Sears's History Predicts Almost Everything Amazon's Doing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sears-predicts-amazon/540888/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> I read an interesting forum post about Sears a few years back [1]

TLDR: In 1985 Sears had vast mail order experience, co-founded an ISP (Prodigy), and had their own credit cards (Discover). All the components they'd need to dominate online retail. In 1993 they closed their mail order division. In 1995, Amazon launched.

[1] [http://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys- Decline...](http://www.metafilter.com/62394/The-Record-Industrys- Decline#1742245)

<comment><USER3> _> In 1993 they closed their mail order division. In 1995, Amazon launched._

If one compresses the timeline, it does seem like Amazon killed off Sears when in reality, Sears was already getting killed off in the 10 years before 1995.

In the 1980s...

\- Home Depot, Lowes, Builders Square, etc home improvement stores were taking away business from Sears power tools (Craftsman)

\- Best Buy and Circuit City were taking the consumer electronics business and appliances. Less customers buy Sears Kenmore.

\- Target, Walmart, Williams-Sonoma, etc were taking housewares (pots, pans, etc) business

\- consumers (especially kids) didn't want "department store brand" clothing from Sears/JCPenney because they were "uncool". They wanted the boutique brands (Guess jeans, Calvin Klein, etc)

\- peak mall traffic was 1986 and malls started dying off after that. An easy way for me to remember that point in time is the 1985 movie _" Back to The Future"._ When you watch the DeLorean spinning around the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall, remind yourself that you're seeing "peak mall".

\- credit-cards criteria were loosened and easy credit was expanded. Sears no longer had a captive audience with the Sears credit-card that kept shoppers within Sears' "walled-garden". Before 1990s, if a young person had zero credit history, one of the first credit cards one attempted to get was the _" Sears department store credit card"._ Once one built up credit history with it, he/she could then try to get Visa/Mastercard. In the meantime, they used the Sears card to _spend money at Sears_. To contrast the difference, today an 18-year-old college student can get a Visa/MC _without a parent_ as a cosigner. That type of easy credit approval for a person with no job was unheard of in the 1960s/1970s.

There were lots of competitive forces that Sears' management didn't respond to long before Jeff Bezos arrived on the scene.

<comment><USER4> >today an 18-year-old college student can get a Visa/MC without a parent as a cosigner.

FWIW, when I was 18 I had to get a secured card[0] and I was barely able to get it (I had to go to my bank twice to appeal the decision). It's definitely different from 40 years ago but it's not super easy for most college students, and a lot of it came down to the fact that I had a few grand sitting in a checking account and a job that paid $12.50/hr. Some of my friends who didn't have that got flat out declined multiple times (I have one friend who has applied for three different cards and she's been denied all three times, with no credit history at all).

[0]: Basically, the card had a $500 credit limit and you had to give the bank $500 for a year, after a year if you've made all your payments they give you your $500 back. It still sat in my savings account generating "interest", but I couldn't spend it

<comment><USER5> When did you turn 18? I started college in August 1999 and nobody I knew had any trouble getting a credit card. Many fraternities and sororities used credit card applications to freshmen as fundraisers. It was typically a $1000-$1500 credit limit. Some people I knew had $10k in credit card debt by the time they graduated...

<comment><USER4> I turned 18 about two years ago. Things might be different now because of the credit CARD act of 2009 which makes it slightly harder to take advantage of younger people (giving a $1500 card to people who have never had credit before and don't know how important it is to pay off the balance in full seems particularly evil)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_CARD_Act_of_2009](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_CARD_Act_of_2009)

>Consumers under the age of 21 must prove that they have an independent income or get a co-signer before applying for a credit card. The Act also prevents credit card companies from ... wooing students with T-shirts, free pizza and other free gifts at university-sponsored events

<comment><USER5> Well at least the interest rate was only around 30% </s>.

[edit] The end of the story for me:

The credit card I got from that was amazingly bad. I had a bill put in the wrong mailbox in my dorm, so didn't get it until 3 days before it was due. I called up customer service:

Me: I can mail this today, but it is unlikely to make it there by the due date, I've always paid my bills on time, can I get a 1 week extension

CS: We can do an ACH for $20 or you will pay a late fee if the check you mail is even a day late.

Me: Seriously?

CS: Yes

Me: Okay, do that and cancel my account.

CS: Okay.

It's like they didn't even want me as a customer if I was going to pay my bills every week. Not a single attempt to retain me when I canceled my account. At this point, I had a Discover card, the CS reps for which were very kind, and my bank had just gotten my debit card on the Mastercard network (previously it was only an ATM card), so I had no absolute need for their card. Had this happened a few months earlier I might not have been willing to cancel as so many places don't take Discover.

<comment><USER6> > It's like they didn't even want me as a customer if I was going to pay my > bills every week.

I semi-suspect you know this, but if you pay in full every month, they don't get to bundle your debt up and sell it off as a security. Interchange fees are competitive enough that it's probably close to break even (and getting more so every year), but the securities are comparatively pretty sweet for the issuers.

<comment><USER7> While you're probably correct its worth remembering that credit-card companies get their money from both sides:

* They earn money via the interest people way if they don't settle their bills in-full, and on-time.

* But they also take money for handling transactions at terminals, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I often wonder what the story of Sears means for Amazon. I think at first, my thinking was that what did Sears in was not noticing the shift to e-commerce like Amazon did, and that to unseat Amazon, it will take another shift that an upstart sees that they don't. Then however, I start to wonder what shift might that be? Voice assistants, it seems like Amazon is leading the way, not that it will be taken by surprise. Logistics? Seems like they are a logistics first company. I guess I can't see the future though, like everyone else.

I think for now I've settled on that the similarities are just that, similarities. Two things with some common history don't have to share the same fate. And looking for lessons in the history of one to apply to the other might be more of a false equivocation than we think. The times are fundamentally different, so perhaps though their stories echo each other, they are fundamentally different companies.

<comment><USER9> Amazon is actually obsessed with NOT becoming Sears. Internally, companies like Sears are referred to as "Day 2 companies." Day 2 companies are trying to maintain the status quo. Day 1 companies, like Amazon, are constantly trying to be disruptive and innovative.

Being called "Day 2" is one of the worst insults within Amazon.

<comment><USER10> So if and when Amazon is blindsided, their disruptor may come from such a derided direction?

The only constant is change. Until it isn't.

