Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.
Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.
Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.
Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.
I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.
I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.
Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.
Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.
Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.
There are people out there who are pretty conflict-avoidant by nature, and any group tends to pretty significant levels of cohesion because of it. There are some classic stories out there about when it goes particularly bad and spirals into a bad case of groupthink.
In the economy there are supposed to be some slightly cruel feedback mechanisms where companies (effectively big groups) that get off track are defunded and their resources reallocated to someone more competent. The west has been on a campaign to disable all those feedback mechanisms and let companies just keep trudging on. We've pretty much disabled recessions by this point. A bunch of known-incompetent management teams have been bailed out so they can just keep plodding along destroying value. There is not so much advantage in being honest about competence in this environment, if anything it is a bad thing because it makes it harder to take bailout money with a straight face.
I cite the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as an interesting case study. A looot of companies should have gone bust with that one because they were imprudent with their money. They didn't.
> Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network)[1] is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation, BlackRock, Inc. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios.
For any one firm to have this much director and/or indirect assertion over the world’s financial assets is ripe for problems of all sorts.
Seems rather indicative of the general consolidation of power and decline of social equality across the west
Being a great engineer or researcher doesn't pay. You won't get your name known for your work. All your achievements will be attributed to whoever manages you at best, or attributed to the corporation above you with not a single human name at worst.
People like being recognized for their work. Every great achiever wants to have their name remembered long after they leave this world. Everyone wants to be the next Isaac Newton. The next Bill Gates. The next Steve Jobs. The next Elon Musk. It's a constant downhill path from being known for using your brain and busting your ass to discover or create something, to being known for managing someone who created something, to being known as someone who bought the company that managed people who created something. Motivations are all fucked up. No matter what you discover or create these days, there's a feeling that you're not going to have your name written in history books. Your best options are join a grift or manage someone who's doing the hard work.
The traditional term for this is cobra effect. [1] When the Brits were occupying India they wanted to reduce the cobra population, so they simply created a bounty on cobra heads. Sounds reasonable, but you need to have foresight to think about what comes next. This now created a major incentive for entrepreneurial Indians to start mass breeding cobras to then turn in their heads. After this was discovered, the bounty program was canceled, and the now surging cobra farm industry mostly just let their cobras go wild.
I think the fundamental problem is that things just don't work so well at scale, after a point. This is made even worse by the fact that things work really well at scale before they start to break down. So we need a large economy that remains relatively decentralized. But that's not so easy, because the easiest way to make more money is to just start assimilating other companies/competitors with your excess revenue. Anti-trust is the knee jerk answer but even there, are we even going to pretend there's a single person alive who e.g. Google (or any other mega corp) doesn't have the resources to 'sway'?
The moment you admit failure as an employee, you are out of the company. And no for most people it is not easy to find a job that will not disrupt their lives (aka move cities, change financial planning, even health insurance).
So employees do what they have to do. They will lie till the last moment and pretend that the initiatives they are working on are huge value add for the company.
In the past you knew you would retire from your company, also the compensation differential was not that huge across levels, so there was little incentive to BS.
Today everything is optimized with a horizon of a financial quarter. Then a pandemic hits, and we realize that we don't even know how to make freaking masks and don’t even have supplies of things for more than a week.
Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate.
An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored.
Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.
This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else.
It used to be that you were expected to be able to fix your own car or washing machine, and moreover that one you couldn't fix would be rejected by the customers. It was expected to come with documentation and be made of modular parts you could actually obtain for less than three quarters of the price of the entire machine.
Now everything is a black box you're expected to never open and if it breaks and the manufacturer doesn't deign to fix it you go to the store and buy another one.
The problem with this is that it poisons the well. Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself. The knowledge and infrastructure to choose differently decays, so that you have to pay someone else to fix the problem, even if that's not what you would have chosen.
The result is a helplessness that stems from a lack of agency. Once the ability to do something yourself has atrophied, you can no longer even tell whether the person you're having do it for you is doing it well. Which, of course, causes them to not. And in turn to defend the opacity so they can continue to not.
Which brings us back to management. The C suite doesn't actually know how the company works. If something bad happens, they may not even find out about it, or if they do it's through a layer of middle management that has put whatever spin on it necessary to make sure the blame falls on the designated scapegoat. Actually fixing the cause of the problem is intractable because the cause is never identified.
But to fix that you'd need an economy with smaller companies, like a machine with modular parts and documented interfaces, instead of an opaque monolith that can't be cured because it can't be penetrated by understanding.
That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.
Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power
>Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]
You got to offer good quality and stand out, which isn't easy without capital.
