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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

scale. big companies set up basically mechanical processes that remove or reduce variance from human decision making, not just in recruiting but also their software dev, marketing, factory assembly lines, this is how scale works. a side effect of increased process is you can no longer achieve outlier results but the average result is predictable. and predictable results (predictable revenue) is precisely what big companies want.

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I think this is actually a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company, including customers who have to integrate the heavy level of process into their usage, employees who have to deal with all the process but don't personally reap much of its benefits, competitors who are edged out by economies of scale more significantly than other competitive edges, and reactionary regulation to harms caused by all this that tend to create both more entry barriers for competitors and more process. Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone who isn't already wealthy enough to angel-invest (And probably those who are too, ultimately, although this does not bear out in the short term)

If you just want to tax success highly enough that the end result is the same as failure why not be explicit about it?

Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.

Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.

I’m sorry, did the parent edit their comment? I don’t see how you get “taxing success” out of this.

They want to punish people and companies for getting good at their jobs to such an extent that there are no rewards for doing something well. The argument is fully analogous to economic growth being bad and by reversal poverty being good.

> a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company

> Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone

That's not a fair reading. You're conflating success with scale, something the parent post explains has a fractal of unwanted externalities.

The only way we have ever discovered of widely making more of anything is scaling processes and organisations that work. If you punish scale you punish success. This is true for manufacturing, agriculture and education and those feed into everything.

economies of scale are why we are rich, imagine if you had to grow your own vegetables

Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence? You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even billions - of people that's meaningless to most of them?

You're right, since you grow your own vegetables the entire global economy doesn't make any sense and is stupid.

You chose the example, not me. Also, my contention isn't that the global economy doesn't make sense, of course it makes sense, otherwise it wouldn't be there. What I'm saying is that prioritizing economies of scale is good for the bottom line of companies that do it and generally bad for everyone else on long timescales

I didn't choose any example.

Dumb anecdote not replicated in the real world.

It's entirely possible that many people satisfy the claim "most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard".

But we can safely read advael's claim as stating "I don't eat very many vegetables", not "I produce enough food to feed myself".

I'm lucky to have a decently large yard in a decently arable part of the world. The garden in my home produces enough fresh vegetables for my (moderate) needs, but it certainly doesn't produce all the food I eat.

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