Fordlandia

Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his workforce?

To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department

Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children.

https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...

> In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles. People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning, then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also, back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit.

This is a great example of how you can't just transplant a culture and expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly.

The most enticing one to me was the story of how Cassava was saved from disaster in Africa. Somehow a certain mealybug crossed over from Cassavas native range in South America, and free from its one antagonists, it spread like wildfire and threatened the sustenance of millions. A few lone researchers tracked down the native habitat of the mealy bug in Peru, and identified a certain wasp that only prayed on that specific mealybug. They managed to introduce it Africa, thereby potentially saving millions from starvations.

Dunn’s case for crop diversity is all in all pretty compelling. I try to pitch it when I get the chance, because it deserves more attention!

What a load of. The privatization and capitalization of literally everything is crazy. I despise companies like Nestlé for trying to capitalize common goods like drinking water. This obsession on the one-dimensional metric of money makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album)

Also the enforcement of the 8-4 shift, despite workers being used to avoiding the hottest hours of the day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-h...

> Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived. Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped pests and blight spread.

> Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in Michigan.

This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation went something like this:

"You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?"

"We're disrupting parking."

"Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?"

"No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested in doing things the old way. We're disrupting parking!"

Today, he's the target of a critical article like this one. (There's more criticism of Winston Churchill on HN today, too.)

My theory is that the world has become so prosperous (at least parts of it) that people have no idea what's good and what's not any more.