This is very insightful and, in my mind, a good preview of what is happening with AI right now. We will forget how to use the skills that built these systems in the first place.
Closer to tech, I feel we have had a big influx on non-tech joining the tech workforce and the quality has suffered as a result of a lack of fundamentals and passion
In the web development community there is a near linear correlation between the number of “influencers” who sell courses that pray on this influx to make money and the influx of such folks.
I miss the days where developers generally had a passion for this work vs seeing only a big paycheck, though without artificial barriers we should have expected a lot of influx of people given how well it generally paid for a long time
Do you own a PinePhone?
Or do you own a higher-spec, more familiar iPhone or Android that can't be opened up?
It's the second one, isn't it. Who made you choose it?
Capitalism needs a deadly threat to be good.
My employer buys a crap load of crap stuff from Broadcom just because the procurement is easy.
> This is really a cultural problem that has infected management along with everyone else.
Because every time a natural correction happens, the government bails them out
The reality is that you can have it both ways. I own an iPhone, I know how to build a computer, I buy software, and I know how to code. There is value in understanding how the things you have work, but that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't buy a high quality product just because you can't take it apart.
It's tiring to read again and again about evil external forces wrecking the world, when the choices are our own, and right in front of our faces.
Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.
Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.
Management and executives had almost all worked their way up the ladder. Toward the end I think some of the higher-up ones were encouraged to get an MBA as they advanced, but they didn't do much hiring of MBAs.
The company got bought by another in IIRC the late 90s, and this other one had already been taking over by the "professional managerial class", and they quickly replaced most of the folks from the top down to the layer just above him with their own sort.
His description of what followed was incredible amounts of waste. Not just constant meetings that should have been emails (though, LOTS of that) but entire business trips that could have been emails. Lots of them fucking things up because they had no idea how anything worked, but wouldn't listen to people who did know. Just, constant.
The next step was they "encouraged" his layer to retire early, for any who were old enough, which was lots of them since, again, most of them had worked their way up the ladder to get where they were, not stepped straight into management as a 25-year-old with no clue how actual work gets done. I haven't asked, but I assume they replaced them with a bunch of young business school grads.
There are sometimes posts on HN suggesting that our dislike of business school sorts is silly or overblown, but if anything I think it's too weak. The takeover by them and, relatedly, the finance folks has been disastrous for actual productivity and innovation. Companies should be run by people who've done the work that the company does, and not just for an internship or something.
And certainly some of these games are useful; abilities of this kind are highly correlated with other abilities, and having masterful language and perception manipulators act for the interest of your company or nation is valuable.
But it's not the only useful skill at the upper tier of organizations, and emphasizing it over all else is costly. So are internal political games-- when your organization plays too many of them, the benefits one gets from selecting these people and efforts are dwarfed by the infighting and wasted effort. It can also result in severe misalignment between individual and organizational incentives.
Enshittification in action.
The handy men of the future were like today’s tech bros. They were loaded, because people couldn’t perform basic tasks around the house. When a father was looking to teach his son how to fix the oven, he showed him how to call the handy man.
I would prefer a scenario where monopolists were broken up and regulators mandated open designs that can be repaired.
Close. They're not incompetent; we just redefined competence.
It used to be that competence was a mix of a lot of distinct, but interdependent, qualities. The end result was synergy that allowed for people and organizations (including companies) to compete and move society forward.
In the 1970s, we started to allow a bunch of psychopaths (I'm saying this in the clinical sense) to redefine competence. Instead of this array of distinct qualities, they just defined it in terms of ability to create monetary value, particularly if that value was then transferred to shareholders. That was it.
We also switched to quarterly reporting for for-profit companies, shrinking the window to evaluate this new definition of competence to 90 days. Three months.
An end result of this was that you could simply do whatever made the most money in 90 days and be considered competent.
Jack Welch was the paragon of this. GE shareholders saw massive gains during the latter half of his tenure at the helm. This wasn't because of groundbreaking new products or services; quite the opposite: Jack realized that selling off divisions and cutting costs by any means necessary was a good way to make money in the 90 day period. Institutional knowledge and good business relationships in the market - two of the elements of the former definition of competence - were lost, while money - the sole element under which competence was judged in the new definition - went up.
You also had managers doing a lot of the avoidance of real management, like you speak of. Instead of betting on a new product or trying to enter a new market, they took a Six Sigma course, learned a bunch of jargon, and cut costs at the expense of business past the 90 day period.
