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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

This is a common response to critiques of capitalism: "well, why don't you tweak some of the parameters of capitalism so it results in the system you want instead" forgetting that maybe capitalism is incapable of producing something better according to the critics, and they are convinced we need to get rid of it entirely!

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it's also pretty common for naïve developers, when faced with maintaining an antiquated codebase, to advocate for tearing the whole thing out and replacing it with something new and unproven. how often is this the correct decision? well, take that logic and scale it to something the size of the economy of the United States—still think it's a good idea?

I think it was Boeing who actually worked this out at some point in the '70s or '80s: when you need to make changes to more than X % of the software, you're better off rewriting it from scratch. I don't remember what the X was, and I can't find the reference right now, but I want to think it was somewhere in the span of 30–60 %.

So, there really is a Ripley Threshold, a point at which it's better to just take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?

I'd also be interested as to what parameters could possibly be tweaked such that capitalism would find it unprofitable to commodify food or at the very least more profitable to distribute it to those who can't afford it. Massive state and international intervention might be able to do it but this isn't the kind of thing we could fix with minor tax incentives and penalties.

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