aomurphy

The United States has a much more violent anti-Union history in comparison to most of Western Europe. Take a look at the Battle of Cold Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain In 1921. In Europe by the early 1900s most Western European countries had accepted that unions would have to be included somehow in the political landscape, the Socialist Parties in France and Germany, Labour in the UK. Plus, American Unions have a long history of being racially divided, lacking the ability to organize all of the workers in the way that say workers in Germany were able to as well.

From that history, American Unions have almost always believed that the government and the business owners were out to get them. Also, because the Southern American states have historically been the most anti-union, American corporations have had a much easier time moving from union friendly areas to anti-union areas then European companies.

So, overall union-business relationships in the USA are much much worse then in Germany. American businesses routinely make decisions solely to hurt unions (a good modern example is Boeing which is moving production from Washington to North Carolina, a large part of which is about weakening the union, even though this has made logistics harder), American unions think of management as the deadly enemy.

I think a model more like Germany's where Unions and Businesses tend to work together would be overall much better for both sides, but we're stuck in the current system. It's also not helped that now there is a strong political anti-union movement no matter what the situation (like when Volkswagen wanted to unionize their plant in Kentucky in order to practice business on a more German model local politicians and businesses were strongly opposed even though the actual managers wanted it).

So, I'm getting the sense this is related to Glushkov's work on pricing right? My understanding, please correct me if I am wrong, was to try and track all items and use computer systems to optimize production and pricing. Was that integral to the network he envisioned? Do you touch much on the various economic debates in the Soviet Academy at the time on how to run a non-market system, like Kantorovich's ideas?

Yes, and not only that, American streetcars had often gotten rights to build track from the city in return for responsibility to repair the streets the tracks were on. Which was a fine deal when there was only foot and horse traffic, but put them in an untenable situation when suddenly cars (which cause much more wear and tear on streets then people or horses) became popular.

I think that's one of the biggest problems on reddit: There's no way to remove moderators, and so subs can easily be subverted by having a small group of bad actors enter the mod team, or just having the mods get burnt out.

Also Minor thing: I think you guys are taking about r/Askhistorians, not r/Askhistory

It's an anagram and then he also "Russianized" it apparently, adding the -ff as what we now mostly transliterate as -ov.

Because there are contexts where bringing that up is appropriate and contexts where it isn't?

At a party: Appropriate. Support Channel for a Service: Not appropriate.

This sort of thing should never happen in a professional context.

Was it this one about Hofstader?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...

Partially because Murakami i very involved in the Japanese to English Translation. He cares a lot about translation, he's actually a very accomplished English to Japanese translator himself, he's translate F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote among others. Plus he has an excellent series of English translators, like Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. He's noted that he really learned to love novels by reading imported English language dime novels as a teenager in Kobe.

Yes, this exactly. The CCA grew out of a widespread moral panic about comic book content, and its effects on youth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent. Basically, after this, the once thriving comics industry in the USA was reduced to just superheroes as all other genres like romance, horror, detectives (there's a reason Batman was published in detective comics), science fiction, were considered too "dangerous." It's quite unfortunate.

There's other reasons of course as well - notably the rise of the collectors market, but the USA today is still overwhelmingly dominated by superheroes in the comics market.

Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now.

This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857

I thought this was going to be about pretending to be a larger company. For years my mom pretended to be my dad's secretary when people called his work number and he wasn't around, bringing the size of the company up 200%.

Yes, he is is in some ways a very tragic figure. As a kid I was always inspired by his absolute dedication to truth, no matter what he saw it as. He really has the most incredible life story, from the child of a one armed Russian-Jewish Anarchist and a German activist, to hiding in France during WWII from the Holocaust, to finding his way after the war in a very odd path to the heights of Mathematics. He really was an exceptional human being.

It's unfortunate his disillusionment led him to leave math completely, and slowly retreat out of society, and probably to develop the mental illness that dominated his later life. A while ago I found some of his writings from the post-math era online, I wonder if they're still around. Strange stuff, all about hermaphroditic angels and his personal beliefs?

We have lost a truly unique and incredible human being, but I'm not sure he would appreciate me saying that "we" lost anything.

I've seen this cited several time on HN recently, is there a better source for this? Sorry, I imagine a lot of this stuff is in Russian only, but I would love if you could give an article/book/post about this sort of thing.

The book where I read most of this from is Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower. It's a big book, and covers a lot about occupation, not just economics, but I found it engrossing and quite readable. It's a little out of date now, being 14 years old, but nothing really noticeable.

One of the most interesting things about Japanese business, is how much was built by New Dealers who came over in the occupation. Americans rebuilt the giant conglomerates, we reinforced the idea of life time employment (salarymen were very consciously modeled on American professionals of the 1950s and 1960s, then made Japanese), we insisted on tight government-corporation intervention in the economy to encourage growth and stability. People often try to make it sound like this ancient relic of Japanese culture, and it's really not. It's a weird fusion of Japanese thought and new Dealer technocratism, left to develop on it's own for decades.

Because there are benefits to this way of doing things, and not all of Japan is like this.

As the link points out being incredibly careful with practices, and really ensuring the quality of a product is exactly the right thing in many situations. When building, say, cars. Huge amounts of training, careful procedures, and lots of time with senior engineers to help is often very useful. Further while a lot of the sales stuff seems completely ridiculous, there is benefit in having very personal interactions and understanding. Again, look at the link to see why. Japanese corporations are actually very innovative in a lot of ways, and often build extraordinarily impressive products, if often ones that are hampered by terrible design.

Secondly, not all of Japan is like this. Japanese productivity is pretty weirdly bifurcated: For office work, Japan is terrible (well below the USA, Europe), for manufacturing Japan is world-class. Japanese companies build things really really well, with very few workers, quickly. They just can;t organize paperwork in any reasonable way.

Here's a link to a nice brief summary of this stuff by an economist in the US whose worked on Japan before: http://neojaponisme.com/2014/01/15/japanese-economic-mythbus...