If you do this enough (and we did, far beyond just GE), that expense is taken at the societal level. Existence extends beyond 90 days. You can't mortgage the future forever. It's now the future, the payment is due, and we have an empty account to draw from.
Theoretically, we could go back to a more in-depth evaluation of competence and reward its display over the long term. In practice, there are a bunch of people who got unfathomably wealthy off of the shift to the "new" competence, and now they're in charge and don't want to switch back, so we won't.
Is this not A) ubiquitous, B) rich with incentives, and C) not downright implied in "They are masterful language and perception manipulators, in a strategic game of corporate dominance." and "the understanding of what makes others in their management circles feel good."
The fact that so many companies play tricks with CAPEX and OPEX completely misses the point that almost all corporate spending should be seen as investment or spending to support investment at some level.
The past 50 years of business school has taught people that outsourcing your core competency is a good idea because it gets things "off the books" and makes quarterly reports look better. The end result was shifting huge swaths of our economy to a hostile country.
Here in tech, I've literally seen companies shift stuff into the cloud even though it's more expensive, because OPEX can be written off right away and they don't want CAPEX on the books, only for a year later to want to shift back because they decided it's now better to optimize for actual cashflow. It's infuriating.
I dunno, there’s something in the fact that Isaac Newton the imaginary cultural figure was hit on the head by an apple, and then invented calculus.
Meanwhile Isaac Newton the actual guy (recalling from memory so feel free to correct) was a bit eccentric (dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts), had some academic posts, some government jobs, and built Calculus on work that was ongoing in the academic community…
The imaginary Isaac Newton and the imaginary Elon Musk look sort of similar. Because we ignore the boring work that Newton did and the fact that Musk just bought his way around it—their real versions look very different of course! But if you want the actual day to day experience of being Isaac Newton, you can, just go be a professor and make some quirky friends.
Not only that, but often with whole government backed companies where the government will gladly support them and even participate in espionage to gain competitive advantages. Huawei is the classic example, but is just the tip of the iceberg.
Meanwhile in most of the western world, executives are focusing on the next quarterly results...
Maybe it's really about wrong incentives and lack of technical excellence.
Government money keeps coming in and making it broken and buggy actually assures ongoing contracts. Investment in skilled workers or solving technical issues is not paid for and everyone - company and customer are completely disconnected from the end user and feedback mechanisms are broken or manipulated.
It's maybe a mix of all the different answers my post got.
On a long enough time scale, short-term oriented systems naturally-select themselves out of existence. The U.S. Constitution didn't survive 7 generations. The Civil War was in 1865 (77 years, ~4 generations). Reconstruction Era made it maybe 60 years (3 generations), as far as the Great Depression / Dust Bowl.
The current post-war ordering of the interest of short-term capital above all else doesn't have a well-defined start date, but 1968 (MLK Jr, RFK, nomination of Humphrey) is a solid one. We're hardly 3 generations in, and it doesn't feel great.
Really, when you look at American history, the periods endowed with bouts of long-term thinking are really quite rare (1770-1810, 1880s-1900s, 1930s-1950s). Maybe we're due for another one.
From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?
And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.
All the incentives are wrong.
Yes. Its a piece of junk. Why do I own it? I like to throw my money away on ideals I never actually follow. Its sitting next to my unplayed guitar, my list of books on how to effectively get A's in college (I ended up a C+ student) and my Raspberry Pi that has only ever been powered on once.
If you have OSX, you can use Al Dente[1] to limit SoC to 70 or 80% while using it to reduce battery aging. There may be similar settings on Windows depending on your laptop's manufacturer.
If you can maintain a limited SoC rather than running the battery down, that's most preferable.
Otherwise, discharging lightly (but not below 20% or so) then charging to 80% or so would be a good usage pattern.
It's helpful to know that many chargers are designed to achieve 1C charge rate (this excludes "fast chargers"). That essentially means they go from 0 to 100% SoC in one hour. So start a 30 minute timer when you plug in electronics to charge, and you'll gain about 50% SoC.
[1] https://github.com/AppHouseKitchen/AlDente-Charge-Limiter
This can be changed in software, setting it to 70-80% or having a toggle is best for the battery.
I know the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the US Constitution are often considered America's Second Founding because they legally eliminated [1] all the elements of racism within the United States Constitution, but saying that the Constitution "didn't survive" doesn't see accurate...
[1] That being said we all know that it took many many decades after those 3 amendments for the laws in the United States to accurately reflect the principles embodied within these amendments.
