As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable tv.
It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but big organizations delivered them before and it’s definitely more possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it was before.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep. Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these topics, go read the scholarship!
EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find that it complicates things.
OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text.
It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to remember:
1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations.
2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated.
3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.
This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead.
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
In terms of collaboration and contributions, I think the contextual search offered by LLMs is significantly underrated.
Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.
We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.
This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.
You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.
But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.
Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
That doesn't mean those regulations or structures were intended to be a permanent fixture. Similarly, Bretton Woods was not intended to maintain gold at $35 per ounce.
The world is a place where some development requires large amounts of capitalization. That is also a competitive advantage. No-one cares about any of those previous bullet points if they are generally happy in their lives.
When the SEC brought their first large scale financial fraud indictment, no-one cared. (Investors Overseas Service (IOS), $224 million and International Controls Corporation (ICC)). It was pursued because someone stole money from the wealthy. However, many years later, one of the two fraudsters was revealed to be a notorious Russian agent that worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London during WW2. He would walk files of Ukrainian sources out of the OSS office (obtained from MI6!) and down the street to the Russian embassy. Those Ukrainian sources later disappeared.
The world is a sketchy/dodgy/evil place. Partitioning it into chunks may provide some temporary benefit, but the real world does not evolve that way. Look at Carlos Slim, Mexican Cartels, Russian oligarchs, META is on track for $80 billion net profit this year ...
Oh also, two of the Bretton Woods principal architects, also Russian agents. One had their US passport revoked and US citizenship revoked in 1954. He was the chief economic advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. No-one cared about him either, and he essentially envisioned the world of monetary policies that we have today. He lived out the remainder of his life very well off, advising Colombia on their monetary policy. In 1995, he was revealed to be a prolific Russian agent from KGB archives researchers and authors.
I was so used to my American bank not actively selling me snake oil that I stupidly bought a very expensive snake-oil subscription from my German bank when I was living there. Ended up with a warehouse full of snake oil (metaphorically speaking) and a sunk-cost fallacy before I finally figured out they just had a strategic partnership with Snake Oil GmbH so my account representative got a commission on my stupidity.
Banks being only local was utterly horrible for the economy. You had many small banks completely depended on one region and a local supply shock would kill all the local banks as well.
This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.
Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.
> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:
Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.
The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.
So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.
Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious.
You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.
how would you pick those 1000 projects? this is the problem with NIH grants too, for example - lots of appeal to authority, lot of noise, not a lot of signal.
AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.
and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)
I feel point 1 is a more specific example of point 4. Point 3 makes sense because banks are handling peoples money, I don't know enough about point 2.
However point 1 & 4 is more about market power than anything else, point 3 is more about ensuring confidence in basic financial services aren't undermined by risk taking which feels like a separate point.
Sometimes for reasons other than foul play or a poorly design regulatory system, there's value in an organisation being large as it has increasing returns to scale, it can produce more output with the same input compared to smaller organisations. It's also unfortunately one way how monopolies form, easiest example being utility companies because there's also a case not to break them up as well as they can provide the service at a cheaper cost, but will they? Which makes the problem harder to solve then just breaking these firms up.
In NSW Australia (New South Wales the state Sydney is based in), the problem was approached by creating an institution called IPART which basically determines prices/rates for both public and private monopolies. In Sydney there are private motor ways and tunnels, IPART determines the rates, and the water company (Sydney Water) largely has its rates also decided by IPART, same goes for council rates (tax on land/properties, etc). IPART is far from perfect, it answers to the Premier (the Governor) so there's a risk of it becoming an instrument of popularism, but this means Sydney water is chronically underfunded (and water rates aren't even that high), this has second order effects like Sydney Water dragging its feet on committing to providing infrastructure. There are massive fixed costs with starting a water utility firm so it impacts stuff like residential construction reducing overall house supply, which is a problem in Sydney when housing is so expensive.
Sometimes these larger entities form as a result of government created entry barriers, in America it's easier to get small business funding than it is in Australia. Also in Australia we have laws about prohibiting pharmacies opening too close to each other, which is incredibly dumb. There's a very strong Pharmacy lobby, not big pharma but instead drug stores which might be a uniquely Australian phenomena. But it means there's no drug store near my local train station in an area that was recently redeveloped, or a single Pharmacy in areas like Sydney Olympic Park, but 10 in a smaller older area such Granville.
