There's kinda a flip side of this in modern life too - which is the getting away with murder that goes on in commerce and other organisations. By this I mean an executive or engineer can do something exploitative and unprofessional - load a company with debt, release a tranche of necessary employees, increase a dividend... or for engineers, make false claims about business cases, delivery schedules or technical capabilities. There are no consequences (provided the timing is done cleverly), a bubble of sucess is created - the act is lorded or claimed on a CV and the person moves on and up the ladder. When the company gets into trouble or the project catastrophically failes the exited individual is rarely confronted with this, and if they are they simply say "it was great when I left - I don't know what went wrong but they really blew it!" There is no community of disapproval, and there is no genuine mechanism of reputataion management.
Maybe an executive did choose a technology to pad his resume over functionally. Without an email from him stating that he is just padding his resume, how can you prove that the new technology wasn't going to be successful?
This seems like a place where you should apply Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will suffice.
Executives and senior domain experts make a lot of stupid decisions borne out of overconfidence and attempts to do flashy things for bonuses or promotions.
It’s extremely tenuous and would require huge evidence to argue this sort of thing is malicious or criminally negligent, as opposed to just someone sincerely doing their job in a way that leads to a mistake or is punished by market trends or competitor advancements or whatever.
Sure, but a lot of the folks making these mistakes inside of companies also don’t care about getting better, just getting paid.
If you wanted every such type of mistake to be susceptible to crimimal or civil litigation, boy, you’d be legislating morality for one (deciding exactly when someone can value money or believe a certain risk is worthwhile), and have almost no way to enforce it (how can you prove a sincere mistake I “learned from” vs negligence I never cared about, without something like smoking gun email admissions or something?), and further no competent people will agree to do these jobs if they feel they cannot have a perfectly healthy and normal process of making mistakes without great risk someone will try to turn it into a lawsuit or criminal charges?
You might say these are all matters of degree, and you just use targeted legislation to make it punishable according to specific guidelines, but it’s just a giant slippery slope, and very susceptible to political subversion for people who have the same malicious intent only operating on the regulatory or legislative side rather than in private firms.
It’s a huge moral hazard problem, but one that can really only be solved by rare, upstanding management, and hardly ever by litigation.
> making these mistakes inside of companies also don’t care about getting better, just getting paid.
I guess that's the problem, but at least for people who are competent today, they got there by failing and learning.
> If you wanted every such type of mistake to be susceptible to crimimal or civil litigation
No I don't, that's bad for all the reasons you said.
Rather I'm all for letting people deal with the consequences of their decisions so that they learn over time. That's a structural change. Some examples:
* Engineers who write the code should also test/debug it
* UX designers should regularly see new users trying their products
I haven't thought too much of the case for CEOs but I imagine it's similar. At least in the startup world CEOs with a failed company under their belt are more valued than those with no experience.
The overall problems of the program - a massively overweight orbiter, compromises on spec, the failures of the ceramic tiles... these are examples of mistakes to learn from.
Launching challenger outside of the design envelope? In a deep sense the lesson was: use the knowledge of engineers, hard won over 300 years and behave professionally. 7 people did not have to die for us to know this - we KNEW THIS ALREADY.
Learning from blowing up a large company by overloading its balence sheet is equivalent to learning that sticking a fork in your eye is likely to hurt. The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad.
> The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad.
I'm not sure it's possible to tell on a case by case basis. Certainly the incentives are not aligned, but I myself don't see the point of blaming individual actors for taking advantage when the system itself is broken.
The better solution would be to align incentives (by legislation if the market won't) and you'll magically see people acting "morally" out of self interest.
That's the flip side of tolerance to failures. If it weren't that way, people who created startups, attracted VC funding and failed would go to jail, or at least shamed and put on a black list and become unemployable for life. You really want that to happen?
This is an interesting piece. The author tackles a few different kinds of fears, starting with fear of Libra destroying normal consumer transaction paths and then looks at fear of entire small and medium sized businesses getting straight up destroyed by moves from giant players like Amazon.
I think the author is pretty spot-on in the implicit conclusion that this is the natural result of increasingly centralized businesses running pseudo-monopolies in key industries.
Definitely thought provoking. I hadn't thought much about how the effects of the fear of retribution reverberate in how people and companies interact with governments, employers, and suppliers.
I feel like this is usually discussed on the micro-level (e.g. an employee's fear of whistleblowing on her boss), but not so much on the macro-level.
I can't put a finger on it but something feels sort of dishonest about this article to me.
He seems to be applying the concept of fear in an inconsistent manner that ends up just reducing down to “things are happening I don't like" and then noting that people experienced the normal human emotion of fear relating to that list.
Like is manufacturers being worried about about being undercut by a competitor for a big contract a wave of terror? As unpleasant as I could imagine that is for the small supplier, that's a pretty healthy way for that transaction to work.
