I am your co-creator, not your competitor
lookback.io
lookback.io
We're always taught that competition brings out the best, and sometimes that's true. Sometimes you get parties in the same space improving in ways to one-up each other and put out a superior product. But sometimes you get Susan G. Komen trying to trademark the pink ribbon.
On the other hand, if you're selling a commodity (e.g. gasoline), then it's pretty hard to say that the guy across the street isn't competition. Perhaps there's a spectrum of appropriateness for cooperation/competition between these two extremes?
It may be morally correct for the apple seller to embrace the new apple seller, and call him a "co-creator". But how will these good feelings will last when his competitor discovers a way to get much higher yields of apples, and drives the price down? Or less ethically (but certainly permitted) would be for a well-healed seller to price dump a little, and try to get the competition out of the market.
The only thing that allows two competitors to happily co-exist is scarcity. If there is huge demand that cannot be satisfied, by both producers together, then these maneuvers just aren't possible, because people will continue to buy from both sellers at any price. This is a luxurious place to be in business. Perhaps that is where we are in the software field, in 2014: a huge demand for new software, with so few people able to actually make the stuff, makes us one big happy family. But when the demand decreases, or the supply of software-makers increases, it will be difficult to maintain this attitude of cooperation.
An important quote from that "the abundance mentality arises from having a high self-worth and security and leads to the sharing of profits, recognition and responsibility".
That point is a bit hard to apply in real world due to the general nature of our inner self or the circles we are exposed to.
Anyway, there's something to do this sentiment, but people often are actually more productive when collaborating than when reinventing the wheel over and over. And splitting up attention between a bunch of projects isn't healthy in and of itself. It's just that it's also true that competition has many benefits. But it's complicated.
The downside is that if you don't have JS, you can't do much. In our case it was a price we decided to pay.
Nice to think everybody will play nice, and in some imaginary world that might happen. But here, its important to keep looking out for number one.
once people start figuring out that public image matters more than anything else, and that the public likes helpful people more than they like assholes, i think this will change.
From Dick Cheney, to Maury Povich, to apparently every university business program, to popular sports, the entire Western cultural environment has been oriented around treating personal endeavors as zero-sum games. There is a thing called winning, only one person/group can win, and it better not be the other guy who gets it.
For generations, at least since the Gilded Age, cooperation and commmunitarianism has been subsumed under individual success. Where do you see people figuring out that things should (or even could) change from this entrenched state of affairs? Are you saying we need a cultural revolution? Because that wasn't very fun for the little guy the last few times it occurred.
UPDATE: Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354012
If that was true we would have thousands of ISPs, Office suites, etc. With way better technology and what not.
But they are all looking for ways to lock out their competition instead of making a better product. So I'm not sure the competition is what pushes us towards.
Historically speaking, there is some degree of success to be had in convincing others to adopt this position, though, so that others can exploit them. Capitalism is at least being honest, unlike the systems that lie to you about how you can adopt this strategy. I often think that a great deal of what people don't like about capitalism is precisely that it is generally being honest and not telling you glittering, appealing lies.
Much of the criticism (but not all!) of capitalism boils down to people shooting the messenger. It is a rough world out there and you do need to find some way to compete, but some people would rather hear from people singing about how if you just give them all the power, their philosophy will erase that from the world and you can just go to sleep peacefully and stop worrying. Unfortunately, this is also a lie, or at least that's what the history shows.
Nor does this mean that we are somehow obligated to "maximize" brutality or something stupid. It means that by facing it squarely, we are better able to deal with it, and that's why the capitalistic countries of the world are far better places to be than the places that reject it. It may not be perfect, but by aligning oneself with the true nature of the world you end up producing enough excess wealth to be able to seriously engage in social programs. It's OK to wish it weren't this way... it's not so OK to think that if we just close our eyes and wish hard enough we can make the problem unexist. That leads to actions that leave you vulnerable and exposed. Facing the truth is part of the path to changing it; denial often just makes it far worse.
EDIT: It is a rough world out there and you do need to find some way to compete
That survival depends on competition is a religious tenet, an ideological rationalization.
