But in the real world, with its focus on immediate results and learning technologies rather than principles, you might spend half a career without ever hearing the word "recursion" or learning the basics of algorithms and data structures.
Of course, I have to justify the tens of thousands of dollars I've spent edjymacating myself somehow. So take my blatherings with a grain of NaCl.
It would be more accurate to say that "by the time I get done explaining it, it won't be funny." 93.7% of humor relies on shared context, and the other 17.9% relies on coupling remarkable precision and outlandish inaccuracy.
1) You didn't get the joke. No problemo. Not everyone's style of humor.
2) How thoroughly must our country suck if one of the distinguishing features of a state is "one of our congressional races is competitive"? I propose that, after twelve years of holding office, our senators and representatives be escorted from the capitol building at gunpoint.
This "Europa" you speak of... I'm sure you're just trying to be funny, but everyone knows that you can't have a major country with a democratic government on what is--let's be honest--a giant snowball in outer space. The poor sods would freeze to death before they'd even decided whether or not to go with the bicameral legislature. In claiming that important software projects are being developed under such conditions, you must be subtly satirizing the stereotype of open source developers as people who code all night in their dilapidated ice caves, rarely sleeping and only leaving the house to hunt for ice weasels and Mountain Dew.
But there is a huge difference between satire and gratuitous insults, and the ice cave thing really pushes you outside the bounds of good taste. At least, I'm not laughing. Next time, go with the 'Soviet Hungaria' jokes; there's a reason they're considered classics.
Disclaimer: I'm working on my own, rather minimalistic CMS in Rails. I'm probably a couple of weeks into it. If it really is possible to do a CMS in "a few hours" then my ego is in for a bruising.
You mean "if all the most drooling, newbie hype is true." A full-featured CMS is a complex thing, and while Rails gives you lots of "damn that was easy" moments, the people who would seriously claim that you should be able to write one in a few hours haven't done much beyond watching the screencasts. I think the screencasts were something of a mistake, because all they can really do in ten or fifteen minutes is show off the scaffolding.
What exactly are you asking for here? Even if your optimistic claim is correct, and a web developer should be able to learn the fundamentals in an hour, then what? He's still going to want to create some sort of library that does what he needs. Sure, it will start out small and elegant. But then he starts finding corner cases, browser incompatibilities, lacking features, and bugs bugs bugs scattered all over his code. Why not just start with something that is featureful, well-designed, and not-sucky?
Then you start off on how programming is being "dumbed down," which--recognizing that I'm jumping to this here conclusion thingy--marks you as a bit of a noob in my eyes. There are three reasons for this, which you may feel free to dispute or ignore.
First, I think that really good programmers recognize that there are very real limits to the amount of complexity that they can handle. If they don't abstract away as many of the nitty-gritty details as possible, then their finite capacities are squandered well before they've finished the project.
Next (but related) I think that the history of computer science can be described as a catalogue of victories of abstraction over complexity. Usually this is the point where I'm supposed to ask, "Do you want us to be writing everything in assembly?" But that ignores the fact that even then, you're dealing with at least a couple of layers of abstraction.
Finally, I've worked with a couple of these toolkits, and always found the resulting code to be much cleaner, and much gooder, than if I'd tried to do it the long-handed way.
I'm not denying that political corruption and incompetent leadership are problems, mind you. But I am saying that the western world unintentionally destabilizes even the better governments as it goes about pursuing its own policies and interests.
An educated and informed populace can go a long way toward holding their government accountable. I hope The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer... I mean, The One Laptop Per Child Project can help make that happen.
We could divert a major fraction of our GDP to feeding the billion starving people in the world. But we don't. The U.S. government spends less on development aid than its citizens spend on pornography. Worse, we spend waaaay more subsidizing our own agricultural industries, in order to protect them from competing with millions of slightly-better-than-subsistence farmers.
