Rationals (NTs)

[Misty]

Has anyone gotten more or less agreeable with age? I've learned that arguments don't really change people's minds.

Action counts for more in this world.

Actually.. it's 2 things.

Words + Action

When you're words line up like arrows with your actions.. then & only then do we have an honest chatacter to show for. Which should honestly be easy behaviour for honest beings.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

Actually.. it's 2 things.

Words + Action

When you're words line up like arrows with your actions.. then & only then do we have an honest chatacter to show for. Which should honestly be easy behaviour for honest beings.

 

[Misty]

 

[MoonFlier]

Problematic... because democracy in government is about consent (to be governed) rather than competence. If you wanted to design a system to choose the best statesman in the country, it wouldn't be democracy.

In business, the focus is more on competence/effectiveness in producing whatever good it happens to be. What value is democracy here?

Unless you're implying that the world of work is so intrinsic to our lives that tyranny here is indistinguishable from political tyranny, in which case you have a point.

Okay you, stop poking holes in my ideas for better elections. All I ask is that the president elects be tested to make sure they understand the basics of how the government works (and preferably our relationships with other countries) and to ensure they are not sociopaths. Humph.

 

[Pin]

Problematic... because democracy in government is about consent (to be governed) rather than competence. If you wanted to design a system to choose the best statesman in the country, it wouldn't be democracy.

I don't think competence and democracy are exclusive when the populace is an educated one. People want to be their best. If a democratic state intends to survive, it has an incentive to educate its people. Unless David Graeber is correct and the notion of a state is inherently opposed to democracy.

Then we're mega-fucked.

In business, the focus is more on competence/effectiveness in producing whatever good it happens to be. What value is democracy here?

Business isn't about selling the best product, it's simply about maximizing profits at the lowest possible cost.

If it were about creating the best possible product, determining that requires some input from as many people (experts and non-experts alike) as possible.

Unless you're implying that the world of work is so intrinsic to our lives that tyranny here is indistinguishable from political tyranny, in which case you have a point.

I think so, I am grateful to have found a professional niche for myself. My professional intent is to avoid purposeless tyranny as much as possible. I'd hate to work in some personally meaningless enterprise.

 

[John K]

Has anyone gotten more or less agreeable with age? I've learned that arguments don't really change people's minds.

Action counts for more in this world.

Depends what you mean by age. I’m less tolerant of fools now than I was in the past - but there’s a good deal of projection in there I suspect . I’ve found as I’ve got older that I’m less likely to agree with others who have strong views - usually because I have some sympathy with all sides of an argument. I’ve found that I have become a lot more conscious of the relatively of insight as I’ve aged. As a result I’ve become a lot more conscious of how much choice I have in my views and I’m a lot less inclined to believe something just because that’s where the herd is. On the other hand I’m less bothered by a lot of things - if I just don’t give much of a damn, I might well adopt the local herd view temporarily, but that’s Fe talking lol.

I learnt a lot about the ineffectiveness of argument when I became primary carer for my father who suffered from dementia for several years. Actions were definitely better than debate there all right. Some of the public political debates have the same eerie feeling of people shouting their views uselessly into a telephone that isn’t connected to anyone who’s listening.

On the other hand information is so important. I value communication of information very highly so I can adjust my views accordingly. I’m very resistant, though, to information that’s presented with the subterfuge of a political hard sell embedded deviously within it. A lot of climate change information is like that, and the embedded politics makes it near impossible to really understand what is actually happening.

 

[dragulagu]

Actually.. it's 2 things.

Words + Action

When you're words line up like arrows with your actions.. then & only then do we have an honest chatacter to show for. Which should honestly be easy behaviour for honest beings.

I'd agree for the most part, but actions can take much more time than words, as longs as these actions stay attuned with the words it's good. Words are easy to give, actions are not. So I would say rather state:
if your actions line up like arrows with your words..then & only then do we have an honest character to show for.

(yeah I'm being an arse here )

 

[John K]

Democracy! I love democracy!

Spoiler

I like the idea of democracy in two spheres: work and government. A big problem I've found is that the great majority of businesses are organized in a vertical top-down structure- structural tyrannies.

Could you clarify what you mean by democracy in business. Companies are all open systems so their stakeholders are very complex. For instance are you thinking that all of Apple’s customers should have a vote on how the company is run? I’d enjoy that .

In my 20s I worked for a nationalised steel company that was run by the democratically elected government of the day. It was a disaster because the managers could never take any decision that would lose votes for the government, so we couldn’t close down obsolete works - which left us competing with modern (at that time) reconstructed industries in Germany and Japan using 19th century technology in the U.K. All the other nationalised companies in the U.K. were the same - and they were starved of capital funding too because no one will vote to increase taxes for such purposes. Our rail network is only just recovering from this investment starvation decades on from the nationalisation days.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

In my 20s I worked for a nationalised steel company that was run by the democratically elected government of the day.

 

[John K]

Hahaha! Quite!

 

[Pin]

Could you clarify what you mean by democracy in business. Companies are all open systems so their stakeholders are very complex. For instance are you thinking that all of Apple’s customers should have a vote on how the company is run? I’d enjoy that .