In Australia we have 2-3 large grocery stores (Coles, Woolworths and to a lesser extent IGA), a 4th exists to an even lesser extent but has struggled to grow and has been struggling in part due to the land planning regulatory framework. Most cities in the US have something similar, but in NSW it's in overdrive plays a big part in why housing is so unaffordable as it largely determines how much floor space is allowed on each lot and how tall buildings can be. But back to groceries, it's very difficult for ALDI to get permission to build as many grocery stores to compete due to energy barriers imposed by the planning system. If you own the land, you need to first get a planning proposal in to rezoned and planning controls updated, then you need to make a seperate development applicaition which can easily take 5 years.
I believe parking minimums in the USA can have a similar effect, as many cities require different levels of free parking for different land use.
Sometimes over regulating things can result in a lack competition, and it's not always a result of a lack of government intervention. And sometimes there's value in allowing organisations to be large. And when it is a problem sometimes the solution isn't always break them up.
>My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations
This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).
Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of themselves.
I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.
Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing, despite agreeing with many of the points raised. I think it's relevant to recognize that large organizations often become large by consuming smaller organizations. And that they consume smaller organizations precisely because they offer something like purpose and meaning, and other emotional/spiritual needs. When there are no more smaller organizations to consume, the larger organizations fracture out of an absence of these necessities. The division of 'small' and 'large' organizations is maybe relevant in today's economic structure but it does not feel absolute or permanent. Anyway, this well highlights the importance of genuine connections and activities at the individual level.
- most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time
- what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).
- it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future
- what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound
- I can't help but think that if our whole economic system reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels meaningless
Realistically, everyone online is constantly complaining about the lack of friends, the lack of community, and so on. Meanwhile, I live in a high rise in SF and have no shortage of any of these.
People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like.
My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to the same kids' birthday parties.
This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the reduction in the barrier to entry with the help of AI and the accelerated pace of change in society due to AI. I hope that once a main driver of scalability and societal change becomes access to computation, rather than human headcount, we will see a reversal of the ongoing trend.
Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social principle:
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."
Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)
Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.
Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?
Families are still the most common small organization and I think they need to be considered as a distinct category rather than being grouped with other small organizations.
I think too many people starting companies dream of getting bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far more about financial games rather than the complex details of say their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on a third party in china who arguably is the more important partner). I don’t know how saas relates to this problem.
This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure
Part of the appeal of software is that it's so low friction that you actually can be a small team and take on giants.
I love hardware but I have basically abandoned any hope of bringing products to market. Just to get compliance certifications can cost upwards of $250k for a basic product, nevermind needing to wrangle with supply lines, manufacturing, and physical distribution. Forget it. You all have seen the graveyard of Kickstarters.
At my day job though, these huge costs can be readily absorbed and amount to a small fraction of the total cost.
106 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 91.9 ms ] threadAs a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable tv.
It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but big organizations delivered them before and it’s definitely more possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it was before.
I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep. Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these topics, go read the scholarship!
EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find that it complicates things.
It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
Mathstodon must have it's setting configured as dark, overriding the default.
Maybe email them and ask for it to be fixed?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29748/commits/9ece...
1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the individual and a move toward large organizations. 2. This provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being undifferentiated. 3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and participating in grassroots groups.
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.
We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.
This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.
50-years ago, if you wanted to:
- read the news (local paper),
- get coffee (local coffee shop)
- get groceries (local grocery)
- buy tires (local tire dealer)
You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.
But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.
Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory:
* The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.
* Banks could not cross state lines, resulting in a geographically distributed financial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always local.
* Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses, resulting in a compartmentalized system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... : Your bank did not try to sell you investments.
* Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .
The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller, more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
The world is a place where some development requires large amounts of capitalization. That is also a competitive advantage. No-one cares about any of those previous bullet points if they are generally happy in their lives.
When the SEC brought their first large scale financial fraud indictment, no-one cared. (Investors Overseas Service (IOS), $224 million and International Controls Corporation (ICC)). It was pursued because someone stole money from the wealthy. However, many years later, one of the two fraudsters was revealed to be a notorious Russian agent that worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London during WW2. He would walk files of Ukrainian sources out of the OSS office (obtained from MI6!) and down the street to the Russian embassy. Those Ukrainian sources later disappeared.
