Comment by hresvelgr
1 year ago
I think Mittelstand is perhaps misdirecting away from a more interesting conversation. Reading between the lines, this highlights an inherent bias in the majority of American companies to provide service to extract value as opposed to providing service for public benefit. Simply put, it's "move fast and break things" versus "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE."
If you want to dig deeper, this is a consequence of America beginning in recent history as a frontier settlement, primarily attracting aggressive, adventurous go-getters to make their fortune. Extracting for personal gain was baked into the culture from the beginning and is an artifact that has persisted to this day.
> "move fast and break things" versus "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE."
I think this is a great analogy to explain the issues to this crowd, although I think there's also a lot of people here who would happily break userspace. And it's successful in a financial sense.
It seems to me that all the America type Europeans already moved to America, and their departure only increased the cultural differences and made remaining more unbearable for the ones who were on the fence.
> "move fast and break things" versus "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE."
An alternative analogy is "binary search" versus "linear search".
With linear search you don't risk overshooting your target, and it's less chaotic, but you also don't progress nearly as quickly.
I wouldn't say that it is a good analogy, since both types of searches in no way change the array they are searching in. While tech products do change lives of their users. Maybe lossless|lossy would be a better analogy?
The state that changes is the location in the search space, in this analogy.
>Reading between the lines, this highlights an inherent bias in the majority of American companies to provide service to extract value as opposed to providing service for public benefit.
American businesses do the same thing businesses do anywhere: try to generate more valuable products and services than they consume. It really is as simple as that. No value is "extracted" when you sell bread for more than it cost to buy flour, yeast, water, labour, and space to work. The idea that it is "extractive" screams to me of the lump of labour/labour theory of value idea, which is not just wrong but incoherent. Maybe that is not what you meant, but it is common for communists to claim that "all profit is extracted from workers' labour" and similar silly rubbish.
You're glossing over the nuance. Selling bread for a profit is of course what any bread business will try to do. But only some bread businesses would be willing to increase profits by switching to cheaper ingredients, flimsier packaging, rushing production and lowering the quality of the bread.
This isn't about communism vs. capitalism. It's about Airbus culture vs. Boeing culture.
I'm taking about extracting value from consumers. Capitalism/communism is a straw man here. It's the attitudes that motivate product development.