Right. Heavily-regulated industries like banking, auto and healthcare are known for being so much better at treating its customers like human beings...
Unregulated banking tend to have a bit more ponzi schemes, pump and dump, and money laundering than regulated banking.
Unregulated auto tend to have a bit more lemon markets than regulated auto.
Unregulated healthcare tend to have a bit more snake oil, blood letting and cocaine than regulated healthcare.
Unregulated food sector tend to have a bit more Listeria and Salmonella then regulated food sector.
No regulation are not know for being that nice either, which is to say that some regulation is good and some regulation is too much, but one can't dismiss regulation as just being bad.
I did not argue that regulation is unnecessary or bad. The argument is that regulation of Big Industries does not bring you better support nor makes the companies more focused in treating customers as individuals.
It all depend on the reason and target of the regulation. Patients might have historically liked doctors more when they prescribed cocaine, alcohol and morphine for most ailments, but then the target of modern regulation is not customer short-term happiness. It is health.
The issue of regulating big industries and big tech in particular is what outcomes we want to avoid and how a healthy market can be created where one does not exist. Words like infrastructure, platforms, and lock-in are all associated with a lack of market choice and competition. Bad support could be a symptom of that, but the target of regulations wouldn't be about support but rather to avoid having a situation where citizens are unknowingly building their homes and companies on quicksand.
There could be an argument that US regulators allow companies to be much more customer hostile than other places... i believe it's done in the name of "innovation".
The point is not to limit the size of the industry. It is to limit the size of a company.
Think of a oil refinery as a monolith, and that such a mandate would enforce that you'd have to build the whole system a set of independent microservices. The industry as a whole would still employ a large number of people, but now they would be forced to coordinate through specific interfaces (the smaller business units) instead of centralizing under a larger corporation.
Like the Amazon’s “API” mandate, as famously described by Steve Yegge:
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Huh, here’s an idea: Maybe Jeff Bezos did what he did because he was fearing just such a goverment-mandated breakup, and wanted Amazon to be prepared for it?
I know you meant a general idea, but for oil refineries in particular, and probably a bunch of others, this sounds disastrously bad from a safety perspective. A lot of accidents that are tremendously costly in terms of human lives and health, equipment destroyed, and operational uptime eventually trace back to poor communication between groups. There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I can't help but think that if you intentionally made inter-department communication worse, it would result in a huge increase in the number of disasters.
> There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when.
I find it very hard to believe that this can not be automated to the point of requiring much more than a dozen controllers (4 groups of 3 people, on a 12-on/36-off work schedule). And there is nothing stopping this "top-level" department to be a company in itself.
But anyway, let's say that I'm underestimating the amount of human brainpower that is needed to get this work done safely. Not to be a Luddite, but shouldn't we be asking ourselves if there really is any type of (isolated) economical activity that is so fundamental for us that can only be done with more than 150 people involved?
It's not like we can not refine oil with less than 150 people. It's just that we can not do it at the scale and efficiency that we are used to, right? Instead of having one "giant" refinery that requires thousands of people, perhaps the limitation would force us to have smaller plants spread out around the world, or to have the downstream industries actually doing the refinement themselves, etc.
So, how about instead of looking for maximizing the efficient usage of resources in order to keep the economy growing at an accelerated pace, we start to focus on a constant growth rate and better distribution?
Capitalism would not allow such a company to exists. There would be too much bottlenecks and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing scenario and the end product would be more expensive compared to a company with no such limitation. Buyers would prefer buying the product at much cheaper rates and then just transporting it to their locations.
I could easily argue the opposite: in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size, they would be forced to become a lot more efficient in their communication and they would be a lot more open and agile.
Also, a lot of the work done by people in Big Corp is something that is not outsourced merely because they don't want to let their competitors to have access it. A lot of these redundancies would be eliminated and replaced by smaller units that can serve multiple companies. Companies that have internal "business systems" developers would simply get rid of that and looking into third-party SaaS and/or open source solutions that could be used, etc.