The 3/5ths compromise, and its implicit enshrinement of slavery as an American institution, is as an example of short-term thinking (compromising on the legal definition of a human being, in order to get the constitution ratified) that eventually caused the greater system to unravel. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the civil war, millions of people experienced slavery. It could have been avoided if longer-term thinking prevailed.
I hear you that the Constitution (inclusive of its self-mutating property) survived as a useful document of federal governance. This purported maintenance of a federal union was a huge legitimizer of northern domination of the post-ACW United States. But, I think you'd agree that the "system of governance" that begat the constitution did not survive, that's more what I was getting at. That each successive system of governance can still legitimately claim to be implementing the U.S. Constitution is indeed impressive.
Compare the market success of the PinePhone to the Framework laptop. Their laptops are technically competitive with the Dells and the HPs of the world, while also being repairable.
The PinePhone doesn't even beat the until-recently-current iPhone SE in performance. It's a terrible choice, technically speaking.
That is what a 0201 capacitor looks like.
It's been like this for a while now.
I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.
So this is why it's a cultural issue.
Let's consider a market that still works basically like it's supposed to: Desktop PCs. You have your ATX standard PC, it came with a Core i3 processor which is getting a little long in the tooth, but you can drop in a Core i7 and double the number of cores. Not only that, the parts are all modular and standard. You take your ten year old i3 6100 dual core, swap out the motherboard and CPU and now it's a 16-core Ryzen 9 5900XT from 2024, but it still supports the same memory, GPU, SSD, chassis, power supply, etc., any of which you could also have independently replaced before or after this.
So now I go and buy a PinePhone, and after a couple years the CPU seems a little anemic. No problem, it's modular, I'll just buy one of those fancy chips they put in the iPhones and put that in there. Or at least the top end things from Samsung or Qualcomm. No? That's not available?
Okay, but at least I can put whatever software I want on it. Now the way this works is, people can improve their own devices in collaboration with other people. Adding a new subsystem to your phone would be a full time job, but it could also be a dozen part time jobs. Somebody does a barebones implementation and throws it on github, then you personally only need it to do one extra thing and all you have to do is add the extra thing instead of starting from scratch, which is a tractable problem instead of a hopeless pipe dream. But when each person contributes a little part, you ultimately end up with a complete implementation. Most of the users don't even have to contribute anything, as long as there is a large enough community of people who do.
Except that 99% of people have locked down devices, so the community is suppressed and then even if you buy the device that allows you to do it, you're the only one working on that subsystem and it's too much work for you to do yourself, so you don't even make the attempt. And then what good is the device?
It's an ecosystem problem. A cultural issue. It can't be just you. You need the default attitude of the common customer to be "this despotism will not stand" and to give the finger to any company that locks you out of your own property. Regardless of whether you personally actually upgrade your own device or write your own code, you need everyone to have the ability to do it, because the alternative is a friction that erodes the community and in turn destroys a backstop against involuntary captivity.
I am not a lawyer but many years ago I read about the following doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
Basically prior to the American Civil War the Bill of Rights was considered to only apply to the Federal government and not the state governments.
After the Civil War, the US Supreme Court interpreted the 14th amendment such that overtime all the amendments of the Bill of Rights were considered to apply to the states as well.
So what you are saying about one system being dominant over the other system (Federal government being dominant over the state governments) makes sense and it is something that seems to have happened more extensively after the Civil War.
Just quoting from Wikipedia:
>Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]
They're managing capital. If they get bailed out because they turned out to be completely irresponsible in managing their capital then nobody can claim to be surprised that management tend not to be of the highest standard on any axis.
What is supposed to be the incentive here for appointing competent managers for most companies? It literally doesn't matter. Even company-bankrupting performance will turn a profit once the effects of money printing are factored in.
People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.
Note: The implementation is out of sight, the vision of what it could be is the actual competitor.
The difference is access to capital. Just like it was 150 years ago. Workers don't have enough holdings to sustain themselves without selling their body. Capitalists have enough holdings to not have to sell their body and can instead put their money to work through various means like entrepreneurship.
Also, I didn't even bring up the Down to the Countryside program as a good aspect of Mao... But since you brought it up, I figured I'd mention that his "harebrained schemes" doubled the life expectancy in China rather quickly. Like all world leaders I've studied, he did great things, and he did horrible things.
Well paid workers can amass the means to become capitalists.
>Let alone with the stereotypes Marx depended upon for his arguments?
Marx called these types of people that make enough money to own their own means of production "petit bourgeoisie". This is in contrast to the "haute bourgeoisie".
This isn't some exception to Marxist thought; this is literally one of the core components of Marxist thought.
---
"Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.
