It's from from acerbus "bitter to taste, sharp, sour, tart." So it's something said in a mildly mean, cynical, or indeed bitter way, which could include irony but doesn't have to.
Also cynicism is about dogs (and Diogenes), and sarcasm is to do with tearing flesh. There's something called the etymological fallacy that says I shouldn't explain words via their roots, but I like to anyway, I think it adds meaning.
I don't know, it's clearly a synonym to me. "Why? Are we running out of names to give out?" is clearly with the intention to be mean but be smug about it, so hence the passive agressiveness.
It was a peculiar thing to say. "We don't need to give a name to anything well known! Names are for obscure concepts only, everything else can be indicated by grunting," you seemed to say.
But really your beef was with attaching a person's name to it, like an attribution?
Zuckerberg-ing (sometimes) refers (jokingly) to the practice of co-founding a business with someone and then screwing the other founder out of their share of the business. I’m not familiar with any other name for that but it’s a useful one as far as colloquial definitions go.
Talking about and analyzing the problem might lead to mitigating or even substantially fixing it, which would remove its usefulness as a rhetorical attack on attempts to solve social problems.
It's a good article for those who are unfamiliar with these cautionary tales of second order effects and fraud. As someone who believes government is a solution to many problems, these lessons are critical.
I disagree with the universality of the statement "any institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back off this in the caveats section.
Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program, asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can the problem be eradicated?
A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such organizations should be considered.
Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is completely worthless
If the mandarins salaries and livelihood depend on it they will move mountains to sustain the institution. This is human nature. The problem with public institutions is that they fase few external pressures. A company will eventually die and history is littered by the corpses of former industry titans. Public institutions on the other hand.
Yeah like all those external pressures that have kept private mega corps from polluting, monopolizing, pervasively surveiling, brutally exploiting labor, and generating false "science" that maintains their dominance even in the face of huge global negative effects... Oh, wait...
In comparison to what? The pristine environmental record of the soviet union, north korea, cuba, venezuela, communist east europe, cambodia, vietnam, china etc...
Ah yes someone always rolls out the false dilemma of "the only options are completely unregulated capitalism or completely top down command economy communism".
It'd be shorter with the same meaning if you'd just scream "traitorous commie!!!!1111"
I think it's when there's no (need for an) exit strategy for the people working for institutions set up for solvable problems (i.e. reducing the inflated housing prices, restructuring other institutions) you get the self preservation effect.
That's why for-profit, non-government/community anything is so terrible at solving problems. Charities spending 80% of the money you give them on marketing efforts. For-profit prisons in general. Self-regulation of most industries. The whole plastic recycling farce. Unless your institution is built with a real intent to solve a problem, and the people put in charge actually care, you get a self-serving institute. That doesn't just happen in private institutions either, corrupt governments accepting bribes and operating on nepotism also tend to set up useless institutions that just serve as job mills for friends or government officials.
A group created to clean up trash in a city park will exist forever if the mayor hires their nephew to run it because he was too incompetent to find a job himself.
There is a trap here of saying "thus we shouldn't do anything about problems" rather than the more reasonable "we should be prepared to iterate on our efforts".
But note how all the examples were private companies or enterprising individuals who weren't controlled somehow, but simply wanted to protect their profits.
The political right uses multiple deca-billion-dollar megaphones to talk nonstop about this problem as it relates to the government while dramatically underrepresenting the extent to which it happens in the private sector so that they can lobby for privatization as a silver-bullet. I think it's fair for the article to shore up the complementary point of view. No less fair than what the right is doing, at any rate.
Private ownership of land and capital is also enforced at the barrel of a gun, lol.
When monopolies are common, every business school student openly aspires to rent-seeking moats, and regulators snore more loudly every day, the claims that the private market is checked by competition frequently ring hollow. The big difference between public and private sector is that the private sector has literally entitled themselves to this rent seeking behavior, while it's only a metaphor in the public sector.
Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a brilliant principle and I think markets are the place to make it happen, I just think that strong anticompetitive forces are common natural occurrences in free markets and I think that the government should play a stronger role in checking them.
This forum seems to be filled with (comments by) people who love the "there's no perfect solution so we shouldn't try because trying might infringe on my libertarian liberties". I need to stop reading the comments.
Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example, even in the context of government. For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
>For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll expense to employees.
Side topic… but I sure love reading about the MIC from the same people that complained about it for decades but now are jumping up and down to “Send Help To Ukraine” which is really just feed the MIC as a stimulus package.
This is 100% accurate to my experience working as a software developer for the US federal government.
Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle managers.
18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to support the status quo.
Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.
This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy.
There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
> Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.
Nobody said it did.
I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.
You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
> individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.
Guilty of this.
I worked for about a decade on a pet project to find a new family of computer languages designed for both humans and machines.
I did not think machines were close to mastering our languages, and new languages were needed.
I knew my approach was a long shot, but if I found a way to make it work the upside was huge.
Then LLMs happened. The possible upside of my approach dropped dramatically.
I have been trying to "rewire" my brain and re-purpose the neurons that evolved over a decade to keep turning my approach around from different perspectives. It is very hard.
It is easy to get a sapling to grow into a desired shape. It is much harder to reshape a fully grown tree. Just the physic of it.
To tie this back to the original article, if you model an individual's brain like Minsky's Society of Mind, you would have neural agents that create a circuit ("Institution") to solve a problem, and some of those agents focus on the task of preserving that circuit. Without those Institution preserving neurons, you would never keep the circuit going long enough to see through a contrarian idea. But the downside is that the organization will persist even when it is no longer a good bet.
Tbf, half the linguistics discipline thought that language's grammar was somehow hardcoded into our brain, which is clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work, so you're not the only one who had misconceptions.
Perhaps you can turn your idea around slightly into finding a language that finds a balance between formality and universality, rather than computers and humans. Because even though computers now speak our language they do not use it in a logical way at all (arguably because we humans don't).
And while mathematics is very formal it has a lot of trouble expressing ideas from different branches that aren't as formal. Things like fuzzy logics have been created and many things like that but they are still very much on the formal side.
Perhaps you could even derive an academic language for a specific field, perhaps standardizing between synonymous constructions. You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
> You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
Oh I 100% agree. LLMs are amazing. Plenty of neural agents in my brain are on board. I use them everyday to work on problems in a way not possible before.
I think what I was trying to express is that a contrarian idea might require developing a large number of your own original solver brain circuits that are very dumb, always running, trying to brute force a path for your idea to work.
Later you can then develop new circuits that recognize there's now a better approach, but those solver circuits that you grew are still in your brain, occasionally still running (like sometimes when I wakeup in the morning), because that's what you trained them to do.
In other words, there's a risk to taking on a contrarian idea in that you have to build up lots of brain circuits that will stick around for life, even if your idea turns out to be wrong. I'm sure people have written about this more eloquently. I need to search more.
Ahh yeah I was trying to help you repurpose these circuits given the new information. But perhaps that's not possible.
It sounds very similar to what happens with love. In my experience, at least, when you love someone you build up these circuits that care about the other person and you cannot break them down, it seems. You can ignore them but then there's this part of your brain you're ignoring.
So perhaps you could say you were/are literally in love with the idea.
> ...clearly ridiculous if you look at how LLMs work
This is well off topic now, but this doesn't follow at all. LLMs aren't brains and don't even resemble them that closely. LLMs demonstrate that it's possible to learn grammar from scratch, not that humans actually do. I for one think it's pretty plausible that humans have a little bit of neural wetware-acceleration for syntax. In much the same way, it's possible to implement AES with just an ALU and memory operations, but your CPU probably has special hardware anyway.
Don't forget that people in any organisation also need opportunities to get some experience which, I guess, isn't ever an optimal course of action for the task at hand. Of you have an idea and and opportunity to do something that's good to actually fit in a bigger picture, paying for a solution that does the exact thing might be more efficient, but it does rob that ones specific person of an arguably invaluable opportunity.
Individuals and organisations can also be impostors.
The impostor as individual cannot usually scale the lies. An organisation can be a total imposture or have internal structures that are impostor structures.
The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives to prolong the problem.
I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.
It might be. How can we say when all be get are "solutions" that deepen it, perpetuate it, normalize it, etc.?
So yeah, I'm glad we agree. Thanks for proving my point.
Hint: Start by reading Matt Desmond's "Evicted" and then go from there.
Also, watch the Rob Redford film "The Candidate". Make note of how many of "the issues" - and the associated narratives - persist today. Imagine selling a product that promises a solution but ultimately only keeps selling you promises.
Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the form entrenched players use to preserve their problem.
It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.
Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self preservation.
Exactly. You should shape an environment where institutions _cannot_ exist if they don't solve the problem. E.g., 'no cure, no pay', set and fixed subsidies, under-performance penalties, competition.
Institutions are composed of people who expect to continue to get paid and therefore their incentives are aligned. If changing jobs was less costly it might alleviate the problem somewhat.
The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed.
Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.
Systemantics by John Gall has some insightful and surprising gems that feel related to The Shirky Principle, I guess because they're both related to complex wetware systems.
> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
> People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:
> A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years.
Great book. I learned from its Wikipedia page that the author (John Gall) pitched 30 different publishers, got rejected by all of them, and then published it himself. It got discussed in academic papers and then the New York Times picked it up. And we're still talking about it 50 years later. Given that the central theme of the book is "systems barely work" I very much like to imagine Gall taking all of the rejections in stride because he was able to view the publishers as just another system that has its own goals and perhaps isn't really working as it should.
I didn’t see a moral judgment against striking, just an observation that the elaborate systems set up to collect trash sometimes end up intentionally not collecting trash.
The union and its member's intentions sure, not the intention of the overall 'elaborate system'. Because the union and its member are only components of the larger system.
i.e. A system that doesn't take into account the free association of its components is incoherent.
I think you’re missing the original point. It was nothing about unions or free association. In fact, the point was that ALL systems become incoherent as they scale.
The existence of unions and free association is built-in to the argument that systems designed to pick up trash sometimes intentionally do not pick up trash.
It’s not a moral judgment that these systems are broken and therefore workers should be slaves. It is an acknowledgment that complex systems end up having to meet conflicting priorities and therefore become, as you say, incoherent.
>Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not a failure of a trash collecting system.
Of course it is. If your phone fails to make calls under certain conditions, that is a failure of the system, and we try to fix it (for example by deploying more antennas, or by fixing software bugs in it).
If workers refuse to pick up trash, we can also fix that (ask Ronald Reagan).
There's no expectation of continuous (24/7) trash pickup, unlike your phone where (these days) you expect it to work all the time.
If the regular collection schedule is every 7 days, and it turns into 14 or even 21, for the most part your trash is still being collected within the bounds of "yeah, my trash gets collected".
I’ve done this arithmetic a few times now and I think you’re wrong: someone born the week after ww1 ended (November 1918) would have been 22 in November 1940, when the first draft registration was held for men who had reached 21. So there should be about 12 months of births in there.
all I'm saying is how mandatorily drafting people to go fight a war in another continent is extremely hard
whereas getting people to fight in a way that's happening near YOUR (meaning their particular case) state border is super easy, barely an inconvenience
It will happen, and the American people will accept it, for the same reasons they accept tons of things today that are done against their best interests: Ideological divisions and loyalty, propaganda saturation, fear of an outside enemy, (possibly) religion, and the general desire to use the political system to punish "others" rather than help themselves.
It also maybe implies that the selective service is responsible for it's own funding and ignores that it's entire a creature of DoD and Congress. It's hardly a bureaucracy run amok for its own purposes. The funding in 2022 was $31.7M. DoD has a lot of contingency plans and that's not a lot of money to spend to fund one of them even if the likelihood putting it into action is small.
31 million dollars is actually a lot of money to waste on an arguably immoral program. Multiply those tens of millions by the 40 years of the program and you are talking about a lot of money that should not have been spent.
It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.
The nature of warfare has changed. You can't give someone a few weeks of basic and throw them on the battlefield anymore. They need to be experts on a variety of technical topics as well as how to do combined arms maneuver in large formations. You need trained professionals.
If the US is ever placed in a position so desperate that a draft is done again, rebuilding a new selective service administration overnight will be a trivial problem compared to everything else going on.
You don't need to throw everybody onto the battlefield.
The standing armed forces and reserve will need a lot of logistical support that can be done with little additional training. Plenty of people are forklift drivers and cooks in their day jobs.
That said, it's not like the SSA is really needed. If a war got bad enough to need a draft I'm sure congress would let the IRS fork over a list of 18+ males. Or even say 18+ males with certain occupations on their tax returns (i.e. Doctors).
Like most systems, on the surface it appears extremely simple. You start to look at the issue deeper and it becomes extremely complex. Start drafting all the doctors? Sure, what happens when you draft an ophthalmologist? Are they even useful for more than TikTok videos? What if they have asthma? How many Doctors can we take without crippling the home front?
Furthermore, we start up a draft. We draft the guy who does calibrations for Maverick missiles in factory. Come to find out, it takes 3 months to train that guy and there are very few of them. It's also really important weapon system. Now what?
SSA constantly holds mock drafts to try and answer all these questions.
> It is overwhelmingly likely the US will never have a draft again.
It's more likely that it will, the longer it exists. Saying "it will never", implies a pessimistic view of US durability. I think this is a fair interpretation, I can agree with. I understand this is not exactly what you meant.