Also, I consider the whole "good governance" mantra a cop-out. Yes, there are many corrupt countries to point to. But even the countries with good leadership are hamstrung by payments on old debts and irrational demands by the IMF. Too often, the cycle goes like this: the old regime is thrown out, replaced by someone who wants to make life better for a country. But to do that, they need money, because a government without money is just a bunch of people sitting around wearing poofy wigs. The IMF offers them a loan, which they really can't afford to pass up. But in order to get the loan, the IMF demands that they do things that will lead them to the Holy Grail of Economic Development: capital investment. The measures for attracting investment are simple, yet cruel: balance their budgets, privatize state-run institutions, and remove any restrictions on the flow of goods and capital into their country.
Balancing the budget means cutting back on expensive programs that provide for the poor, the elderly, and the unemployed. Liberalized trade means that while people get cheaper goods, the gain comes at the cost of jobs, as the market wrings out the "inefficient" producers. Liberalized capital controls means that investment money pours into the country when times are good (causing inflation), and flees at the first sign of trouble. The newly privatized industries have meanwhile fallen into the hands of foreign investors, who frankly don't care if the industries are serving the needs of the country, so long as they're delivering 22% a year.
The people look at the massive unemployment and the piecemeal sale of their country to foreigners, and they don't see good governance. Quite the opposite. So they throw the bums out, and the IMF just shakes its head and mutters about how sad it is that so many countries have such a shortage of good leadership.
Compare those outcomes with the Asian economies, which are growing rapidly while steadfastly ignoring the IMF's advice and rejecting their loans.
Slashdot Mirror
Immunity is tested statistically.
You find a group of high risk individuals, give some of them the vaccine and the rest get a placebo. If the vaccinated group has significantly fewer incidences of HIV, then the vaccine is at least a partial success.
So, what are the ethical implications here? Well, I lived in San Francisco this summer, and the local media had some good articles about how the testing is done. They're really careful to drive home the fact that 1) they may not have gotten the vaccine and 2) the vaccine may not protect them. They do what they can to discourage the subjects from engaging in high risk behaviors. Most important, the success of the study doesn't rely on the subjects doing anything they're not already doing.
How is it "whacked," "liberal," or--the word that always seems to follow in these discussions--"activist" for a judge to rule against a defendant who claims to have irrefutable evidence, but is unwilling to present it?
Aw, hell. I've been pwned by a 13-year old Dittohead. I've really got to stop hitting the reply button.
If only you'd used "congradulations" again.
You run your business exactly as you like. Don't give your employees any authority, and wonder why they don't take responsibility. Only tell them what you think they need to be told, and wonder why they don't seem to understand the realities of your business. Don't pay them more than you absolutely have to, and wonder why they don't go the extra mile for you. Just remind yourself that our society is in a steep moral decline caused by MTV and Internet pornography and kids having no respect for their elders. It can't possibly have anything to do with you.
You admit that you don't know what it's like to be poor, and you seem oblivious to the challenges they face. Yet you claim to know how to solve their problems. I'm sorry, but what worked for you isn't always going to work for people basically like you, so how much less effective is your advice for people whose situations don't remotely resemble your own?
I'm curious. If an employee has practically no stake in his job, if his employer's goal is to get the maximum work for the minimum reward, and if the employee is treated as an object of contempt and mistrust, then where is the incentive for him to strive to make the company better? If the employer is fighting for maximum work for minimum compensation, then why do you blame the employee for fighting for minimum work for maximum compensation? Every person in this world is blessed with only a finite amount of physical, intellectual, and emotional energy, and asking someone making spitting distance to minimum wage to lavish it on an uncaring employer is naive.
Is it the hope of promotion that should drive people? Or the hope that, as the company's profits soar, their employers will hand out pay raises? Hardly. Corporations have fought tooth and nail to keep wages and benefits down, to undermine the labor movement, and to make sure that as much of the nation's tax burden is shoved onto their employees rather than themselves.
Finally, people damn well ought to be able to ask for pay raises for "doing the same work as last year." The employee is more experienced than last year. The employee is therefore more efficient than last year. The employee is working with new technologies that increase productivity that weren't there last year. In short, the employee is generating more wealth for the company, and is just asking for a small fraction of it back. Even the janitor--who is only keeping the building as clean as he did five years ago--is providing a more valuable service, if the building itself is generating more wealth than it did back then.
