
Employers are monitoring computers, toilet breaks, even emotions - pmoriarty
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/14/is-your-boss-secretly-or-not-so-secretly-watching-you
======
nimbius
Disclosure: im a "blue collar" automotive repair tech.

I cant understand why anyone would put up with a lot of this, but I can guess
its probably some smug "white collar" manager who thinks production or revenue
are down because people who didnt go to $college are inherently lazier than he
is. Putting the screws on the workers is always the easiest way to compensate
for bad decisions in the leadership change.

I worked in an old shop once that did an oil and air service for $59.99. We
got a ton of business from a local rental car place because their service pool
was under provisioned after their managers expanded the fleet. Now typically
when working on simple stuff like a packaged deal, I inspect other stuff. Your
brakes/brake lines and any leaks i might spot that seem dangerous. Those get
logged in your invoice with a $0.00 fee. Typically the rental place would send
the vehicle back for the additional service and a nice thank you box of donuts
for the crew.

Management started seeing these 0.00 fees and assumed we were giving away free
service because they didnt take the time to train on the computer system we
all have to use. So they dismantled the service deal and started charging
individually for everything, driving the cost up to close to $100. they also
eliminated the inspection line items. We lost the rental place, and we had to
spend 20 minutes hand writing issues we noticed on greasy post-its, which
makes the shop look cheap.

I eventually quit the place when they started putting cameras in the garage
bays "for safety" and changed our normal punch clock system to a fingerprint
system...not because i dont like biometrics, but because they dont work when
your hands are coated in 30 cars worth of grease and fluid. When the
timeclocks broke down, we were always accused of sabotage.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> thinks production or revenue are down because people who didnt go to
> $college are inherently lazier than he is.

"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of
pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.

There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:

1\. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs -
enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get
things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for
failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.

2\. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create
- your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about
lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give
them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.

Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my
life has never been better since I began working under the second.

~~~
jmcunningham
I think those 2 schools of thought exist, because those 2 types of employees
exist.

I've been a dev for 20 years now, and I've definitely had coworkers that fall
into both those categories you mention.

I'm new-ish to management now, but I'm working under the (hopeful/optimistic)
assumption that most people fall in the latter category. But I need to find a
style that can handle both types of employees.

~~~
cimmanom
To some degree, both categories can also co-exist in the same person.

Some people are self-motivated when crunching numbers on spreadsheets because
they find it satisfying but would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to
provide phone support -- and vice-versa.

And there are probably some jobs that it's more common to be self-motivated
for than others. Garbage collection? Data entry?

~~~
scarface74
Even development. I hate having to deal with project management software,
detailed estimations, estimating points, etc. I know some of the drudgery of
process is necessary, I just don't like it.

~~~
rjbwork
I don't mind the software. The estimates are asinine though.

------
EvanAnderson
Was I the only one who thought about Y.T's mother reading the bathroom tissue
memo in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" (quoting below)?

 _Y.T. 's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it.
The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her
end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M.,
she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time
spent reading this memo..._

 _Y.T. 's mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading
the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that
they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast,
to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the
memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals,
occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The
computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small
thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits
summary._

~~~
sireat
Going back to Gibson's Neuromancer 10 years before 'Snow Crash' is also eerie:

"He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the
Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man's right hand.

Was it authentic? If that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it
wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted
with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the
bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled
straight into a black clinic."

~~~
pjc50
"Cyber-" as in cyberpunk comes from cybernetics: _control systems_.

A key theme in cyberpunk is control and means of escaping or disrupting it.
Both of which might be physical violence, chemical (qv Case, or the
salaryman), informational, or psychological.

------
Rotdhizon
A majority of stuff mentioned in this article has to be outright illegal, if
not borderline illegal when talking about privacy concerns. To get past it,
they had to have put massive inclusions in their employee contracts and had
employees sign off their entire existence to the company. It should also be
noted that these happenings seem to all take place at sleazy, physical labor
intensive companies. This isn't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope.
I think the worst part is, is that these ideas are being created more and more
by higher ups in companies and government who see no moral wrong in their
plans. It doesn't affect them personally, but if it can be used in any way to
further control a peon employee, then it's good for productivity. Even though
it seems a bit like the article tries to defend this practice, there will
never be a day on society where this is considered alright.

