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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

That's the majority of the people in the world. Not just Fortune 500 execs.

In spite of every thing, I do not believe its a majority. As with many things, it is the loud minority. We would not have progress, if your statement were true.

Progress happens when the incumbent interest is disrupted by something they couldn't see coming, or couldn't stop because of their own inertia.

When I think about this, I think about how Apple stole the music industry for awhile.

The RIAA was tossing lawsuits left and right to try to stem the tide of piracy. Companies tried to build up digital marketplaces, but the studios and labels owned the rights and didn't want to play ball. And most of the companies shot themselves in the foot by also not playing ball; after all, the RIAA was wrong, they were dinosaurs, they didn't understand tech and their demands were anachronistic nonsense.

Along came Apple, and they basically sat down with the RIAA and did nothing but play ball. Exclusive deals? Got it. Our best cryptography folks working on a cipher algorithm to keep your music "secure" on a device someone else owns? Yes, we'll tell you we can do that and invest time and money into making it plausibly true. A revenue-sharing agreement so lopsided it would make a used car salesman blush? Here's our vein; open us up and leave us with as much as you think we need.

And that lasted for a couple years. Then Apple unilaterally announced they were dropping the encryption. It was, after all, a pain in the ass for end-users.

And the RIAA screamed.

And Apple just stared them down and said "You killed all the alternatives. Where else but iTunes will you go? You can't even go back to CDs; customers liked digital so much they stopped buying them and the machines that play them."

And for a brief period, Apple became de-facto owners of music distribution overnight by simply giving the previous owners everything they thought they wanted.

The difference is that a VP at an F500 has significantly more resources at their command.

Firefly: “Half the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”

This is a pattern of behavior as old as time in politics and commerce and academics and relationships.

This type of person isn’t the majority, at least in my experience, but their minority is large enough that you reliably encounter them when you start working with large organizations.

Of course, we are subservient to and dependent on an economic system which both incentivizes and enforces this type of behavior.

Seems like you're making a swipe at capitalism, but this behavior is also rampant in socialist economies (e.g. was very widespread in the USSR), so I don't think the economic system is to blame.

Those two facts aren't mutually exclusive

Which two facts?

It's a problem of bureaucracy

Particularly career ladders. Without career ladders, people wouldn't feel like they're losing something if they didn't come up with the idea.

My personal feeling is they are overused, but I'm not entirely ready to say they shouldn't exist entirely.

The one thing socialism gives you that capitalism doesn't in this case is that you're guaranteed a job if you are made redundant whereas in a capitalist system, you're out of a job unless you made your own arrangements.

In state bureaucracies and very unionized workplaces people will be afraid to fix something, even if they can and they should to avoid extreme waste, because they are afraid that it would take the credit away from someone else.

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