The problems of Soviet culture are really the problems of bureaucracy.
The way this is intended to be addressed in free markets is through competition. If your employer sucks, go work somewhere else. If their product sucks, buy it from someone else. This works pretty damn well as long as the company doesn't find a way to insulate itself from competition. But if that happens, it stops working, and then you're back to an unaccountable bureaucracy and all that entails.
This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government, and then they do two things: Weaken antitrust laws/enforcement, and "strengthen" other laws that raise market barriers to entry which are then sold to the public under the subterfuge of some kind of safety/security/labor protection/etc., because the public rightly wouldn't accept their true motivation as a valid justification.
This also tends to feed on itself. Some industry captures the government, constrains competition, becomes abusive so people start demanding something be done about it. Instead of addressing the root of the problem (regulatory capture and insufficient competition), the incumbents propose a rule to reduce competition even more. So you get housing construction constrained by zoning, but instead of addressing that, the proposal is something like rent control, which disincentivizes construction even more and then long-term rents get even higher.
There is another issue: collusion. If every company requires binding arbitration in their contracts (of adhesion), do I just opt out of having a cell phone, internet service, etc.?
See also: RealPage's rent-fixing.
"Free market competition" is an ideological construct. Collectively (and sometimes even personally), we can't "go work somewhere else" - and we certainly can't not-work at all. Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
> This has been happening increasingly in the US because corporations capture the government,
The government exists to serve the interests of property owners, and more so, the larger ones - enforcing the social order and protecting their minority control of economic forces, the means of producing and distributing goods and services, from the rest of surrounding society.
Capture by certain corporation is an attempt to tug at that common blanket to favor them specifically rather than keep the system somewhat stable and functional.
If Company A sucks and there are many other companies that don't, every single employee at Company A could quit and go work somewhere else, and then Company A can go out of business. That's a completely reasonable outcome for a company that sucks, and is what happens when there is actually competition.
> and we certainly can't not-work at all.
No known system satisfies the criterion that we all collectively don't have to work.
> Moreover, if an "employer sucks", it may suck in multiple ways - environmental impact, social impacting where it operates, impact of its products and services on society etc. None of that changes even if you do go "work something else". What's necessary is improving things, not finding another 'stall' in the 'market'.
These are not the "Soviet Shoe Factory" issue, they're externalities. If the company tries to make only baby shoes to save material but people want adult shoes and competition exists then people buy adult shoes from somewhere else and the shoe factory making unnecessary baby shoes goes out of business or doesn't have the perverse incentive to do that to begin with.
If the company is dumping toxins in the river, that isn't one of the problems that competition is expected to fix, in the same way that it isn't expected to prevent thefts or murders. And it's also not a problem the Soviets fixed either.
Sure, but is competition an ideological construct? Even the Soviet Union had competition between companies and institutions – without any free market.
In a natural world, "collectively" is easier than "personally". You might have some reason that you absolutely can't quit, but there will be other employees who don't have that handicap. Their pressure will be enough to keep the employer reasonable for you too, since there are probably more of them than there are people who can't leave like you. But even if no one can realistically go get another job, that's not the true pressure... the true pressure is that they're so awful you'd all just quit despite how awful that will be for you, despite your inability to get a new job.
In a natural world with well-cultivated libertarian tendencies, the threshold for "fuck you I'd rather starve than put up with your bullshit" is pretty low. This is why companies (and government) are so eager to do everything they can to undermine libertarian tendencies... it makes everyone more vulnerable. Not that anyone understands this. The modern impulse when abuse takes place is to try to goad mommy government into coming to the rescue, which further erodes libertarian attitudes. They need you vulnerable, they need it to be such that if you have problems only they can solve them. If they can contrive that to be the case, they get to decide whether or not they want the problems solved at all.
There is going ro be a sociological rule that this thing always leads to similar dysfunctions.
Hayek said that the reason Communist economies failed was that the center could not get accurate information on what the leaves needed/wanted, so there was always a supply/demand problem. Market economies use prices to automatically convey this information. It seems like as companies get towards nation-state sizes they tend to have a similar problem: management is completely out of touch with what the people doing the work need (and/or out of touch with the customer base, market situation, etc.).
Fortunately, leaving companies is a lot easier than Communist countries. Also disagreement is a lot less dangerous, and the consequences of being on the receiving end of political backstabbing are a lot more tolerable. Maybe most importantly, corporations don't tend to be founded on a lie like Communist governments (see the Charter 77 essay [1]).