I don't know why anyone would believe that, as I implied. The future is unknowable, but history has shown it takes less than a generation to militarize any nation. Assuming it will be different this time around, is not "overwhelmingly" likely.
The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. The need for human material is so large, that the Ulranians are considering forcing citizens that are in other countries to return and submit to the draft.
Any war that will be fought between powers that can easily destroy each other will be fought in the Clausewitz way:
Throw bodies at each other until one side is not willing to suffer the losses anymore.
Should the US be China ever go to war, that will be the war that we will see. And since China would pick a battle ground south of the topic of cancer ( NATOs southern border) , that bodycount would mostly be US.
The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.
Please explain to me how the trench warfare in Ukraine is relevant to a potential war with China, which will be fought almost entirely by the Navy and Airforce. In fact, the Marines are so convinced of this they gave up all their tanks to reorganize as a more agile force that could island hop while deploying anti ship missiles.
The idea that a war with China will require an infantry draft is preposterous. It's no longer 1940. Attempting any form of amphibious landing without naval and air superiority is suicide. That means if China ever lands boots on Taiwan, the war is already over, and a draft would serve no purpose.
1. Conservative forces in the southern states continue to claim that the Federal Government is trying to change the voting dynamics by naturalising immigrants.
2. Some form of legal argument is made against the legality of the vote of naturalised citizens in state level.
3. Hawaiian nationalists, secretly backed by China adopt that.
4. Some form of secession movement in Hawaii is formed.
5. China recognises independent Hawaii.
6. The US cannot accept to loose its influence in that part of the Ocean.
7. War by proxy, on US soil.
This is all very unlikely, and would make a good plot for a Novel BUT:
Historically the US has a much weaker claim on Hawaii ( which was annexed agains the will of the population) than China on Taiwan and there is already friction with the native Hawaiian population e.g. by Zuckerberg circumventing traditional local inheritance laws to build his mansion.
I don't think there's any reason to talk about a civil war in that sense. It's pure fantasy. That's not to say I'm unconcerned about right wing extremists but that sort of scenario is just nonsense. If anything they'll try to capture control of US military leadership instead.
Ukraine is a war of attrition because its primarily being supplied by other countries which are dripfeeding supplies while Russia has to slowly unmothball a lot of kit.
If the USA actually went to total war it would likely be over long before the average Joe Blogs can be turned into a useful warfighter.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine implies otherwise.
It's unlikely the US will find itself in such a conflict soon due to their technological advantage. However, multiple simultaneous engagements can stretch the available manpower to such an extent that a draft is needed.
The war in Ukraine reflects exactly what I said. They've run into a stalemate because both sides are heavily using conscripts and are incapable of doing maneuver warfare on a scale beyond a platoon.
If the US military stepped into the Ukraine war, and there was somehow no possibility of nuclear escalation, the Russian military would be decimated within a matter of a week or two, and that's not overly optimistic thinking on my part. The incompetence of the VKS as well as Russia's mechanized formations has been gallingly clear.
I don't know - there were several effective land armies in WW2 - Germany, US, UK (though small), Russia from 1942 or so. They didn't have it much easier then. There was technology then, which was simpler but also more raw. What they did have was good officers, NCOs and training. I don't see reason to believe that a side in the Ukraine war has these.
> The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
This quote applies to more than the people at the top. I thought office backstabbing and power plays happened at the senior management level when I was young, which left me unprepared for how much subterfuge and infighting came from ICs trying to be king of their little circle within a company. Recognizing and getting away from the people who compete by putting others down is a valuable skill in the workplace for anyone, not just the king.
Yes, totally applies to everyone within the system. When I first read that I immediately started pondering how my actual work is different than my stated role. The example of the king is just the most quickly grokkable example IMO
These all boil down to “any collection of organisms will act the same as one organism”. It will focus on survival and self interest first. It’s an emergent property from the incentives of the (potentially well-meaning) individuals
Useful for thinking through questions like “does my organization/city/etc need this new team/committee/department to exist?”
> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
That analogy is bit weak because strikes don't go on forever and trash pickings always resume. The city is not in the same state of perpetual trash everywhere it was in before setting up/contracting the waste management company.
I don't think Gall would disagree with you. He says "systems tend to oppose their own function". He doesn't flat-out say "systems don't work." He would probably explain its functioning in terms of these axioms:
> A Simple System, Designed From Scratch, Sometimes Works.
> A Complex System That Works Is Invariably Found To Have Evolved From A Simple System That Works.
He might also direct your attention to this one:
> The Total Amount Of Anergy In The Universe Is Constant. Gall defines anergy as the negative of energy. See also clonal anergy. “The sum total of problems facing the community has not changed. They have merely changed their form and relative importance.”
You have reduced the trash on the streets, but where did you shift the anergy by reducing the "trash-on-street" issue?
The real fun IMO is contemplating all the other axioms in combination with the trash collection system:
> New Systems Mean New Problems.
You started out with a trash problem, and now you've got a union problem. Maybe also a powerful mafia-connected monopoly problem.
> The Bigger The System, The Narrower And More Specialized The Interface With Individuals.
To the waste collection company I am surely just an address, 1 trash bin, 1 recycling bin, and 1 compost bin.
The purpose of the waste management company is not to manage waste, it is to gain control of waste management. That's the difference.
If you have a problem, often your solution just means you have the same problem but now lack the agency to control it.
Once the waste management company has control, they can then extract the majority of surplus from the problem being solved so that if your cost if the problem is unsolved is x, your cost if the problem is solved becomes x-ε.
The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.
The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.
Government departments are not immune to this structure. It's a fundamental property of organizations. It's why you'll find empire building in private companies too.
Interestingly, this happens even if you remove the profit motive, say by making it a government entity or a non-profit with fixed pay structure. The surplus just goes into diffuse inefficiencies instead of being efficiently channeled into someones pocket.
Maybe it's just that people still profit from bigger organizations by means of prestige, influence, etc. Whatever the cause, most organizations seem to try to grow to the size equivalent to the value of the solution, not the cost of delivering the solution.
Also weird example because it's basically describing the process of improving efficiency.. picking up trash every day is a waste of human resources and petroleum. Non-standard cans waste the potential benefits of automation. Poor labor relations are wasteful by hoarding the benefit of an enterprise away from the workers who make it a viable endeavor, and shunting responsibility for the workers' healthcare, retirement, safety nets, and wellbeing onto society.
Thanks for the perspective. I agree that improving efficiency is a fair counterargument.
> picking up trash every day
Yeah, I think that Gall should have started with "twice a week" instead of daily (he might actually use "twice a week" in the book, and the "daily" reference is an error on my part). When you start from bi-weekly to weekly, I'm not sure if the improving efficiency argument holds up that well. I could see twice a week being as efficient as once a week.
Not sure about the automation argument in terms of improved efficiency. Brazilian trash collectors work very quickly and do not rely on automation. However I think they're also subjected to more occupational hazard by personally handling more trash. Maybe they're not more efficient. Even if you are more efficient, does the "anergy" (i.e. shifting the problem) idea mean that your improved efficiency essentially enables the community to generate far more trash per capita?
Re: unions to be clear, there's no moral judgment intended. It's just another example of the system opposing its own intended function. The purpose is to collect trash, striking workers is one of the ways that the system opposes itself. Also it might be relevant to remember that Gall was writing back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure there strikes were a lot more frequent back then.
You can replace the trash collection example with the US federal taxation system if the details of the trash example are distracting. Think of all the ways that the taxation system is set up to push against its own clear goal of collecting tax revenue. It's not really about explaining why it is that way, the most profound insight for me is this curiously common phenomenon of a system opposing its own purpose. One day I dream of coming up with a rigorous analysis of this in terms of entropy
New printing might be coming up! His wife (and heir) suggested to a friend that he might be invited to write the forward to the next one. He has cases and cases of books in his basement, and has given them to all his students for years :)
IIRC I sent an email to a robotics team about cataloguing metadata for supported procedures as (JSON-LD) Linked Data; there also so that it's easy to add attributes and also to revise the schema of Classes and Properties.
Compared to Ctrl-F'ing a PDF copy of an ebook,
Client-side JS to fuzzy search (and auto complete) over just the names of the patterns/headings in the book would be cool; and then also search metadata attributes of each.
The facts in Mediawiki (Wikipedia,) infoboxes are regularly scraped by dbpedia. Wikidata is also a Wikipedia project, but with schema.
IIRC there used to be a longer list of {software, and project management} antipatterns on wikipedia? It may have been unfortunately and sort of tragically removed due to being original research without citations.
There are probably more useful systems patterns to be mined from:
the Fowler patterns books like "Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)" [1] and "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture", Lamport's "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport", Leslie Valient's Distributed Systems work,
Perhaps there's also general systems theory insight to be gained from limits and failures in [classical and quantum] Universal Function Approximation; general AL/ML limits and Systemantics.
Gall mentions the example of an organization founded to conquer polio. With that disease all but eradicated, the foundation almost collapsed, but instead changed the goal to conquer genetic defects. Very little changed about what the organization did, and the new goal is one that isn't likely to ever be completely achieved.
That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though. Once you have an organization built up to solve a problem, shifting those resources into solving another problem is a reasonable next step. This is not the same as TFA, which talks about organizations preventing the problem from being solved.
> That doesn’t seem like an entirely bad thing, though.
Not at all. It's an example of a good pivot. Probably Gall thought it rare enough to mention it in a book otherwise full of wisdom about how systems go wrong.
I disagree. When you've solved the problem the best thing to do is to celebrate, give resources back, and then organize to solve another problem if you want. Switching missions is a bait and switch for your supporters and should be avoided.
Organizations are expensive and hard to build. If you liquidate an organization, you might free up some modest amount of cash in a bank account (and maybe some furniture, office supplies, etc.) but the cost of rebuilding that same organization will be vastly higher than the money freed up. It’s like tearing the copper out of a working industrial air conditioner and selling it for scrap: a huge waste and a loss of value in absolute terms. Perfectly reasonable to give back money to recent donors who opt out and raise it over again, though.
This is a classic problem. The best example I have of it is probably Mozilla. They went out in the beginning to set up the open web. They won. Complete and total success. The web is uniformly open and standards based. The major browsers are open source and on open source engines.
Unmitigated and total victory.
So what's next? Well, that's what they're struggling with. What to do with a non profit that achieves its goals?
I'm sure you can find a better example, because Mozilla's goal needs continuous maintenance. If they don't continue providing a competitive browser, Chrome might start playing the role of the IE of old, free to disregard those standards you mention.
...doesn't that entire problem rest on the fact that the unstated goal is to pick up the trash at the lowest cost labor will bear? That yields service reduction, automation, and labor disputes. When you look at it that way, the organization is seeking the goal, not fighting it. I think there is truth in the general idea, but a correlary that no one sees value in continuing to solve a problem that has been solved once. They always imagine it will get cheaper, meanwhile those who create expertise in it see themselves as more valuable with time, and that creates tension.
As soon as I read this, I thought of TurboTax and its mission to preserve the crappy system of filing US taxes so that its software can continue to profit.
My first thought was of the 2 major US political parties and their mission of promising things they have no intention of ever doing to get votes so they can win elections, take away more of our freedoms and redistribute more wealth from the many to the few. TurboTax is also a great example though.
This is quite independent of the US. The state functions purely to protect the interests of the dominant class. In the US, the dominant class happens to be capital owners, but that's true in most of the world these days.
I tend to agree, but then I look at Europe and I say, who is the ruling class here? In the US it's obvious that corporations run everything, but that doesn't seem to be the case in western Europe.
Means & motive are still largely governed by whether you own things for a living or work for a living. The pay to exist vs get paid to exist dynamic is alive and well over there and the debates are all quite familiar. After all they invented the rules and we just copy-pasted them with a few small modifications. The ownership class just isn't as dominant as it is in the US at the moment, for better and for worse.
Is it possible that they pass USB-C charging and data privacy laws in Europe because the companies affected are primarily American companies not European companies?
Likewise, I imagine they pass anti-fossil fuel laws because there aren't really any major fossil fuel producing countries in Europe besides Russia which is both a pariah and the continent's gas station.
I won't say this is a good representation of every european country, but in France, basically two bilionary own all mainstream private press media, the rich class basically built Macron to push their agenda, and most important laws anyway come from Europe transpositions where only those that can build a perpetual lobby service can push a topic into a directive.
So yes obviously Europe is a paradise of direct democracy where every citizen bloom thanks to a social structure made to help each of them thrive and reach the best version of themselves acting everyday for an harmonious society free of any anxiety about future that promise only bright shiny days for the masses and their children.
Multiparty systems can become completely deadlocked as well. Belgium has had complete deadlocks because nobody can form a coalition, Israel had five elections in three years for similar reasons, Britain was effectively deadlocked under Theresa May, and Canada has had outright minority governments.
I also wouldn’t describe US politics as “rigid” just because we have the same two parties, because each party has different factions and some of the most powerful factions were either marginal or completely nonexistent a couple decades ago.
The biggest problem with the U.S. system isn’t that there are only two parties (that’s a problem, just not the biggest one). It’s that both parties need to agree in order to pass anything (due to the senate filibuster), which as far as I know is unique among democracies.