It just seems like fear is another way of saying, not everyone gets what they want and this article is simply a list of things this guy doesn't like. It's not even a bad list it just doesn't really say much of anything.
The author's point is about fear corroding democracy by limiting public action and information.
"I am not going to let you sell your widget through Tamazon" is unfortunate and potentially crippling for the supplier, but as you've pointed out that's business.
"I am not going to let you sell your widget through Tamazon... in the event you make disparaging remarks about Tamazon in any public forum or divulge any information about our agreements" is very different.
In the later case, the last mile is threatening to retaliate in the event the supplier does anything they don't like.
Which, as a supplier, you rightly wonder "What can I do to avoid getting on Tamazon's naughty list?" To which Tamazon replies with a wink and a smile, "Just be careful what you say and to who, and I'm sure it won't come to that."
Absent legal protections and methods of redress, this dynamic is likely to exist in any market where the aggregator captures a sizable customer share. The size disparity is simply too great.
Yeah, for me I personally agreed with his points when they were relating to how much power some corporate giants have to instill fear.
But then the union bit and the anecdote about bidding the contract just seemed totally off topic except for the fact that someone felt scared at some point.
I honestly don't hate the article but it ended up feeling like he was fishing for some story where someone was scared.
I agree with your point, limiting public discourse and transparency through business practices is more malicious than simply trying to increase efficiency by negotiating lower prices.
That said, brave suppliers are capable of shifting the balance of power. Think about it, if "Tamazon" drops an efficient supplier for one of their competitors, Tamazon is going to expose themselves to a competitor who picks up that supplier - likely a competitor who's trying to break Tamazon's monopoly.
Then, suddenly, Tamazon's competitor is offering the consumer a superior purchase option.
If I was the supplier, I wouldn't get afraid, I'd get even. I'd go to every Tamazon competitor I could find and convince them to offer my product at wholesale and then give a scathing testimony to the anti-trust regulator.
You would drive your own company out of business to make a minute dent in Tamazon's bottom line? Seems like it would not be a very popular course of action.
He is dishonest because his very nature is selling favors. Remember, we are not talking about an entrepreneur or engineer who create things that are exchanged for value. This is a guy that everyday when he was in office, his sole objective was literally to pick winners and losers. They dont create value. They literally destroy it AND get a cut of the action in the process.
Every single problem he comments on (central bank, monopolies etc) are a direct result of legislation that he (or someone like him) helped draft.
Only a bureaucrat can complain in the same article about Unions losing power and american enterprise being fearful of outsourcing. They simply cannot connect the dots.
So if the article seems disonest is because it is. You cant say something is bad when you have no skin in the game (alt currency vs hyperinflation) and you also enabled its creation (amazon via USPS, tax breaks, etc).
Interesting article. I wish he touched on another point, which is the political monoculture in tech and media. The left has a vice grip on the discourse in these industries. Many conservatives have a justified fear of speaking publicly, worried they’ll be labeled a racist/nazi and have trouble getting jobs or making sales. I’m not sure what the downstream effects of this will be, but the culture of ostracizing wrongthink is real, and a worrying trend.
The fact that you think either side has a "vice grip" on anything speaks volumes to how effective the filter bubbles have become. You hear what you want to hear, see what you want to see, the engagement stats are through the roof!
90% of reality has been filtered out and you're being fed a constant stream of "poor white man persecuted for wrongthink" stories to keep you clicking.
How does the left has a vice grip on discourse in media? The most watched cable news network is conservative. The largest operator of local tv is conservative.
The problem is, people with seemingly unpopular views do not know which of their acquaintances share their views. So it’s hard to estimate the popularity of a given view, and the default option becomes silence. Inevitably, the popular view quickly seeps into the void, meeting no resistance as it becomes the de-facto standard of thought.
The end result is a polarized society driven by a stagnant discourse of self-indulgent moral platitudes.
Intellectual conservativism was destroyed from the right. Incoherent anger politics turned out to be far more effective at getting the voters.
Edit: meanwhile in Oregon the conservatives have fled to break a quorum rule and are issuing press releases with armed anti-government groups. As the Maoists discovered, who needs intellectuals when you have guns and slogans?
Intellectual conservatism - at least under certain definition - is tricky to defend. When there is a choice between "progress" - moving forward - and "stability" - avoiding changes - staying implies perceived perfection, which doesn't seem particularly intellectual. Progress doesn't just mean "change by all means", but conservation does mean "reject change", otherwise there would be no difference to talk about.
You sort of answered your own question. People looking for a left-leaning narrative have (C)(MS)NBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. People looking for a right-leaning narrative have Fox(News)(Business).
Fox has consolidated the right-leaning audience. Anyone who complains about them should always follow the complaint asking why there aren't more conservative news networks to keep them honest.