[1] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...
The last decade has increased US GDP per person by more than 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation), and launched many innovations making live better and safer.
Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior.
Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.
But I would strongly argue that the failure of Sears is an example of free market success.
Things can get much uglier and be much more protracted for governments.
that is the Marx's law from Das Kapital which in modern language can be stated as "the larger the entropy of the ownership distribution - the more socialism inside". The smallest entropy - one owner, classic capitalism, the largest - everything belongs to everybody, ie. government property, the socialist state, etc. The large publicly owned corporations are more toward the large entropy values, thus a lot of socialism inside.
Android is pretty standardized these days, and even a fairly cheap Android phone will probably do most smartphone things (make calls, send texts, watch YouTube, etc.) reasonably well, but a corner that seems to be cut in cheaper phones is almost always the camera, and that kind of makes sense.
If you're buying your phone online, you can look at the more-or-less objective specs of the phone like how much RAM it has, or how fast the CPU is, but you can't really tell how the photos will look [1], and as such it's easy to put a cheaper sensor or lens in there, especially in the cheaper phones which (I think) have lower margins.
[1] Even if the listing has sample pictures, you don't know how representative they are of the actual experience; they could just have taken the sample photos with ideal lighting, with a tripod, in a controlled studio, for example.
What is atrocious is the inch format - e.g. 1 inch sensor, 1/2.2" (decimal and fraction!). It somehow refers to the diagonal length of the vacuum tube and not even the active image area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format#Table_of_s... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Size
*300 watts for 1e-20ns
An optical system composed of multiple lenses doesn't obviously correspond to a certain resolution, but the confusion is merely the literature taken at hand: instead of obsessively comparing smartphone advertisements, it is physically possible to read books and course notes on physics, optics, ...
There is nothing impossible about publishing spatial frequency responses etc, or legally mandating such information to be present on any advertising materials as soon as the MPixel counts are advertised.
Pixel counts are objective. But the problem is that while the pixel count sets the upper bound on the image quality, all cameras don't achieve that upper bound - especially due to the Bayer color filter matrix.
To hit this point home, try taking a photo on a smartphone with a 12-megapixel camera. Now take the same photo on a professional camera, say the Canon EOS R5 with an expensive L-series prime lens. The R5 photo has 45 megapixels, so go and downsample that to 12 megapixels to match the phone photo. The pro camera photo will look much better than the phone photo, thus demonstrating that the phone camera is not maximizing the limits of the 12 MP picture format.
(Also, to make the comparison fairer, take a landscape photo of faraway scenery and buildings so that there are no effects of focus blur from having a large lens aperture. Everything in the photos should be in sharp focus.)
And to get the full advertised resolution (which you have to enable in the photo toggles) you have to tolerate a delayed shutter button and a "long exposure" for it to do the computational photography or something. So it's useless to expect full resolution with kids or action.
I've heard that the Pixel 8 was better, but I'll never know.
Not completely ungameable, but for a consumer product manufacturer in a free market it's the least gameable metric invented so far.
Markets are kind of a dumb thing if you think about it. You take all the qualities of an item and project them into a single scalar we call 'price'. Then use that scalar as a form of comparison.
It's comical when you think about it. Seems we need a better technology now that we have computers.
The share price kept rising while they were investing profits in expanding.
It's far from a fool proof way of doing things, many companies that prioritise growth over profitability wind up with neither, but Amazon managed it.
As for prices, no computer can work out my preference or not for a Mac over a PC, or a iPhone over an Android, or how much quality I will pay for in a bike. Prices reveal this.
Ludwig von Mises said this was why Communism wouldn't work in 1920. He was right.
2. "Free" and "market" are fundamentally contradictory terms. But that point is irrespective of the difficulty of quantifying complexity/heft of tasks and goals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/6iewhc/t...
Commenters claim it is done so that people in the factories won't steal shoes since they can't get both left and right shoes.
The second link has labels stuck to the insole but they look like off a hand held label printer, not the mandated COO label so I am a little skeptical.
These memes tend to propagate and mutate through the minds of those who are keen to believe things without evidence.
There is definitely evidence of shoe shortages in the Soviet Union - enough that it's a running joke.
A quick Google turned up this post:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/09/soviet_shoes.html
which cites this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Dismantling-Utopia-Information-Ended-...