For the last several decades, hourly productivity has been rising dramatically, while hourly compensation has been pretty much flat. So the fraction of productive work that employees get to keep has been plummeting. This will always be true so long as it's easier for employers to replace demanding employees with pliant ones than it is for employees to find more generous employers.
Finally, you have no right to whine about how the government picks your pockets to promote the general welfare. The U.S. has the lowest tax burden of just about any industrialized nation, and we spend nearly as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. I understand why we need to make sure we can hold our own in the event of invasion by every single other country in the world, but ask yourself, was that true before Bush took office?
Compare our situation to European countries. They spend a much higher fraction of their GDP on social programs and, guess what? People like it that way. That's because their programs are broad enough to benefit everybody, rather than our miserly programs, which benefit only the poorest of us, the people generally assumed to deserve their fates because of their ineptitude, vice, and sloth.
Oh, I'm sure you'll argue that these programs have had a generally negative effect on the EU economy. But Europeans live longer, report themselves to be happier, and they've got all the good restaurants. So which economy is really doing a better job of distributing limited resources in a way that fulfills the most needs?
"Let them eat cake?" You sound like somebody who has no idea what it's really like at the bottom of the wage scale. Why don't you try going up to a middle-aged Wal-Mart clerk who has to spend 60% of her paycheck just to make rent, and ask her why she doesn't just go into business for herself? Better yet, rather than making a public spectacle of yourself, why not just recognize that the people on the margins don't have the expertise or access to capital that they'd need to go into business?
You seem to think that the "entire reason" for the increasing dominance of employers over employees and the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-squats has something to do with the average person's intense desire not to have a business of their own. The simple fact that the vast majority of small businesses fail should put a rest to that lie. A small business takes a lot of effort, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of money. What I'm hearing from you is that those who lack any of those three ingredients should be content with jobs where they have no say in what their company does or how the company treats them.
You and I have totally different definitions of "risk". You seem to take my question as "who is going to lose the most money?" when what I'm really asking is, "which would you rather have happen to you?" So I ask you, would you rather A) lose out on three months rent from an apartment you own, or B) be thrown out of your home and have to either move in with a friend or spend some time in a homeless shelter?
What you ignore is how desperately important it is for a wage slave to always be investing his or her time. You make it sound like employees are whistling along, stuffing their time investment into a mutual fund, which they cash out when they depart from a job. In fact, for a large number of people, the money is going out at least as fast as it's coming in, so the moment the ability to trade time for money is interrupted, you've cut off their financial air supply. A wage slave doesn't "cash out," because the cash is already gone, most of it to pay for things that only a truly heartless bastard would recommend they do without.
This tends to make employees very compliant. If the idea of losing your job is scary enough, you don't complain about sexual harassment or dangerous working conditions or abusive co-workers. You learn to shut up and take it. You get used to feeling powerless. You get used to having your opinions ignored. You learn to accept a completely subservient role, and make the best of it. What a wonderful way to train up citizens of a democracy-in-name-only.
Ultimately, that's why I don't share your sympathy for business owners and landlords. I understand their motivations, their need to bring in money to keep their businesses afloat. But they're living with risks that they chose, and that ability to choose grants them mastery over their own fates that their low-level grunts don't share. "Should I invest my money in an apartment complex, or throw it into a mutual fund" is a much more rewarding choice than, "Should I be a waitress at TGIFridays or Denny's?" and a hell of a lot more rewarding than "should I take this construction job or sleep in the street for another week waiting for something better?" The first choice is a satisfying, empowering one. The second one is a meaningless one, because the results will be basically the same. The third one can hardly be said to be a choice at all.
We're apes, and therefore keenly aware of our own place in the social hierarchy. Recent studies are showing that--beyond the problems caused by lack of access--the perception of being on the bottom rung of the social ladder is itself a major source of stress and ill health for people. That's why I'm constantly harping on the need for greater equality, for a world where everyone gets to feel like they have some control over their lives. Instead, our society seems hell-bent on continuing to expand the gulf between the rich and poor, ripping apart any sense of shared risk, shared obligations, or shared society, all in the name of "personal liberty."
