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Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

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Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#381

Post by brbrodude »

twoquestions wrote: post #199
baursak wrote: post #46

Democracy can be improved by having democracy in the workplace. Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out. People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly…

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Your workplace is the government that you're made to obey most of the time, and unless you have a lot of leverage your position is very similar to a Medieval serf. One benefit that I feel may happen, is to generate better buy-in for management decisions if the workers feel they have a hand in making said decisions. They might also care more about the health of their c…

As I've said in another reply, make sure to checkout Ricardo Semler's TedTalk. An awesome example. I won't post a link because everythings is blocked here, next week I'm back at a much more democratic company I've worked before, pretty satisfied.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#382

Post by Alex_Butters »

thowar2 wrote: post #34

Education should be on this list. The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. 1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy. 2) The current goals for education do not align with current…

When I gave my first college lecture, I actually started wandering off half way through in my head wondering how this model of me talking, them listening ever worked or even lasted. By the end of the semester, I was "flipping"lectures and trying to engage my students more instead of just me talking.

The current model doesn't need to be destroyed and rebuilt, just remodeled as you said for a different future

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#384

Post by baursak »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #328
baursak wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as a small business owner, it's a tougher concept to come to terms with. You can try looking at it from different perspectives though. For one, I'm sure a 12th century monarch or a lord would have a host of reasons why you're damn right it's my regime . Or a modern-day King Saud for that matter I guess. After all, it's his father who built his kingdom, and he has all the risks and responsibilities of a monarch.…

> Same goes to modern day dictatorships like North Korea. If not for international borders and internal controls, most North Koreans would probably prefer to leave their country. So, to continue the analogy, one could imagine a day in the future where as a small business owner, you are no longer able to attract any employees on the terms you're used to now -- not unless they are not employees, but co-workers with all…

> However this is incredibly far from reality because people actually like being employees.

Really? Why don't you offer your employees equal partnership with no strings attached and see if they'd just rather stay employees. I call bullshit on this.

> Injecting this type of politics into a company is a fantastic way of slowing it to a crawl.

Not true. Taking one day a year to nominate candidates and vote is hardly a burden. It's less of a burden than any normal employee turnover process in non-democratic companies. And I'm not even talking about large bureaucratic corporations with layers of management and their constant "re-orgs".

> Besides, who says elections give us the best candidate? ;)

Elections where most people are apathetic and don't even bother to vote because they think the entire system is corrupt are a bit different from elections in a 50-people organization, where everyone knows everybody else.

> Unlike the North Korea example, the employees really do have options here.

You missed my point. If all other organizations out there were democratically governed, then you'd probably have had to put a gun to someone's head to stay.

> There are serious business consequences to injecting such a high level of politics into a company.

Again, this is untrue. You might be projecting American election process onto this and may not be aware that everywhere else election cycles don't actually last 2 years. Most normal countries don't spend more than a month on an election cycle. A small business wouldn't spend more than a day.

> What keeps me from exploiting my workers primarily are competitors, with competing potential offers, and the flow of information on the internet, e.g. 'this type of engineer makes X a year'.

I think again you're projecting your own bubble here. Fast food industry is fiercely competitive, correct? Do you think a Burger King employee would get a vastly superior competing offer from McDonald's?

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#385

Post by baursak »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #329
kmicklas wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor. It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion). This one sentence already demonstrates that you…

Please do share.

I can try as well.

> If I'm dismissive it's because we've had a lot of field tests of socialism throughout history, as well as in economic studies, and the results are always poor.

While this may sound like a no-true-Scotsman argument, the most prominent example of a failure, USSR, has quickly (within a few years) moved off course from socialism to totalitarianism and state capitalism [1]. There were never democratically governed workplaces in the Soviet Union. This happened for a variety of reasons, including constant military threats from capitalist countries that naturally pushed the population to rally around autocratic leaders. Same is true for many others. There were successful-looking democratic attempts as well, but those were crushed by capitalists pretty quickly.

North Korea's full official name, for example, is Democratic People's Republic of Korea. However, nobody is seriously arguing that democracy doesn't work because North Korea is democratic. However, the same logic somehow fails to apply to communism.

> It's a dangerous mindset to not examine critically because it is a slippery slope towards communism, the most inhumane type of society responsible for the most deaths in human history (much more than religion).