The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labour-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie, defined by owning the means of production and thus deriving most of their wealth from buying the labour-power of the proletariat..."
---
The critical distinction being that they aren't 'selling their labor-power' to others.
And I just don't see how one can claim this makes any sense in modern times! Proles selling their 'labor power' are out-earning the bougies, anybody (even relatively low wage workers) can hire the 'labor-power of the proletariat' with things like Fiverr (amongst many others). And basically everybody owns the most valuable means of production in modern society - a computer. If you don't, you can buy one with a day or so of minimum wage work.
For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels. Bonds right now are at near 5%! And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
No, they generally are not. There is obviously overlap, as there was in Marx's time, in income, but that’s not a problem with the theory—class isn’t about income but mode of participation in the economy.
> For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels.
The “financial vessels” are instruments of other entities, most of which exist by rented labor power.
> And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.
The distinctions have never been hard lines. In the most simplistic analysis class is determined by the predominant mode of interaction with the economy, while a more nuanced view sees class membership as essentially a fuzzy membership function, depending on the degree to which one interacts in the manner (selling labor to capitalists vs applying your own labor to your own capital vs. owning capital to which rented labor is applied) archetypical of a given class (both these modes of a analysis have been around for quite a while, thougj the fuzzy membership function language would only be used fairly recently.)
We can challenge this assertion by reductio ad absurdum. Imagine somehow all bougies earned less than all workers. Everything Marx said would be absolutely and completely nonsensical. There's nothing inherently impossible about such a world existing and it makes clear the point that income levels do absolutely matter. And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies. The concept of a 'factory' worker earning more than a factory owner would have been entirely alien to him, and most of the world, until fairly recently.
The most paradoxical thing about all of this is that the people most drawn to Marxist stuff are disproportionately in tech, the exact sort who, in many cases, already earn more than many, and likely most, business owners, work far fewer hours, and generally have dramatically nicer working conditions. I think it's mostly misidentified discontent. It's not the economic system that's at fault, but somehow building things in the digital world is fundamentally unsatisfying and unfulfilling, even if you get drowned in money, massages, bean bag chairs, and ping pong tables.
If people want fulfilling lives (so far as work as concerned) don't work in ad-tech. If you want stupid amounts of money work in ad-tech. You get the stupid amounts of money precisely because the work is awful and empty. It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
I mean, it wouldn't, if they still exercised power. But...they don't, while there is overlap on the boundaries, the classes defined by modes of interaction do, across every capitalist economy (including modern mixed economies, which are not the same system as the capitalism that Marx named and addressed, but share important features with it) form on aggregate hierarchy of both power and income in the same order that as the heirarchy of power Marx describes them in, even though the ranges of individual incomes overlap.
> And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies.
No, definitely the most well-paid person-living-by-rented labor would have had a higher income than the least-successful owner of capital to which rented labor applied. Capitalists (then no less than now) are capable of losing money continuously, eventually reaching the point where they fall out of the bourgeoisie entirely, and even among those that are more fortunate than that, there would have been many who were technically haut bourgeois because they relied primarily on renting others labor to apply to their capital, and many more who were petit bourgeois and applying their own labor to their own capital--like homesteaders with small holdings--who would earn less the most successful hired experts.
> It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.
Yes, in modern mixed economies the condition of the median worker is better than in the capitalism of Marx's time, but, in general, work is awful and compensation is awful. Sure, the small percentage of the workers in well-compensated positions like the ad-tech you point to may do amazingly well -- but that's a minute fraction of workers.
Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.
And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'
[1] - https://altline.sobanco.com/small-business-revenue-statistic...
SVB has been a vital supporter of startups for decades. Why would a resource constrained startup spend time worried about it? Money goes in and out the bank, great, that’s all most startups should need to worry about.
The startups had a strategy of pooling their money - their huge amount of money, as it turns out - into a fund run by people who couldn't keep a bank solvent. If you want to shield the people doing that from consequences then, frankly, you don't have an interest in running a high-integrity system geared to competence. Because there need to be direct and painful consequences to an action that stupid. Oh there are only 5 of them! Well there is only 1 of me and I can tell you how dumb they were in isolation. The only reason to act this way and keep all the eggs in one high-risk basket is because of an assumption that the government will come in and conduct bailouts if any risk eventuates. IE, a management class that doesn't ever expect to succeed on their own merits. Although since the bailouts did happen that suggests that sticking to a dumb strategy is what winners should do.
The entire capital management system here is out of control.
Investments into what? Businesses?
Businesses that have employees? Employees that are selling their labour? Who are they selling their labour to?