More likely though, Amazon gets complacent eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sear's, unfortunately, has become a sad shadow of its former self. In particular their CEO, Eddie Lampert, has enjoyed a nightmarish rein-of-power based on "Ayn Rand" principles that have been driving the once mighty store into the ground. (see [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-eddie-lampert-set- sears-u...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-eddie-lampert-set-sears-up-to- fail-2017-5) and [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/column-this-is- what...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/column-this-is-what-happens- when-you-take-ayn-rand-seriously/))

<comment><USER12> Thanks for those excellent links.

The descriptions of applied Randian Objectivism in Honduras are particularly... noteworthy:

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won't fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation."

<comment><USER13> >They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

Probably a more apt 'libertarian utopia' would be an entrepreneur buying land from consenting property owners (Converse to the government forcing people to move and not respecting their property rights via eminent domain), build a road (via a decentralized, competitive bidding process rather than a single point of economic co-option opportunity such as a state) and then charging access to the road (with guards in low-tech community, Toll-payment box in medium tech community, and a Bitcoin Lightning-Network payment channel in a high-tech society.) ;]

<comment><USER14> Roads are built by competitive bids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1) "In 1969, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the largest retailer in the world, with about 350,000 employees. Sears executives decided to consolidate the thousands of employees in offices distributed throughout the Chicago area into one building on the western edge of Chicago's Loop. " [1]

2) "... Parkinson's Law of Buildings. This he defines as follows; 'a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done.'" [2]

3) "Amazon HQ2 will be Amazon's second headquarters in North America. " [3]

Now this is not the beginning. It is not even the end of the beginning. But it is, perhaps, the beginning of the end.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower) [2] [https://johannesdeberlaymont.com/2016/06/10/c-northcote- park...](https://johannesdeberlaymont.com/2016/06/10/c-northcote-parkinsons- law-of-buildings/) [3] [https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17044620011](https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17044620011)

<comment><USER16> > 2) "... Parkinson's Law of Buildings. This he defines as follows; 'a > perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point > of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period > of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect > headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has > been done.'" [2]

It seems like this would apply more to Apple's campus than Amazon... but I haven't really seen anyone suggesting that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget the real estate shenanigans.

1\. Slowly but steadily run the retail operation into the ground.

2\. Sell the real estate to your own REIT, and use the proceeds to prop up the stores - but now they're on the hook for rent.

3\. Continue running the stores into the ground, and when they inevitably can't make the rent, shut them down. Your REIT now holds a lot of prime real estate that can be sold or rented to others.

<comment><USER18> Why would they do that?

If they want to run stores into the ground, they would have closed them all by now.

<comment><USER19> It cuts the shareholders out. It leaves the valuable part of the business in the hands of a select few, and leaves the crappy part of the business in the hands of the shareholders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So is Amazon going to start getting into the housing buisness next?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home)

<comment><USER21> Muji in Japan does this. I would not be surprised if there's at least one 6-pager in Day One on housing in some shape or form.

<comment><USER22> I was impressed to see how small a space Panasonic/PanaHome could build you a house or apartment tower in Japan. The apartment itself was made from nice material and pretty livable for being 50 ft^2. (Meanwhile in California, no way to escape beige carpet and 80F interiors with no A/C.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My Dad told me that the house he grew up in was ordered from Sears. They had to build a foundation to set it on, but everything else was shipped to them from Sears and they assembled it. That was about 90 years ago.

I wonder if Amazon will start selling prefabricated houses?

Go to Amazon and pick out the features you want in your converted shipping container. Pour a slab to set it on. Free 2nd-day delivery with Prime.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this article ignores some of the other tenants of Amazon's corporate strategy. While Amazon is an online shopping behemoth, they are also expanding in to AI, web hosting and Platforms as a Service, financing, robotics, logistics, and lord knows what else. I think if you want a more accurate foil to Amazon, you should look at Alibaba.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think it's funny the author referred to Sears' "everything store" was a "genius marketing move." Back in the day, they used to call those "general stores."

<comment><USER26> This does sound ironic, but the scope of what Sears Roebuck offered was staggeringly greater than what you could get at any brick and mortar store. For a time you could even order a house: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home)

<comment><USER25> Well of course they did. We live in an industrialized society and they had an industrial offering of products. Actually, we live in a digitized society now and that's where Amazon stepped in. General stores existed in an era before branding, before supermarkets, before everything was made in a factories halfway across the planet.

<comment><USER12> >Well of course they did.

Somebody has to do initially remarkable things first. You act like it's no big deal!

<comment><USER26> Yeah - it's hard to imagine a world where rail shipment, parcel delivery, industrial warehousing, and efficient processing of mail orders are recent technological developments. But they were! And bringing tech into the domain of consumer retail has been profitable throughout history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is an interesting article, but it doesn't talk about the pitfalls of sears, or the failings that have lead sears to where they are at now.

</comment><comment><USER28> The difference is that nowadays, information and insight is propagated and digested much faster than it was in the 80s. It is much easier for Amazon to detect and react to threats than Sears was ever able to.

In my opinion, there's a threshold of information absorption and digestion, beyond which a corporation can be sure to survive no matter what, as long as it doesn't cease to adapt.

<comment><USER29> > It is much easier for Amazon to detect and react to threats than Sears was > ever able to.

True, but the competition of the 70s and 80s was also playing at the same speed. Sears was able to react to 80s-paced threats just as fast as anyone else could.

It might actually not be 'easier' today for anyone to keep up with and defend against as many potential threats as there may be today. Amazon, however, is mostly in a league of their own, and generally are the threat to other companies, not so much the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So does this mean Amazon will soon provide a section of the mall that always have parking close to the doors? ;)

(In all seriousness, it does not bode well for Sears that my local mall, which seems to not be dead at all, always has spots 1-2 cars away from the doors outside Sears while people circle the lot out front)

</comment><comment><USER31> Title should be "Sears' History Predicts Almost Everything Amazon's Doing"

(or "The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing" \- the actual title of the article)

</comment><comment><USER32> Yeah SWS (sears web services) was revolutionary in its day

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm ready for my Amazon house kit!

<comment><USER34> Getting close: [https://www.amazon.com/Little-Cottage-Company-10x16-GPM- WPNK...](https://www.amazon.com/Little-Cottage-Company-10x16-GPM- WPNK/dp/B003VNXX2K/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Adblocker blocker made me block the article and read something else.

<comment><USER36> Just like complaining about paywalls, complaining about adblocker-blockers is pretty pointless.