> in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size
What does all companies mean, are you proposing the entire world follow this approach or just the US. If its just the US then other refineries would just offer cheaper oil and US consumers would buy it from overseas while the US refining goes bankrupt.
1) The price of oil (and basically everything downstream of crude) has little to do with the cost to produce it, and a lot more to do with current market conditions. So even if their productions costs were (slightly) higher, I don't see why a local, smaller, refinery would have too much trouble to keep themselves profitable even if they had to have lower margins to stay competitive.
2) Smaller companies would mean that you'd be consuming a lot less primary resources and your business relationships would be on a much more local scale. You wouldn't be getting a networks of branded gas stations that receive their gas from the same mega-distributor, you'd be more likely than many different gas station owners, each of them too small to be interesting to a foreign refinery.
3) Even if that is not enough and "US refining goes bankrupt"... so what? Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
> Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
Looks like you did not think it through.
You need to have energy independence. When you depend on other countries, those countries can use your weakness to get better deals or control you. If there is a pandemic and all the supply chains breakdown your people can still survive.
How "energy independent" is Switzerland? Singapore? The UK?
You are too deep in "Big State" thinking. Forget about that.
> If there is a pandemic and all the supply chains breakdown.
Under a localist model, your people can still survive because they do not depend on global supply chain and can still have a functioning economy.
What I am asking you is to imagine a less radical version of an Amish community. Less focus on economic output and more focus on resiliency. Try to keep your economy as local as possible and do not over-generalize. Do not think of industries as something that has "strategic value" and instead let them develop as much as it is required to fulfill the needs of your citizens. This way, your community will have plenty of redundancy and no one will be at the mercy of any other external entity.
You are too deep in "Fantasyland" thinking. Forget about that.
> How "energy independent" is Switzerland? Singapore? The UK?
Exactly, atleast the UK depends on middle east and Russia which funds their murderous regimes. You should be supporting human rights not murdering innocents.
> your people can still survive
Tell that to the people who died from Covid because they could not get masks which were all manufactured in China.
> Try to keep your economy as local as possible and do not over-generalize.
I think you getting confused with your own talking points, in the previous comment you wanted want the US to be served by others and now you are saying keep the economy local.
What I am asking you is to live in reality and not live in fantasy land, you sound exactly like a politician who declares war on drugs. The current globalized world cannot just cannot function with your fantasy 150 people limit.
You getting confused with your own talking points is one the proof that your limit does not work.
I misspoke. I meant to say "do not over-specialize".
> in the previous comment you wanted want the US to be served by others
No, read again with the whole context: what I said was that the focus should be on keeping the industry local, on a smaller scale and more worried about robustness than profitability. Then I said that "even if after that they are still being out-competed, it doesn't mean that they all is lost".
The point was that plenty of countries can be successful even if they are not 100% self-sufficient about key resources. I am not advocating the end of trade. I am advocating for smaller/stronger communities and stronger/more explicit interfaces between them.
> You should be supporting human rights not murdering innocents.
Please stop with this absurd rhetoric. Not only is BS, it could easily be turned on you ("So, you buy things from China? This means that you support the genocide of Uyghurs!")
> The current globalized world cannot just cannot function with your fantasy 150 people limit.
First, this "current globalized world" is precisely the thing that is so full of systemic issues that we should be working to avoid. In a less-globalized and not hyperconnected world, Covid would not even be a thing, so the whole "people died of Covid because they didn't have masks" is complete rhetorical bullshit .
Second, there is no limit on people. The only limit is about the size of a single corporation. I don't know what is so hard about it to understand. You keep mischaracterizing the argument to the point that it is making clear you are not interested in a good-faith conversation, which should be a signal that I am done here.
You say misspoke, I say you got confused with your own talking points.
> it doesn't mean that they all is lost"
I dont know if you understand capitalism but out competed companies eventually run out of money and get bought out by the more successful one. I think that is the context which you dont undestand.
> it could easily be turned on you
Its not rhetoric, I am being serious, I would love to buy things made locally but that is just not possible with your 150 people limit. You want things to be less efficient and more expensive.
> In a less-globalized and not hyperconnected world,
Again you sound like a politician who declares war on drugs, your ideas sound great on paper but the globalized genie is out now, its not going anywhere for a long time.