In my 20s I worked for a nationalised steel company that was run by the democratically elected government of the day. It was a disaster because the managers could never take any decision that would lose votes for the government, so we couldn’t close down obsolete works - which left us competing with modern (at that time) reconstructed industries in Germany and Japan using 19th century technology in the U.K. All the other nationalised companies in the U.K. were the same - and they were starved of capital funding too because no one will vote to increase taxes for such purposes. Our rail network is only just recovering from this investment starvation decades on from the nationalisation days.

By democracy in business I mean that Apple's workers would perhaps have a vote on how the company is run, maybe for their managers, CEOs, etc.

 

[dragulagu]

By democracy in business I mean that Apple's workers would perhaps have a vote on how the company is run, maybe for their managers, CEOs, etc.

Wish that could work, but for a company like Apple with public stock this will not work as the one's that decide (the executive party) listen to the one's who hold the money (Stock holders) and these executive decisions are always heavily time constraint. Perhaps a rather more interesting way of democracy in companies like Apple is to have their employees have an open voice in the company (that would give the PR department a headache though ).

 

[Pin]

Wish that could work, but for a company like Apple with public stock this will not work as the one's that decide (the executive party) listen to the one's who hold the money (Stock holders) and these executive decisions are always heavily time constraint. Perhaps a rather more interesting way of democracy in companies like Apple is to have their employees have an open voice in the company (that would give the PR department a headache though ).

You don't think co-ops work?

 

[Reason]

You don't think co-ops work?

@Capitalism multiplayer support team, my co-op mode won't start, plz halp

 

[John K]

You don't think co-ops work?

I don't think employees get a real say in how to run any but the smallest coops. In the large ones few staff (or other stakeholders) could be arsed to find out about the alternative choices for positions that they don't fully understand. So the internal politics gets taken over by fringe groups with an external political angle who carve up the senior positions among themselves - Animal Farm kind of thing. It can work well - our John Lewis partnership in the UK is a bit like that; but our massive Coop conglomerate went pear shaped a few years ago when a bunch of dickheads were voted into senior positions by the tiny fraction of the total voting population who actually knew the candidates and were bothered about it - of course any idiot knows how to run a major banking subsidiary don't they lol. They nearly caused a financial crisis when the bank went all but bust. They managed to rescue most of the group but the bank and insurance businesses had to be sold off to rescuers in a most embarrassing crisis. I think where a cooperative can work really well is in small companies which really engage their staff and everyone knows everyone else and there are not many 9-5-and-forget-it-when-you-go-home staff - eg small medical practices, skilled workshops, small software houses all excel at this. I worked for an international pharma and I don't see how that could have been effectively run as a cooperative because the roles and functions are all highly differentiated, specialised and remote from each other both conceptually and geographically.

 

[dragulagu]

You don't think co-ops work?

@John K answered it perfectly.

 

[Pin]

I don't think employees get a real say in how to run any but the smallest coops. In the large ones few staff (or other stakeholders) could be arsed to find out about the alternative choices for positions that they don't fully understand. So the internal politics gets taken over by fringe groups with an external political angle who carve up the senior positions among themselves - Animal Farm kind of thing. It can work well - our John Lewis partnership in the UK is a bit like that; but our massive Coop conglomerate went pear shaped a few years ago when a bunch of dickheads were voted into senior positions by the tiny fraction of the total voting population who actually knew the candidates and were bothered about it - of course any idiot knows how to run a major banking subsidiary don't they lol. They nearly caused a financial crisis when the bank went all but bust. They managed to rescue most of the group but the bank and insurance businesses had to be sold off to rescuers in a most embarrassing crisis. I think where a cooperative can work really well is in small companies which really engage their staff and everyone knows everyone else and there are not many 9-5-and-forget-it-when-you-go-home staff - eg small medical practices, skilled workshops, small software houses all excel at this. I worked for an international pharma and I don't see how that could have been effectively run as a cooperative because the roles and functions are all highly differentiated, specialised and remote from each other both conceptually and geographically.

Scale is something to keep in mind, if only democracy at work were an easier problem to solve. I'm going to address your experience with nationalization when I get a second wind.

 

[Deleted member 16771]

You don't think co-ops work?

Co-ops can and do work, but they are disincentivized to run lean payrolls, for obvious reasons, so I think they're typically going to be at a competitive disadvantage most of the time. There are loads of dimensions to this question, but I didn't post to address them.

Instead I just wondered if one day wage-labour might be viewed as barbaric as we view slavery, and therefore that the only barometer of success ought not to be that of economic efficiency. I want to draw your attention to an infamous work of economic history by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman called Time on the Cross. Here they argued that the institution of slavery in the South was actually really lucrative and pretty productive. There's disagreement, of course, but you might notice that modern corporations don't get to keep slaves (at least not de jure ones) - purely political changes to the economy are possible, it just depends on the amount of will.

 

[dragulagu]

Instead I just wondered if one day wage-labour might be viewed as barbaric as we view slavery, and therefore that the only barometer of success ought not to be that of economic efficiency. I want to draw your attention to an infamous work of economic history by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman called Time on the Cross. Here they argued that the institution of slavery in the South was actually really lucrative and pretty productive. There's disagreement, of course, but you might notice that modern corporations don't get to keep slaves (at least not de jure ones) - purely political changes to the economy are possible, it just depends on the amount of will.

One day wage-labour is modern slavery. There's no guarantee/incentive in a stable income for you as an employee, let alone proper social protection. The contract is empowering towards the employer.

 

[Pin]

The. Show. Must. Go. On.