It is a wonderful thing that humans cooperate enough that we can build enough wealth that some of us, even many of us, can forget this... but the fact that the human strategy is ultimately one of great cooperation doesn't change the fact that the human cooperation lives on a substrate of vicious, no-holds-barred competition, induced by the physics of how this universe works.
Realizing the world is built on competition is not what breeds viciousness... it is what lets us successfully build the secondary layer on top that shields us from it. Those philosophies that try to take a shortcut and declare that the world is not a competitive place have the paradoxical effect of exposing us all the more directly to the raw competition again, because it causes people to build structures that, in their denial of the nature of reality, therefore fail to insulate us against it.
The first step to solving a problem is ever and always clearly identify the problem, not refuse to see the problem.
Long story short, if you're talking about a secondary layer over anarchic brutality, I'm talking about tertiary-and-beyond ones. Obviously this is no natural law, much less than your secondary layer. And I never said that competition breeds viciousness, but if you want to argue that point, I'll take the position that your secondary layer has not eliminated it.
The first step to figuring out if you've identified a problem properly is to figure out whether you are soaking in it.
I'm actually the first to say that A: it's all energy and atoms in the end and B: the universe is awash with both and it's mostly our own stubborness that prevents us from claiming both since we don't "like" nuclear. However, even a Kardeshev Type III civilization will have to contend with the fact that its resources are finite, and as rapidly as its ability to exploit them grows, its desires are likely to grow even faster.
It's not capitalism that causes that, either... a great deal of our desires expanding faster than our resources predates the entire concept, and the problem will likely outlast it as well.
There is nothing wrong with desire, in fact desire is good. There is problem with non-sustainable practices that damage the environment which includes people.
What you're stating as an issue comes down to management, resource management and people management. Capitalism has played a role in allowing us to see what is possible when we allow people to pool large amounts of resources, when people's efforts can be directed towards a specific goal - incentivized by the organization's leadership to aim for profits. Money is a concept which is important to remember when we're talking in theoretical terms. Money is time, time is money. What can we do with unlimited money?
In this style: ".main-content#blog article:after, .main-content #blog article:after", just delete the position: absolute line (not sure where that is in your css file as yours is concatenated/minified in your theme).
As always, it's about a healthy balance :)
It's seen time and time again that having multiple drug categories in a concept (say SSRI, proton pump inhibitor, etc.) validates the concept and encourages the sale of those drugs.
I've seen similar with red on Youtube, but I just assumed it was a google perk for running on google chrome.
> The final outcome might also be better if we do it ourselves rather than give everything away.
Yeah, that pretty much allows for negating everything above.
The problem is that the philistines can't motivate themselves to do anything without a competitive frame. They just fall into pointless favor-trading and rent-seeking. They see creation for its own sake as self-indulgent, manic, pointless, or (gasp!) effeminate. The result is that motivations like "build cool shit" or "help people" are cast as reckless and irresponsible, vision goes away, and reliable mediocrity becomes the new game of the day. With competing to excel rendered impossible, people compete instead to suffer in pointless social competitions that have a flavor of reality TV.
There's this negative stereotype that engineers "don't want to concern themselves with the business", and that they'd rather shut themselves away in an ivory tower and build "cool" stuff that no one cares about. That's not true at all! However, they refuse (often passively, because to be active in it leads to professional adversity) to subordinate themselves to the business, especially when the business seems to have no vision, no real purpose for existing, and a cost-cutting mentality that squashes excellence.
Often, the only way to get the MBA-culture philistines to do the right thing (and let the creative geniuses shine) is to create a sense of competition and existential crisis. "We have to crush Facebook before they crush us. We need this autonomy for our best people." Meanwhile, Facebook doesn't give a damn about "crushing" anyone. The problem is that the people who are the best at creating a sense of existential crisis are the ones who excel at artificial scarcity and its theater-- psychopaths. The long-term consequences of this competitive mentality (often the only alternative to executive, rent-seeking complacency) are horrible.
I'd love to see the excellence mentality become more common. You're starting to see it in open allocation cultures like Valve. We need a million times more of that because, you're right, OP, we're not in competition. We're just trying to fucking live well. No one has to lose.