Comment by zoomablemind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoomablemind | Hacker News Reader

It's obviously a rant-inspired introspection about a specific kind of organisations.

These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb.

It could be a niche product sold out to big orgs or other steady clients. It could be a subsidiary or some other steady org. Either way, there is no market pressure to really push such orgs to adapt.

Thus all this theater and moldy props. These orgs are not expected to improve, they will live, but required to demonstrate an effort.

This reminds me of some shitty restaurants or deserted "boutique" storefronts which stay in business for decades with no suply-demand explanation for such longevity. I guess, these may somehow have low operating costs and some strong funding source.

They’re still functioning per market principles, just like the Dodo bird was still functioning in an evolutionary environment!

It was just a particularly protected and ‘calm’ place. Which, unfortunately, made the Dodo bird very susceptible to an outside context problem/sudden upset. But it worked for a very long time!

> These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb.

All signs point to market principles leading directly to this kind of situation. It seems like markets produce ruthless competition but that's a rudimentary and naive extrapolation from the prediction.

Reality gives good evidence to a more sophisticated prediction: that, in times of non-scarcity, markets produce docile mediocrity, because everyone's goal is to keep their job and make enough money and status to survive, rather than to maximize their money or status, and mediocrity attains that.

Absolutely this.

People keep thinking about markets as some all-knowing relentless optimization machines. But they are just a bunch of distributed computing acting on extremely limited data trying to act over a completely chaotic environment.

Markets are neither all-knowing nor relentless. They are always extremely conservative and risk-adverse. That holds for times of crisis too, they just become a little bit less risk-adverse.

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