> Second, there is no limit on people.
You are getting confused again with your talking points, you are the one who is advocating for 150 people.
> I don't know what is so hard about it to understand.
and yet who are the one getting confused or "misspsoke"
The only thing I misspoke was that I said "over-generalize" when I meant "over-specialize". Everything else (I think) was okay.
> You want things to be less efficient and more expensive.
There is a difference between wanting things to be more expensive and accepting that this may happen as part of the trade-off being made. Specially so if the idea is that this type of policy could potentially eliminate the concentration of power on the hands of a few conglomerates and create an incentive for automation and to eliminate "bullshit jobs".
> I would love to buy things made locally but that is just not possible with your 150 people limit
Why? Go to any farmers market, is there any step on the production chain that requires 150 people? Do you think (e.g) a municipal ISP to serve 10-20k people can't be operated with less than 150 people? Can't we buy fabric and materials (from small scale producers) and have a small textile manufacturing co-op making clothes?
Also, consider that we are used to having products being completely assembled, but there is nothing stopping companies in a "human scale" economy to work as provider of components that get to be assembled by the final consumer. These components could be made by separate companies. So, instead of having "Google Assistant vs Amazon Echo vs Apple Siri", we would pick-and-choose different speakers, different software providers, different enclosures, etc. The hard work here would be one of coordination - i.e, all these companies and providers would benefit if they worked on a "AI speaker device" common standard - but once that is set in place it reduce the average company headcount. The same logic could be potentially applied to any big consumer industry: clothing, furniture, home appliances...
Finally, let's talk about the software industry. Take any big product from the big companies and you can bet that you can find a small ISV (with certainly less than 150 people) who can deliver and profitably operate an equivalent service. Even though Gmail and Outlook dominate the mass market, smaller email providers still exist and they haven't "ran out of money" and got bought out by the more successful ones. We don't need the big players to serve the population, we could have more of these ISVs acting independently (*). These ISVs would likely invest in opensource as a way to outsource as much as they can to keep their overhead low, which would lead to a even more pulverized industry.
> your ideas sound great on paper but the globalized genie is out now
Again, why? There is no magical force stopping us from preferring local products. There is nothing forcing us to consume indiscriminately. I get that "the system" is too big for any of us and that our individual actions will barely have any impact. But feeling apathetic is not a justification to just accept things as they are. You can not say "I would love to buy things locally" and blame "Capitalism" when you end up buying things at a big-box store.
(*) "Oh, but Gmail/Facebook/etc are free to the user, people won't be willing to pay for it!" Well, the argument could be that these people would either have to find a smaller provider willing to do the service for them (their employer, some non-commercial community, the tech savvy family member who wants to self-host?), or they would indeed have to learn about TANSTAAFL.
These "issues" only exist because of the scale and reach of Corporations. You can not fix "too big to fail" issues unless you stop letting these institutions to grow too big in the first place.
I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument of why we need to have organizations of such a large scale nowadays. Could you make a case of what we would be missing if we just "threw the whole thing out"?
I propose another option: unless you can show clear written instructions, the ceo and the board are personally criminally responsible for the acts of their agents, contractors, and employees at the course of their duty.
If your branch manager incorrectly adds your teller to an industry wide list of do not hire, the board and CEO are personally criminally responsible for it. No hiding behind the corporate veil. I don’t know how to prove whether someone acted in their own and not on the instructions of the employer though. What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees.
> What I’m afraid of is equifax will simply create many companies and divvy up it into equifax backend web services llc that has fewer than 150 employees.
I'd argue that if the split child company ends up only working for the parent, it is easier for the governments to prosecute them. So the child company would have to get other customers and act as a real independent unit or would have to shut down altogether and the parent company would have to go back to the market to find a proper "web service" provider.
I'd also argue that there is no way that a company like Equifax would be able to exist only with 150 people. The whole national level corporation would simply be broken down into many localized offices. Their databases would no longer be shared. The damage that each unit could make would be reduced, and their customers would be much closer to the managers responsible in ensuring that their data is managed properly.
