The gaming community instead informs them as one voice that this is a massive breach of trust they will never forget, and that is if it is reversed. The most recent other examples involve Wizards of the Coast, which has done this multiple times.
If a company can do something multiple times, it seems like the community either forgets, or that their bad memories have little impact on their actual behavior.
This is one of the most underappreciated moves out there – find someone who is creating something you love and want to have a bigger impact on the world, and pay them what they need to be able to focus on it.
The traditional alternatives I can think of are starting a non-profit and asking for donations, or making a Kickstarter project. They both seem to be less effective, because the have significant overhead and risk. (In case of a non-profit, you need to do all the related paperwork. In case of Kickstarter, you need to follow their rules: define a specific product, make a promotional video, etc.) And after you deal with the overhead, it may turn out that no money comes your way, or maybe even worse, a little money comes at the beginning, so you quit your boring job that paid your bills, and then it all fizzles out. One problem is that people often hate risk. Another problem is that the right person to do X (the thing you want them to do) may be quite bad at doing paperwork or self-promotion, so the project fails for reasons unrelated to doing X well.
Compared to that, if there is someone competent who cares about X, and you just give them the money with almost no strings attached (just some minimal evidence that they are actually working on X), they can 100% focus on doing X. They will probably be more productive than an average employee, and they will definitely be much cheaper—because usually one employee is not enough; you also need to pay for the office, and you need to hire managers; if they are only doing it for money, the salary needs to be competitive; people quit anyway so you keep losing tacit knowledge and training their replacements. Here you just spend some money and that’s it.
they could often make huge profits by firing a bunch of worthless unnecessary staff and have the remaining engineers do things that make you money, or otherwise run a sensible business? (...) Or perhaps it is one of those cases where the people who can pull off the takeover part are not also capable of understanding how to run the company.
I wonder whether companies even know who is necessary and who is not. In the software companies (the case I am most familiar with), non-technical managers often don’t have a clue about what exactly happens and why, and even technical managers’ knowledge gradually becomes obsolete. Add several maze layers on top of that. If you start firing people, it will probably be managers making the decision, and they will probably choose to fire the people at the bottom of the pyramid rather than the ones close to them (which is almost the opposite of what you’d do if you tried to get rid of unnecessary staff). People from the new company can ignore the loyalties of the old management, but they have even less knowledge about how things actually work at the bottom.
So I would expect that people will be fired more or less randomly. So I would update my CV and start looking for a new job. (Unfortunately for the new company, this would happen even if they had a 100% sure method to figure out who is necessary and who is not—as an employee I have no reason to believe that they do.) This would start a chain reaction: people often stay at jobs because they made friends there, so the more people leave, the less reason their remaining colleagues have to stay. By the way, even people who are not very productive can be popular, so the chain reaction may start even if you detect and fire them correctly.
Generally, a major change means unpredictability. People are often risk averse, so they stay at the old job even if they have a potentially better job offer elsewhere. But if you announce dramatic changes, then staying also feels like a risk, so you might take that job offer coming with a 10% salary increase that you would have ignored in normal circumstances.
US manufacturers only wanted to do 1-2 pieces of the process – forging but not machining, machining but not heat treat, heat treat but not packaging. Taiwanese manufacturers offered to print my business cards. The general attitude I experienced with US manufacturers was that I was lucky that they were considering taking me as a customer.
Possible business opportunity? Make a company that offers all parts of the process, and then outsources them to the existing manufacturers, generally choosing the cheapest one that still does that one part well. Your services would be a little more expensive than ordering all parts separately, but also more convenient. (Generally, do this for every industry that has a similar problem. Become the most convenient seller of everything. Take over the economy. Convert the universe to paperclips… I mean utilons; green paper utilons.)
So that seems like all the lonely people, where do they all come from? Tomas suggests it is because they want it that way.
Narrative violation: in developed countries, the more ppl live alone, the less lonely they say they are.
Well, “lonely” and “alone” isn’t the same thing. In one direction, you can be alone without thinking about it; that would be “alone” without “lonely”. In another direction, you can be with people you don’t like (or maybe with people who ignore you despite the physical proximity) and you would prefer to be with the people you like; that would be “lonely” without “alone”.
The author mentions the first option, but I think the second one is also important. For example, if you live alone (read: without parents), you can more frequently have a party and invite your friends (i.e. feel less lonely). Living alone is not a problem, unless something else is a problem—for example your friends living far away from you.
Generally I hate this kind of “revealed preferences” explanations, because they are often a just-world fallacy under a different name. (As a most obvious example, the according to the logic of revealed preferences, the strongest human preference is to die. I mean, people may talk about wanting to live, but the fact that 100% of them die anyway is a solid proof of their hypocrisy, right?) In real world, the reason people choose something other than what they say they want is that the thing they want became too expensive or otherwise unavailable. Like, you may prefer apples to oranges, but if the price of the apples increases to $1000 a piece, and the price of oranges remains $1 a piece, you will probably eat oranges most of the time. Perhaps similar logic applies to people being alone, and the costs of socializing have somehow increased compared to the past.
Customers who seek out discounts are often highly toxic. They are frequently there to get away with something, to game the system, and will not hesitate to complain or impose massive costs on you.
