conatus

With regard to the economic calculation problem.

In the first instance Cockshott and Cottrell have demonstrated how with the computing technology of 1993 could create a system that allocated resources efficiently. It is now 2018 and computer technology is significantly more advanced and big data systems process more information at higher speeds than at any other time in human history.

Second large corporations such as Amazon function as hugely effective resource allocation mechanisms at the scale of states and further - internationally - but without using the free market within. Hayek even admits as such in his work that corporations internally operate by planning, he is just opposed to planning outside of corporations in the general economy.

Worth saying that the other argument commonly made for market efficiency, general equilibrium theory, rests of strange and blatantly untrue assumptions when compared to the real economic system. At least as an Austrian economist Mises had the good grace to start with more realistic assumptions!

> "Which can and always does a better job than central planning."

Does it though? At what? Resource allocation? It is hugely inefficient and wasteful. Is that the same free market bootstrapped into existence by the state and bailed out by the state periodically? (and I am no fan of the state)

Its important to note that when Corbyn talks about nationalisation he is talking about something more similar to this than top down state control.

There is a partial critique of the post-1945 wave of nationalisation in John McDonnell's speeches where he recognises that they were undemocratic and far too centralised and inefficient. There was a conference on this in London this year.

Like the mooted BDC is?

The whole piece does have a general hot air feeling to it...

There is an obvious model which can be for profit but bakes in user ownership and control: cooperatives.

There is plenty of work being done on this area in online spaces - the platform cooperative movement. I wonder if it a major failure of this movement in terms of visibility that this wasn't their go to model.

In the world outside of Macs how much would £2,699.00 get me and what would be worth getting? For development work.

Doubtless scrum can be imposed from above as a management tactic. This would open to more wider discussions about how power operates in workplaces.

I don't know if there is anything intrinsic to Scrum that makes this more common as imposition but there are certainly risks involved in it that can push a negative power dynamic that is certainly possible in any undemocratic workplace. I'd have to reflect on this a bit more before answering.

But in a couple of cases I've seen it was sought by the team "from below" to protect the quality of their work, make work more enjoyable and self-organised and basically work to more reasonable timescales. There is something to scrum being a toolbox you can use and having a brand. It means you can ask for a process and people know what you mean. Rather than say "I wish work was better".

Well all I can say is that I've seen multiple teams implement scrum and this improve overall team productivity, usefulness to the wider organisation and general happiness amongst all members of the team. I have no evidence to suggest that it was anything but adding the framework to the mix that caused these effects. And the more the processes were adhered to by the letter of the framework (i.e. all meetings were adhered to, stand ups were understood well etc), the better the results have been.

Of course one could argue that the improvements were the result of some other phenomena. But it certainly seems that the equation seems to have worked and turned teams around. Scrum wasn't in the mix before and now it is things are much improved.

By the way I'd in no way advocate a one-size fits all solution. Sometimes other techniques might be as effective or more effective. I'd not say you should agree another way is definitely better if your team is humming along. Why would I?

Seems you are shakey ground, without empirical justification, to say that in the majority of cases when applied scrum goes badly.

We are probably at the point of trading ancedotes, but I'd say in the majority of cases where I have seen it applied it has worked more than it has not. Even a poor implementation has yielded some benefits. And those pieces that have not worked there are reasons why.

Basically this.

If the ecosystem in which scrum (or any process) is embedded is hostile then it will fail. But so will everything else, in time.

Well, sure it stumbles into this fallacy but so does the roll out of any process involving humans that has a set of normative criteria with a given critique in hand. I always feel this fallacy is a weak response as norms can always be applied well or less well. This is what makes them norms.

I've seen it work very well. I've seen it work badly. Where it has worked badly it was because the process was not fully understood, badly implemented and not iterated upon. For reasons I can detail on reflection. These are explicable and fixable reasons that given the right company ecosystem and desire to honestly reflect upon them and fix them could have been fixed. A bad process tout court would never see highly effective result in some cases.

> Despite working in a a Scrum team, I recognise literally nothing of the problems that are described.

Same. This process takes work, requires buy in by all levels of the company and needs to be fully understood including its error cases. It takes time and requires course correct and attention. Its not easy but done right it is effective.

"no-one with the authority to balance the product owner and advocate for developing with higher quality"

In a functional scrum team everyone on the team should be empowered to advocate this. In turn the product owner should be receptive to technical improvement because it is in the interest ultimately of the overall project success.

Perhaps tangential but does anyone know if you can run Ableton Live on Linux using some emulation layer?

This is maybe the one piece of software keeping me from ditching Mac OS X.

OpenShift is really good.

The most important thing here seems to be "For every part of my code change, if I break the code, will a test fail?". Or as I'd put it "if you break the code deliberately does the test actually fail?".

Seen quite a few tests in my time that don't capture the functionality they think they are. They pass but wouldn't be able to tell if the underlying functionality they capture is genuinely broken. This is why I guess the standard practice is to go test red before you go test green.

Interesting piece, though I feel flawed in at least some pretty fundamental ways.

1. Humans have always been "merged" with technology. It is becoming more pervasive now, more powerful and to some extent more intimate, but it has always been the case. For example, the evolutionary advances of homo sapiens were in part a result of our ability to "out source" elements of digestion to cooking, enabling our intelligence to outstrip rival animals and hominids. Other examples: farming, writing, the printing press, telegraphs and so on.