I'm not saying that to say that the us is any better, but simply for context for what happens when you don't need all the parties to approve:
France effectively has that by way of the infamous 49.3. the majority party coalition can effectively force all others to accept a law, without ever presenting it for a vote.
The caveat is that the other parties can start a vote of no confidence and dissolve the government with a simple majority, but in reality this never happens because dissolving the government over [pension reform, the budget, insert issue here] is disproportionate.
The current government's lack of caring about their voter base because of the Overton windows shifting to the right has obviously aggravated this.
The filibuster is just a product of the Senate rules and could be changed at any time. There's no incentive to do so now because the Democrats currently control the Senate but they couldn't pass anything even without the filibuster because the Republicans control the House. I suspect it's going to happen with the next trifecta.
any sentence that starts this way is just walking straight into its own falsity.
No human system as complex as "the state" ever functions "purely" to do anything. Instead, it's a venue in which different interests and power levels sometimes compete and sometimes cooperate, sometimes achieving goals and often not.
Yes yes and the other is the saviour of the democracy and humanity, while preserving equity.
Either you're new on this planet or just lying to yourself - all parties are marching against same goal, they just keep the distraction going so people are interally conflicted instead of paying attention.
Not really a helpful comment in either content or tone. Biden and Trump are marketedly different in both major policies and governing competence, and it doesn't help the discourse to say that they're just "marching against the same goal."
Biden passed the most comprehensive climate law in US history. The most unbelievable part is that the law was nearly unchanged from what was written by climate experts. Usually bills start out looking good, then get frankensteined by the hundreds of stakeholders that want to cram their shit into it. For once, we got a pretty clean bill that will actually do good (based on the climate experts I've read).
Form your own opinions, but I had to mention real action that happened.
I think the more archetypal example is that _treating_ a disease is a lot more profitable than _curing_ a disease -- would the Epipen manufacturer ever develop and market a allergy _vaccine_ that cured an allergy with a one time shot?
If it's too free, nobody will do the research because they'll get scooped by copycats while everyone will claim to have a cure because they'll already have the customer's money by the time their fraud is discovered. Freedom is a good default and a good guiding principle, but it's a terrible absolute principle.
Or a system that removes profit from the equation. From the article, I don't think any one bureaucratic system is immune from the effect.
In the tech sector, we see many examples of the disruptor opening a temporary wedge to either get acquired by the dominant player or becoming the new hegemonist.
This is just taking the rational consumer model, forgetting it's just a model and treating it as a fact of life, and then inventing corollaries from it. Plenty of people find intrinsic value in solving problems without there needing to be a profit. See, e.g. Open Source Software, The Apollo Program, Academia, the BBC.
You are replying to a post that references exceptionally expensive efforts. The inflation adjusted cost of the Apollo Program was hundreds of billions of dollars[1]. By what measure is that cheap? Maybe I'm missing intended sarcasm?
The Apollo Program, Academia, and the BBC all pay their workers, which makes it profitable for them to do the work.
I get your point: These are not for profit enterprises and they still get important work done.
I'm making a different point: People don't work for the benefit of others without being rewarded.
Open Source Software is not a bad counter example. I think there are rewards in the joy of programming, making a name for yourself, and a few other things, but I'll concede that there is some nuance there.
Free enterprise is not a necessary precondition for research. You'll note how much of the last 50 years of technological advancements were direct or indirect results of government funded research programs.
One of the most successful drugs in recent times was one that actually cured a previously chronic and not curable disease. It was also a controversial one because it was very expensive. But Solvadi, which cured Hepatitis C was certainly a huge commercial success and shows that the whole idea that pharma companies are never incentivized to cure diseases instead of treating them is just wrong.
> What comes to my mind are labor unions, the NAACP,as well as feminists and other identity groups.
> They seem to follow a pattern of being really important for their time and place, but after winning the important, landmark victories, they stick around.
They stick around because union busting corporations, racists, and sexists don't just magically disappear or give up after they lose a battle.
If these groups were doing their job, those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right? They used to make the history books with their accomplishments. What have they done for you lately?
> If these groups were doing their job, those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right?
Wrong. By what magic do you think their opponents suddenly disappear or give up?
Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long". Progess is slow and subject to setbacks.
> They used to make the history books with their accomplishments.
Some areas of the country now want to ban the teaching of that history.
Forget racism and sexism for a moment: do you seriously think that the temporary existence of labor unions makes profit-maximizing corporations give up and give in to all of labor's demand for eternity, even after labor unions dissolved?
Do you feel the wars on drugs and terror will ever be won? I don't. I look at your wars the same way.
They'll drag on and on. Some people will get rich and powerful, but the people on whose behalf you're supposedly fighting don't really care about any of it.
They'd much rather have affordable healthcare and housing.
Get out of here with the "my team" / "your team" nonsense and the trolling in general. It's perfectly possible to make your point with reason and civility instead of cheap, shallow jabs, and if it isn't, well - probably not a point worth making.
> They'd much rather have affordable healthcare and housing.
The "wars" for affordable healthcare and housing will also drag on and on. Because guess what, there are opposing sides fighting against each other on those issues too, and neither side will magically disappear or give up when one side wins a temporary victory.
It's truly bizarre that you think longstanding social issues can just be "solved" once and for all (if you truly believe that and aren't just trolling).
"If Christian evangelists did their job, then the whole world should be Christian." Doesn't that sound silly? It turns out that there are a whole lot of non-Christians in the world who don't want to be Christians, and they're going to do their "job" too.
So you've now compared feminist movements to Christian evangelists. Do you think christian evangelists are important and deserve our attention even if the majority of christians don't care about them? How about feminists if women don't care about them?
> So you've now compared feminist movements to Christian evangelists. Do you think christian evangelists are important and deserve our attention even if the majority of christians don't care about them?
You seem to have completely missed the point of why I mentioned them. We've now compared many different organizations and social issues. What they all have in common is that there are longstanding competiting interests on both sides, and thus an advocacy group doing its "job" doesn't entail that the opposition magically disappears. An advocacy group hasn't failed to do its job if it doesn't wipe the opposition off the face of the earth, thereby rendering itself irrelevant.
"An advocacy group should disband after one significant victory" is really an incredibly inane suggestion that could probably only be made by someone who doesn't like the advocacy group in question and wishes they would disband regardless of successes or failures.
I'm just writing to call out your abrupt change of subject and avoidance to actually answer the person you replied to. Please be a better poster, if you have no answer, just don't reply.
I'm not supportive of all opinions from the left-wing about race and whatnot, but it's clear that there is real pushback. Some people want to downplay the crime of enslaving Africans and highlight "American exceptionalism", complete with evangelical Protestantism and some degree of white supremacy.
I don't think they're too powerful. Like I said, the major victories were won long ago and are in the history books.
The institutions that claim to fight those things are the ones who are the bad guys now. All the while, ignoring the real problems that everyone wants solved.
Wage slavery and misogyny *are* real problems that sane people want solved.
Yes they are still problems.
No, there hasn’t been newsheavy significant wins recently. There has, however, been newsworthy significant losses.
The idea that institutions should disappear because they’ve managed certain successes is utterly, bafflingly stupid. That’s especially the case as we are still current fraught with issues that these institutions exist to help with.
>those bad guys you mentioned should be gone by now, right
I dont follow your logic. Isnt this a bit like saying if doctors were doing their job, cancer should be gone by now? If police does their job all crime is gone?
Scientists research cancer and are producing visible, measurable results. If they hadn't had any for the past 50 years, I'd say maybe they should change course.
Are you saying that the civil rights and feminist movements in the US have not had visible measurable results in the last 50 years? If so, you are wrong.
> The fact that you think racial equality or feminism are "done" illustrates clearly that the problem isn't solved.
Where are you going with this?
I mean, do any of those institutions formed solely for feminism (for example) actually have a metric for when they will be done?
Did they actually draw a line in the sand, saying "When we reach this point, we will dismantle the institution because at this point we will, happily, no longer be necessary?"
Because to all of us watching, they don't have a "done" metric. They don't have a goal, which when reached, will cause their existence to be unnecessary.
Their primary goal isn't "fighting for $whatever", it's to ensure the continued existence of the institution.
Sane people don't work that way - they have a goal in their mind, and once that is achieved they move on to a new goal.
I'm not sure what you think the goal should be. Do you imagine a world where racist policies end and never resume? We're a long, long, long ways from that so it seems premature to ask for organizations opposed to racism in government and business to close up shop, eh?
Tbh this comes across as related to the typical conservative argument that racism is over because we elected a black man president. That's not really what you're talking about, is it?
> Do you imagine a world where racist policies end
Yes. I don't, right now, see racist policies.
> and never resume?
Why does that matter? Can't a new institution form to fix the problem if it comes up again?
If society goes through (for example) 100 years of a totally racist-policy-free existence, why on earth would you argue that the institutions founded to oppose racist policies continue existing for that 100 years?
The way it applies to companies, we can state that <whatever>-ism is solved because we reached some metric. So I'm not sure we can close up shop on an <ism> issue after winning some policy or reaching some type of measurable threshold.
That said, what I'm really hearing in this conversation isn't actually that the -ism institutions need to go away. What I'm really hearing is that some folks are very fatigued and tired of being inundated with the -ism dialogue and the demand to spend any energy on it at all. This seems to be significantly true for the people not affected by a particular ism.
And on the side of the -isms, folks are saying, "We absolutely do not feel heard, you're not hearing us about my particular -ism! You can't ignore the badness of the -ism. listen to me! I will step up my activism!"
The reality of the matter is that the -isms aren't going to go away and change is going to be a generational process. For example, every significant founding woman of woman's suffrage died of natural causes (old age), and none of them got to see womens' voting rights pass in their lifetime. Now that women voting isn't even a question of debate and very obvious, no one is really debating in earnest whether women should be allowed to vote or not. That's just a ridiculous thing to consider.
If you want a metric for a measurable threshold of when the ism-issue should go away, it's when we reach a point where the ism-issue has reached a point of saturation where it's plain and obvious and has enough societal inertia not to be challenged. And if people decide to revive something like whether women should be allowed to vote, trust that there will be an opposing force that rises up to fight that.
The pandora's box of the internet and social media is that much of the learned-helplessness to accept that an -ism-issue is here to stay can actually be rallied against, and that change can come about from it. So I would expect that this is the new reality we live with. One can either fight for or against the ism, or ignore it and focus on their interest of choice.
From the perspective of most people belonging to those groups, the major battles are all won and they have much bigger cocerns in their day to day lives. These groups know that, so they have to keep manufacturing outrage in order to stay relevant.
I am a gay man and I see increasing homophobic speech that stems from transphobia which most definitely isn't a "solved issue". This worries me.
Yes there was a battle in culture and politics that lasted decades for gay men, but as soon as you let go. You will see conservative groups pushing back. Because they're not gone, there is a long way for them to go as a lot of these ideas come from religious and conservative groups that will probably never go away.
Sorry, but the fight is not over. You don't see it because you're not a part of it it's as simple as that.
If you haven't taken the time to understand why people are still struggling then you can't come and say "well this is a done deal".
Societies move forward but they so with a constant push back. That's just how it is. Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions that it's silly to think this is "made up" struggle for these groups to "stay relevant". I mean, homosexuals, transpeople, women and racial minorities are never going to go away so they're always going to be relevant.
The groups organizing against trans people are amplifying the problem 10000000000x.
A recent example is [1]. Many anti-trans activists, including some that represent themselves as more polite, are actively engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate the notion of transgender experiences being a real part of humanity. This is obviously going to elicit a response from trans people like me, and our reaction is not just understandable but wholly legitimate. Why are you not focusing your attention on those people?
If the "transgender experience" is males insisting that they have the right to impose themselves on any female-only space simply because they imagine themselves to be women, disregarding the boundaries and consent of actual women, then this experience should indeed be eliminated. If you are behaving in this way, please stop it.
And yet, you continue to use software and hardware that trans people have made significant contributions to, including quite likely (at least indirectly) some written by myself.
This is the great tragedy of open source software, isn't it? We keep laboring on things that make people's lives better, including the lives of the people who hate us. Sometimes I ask myself if focusing my career on FOSS always was a mistake.
> Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions t
Is that really the case though? It seems like in many (most? nearly all?) cases we've gone from people saying things that are overtly and objectively racist / sexist / etc. to things that aren't but could be construed that way if you squint hard enough, and it's largely in the eye of the beholder to decide, and along with that we've seen the rise in assuming people's intent. Once you've crossed the bridge of assuming intent, then pretty much everything can be further "evidence" of the foregone conclusion.
I invite you to take the statements of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions" for any recent period of time (the past month, the past 6 months, whatever) and make a note of all the ones that you are sure are homophobic, transphobic, racist, or whatever and try to take a look at them with fresh eyes. Set aside for a moment what you are so "sure" about their intent and background and see how many you can find are actually and objectively bad, or if they are just "bad" in the sense because (a) they have a different view than you and/or (b) it's only bad because in your mind that person is already <whatever>-ist and so everything they say is just going to be viewed through that lens.
We're never going to say that e.g. racism is a completely solved problem, but the headway we've made over the past century or two is so incredible that from the 30,000 ft view we're relatively close, and the organizations that exist to combat it have largely outlived their purpose and, unfortunately, in many cases seem to exist mostly to fan the flames.
