[davee5]

I was part of this history, when I graduated in 2003 (marginal timing) I took a gig at Northrop in Sunnyvale. I grew up in Silicon Valley as the grandkid of folks who lived in orchards (long gone by the time I showed up) and between this not-that-secret history of SV and idolizing the Skunk Works as a kid, I was pretty sure that I needed to be in the military industrial complex when I grew up.

I consider it the nadir of my engineering career. I got to stare at an aging brown cubicle wall for 8 hours a day twiddling my thumbs, literally. I had joined a group of old timers (only) who had designed the Trident D5 submarine missile launcher 25 years earlier and had basically just been generating paperwork since. Along the way they had "cleverly" learned how to earn quarterly bonuses by just barely overspending their budgets, ~5% over, which then got renewed at whatever got spent. Over a few decades that's a lot of compound interest you gotta spend to get those bonuses, especially if you're doing absolutely nothing all day. You couldn't even read a book or check the net because it was a classified area and everything was locked down. Just you watching your life ebb away. The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

After George W. Bush realized that what he wanted was more tomahawks and fewer nukes, the military budget for strategic weapons was decimated. (If you're gonna blow up Afghans in caves you should mete our force more judiciously, don't just turn the Himalayas into irradiated slag.) I got called into the bosses office and told "davee5, our budget got cut and you're the newest guy here, so unfortunately this is your 30 days notice." I was mad I got laid-off, but later profoundly grateful to be shoved out the door. I ended up pivoting into consumer electronics, which was an excellent move (and has since provided another ~18 years of career).

I still have a pretty cool diagram of the [redacted] that I'm 90% sure was never classified and a Zip drive disk that I definitely should destroy, because it means nothing to me and I'm not sure if it would be a problem.

[WalterBright]

> The machine they created to burn cash was a paragon of government waste, it represented everything that's wrong with that industry and I hated it.

Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this.

Free markets, on the other hand, always have a corrective factor applied - people have to be willing to spend their own money to buy your product.

[ido]

    people have to be willing to spend their own money to 
    buy your product.

I would like to introduce you to the depressing world of Enterprise Software. Do you remember the old saying "nobody got fired for buying IBM"? Think about its origin & implications, all of which outlived the status IBM had at the time of that saying.

[WalterBright]

I remember those days. Those people got punished by accounting reality, and so IBM is just another vendor today.

Which is my point.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Those people were usually "punished" by being promoted. And IBM is just another vendor today because of decades of indescribably poor management.

Today we have the free market glories and hosannas of FAANG instead - until the next set of antitrust actions picks apart their zombie remains.

[watwut]

Except that those people did not got punished. Their careers went up just fine. Those people changed jobs to different companies long before any accounting reality happened.

And accounting reality did not happened to companies that were buying IBM, it happened to IBM. That is difference.

[WalterBright]

If a company promotes/hires people who make decisions deleterious to the company's financials, that company will be less profitable and the stock price will be less.

I.e. the market corrects for things.

[ido]

Eventually, sometimes. After billions have been spent/wasted. Companies the size (and with the cash cows) of Apple/Google/MS/etc can make atrocious decisions for decades before they go down.

[watwut]

First, that does not make those people punished. At best it make the company punished.

Second, it does not seem like those companies were punished in any measurable way.

[ido]

Oh those people didn't (all) get punished. And this is still happening all the time - huge companies waste an enormous amount of work & money. They can waste/mismanage for decades before the market punishes them (if at all).

Bureaucratic waste (and sometimes corruption) is absolutely rife at huge companies.

[WalterBright]

> Bureaucratic waste (and sometimes corruption) is absolutely rife at huge companies.

Yes. And this is why (despite common wisdom) companies do not grow until they take over the world. They grow until their bureaucratic waste chokes the life out of them, and get replaced by a smaller, nimbler company.

[noir_lord]

I think there is a meta system at work above whatever economic system you are at least claiming is in practice - humans game systems, if you give them rules they'll bend them up to and beyond the point of actually snapping.

It may be that capitalism works (for a given value of work) because it has more corrective pressure in the absence of other rules - I'd certainly agree with that I think.

That said I think the best (practical) system is social market capitalism, capitalism as a subservient tool to achieve societies as a whole goals which comes with it's own problems (the capitalists have the money and money corrupts) but seems fairer - somewhat like the nordic countries rather than crony capitalism.

Now if I could pick the system I live under and will it into existence, it would be this one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

I miss Iain M Banks like you miss a good friend you haven't seen for years and I never met him.

[ido]

Look into The Dispossessed[0] and Walkaway[1] for descriptions of (somewhat) utopian Anarcho-Syndicalism.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway

[noir_lord]

Thanks, checkout The Polity series by Neal Asher, he's the only one who had come close to matching Banks but in a slightly darker universe and he world builds like no-one else I've read, the Prador are a brilliant conception.

[zozbot234]

> Government operations always operate by fairly rigid bureaucratic rules, which can always be gamed like this.

It's not _just_ government operations, it's large bureaucracies in general. The main 'corrective' factor inherent in free markets is that organizations that waste too much money will eventually go bankrupt, hence they can't waste any more. Or if their inefficiencies are known, they can be reformed via mechanisms such as the takeover bid.

[specialist]

Which organizations don't have bureaucracy?

What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

[WalterBright]

> What would a military run on Freedom Markets™ principles look like?

It would look like the mercenary armies hired by the Italians in the middle ages. They rarely engaged in battle, but would maneuver until one had the advantage and the other would cede. They were very parsimonious with the lives of their soldiers.

Government conscript armies, on the other hand, tend to treat their soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bloodletting grows to incredible amounts.

[specialist]

Your example of parsimonious mercenaries reminds me to learn more about pirates (privateers).