2. For most of human existence humans have believed in forces superior to themselves, whose intelligence, power and strength out strip their own: whether God, gods or other metaphysical forces. Its amusing to me how theological tropes reappear in these writings with a high degree of regularity. Now one might argue that the difference is that AIs "really exist". But crucially the idea that humans have always considered themselves totally "top of the pile" seems radically false. It is at best a very limited notion in human society. Even modernity, increasingly secularised, was quick to assert that human mastery was at best an illusion, e.g. the psychoanalytic or Darwinian revolution.

3. The obsession with AI being the largest existential threat to the human species seems hubristic in the extreme given that a very current and very real threat is already here and it is often the most poor that are already feeling its effects: catastrophic climate change.

Is my career as a Webpack whisperer at an end?

cries tears of joy

;-)

I run a record label[1] and for our music that we think could have a broad appeal we are at pains to ensure there isn't too much of a instrumental intro for the reasons this article describes. It makes me a little sad that this is the case, but it is. We can watch the drop off stats after a long intro-ed song.

[1] Records On Ribs - http://recordsonribs.com

The OP is a bit misleading. At the New Statesman George Eaton is reporting that the vote will be "take or leave it". Important.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/11/david-davis...

I'm afraid with all due respect to the author, I have to concur.

"Right now, it isn’t clear that the advantages are significant" - so why invest the time in doing so? Why not use a tried and tested version until such times as you either need features from the newer version or some third party dependencies you absolutely need require it?

I agree. It is really unfortunate, especially for something that is trying to remove relationships of dominance.

Thanks for this - very interesting.

Also very interesting on the degrading reputation - glad you/they have thought about these issues a bit.

I'll add though I do think my concern of a quantitive fix to a qualitative and/or cultural problem still stands but will take a more informed view once I've looked at the white paper in detail.

Cheers.

Legally organised as a cooperative.

There are three categories of membership and a democratic process to move between each: 1. Members - formal cooperative members with legal responsibility. 2. Outlanders - people more dedicated to the cause who get benefits like first refusal on incoming work and so on. 3. Collaborators - the first stage. You work at Outlandish basically.

No status prevents you from participating in circles to make decisions, apart from the Outlanders circle (which is a meeting between members and Outlanders) and the members circle (an extraordinary circle when there have to be particularly big or legal or sensitive decisions made - most decisions are made between Outlanders and members).

The intention of the organisation is for everyone who wants to to be a member.

See above ^ - I work for one so can say with some truth here.

Yes they do have this problem but it confers several advantages: people are more bought into the work they are doing, they are happier, they understand decisions made about them, they work with more passion. Not all communicational efficiency makes people happier or more productive. Though it does take discernment and judgement when to not bother have a meeting and make a decision about something. You want to try and lower the problem you identify.

As far as I can tell Holocracy is basically a form of organisational design that doesn't depend on the blockchain for organisation.

Outlandish.com - :)

Interesting. In a sense we do get a stake in the company, which is a missing piece of the puzzle. The profits are put into a pot and you get a share equal to the days you worked. Then people can use an internal crowd funding platform (CoBudget) to decide where to invest this money, which could include "please give it all to me".

So I guess this is to some degree integrated into our digitally enabled but relatively analog model.

I work for a digital workers cooperative.

It is organised non-hierarchically and via consent (i.e. a modified and lighter form of consensus decision making that emphasises "I won't stop this" over "I 100% in agreement) - there is no voting but decisions still get made. Its called sociocracy[1].

Here is roughly how it works: 1. Someone brings in work, meeting clients etc. 2. They put together a proposal on this work, summoning together a team from people who are around who have the relevant skills from a pool of people in the company and surround networks. 3. This goes up on an internal jobs board called CoPitch[2] where everyone decides how much time they think they will spend on it, how much they want to be paid and so on. They say "I will do this for this much money to this time scale". 4. This passes through a few circles - business development, tech etc - to check it is reasonable. 5. Work goes out to client. 6. If client says yes the resourcing circle coordinates a time box to put those people on that particular job. 7. The work is done. People are paid out of the company what they signed up for. If it doesn't deliver or goes over budget then they have to say why or their pay is basically going to be what they said they would be paid.

Apart from the formal members of the cooperative, we are all free lancers.

I've not read the Colony paper in detail (but will) yet on the surface of it this sounds like some of what we do, but in software. In my experience all of this is moderately hard face to face when you are co-located. I treat this with high degrees of interest but a good dose of skepticism that this is a technical fix for an organisational problem that will, despite the software contracts, still have many of the hard organisational problems associated with this sort of thing.

As far as I can see it tries to tackle this to some extent automatically and quantitively with reputation systems and so on. However, off the bat it strikes me that there are going to be "off grid" problems (outside of the software and protocol) that occur that will require a more "cultural" fix that may be harder. We know from digital sociology that these reputational systems create their own hierarchies and imbalances in the system and I am wondering if Colony can prevent these in any way. As I say, open minded, but skeptical, having been doing something like this IRL for a year, eight months.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy [2] https://www.co-pitch.com/