Actually, I think this is a fantastic example of my point. He did not, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth, at least according to the quote in the article - the headline and the article clearly misconstrue what he said.
But let's pretend for a moment that he did say that. Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"? With a sufficiently large population, we will be able to find people saying hateful things until the end of time - I don't dispute that at all. There will always be morons. But as you cast a wider and wider net to find people saying stupid things, you have to also take into account their proportion of the population. Even if he had really said that, he'd be part of a vanishingly small minority. Heck, the very fact that an article was written about what he not-quite said also shows how far we've come.
"We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state – we are a moral state"
Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.
When later questioned about calling LGBTQ+ people filth, he answered: "I support my constituency, and like I said, we’re a Christian state, and we are tired of having that shoved down our throat at every turn. I’ll let my words [spoken here] speak for theirselves, but that is my statement, and I stand behind it, and I stand behind the Republican Party values, and that is my statement"
I get that you want there to be a bright line rule and that the only way for you to see that he said this was if he said it in a way that cannot possibly be construed as anything else, but that's not the reality of the english language. Since his statement was clarified further, I think we can all take it to mean what the headline says and agree that the bit of grace we might grant someone being misunderstood is run through.
> Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"?
Actually, yes. If anything, recent legislation has shown that you underestimate the power of state government at your peril.
As to the "vanishingly small minority" - I'd say if 0.01% of people felt that way, it would be vanishingly small. The reality is, given Republican party platforms in multiple states, that closer to 21% of people feel this way. 21% is a minority, it's true, but it is not vanishingly small.
> Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.
I see that you are choosing to read it that way, but that is quite literally not what he said, and I don't agree with the assumptive leap that you took to get there. Is it possible he meant it the way you're choosing to interpret it? Of course it is. But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't (the fact that he said 'that' and not 'them' means he's probably referring to some sort of dogma or indoctrination or messaging, and not people), but you - and the author of that article apparently - are choosing to go with that particular interpretation anyway. If you can't see the rather large assumption you're making, to me that's a far bigger problem, because it all but guarantees a state of perpetual aggrievance.
Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
(And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.)
>But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't
I do not believe that is true. Possible, perhaps. Plausible, much less at least as plausible? No. You're kinda making an unjustified leap to support your position here. The alternative meaning of his statement is that LGBTQ+ behavior is filth and that their advocacy for equal rights and safety was advocacy for filth. That is essentially the same as calling the behavior that makes them members of a subgroup filth, and so the subgroup is made up of filth as a requirement for membership. The fact is, though, that he was asked about his statement in the context of calling LGBTQ+ people filth and reiterated that his words stood as a Christian and Republican.
>Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
That's not really it - I implied that he was similar to about 20% of the population, which is about 2/3 of the population against gay marriage or who believe gay and lesbian people are sinning/immoral. These people advocate for their position. They do not want gay people to exist; they would prefer that sin be eradicated. It is not a stretch to say that people who openly state that their core beliefs are antagonistic to the existence of a group of people are similar to one another in terms of their general unwillingness to allow those people to exist peacefully and freely.
>And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.
I don't think that's actually true. If you look at the history of the civil rights movement, at least in the US, it has not required the willing participation of out-and-out bigots to make forward progress. It has required the population that is not flatly bigoted to either take action or get out of the way, but nobody required the KKK to become the ally of the civil rights movement. Fortunately, as their behavior is less respected or allowed, they get less out of being members of their groups and most withdraw or change their behavior.
You don't stop fighting after the major battles are won. You fight until the the war is over.
As long as there are groups that continue to fight to reverse the gains that were hard won, one must continue to fight hard. Complacency risks society regressing. See: abortion rights.
Douglas Murray's book "The Madness of Crowds" explains this very succinctly. On the other side of the political aisle you could reference the pro-life-only voting block who now finds themselves trying to raise money on an issue that has been resolved (in their minds). "Dog Catches Car" is the headline for all of these issues.
You're correct on a theoretical level. But in reality these are still very real issues. You don't even have to squint - just look at the Supreme Court and Dobbs v Jackson.
Yup: Looks like there is an industry
with a standard operating pattern:
Form a public interest group. Find an
issue, e.g., a claim of a big threat, some
version of the old the sky is falling.
To put over the issue: For evidence for
the threat, scientific is not necessary;
anecdotal is sufficient. Celebrity
endorsement can help.
Get the media hungry for content on-board:
Have them gang up, pile on, form a mob,
publish shocking content, get credibility
for the group and the issue via one for
all, all for one, write click-bait
headlines. Then the media gets eyeballs
and ad revenue.
The group gets publicity, credibility,
donations, goes for legislation and
appropriations which help the group,
result in campaign contributions, maybe
cushy jobs.
Make use of a fact of life in politics:
One percent of the voters making a big
noise can scare politicians more than the
other 99% not much concerned.
I.e., there is "extortion" -- objecting to
the issue can result in getting hurt.
But eventually too many of that 99% find
reasons not to like the issue, and it
dies.
Given you mention NAACP I'm assuming your comment refers to US-based organizations.
In that respect "feminists" won a landmark victory in 1973 that was just recently overturned in Roe v Wade. That's one example of the importance of "sticking around".
As all your examples are of groups leaning one particular way politically I'll proffer another example from other side.
Consider the NRA, presumably they don't need to exist as the 2nd amendment enshrines the right in our constitution.
As you may point out that right is under constant threat. Apply that same logic to the groups you're disparaging and you may better understand their purpose.
The "culture war" just resulted in the reversal of Roe v Wade denying millions of women with healthcare access. The current and previous presidents both called for depriving people of their constitutional 2nd amendment rights. Even if you specifically dislike the NRA their stated purpose is objectively needed.
To reorient the discussion back on topic, the Sharky Principle is often weaponized by those who don't understand the ongoing endangerment of our basic rights. Even with immediate relevant examples like Dobbs v Jackson. Though it may be broadly applicable across organizations it's important to pick good examples.
> The "culture war" just resulted in the reversal of Roe v Wade denying millions of women with healthcare access.
I don't really think it's accurate to describe abortion as "healthcare access". Whatever your views on the topic may be, the situation is more complex than that.
It really is that simple. Women are at severe risk now if they develop certain normal conditions which are mathematically certain to happen to a number of people every year, but now they have to leave to free states (if they can) or plead with a court system to get life/fertility-saving healthcare because the medical treatment is an abortion. Anyone doing IVF especially has to worry about that because there are more situations which can go wrong with elevated risk of death or loss of fertility. It’s not even directly reproductive care: some things like chemotherapy have the risk of complications due to pregnancy during treatment, which has numerous documented cases where treatment was delayed waiting for proof that someone isn’t pregnant because state law prohibits an abortion if that happens.
There’s another aspect which again really is that simple: the liability risk of having some theocrat second-guess their medical expertise means that hospitals are closing obstetric departments and doctors are leaving repressive states. Reduced access guarantees that people who would have had medical care a few years ago do not today.
There’s a lot of businesses like this that rely on “complexity” or “fragmentation” of existing systems, particularly in the US where laws and standards differ across all states. Another example is a business like Segment—-they profit off of the complexity and incompatibility of other companies’ products, and would likely oppose or delay an open standard.
The insurers have somehow created which ensures their survival at a real cost. Attempts to rationalize the system have failed because of the focus on getting everyone health insurance rather than health care (admittedly among other reasons).
It doesn’t help that politicians continue to propose dead-in-the-water alternatives. The last round of “Medicare for All” included a lot of provisions that were very unpopular when you asked people about them directly, such as taking away people’s existing private insurance.
This a common theme in politics: Actually solving the problem might remove enthusiasm for your candidate or party, so instead they propose things with no realistic chance of passing. Their business is being front and center in public discourse, not quietly fixing things.
EDIT: I’m getting downvoted because a comment below is denying this part of the bill, so I’m adding the exact text here:
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
The comment below is incorrect. The bill would have made people’s existing insurance plans illegal to offer.
No one is going to get elected for solving a problem everyone today is going to be dead to see the results of.
Although we all might agree that this is necessary, people usually tend to vote for people who promise "real" solutions. As in, short term solutions to problems we've been carrying for decades (which obviously requires policies that also take decades to cement).
This is not correct. There was no prohibition on private insurance. Rather, all would have been required to participate in the public plan to spread the risk. That's the only way it could work. If someone wanted to also pay for a private plan, that was allowed.
No, this is incorrect. Here is the actual section from the bill:
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
You could technically also buy extra insurance for… something extra, but your existing insurance plan would have become illegal.
This was a huge sticking point, despite how many people try to deny it or downplay it.
I'm honestly curious what the real meat of the objections to this were (I never heard much about this sticking point). Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the public coverage?
I didn't say I had objections to it. I said it was unpopular with the general public when you told them the details.
This is an example of a situation where people dislike the system but when you ask them about it they like their part of the system.
For example, people generally have an extremely low opinion of Congress, but on average they like their own Congress person.
You get similar results when you poll people about healthcare and health insurance: People generally hate the health insurance system, but if you start talking about taking away their health insurance or their doctor and replacing it with an unknown system, they get upset.
> Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the public coverage?
Duplicating coverage is superfluous if you assume the new plan would be better in every way and you give up nothing in the process, obviously.
However, the fear is that upending the entire system would require people to give things up and replace it with unknowns. There's a good chance that some people would be forced to be reassigned to different doctors under a centrally-planned system, or that access to things would be reset and need to be re-determined under new guidelines.
If this doesn't make sense, consider a situation where someone got special approval for off-label coverage of a drug (happens all the time) but the new government insurance had stricter guidelines about which conditions could be treated with which drugs (to keep cost down). Those people could lose access to medications or treatments that were covered privately.
We tend to think of "Medicare for All" type plans as being without downsides, but when you get into the details of changing the entire health care system out and banning the old ways, it's inevitable that some people would start losing things they liked. And that's where people get upset.
To be fair, there was a log of disingenuous fear mongering around the notion of "the government is getting rid of your insurance".
It would be extremely difficult to get an accurate idea of what the general public thinks about a measure before certain interests get involved with publicizing FUD.
Because it's being disingenuous. The insurance isn't getting removed, just like "the HVAC tech is removing heating" is not a coherent statement if the tech is just replacing your furnace. You might have opinions about the performance of the new furnace, but saying that the heating is going to be removed is simply untrue beyond discussing the logistics of that change.
I don't think you understand what people disliked about the idea.
They understood that it was being replaced. Nobody ever pretended like health care was going away and being banned. People weren't assuming that. That would be nonsensical.
People thought the bill was going to be about a Medicare option for all, but then it came out as forced Medicare for all. People didn't like that.
It wasn't fear mongering, people just didn't like that. It's demonstrably unpopular, and this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention.
What I have works. It doesn’t for everyone. But it does for me.
If I’m too busy to read a thousand-page bill, it’s rational to default to the status quo. (Also, Americans like competition. Banning duplicate coverage sounds like ruling out the competition.)
They had to prohibit overlapping coverage in order to make sure that all private practice physicians accepted the medicare system, which has lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. You can pay for more coverage, because that doesn't compete with the public system, but you cannot pay for private insurance that may lead to lower access for publicly insured persons.
Yes, I did not read closely enough. You referred to new medicare for all plans, while I responded recalling similar false accusations against Obamacare. Some of these new proposals do not allow duplicate plans. Nevertheless, I don't think this particular objection makes them DOA. I believe this is an objection that could be overcome with discussion.
I recall an interview where the interviewers were asking the politician if their plan for health coverage would raise everyone's taxes, to which they responded yes - of course they would. The interviewers tried to move forward with that, but the politician then notes that this would also mean that everyone stops paying for their current health insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
> the politician then notes that this would also mean that everyone stops paying for their current health insurance - and thus quite a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, not so simple:
1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10% of costs, all things equal.
2) The government run system would realistically be expensive to run, like any program covering all Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would just be transferred to a government-run operation. In theory it should be more efficient to have single payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the short term to build and overhaul the system.
3) The actual cost savings wouldn’t come from operational efficiency (not the government’s strongest ability) but from forcing prices down because nobody would have any choice but to accept the government insurance. They were going to drive costs down by forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments and, as unpopular as it is to say, by limiting the types and amounts of treatments available to people.
These points assume that costs would stay the same and there's no overhead in the existing insurance system.
Single-payer could be cheaper and more efficient simply by returning the massive profits of health insurers directly to taxpayers. Part of high cost for healthcare in the USA is the huge number of middlemen.
> The government run system would realistically be expensive to run, like any program covering all Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would just be transferred to a government-run operation. In theory it should be more efficient to have single payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the short term to build and overhaul the system.
The government is already the largest health insurer in the country, and providers can't turn them down. There's no system to overhaul.
The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
> The government is already the largest health insurer in the country, and providers can't turn them down.
This is completely false. Many providers don’t accept Medicare or Medicare.
I don't know where you’re getting the idea that Medicare/Medicaid can’t be turned down by private practices.
> The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
Again, that’s not what the “Medicare for All” bill actually said.
People just assumed it was an optional thing, but the bill said something else entirely.
Your post is a great example of how people had their own ideas about how things work or would work under new bills, but when you actually read the details it’s a different situation altogether.