In other words, my argument is that Capitalism and market forces do work. We just need to have these systems deployed in the correct scale.
Wouldn’t that result in the CEO and board being literal scapegoats, employed by the people actually in charge, to be beheaded if something goes wrong? They would even sell it as „giving control to the employees“ or something.
I don’t believe in measures to radically change the world. That’s both a direct example of the Chesterton fence, and applied game theory - CEOs, board members, or investors, they are all gamers. Give them any set of rules, they will analyse and subsequently game them.
Because scale breeds efficiencies. It should be obvious why WalMart is a better business model than the previous experience of shopping at 15 different stores to get the same stuff.
"Efficiency" is not a goal in itself, and it does not pass as an argument here.
1) Walmart may be a better "business model", but is it a better model for a society that we want to live? I surely don't want to live in a place where big box stores are the norm, and the only alternatives are crazy expensive "niche" stores. And I surely don't want to live in a world where the quality of my food is determined by Walmart's weight, who will favor products that can last longer, are cheaper to produce and are easier to store and transport - i.e, ultra processed crap. If the price to pay to have better groceries is the "inconvenience" that I will have to go to 2-3 separate shops, it's absolutely worth it and I'll gladly accept the "inefficiency".
2) Optimizing for efficiency is a recipe for systemic, catastrophic failures. Just as an example: think of the semi-weekly github outages that are happening. Everyone is convinced that the cost of paying for a SaaS is negligible compared to the cost of operating your own, so they don't even try to set up their own CI and code repository and have to pray everyday to make sure that will be able to work with it. Meanwhile, my self-hosted gitea/drone/docker repo has been running for almost 4 years already with no issues and it requires minimal maintenance. It took me some time initially to set things up in a way that I was satisfied, and it probably doesn't save me any money compared with a off-the-shelf solution, but thanks to my initial investment and willingness to accept these costs I am more resilient than any competitor.
3) Taken to an extreme, focusing on "efficiency" could be used to justify authoritarian governments and the most dystopian worlds. I really do not share this techno-utilitarian worldview that thinks that maximizing economic output can justify the existence of corporations that reduce us to nothing but consumers that can be placed in a segmented box. It's this worldview that is brought us Big Data, the invasion of our privacy, the "gamification" of everything, and so on. Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon may all be trillion-dollar companies and may have built incredible products, but the societal/environmental/civil cost is just too much to be worth it. If I knew in 2004 that by accepting the invite to 1GB of Gmail I would be contributing to the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, I'd never had done it.
That's a lot of text to just say you don't trust the government or corporations. This argument is orthogonal
Of course efficiency is the goal. Wouldn't you argue our current use of natural resources is unsustainable long term? The only way out of that is to improve efficiency.
Ignore Walmart. If we were to rollback farming to the methods used just a few decades ago, the world would starve. So, yes, we need to continue to improve efficiency. It's required due to resources being limited.
> The only way out of that is to improve efficiency.
Or by stopping/reducing consumption of things that we don´t really need and have been shoved on us by the corporations. Stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on getting rid of the disease. Let's get rid of fast food, fast fashion, let North America abandon the failed experiment that is called "Suburbia" and get rid of its car dependency. Let's stop expecting overnight shipping for whatever stupid gadget we want to buy, etc...
If the US reduces its consumption to the average of the developed world, instead of having growth-addicted Corporations and Goverments pushing to make the rest of the world consume like the average American, I can bet that we can improve our overall quality of life even on a smaller GDP per capita.
Also, even if you disagree with that: the argument is not against "improving efficiency". The argument is against optimizing for it while ignoring other costs and especially ignoring the fact that most of these optimizations have diminishing returns. E.g: airline travel is something that has been optimized beyond imagination, but it will never be as sustainable as an economic activity as traveling by train or boats. Between trying to "optimize" air travel even more, I'd rather we just decided to ban short haul flights altogether and reallocated our resources to the (re-)construction of decent rail roads and passenger boats.
What would someone break Google up into, ad and vertisements? If you look at their quarterly reports you'll see that they are almost entirely based around one product.