I disagree. Most capital is controlled and directed by people who have very little risk of falling from the ranks of the upper class. Most labor is performed by those who are either locked out of the middle-class lifestyle, or are working their assets off trying to hang onto it. They don't have the choice to diversify away their risk, as owners do, and they generally have far fewer choices about how and when they exchange their labor for money.
An example showing owners having great control over their investment and laborers having very little is far, far more representative than the converse. Just because you can appear to flip the situation around by ignoring certain economic realities, doesn't mean that the two situations are actually equal.
Open source software doesn't work because of subsidies. Everyone who contributes to a software project does so because they feel that the benefits outweigh the costs, whether those benefits come in the form of intellectual pleasure, geek cred, or (increasingly common) direct financial contributions by those who stand to benefit from the software. Open source works because the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and because there is a large community of people who enjoy developing software.
You argue that the current style of business organization has developed and thrived because the efficient have driven out the inefficient. I would argue that it's because of self-reinforcement: those who start with more power tend to be able to maintain and reinforce that power in ways that the powerless cannot. The system you describe isn't about ensuring that a business is necessarily as efficient as possible, but about ensuring that as much benefit as possible accrues to those who own it. If this requires causing great human suffering to the workers to get a small increase in the amount of capital controlled by the owners, what stops the owners from playing that negative-sum game?
Traditionally, the answer has been "labor." But those who side with owners point out that labor can get overly demanding, become corrupt, stop listening to its members, and a whole host of other ills. To the extent that it's true, I would say it's because labor has the same motivations as owners: to get as much for themselves as possible, while offering as little as possible in return. Labor cares more about its workers than about the company's profitability, and labor organizers care more about themselves than the people they represent. That's not surprising, and I think that more transparent practices by both sides could help, but the fundamentally antagonistic relationship would remain.
But when the workers are also the owners (the sort of system Ted is describing) that antagonistic relationship disappears. The hope is that it is replaced by something where both managers and workers can feel more loyalty to the organization itself, rather than something to be fought over in order to direct as much of its profitability into a given pocket. Because the benefits of any gain in productivity are spread widely, few people have strong incentives to fight real improvements.
You seem to be of the opinion that laborers, left to themselves, would stumble around mired in their own lazy inefficiency. Therefore, they need management to help them overcome the vices inherent in their lower-class nature. I think that attitude is both paternalistic and ignoring where people's self-interest would really lie in such a system. Slackers would be less of a problem, because there is more incentive for "owner-workers" to keep each other in line than there is for "owned-workers." If you're working for a company you hate and whose performance doesn't seem to affect your bottom line, and you discover your co-worker has found a clever way to slack without getting caught, you're less likely to pressure him to stop, and more likely to join him in his slackery. If you work in a position where you know things could be done more efficiently, but reporting the inefficiency will either be ignored or lead to the elimination of half your department, what is your incentive for coming up with a better solution?
The information flow also fails to flow in the other direction. You say that workers will invariably make stupid decisions because they don't see the whole picture. But this is at least partly by the design of the owners. Information is power, and so long as the goal is to maintain as much power over workers as possible, information will only be shared when management thinks it will help them. Giving the employees a deep understanding of the company's workings is risky, because they are the enemy and will treat you as such.
It's hogwash to claim that traditional companies are necessarily more efficient. The easiest way to make your workers productive is to convince them that it is in their interests to do things that benefit the company. The easiest way to convince them of that is to make it true, by giving them a share of the company.
Your answer reminds me of the standard Dilbertesque logic: "If this proposal is a good idea, why aren't our competitors doing it?" There are lots of reasons for the existence of heirarchal business organizations, many of which have nothing to do with economic efficiency. I think that many of the reasons for
While I would urge this guy to start small (and have a clear idea of what he wants to accomplish, which he seems to lack at the moment), I would also encourage him to start implementing his organizational ideas from the get-go. If he tries the normal business first, he'll probably lack the passion to make it succeed. Also, if he really believes that the standard business is doing things "the wrong way," then focusing his energies on that could end up teaching him all the wrong lessons. It's sometimes good to start out not being immersed in the current understanding of the impossible.
