111–120 of 335 posts
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You might be surprised. Enforcement is certainly draconian, but there are not absurdly many regulations, and it is also surprisingly (to westerners) Feudal - personal relationships and high agency in a narrowly defined area are very important to the system functioning.
Sorry but you can't be serious that a feudal system is actually a good idea
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And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts. During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my…
To me, the web page nearly is always faster than asking a human. Even setting aside the phone trees designed to slow me down, I'm more comfortable with the bloated, user-hostile page than trying to understand a human voice through a 4000 Hz telephone channel. I like not having to try to explain to them what I want. With the web I can do it whenever I want, at my own pace. It feels like a voice call is an admission of…
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I spoke to a family owned business tycoon from South America and he was convinced that publicly owned companies are doomed in the long run. His rough quote (my Spanish was not fantastic) was something like, “I’m managing this company for the next 10 generations and your country’s companies are managed for the next quarter. Which of us will be here in 100 years?”
What's the market cap of his company?
Something that I've noticed recently is that in my work life, I'm finding there's more bureaucracy in what I do, mostly in the name of "efficiency". When you encounter a problem to solve, there's often a process already defined that is most efficient (or at least thought to be most efficient), when accomplishing tasks, there's a pre-defined way of laying out the tasks (i.e. tickets), updating them, reviewing them, an…
Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.
J. R. Dobbs approves.
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I work for a company that has been in the same family for over one hundred years. The CEO started work there at sixteen and has worked in every department in the company. I am not saying that he wants to see people sitting around on his dollar, but he staffs appropriately and genuinely cares about the long-term health of his company and employees. Companies like this exist all over the country; they are not glamorous…
For every well-run family-owned business like this, there are a dozen that are hell holes full of nepotism and corruption. That is to say, I think you're pretty lucky to have found one of the rare good ones.
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It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing software.
Systems are better too though. When I was an intern all meeting scheduling was done on some convoluted mainframe system. Most of my co-workers had forgot their login to the system, they either grabbed a room that was empty and left if someone showed up, or they had the secretary schedule it (these were computer programmers Sun workstations on their desk, not computer haters who refused to learn). One day we rolled ou…
For example, in one of my internships, it turns out that someone mistyped my address so my paychecks were sent to the wrong building; after a few weeks of that not getting resolved through HR, the administrative assistant took it upon herself to fix it and figured out whom to go yell at to get it resolved within a few days.
They're also good for things where having specialized knowledge of a process that's not done often can be done by someone who does it more often.
For example, when it comes to corporate travel, our company has a self service portal, and every time I need to book business travel I have waste an hour to figure out the right combination of flights and hotels to use, and another hour after returning to enter all of the expenses in the expensing system; I'd much rather send an email like "need to go to office X between Y and Z, no red eye flights" and "here's the receipts from our last trip, we took client W for a business dinner on May nth" and have it all happen.
Someone who does it several times per week would be much more efficient at doing it than me doing it a few times per year. But maybe in a few years we'll get some AI assistant that figures out that I like seat 3A, departures that are not too early, and figures out how to determine the expense types from various receipts.
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I spoke to a family owned business tycoon from South America and he was convinced that publicly owned companies are doomed in the long run. His rough quote (my Spanish was not fantastic) was something like, “I’m managing this company for the next 10 generations and your country’s companies are managed for the next quarter. Which of us will be here in 100 years?”
What's the market cap of his company?
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Overregulation and bureaucracy are the downfall of the west. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can fix it.
There is a whole spectrum of bureaucracy and overregulation in the “West”. The EU is probably worst. The US are quite relaxed in comparison. The UK is somewhere in the middle.
This is basically a myth at this point, bolstered by how much more we complain about it.
The US made the colossal mistake of trying to do regulation at the federal level, basically equivalent to doing it at the EU level, which the EU is now attempting to do more of and discovering what a trash fire it is.
And one of the big reasons for that is that the more centrally the regulation happens, the more corruption it attracts. That's where the US got the reputation for not regulating -- it's not that there aren't rules or that the rules aren't long and arduous and inefficient. It's that they're, on top of that, less effective because there is more regulatory capture by incumbents.