I'm not sure if there will be better evidence, given the USSR's propensity to pad their stats.
This is explicitly labeled as a story. It is a parable used to illustrate a point. Do you also demand evidence of the boy who cried wolf? Or little red riding hood who strayed from the safe path? These are the same kind of things.
I would understand your question maybe if the article would purport the existence of the shoe factory. But it doesn’t. And that is not the point of it.
1. Spend a lot of time and thought into developing ungameable(whether this is possible is unclear) metrics and ways to measure these metrics.
2. Admit defeat and not be transparent with evaluations and/or go off of vibes.
Places with robust metrics ranged from excellent to meh. One place had a sales team that was owning it, and the leadership was shoveling cash into wheelbarrows. But the company was losing a fortune because the sales metrics were precisely stupid.
So first be really sure what it is you want to get.
What you want to get will be hard to measure. Accept that as truth. However accept no proxy measures.
Measure only the specific outcomes you want.
This reminded me of something our anti-counterfeiting startup learned when integrating into manufacturing for a high-end outdoor apparel brand.
There are efficiencies that the factory gets by, say, parallelizing work on the sleeves of a jacket, while other parts are also worked on. But each batch of dyed outer material may have slight variation in color, no matter how hard they calibrate.
So, their processes are designed to ensure that, when the jacket pieces come together, they all came from the same dyed batch of outer material.
(There were many interesting tidbits like that, and those were just the ones relevant to us, in terms we could understand. I'm sure the factory also knew a million other things.)
Probably the Soviet shoes of TFA had worse problems than slightly mismatched color.
I think I saw in the context of a company that made radios, and at the time (80s?) it didn't really work out for them.
2. Theranos as a “Startup Shoe Factory”
Theranos is the perfect capitalist version of the Soviet Shoe Factory:
Soviet Model == Theranos Model (Capitalist Equivalent) Shoe factories produced small sizes to meet quotas. Theranos faked blood test results to meet investor expectations. Factories cut material costs and quality to meet output goals. Theranos lied about its technology because real innovation was too slow. Central planners rewarded metrics over reality. VC investors rewarded hype over real products. Factories looked productive on paper, even if they made useless products. Theranos looked like a billion-dollar startup, even though it had no working product. The economy was distorted by planned quotas. The startup world is distorted by fake valuations and exit-driven funding.
Capitalism isn't magic, humans can still be fooled. The nice thing about capitalism is that I personally didn't have to give them money. Caveat investor.
Extraordinary claims require some kind of data and facts to back the claim, which there was none. There is no evidence to believe they could develop this technology, optimism yes, but evidence no. It was fraud from the start.
But, Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure."
Sometimes. Other times...just look at the US public education system.
The corollary for the Soviet shoe factory is you need incentives that propagate to guide production. You need the market to guide you in all the little details and you have to discover little by little what it is actually demanding.
For ML, we need something similar if not the same.
Describes every Enterprise software I've ever used.
Generally speaking, they're more concerned with the supplier than the product. Yes, it must (generally speaking) meet their requirements, but its also important that they -believe- the supplier can roll it out, and will be around in 10 years still supporting it.
In other words Enterprise doesn't just want software. They want a stability of supply, so suddenly they're looking at things like Support levels, customability and so on.
"You never get fired for buying IBM (a reference likely lost on you if you're a bit younger than me) wasn't about quality, but about longevity.
Is there a guide for the markup somewhere?
Which is also why I have a sneaking suspicion that most economic theory is complete bullshit. All the debates over privatization vs. public services, monopoly vs. competition, autocratic vs. democratic styles of leadership etc. are mostly irrelevant. Both can work. It all boils down to whether you have good human stakeholders who have the integrity and agency to do the right thing. Counter to most economic theories, for example, a monopoly that is run by people who actually care about doing the right thing might be better run than fiercely competitive startups who just want to make a quick buck.
I don't think this is some gotcha, but basic economic understanding for at least the last hundred years. Fundamentally, much of economic theory acknowledges these questions. This brings you full circle, given inconsistent humans with individual values, how do different systems and rulesets perform.
Soon enough, we started seeing lots of politics, cutthroat environment, management pressure, management meetings looking at dashboards of commits, stack ranks, PIPs and firings, but also a significant rise in the number of commits.
One year later, commits metric won. But the business lost customers tired of buggy software.
You got what you measure but quantity does not substitute quality.
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
