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Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

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Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#91

Post by geon »

pjc50 wrote: post #90
51stpage wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate your insight that different political structures work better for different scales and different situations. I suppose that's intuitively obvious but I hadn't ever considered it.

There's some classic economic work on "the theory of the firm" by Coase that really gets into this question. Within companies, it's not an internal market but some kind of autocracy. Why? Coase makes an argument about transactional and informational costs.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism.

Sales would invest in RnD, and buy services from IT. HR would would need to focus on high quality services, not dictating unwanted routines.

Profit could be extracted as a tax, and all departments could be required to just break even (with an allowed buffer for investments spanning multiple years).

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#92

Post by dagw »

geon wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some classic economic work on "the theory of the firm" by Coase that really gets into this question. Within companies, it's not an internal market but some kind of autocracy. Why? Coase makes an argument about transactional and informational costs.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. Sales would invest in RnD, and buy services from IT. HR would would need to focus on high quality services, not dictating unwanted routines. Profit could be extracted as a tax, and all departments could be required to just break even (with an allowed buffer for investments spanning multiple years).

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism.

I've worked at such companies and it kind of sucks. Everybody optimizes for their local optima without any concern for what is good for the company. People end up a lot less willing to lend a hand to a 'rival' groups, and projects that would be good for the company as a whole end up scrapped because the individual departments involved cannot agree on how to spread the profits/risks internally. Also a lot of work ends up duplicated because it is 'cheaper' to get someone in your department to do it rather than to 'pay' a rival department to be allowed to use their solution.

Basically you end up losing many of the advantages of scale that a big company should provide without gaining most of the advantages of flexibility and nimbleness that a small company should provide

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#93

Post by 51stpage »

dagw wrote: post #92
geon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. Sales would invest in RnD, and buy services from IT. HR would would need to focus on high quality services, not dictating unwanted routines. Profit could be extracted as a tax, and all departments could be required to just break even (with an allowed buffer for investments spanning multiple years).

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. I've worked at such companies and it kind of sucks. Everybody optimizes for their local optima without any concern for what is good for the company. People end up a lot less willing to lend a hand to a 'rival' groups, and projects that would be good for the company as a whole end up scrapped because the individual departments i…

What about the opposite? What if every team department had a pool of tokens representing their services that they had to give away in a certain time period. I suppose tokens are the same thing as money but I like the shift from "Gimme, Gimme" to "Hey, I've got plenty, let me give you some." Each department would also be accountable for how many tokens they collected from other teams.

I'm not sure how you would work out how many tokens a department has to give. My hope is that there would be a way to incentivize going outside your team/department to get help.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#94

Post by pjc50 »

geon wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some classic economic work on "the theory of the firm" by Coase that really gets into this question. Within companies, it's not an internal market but some kind of autocracy. Why? Coase makes an argument about transactional and informational costs.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. Sales would invest in RnD, and buy services from IT. HR would would need to focus on high quality services, not dictating unwanted routines. Profit could be extracted as a tax, and all departments could be required to just break even (with an allowed buffer for investments spanning multiple years).

By "interesting" you mean "failure"?

OK, so it's not automatically a disaster, but companies have attempted to do this with "virtual org" and clouds of freelancers. It only works for certain types of piecework and small organisations. For larger things it's simply impossible to write the required contracts. This is part of why the London Underground privatisation failed: contract documents were heading into the millions of words and still inadequate to describe the working relationships.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#95

Post by dagw »

51stpage wrote: post #93
dagw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. I've worked at such companies and it kind of sucks. Everybody optimizes for their local optima without any concern for what is good for the company. People end up a lot less willing to lend a hand to a 'rival' groups, and projects that would be good for the company as a whole end up scrapped because the individual departments i…

What about the opposite? What if every team department had a pool of tokens representing their services that they had to give away in a certain time period. I suppose tokens are the same thing as money but I like the shift from "Gimme, Gimme" to "Hey, I've got plenty, let me give you some." Each department would also be accountable for how many tokens they collected from other teams. I'm not sure how you would work o…

Maybe I'm naive, but if you remove any disincentive to do so I find that most people, on an individual level, are more than happy to lend a hand to other departments and many people rather enjoy the variety and novelty of the projects that this can entail. I don't think it needs to to be actively incentivized as much you just need to remove as many barriers as possible for doing so.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#96

Post by shoover »

colechristensen wrote: post #71
shoover wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point about the owner/captain regulation. It seems incredible that the little guys won in this one. Also, chrisbennet's comment reminded me of another piece of the sustainable fishing regulations, which is that the traps are regulated to be inefficient and let the lobsters walk out. As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle.