No.
Next question?
I'm not sure I'd do it that way, because it undermines the ideals that I'd be striving for. Once you start contracting out services, you create a class of people who are working for your company's benefit, but who aren't participating in the democratic aspects of the company. In other words, there are still people in your organization that you're pretty much obligated to screw.
But I do recognize that (especially for a small company) it may well be impossible to have all your expertise in-house. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.
Consensus-based decision making doesn't sound easy to me, nor does it seem strictly necessary. In fact, it might be a case of the good being driven out by slavish devotion to an ideal.
My arguments: it's not easy, it's time intensive, and it doesn't scale well beyond small groups of relatively like-minded individuals. In any noteworthy organization, there are going to be things about it that individuals don't like, and yet the message of consensus-driven decision making seems to be that these things are anomalies which need to be eliminated.
To me, it seems more pragmatic to do the following:
1) Demand transparency in all business processes (especially decision-making).
2) Use committees to study issues in depth, then either give them the power to make the decision, or (for more important decisions) ask them to present their findings and a proposed plan of action to the wider membership.
3) Use condorcet voting, so that multiple variations of a plan can be presented without splitting the vote.
4) Demand supermajority voting for really far-reaching decisions.
5) Foster a culture where things are debated in a constructive, non-adversarial way.
6) Avoid institutionalizing the power of any individual or group of individuals.
I think this overcomes my primary objection to consensus, which is that people start expecting decisions to always agree with them. Doubtless the people who have been experimenting with consensus-based decisions have found other ways to overcome my objections, and I'm interested in hearing them.
I think the problem is greater in most Open Source projects, because it's hard to provide incentives for the grunt work. If a company that is making money sees that it's being harmed by a lack of bugfixes or a lack of documentation, the solutions are obvious enough: pay someone to do it.
In a communal-style business, people might decide on a system for ranking the importance of bugs (some combination of severity and required skill and effort), then use that to decide how big a bounty to offer. For example, you could say that bug X is worth 25 points, and each point gets you $2.00. Then just keep increasing the dollars-for-points exchange rate until somebody wades in and fixes the bugs, or it's realized that the bugs aren't really worth fixing.
Your arguments only make sense in a world where business owners and laborers come to the table with basically equal negotiating positions. For the vast majority of employees, it's not a matter of voluntarily agreeing to exchange labor for a 'risk-free' reward. Instead, they come from a position of "I have to find some job somewhere, in order to avoid starving to death or being eaten by coyotes." Therefore, they take pretty much whatever terms the owners of capital are offering.
Nor is the exchange as "risk free" as you claim. Employees can be injured or killed on the job, which degrades or eliminates their ability to generate revenue in the future. Employees can have their wages cut, their jobs eliminated, their duties increased, or their working conditions degraded. Any one of those events changes the amount of reward that employees get for their efforts, which means it's absurd to talk of waged employment as a risk-free endeavor. Finally, once they have a job, they cannot back out of it without losing the initial investment that was required in finding the job in the first place.
Honestly, who is really facing the greatest risk? The venture capitalist who invests a few million in a startup, knowing that his other, less risky investments guarantee him high income for life? Or the person who takes a minimum wage job knowing that she could be fired in a couple of weeks and be unable to make rent, or spend the next two years working for a manager who likes to feel her up, or injure herself on the job and have to fight her employer tooth and nail to get her medical bills paid?
The business practices you're defending make the world a far suckier place for everyone, including the companies that practice them. Congratulations on that.
Can you name some examples of companies that went out of business because the employees had too much say in how the company was run? You say "Look at all of the companies..." but frankly most of the people who are nodding their heads in agreement with you probably couldn't name one company organized this way, much less one that follows the pattern you describe.
Also, I take issue with your "runny noses" barb. Frankly, this smacks of the same sort of paternalism that neo-cons are constantly accusing liberals of. Only, instead of saying "only government can competently manage the affairs of the infantilized lower classes," conservatives have decided that only the brilliant, noble capitalist can run anything more complex than a lemonade stand properly.