Relevant C&H: [http://explosm.net/comics/4729/](http://explosm.net/comics/4729/)

Except instead of $1, they just want to be able to display ads.

<comment><USER37> If we must use that analogy, it's more like they answer "yes!" to "are they free?" but then a stalker follows you with binoculars, a camera, and a notebook for months because you took the cupcake, and if you show up with private security guards and ask for a cupcake they say they're free but only for people without private security because they want to have a stalker follow you around, which is obviously a weird and concerning thing for them to require and would tend to make one turn them down for being such creepy/threatening weirdos, and then tell other people that they're creepy/threatening weirdos so those others don't take their cupcakes and get followed around by a stalker as a result.

It would also tend to make one hope the business model of being creepy weirdos is outlawed or otherwise destroyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Unfortunately, The Atlantic doesn't work on the free web, where users control who gets to load content on _their_ computer, rather than having the website dictate who to sell out to before seeing the text requested. Is there a different source?

<comment><USER19> Read their ads, pay them money, or don't read their content. Seems like a pretty fair trade off.

<comment><USER39> The Atlantic doesn't actually provide the second as an option without interacting with JS. There's no way for someone to subscribe if they are running ghostery+noscript like I am.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Easily manage Firefox hidden privacy settings (plugin) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/UnGround/netmask-privacy-plugin <comment><AUTHOR> I saw some of these parameters discussed here recently, so I figured I would share with the community if there's interest.

It seems like a continuous topic that these are hard to set for the average user, but I don't think it should be that way.

If you know of settings I missed (that don't break most sites!) please let me know.</comment>


Good explanation of PS3 hack potential . . .  - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ps3hacked-article?page=2

<comment><USER2> The article mistakenly refers to an SPE as "the group of all SPUs", which is incorrect. An SPE is a single element that contains an SPU, a MFC, and some RAM.

It (Geohot's work) is an impressive achievement but the magnitude of what's been achieved has been blown completely out of proportion, including by Geo himself. It's akin to picking the lock on a bank door - you might be in the bank but there's a whole host of bigger locks waiting before you even get to the vault.

<comment><USER3> But most of the money isn't in the vault. It's on the computers. I agree that most of the work has been way overblown. Geohot even lists some of the reason why he's not getting involved in hacking other aspects of the system. You don't need to decrypt the BD drive unless you are trying to bypass the encryption on games. Some commenters are asking specifically on how to run pirated copies and this undermines the value of the platform.

Access to the HV, memory, and GPU are things that are wanted and don't involve pirating. It would be great if their was an alternative DLNA controller/renderer available. Frankly, browsing hundreds of albums and videos sucks with the XMB. Using 100s of different BT devices would be great.

This could open it up to a bigger development community than the one sony sactions. Similar in ideas to the iPhone jailbreaking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When it was launched, the PS3 could be a nice general-purpose computer. If Sony decided to reinvent the NEWS workstation series with a usable OS (Linux, BSD, a port of OpenSolaris, AIX, whatever) on top of Cell BEs with expandable RAM, a decent GPU and non-subsidized prices, I would have used it. Heck... I would buy one even today. I would help port software to it.

Now it's just a gaming platform.

<comment><USER5> you're forgetting that sony was taking a loss on each PS3 sale when it first came out. they make it up on game licenses so they absolutely did NOT want to be selling to people who would buy few games.

<comment><USER4> I said "non-subsidized prices". Besides that, it's not the PlayStation I am talking about, but some hypothetical machine that never existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great, this is just what my _missile guidance system_ needed [joke from 2000]

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/04/18/playstation_2_export...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/04/18/playstation_2_export_limit_lifted/)</comment>


Humble Indie Bundle 3 focuses on one dev, offers unreleased games - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/humble-indie-bundle-3-focuses-on-one-dev-offers-unreleased-games.ars

<comment><USER2> Technically, this is not the HIB3. There will be an actual HIB3 later this year.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the best part of this HIB is the linux port and the opensourced project they are hoping to build community around.</comment>


It's only been a year or so… - <AUTHOR> http://smallstarsblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/its-only-been-a-year-or-so/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is Jesse Knoller's [Pycon organizer] wife's blog post.</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone sold a "fork" version of their web app? - <AUTHOR>

So my app made it onto Lifehacker over the weekend. (http://lifehacker.com/5874115/ikeepm-is-a-simple-free-inventory-for-all-your-stuff). Since then, I've gotten over 1700+ signups, granted a lot of it are just folks who are curious but nonetheless, I do have a lot of folks who are using it.
A couple of days later I received an email from a marketing manager of a company. She expressed interest in buying a "fork" version of my app. Needless to say, I'm speechless and things are happening so fast. What turned out as a side project that I had hope to monetize one day, is now in consideration to be bought by a real company.
Has anyone experience this? She's asking for a price and I'm stumped. It's definitely a good problem to have, but I need to be careful. <comment><USER2> Would they end up being a competitor to your site? if so why would you deal with them. or do they want it for some kind of internal tool? You could sell them a license to run a custom version on their own system. Are they looking for you to make all the changes? then to support it? do they want the source?

</comment><comment><USER3> by fork version, do you mean white-label version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, looks like they want to push out their own version after I make small modifications to it.</comment></comment>


KeystoneML – Simplify large, end-to-end, machine learning pipelines with Spark - <AUTHOR> http://keystone-ml.org

<comment><USER2> What is the main difference between it and SparkML pipeline?

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK SparkML pipeline is 'just' for text, whereas 'KeystoneML also presents a richer set of operators than those present in spark.ml including featurizers for images, text, and speech, and provides several example pipelines that reproduce state-of-the-art academic results on public data sets.'</comment></comment>


Just Too Efficient - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/07/05/Too-Efficient <comment><USER3> > Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee > injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in > twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It's not they're actually dangerous > places to work, it's just that they've maximized efficiency and reduced > waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every > minute they're working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human > bodies simply can't manage that. They break down under pressure.

Wouldn't a more parsimonious explanation be that the job previously consisted of a safe part and a dangerous part, and it was easier to automate the safe part, so now more of a human's time on the job is spent doing the dangerous part?

If you imagine the "safe part" of the job as "slack" (i.e. imagine that the employees were previously half working, and half doing nothing—not that they actually were, but it makes the model clearer), then they've effectively just gotten rid of all the slack, and so made the employees do twice as much _work_ per work day. If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many injuries per employee per work day. You'd have gotten the same number of employee-injuries out per items-packed in, no matter what time scale that packing occurred on.

