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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#71

Post by 13of40 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #59
Alex3917 wrote: post #29

Great essay. I would quibble with the following though: > [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating. The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity. Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means…

Opportunity has increased massively. When I was a lad I got my hand on a great prize: a copy of Delphi 3 (already obsolete by then), which got me started coding. Today anybody can download much better tools (Visual studio, IntelliJ, etc for free). Any question you have can be searched on the internet, etc. Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.

Seconded. I learned assembly code on a DOS 2.0 machine by disassembling tons of random bytes and making a hex->assembly lexicon that I could use to write programs in hex. Not because I was trying to be hardcore, but because I was in an information, and software, and hardware desert. My kid, on the other hand, has a 24-hour, 50 gigabit connection to any information he wants, a computer made in 2015, and his choice of nearly any IDE and any programming language he could possibly want.

> Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.

The only problem is that it's increased for everyone else, too. Used to be you were a king if you had a board with a nail in it. Now everyone's packing Uzis.

Re: The Refragmentation

#72

Post by tomjen3 »

cronjobber wrote: post #7

He takes the easy way out on the war theory: It would be awful, of course, so let's not think about it. But think about it. Would historical WWII be possible in today's United States? Introduce the draft and send current US population off to die in Europe? I think you'd see intense levels of political resistance, draft dodging and desertion in the field. Fragmentation means you probably can't unite the whole country…

Any US politician who votes to reinstitute the draft will automatically activate a huge portion of the young people who normally don't vote as well as the soccer moms (as you pointed out). Those millions of new voters will be be single issue voters and will automatically vote against the politicans who voted for the draft - which the politicians know, and which their opponents knows and will use.

The congressional voting turnout was 41.9% in 2014 (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-122...), which means that even if the politician who proposes this is polling at 100%, they could still be beaten.

As a European, who have the remains of a nazi bunker not half a mile from my apartment, I am extraordinarily happy that we can't unite a huge portion of a country to go die anymore.

Also even the military doesn't support a draft.

Re: The Refragmentation

#73

Post by bawana »

Refragmentation is the result of the fungibility of money. When we wanted to make things (stuff people could use to make war or make a better life) money was spent to make those things. Like the water cycle, money would be transformed from one phase into another so that work could be accomplished that directly impacted humanity. But we have short circuited that cycle. Now money is being used directly to make more money through financial instruments. People and the stuff that people want are excluded from this new cycle. (Most people anyway) Money goes directly from its production right back into wagers on the production of more money. For example, the currency markets dwarf the actual gdp of the planet.

To restore balance to the ecology of our civilization, we need to make money a tool for humans. By requiring the use of money only for investment in real stuff, we will deflate the artificial valuations that dwarf the real value of human labor. We will necessarily find ways to restore value to human endeavors and new ways to measure the value of human efforts. More people will thus have value to our civilization on this planet. Otherwise, the refragmentation will continue until it reaches its logical conclusion - a scary picture for humanity.

Re: The Refragmentation

#74

Post by igama »

golergka wrote: post #36
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

"Startups either go Facebook or go bust" For me, this reflects the problem with the current Startup mentality.

Re: The Refragmentation

#75

Post by michaelbuckbee »

golergka wrote: post #36
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

'Startup' has come to mean too many different conflicting things.

You're describing what I would call a "VC backed startup", where you'll either get big or wither away.

The other end of the spectrum (for people here) would be something like a Bootstrapped Technical Startup. Where you're trying to build a cashflow positive business leveraging technology in some way.

Re: The Refragmentation

#76

Post by 13of40 »

Typhon wrote: post #65

I remember when Paul Graham pointed out that, « internally, most companies are run like communist states » (in http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html ) The picture he paints here of postwar-America as a bland, uniform country dominated by a few mega-institutions reminds me of the USSR. How ironic.

I knew a fellow who used to do some trade with the Soviet Union back in the day, and he made the opposite point: In the US, your government is democratic but at work it's a totalitarian hierarchy. In the USSR, the government was totalitarian, but at work everyone got to vote on major issues. (This would have been in post-Khrushchev times.)

Re: The Refragmentation

#78

Post by ArkyBeagle »

wbl wrote: post #42

I think this essay ignores the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism in undermining the 1950s. The world of the 1950's wasn't one where women could work, despite that having been the case since the 1920's. It was also the world in which Brown v. Board of Ed. lead to federal troops being deployed in the south to safeguard the rights of citizens, and ultimately lead to the Freedom Summer which radicalized a…

There's no real reason/mechanism for the exclusions to have made anything work better. Compared to the US being the Arsenal of Democracy, the economic effect of liberalization was very small, ignoring long-term government debt.

The New Left in the 1960s mostly just failed outright. Any change then was due to judicial or executive action.

Re: The Refragmentation

#79

Post by gotchange »

cushychicken wrote: post #18
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

Good observation. Paul's definition of "startup" seems to be "company that grows explosively to a massive size/valuation in a short number of years". The sort of businesses you cite seem to fall under the "small business" moniker, and would probably be one of the mouse-sized companies he referenced in the essay as one that tried to avoid trampling by the elephants of BigCo.

Here's the specific part in question:

" People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a startup: a business that starts small and grows big. That was much harder to do in the mid 20th century. Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small."

Re: The Refragmentation

#80

Post by wpietri »

csours wrote: post #50
csense wrote: post #46

Interesting to see that PG agrees with something I've been saying here for a long time, about the role of globalization in economic inequality [1] [2] [3]. Of course I grew up in the Rust Belt, where the average person used to be able to make a good living with a high school education in the steel or automotive industry, but now most of the factories are idle, rusting eye-sores, most of the ambitious, talented kids w…

I read a comment once that the steel industry collapsed in the US because they failed to innovate or continuously improve (much like the Big 3 automotive companies). Do you know of any concrete examples of this? or books about how US Steel lost?

I don't know about steel, but Rother's Toyota Kata makes this case for cars. There's one graph in particular that shows carmaker productivity per worker over several decades.

Toyota, working in a Japan decimated by war, definitely came from behind when competing with Detroit's big 3. Toyota starts lower than the other 3, and all of them improve gradually together. But at some point US carmakers plateau. Toyota just keeps on climbing for decades more as the big 3 stagnate.

Eventually, US automakers try to copy the Toyota approach, and Toyota works hard to teach them. But they never quite get it, because US automakers basically miss the point, copying visible behaviors rather than the deeper structures that really make the difference.

Those curious but not wanting to read a whole book should start with the This American Life episode NUMMI:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/N...

It tells the story of a joint Toyota-GM plant in California. Basically Toyota takes one of GM's worst plants and makes it one of the best. But GM is never able to adopt the differences, or even to really understand them. The worker-level stories are particularly powerful.

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