I’m also amazed at the confidence with which people will deny the basic facts of “Medicare for All”, as evidenced by many comments in this thread. I posted an actual excerpt from the bill above, yet people are still trying to argue that it said something else.
You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep quoting. As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare, practically all do because the people that need the most healthcare are all on it. That would be akin to not treating anyone over the age of 65.
> You are misinterpreting the text of the bill you keep quoting.
I don't think I am. You haven't provided any specifics and your claims above were easily disproven, so I'm not sure what you think I'm doing wrong.
> As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
See above: My parent comment was specifically talking about the Medicare for All bill. You are the one trying to substitute a different concept into the discussion.
> While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare
This is the exact opposite of what you claimed two comments up.
This discussion is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: When it comes to these discussions, people like to substitute their own facts and pretend like we can just ignore the reality of of what goes into bills. Once you start looking at actual legislation these things aren't as popular as people think because it doesn't match their imaginary ideal.
Hence my original point: Politicians have an incentive to keep these concepts as far from reality as possible, because it allows people to cling to their own idealized versions of what it would look like. The closer you get to reality, the more people realize that tradeoffs and compromise are necessary in the real world.
> 1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10% of costs, all things equal.
All things remaining same, yes. But all things won't remain same because the incentives would be completely different. The 10% rule has incentivized the entire industry to raise their prices so that 10% will be worth more each quarter. Private insurance would rather have insulin at $1000/mo instead of $10/mo so that they can take $100 instead of $1 and they would rather collect $2000/mo in premiums than $200/mo. Medicare, on the other hand, can and should negotiate prices down: https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
Indeed, however at least TurboTax has competition so that the experience, while unnecessarily complicated, is not as unpleasant as it could be. I have recently been thinking about this as I have just filed my taxes, which, in the country I am living in, can be done only using the government's website. This website is dreadful. It hasn't changed since the early 2000s at the latest, provides no help or guidance, contains typos, and even requires that you manually copy a number from one page to the next. I also don't think the tax system is noticeably easier than the one in the USA (where I used to live) even though there is no direct analogue of TurboTax lobbying for complexity (although there probably are still accountant lobby groups).
I don't understand why saying institutions and focusing on government, the current example I have in mind for this is Google relationship with search and Ads in the AI era.
That's what I thought was weird. It starts and concludes with "For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency [...]", but all the actual examples in-between are of private companies causing problems, not government agencies.
I have to leave the example of police and police unions - which have very powerful lobbyists who try their darnedest to keep as many things illegal as possible.
Our firefighters, who also do ems, are currently battling a bike lane plan. I guess in places like Amsterdam with bike lanes huge swaths of city must burn down routinely if you believed the bull pedaled by our fire dept.
Id we are being charitable to firepeople, I assume, that bikelane will reduce width of auto part of the road, thus making difficult: for firetruck to drive on it or make turns, other cars can not allow through the firetruck.
(Maybe amsterdam bikelanes were not an afterthought and took all this into the design)
This explains a lot about the effectiveness of San Francisco's $600M in spending on drug addiction/homelessness, the spend and problem seem to increase together
They produce wealth for their executives. The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit.
>The Colorado Coalition For The Homeless received 122M in 2023. In 2021, the CEO made $313K. The top 6 people make over $200K a year. All of this from a non-profit.
What's the typical salary for a CEO of a for-profit company that has 122M in revenues? While I can understand why people are outraged at the prospect of people getting money from a non-profit, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be volunteers. Besides the question of how they'd financially support themselves, you have the problem of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
You're losing the point. It's not outrage at the amount they are paid. It's outrage at the Shirky Principle-- they are incentivized to keep the homelessness problem going and growing.
I don't know that high executive salaries are evidence of anything other than theres an executive class which exists, even in the non-profit world. You'll need to come up with better arguments that there's a homeless-industrial complex, which there very much is, but complaining that the leader of a 700-person organized doesn't deserve more than a low end FAANG shows a very naive understanding of how the world works. $313k is cheap for that kind of work. A CEO for a 700-person strong tech company makes well into a million dollars a year, counting equity. Complaining that executives make a lot of money at a non-profit is like complaining that things cost money in the first place. there is a need for someone to do job X. people who do job X cost $xxx/hr. it doesn't matter the context of that job, whether it's running a business, managing armed forces, saving the homeless, or writing a web browser, that's what that job pays.
A better argument for there being a homeless-industrial complex would to say there are incentives for organizations to expand operations rather than fix problems, and then give examples where organizations didn't fix problems because it would result in their lowered funding.
It goes something like this. Well meaning people join government to solve the problem (homelessness). They can't do it on their own so they allocate money to local charities that run services for homeless, like soup kitchens and shelters. Two things happen
1. if homeless didn't exist anymore, these kitchens and shelters would have to shut down. The volunteers are fine with it, they'll volunteer elsewhere. But the permanent employees would be laid off. Understandably, they want to remain employed. So they're incentivised to not search for a durable solution to the homelessness problem.
2. The people in government realise the problem isn't getting solved, so they leave government and form their own think tanks/charities or institutions to solve the problem. They have connections in government (their former co-workers) which they use to get funding. Now there's another company in the homeless industrial complex.
Shelter beds for half a million dollars a pop and lucrative service contracts surrounding that pile of money. LA county did an audit and some units they paid north of 830k.
“The planet had once been beset by burning winds, which—the scientists said—threatened to turn it into one enormous desert. Therefore a great irrigational plan was adopted. To implement which, appropriate institutions and top-priority bureaus were set up; but then, after the network of canals and reservoirs had been completed, the bureaus refused to disband themselves and continued to operate, irrigating Pinta more and more.”
By the time Tichy arrives, people are being encouraged to breathe underwater.
— The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
I’m surprised the Soviets didn’t suppress this story
The UNRWA, the UN Agency for helping Palestinian refugees has been accused of perpetuating their misery - (The real problem with the UN’s agency for Palestinians, The Economist https://archive.is/c7Pop).
Unfortunately that is a deep and complex problem. There are a lot of forces that are using the Palestinians as a stick with which to harass Israel, in part to deflect from their own human rights abuses.
The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
This phenomenon (institutions helping to preserve their nominal enemy) has been omnipresent on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example:
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
- Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015
> The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field in this game of delegitimization, think about for a second, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the ICC [International Criminal Court] and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN [causing us to] need an American veto. … I’m not sure at all that given the current situation, given the current fact that the central playing field we’re playing in is international, Abu Mazen (Abbas) is costing us serious [PR or political] casualties and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. I don’t think we need to be afraid of [Hamas].
UNRWA was created in 1949 to help displaced Palestinians from the 1948 Palestine war. That was 76 years ago. Today the Palestinian life expectancy is 74. (In 1948, it was under 50.) Almost everyone they're supposed to be helping is dead.
There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...
>There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
>There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.
People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI voice changers, it even sounds like them.
Your example doent make sense.
Those who spend spam for profit will do it anyway - they dont care if tools that detect spam exist or not. In fact those tools limit the ability of script kiddies to enter. It is a cat and mouse game.
A homeless person can steal some electic wires and pipes and fixing it will cost a lot of money. So you say that we shouldnt fix it?
The root problem is not that I'm receiving spam emails, but that people are sending them.
Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to stop sending spam emails. In the case of the pharma/counterfeit emails that were so common 10-15 years ago the fix was quite simple, but didn't come from the anti-spam industry - it required finding an aggrieved party (brand owners) with enough clout in the financial world.
As you point out, fighting spam is an asymmetric game of whack-a-mole, where spammers can easily adapt to countermeasures. Forcing spammers to get a new merchant bank to handle their credit card transactions flips the asymmetry and makes them do all the work; as a result you no longer see spam advertising viagra.
Getting rid of ransomware would be quite easy, in theory, if you could tank the value of bitcoin, since few ransomware gangs are able to collect ransom the traditional way in bags of cash. And a large fraction of other phishing attacks could be prevented by putting stricter controls on gift cards.
Of course institutions preserve the problem - that is the reason for their existence - so they are in a fight for survival to keep a systemic problem going. It is even better for them if the institution has managed to enshrine its position in law, creating huge barriers to entry for any upstart that tries to come up with better solutions. Taxis, medicine, banking - there are so many examples.
If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention, allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the right thing' to facilitate legal changes.
Sounds like a lack of competition. Multiple entities should compete for providing the best solution, and the entities should be rewarded or penalized accordingly.
I'll give the Canadian telecom market as a counterexample: Multiple large providers (Rogers, Bell, Telus, Videotron to name the top four) instead of competing for customers and driving prices down, they have effectively colluded into an oligopoly - to the point of matching prices and plan details.
In this case we have multiple entities working together to maintain the existing problem, so they can collectively maximize profits.
One solution is to keep these organizations so lean and understaffed that they would love to eliminate tasks and reduce the scope of their responsibilities.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 462 ms ] threadAlso cynicism is about dogs (and Diogenes), and sarcasm is to do with tearing flesh. There's something called the etymological fallacy that says I shouldn't explain words via their roots, but I like to anyway, I think it adds meaning.
But really your beef was with attaching a person's name to it, like an attribution?
I disagree with the universality of the statement "any institution made to solve a problem will preserve it". They back off this in the caveats section.
Two important things to prevent this is to consider the influence of money on a solution/organization, and what kind of oversight is needed for an organization. Also, when spinning up a program, asking "is the problem this org solves a permanent one?" Or can the problem be eradicated?
A group created to clean up trash in a city park system might need to be large one year, but practically non-existent 5 years later if goals are met. The planned decommissioning of such organizations should be considered.
It'd be shorter with the same meaning if you'd just scream "traitorous commie!!!!1111"
That's why for-profit, non-government/community anything is so terrible at solving problems. Charities spending 80% of the money you give them on marketing efforts. For-profit prisons in general. Self-regulation of most industries. The whole plastic recycling farce. Unless your institution is built with a real intent to solve a problem, and the people put in charge actually care, you get a self-serving institute. That doesn't just happen in private institutions either, corrupt governments accepting bribes and operating on nepotism also tend to set up useless institutions that just serve as job mills for friends or government officials.
A group created to clean up trash in a city park will exist forever if the mayor hires their nephew to run it because he was too incompetent to find a job himself.
Cui bono makes that clear
When monopolies are common, every business school student openly aspires to rent-seeking moats, and regulators snore more loudly every day, the claims that the private market is checked by competition frequently ring hollow. The big difference between public and private sector is that the private sector has literally entitled themselves to this rent seeking behavior, while it's only a metaphor in the public sector.
Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a brilliant principle and I think markets are the place to make it happen, I just think that strong anticompetitive forces are common natural occurrences in free markets and I think that the government should play a stronger role in checking them.
Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll expense to employees.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511
Even if it were true (which it isn't), most of the money that goes to contractors also goes to salaries.
Yesterday I came to this exact conclusion when talking about how things work at my job :/
Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle managers.
18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to support the status quo.
It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.
This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy.
There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.
It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.
Nobody said it did.
I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.
You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
Competition solves everything.
Who gets to mate with who has been answered by competition our entire existence.
Striving for non-violent, yet fair, competition is what advancing the world is about.
Guilty of this.
I worked for about a decade on a pet project to find a new family of computer languages designed for both humans and machines.
I did not think machines were close to mastering our languages, and new languages were needed.
I knew my approach was a long shot, but if I found a way to make it work the upside was huge.
Then LLMs happened. The possible upside of my approach dropped dramatically.
I have been trying to "rewire" my brain and re-purpose the neurons that evolved over a decade to keep turning my approach around from different perspectives. It is very hard.
It is easy to get a sapling to grow into a desired shape. It is much harder to reshape a fully grown tree. Just the physic of it.
To tie this back to the original article, if you model an individual's brain like Minsky's Society of Mind, you would have neural agents that create a circuit ("Institution") to solve a problem, and some of those agents focus on the task of preserving that circuit. Without those Institution preserving neurons, you would never keep the circuit going long enough to see through a contrarian idea. But the downside is that the organization will persist even when it is no longer a good bet.
Perhaps you can turn your idea around slightly into finding a language that finds a balance between formality and universality, rather than computers and humans. Because even though computers now speak our language they do not use it in a logical way at all (arguably because we humans don't).
And while mathematics is very formal it has a lot of trouble expressing ideas from different branches that aren't as formal. Things like fuzzy logics have been created and many things like that but they are still very much on the formal side.
Perhaps you could even derive an academic language for a specific field, perhaps standardizing between synonymous constructions. You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
Oh I 100% agree. LLMs are amazing. Plenty of neural agents in my brain are on board. I use them everyday to work on problems in a way not possible before.
I think what I was trying to express is that a contrarian idea might require developing a large number of your own original solver brain circuits that are very dumb, always running, trying to brute force a path for your idea to work.
Later you can then develop new circuits that recognize there's now a better approach, but those solver circuits that you grew are still in your brain, occasionally still running (like sometimes when I wakeup in the morning), because that's what you trained them to do.
In other words, there's a risk to taking on a contrarian idea in that you have to build up lots of brain circuits that will stick around for life, even if your idea turns out to be wrong. I'm sure people have written about this more eloquently. I need to search more.
It sounds very similar to what happens with love. In my experience, at least, when you love someone you build up these circuits that care about the other person and you cannot break them down, it seems. You can ignore them but then there's this part of your brain you're ignoring.