<comment><USER4> > If there's a constant small probability of injury per item packed, then of > course doing twice as much work per work day, will lead to twice as many > injuries per employee per work day

This assumes injury-risk is a linear function of number of items packed. That's not true. Fatigue increases injury-risk - that is how tired you and your entire team is while performing the task. If the person sorting the packages up the line is tired and making mistakes, the person binning it is more prone to mistakes, leading to an injury. In summary, there is a "fatigue- threshold" after which injury-risk increases non-linearly (say exponentially) with every item packed.

<comment><USER3> If fatigue is a simple threshold (i.e. you "become fatigued" after a certain number of units of work done), then the obvious solution is to work the employees at 100% utilization _for half as long_ (at which point they should be roughly as fatigued as the employees worked half as hard for twice as long), and then swap them out for a second shift. (I.e., instead of having 10 employees with 40hr weeks, you now have 20 employees with 20hr weeks.)

This is the approach I believe is also advised for improving productivity/decreasing errors in the medical field (where doctors have a hard time not pushing themselves to 100% all the time, because of their personalities): hire more doctors per hospital, such that each doctor can be cut down to a shorter shift (and thus maybe lower salary, too.)

If, on the other hand, fatigue is about the lack of micro-rests between individual units of work, then the appropriate solution is more subtle:

1\. replace the low-quality rest of doing "slack" work, with _high-quality_ rest of doing nothing-at-all (or even "actively" resting, the equivalent of an athlete doing cool-down stretches between sets of an exercise), so that employees can cool down _more quickly_ and/or return closer to peak productivity from each rest;

2\. have slightly more employees (hopefully fewer than double), working off branching lines, such a way that units of work are directed to go to whichever employee is "fresh" rather than "stalled." Like processors with pipelined executions and multiple APUs per core, directing instructions to the APU that isn't currently blocked.

<comment><USER5> > If fatigue is a simple threshold (i.e. you "become fatigued" after a certain > number of units of work done), then the obvious solution is to work the > employees at 100% utilization for half as long (at which point they should > be roughly as fatigued as the employees worked half as hard for twice as > long)

I am skeptical. Fatigue rate would be the delta between exertion and recovery rate. Recovery rate is far from negligible.

Try running up several flights of stairs as fast as you can, vs taking them at a leisurely pace. Most people would be winded after the former, but not bothered after the latter.

EDIT: It's made more complicated by the fact that we have many different "recovery rate"s. When talking exercise, there's the obvious "V02 max", or the maximum rate at which we can absorb oxygen. So long as our muscles have sugar/fat, they should be able to work if we keep our exertion below this point.

If we exceed this, our muscles begin working anaerobically; recovering energy there takes much longer. That's the difference between running and walking up the stairs.

I imagine there are other types of fatigue, but I am not a medical/health/exercise professional.

Mental fatigue is different again as well.

But there are probably background "fatigue"ing rates that are important, like hours-since-you've-eaten. In that case, doing the same work in half the time may be better.

It's easy to talk myself into realizing I know nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It's important to realize that Amazon isn't violating any rules, nor even > (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? > They're doing what's taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency > is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely > good at it.

It's important to realize that tycoons cornering the market in days gone by weren't violating any rules or societal norms. They were just maximizing efficiency. Same goes for industrial revolution era business owners demanding 16+ hour work shifts and tossing the broken people aside. You didn't need much skill to feed the machines; just functional hands.

Eventually, society steps in and changes the rules to favour the downtrodden, and those who stand to lose from the change fight and complain bitterly about interference and the unfairness of making their efficiency harder to achieve, and then it gets pushed through regardless and life goes on.

We may not be able to prescribe remedies against future abuse in many cases (and probably shouldn't in some), but we can at least recognize it when it's there, and do something about it. That's what a free society is about.

</comment><comment><USER7> For a much grimmer and soul-wrenching take on this, read Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander:

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations- on-moloch)

<comment><USER8> >an ancient Carthaginian demon

This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch?

It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.

<comment><USER9> What is the correct definition then?

<comment><USER10> Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is taken from.

<comment><USER11> Carthage and Canaan did share many cultural traits, and the Carthaginians also called themselves Canaanites. It's quite plausible that the Carthaginians would indeed worship Moloch and make sacrifices to that god, and that the mentions of child sacrifice in classical sources about Carthage are based on such.

<comment><USER8> I think it's still inaccurate to refer to Moloch as Carthaginian rather than Canaanite. The latter is obviously correct, though a bit vague. The former is contested and not as clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: [https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais...](https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf) . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092)

</comment><comment><USER13> Union, yes!

This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories.

 _Unions. The people who brought you the weekend._

<comment><USER14> Comparing today's IT workplace to the conditions that inspired Marx and the labor movement seems a tad naïve, to put it politely.

<comment><USER15> And yet, it seems to be working out fine for the actors and writers guilds... Unions are about dealing with the power asymmetry between a large organization and individual workers, which has nothing to do with the kind of work being done.

<comment><USER16> It works out well for the IT people as well, they're making much more than the average employee. Most could cut back on the hours by taking a hit in the salary. People value getting more money though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is also true for software production: we have made writing and deploying software so easy to do that the rate at which training of software developers to produce PRs has outpaced the ability for systems either human or automated to handle managing the introduction of risk in all this new code.

This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage.

[1] [https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/](https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/)

<comment><USER18> As a society, "injury" (defined broadly to include software bugs as well as knee damage) has always been accepted for certain benefits. At some point we decide that the injuries are worth the cost of progress.

We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly.

Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk.

We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.

<comment><USER19> People conflate risk (likelihood of the event) and hazard (amount of harm if the event happens) and I think it degrades our conversations. The issue with software is that hazard has _quite_ a large range, due to class attack (hitting all instances of something at once, like a software update poisoned with malware) and I don't think even software developers understand the scale of a worst case scenario, let alone most politicians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The word "efficient" isn't defined in the article. Is it a synonym for "productivity" (output per worker)?

Modern society seems obsessed by productivity. It's interesting for example that the mission statement for the Gates Foundation is to build a world where _every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life_. Why is that? What if I don't want to be productive? Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" people?

In Cape Town, at the top of Table Mountain lives a species of little mammals, the dassie (rock hyrax). They spend most of their day staring into the void, not looking for food, not mating, doing nothing. (I know because I once spent a day watching them.) The official explanation is that they either stand guard for predators, or they stay immobile in the sun to keep warm.