Sometimes I sell things I don’t need using an online bazaar, where you post a photo of the object, a description, a price, and a contact phone number; and then the buyers call you and you arrange the trade. The prices there are usually very cheap. Despite that, many people have the unpleasant experience that they e.g. offer to sell something for €20 (something that might cost €100 in a shop if it was new), the buyer calls them, they agree on the time to meet… and then the buyer comes and says something like “oops, I only have €10 with me, would that be okay?” or even starts begging them to just give them the object for free. This happens quite often, and is obviously intentional, because the price is clearly listed on the web, next to your phone number. The FAQ on the page even mentions this explicitly and asks people to always say “no”, to discourage this behavior.
If a company can do something multiple times, it seems like the community either forgets, or that their bad memories have little impact on their actual behavior.
The traditional alternatives I can think of are starting a non-profit and asking for donations, or making a Kickstarter project. They both seem to be less effective, because the have significant overhead and risk. (In case of a non-profit, you need to do all the related paperwork. In case of Kickstarter, you need to follow their rules: define a specific product, make a promotional video, etc.) And after you deal with the overhead, it may turn out that no money comes your way, or maybe even worse, a little money comes at the beginning, so you quit your boring job that paid your bills, and then it all fizzles out. One problem is that people often hate risk. Another problem is that the right person to do X (the thing you want them to do) may be quite bad at doing paperwork or self-promotion, so the project fails for reasons unrelated to doing X well.
Compared to that, if there is someone competent who cares about X, and you just give them the money with almost no strings attached (just some minimal evidence that they are actually working on X), they can 100% focus on doing X. They will probably be more productive than an average employee, and they will definitely be much cheaper—because usually one employee is not enough; you also need to pay for the office, and you need to hire managers; if they are only doing it for money, the salary needs to be competitive; people quit anyway so you keep losing tacit knowledge and training their replacements. Here you just spend some money and that’s it.
I wonder whether companies even know who is necessary and who is not. In the software companies (the case I am most familiar with), non-technical managers often don’t have a clue about what exactly happens and why, and even technical managers’ knowledge gradually becomes obsolete. Add several maze layers on top of that. If you start firing people, it will probably be managers making the decision, and they will probably choose to fire the people at the bottom of the pyramid rather than the ones close to them (which is almost the opposite of what you’d do if you tried to get rid of unnecessary staff). People from the new company can ignore the loyalties of the old management, but they have even less knowledge about how things actually work at the bottom.
So I would expect that people will be fired more or less randomly. So I would update my CV and start looking for a new job. (Unfortunately for the new company, this would happen even if they had a 100% sure method to figure out who is necessary and who is not—as an employee I have no reason to believe that they do.) This would start a chain reaction: people often stay at jobs because they made friends there, so the more people leave, the less reason their remaining colleagues have to stay. By the way, even people who are not very productive can be popular, so the chain reaction may start even if you detect and fire them correctly.
Generally, a major change means unpredictability. People are often risk averse, so they stay at the old job even if they have a potentially better job offer elsewhere. But if you announce dramatic changes, then staying also feels like a risk, so you might take that job offer coming with a 10% salary increase that you would have ignored in normal circumstances.
Possible business opportunity? Make a company that offers all parts of the process, and then outsources them to the existing manufacturers, generally choosing the cheapest one that still does that one part well. Your services would be a little more expensive than ordering all parts separately, but also more convenient. (Generally, do this for every industry that has a similar problem. Become the most convenient seller of everything. Take over the economy. Convert the universe to paperclips… I mean utilons; green paper utilons.)
Well, “lonely” and “alone” isn’t the same thing. In one direction, you can be alone without thinking about it; that would be “alone” without “lonely”. In another direction, you can be with people you don’t like (or maybe with people who ignore you despite the physical proximity) and you would prefer to be with the people you like; that would be “lonely” without “alone”.
The author mentions the first option, but I think the second one is also important. For example, if you live alone (read: without parents), you can more frequently have a party and invite your friends (i.e. feel less lonely). Living alone is not a problem, unless something else is a problem—for example your friends living far away from you.
Generally I hate this kind of “revealed preferences” explanations, because they are often a just-world fallacy under a different name. (As a most obvious example, the according to the logic of revealed preferences, the strongest human preference is to die. I mean, people may talk about wanting to live, but the fact that 100% of them die anyway is a solid proof of their hypocrisy, right?) In real world, the reason people choose something other than what they say they want is that the thing they want became too expensive or otherwise unavailable. Like, you may prefer apples to oranges, but if the price of the apples increases to $1000 a piece, and the price of oranges remains $1 a piece, you will probably eat oranges most of the time. Perhaps similar logic applies to people being alone, and the costs of socializing have somehow increased compared to the past.
Sometimes I sell things I don’t need using an online bazaar, where you post a photo of the object, a description, a price, and a contact phone number; and then the buyers call you and you arrange the trade. The prices there are usually very cheap. Despite that, many people have the unpleasant experience that they e.g. offer to sell something for €20 (something that might cost €100 in a shop if it was new), the buyer calls them, they agree on the time to meet… and then the buyer comes and says something like “oops, I only have €10 with me, would that be okay?” or even starts begging them to just give them the object for free. This happens quite often, and is obviously intentional, because the price is clearly listed on the web, next to your phone number. The FAQ on the page even mentions this explicitly and asks people to always say “no”, to discourage this behavior.