You're right when you say that six people can't decide where to go for lunch. But if "lunch" is a daily event, they can certainly figure out that their current system isn't working, and choose a more efficient decision-making process. I'd start off with a rotating benevolent dictatorship. That is to say, "it's Monday, so Bob gets to decide." You're a bit lacking imagination if you think that every person needs to be directly involved in every decision, and even moreso if think a janitor shouldn't be involved in IT decisions.
Here's how it ought to work: The IT people ask the janitors what they need to do their jobs more efficiently, then work with them as they would work with any customer to get those needs filled. Meanwhile, while the janitors might not have any say in the architecture of the software the company sells, they might have worthwhile input about other aspects of the business, like how the company treats its customers. They'll also have contacts in the community that could be valuable.
The simple fact is, if you treat labor like a commodity where all you do is provide it certain inputs (mops, brooms, and wages) and expect certain outupts (a clean building and no pesky opinions) then these are the only outputs you're going to get. If you treat them like adults who have eyes and ears and powers of observation, and provide means and incentives for collecting that knowledge and spreading it around the rest of the company, then you get invaluable information about the company. Possibly more important, you get an employee who is less likely to treat his job like a commodity where all he does is provide certain inputs (time and effort) in exchange for certain outputs (money).
You make it sound like school would be an absolute impediment to learning. I would argue that your characterization is too simplistic, and that your advice is harmful.
First, while degrees don't guarantee jobs, the lack of one guarantees that some jobs will be forever outside your reach. So for someone making this decision, the best advice is to look at the market, see what employers really are demanding, and decide whether it's a good move.
Second, when this discussion comes up, lots of people argue that school doesn't provide any "real world experience." I think it would be more accurate to say that a university program and an entry level tech job teach orthogonal skills. It's the real-world stuff that employers think they need, and it's what they're actually paying for. But school can train your brain to take totally different approaches to solving problems, ones that rely on principles that almost nobody picks up on their own. This isn't due to laziness or incompetence, but a simple lack of exposure to people who are well-versed in them.
Lastly, programming isn't something you master in a couple of weeks, or a couple of years. I think it takes at least a decade before you can look back on the code you wrote a couple of years ago without wincing. I think that formal CS programs are a good way to start rewiring your brain into a lean, mean coding machine. The real world, despite its advantages, lacks one important thing: guaranteed, systematic exposure to an organized body of knowledge. It's a good thing to have done. For example, whether you actually remember DeMorgan's Law five years after you graduate, having once learned it leaves behind traces of how to work through logic problems, which comes in handy. But in the real world, with its focus on immediate results and learning technologies rather than principles, you might spend half a career without ever hearing the word "recursion" or learning the basics of algorithms and data structures.
Of course, I have to justify the tens of thousands of dollars I've spent edjymacating myself somehow. So take my blatherings with a grain of NaCl.
It would be more accurate to say that "by the time I get done explaining it, it won't be funny." 93.7% of humor relies on shared context, and the other 17.9% relies on coupling remarkable precision and outlandish inaccuracy.
1) You didn't get the joke. No problemo. Not everyone's style of humor.
2) How thoroughly must our country suck if one of the distinguishing features of a state is "one of our congressional races is competitive"? I propose that, after twelve years of holding office, our senators and representatives be escorted from the capitol building at gunpoint.
This "Europa" you speak of... I'm sure you're just trying to be funny, but everyone knows that you can't have a major country with a democratic government on what is--let's be honest--a giant snowball in outer space. The poor sods would freeze to death before they'd even decided whether or not to go with the bicameral legislature. In claiming that important software projects are being developed under such conditions, you must be subtly satirizing the stereotype of open source developers as people who code all night in their dilapidated ice caves, rarely sleeping and only leaving the house to hunt for ice weasels and Mountain Dew.
But there is a huge difference between satire and gratuitous insults, and the ice cave thing really pushes you outside the bounds of good taste. At least, I'm not laughing. Next time, go with the 'Soviet Hungaria' jokes; there's a reason they're considered classics.