But isn't it possible they're having an aesthetic experience? The scenery there is simply breathtaking, and changes constantly due to moving clouds just below. Contemplation is possibly the least productive activity one can think of; yet it's vital, if not for dassies, at least for us humans.

One possibility may be that we love productivity so much, simply because it's eminently, and easily, measurable: weight the output, divide by the number of workers, done.

We need a way to measure contemplation.

<comment><USER21> > Am I still entitled to be healthy, or is health reserved for "productive" > people?

Who pays for the sustenance of these idle people and why are they obligated to do it? Life is not sustained by manna from heaven. Life is sustained by the hard work of real people. Glorifying idleness is a giant "screw you" to the people who make civilization possible.

<comment><USER11> We are of course not obligated, but it's a good bet that those who are currently idle will _become_ productive if we enable them to do so, and we all stand to benefit. Teach a man to fish, and all that.

<comment><USER21> I'm all for helping people be productive. It's a shame to waste human potential. But if you have the ability to be productive and _choose_ to be idle instead, nobody is under any obligation to feed, house, or clothe you. If you want things made by other people and you're able to work, you must work. Anything else is incompatible with basic tenets of fairness. And even ignoring fairness and descending to the level of crude practicality, when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the size of the former group shrinks and the latter one grows. Eventually, there's not enough productivity to go around and the whole thing collapses.

<comment><USER22> still, even really productive people (such as the ones sewing your shirt) can't yet have all of the above basic goods (let alone something extra), while yet other people (heirs, investors, ...) are consuming insane amounts of labor in no relation to the outputs of their "work" (if they do any). That's what our economic system is happily covering and it's decidedly not fair in any rational way. And its also leading to societal collapse if you're looking at the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The article start with the example of to cleaners that takes a break at their job and that is seen as inefficient in today's society. But I say this is most a misuse of the word and understanding of efficiency. Taking a break is a stop in productivity short term(cleaning in this example). Efficiency can actually be better by a break, by boosting productivity long term and thus reaching the goal (clean streets) with higher quality. Most management try to think scenarios in closed simplified systems with in- and outputs at a certain time, but by doing this the bigger picture is missed. For example: By neglecting the cleaners wellbeing (physically and mentally) the output may be good cleaning for a while but as times go with no break the wellbeing decrease and so the output.

<comment><USER24> The problem with this argument is that it's less important than the one in the article but easier to undermine. What if a soulless bureaucrat read it and thought, "OK then, I'll try it out and see if it increases productivity" and find that, even in the long term, it doesn't. Is that enough justification to remove breaks? If course not. The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.

It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.

<comment><USER25> > _reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but > then adds "and it doesn't work anyway"._

This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says "torture is repugnant and should be banned"; person B responds "well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need".

And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they'll tell you "nah, skip the torture, because you'll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they'll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it's even possible at all".

This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that's just a rationalization. They're really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.

The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with "evidence" that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.

<comment><USER24> I was in two minds about mentioning that analogy in case someone attempted to address the content directly, which is what you've done. It really misses the point of what I was saying. The point was, if you can imagine a person that did make an argument like I said - however unlikely it is that you think it is that anyone actually would - then hopefully you could see that it does not communicate their point of view well. As it's an analogy, the idea is that this lesson would carry over to what the parent comment was saying.

<comment><USER25> Yes, I understand the point you're trying to make, and this analogy is fine insofar as it refers to some kind of fictional/hypothetical conversation about torture.

But this characterization of anti-torture arguments is a straw man, not reflective of how the discussion goes in practice, and itself missing the point of converations about torture's essential ineffectiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > "All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare > system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production > that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local > supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this > crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not > just the national chains."

Just In Time - the machine that changed the world (See Toyota Production System)

Just In Time works great, until it doesn't. The factory works at 1 unit per minute, demand is pretty inelastic. Society is pretty elastic, if a bunch of people decide they want toilet paper TODAY, the Just In Time system is going to starve out.

<comment><USER27> Just In Time works great; that and other efficiencies have brought humanity to a world so cosmically wealthy, so infinitely more developed than robust decentralized green (ie. medieval peasant standard of living) economies, that its inhabitant can lounge around eating bon-bons getting obese while endlessly resharing on social media the same photo of one shop out of thousands being out for a day or two of a luxury as a devastating indictment of Just in Time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The word missing from the post is "headroom". In critical systems it's more often called safety margin.

If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.

<comment><USER29> Funnily enough - margin of safety is also exactly what works best in capital(ist) markets. See Graham&Dodd, or Buffett&Munger.

This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.

<comment><USER30> > This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are > reminded (yet again) about what risk is

Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like I need to plug Zvi Mowshowitz's "Immoral Mazes" series of blogposts here, as it goes pretty in-depth into the whole matter of efficiency, slack, and "how hard should we work".

[https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS)

<comment><USER32> It would be more efficient if you added the actual link

[https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS) ?

<comment><USER31> I actually intended to, but when I finished writing the comment I forgot to paste the link in. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, a book that explores the origin and causes of global inequality. This article reminded me of the book's chapter about the enclosure movement in Britain: Families used to just farm and live off the land. The enclosure movement made most of this land the property of the aristocracy, who would then lease it back out to farmers - <USER2> they would keep increasing the price of the lease, so the farmers now had to work themselves to death and use every means to increase yield, in order to keep up, and not get replaced by someone else. It was much more efficient than the previous subsistence farming. (And left many thousands without a home or the means to support themselves)

<comment><USER34> The farmers probably paid the aristocracy before as well under a different name. What prevented the aristocrats to increase it before?

<comment><USER33> No, the aristocracy didn't own the land before it was enclosed - the land used to just be commonly owned: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The part about Amazon reminded me of one of the best quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

― Frank Herbert, Dune

<comment><USER36> "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind."

\- Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The key question that is missing in the article - efficient for _whom_ , buyers or sellers? Too often (but not always), business is a zero sum game. Make customers pay 20% more without extra cost and your business will be 100% more profitable (assuming 20% profitability). Or, which happens more often, cheapen quality/cost by 20% while retaining the price, and your profitability doubles.

Competition is supposed to enforce efficiency on sellers, but the temptation to cheapen quality is just too big, because it turns out customers are less picky than they should've been in theory, and are ready to give up quality for something free (as free social network) or cheaper (as cheaper sugar-laden food). So when your competitor cheapens quality and it goes down well with the customers, what else can you do besides watching your market share shrinks?

EDITED: typos.

