I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical.
Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.
Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.
R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.
Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.
> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself?
Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.
Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.
Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student.
Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.
> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.
The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.
> Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.
Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.
> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.
That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.
Universities dont do product oriented research. They do more general research. And also, they should not do product oriented research, that is companies role.
And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.
It's similar to dominos then - every region and cultural/ethnic group has their own variant, and every family has their own house rules. Or craps! I was so confused my first time playing in a casino after learning to play in the streets.
Science is no longer a hobby for the idle rich, it's an occupation. Peer review cannot function in a hostile environment governed by self interest (results == resume). Science practice needs to adapt to modern conditions rather than to pretend the idealized system that worked for an exclusive and elite group would work for a competetive worldwide industry.
LSD may not fry the brain, but the article makes a compelling case that Leary and the CIA certainly intended to fry some brains, or at least persuade them to stop protesting the war.
"Regularly" is doing a lot of work here. Plenty of rich and successful people dabble in drugs. People with any level of wealth who can function normally in society while habitually and regularly using any substance are pretty obviously much less likely to develop a habit in the first place.
> [1] But this youngest generation also gets the privilege of never having easy access to cigarettes.
Being an island, it's probably slightly easier to control smuggling, but if there's money to be made, people will be smuggling in cartons. Anyway, getting an older person to buy cigs isn't difficult, and they're still legal for the majority of the population. I doubt smoking will become immediately attractive, but if the ban sticks around, probably in a decade or so tobacco will be a niche hipster rebellion, then become poser-cool, then totally normalized again.
"being an island" doesnot, in fact, make it easier to inhibit smuggling. One reason, the sheer number of small, unstaffed seaports and the volume of small fishing vessel traffic does in fact make it easier for unobserved ingress of materials under the guisd of small commercial and noncommercial fishing and small to midsize shipping. (see Scotland as major import of currently illicit drugs and undocumented refugees)
Adding another globally common and less regulated substance to the list of extrajudicial desireables simply equals a performance bonus and being low aquisition risk (already shipping other goods from places that grow tobacco and make cigs) as an incentive for the already very profitable and active operators of these networks.
From my perspective this would simply make being a smuggler easier and more profitable and be a value uplift for corrupt enforcement and a net reduction in collectable taxes... moving the revenue from comsumption tax books to black market coffers.
> "being an island" doesnot, in fact, make it easier to inhibit smuggling. One reason, the sheer number of small, unstaffed seaports and the volume of small fishing vessel traffic does in fact make it easier for unobserved ingress of materials under the guisd of small commercial and noncommercial fishing and small to midsize shipping. (see Scotland as major import of currently illicit drugs and undocumented refugees)
I mean, sure, that's true, but is it more difficult to smuggle by walking or driving over an imaginary line or getting a boat and crew and crossing the water? I don't see water as being the low-effort option.
They're about the same in practice .. with a boat having the advantage of being able to unload tonnes of goods outside a national limit in open waters for pickup by fisherman where heavy incoming tonnages by truck or aircraft are a little more constrained in respect to transport path (roads for haulage) and drop offs (typically airfields, air drops are relatively rare (but not unheard of)).
There's little logic to it because prohibition is a fashion, and politics is the dressing up of self-interest in flashy clothes while telling the public they like it. This is not the first ban on tobacco in Britain, and it probably won't be the last.
> But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.
I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.
Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.
Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.
R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.
Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.
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