Disclaimer: I'm working on my own, rather minimalistic CMS in Rails. I'm probably a couple of weeks into it. If it really is possible to do a CMS in "a few hours" then my ego is in for a bruising.
You mean "if all the most drooling, newbie hype is true." A full-featured CMS is a complex thing, and while Rails gives you lots of "damn that was easy" moments, the people who would seriously claim that you should be able to write one in a few hours haven't done much beyond watching the screencasts. I think the screencasts were something of a mistake, because all they can really do in ten or fifteen minutes is show off the scaffolding.
What exactly are you asking for here? Even if your optimistic claim is correct, and a web developer should be able to learn the fundamentals in an hour, then what? He's still going to want to create some sort of library that does what he needs. Sure, it will start out small and elegant. But then he starts finding corner cases, browser incompatibilities, lacking features, and bugs bugs bugs scattered all over his code. Why not just start with something that is featureful, well-designed, and not-sucky?
Then you start off on how programming is being "dumbed down," which--recognizing that I'm jumping to this here conclusion thingy--marks you as a bit of a noob in my eyes. There are three reasons for this, which you may feel free to dispute or ignore.
First, I think that really good programmers recognize that there are very real limits to the amount of complexity that they can handle. If they don't abstract away as many of the nitty-gritty details as possible, then their finite capacities are squandered well before they've finished the project.
Next (but related) I think that the history of computer science can be described as a catalogue of victories of abstraction over complexity. Usually this is the point where I'm supposed to ask, "Do you want us to be writing everything in assembly?" But that ignores the fact that even then, you're dealing with at least a couple of layers of abstraction.
Finally, I've worked with a couple of these toolkits, and always found the resulting code to be much cleaner, and much gooder, than if I'd tried to do it the long-handed way.
Another good source of Prototype documentation.
I'm not denying that political corruption and incompetent leadership are problems, mind you. But I am saying that the western world unintentionally destabilizes even the better governments as it goes about pursuing its own policies and interests.
An educated and informed populace can go a long way toward holding their government accountable. I hope The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer... I mean, The One Laptop Per Child Project can help make that happen.
We could divert a major fraction of our GDP to feeding the billion starving people in the world. But we don't. The U.S. government spends less on development aid than its citizens spend on pornography. Worse, we spend waaaay more subsidizing our own agricultural industries, in order to protect them from competing with millions of slightly-better-than-subsistence farmers.
Also, I consider the whole "good governance" mantra a cop-out. Yes, there are many corrupt countries to point to. But even the countries with good leadership are hamstrung by payments on old debts and irrational demands by the IMF. Too often, the cycle goes like this: the old regime is thrown out, replaced by someone who wants to make life better for a country. But to do that, they need money, because a government without money is just a bunch of people sitting around wearing poofy wigs. The IMF offers them a loan, which they really can't afford to pass up. But in order to get the loan, the IMF demands that they do things that will lead them to the Holy Grail of Economic Development: capital investment. The measures for attracting investment are simple, yet cruel: balance their budgets, privatize state-run institutions, and remove any restrictions on the flow of goods and capital into their country.
Balancing the budget means cutting back on expensive programs that provide for the poor, the elderly, and the unemployed. Liberalized trade means that while people get cheaper goods, the gain comes at the cost of jobs, as the market wrings out the "inefficient" producers. Liberalized capital controls means that investment money pours into the country when times are good (causing inflation), and flees at the first sign of trouble. The newly privatized industries have meanwhile fallen into the hands of foreign investors, who frankly don't care if the industries are serving the needs of the country, so long as they're delivering 22% a year.
The people look at the massive unemployment and the piecemeal sale of their country to foreigners, and they don't see good governance. Quite the opposite. So they throw the bums out, and the IMF just shakes its head and mutters about how sad it is that so many countries have such a shortage of good leadership.
Compare those outcomes with the Asian economies, which are growing rapidly while steadfastly ignoring the IMF's advice and rejecting their loans.
Out of curiosity, which side of the room would you put yourself on?