<comment><USER38> The efficient for whom par is clearly stated all along, with even a direct mention:

> and (for the business) efficient

Otherwise on the bigger point about competition: it doesn't seem to me the landscapes are that tight, except when you're in the efficiency game.

If your target is Amazon, you're in for a ride and can leave your ethics in the closet. If your goal is to find a viable niche where you can grow with your customers, you won't be in a zero-sum, drive the prices to the ground kind of rat race.

Finding that kind of niche if of course far from easy, now I'd argue a rat race to become the next Amazon isn't either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.

<comment><USER40> Reminds me of this pg classic [1]:

> When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what > are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers > want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more > than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus > identical with saying that people want the wrong things.

> Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised > by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds > of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want > the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs > to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying > that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.

In the same way, it's "lamentable" that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1](http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1)

<comment><USER41> You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> One way I heard efficiency described is the idea of a race car falling apart at the end of a race, doing its job in the most efficient manner as possible.

Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.

<comment><USER43> But otoh, this kind of efficiency is probably the reason why washing machines and other household items are now breaking sooner than before ("planned" obsolescence)

<comment><USER18> I also blame consumers here. Are you willing to pay $100 for a better quality washing machine? Most people are not.

<comment><USER44> But even if I want to spend more, how will I know I am no spending more on inefficient stuff like a touchscreen on my fridge? Spending more money is sadly not equal to better quality, but I don't know what designates it.

<comment><USER45> Buy industrial/commercial appliances. They're ugly as hell and last forever. Except... people want nice looking things.

<comment><USER46> This.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark.

This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re- discovering it at our own expense decades later.

> The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to > Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of > methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given > stage of development) in every field of human activity.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul)

</comment><comment><USER48> I work in an environment where everything can be measured: emails sent, calls answered, CRM cases resolved, SMS sent and so on. I can even see if anyone went to the toilet at a particular time. And I simply ignore half of it. The jobs that are being monitored are already bad enough: monotonous, repetitive,and etc. And tbh, by ignoring half of all these metrics,I somehow have almost issue free workforce, as opposed to the other department that follows it by letter. Let's be efficient but let's not go completely crazy either.

<comment><USER49> Raises the question: do you ever wonder whether your monitoring of the employees will someday, itself, start to get monitored?

<comment><USER36> "See how easily our technologies turn on us? The more power you think you have, the more quickly it slips from your grasp."

\- Tracer Tong, Deus Ex

The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This resonates with me a lot.

I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations.

The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.

</comment><comment><USER34> Big enterprises are (too) great at improving efficiency for their low-level workers. On the other hand they utterly fail to do so with the middle management.

The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.

<comment><USER11> Low-level work can often be measured in some way, and that's the kind of "efficiency" one can improve most easily. Whereas the whole point of having middle management in a firm is to deal with the many things that can't be measured easily,

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The question is not always "Is this efficient?" but "Who is this efficient for?"

A lot of the things that he is describing are very efficient for the company providing them, and now less so for the customer.

</comment><comment><USER52> Efficiency goes dark when the measure is myopic. If the system took in account the quality of food rather than the price tag .. the efficiency wouldn't be a problem. Quantity over quality in a way.

</comment><comment><USER53> There is a broader point here: maximizing local efficiency in systems leads to greater fragility overall. The current COVID crisis highlights this very well with shortages due to global supply chains.

</comment><comment><USER54> Several times in my software engineering career, I've experienced cases where super-optimizing a system leads to later removing the optimzation due to critical bugs found much later (threading, racing conditions, producing invalid data, etc.), thus leading to less performant than before software.

</comment><comment><USER55> Efficiency is not the problem, because the term "efficient" by itself is meaningless. You have to define what you consider the "costs" to minimize or the "benefits" to maximize to even be talking about efficiency.

In many cases, the quantity that is being optimized is simply profit.

<comment><USER56> Yes, the article mentions the metrics movement that allows these efficiency calculations. Other variables need to be added to the equation to maximized (and minimized) such as employee well-being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I am reminded of this observation from another thread:

> _If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, > and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice > as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is > inefficient resource allocation._

> _However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater > productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what > level produces the best outcome?_

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342)

</comment><comment><USER58> He points to a real problem, but the solution is - what? We are not in a position to say "efficiency must stop", all we can say is ~"this efficiency drive has serious drawbacks" \- which we can say in all perpetuity to no avail.

I'm wondering if this is might be a problem of "incomplete models". Defined such, the human need for "inefficient gaps" in their work could be factored into the models, and we might get something that resembles a less controlled mode of production again, which doesn't burn out the workforce.

But I wouldn't hold my breath.

</comment><comment><USER59> Normally one optimises GDP because that's (a) more or less measurable, and (b) more or less correlates with things that individual wants out of society. Part of Bray's point is that going for too much efficiency is like going for pure returns at the expense of risk, another part is that GDP is merely means, not the end, and blindly optimising for GDP continues to do so even when increasing GDP starts negatively correlating with having a worthwhile society.

Efficiency yes, but please to measure in human utility per input, not in currency output per input?

</comment><comment><USER60> A few points:

* People scale poorly. There is a reason Agile favors a "less is more" approach.

* There is more than one dimension. Money is an easy metric, but not the sole one. Diminishing returns kick in when we optimize for frog$kins.

* Wisdom is hard to communicate. If human wisdom were cumulative, we should have long ago reached some paradise where everyone shares their toys nicely. Doesn't happen, and great parents are followed by dull kids. And the wiser parents somehow have less offspring than the fools. This, too, is counterproductive.

</comment><comment><USER61> This is such an obvious and basic truth to most working people that it barely merits saying. It is only we that have to "work it out". That's why many of us that do this work are so valuable to our employers: we aim for efficiency without asking what it is efficient for.

Efficiency without a specific goal doesn't mean anything. It's like Philip K Dick's Autofac. Just a replication machine.

</comment><comment><USER62> " _Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient._ "

Hey, I was there! Back in the '90s, IBM was getting too many support calls for AIX forwarded to the AIX team, so they introduced another layer of phone tech support to cut down on it.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _It's important to realize that Amazon isn't violating any rules, nor even > (on the surface) societal norms._

Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.

</comment><comment><USER63> _> They're winning, but everyone's losing._

Huh. Interesting. I think it's the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic "item" is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?

<comment><USER64> This is exactly the point he addresses in his final paragraph. Efficiency is great, but up to a point, and we've passed it.

Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own.

Edit: See this interview which makes the point very well [https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon- inter...](https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-interview)

<comment><USER65> Agreed

There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier.

Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done.

But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes.

No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.

<comment><USER66> Well, the wall-clock time may be longer, but the human time is much shorter. As long as you have one meal's worth of slack in the amount of crockery you have, the dishwasher wins by a country mile in the amount of effort expended.

<comment><USER65> Yes, but as I said, and the math changes for different automations, the time (and ease) vary

Automate dishwashing for a 10 party dinner: no brainer

Automate dishwashing for one plate, one fork and one knife. Not advantageous

Automate generating a manual report that takes 30min and needs to run everyday: no brainer also

Automate a report that needs one piece of data that's easy to get and needs to run once a month: does it really matter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Professor Julian Birkinshaw judges that we may go from knowledge era where technologies lower transaction costs to zero to post-knowledge era where we use our knowledge to make more people feel better emotions:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVP0tb6FzCs)

</comment><comment><USER68> Distributism would solve these problems, I'm just not sure we could ever get there with the current vested interests getting in the way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism)

<comment><USER69> So basically, communal ownership of the means of production? Where have I heard about that before...

Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red.

In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.

<comment><USER70> Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above.

For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.

Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.

<comment><USER11> > create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power

That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a _lot_ more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.

<comment><USER69> There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness

Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :)

Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly.

Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way.

If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)

<comment><USER11> > Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a > good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist > example was that of the pirate ship

Peter Leeson has written extensively on the way actual pirate ships were run. He sometimes calls himself an anarchist, but he makes it clear in his work that these ships were relying on carefully-tuned institutional designs that were not all that far from what we would now call liberal, representative government.

<comment><USER69> I don't see how that conflicts at all with what I said.

Even in the most extreme of situations, such as a pirate ship, there would be less hierarchy than in our society (this is due to analysis of economic hierarchy).

That is exagtly what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or less > for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting investment > funding.

Please continue this while I find something to get VC funding

</comment><comment><USER72> When you optimize a complex system for single variable you get suboptimal strange and shitty results. This is revelation that every software engineer and gamers know by heart after year of experience.

</comment><comment><USER73> Just think how much more efficient porn is than the real thing.

</comment><comment><USER74> Pretty much everyone in management should read "Slack" by Tom DeMarco. And try to make changes to free up that time for their reports. It will pay off.

</comment><comment><USER75> Efficiency is very unevenly distributed. If only my local and national administration would be half as efficient as Amazon!

</comment><comment><USER76> Many things are so much less efficient now, though.

Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into process foods and then shipped right back again. We eat meat in nearly every meal.

We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to half-life for years or decades.

We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and natural areas in our own backyards are not enough.

etc...

<comment><USER21> Anti-modernity is a tiresome perspective. It's always the same: the past was some kind of lost idealistic state and the contemporary world is a fallen and corrupt one inimical to the human spirit. Every generation has had people who thought this way, going back at least as far as the Sumerians. so what? Writing something doesn't make it true. In reality, technology has been a huge boon to humanity, and the more of it we have, the better.

> Where formerly we ate what was in season, we now have produce shipped around > the globe, sometimes raw foods shipped across the ocean and turned into > process foods and then shipped right back again

Yes. Now instead of eating salt pork and tubers all winter, we can enjoy a healthy and balanced diet year-round. How inefficient.

> We used to die quickly at home when we were incurably sick; now we cling to > half-life for years or decades.

People like Stephen Hawking can lead a full life. How inefficient.

> We used to let our kids out the front door when they were bored, now we > drive them all over town for everything in their busy calendar.

Travel across town can happen in minutes, not hours. Our kids can visit their friends and have rich social connections instead of helping with the corn harvest. How inefficient.

> When we wanted to learn how to do a job, we'd talk to someone doing it and > start working directly under them, quickly making ourselves useful. Now we > spend years learning totally unrelated stuff, just to prove that we're human > beings with a pulse who can be hired.

Previously, you were born into a trade and just joined your father's guild. Now someone of any background can prove himself via an impartial process and work on problems he feels passionate about. How inefficient.

> Now, flying across the world to have fun is 'necessary,' because parks and > natural areas in our own backyards are not enough

Now people can experience all humanity has to offer instead of limiting their perspectives to whatever backwater their parents happened to call home. How inefficient.

<comment><USER77> You're not wrong, but at the same time, our western lives have lead to the exploitation of both the people and the resources of less economically developed nations.

It seems our geographic removal from that exploitation leads to an emotional removal from it in a lot of people too

<comment><USER78> Developing nations are actually very happy to have work instead of abject poverty which was their state before.

<comment><USER77> Im sure nations are very happy with increasing GDP, and im sure families are happy to receive 5c/h manufacturing clothes for a multibillion dollar multinational corperation.

Just because their lives are better doesnt mean we are doing good. Not to mention that india and most of africa wouldnt be living in abject poverty were it not for western colonialism.

Let's go to your country, destroy your society and culture, then build a factory and pay you pennies. Then you can thank me for pulling you out of poverty. It's a tough sell

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> This guy sure has a bone to pick with Amazon. Did so much change in the 5 years he worked for them?

<comment><USER80> Does he? It doesn't seem like he's arguing they're really doing anything "wrong", other than being caught up in a larger societal process and doing what _society_ is saying is good and rewarding:

> It's important to realize that Amazon isn't violating any rules, nor even > (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? > They're doing what's taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency > is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely > good at it.

This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an _effect_ of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists.

But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises:

> It's hard to think of a position more radical than being "against > efficiency". And I'm not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, > has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is > too high, and we've passed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Words like efficiency and freedom are loaded terms that have an implicit context. It's always important to ask what the context actually is. Efficient to what end, or freedom to do what. All too often we discover that we are not the beneficiaries of the efficiencies and freedoms being discussed.

</comment><comment><USER82> Some great commentary here :)

I for one am enjoying being not so efficient this morning.

</comment><comment><USER83> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

</comment><comment><USER84> There is also another side to efficient systems: as you remove the slack, they become fragile. The inefficiencies are what allows systems to adapt to changing environments.

You could also think of this as the bias-variance tradeoff, lack of generalization, or overly specific adaptation.

This can be seen in the supply chains and economies right now with the COVID-19 impact. Economies with ultra-efficient supply chains (like the US or Western Europe) are being hit the worst, while those with slack and inefficiencies (like Central/Eastern Europe post-communist countries) can absorb the impact much better.

</comment><comment><USER85> > Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still > functions.

It seems to be quite anemic.

