Comment by 🚀 stack

Easy solution: Don't!

Without a government with infinite money, all kinds of absurdly large, unsafe, pointless and wasteful projects are not even on the radar.

Sep 13 · 3 months ago

19 Later Comments ↓

small decentralized solutions have the benefit of not leading to actual or equivalent nuclear meltdown if they are flawed in some way.

Large solutions are what drives society forward though. Microchip manufacturing is an excellent example we all utilize. You don't need the latest and greatest at all times but I wonder if we would have personal computers without the large scale work. Computing would probably still be mechanical without those big expensive early projects that took a power plant to run basic digital calculations.

Societies made little technological progress for millennia and it isn't hard for me to imagine a small scale driven society still stuck in the 800s technologically. These small societies had their own vulnerabilities with things like sanitation (with it disease) and food supply. Meltdowns weren't a concern but the harvest was.

Are we really better off though?

My mother-in-law was born with horses on cobblestoned streets. No wonder she has blown a gasket.

We were not really stuck -- just moving at a human speed. Something went terribly wrong.

It feels like a Star Trek episode: the civilization is not ready for technology and is going to set itself on fire. Actually, it already has. Catalyst: infinite free money from guys with guns.

I can argue we are. Stroll through an old graveyard sometime. People recycled names on their kids if they didn't make it out of childhood. I am personally on my third or forth chance at life based on diseases I have had.

Selfishly, yes, agreed. Although at a certain point it's time to make room for the next generation. We are keeping too many zombies alive.

Big picture -- we made it without antibiotics or doctors washing their hands until mid-last-century. Also largely without destroying everything we touch -- or at least relative to today.

Coincidentally, stumbled across:

This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our …

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction

Can you have something like antibiotics without other technical advancements? You need steam, you need reverse osmosis, you need big steel tanks, you need wet milling of corn, you need filters, you need resins, you need mass scale production of glass. We did fine before antibiotics, we just lost tons of people to disease.

Hand washing doesn't require much except for untainted water. You can saponify with ashes and animal fat to make soap. That is human scale.

I think we would have something like antibiotics with technology achievable without a government-funded effort (and associated violence, confiscation, and debasement of currency).

Bacteriophages and antibiotics have been around forever. Nubian mummies were full of tetracycline. Maybe less effective, but eating fermented moldy crap and drinking holy beer could work.

Surprisingly useful things literally grow on shit.

We are late entrants into an eons old war is why useful things can be found on seemingly gross things. Ethanol is useful and able to be cultivated without special technology. I am a bit skeptical you can get a simple antibiotic in useful quantities with basic tools. The first penicillin culture needed 11 liters of broth per dose. Improvements came about by better mold selection and UV mutagenesis.

If we stop stuffing animals with antibiotics (and eating them in such quantities), we would need a lot less antibiotics... And they would work a lot better.

@stack getting back to original point, I think your free market example is still a financially based motivation with all same effects on product quality. Even if maybe at slightly different scale.

For example website development is unregulated, highly competitive and has super low margins (with rare exceptions). Most players are freelancers to small 2-4 people teams, even for premium projects. But businesses still cut corners, "optimise" processes and deliver minimal acceptable quality when possible.

I'm also not convinced that free market can survive on its own. Network effect like youtube video library or app store collection, are effective barriers against newcommers no matter how smart they are.

You are forgetting that when there are no corporate protections from the government, large business cannot exist. There is a natural upper bound on the size of a business, and a monstrosity like Google would have collapsed of its own weight long ago.

If you've ever worked for a large or even a medium-sized company you know what I am talking about. It is absolutely impossible that such things exist with 6 layers of managers in meetings and layers of approval for everything.

A small, more agile company would immediately run rings around them and take away their business long before anything like 'network effect' would take place.

I can't imagine more than a dozen people cooperating efficiently.

A large number of small, interoperable youtubes would achieve network effect just as easily as it reached a reasonable size. Participants would compete on quality of presentation and content, as well as for advertisers. Need for ownership of a single 'network-effect' corporation is corporate propaganda, of course.

That is assuming that there is any value to something like youtube or facebook. That is also questionable, as these are brainwashing machines developed by corporations to capture your attention with low-cost, low-quality bullshit while they show you ads.

In my experience growing a start up to a monster, it all falls apart around 60 people. Then you don't know everyone's name and vaguely what they're working on. I went from doing my job to filling out forms for permission to do my job.