So perhaps you could say you were/are literally in love with the idea.
Ha! My experience as well. Even after many years when you see that person again those circuits turn back on (and are very strong).
That is a bigger more important thing. But also, on the topic at hand, an interesting and probably strong analogy!
This is well off topic now, but this doesn't follow at all. LLMs aren't brains and don't even resemble them that closely. LLMs demonstrate that it's possible to learn grammar from scratch, not that humans actually do. I for one think it's pretty plausible that humans have a little bit of neural wetware-acceleration for syntax. In much the same way, it's possible to implement AES with just an ALU and memory operations, but your CPU probably has special hardware anyway.
Individuals and organisations can also be impostors.
The impostor as individual cannot usually scale the lies. An organisation can be a total imposture or have internal structures that are impostor structures.
This is not exclusive to government.
I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.
If only more government programs operated this way. Yet instead of (for example) a solution to poverty, we get The Poverty Industrial Complex.
So yeah, I'm glad we agree. Thanks for proving my point.
Hint: Start by reading Matt Desmond's "Evicted" and then go from there.
Also, watch the Rob Redford film "The Candidate". Make note of how many of "the issues" - and the associated narratives - persist today. Imagine selling a product that promises a solution but ultimately only keeps selling you promises.
Clearly there's a lunch industrial complex
I noted that the article didn't mention the War on Drugs; probably books have been written about the Shirky principle and the US's war on drugs.
It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.
Instead we back unproven "solutions" and then keep throwing money at them in an insanity sorta way. Boggles the fucking mind.
Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.
> Complex Systems Tend To Oppose Their Own Proper Function. My favorite axiom. Your city has a problem with trash building up on the streets so it sets up a waste management company. The company starts out by collecting trash daily, but then they shift to a Tuesday-only schedule. Next, you get a notice saying that the company will no longer service your building unless you buy their standardized garbage cans (to ensure that the robotic arms on their trucks can pick them up). Eventually, the waste management union goes on strike and the trash starts piling up on the street again anyways.
> People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing. The stated purpose of a king is to rule a country, but in reality they spend a lot of time fighting off usurpers.
This one feels related to the Shirky Principle:
> A System Continues To Do Its Thing, Regardless Of Need. The Selective Service System continues to require all 18-year-old male US citizens to register for the draft, even though the US hasn’t had a draft in 51 years.
https://www.biodigitaljazz.net/blog/systemantics.html (one of my many blogs)
Isn't that just free association?
Unless they signed a binding agreement that prohibited striking whatsoever, I can't see why they shouldn't be able to.
i.e. A system that doesn't take into account the free association of its components is incoherent.
The existence of unions and free association is built-in to the argument that systems designed to pick up trash sometimes intentionally do not pick up trash.
It’s not a moral judgment that these systems are broken and therefore workers should be slaves. It is an acknowledgment that complex systems end up having to meet conflicting priorities and therefore become, as you say, incoherent.
Failure to collect trash under certain conditions is not a failure of a trash collecting system.
Inability to regularly collect trash is the failure mode we're concerned about.
Of course it is. If your phone fails to make calls under certain conditions, that is a failure of the system, and we try to fix it (for example by deploying more antennas, or by fixing software bugs in it).
If workers refuse to pick up trash, we can also fix that (ask Ronald Reagan).
If the regular collection schedule is every 7 days, and it turns into 14 or even 21, for the most part your trash is still being collected within the bounds of "yeah, my trash gets collected".
That smuggles an assumption that US will never have draft again
whereas getting people to fight in a way that's happening near YOUR (meaning their particular case) state border is super easy, barely an inconvenience
America will automate warfare before that happens.
The nature of warfare has changed. You can't give someone a few weeks of basic and throw them on the battlefield anymore. They need to be experts on a variety of technical topics as well as how to do combined arms maneuver in large formations. You need trained professionals.
If the US is ever placed in a position so desperate that a draft is done again, rebuilding a new selective service administration overnight will be a trivial problem compared to everything else going on.
The standing armed forces and reserve will need a lot of logistical support that can be done with little additional training. Plenty of people are forklift drivers and cooks in their day jobs.
That said, it's not like the SSA is really needed. If a war got bad enough to need a draft I'm sure congress would let the IRS fork over a list of 18+ males. Or even say 18+ males with certain occupations on their tax returns (i.e. Doctors).
Furthermore, we start up a draft. We draft the guy who does calibrations for Maverick missiles in factory. Come to find out, it takes 3 months to train that guy and there are very few of them. It's also really important weapon system. Now what?
SSA constantly holds mock drafts to try and answer all these questions.
It's more likely that it will, the longer it exists. Saying "it will never", implies a pessimistic view of US durability. I think this is a fair interpretation, I can agree with. I understand this is not exactly what you meant.
Any war that will be fought between powers that can easily destroy each other will be fought in the Clausewitz way: Throw bodies at each other until one side is not willing to suffer the losses anymore.
Should the US be China ever go to war, that will be the war that we will see. And since China would pick a battle ground south of the topic of cancer ( NATOs southern border) , that bodycount would mostly be US.
FYI Hawai is south the topic of cancer.
Please explain to me how the trench warfare in Ukraine is relevant to a potential war with China, which will be fought almost entirely by the Navy and Airforce. In fact, the Marines are so convinced of this they gave up all their tanks to reorganize as a more agile force that could island hop while deploying anti ship missiles.
The idea that a war with China will require an infantry draft is preposterous. It's no longer 1940. Attempting any form of amphibious landing without naval and air superiority is suicide. That means if China ever lands boots on Taiwan, the war is already over, and a draft would serve no purpose.
1. Conservative forces in the southern states continue to claim that the Federal Government is trying to change the voting dynamics by naturalising immigrants.
2. Some form of legal argument is made against the legality of the vote of naturalised citizens in state level.
3. Hawaiian nationalists, secretly backed by China adopt that.
4. Some form of secession movement in Hawaii is formed.
5. China recognises independent Hawaii.
6. The US cannot accept to loose its influence in that part of the Ocean.
7. War by proxy, on US soil.
This is all very unlikely, and would make a good plot for a Novel BUT:
Historically the US has a much weaker claim on Hawaii ( which was annexed agains the will of the population) than China on Taiwan and there is already friction with the native Hawaiian population e.g. by Zuckerberg circumventing traditional local inheritance laws to build his mansion.
If the USA actually went to total war it would likely be over long before the average Joe Blogs can be turned into a useful warfighter.
It's unlikely the US will find itself in such a conflict soon due to their technological advantage. However, multiple simultaneous engagements can stretch the available manpower to such an extent that a draft is needed.
If the US military stepped into the Ukraine war, and there was somehow no possibility of nuclear escalation, the Russian military would be decimated within a matter of a week or two, and that's not overly optimistic thinking on my part. The incompetence of the VKS as well as Russia's mechanized formations has been gallingly clear.
Humans just seem wired to want to find “the solution” and the call things done.
This quote applies to more than the people at the top. I thought office backstabbing and power plays happened at the senior management level when I was young, which left me unprepared for how much subterfuge and infighting came from ICs trying to be king of their little circle within a company. Recognizing and getting away from the people who compete by putting others down is a valuable skill in the workplace for anyone, not just the king.
Unfortunately few managers seem able to do it.
Useful for thinking through questions like “does my organization/city/etc need this new team/committee/department to exist?”
When they stay longer than they're due, and divert blood that's better spent elsewhere, that's cancer
That analogy is bit weak because strikes don't go on forever and trash pickings always resume. The city is not in the same state of perpetual trash everywhere it was in before setting up/contracting the waste management company.
> A Simple System, Designed From Scratch, Sometimes Works.
> A Complex System That Works Is Invariably Found To Have Evolved From A Simple System That Works.
He might also direct your attention to this one:
> The Total Amount Of Anergy In The Universe Is Constant. Gall defines anergy as the negative of energy. See also clonal anergy. “The sum total of problems facing the community has not changed. They have merely changed their form and relative importance.”
You have reduced the trash on the streets, but where did you shift the anergy by reducing the "trash-on-street" issue?
The real fun IMO is contemplating all the other axioms in combination with the trash collection system:
> New Systems Mean New Problems.
You started out with a trash problem, and now you've got a union problem. Maybe also a powerful mafia-connected monopoly problem.
> The Bigger The System, The Narrower And More Specialized The Interface With Individuals.
To the waste collection company I am surely just an address, 1 trash bin, 1 recycling bin, and 1 compost bin.
If you have a problem, often your solution just means you have the same problem but now lack the agency to control it.
Once the waste management company has control, they can then extract the majority of surplus from the problem being solved so that if your cost if the problem is unsolved is x, your cost if the problem is solved becomes x-ε.
The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.
The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.
> The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.
That's a good argument for bigger governments instead of a governments hiring private entities whose only goals are to capture surplus :).
Maybe it's just that people still profit from bigger organizations by means of prestige, influence, etc. Whatever the cause, most organizations seem to try to grow to the size equivalent to the value of the solution, not the cost of delivering the solution.
> picking up trash every day
Yeah, I think that Gall should have started with "twice a week" instead of daily (he might actually use "twice a week" in the book, and the "daily" reference is an error on my part). When you start from bi-weekly to weekly, I'm not sure if the improving efficiency argument holds up that well. I could see twice a week being as efficient as once a week.
Not sure about the automation argument in terms of improved efficiency. Brazilian trash collectors work very quickly and do not rely on automation. However I think they're also subjected to more occupational hazard by personally handling more trash. Maybe they're not more efficient. Even if you are more efficient, does the "anergy" (i.e. shifting the problem) idea mean that your improved efficiency essentially enables the community to generate far more trash per capita?
Re: unions to be clear, there's no moral judgment intended. It's just another example of the system opposing its own intended function. The purpose is to collect trash, striking workers is one of the ways that the system opposes itself. Also it might be relevant to remember that Gall was writing back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure there strikes were a lot more frequent back then.
You can replace the trash collection example with the US federal taxation system if the details of the trash example are distracting. Think of all the ways that the taxation system is set up to push against its own clear goal of collecting tax revenue. It's not really about explaining why it is that way, the most profound insight for me is this curiously common phenomenon of a system opposing its own purpose. One day I dream of coming up with a rigorous analysis of this in terms of entropy
Aarne-Thompson-Uther ATC character/plot story codes as Linked Data would be neat, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80%9...
IIRC I sent an email to a robotics team about cataloguing metadata for supported procedures as (JSON-LD) Linked Data; there also so that it's easy to add attributes and also to revise the schema of Classes and Properties.
Compared to Ctrl-F'ing a PDF copy of an ebook,
Client-side JS to fuzzy search (and auto complete) over just the names of the patterns/headings in the book would be cool; and then also search metadata attributes of each.
The facts in Mediawiki (Wikipedia,) infoboxes are regularly scraped by dbpedia. Wikidata is also a Wikipedia project, but with schema.
Dbpedia:
dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm: https://dbpedia.org/page/Distributed_algorithm
dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Distributed_algorithms
dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns: https://dbpedia.org/page/Category:Anti-patterns
IIRC there used to be a longer list of {software, and project management} antipatterns on wikipedia? It may have been unfortunately and sort of tragically removed due to being original research without citations.
Anti-pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
Also there's an Antipatterns catalog wiki: https://wiki.c2.com/?AntiPatternsCatalog
There are probably more useful systems patterns to be mined from: the Fowler patterns books like "Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)" [1] and "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture", Lamport's "Concurrency: The Works of Leslie Lamport", Leslie Valient's Distributed Systems work,
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234304
Perhaps there's also general systems theory insight to be gained from limits and failures in [classical and quantum] Universal Function Approximation; general AL/ML limits and Systemantics.
Universal approximation theorem; simulacra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
More notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497800
Not at all. It's an example of a good pivot. Probably Gall thought it rare enough to mention it in a book otherwise full of wisdom about how systems go wrong.
Unmitigated and total victory.
So what's next? Well, that's what they're struggling with. What to do with a non profit that achieves its goals?
...doesn't that entire problem rest on the fact that the unstated goal is to pick up the trash at the lowest cost labor will bear? That yields service reduction, automation, and labor disputes. When you look at it that way, the organization is seeking the goal, not fighting it. I think there is truth in the general idea, but a correlary that no one sees value in continuing to solve a problem that has been solved once. They always imagine it will get cheaper, meanwhile those who create expertise in it see themselves as more valuable with time, and that creates tension.
Likewise, I imagine they pass anti-fossil fuel laws because there aren't really any major fossil fuel producing countries in Europe besides Russia which is both a pariah and the continent's gas station.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_...
So yes obviously Europe is a paradise of direct democracy where every citizen bloom thanks to a social structure made to help each of them thrive and reach the best version of themselves acting everyday for an harmonious society free of any anxiety about future that promise only bright shiny days for the masses and their children.
> This is quite independent of the US.
Happens less in electoral systems where the 2nd party can become 3rd overnight. Politics become less rigid.
I also wouldn’t describe US politics as “rigid” just because we have the same two parties, because each party has different factions and some of the most powerful factions were either marginal or completely nonexistent a couple decades ago.
France effectively has that by way of the infamous 49.3. the majority party coalition can effectively force all others to accept a law, without ever presenting it for a vote.