<comment><USER86> It's the seventh largest economy in the world with a per-capita GDP of $42k.

<comment><USER80> Notably, looking up graphs of GDP per capita of France and the UK and putting them next to each other, I'd challenge anyone to see _when_ the change happened.

One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week.

What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked.

The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions. Pretty sure Tim Bray has turned full socialism, to be honest.

If an "efficiency rate" leads to too many injuries, it is not the best "efficiency rate". I don't think you need Unions to figure that out, it is in the capitalist interest to then reduce the efficiency rate.

I find the whole idea of discussing "how much should we work" very telling. It comes from a position of high privilege and ignorance - the idea that we live in abundance, and stuff only needs to be distributed somehow.

If you are naked in the jungle, the question is not "how many hours should I work", the question is "what do I have to do to survive". If it takes 80 hours to build shelter, make a fire and hunt some food, then you'll work 80 hours.

If you manage to build stuff that reduces your work load, good for you. Like in the jungle, build a net that automatically catches fish, so you don't have to spent so many hours hunting. Not you have spare time. Good for you. But don't ask some imaginary entity (god? capitalism? the government?) to provide you with your spare tie and assign your jobs.

I'd like to add that to me the story of the 8 hour work week is also a warning before corporate employment. Because if 8 hours maximize your productivity, it means you are wasted after 8 hours. All you can still hope to do is eat and watch some TV. But that's not a reason to me to blame corporations . If you don't like it, negotiate with the corporations to work only part time, or seek to improve your skills so that you can ask for more money and afford more spare time. Nobody owes anybody a job.

<comment><USER88> > I thought the 8 hour work week was introduced by Ford, because he figured > out it would maximize productivity. Not by Unions.

The Haymarket Massacre happened 30 years prior to Ford introducing the 8 hour workday in his plants. Furthermore, there had been labor agitation resulting in 8-hour days in other parts of the country decades before Ford did so.

<comment><USER87> Thanks for the information.

Nevertheless the claim that only Unions can reduce work hours is simply false. People can negotiate their contracts. Many people work less than 40 hour work weeks.

<comment><USER89> > People can negotiate their contracts.

I'd wager that's true for perhaps 10-20% of the workforce at best.

<comment><USER90> You're very optimistic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> "The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists." \-- that's Wikipedia on Marx' theory of alienation.

Sounds weirdly similar and weirdly appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER92> "But, wealth! If we all work less, we'll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in."

In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work.

Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well.

Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products.

Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.</comment>


Ask HN: Android AudioRecord forcing VOICE_CALL to MIC audio source - <AUTHOR> I have a call recording app that uses VOICE_CALL audio source. Although ASOP does not implement/mandate it, most manufacturers have implemented VOICE_CALL and apps that use VOICE_CALL audio source worked fine on many devices. That is until Android 6.
Apparently Google changed this behavior with Android 6. Opening VOICE_CALL audio source now requires android.permission.CAPTURE_AUDIO_OUTPUT which is only granted to system applications.
Although Android 6 is almost 1 year old, there is no documentation about this. But, according to Eric Laurent "This change was intentional in M.RECORD_AUDIO permission was too easy to acquire considering the privacy risk involved in allowing capture of voice call audio. Also note that capturing from VOICE_CALL source is not supported consistently across the Android ecosystem and not mandated by the Android CDD. The SDK documentation should be updated accordingly."
This essentially stops call recording, or it should have. Well, it does for mine and 200+ other call recording apps apart from 3 who have found a way to get around this limitation on phones with Qualcomm chip-set such as most Sony Xperias and OnePlus1/2
I have been trying those apps on many couple of phones with Android 6 and found out certain characteristics in the way they manage to record.
They all use Android AudioRecord class and open MIC audio source. I do too; but on my app, I only get audio from MIC, not the other party. What I've found out is telling me that they are issuing some sort of system call just after or before starting recording.
Have a look at the following log form one of the apps that successfully record VOICE_CALL, even though it uses MIC to record. It looks like it is some how managing to mix/route/stream/merge VOICE_CALL audio source in to MIC. <comment><AUTHOR> \- D/audio_hw_primary: in_set_parameters: enter: kvpairs=input_source=1;routing=-2147483644 \- D/PermissionCache: checking android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS for uid=10286 => granted (432 us) \- D/audio_hw_primary: in_set_parameters: enter: kvpairs=input_source=4;routing=-2147483584;format=1 \- D/audio_hw_primary: select_devices: out_snd_device(0: ) in_snd_device(283: voice-dmic-ef) \- D/hardware_info: hw_info_append_hw_type : device_name = voice-dmic-ef \- D/voice: voice_get_incall_rec_snd_device: in_snd_device(283: voice-dmic-ef) incall_record_device(283: voice-dmic-ef)

As you can see in the first line it is starting with MIC audio source input_source=1;routing=-2147483644.

Then, on the second line it does something and get granted android.permission.MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS which is normal permission and my app has it too. This seems to be the most important part and it looks like all 3 are using JNI to do what ever they do to trigger streaming/merging of VOICE_CALL audio source to MIC and record with standart AudioRecorder API

On the next line you see that audio hardware starting to mixing VOICE_CALL (input_source=4) even though they have opened MIC(1) audio source.

I have assumed they used something like

AudioManager.setParameters("key=value") and tried many variations such as

AudioManager.setParameters("input_source=4;routing=-2147483584;format=1") without any luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> After some more research for the log entries created when call recording is on, such as "voice_get_incall_rec_snd_device" or "incall_record_device", I came across [https://github.com/dtsinc/DTS-Eagle-Integration_CAF- Android-...](https://github.com/dtsinc/DTS-Eagle-Integration_CAF-Android- hardware-qcom-audio/blob/master/hal/voice.c) It looks like it is Qualcomm specific because I don't see any reference to "voice_get_incall_rec_snd_device" on actual ASOP source code ([https://android.googlesource.com/platform/hardware/qcom/audi...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/hardware/qcom/audio/+/android-6.0.0_r1/hal/voice.c))

I don't have nay C knowledge, heck, I don' t even know Java in order to write a piece of code without Google's help, but I have spent 4 year on my app and cannot bare it to bite the dust.

I am trying to collaborate get help from somebody who has insight to Android audio HAL as well as C and JNI. I am happy to pay for their time and effort but like the issue finding somebody who has these proven to be very very hard. I have emailed many maintainers of CM, posted to SO as well as XDA.

Is there anyone here that can help me?

Thanks</comment></comment>