Most of these networks (CNN, CBS) aren’t actually left leaning, except in comparison to Fox. Consider how much time they gave to stories like Hillary Clinton’s email server during 2016. They didn’t focus soley on Benghazi for a year, but that shouldn’t make a network “left-leaning”.
left and right have always been relative terms. saying CNN isn't "actually" left leaning is like saying California isn't really west because Hawaii exists.
That you can think these networks have left-leaning narratives just goes to show how much right-wing politics have become the norm.
As another commenter pointed out, the only thing that can be tought of as "left-wing" with them is that they are to the left of Fox News.
To go back to basics, left means distributing profits more equally, having built-in methods of solidarity, and giving power to the people (all of them).
> The most watched cable news network is conservative. The largest operator of local tv is conservative.
In USA. But nowadays is more complicated than this. There is also CCTV and Al Jazeera for example that have a mix of USA and non-USA watchers largely exceding the number of USA population.
That is hilarious. Good thing they have strong unions and "don't be evil." Being slightly less conservative to the rabid dogs of today's right wing juggernaut is not a socialist utopia.
In your world george bush jr. is a socialist lefty.
highly educated people middle class and upper people can have more in common with the same type of people in other countries, consuming the same goods, media, and entertainment, than the citizens of their own country who are in different circumstances.
Sure, people can have tons in common, but attempting to argue that educated people in, say, India, Korea, and France all basically have the same political or social belief enters the realm of the ridiculous.
Only socially liberal. Economically speaking, the tech industry is more akin to the traditional economic liberalism. Not left by any stretch of the imagination.
Thank you: good and relevant point. There's a possible argument that current politics is in part a reaction against neoliberalism: which is to some extent socially left, but in terms of hegemonic power, is profoundly conservative in nature.
Always cumbersome when our frameworks of language and thought break down, and stop fitting observable reality.
They are worried about being labeled a racist, because that carries a heavy social cost. They can be very easily fired, lose their jobs only based on vague allegations.
We live in a time where slander carries virtually no penalty and big corporations are terrified of being seen as anti-PC.
The mainstream media and internet outrage mobs can very easily ruin anyones day. It doesn't matter if they are right or not. Sometimes the "news" are entirely fabricated.
There are reasons to avoid being called racist, or not being PC, but anybody can call anybody anything - it's the arguments that matter. Fearing participating in a discussion and maintaining views carries a possibility of being wrong without correction, which should reasonably be avoided.
Unfortunately we don't have ways of reasonable exchange of opinions in our populism times.
Legal system was put in place to prevent mob rule. Internet has again enabled mobs to go around and freely harrass, bully and target individuals in order to enforce their own ideals, instead of what is written in the law.
What makes someone upset is not the same what is unjust.
Yes. For example, being anti-illegal immigration and pro strong national borders is something that is hard to talk about without being labelled a racist.
No, it’s not — you just have to avoid saying things which are racist or being dishonest about your motivations. For example, if you want to talk about illegal immigration don’t use rhetoric of the “brown criminal hordes” genre and hope that your audience isn’t aware of the stats. Do be prepared to talk about your proposed legal changes and what problems they address.
Maybe in your social/family circle, but up here in Portland and in my observable social circles, it's a topic that you can't discuss except for with people you know really well. Or rather, you can, and the person on the other side might not call you racist to your face, but they'll entertain no discussion of the topic other than suggestions that you are a bad person for not being compassionate enough. The fact that you have to give a disclaimer along the lines of "Don't get me wrong, I think Trump is an idiot and I have voted Democratic since I could vote..." to even have anyone participate in the conversation, is telling.
I even made a throwaway because I am scared of being viewed as a racist in my workplace.
I think you might look at is as a situation where the libertarians won/defined the economic politics of these big tech companies and indeed the internet itself, while the left/liberals came to define the social politics of the big tech companies.
If Libra can give people an option of a stable currency and chance against bad central bank (Zimbabwe, Venezuela etc) than may be it's not that bad of a thing. It's backed by basket of currencies and over a long period will face inflationary and bad monetary issues but it will still be a leg up over many many currencies.
Author has not lived into high inflation market or lack awareness of people who suffer under these everyday. If Libra can free a multitude from this menace, we should support it indeed.
>Libra can give people an option of a stable currency and chance against bad central bank
In the future we will have strong criticisms of the US Dollar. It historically has not been stable over long periods of time. However, the US government has nearly forced every country to doing business in USD.
This is great for ease of business, but given how low interest rates are, I expect a historic inflation of USD in my lifetime.
Given its impossible to hire someone at Minimum Wage(2019), I believe we have inflation that is not being recorded with the US federal reserve. 2%/yr seems... fake.