The caveat is that the other parties can start a vote of no confidence and dissolve the government with a simple majority, but in reality this never happens because dissolving the government over [pension reform, the budget, insert issue here] is disproportionate.
The current government's lack of caring about their voter base because of the Overton windows shifting to the right has obviously aggravated this.
any sentence that starts this way is just walking straight into its own falsity.
No human system as complex as "the state" ever functions "purely" to do anything. Instead, it's a venue in which different interests and power levels sometimes compete and sometimes cooperate, sometimes achieving goals and often not.
Either you're new on this planet or just lying to yourself - all parties are marching against same goal, they just keep the distraction going so people are interally conflicted instead of paying attention.
> all parties are marching against same goal
Clearly you’re both in agreement.
Form your own opinions, but I had to mention real action that happened.
Right now I'm not doing billions of things, and don't see a cent is coming in!
In the tech sector, we see many examples of the disruptor opening a temporary wedge to either get acquired by the dominant player or becoming the new hegemonist.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
I get your point: These are not for profit enterprises and they still get important work done.
I'm making a different point: People don't work for the benefit of others without being rewarded.
Open Source Software is not a bad counter example. I think there are rewards in the joy of programming, making a name for yourself, and a few other things, but I'll concede that there is some nuance there.
> They seem to follow a pattern of being really important for their time and place, but after winning the important, landmark victories, they stick around.
They stick around because union busting corporations, racists, and sexists don't just magically disappear or give up after they lose a battle.
Wrong. By what magic do you think their opponents suddenly disappear or give up?
Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the moral universe is long". Progess is slow and subject to setbacks.
> They used to make the history books with their accomplishments.
Some areas of the country now want to ban the teaching of that history.
Forget racism and sexism for a moment: do you seriously think that the temporary existence of labor unions makes profit-maximizing corporations give up and give in to all of labor's demand for eternity, even after labor unions dissolved?
They'll drag on and on. Some people will get rich and powerful, but the people on whose behalf you're supposedly fighting don't really care about any of it.
They'd much rather have affordable healthcare and housing.
The "wars" for affordable healthcare and housing will also drag on and on. Because guess what, there are opposing sides fighting against each other on those issues too, and neither side will magically disappear or give up when one side wins a temporary victory.
It's truly bizarre that you think longstanding social issues can just be "solved" once and for all (if you truly believe that and aren't just trolling).
"If Christian evangelists did their job, then the whole world should be Christian." Doesn't that sound silly? It turns out that there are a whole lot of non-Christians in the world who don't want to be Christians, and they're going to do their "job" too.
You seem to have completely missed the point of why I mentioned them. We've now compared many different organizations and social issues. What they all have in common is that there are longstanding competiting interests on both sides, and thus an advocacy group doing its "job" doesn't entail that the opposition magically disappears. An advocacy group hasn't failed to do its job if it doesn't wipe the opposition off the face of the earth, thereby rendering itself irrelevant.
"An advocacy group should disband after one significant victory" is really an incredibly inane suggestion that could probably only be made by someone who doesn't like the advocacy group in question and wishes they would disband regardless of successes or failures.
This is not actually true, but the lie serves the purposes of activists seeking to justify their continued existence, so they keep telling it.
The institutions that claim to fight those things are the ones who are the bad guys now. All the while, ignoring the real problems that everyone wants solved.
Yes they are still problems.
No, there hasn’t been newsheavy significant wins recently. There has, however, been newsworthy significant losses.
The idea that institutions should disappear because they’ve managed certain successes is utterly, bafflingly stupid. That’s especially the case as we are still current fraught with issues that these institutions exist to help with.
I dont follow your logic. Isnt this a bit like saying if doctors were doing their job, cancer should be gone by now? If police does their job all crime is gone?
Every position invites the opposite position to exist and gather power.
Where are you going with this?
I mean, do any of those institutions formed solely for feminism (for example) actually have a metric for when they will be done?
Did they actually draw a line in the sand, saying "When we reach this point, we will dismantle the institution because at this point we will, happily, no longer be necessary?"
Because to all of us watching, they don't have a "done" metric. They don't have a goal, which when reached, will cause their existence to be unnecessary.
Their primary goal isn't "fighting for $whatever", it's to ensure the continued existence of the institution.
Sane people don't work that way - they have a goal in their mind, and once that is achieved they move on to a new goal.
Nowadays they seem to deal more in narratives.
Tbh this comes across as related to the typical conservative argument that racism is over because we elected a black man president. That's not really what you're talking about, is it?
Yes. I don't, right now, see racist policies.
> and never resume?
Why does that matter? Can't a new institution form to fix the problem if it comes up again?
If society goes through (for example) 100 years of a totally racist-policy-free existence, why on earth would you argue that the institutions founded to oppose racist policies continue existing for that 100 years?
The way it applies to companies, we can state that <whatever>-ism is solved because we reached some metric. So I'm not sure we can close up shop on an <ism> issue after winning some policy or reaching some type of measurable threshold.
That said, what I'm really hearing in this conversation isn't actually that the -ism institutions need to go away. What I'm really hearing is that some folks are very fatigued and tired of being inundated with the -ism dialogue and the demand to spend any energy on it at all. This seems to be significantly true for the people not affected by a particular ism.
And on the side of the -isms, folks are saying, "We absolutely do not feel heard, you're not hearing us about my particular -ism! You can't ignore the badness of the -ism. listen to me! I will step up my activism!"
The reality of the matter is that the -isms aren't going to go away and change is going to be a generational process. For example, every significant founding woman of woman's suffrage died of natural causes (old age), and none of them got to see womens' voting rights pass in their lifetime. Now that women voting isn't even a question of debate and very obvious, no one is really debating in earnest whether women should be allowed to vote or not. That's just a ridiculous thing to consider.
If you want a metric for a measurable threshold of when the ism-issue should go away, it's when we reach a point where the ism-issue has reached a point of saturation where it's plain and obvious and has enough societal inertia not to be challenged. And if people decide to revive something like whether women should be allowed to vote, trust that there will be an opposing force that rises up to fight that.
The pandora's box of the internet and social media is that much of the learned-helplessness to accept that an -ism-issue is here to stay can actually be rallied against, and that change can come about from it. So I would expect that this is the new reality we live with. One can either fight for or against the ism, or ignore it and focus on their interest of choice.
I am a gay man and I see increasing homophobic speech that stems from transphobia which most definitely isn't a "solved issue". This worries me.
Yes there was a battle in culture and politics that lasted decades for gay men, but as soon as you let go. You will see conservative groups pushing back. Because they're not gone, there is a long way for them to go as a lot of these ideas come from religious and conservative groups that will probably never go away.
Sorry, but the fight is not over. You don't see it because you're not a part of it it's as simple as that.
If you haven't taken the time to understand why people are still struggling then you can't come and say "well this is a done deal".
Societies move forward but they so with a constant push back. That's just how it is. Even today there is so much homophobia, transphobia, misoginy and racism being touted by people in our most powerful sitting positions that it's silly to think this is "made up" struggle for these groups to "stay relevant". I mean, homosexuals, transpeople, women and racial minorities are never going to go away so they're always going to be relevant.
I'm saying that the groups in question are amplifying the problem 100x, with the goal of angering folks like yourself.
They are the arms dealer in a never ending war.
A recent example is [1]. Many anti-trans activists, including some that represent themselves as more polite, are actively engaged in a conspiracy to eliminate the notion of transgender experiences being a real part of humanity. This is obviously going to elicit a response from trans people like me, and our reaction is not just understandable but wholly legitimate. Why are you not focusing your attention on those people?
[1] https://genderanalysis.net/2024/01/still-dreaming-of-running...
This is the great tragedy of open source software, isn't it? We keep laboring on things that make people's lives better, including the lives of the people who hate us. Sometimes I ask myself if focusing my career on FOSS always was a mistake.
Is that really the case though? It seems like in many (most? nearly all?) cases we've gone from people saying things that are overtly and objectively racist / sexist / etc. to things that aren't but could be construed that way if you squint hard enough, and it's largely in the eye of the beholder to decide, and along with that we've seen the rise in assuming people's intent. Once you've crossed the bridge of assuming intent, then pretty much everything can be further "evidence" of the foregone conclusion.
I invite you to take the statements of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions" for any recent period of time (the past month, the past 6 months, whatever) and make a note of all the ones that you are sure are homophobic, transphobic, racist, or whatever and try to take a look at them with fresh eyes. Set aside for a moment what you are so "sure" about their intent and background and see how many you can find are actually and objectively bad, or if they are just "bad" in the sense because (a) they have a different view than you and/or (b) it's only bad because in your mind that person is already <whatever>-ist and so everything they say is just going to be viewed through that lens.
We're never going to say that e.g. racism is a completely solved problem, but the headway we've made over the past century or two is so incredible that from the 30,000 ft view we're relatively close, and the organizations that exist to combat it have largely outlived their purpose and, unfortunately, in many cases seem to exist mostly to fan the flames.
So is this just bad because of a or b? Is it because their view is different, or because I'm not giving them enough credit?
How about the fact that three states are having to re-district because they have been using racial gerrymandering to reduce black votes right now?
But let's pretend for a moment that he did say that. Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"? With a sufficiently large population, we will be able to find people saying hateful things until the end of time - I don't dispute that at all. There will always be morons. But as you cast a wider and wider net to find people saying stupid things, you have to also take into account their proportion of the population. Even if he had really said that, he'd be part of a vanishingly small minority. Heck, the very fact that an article was written about what he not-quite said also shows how far we've come.
Seems to me that he did, in fact, call LGBTQ+ people filth.
When later questioned about calling LGBTQ+ people filth, he answered: "I support my constituency, and like I said, we’re a Christian state, and we are tired of having that shoved down our throat at every turn. I’ll let my words [spoken here] speak for theirselves, but that is my statement, and I stand behind it, and I stand behind the Republican Party values, and that is my statement"
I get that you want there to be a bright line rule and that the only way for you to see that he said this was if he said it in a way that cannot possibly be construed as anything else, but that's not the reality of the english language. Since his statement was clarified further, I think we can all take it to mean what the headline says and agree that the bit of grace we might grant someone being misunderstood is run through.
> Is a state senator from Oklahoma one of the "people in our most powerful sitting positions"?
Actually, yes. If anything, recent legislation has shown that you underestimate the power of state government at your peril.
As to the "vanishingly small minority" - I'd say if 0.01% of people felt that way, it would be vanishingly small. The reality is, given Republican party platforms in multiple states, that closer to 21% of people feel this way. 21% is a minority, it's true, but it is not vanishingly small.
For example, 28% of the country believes gay marriage should be illegal, and 33% believe it is morally unacceptable to be a gay or lesbian person, according to Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
I see that you are choosing to read it that way, but that is quite literally not what he said, and I don't agree with the assumptive leap that you took to get there. Is it possible he meant it the way you're choosing to interpret it? Of course it is. But it seems at least as plausible that he didn't (the fact that he said 'that' and not 'them' means he's probably referring to some sort of dogma or indoctrination or messaging, and not people), but you - and the author of that article apparently - are choosing to go with that particular interpretation anyway. If you can't see the rather large assumption you're making, to me that's a far bigger problem, because it all but guarantees a state of perpetual aggrievance.
Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
(And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.)
I do not believe that is true. Possible, perhaps. Plausible, much less at least as plausible? No. You're kinda making an unjustified leap to support your position here. The alternative meaning of his statement is that LGBTQ+ behavior is filth and that their advocacy for equal rights and safety was advocacy for filth. That is essentially the same as calling the behavior that makes them members of a subgroup filth, and so the subgroup is made up of filth as a requirement for membership. The fact is, though, that he was asked about his statement in the context of calling LGBTQ+ people filth and reiterated that his words stood as a Christian and Republican.
>Regarding the other stats, that is actually committing the common follow on mistake of lumping everyone together as the same. Again, let's pretend this rando really meant things the way you're choosing to interpret it. To go from there to implying that he is equivalent to everyone who is not on board with gay marriage is again a huge (and false) assumption that only serves to ratchet up your frustration / anger / whatever towards people who don't see the world the same way.
That's not really it - I implied that he was similar to about 20% of the population, which is about 2/3 of the population against gay marriage or who believe gay and lesbian people are sinning/immoral. These people advocate for their position. They do not want gay people to exist; they would prefer that sin be eradicated. It is not a stretch to say that people who openly state that their core beliefs are antagonistic to the existence of a group of people are similar to one another in terms of their general unwillingness to allow those people to exist peacefully and freely.
>And as an aside, if you are truly interested in making further progress on some of these issues instead of just being angry about them, you need those people as your allies and could probably win many if not most of them closer to your POV, but demonizing them by lumping them in with the tiny minority representing the worst of them all but guarantees that won't happen.
I don't think that's actually true. If you look at the history of the civil rights movement, at least in the US, it has not required the willing participation of out-and-out bigots to make forward progress. It has required the population that is not flatly bigoted to either take action or get out of the way, but nobody required the KKK to become the ally of the civil rights movement. Fortunately, as their behavior is less respected or allowed, they get less out of being members of their groups and most withdraw or change their behavior.
As long as there are groups that continue to fight to reverse the gains that were hard won, one must continue to fight hard. Complacency risks society regressing. See: abortion rights.
Any institution has, as its primary goal, to further its own life.