>As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle. Why? It's just engineering to optimize for a bigger system. Set your system boundary too small and you risk damaging the whole. Making a perfect trap is something like premature optimization.

Because the core labor is boating around to process each trap every day. That's time, fuel, and bait every day. Point taken about optimizing the larger system, but the other pieces of the regulation resonate more for me. Throwing back a small lobster or a producing female offers a tangible connection to the global effort, whereas pulling up more traps for the same catch feels like doing more work just to keep busy. I'm sure there are good reasons for how it fits in the system, but that one would bug me nonetheless.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#97

Post by Neliquat »

blackguardx wrote: post #50
orik wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perspective from the north pacific on fisheries, counsels, voting rights, etc - The whole thing is a many sided tug of war. Ultimatly Fisheries are very complicated. Green Peace & Environmentalists would like us to reduce our use of capture fisheries or abandon the practice altogether. (Even though capture fisheries produce protein without damaging biodiversity, unlike farms. also less greenhouse impact.) Financial…

I'm not sure if you meant ocean farming or land farming, but most environmentalists oppose land fish farming because of the practices used to get fish meal are pretty destructive and impacts of concentrated penned animals (antibiotic use, waste, etc.) that affect all dense animal protein production. http://www.farmedanddangerous.org/salmon-farming-problems/en...

Sure, if you ignore the rapidly growing auqaponics/bioponics tech that has been around si ce the 80s. Its basically a semi sustaining closed loop of agriculture and fish farming, using the waste of each, as the input to the other. Less food, antibiotics, and fertilizers in one shot.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#98

Post by flyingfences »

tyingq wrote: post #17
shostack wrote: post #2

I for one will do my part to help pick up the slack in demand. While the wholesale price has fluctuated, has there been much change in retail/restaurant lobster prices? I certainly don't see restaurants near me lowering the price of a lobster roll. If anything, looks like Old Port Lobster Shack in Redwood City increased theirs judging by what Google shows in their menu listing for a "Maine Lobster Roll" ($18.75) vs.…

Some of the New England area McDonalds sell Lobster rolls: https://newengland.com/today/travel/new-england/places-to-ea... No idea if they are any good, but they are $8.

If you're actually in New England then you don't have to go to McDank's for a lobster roll.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#99

Post by nickik »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #47
scrollbar wrote: post #3

I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights. Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the…

I think it's interesting to think about the way such a system is a hybrid of different political systems. At the fishery level it's not communistic... But it's also not capitalistic. The fishery isn't owned by a single profit driven entity, it's a democracy or a beurocrasy, or however they have it set up. At the boat level it's a single profit driven entity, which is purely capitalistic On the boat itself you have a…

You are missing some aspects of the problem. Whole point behind free-market capitalism, is the creation of property rights and then allowing trade between them.

Fisherman (with potentially outsider) creating a set up a property rights institutions maximise their own profits is exactly what free-market capitalism is all about. Voting in a private club that you can only get into if you fulfil several requirements is NOT DEMOCRACY, only voting.

That's what people like Hayek are talking about things like local knowledge. There is a hole field of economics that try work on these issues, property rights economics, constitutional economics, economics of clubs. There is a subfield called "free-market environmentalism" that tries to use property-right economics to achieve better outcomes for the environment.

The same problem applies to your idea that a captain is a king. The owner of the ship has the power to set up whatever he thinks is the most effective way to get people to fish with the limitation that they have to volunteer to join him.

So the reason free-market capitalist are free-market capitalist is because it allows free people associating with each other create the institutions that solve their problem in the most effective way.

Also I want to point out that none of these things are anti-state, a state can need to provide the legal system that allows for such institutions to be created and needs to enforce the contracts.

Some things that might be of interest:

- Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

- Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited

- Free Market Environmentalism

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#100

Post by nickik »

Spooky23 wrote: post #44
jaredhansen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing for the few. OK, but that's not really a full accounting of the tradeoff being made. Preventing "outside" or "non-local" fishing does have the advantage of privileging local stakeholders over remote capitalists - but it also privileges local stakeholders over remote _customers_. If e…

Local vs. Remote matters because the remote guys give zero fucks about the state of the fishery, or any other resource. For example, as a consumer, we in aggregate give zero shits about the oppressed seamstress in Bangladesh who is essentially a slave making our t-shirts for pennies. But if somebody kicks a dog, it will generate a massive outcry. We relate to the dog, who could be our own dog, but don't relate to the…

The control remains local because that where the resource is. It's about local vs remote ownership.
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