Citations needed here. Putting aside the fact that no countries in history have actually been communist yet, most claims of "millions deaths under communism" are pretty dubious, counting many deaths without establishing causal effect. For example, Chinese famine deaths are counted as directly caused by communism. If the same methodology were applied to capitalism, you can count many more deaths throughout the world until today -- famines, starvation, easily preventable diseases in capitalist Third World, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#386

Post by logfromblammo »

Kliment wrote: post #375
RangerScience wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah! I hadn't noticed that you weren't the question's author. I really like your summation that "can't get the capital in a capitalist society through the use of their obsoleted skill". Arguably, the benefit of the cobbler could be a) highly custom small batch work, b) expertise to maintain the Elfbot, and c) a thinking mind behind the task. Elfbot will not improve by itself, the cobbler would.

But you have to remember that the one machine has put a large number of cobblers out of work, and you need very few for the tasks you listed, so the total displacement is still problematic.

The Elfbot was likely built by a cobbler, and sold to the burgomeister for immediate cash plus an Elfbot servicing contract. The machine owner only needs to rent a tiny bit of one ex-cobbler's labor to program new shoe construction techniques into the machine, and the person creating new shoe fashion patterns for it might not even be an ex-cobbler at all.

The human labor requirement has been slashed and burned for shoe-making, and the 99% of ex-cobblers that can't find work reprogramming and servicing Elfbots are busted back down to the pool of unskilled laborers.

The modern economy is increasingly asking unskilled laborers to retrain themselves to a different category of skilled labor at their own expense. Those categories of skilled labor may not even stay viable long enough to pay off the (re-)education loans, so those people may even be in exactly the same situation ten years later, except instead of just being broke, they will be broke, still in debt, and unable to borrow more for additional retraining.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#387

Post by Kluny »

fpig wrote: post #379
Kluny wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values. Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alo…

This is a fallacy inherent to the modern mentality of obsessing over your child's safety that is likely counterproductive on average. Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / ear…

True, but you were still in school for most of the day, right? You were probably alone for a couple hours in the evening and busy doing stuff with friends on the weekends, but don't you think it would have gone all Lord of the Flies if you were alone all the time? I remember staying home alone from age 10 or so and I was fine, but I also remember that bullying seemed to be a much more serious problem then than it is now.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#388

Post by fpig »

Kluny wrote: post #387
fpig wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fallacy inherent to the modern mentality of obsessing over your child's safety that is likely counterproductive on average. Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / ear…

True, but you were still in school for most of the day, right? You were probably alone for a couple hours in the evening and busy doing stuff with friends on the weekends, but don't you think it would have gone all Lord of the Flies if you were alone all the time? I remember staying home alone from age 10 or so and I was fine, but I also remember that bullying seemed to be a much more serious problem then than it is…

Parents would be away for 4-5 hours at most while I was at home I guess, but we'd be without parents for more than that because we'd go out and do stuff with friends even when parents were home. Parents were kind of there to fulfill your basic needs, not your social needs. I think my parents would have probably loved to spend more time with me but kids prefer to be with other kids.

To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#389

Post by conanbatt »

milesrout wrote: post #363
conanbatt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Otherwise, every single teacher, caretaker, would quit their jobs as soon as they had a child and would get the same economical benefit. If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.

They don't do that because they can't afford to do that. That's sad and unfortunate.

Or because its simply inefficient, and you must bear the price of doing it if you want it.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#390

Post by thowar2 »

bambax wrote: post #371
thowar2 wrote: post #34

Education should be on this list. The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. 1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy. 2) The current goals for education do not align with current…

> The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education. Does it? Many people with a college degree hold political beliefs one would consider unwieldy; Bannon went to Harvard. It seems startups themselves are part of the problem, so one can doubt they will bring the solution. "Disruption" is another word for tearing society apart, ignoring legal norms designed to protect citizens from corporations. T…

I wouldn't consider college to be effective education. It's a credential factory, and the bar is low.

Bannon is the leader, not the follower. He takes advantage of those who are less informed and less likely to accurately judge fact from fiction.

If they were effectively educated, they would 1) be less susceptible to propaganda, 2) have better economic prospects and not be so pissed off.

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