Why would institutions against $FOO (where $FOO is whatever your personal bogeyman is, such as racism or sexism) be any different?
Yup: Looks like there is an industry with a standard operating pattern:
Form a public interest group. Find an issue, e.g., a claim of a big threat, some version of the old the sky is falling.
To put over the issue: For evidence for the threat, scientific is not necessary; anecdotal is sufficient. Celebrity endorsement can help.
Get the media hungry for content on-board: Have them gang up, pile on, form a mob, publish shocking content, get credibility for the group and the issue via one for all, all for one, write click-bait headlines. Then the media gets eyeballs and ad revenue.
The group gets publicity, credibility, donations, goes for legislation and appropriations which help the group, result in campaign contributions, maybe cushy jobs.
Make use of a fact of life in politics: One percent of the voters making a big noise can scare politicians more than the other 99% not much concerned.
I.e., there is "extortion" -- objecting to the issue can result in getting hurt.
But eventually too many of that 99% find reasons not to like the issue, and it dies.
Repeat with another group/issue.
In that respect "feminists" won a landmark victory in 1973 that was just recently overturned in Roe v Wade. That's one example of the importance of "sticking around".
As all your examples are of groups leaning one particular way politically I'll proffer another example from other side.
Consider the NRA, presumably they don't need to exist as the 2nd amendment enshrines the right in our constitution.
As you may point out that right is under constant threat. Apply that same logic to the groups you're disparaging and you may better understand their purpose.
To reorient the discussion back on topic, the Sharky Principle is often weaponized by those who don't understand the ongoing endangerment of our basic rights. Even with immediate relevant examples like Dobbs v Jackson. Though it may be broadly applicable across organizations it's important to pick good examples.
I don't really think it's accurate to describe abortion as "healthcare access". Whatever your views on the topic may be, the situation is more complex than that.
There’s another aspect which again really is that simple: the liability risk of having some theocrat second-guess their medical expertise means that hospitals are closing obstetric departments and doctors are leaving repressive states. Reduced access guarantees that people who would have had medical care a few years ago do not today.
https://www.idahostatesman.com/living/health-fitness/article...
The insurers have somehow created which ensures their survival at a real cost. Attempts to rationalize the system have failed because of the focus on getting everyone health insurance rather than health care (admittedly among other reasons).
This a common theme in politics: Actually solving the problem might remove enthusiasm for your candidate or party, so instead they propose things with no realistic chance of passing. Their business is being front and center in public discourse, not quietly fixing things.
EDIT: I’m getting downvoted because a comment below is denying this part of the bill, so I’m adding the exact text here:
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
The comment below is incorrect. The bill would have made people’s existing insurance plans illegal to offer.
Although we all might agree that this is necessary, people usually tend to vote for people who promise "real" solutions. As in, short term solutions to problems we've been carrying for decades (which obviously requires policies that also take decades to cement).
> SEC. 107. PROHIBITION AGAINST DUPLICATING COVERAGE. (a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for— (1) a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this Act; or (2) an employer to provide benefits for an employee, former employee, or the dependents of an employee or former employee that duplicate the benefits provided under this Act.
You could technically also buy extra insurance for… something extra, but your existing insurance plan would have become illegal.
This was a huge sticking point, despite how many people try to deny it or downplay it.
This is an example of a situation where people dislike the system but when you ask them about it they like their part of the system.
For example, people generally have an extremely low opinion of Congress, but on average they like their own Congress person.
You get similar results when you poll people about healthcare and health insurance: People generally hate the health insurance system, but if you start talking about taking away their health insurance or their doctor and replacing it with an unknown system, they get upset.
> Why would you want duplicating coverage anyway? Is it not strictly better for any consumer to only be paying for the extra coverage you want on top of the public coverage?
Duplicating coverage is superfluous if you assume the new plan would be better in every way and you give up nothing in the process, obviously.
However, the fear is that upending the entire system would require people to give things up and replace it with unknowns. There's a good chance that some people would be forced to be reassigned to different doctors under a centrally-planned system, or that access to things would be reset and need to be re-determined under new guidelines.
If this doesn't make sense, consider a situation where someone got special approval for off-label coverage of a drug (happens all the time) but the new government insurance had stricter guidelines about which conditions could be treated with which drugs (to keep cost down). Those people could lose access to medications or treatments that were covered privately.
We tend to think of "Medicare for All" type plans as being without downsides, but when you get into the details of changing the entire health care system out and banning the old ways, it's inevitable that some people would start losing things they liked. And that's where people get upset.
It would be extremely difficult to get an accurate idea of what the general public thinks about a measure before certain interests get involved with publicizing FUD.
But that’s literally what the bill said.
Why is it “fear mongering” to state the effects of a bill? People truly didn’t like this idea.
They understood that it was being replaced. Nobody ever pretended like health care was going away and being banned. People weren't assuming that. That would be nonsensical.
People thought the bill was going to be about a Medicare option for all, but then it came out as forced Medicare for all. People didn't like that.
It wasn't fear mongering, people just didn't like that. It's demonstrably unpopular, and this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention.
This is simply not the case and it's naive to think otherwise.
What I have works. It doesn’t for everyone. But it does for me.
If I’m too busy to read a thousand-page bill, it’s rational to default to the status quo. (Also, Americans like competition. Banning duplicate coverage sounds like ruling out the competition.)
They had to prohibit overlapping coverage in order to make sure that all private practice physicians accepted the medicare system, which has lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. You can pay for more coverage, because that doesn't compete with the public system, but you cannot pay for private insurance that may lead to lower access for publicly insured persons.
Unfortunately, not so simple:
1) Health insurance is already required to pay out at least 90% of your contributions, so even a hypothetically perfectly efficient replacement could only eliminate 10% of costs, all things equal.
2) The government run system would realistically be expensive to run, like any program covering all Americans. Many of those private insurance costs would just be transferred to a government-run operation. In theory it should be more efficient to have single payer, but it would also be extremely expensive in the short term to build and overhaul the system.
3) The actual cost savings wouldn’t come from operational efficiency (not the government’s strongest ability) but from forcing prices down because nobody would have any choice but to accept the government insurance. They were going to drive costs down by forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments and, as unpopular as it is to say, by limiting the types and amounts of treatments available to people.
Single-payer could be cheaper and more efficient simply by returning the massive profits of health insurers directly to taxpayers. Part of high cost for healthcare in the USA is the huge number of middlemen.
https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/he...
Contrast that with the average of all industry profit margins at ~10% and with SaaS type firms of ~80%.
If you want to improve US healthcare costs by getting rid of the profit margin of insurers, it's probably a bad idea. You wouldn't notice the impact.
The government is already the largest health insurer in the country, and providers can't turn them down. There's no system to overhaul.
The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
This is completely false. Many providers don’t accept Medicare or Medicare.
I don't know where you’re getting the idea that Medicare/Medicaid can’t be turned down by private practices.
> The idea of "Medicare for all" is actually very simple - if you do not have private market health insurance, you can opt in to the health insurance the government already provides for about 65 million people.
Again, that’s not what the “Medicare for All” bill actually said.
People just assumed it was an optional thing, but the bill said something else entirely.
Your post is a great example of how people had their own ideas about how things work or would work under new bills, but when you actually read the details it’s a different situation altogether.
I’m also amazed at the confidence with which people will deny the basic facts of “Medicare for All”, as evidenced by many comments in this thread. I posted an actual excerpt from the bill above, yet people are still trying to argue that it said something else.
While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare, practically all do because the people that need the most healthcare are all on it. That would be akin to not treating anyone over the age of 65.
I don't think I am. You haven't provided any specifics and your claims above were easily disproven, so I'm not sure what you think I'm doing wrong.
> As well as equating the notion of Medicare For All as a policy with one attempt to pass it that failed.
See above: My parent comment was specifically talking about the Medicare for All bill. You are the one trying to substitute a different concept into the discussion.
> While sure, providers could choose to not accept Medicare
This is the exact opposite of what you claimed two comments up.
This discussion is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: When it comes to these discussions, people like to substitute their own facts and pretend like we can just ignore the reality of of what goes into bills. Once you start looking at actual legislation these things aren't as popular as people think because it doesn't match their imaginary ideal.
Hence my original point: Politicians have an incentive to keep these concepts as far from reality as possible, because it allows people to cling to their own idealized versions of what it would look like. The closer you get to reality, the more people realize that tradeoffs and compromise are necessary in the real world.
All things remaining same, yes. But all things won't remain same because the incentives would be completely different. The 10% rule has incentivized the entire industry to raise their prices so that 10% will be worth more each quarter. Private insurance would rather have insulin at $1000/mo instead of $10/mo so that they can take $100 instead of $1 and they would rather collect $2000/mo in premiums than $200/mo. Medicare, on the other hand, can and should negotiate prices down: https://www.cms.gov/inflation-reduction-act-and-medicare/med...
Yea… things were going to get better when more people were being ripped off.
(Maybe amsterdam bikelanes were not an afterthought and took all this into the design)
Diclaimer: I have no idea, just speculting
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/840... https://kdvr.com/news/problem-solvers/colorado-coalition-for...
What's the typical salary for a CEO of a for-profit company that has 122M in revenues? While I can understand why people are outraged at the prospect of people getting money from a non-profit, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to be volunteers. Besides the question of how they'd financially support themselves, you have the problem of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
A better argument for there being a homeless-industrial complex would to say there are incentives for organizations to expand operations rather than fix problems, and then give examples where organizations didn't fix problems because it would result in their lowered funding.
1. if homeless didn't exist anymore, these kitchens and shelters would have to shut down. The volunteers are fine with it, they'll volunteer elsewhere. But the permanent employees would be laid off. Understandably, they want to remain employed. So they're incentivised to not search for a durable solution to the homelessness problem.
2. The people in government realise the problem isn't getting solved, so they leave government and form their own think tanks/charities or institutions to solve the problem. They have connections in government (their former co-workers) which they use to get funding. Now there's another company in the homeless industrial complex.
https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-t...
By the time Tichy arrives, people are being encouraged to breathe underwater.
— The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
I’m surprised the Soviets didn’t suppress this story
The result is a set of permanent mutual grievance. An intractable problem may now be utterly insoluble.
UNRWA's budget is set by the UN General Assembly and derives almost entirely from voluntary contributions by UN member states.
with US being the biggest contributor.
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.
- Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015
> The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field in this game of delegitimization, think about for a second, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the ICC [International Criminal Court] and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN [causing us to] need an American veto. … I’m not sure at all that given the current situation, given the current fact that the central playing field we’re playing in is international, Abu Mazen (Abbas) is costing us serious [PR or political] casualties and Hamas in such a situation would be an asset. I don’t think we need to be afraid of [Hamas].
- Bezalel Smotrich, 2015
https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-sup...
There's a paper from Stefan Savage's group a while back where they were able to estimate overall revenue of a few big spam-generating pharma/counterfeit product networks, and it looks like the anti-spam industry is vastly bigger than the underground spam-generating industry, and had no desire to shut off the ultimate source of their revenues.
There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore, and it's not because of any action by anti-spam companies - it's because firms whose products were being counterfeited convinced the credit card companies to shut off the banks handling payments for these purchases. (most evidently went through a couple of banks in I think Azerbaijan) Evidently all the viagra spam was coming from people who also hawked fake Gucci stuff...
This doesn't follow. The US army has a vastly bigger budget than the Taliban or Viet Cong, yet it still lost to them. Revenue is only a relevant factor when the battle is symmetric. For spam there's no reason to believe it is. Spammers are basically guerilla fighters because they operate as criminal networks in areas with lax law enforcement. What's the "anti-spam industry" supposed to do? Send in PMCs?
>There's a reason we don't see many of those emails anymore
Yeah, they've been replaced with phishing emails and scams instead.
People copy someone's profile, pretend to be them, say they're them to their friends and ask them for money. With AI voice changers, it even sounds like them.
A homeless person can steal some electic wires and pipes and fixing it will cost a lot of money. So you say that we shouldnt fix it?
Symantec etc. have no business interest in getting people to stop sending spam emails. In the case of the pharma/counterfeit emails that were so common 10-15 years ago the fix was quite simple, but didn't come from the anti-spam industry - it required finding an aggrieved party (brand owners) with enough clout in the financial world.
As you point out, fighting spam is an asymmetric game of whack-a-mole, where spammers can easily adapt to countermeasures. Forcing spammers to get a new merchant bank to handle their credit card transactions flips the asymmetry and makes them do all the work; as a result you no longer see spam advertising viagra.
Getting rid of ransomware would be quite easy, in theory, if you could tank the value of bitcoin, since few ransomware gangs are able to collect ransom the traditional way in bags of cash. And a large fraction of other phishing attacks could be prevented by putting stricter controls on gift cards.
If you ask me, a freer market is the answer - less intervention, allow simple economic forces to play out. But the inclination is to have more government meddling etc to fix the mess, which has the opposite effect that it was intended to have. This is such a common pattern however, one ought to be asking whether the "unintended effect" (of entrenching the problem) is in reality an "intended effect", with only lip service being paid to 'doing the right thing' to facilitate legal changes.
Free market is the myth that can be thrown at plebeians to ashame them on their inability to compete with establishment, whatever the form it takes.
In this case we have multiple entities working together to maintain the existing problem, so they can collectively maximize profits.