Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

Is there any profession where they aren't focused on staying employed?

In medicine and law, it is unethical and sometimes illegal to choose your course of action based on profitability against the needs of the client. Teaching has been traditionally been held to the same ethical standard.

And to their credit, a healthy chunk of those practitioners seem to hold true to their oaths. The swelling ranks of administrators “optimizing their productivity” for the shareholders, on the other hand…

You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

History says no...

You can literally just strike the words “state funded” from your sentence. If you don’t think companies function exactly this way, I’m not sure what to tell you.

And in a world where every competitor in a given market is owned by one of two or three megaconglomerates, “voting with your feet” stopped mattering long ago.

For one thing, very few markets are like that, and even then they face the threat of new entrants if they suck. e.g. the cab companies that got blown out by Uber. You are right that they fundamentally operate the same way as state funded entities, but having a revenue stream that is completely divorced from providing economic value allows the institution to keep its doors open at levels of rot 10x that which it takes to kill a megacorp.

Uber had to break a lot of laws and grease a lot of palms to do what they did and they still lose mountains of investor money every quarter (almost every? When they aren't liquidating regional divisions and calling those wins).

I don't think we want a system together where the way to make it work is to cheat and increase corruption. Maybe there are better examples of good ol' fashioned honest companies just plan ol' out competing entrenched incumbents without cheating or lying or hurting the public.

> You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

> History says no...

Aside from the obvious typos, I think that there is a crucial 'not' missing in the first sentence.

Also, why single out state funded systems? I don't believe that private enterprises have been a great model for provision of goods or services over self enrichment. (I now see that stouset said the same hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546268.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com