Category: the market
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Abundance obsoletes Efficiency
Efficiency often gets framed as inherently good by economists and engineers, but that obfuscates any consideration of Enough. Trying to find Efficiency on the abundant side of Enough is waste; all you are striving for is Excess.
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Failure
Every failed project I’ve been around can trace its failure back to a lack of agreement among the participants about what problem the project is trying to solve.
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Is there a relationship between market stability and market fragility?
There this argument in economics that big, interconnected markets are more stable than markets without inter-dependencies because can make it through economic shocks better when they can dissipate the impact of those shocks more widely. This makes sense on a macroeconomic level where you don’t actually look at the individuals and where the low level…
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Two kinds of software creation
There is a fundamental discord between software creators and the businesses that want them to create software on their behalf that really just boils down to something like the following: Programmers at all levels of experience want to believe they are artists, while businesses of all sizes want to believe that software can be manufactured.…
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No Capital Opportunity in Social Problems
Because social problems cannot be solved by technological solutions, there are limited opportunities to invest capital into the solution itself. This is a problem for capitalists, since investing capital for gain is what they do. Once the opportunities to provide the tools that make implementing the solution to a social problem are exhausted or the…
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There are two economies – the sharing economy and the capture economy
If you own something you have two choices – share it or don’t share it. That’s it. If you share it — and by share it I really mean, “let other people use it for free” — then it isn’t capital in any classical sense, though you may be mining social capital through the act…
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Taylorism and Software Manufacturing
When we make software like it is a commodity that is manufactured, and that can be managed like a manufactured product, we are bringing in all the baggage of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s ideas that dehumanize the labor force in service of an efficiency-centric view of labor productivity. The first problem with that is that creative…
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1600 hours
It might be the case that the greatest change in American society we could make is to fix Federal Officer pay schedule as a multiple of 1600 hours of the Federal Minimum wage and to tax corporations based on how much greater that multiple is between their lowest paid worker and their highest. Currently the…
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The Milwaukee Road’s Pacific Extension
The Pacific Extension was the successful attempt by the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railroad (the Milwaukee Road) to build a transcontinental line over the Rocky and Cascade mountain ranges and reach the Pacific Northwest, specifically the Seattle area. Construction on the line began in 1906 and completed in 1909; the line represented the shortest…
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Democracy and capitalism
Democracy is about removing the friction of living well amongst people. Capitalism has realized there is money to be made by monetizing in perpetuity that friction that democracy is trying to remove.