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"Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

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Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#51
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember those days. Those people got punished by accounting reality, and so IBM is just another vendor today. Which is my point.

Oh those people didn't (all) get punished. And this is still happening all the time - huge companies waste an enormous amount of work & money. They can waste/mismanage for decades before the market punishes them (if at all). Bureaucratic waste (and sometimes corruption) is absolutely rife at huge companies.

> Bureaucratic waste (and sometimes corruption) is absolutely rife at huge companies.

Yes. And this is why (despite common wisdom) companies do not grow until they take over the world. They grow until their bureaucratic waste chokes the life out of them, and get replaced by a smaller, nimbler company.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it. Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this. Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their own money to buy your product.

Which organizations don't have bureaucracy? What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

> What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

It would look like the mercenary armies hired by the Italians in the middle ages. They rarely engaged in battle, but would maneuver until one had the advantage and the other would cede. They were very parsimonious with the lives of their soldiers.

Government conscript armies, on the other hand, tend to treat their soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bloodletting grows to incredible amounts.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report

One of the great things about the Corbett Report is that you don't have to believe it, you can just look at the sources because every source is referenced. The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG . The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting fr…

In which case, cut out the (biased, unreliable, deceptively narrated, and ultimately detracting-from-the-point) middle-man, and cite sources directly.

The problem with fabulatory conspiratorialists isn't that they are always wrong. It's that they are so indifferent to truth that teasing fact from fiction is far more effort than reward. Citing them directly and credibly only feeds the bullshit cycle. See Harry Frankfurt: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...

I realised this some years back watching a 3h40m epic conspiracy fantasy which does, yes, contain numerous actual, verifiable facts. It also contains numerous uttlerly unsubstantiated claims, and in either case draws supposed conections between individual items --- the narrative --- that are entirely invalid. One key tell was about 20 minutes in, where a fact (Kennedy's "Secret Society" speech, referring not to some hazy/hazing Ivy League drinking club, as claimed, but the Soviet Union: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#.27Secret_Soci...) was both utterly falsely narrated and very selectively edited. Going a few lines outside the cited bits makes this clear. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam for another 3h20m (and there were likely earlier whoppers I didn't catch).

The reward for my sunk time cost was a realisation of the distinction and relationship between facts and narrative. These can be thought of as a graph or network, whose nodes (facts, real or claimed) and links (narrative relation) can occupy almost wholly separate truth worlds. False facts may fit within a true narrative (an essentially true though fictional novel or film, say, such as Sophie's Choice), true facts, possibly with or without false or invented ones, within a false narrative (a key element of fabulist conspiracies, though often also popular cultural mythologies), both may be entirely invented (usually seen as entertainment fiction, or mad ramblings). The case where both facts and narrative are largely true makes for the most compelling accounts.

There are other dimensions to this: Facts void of narrative or relation are raw data tables. Relationship diagrams tend to narration without facts. There are the various storytelling elements and techniques which strengthen narrative and make it more compelling. All these still seem to work best within the fact-narrative-truth relation I've described above.

The problem with fabulists is that your time is very poorly rewarded, and your own views become slowly warped. Again, going straight to sources, or following more credible narrators (Surveillance-InfoTech ties are not hard to find, recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435499 ) is a much better use of your own, and your audience's, time.

Again, it's not that Corbett is uniformly wrong, and the directive would be far simpler were he. It's that he's indifferent to, or incapable of distinguishing, fact from fiction.

Use a source that is.

Re: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which organizations don't have bureaucracy? What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

> What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like? It would look like the mercenary armies hired by the Italians in the middle ages. They rarely engaged in battle, but would maneuver until one had the advantage and the other would cede. They were very parsimonious with the lives of their soldiers. Government conscript armies, on the other hand, tend to treat their soldiers as cannon fodder, and the…

Your example of parsimonious mercenaries reminds me to learn more about pirates (privateers).
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