The world is a sketchy/dodgy/evil place. Partitioning it into chunks may provide some temporary benefit, but the real world does not evolve that way. Look at Carlos Slim, Mexican Cartels, Russian oligarchs, META is on track for $80 billion net profit this year ...
Oh also, two of the Bretton Woods principal architects, also Russian agents. One had their US passport revoked and US citizenship revoked in 1954. He was the chief economic advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. No-one cared about him either, and he essentially envisioned the world of monetary policies that we have today. He lived out the remainder of his life very well off, advising Colombia on their monetary policy. In 1995, he was revealed to be a prolific Russian agent from KGB archives researchers and authors.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/may/21/internationalc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Controls_Corpora...
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/591496adadd7b049345e5c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauchlin_Currie
This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.
Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.
> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:
Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.
The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.
So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.
AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.
and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)
it's protectionism, and led to ~50 monopolies (or oligopolies) instead
However point 1 & 4 is more about market power than anything else, point 3 is more about ensuring confidence in basic financial services aren't undermined by risk taking which feels like a separate point.
Sometimes for reasons other than foul play or a poorly design regulatory system, there's value in an organisation being large as it has increasing returns to scale, it can produce more output with the same input compared to smaller organisations. It's also unfortunately one way how monopolies form, easiest example being utility companies because there's also a case not to break them up as well as they can provide the service at a cheaper cost, but will they? Which makes the problem harder to solve then just breaking these firms up.
In NSW Australia (New South Wales the state Sydney is based in), the problem was approached by creating an institution called IPART which basically determines prices/rates for both public and private monopolies. In Sydney there are private motor ways and tunnels, IPART determines the rates, and the water company (Sydney Water) largely has its rates also decided by IPART, same goes for council rates (tax on land/properties, etc). IPART is far from perfect, it answers to the Premier (the Governor) so there's a risk of it becoming an instrument of popularism, but this means Sydney water is chronically underfunded (and water rates aren't even that high), this has second order effects like Sydney Water dragging its feet on committing to providing infrastructure. There are massive fixed costs with starting a water utility firm so it impacts stuff like residential construction reducing overall house supply, which is a problem in Sydney when housing is so expensive.
Sometimes these larger entities form as a result of government created entry barriers, in America it's easier to get small business funding than it is in Australia. Also in Australia we have laws about prohibiting pharmacies opening too close to each other, which is incredibly dumb. There's a very strong Pharmacy lobby, not big pharma but instead drug stores which might be a uniquely Australian phenomena. But it means there's no drug store near my local train station in an area that was recently redeveloped, or a single Pharmacy in areas like Sydney Olympic Park, but 10 in a smaller older area such Granville.
In Australia we have 2-3 large grocery stores (Coles, Woolworths and to a lesser extent IGA), a 4th exists to an even lesser extent but has struggled to grow and has been struggling in part due to the land planning regulatory framework. Most cities in the US have something similar, but in NSW it's in overdrive plays a big part in why housing is so unaffordable as it largely determines how much floor space is allowed on each lot and how tall buildings can be. But back to groceries, it's very difficult for ALDI to get permission to build as many grocery stores to compete due to energy barriers imposed by the planning system. If you own the land, you need to first get a planning proposal in to rezoned and planning controls updated, then you need to make a seperate development applicaition which can easily take 5 years.
I believe parking minimums in the USA can have a similar effect, as many cities require different levels of free parking for different land use.
Sometimes over regulating things can result in a lack competition, and it's not always a result of a lack of government intervention. And sometimes there's value in allowing organisations to be large. And when it is a problem sometimes the solution isn't always break them up.
This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power" (1945).
I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering and shrinking away.
Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations becoming dysfunctional, but not dying because they have sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their replacements become large organizations.
- on average, complexity is increasing.
- most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over time
- what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).
- it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the future
- what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound
- I can't help but think that if our whole economic system reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels meaningless
"There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America....
In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one."
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html
People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like.
My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to the same kids' birthday parties.
This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.
"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."
Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)
This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure
I love hardware but I have basically abandoned any hope of bringing products to market. Just to get compliance certifications can cost upwards of $250k for a basic product, nevermind needing to wrangle with supply lines, manufacturing, and physical distribution. Forget it. You all have seen the graveyard of Kickstarters.
At my day job though, these huge costs can be readily absorbed and amount to a small fraction of the total cost.