I haven't heard stories about bank's AI deciding to close a person's account, take all their life savings, and refuse any explanation, contact or cooperation. Maybe regulation has to do something with it?
1) There have been stories of N26 customers who are locked out of their accounts, or had their devices stolen and lost their funds to thieves and the bank refused to reverse the transaction.
2) No, regulation (or the lack of it) has nothing to do with it.
I'll buy that when the German auto makers get to pay properly for Dieselgate.
Until then, EU regulation will be just a demonstration that money and power still talks just like in the US, the only difference is that Europeans are better at fooling themselves about their moral superiority.
I fully agree that automakers should be held responsible. However, I am feeling a bit of negative sentiment here. What does 'properly' mean? There has been court cases that have been decided against them. Sure there is always more. But this sounds a bit like whatabotism. Also there is a high probability of defeat devices in Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, Ford and Honda cars as well. It is however true that the EU create a huge grey zone. But what does that mean in terms of court cases against cloud providers??
"Properly" means that the automakers should pay a fine per vehicle sold that was producing more emissions than allowed, and that fine should be so high as to effectively get them into bankruptcy. It should also put in jail anyone that was aware of the violation and did not report to the authorities. Everyone, from the CEO to the test engineer who knew about the cheating devices.
Anything less than that and all you are getting is an incentive for the make a risk calculation between profit and losses of being caught.
> Also there is a high probability of defeat devices in Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, Ford and Honda cars as well.
Which would be a sign that the regulations are not really working and consumers are just getting fooled into believing that their beloved EU is oh-so-awesome.
If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it.
> If the infraction was intentional and with the sole purpose of getting unfair competitive advantage in the market, yes, the company should be dissolved for it.
My memory may be hazy[1], but I don't think Dieselgate was ever proven intentional; your proposed policy wouldn't have kicked into effect anyway.
[1] So feel free to post links to the findings if you have them handy
The whole thing started because the EPA reported that the software that controlled fuel injection on diesel engines was intentionally programmed to detect if the car was running in special lab conditions. It's on the first paragraph of the wikipedia page[0].
I'm mostly with you in spirit but I'd stop at big fines and jailing the executives. Most of the employees are probably fine and someone better can take the helm without too much disruption to their work. Jailing executives might be enough on its own but the fine is useful as well, to pay compensation if nothing else.
Meanwhile, the prices in EU are overall higher even after sales tax included...
We could spend the whole day in this pointless display of "my dad is better than your dad", but can we just skip it please?
Having lived in the US and now living in Germany for over 9 years, I have no intention to leave. But this idea that "regulations" could fix the consumer hostility of Big tech is naive at best and damaging at worst. To assume that the differences between US and Europe are due to lack of regulations is a terrible mistake of reversing cause-and-effect. Cultural differences between and Europe can explain a lot better why things work different, while "regulations" assume that people are just automatons who can do nothing but follow orders established by some higher authority.
This is a non-sequitur. EU has shown plenty of effectiveness enforcing consumer-facing regulation especially in tech/internet.
Dieselgate is a case of corruption in Germany, a particularly horrific and embarrassing one sure. But the existence of corruption in a single member state is not sufficient to disregard EU-wide regulatory efforts in a broad swath of consumer-facing industries.
The point is that no matter how good they are at enforcing, they still can't manage to use the regulations to actually regulate behavior of the economic agents in a way that is beneficial to society.
"Strict emission laws" did not stop EU car makers to focus on ICE cars, it worked only to give consumers a false belief that their cars were not as clean as they believed. It's not regulation that is changing the industry, it is Tesla.
GDPR did not (and will not) stop big companies to collect and exploit user data.
"Right to repair" did not get the big manufacturers to stop producing devices that are consumer friendly and don't stop planned obsolescence.
Europeans have this stupid sense of moral superiority, but the people still buy from China, still look at cost above ethics and just use the "but our govt is strong" as an excuse to redeem themselves of personal responsibility.
Heavily regulated industries ANYWHERE in the world except the US work perfectly fine. Its because regulations are watered down in the US that they don't.