I think those of us over a certain age recall the early internet when you had a lot of small companies on the internet. Some overly inflated companies towered over others (eg Netscape and Yahoo) but they had a lot of competition too (Mosaic, links, Spyglass and a thousand search engines like Webcrawler Hotbot Lycos and later Altavista).

Early ISPs had a lot of competition as well. Numerous local companies along with the big providers of network services (AOL, Prodigy who eventually added internet connectivity outside their walled gardens.)

But here is the thing. All of this was enabled by the natural monopoly of telephone service. If we had 1,000,000 telephone co-ops operating nationwide without interconnection it all falls apart. Early electricity service was like this, fragmented with every provider a power island operating at different frequencies and voltages.

@darkghost, my startup experience is similar. The one that 'made it', was extremely productive at 3 (although I was burning both ends), became a zoo at around 30, and the big concern was going public while doing decent demos at endless meetings with investors. Then the company was no longer productive (by my definition) and dealt with standards, sales to 'anchor customers', maintenance, compliance and staffing (which went into hundreds in several countries). I was out by then, thank god.

And soon it collapsed, shrunk to around 20 on payroll, and got picked up by Google for chump change, mainly for the patents and a couple of remaining smart people.

The ones that did not make it stayed in low single digits staffwise, created amazing products, but had no chance in retrospect. I was naive, unprepared, and cared too much about things that are not important in Capitalism.

I would assert from experience, that having a product or customers in a Capitalist system is just a ticket to the game -- one that allows you to literally print money (IPO, secondary offerings, spinoffs, borrowing billions at low rates, currency swaps, insane tax insentives, government contracts, bailouts, etc). Quality of product or customer satisfaction -- not that important. It has to be good enough that there are no scandals to tank your stock, hopefully.

I feel completely exhausted summarizing just that part of my professional life. Would not want to do it again.

One I worked for there were 5 of us. The product would "sell itself." It was pretty amazing, with massive market potential. The product was chemically impossible except for our way of making it. Spoiler alert: it didn't sell itself, competitors caught up and ate our lunch. You can buy their products at your local drug store and meanwhile all I have is a jar of this stuff and what should have been. Still a better story than my current gig though.

Interesting. It is a good story. You hear success stories, but there are so many near misses and complete failures no one hears about...

Do you think someone leaked it or was it one of those things that is not that hard to repeat once you know it's possible?

Sounds like a process patent... Did competitors hit upon it before priority date, or did they just work around the patent? I've had both things happen to me.

[I hate IP, but when in Rome...]

There are two main steps to make the product. (I am simplifying here.) It is somewhat obvious if you study it. Step one was in the public domain and extremely efficient. All the IP was around the catalysts to make the magic happen in step two (which was rate limiting) but it turns out there are dozens, possibly hundreds in nature that perform the same function (with varying efficiency) in this application. We locked up about 20 of them, some of them very efficient and some of them lousy. One competitor was stopped from using one but we lost our shirt doing it and they easily worked around the patent. Others just worked around the IP. The engineering to build this is all public domain.

My favorite fail involved an IP attorney I hired to negotiate with a large manufacturer/distributor in a specific market. Turned out he was more interested in getting the manufacturer as a client, and at one point asked me how one could work around my patent, in order to supposedly strengthen it and apply for supplemental patents. Like a fool I told him what I would do (which was pretty specific and not at all obvious), and a couple of days later the manufacturer did just that. The manufacturer told me that he 'had fulfilled all his legal and moral obligations' and told me to f**k off. The product has been a good seller in their catalog for over two decades now.

Oh, and I had to pay the attorney another fifteen thousand to avoid getting sued.

Wow that is pretty bad. I got offered a consulting gig basically doing the same thing, telling someone how to defeat my former company's patents. The offer was $150 for a one hour consultation but the screener questions were specific enough to get the required information without paying. I told them no thanks.

Original Post

Limits of financially based motivation — In the past forced labor and systems like serfdom had violence based motivation. Work and you won't die. People usually put minimal possible effort in. Especially intellectually. Cheap Manual labor bonus Intellectual labor penalty Most people, including me work for money. We need food, shelter, etc... Money is our prime motivation to do our jobs. Level of motivation depends on pay (capped) Pay must be competitive I'd like to argue that like forced...