Facebook’s Libra seems to have grabbed all the attention of regulators, legislators, and pundits, which could be seen an absolutely fabulous gift to wider cryptocurrency world as now it’s Facebook’s problem to deal with all of them, deflecting scrutiny away from real cryptocurrencies and to this corporate reserve/ETF currency something or other.
"I’ve heard from venture capitalists frightened to talk for fear they can’t sell portfolio companies to big tech"
So you want to profit from selling out to big tech, but you're afraid of them because they've become so big and powerful - in part by buying other companies...
- Sale on revenue and clients : boring, competitive and comparably low return for founders. Invest 10-15 years at comparatively low compensation with high risk of total failure , and huge opportunity cost.
- Sale on IP and team : quick, high return.
Founders often build category 2 opportunites without knowing, and are removed after a short time, with no compensation and several years of their lives missing!
"...could threaten the ability of emerging market governments to control their monetary supply, the local means of exchange, and, in some cases, their ability to impose capital controls."
Read 'emerging' as 'failed centrally planned economy'. The self-described anti-monopolist is defending an failed state monopoly.
"After many mistakes, we have learnt that we want a central bank to act to increase or decrease the monetary supply in moments of contraction or expansion."
Yet he is railing against monopolies fueled by artificially cheap credit and stock buy backs.
Why is no-one making the "free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" argument in response to small(er) businesses being afraid to criticize oligopolies?
> The sponsors are right that a liquid, stable currency would be attractive to many in emerging markets. So attractive, in fact, that if enough people trade out of their local currencies, they could threaten the ability of emerging market governments to control their monetary supply, the local means of exchange, and, in some cases, their ability to impose capital controls.
Easy to counter. The government can declare that Libra is illegal and stop its banks from converting Libra into Fiat. Sure you could probably get around it by a P2P marketplace.
Countries that have done this are: China, Russia, Vietnam and others [0].
> Unless regulators jump in quickly, these for-profit companies will set the standards for identity verification, at least in the short run, as well as defining the rules and enforcement around the privacy of transactions and what to do in case of theft.”
No there are already defined and in place rules for banks to adhere too. Companies cannot just set these standards. They'll be fined until they are told by the regulators to close shop.
> “That’s sort of the most dangerous consequence of this kind of concentration is the ability to exclude rivals, put them out of business, diminish innovation, diminish entrepreneurship, diminish choices for consumers,” he said.
This is one thing that regulators will look at with regards to Libra. There's just one wallet. Who are the competitors. In the case of banking there are many competitors. If Chase closes your account, you can move over to TD Bank. But if say Stripe closes your account because they take umbrage with you, does your wallet also get closed down? What happens also with
your Libra coins? These questions must be answered in precise detail for consumer protections and this right there, consumer protections determines the progress of Libra.
I do think Libra is a good idea. But a few things must be brought up to the fore.
- FB must open source their tech. Have other companies [or even groups of people once they are certified] run other groups of nodes. If these conglomerates of Stripe, Paypal, etc which have a history of banning people just because. Have the built-in ability that someone can move over to another provider.
- Have FB ensure that standards are met in terms of banking regulations and fine heavily if they don't. Make them feel the pain. Have some teeth when fining them.
It makes one wonder if the Chinese government has a point. In the modern world, perhaps it’s not the government that should be feared, but the conglomerate corporations. A centralised government could have more teeth to compete with. Just an opinion...let’s keep it civil
Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the impression I get from many other sources.
I don't think any government is impartial, but you're right. That seems like it's the idea. In theory, it's much better to have the government be the big man on campus. You really don't want to live in a place where corporations are more powerful than the government.
This relates well with the gang model of politics, where the government is merely the biggest gang. It is an interesting way of looking at political systems because it encompasses such a range of scales.
One can argue if the US government is elected. Many people dont even bother to vote. And big states like California and New York are openly at war with the current administration.
Also, the democrats won the popular vote for president, but we got trump. In 2018, they won by 12%, but the senate has a republican majority.
Because of this, the judicial system is being stacked with ultraconservatives with lifetime appointments. They’re mostly filling seats that opened under the Obama administration.
“Majority rules” is becoming a bad joke in the US. Even after demographics shift enough to vote the republicans out, the senate and executive branch will still be blocked by the judiciary. There are ways to fix the supreme court, but that won’t change the fact that the lower federal courts are politically driven kangaroo courts.
Tl;dr: minority radicals intentionally broke the federal government, and it will take at least 30 years to fix (short of rewriting the constitution).
Those examples aren't entirely invalid, but in one case of one of them (Purdue) they are facing legal jeopardy for their actions including a $270MM settlement in Oklahoma alone. The other company was founded 400 years ago, relied on letters of marque issued by (you guessed it) governments, and is no longer a going concern.
The thing about governments is that they have basically zero accountability to anyone except a better-armed government. We talk a good game here in the US, but it's certainly playing out differently.