At the end of the day though, this is happening mostly to disposable workers
who no on cares about. If one person complains about company overreach, well
they can be replaced within 5 minutes. This is more something that lower
income, down and out employees will have to worry about. This absolutely would
not be tolerated to catch on to any respected industries/sectors. That's to
not say physical labor workers aren't important, without them society would
fall apart. It's that no one in authority typically cares about that type of
worker and those employees concerns fall on deaf ears.

~~~
Silhouette
_This isn 't happening in any respectable sector I'd hope._

When a bigger company bought the smaller software company where I worked,
almost the first thing they tried to do was change all the contracts to
include things like universal IP claims and getting more visibility and
control over things people were doing away from the office.

This culture was becoming pervasive even a few years ago, and the arrogance
and contempt exhibited by the senior executive who came to tell us about it
was almost unbelievable. It felt like he watched Darth Vader's "I am altering
the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further" scene and thought it was an
instruction manual.

The only meaningful difference seems to be that since it was a software
business, a significant proportion of the developers essentially telling them
to shove their deal or we'd walk was powerful enough to put a stop to it.
Obviously people working in unskilled jobs where staff are fungible aren't so
lucky. We're supposed to have employment laws to protect people in vulnerable
positions like that from exploitation, but welcome to 2018 I guess.

~~~
DoubleGlazing
The Darth Vader quote rings true with me. I was working at a logistics firm in
its in-house dev team. There was a constant push to increase employee
tracking. Toilets were fitted with swipe card readers, we were encouraged to
"give time" to the company for free, and we came under huge pressure to
install various apps on our phones so that we were always "connected in" to
company operations. Some people accepted this, some refused. When there was
too much push-back management just implemented it anyways.

For example, I wrote the performance monitoring web application. Each
employees manager would rate them 1 (good) to 4 (bad) on 10 criteria (e.g.
punctuality, quality of work etc). The scores would be averaged and you'd end
up with a 1 to 4 rating. I was asked to change it so that an average score
greater than 2.2 would automatically become a 4 and also a manager could
arbitrarily lower the overall score if they wished. So someone getting a 1
average could be moved to a 4 if their manager felt like it. This formula was
baked in to everyone's employment contract, so legally the company would have
had to notify all staff and get their approval to make the change. I raised
ethical concerns but was told to implement it and not tell anyone, or risk
getting fired. I told people anyway, I knew I wasn't going to be working there
much longer.

------
BonesJustice
My employer recently started installing motion and heat sensors under
employees’ desks. They claim it is not for monitoring individuals, but for
analyzing workspace usage and identifying free desks.

Given that the company in question is a bank, and teams must often be
physically separated from each other for compliance and liability reasons, I
am highly dubious of that explanation. Only a handful of people outside my
immediate team can even access the floor where we’re located, and they
certainly couldn’t just plop down at an empty desk and start working. And yet
we have the sensors anyway.

And even if that _were_ the reason, the fact that they thought anyone would
believe it is concerning in itself.

~~~
XorNot
Watch out - you're about to receive a hot-desking initiative. See obviously
only 80% of the workforce is in the building at any given time, so you don't
really need to provision desk-space for all of them. There will definitely be
no on-going productivity issues from all the time people spend trying to find
somewhere to sit, or forcing people to setup their whole workspace every
single day they come in.

~~~
damontal
yep. happened at my workplace. we had offices and cubicles. had sensors
installed and now we are hot desking. many people don't like it and choose to
work from home... so they are installing sensors under the hot desks to figure
out how many of us are even coming in any more.

------
ravenstine
I know not everyone has the option to rebel against this kind of
totalitarianism at the workplace, but as a person without family obligations,
I'd sooner become a traveling hobo than work for a company that wants to
implant a chip under my skin or so much as monitor my toilet breaks. F* that.
My self-respect has no price tag.

~~~
mkirklions
We badge in/out. Which is supposed to be security, but the reality is that
they wanted to see everyone had an 8 hour workday.

I think it backfired because the amount of people coming in late/leaving early
hasnt gotten better. Tbh, fridays seem worse.

Now that we know we are tracked, people dont even hide it. Sub 40 hour weeks
are becoming norm.(assuming you dont have a major issue)

~~~
blacksmith_tb
That's interesting, in my office we badge in, but not out. I would have
thought that the need to evacuate the building would prevent locking the
exits? What happens if you leave your badge at your desk while visiting the
bathroom or kitchen and the fire alarm goes off?

~~~
mkirklions
During emergencies, all exits open.

~~~
ravenstine
I imagine the doors aren't locked from the inside out, and that keying-out is
a voluntary process? Otherwise, your workplace is a disaster waiting to
happen. All it's going to take is the fire detection system to fail, the
unlocking system to break, or the front-desk person to fall asleep on the job.
Or, worse yet, there's an active shooter and no time for someone else or some
thing to unlock the doors.

------
organicmultiloc
I once applied for a job that I thought was doing security engineering type
stuff, and that's what the posting certainly described, but in the interview
it quickly became a bait and switch, and they started explaining in detail
about how their product monitors employees network usage in detail and the
lengths they go through to make sure it is hidden on phones and workstations
so employees don't know.

Nobody who worked there seemed to have a problem with it. I ended the
interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company. Threats were
made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.

You can say no to making bad things. Even if you work at Google, you can say
no.

~~~
pinebox
> I ended the interview early which apparently infuriated much of the company.
> Threats were made, but thankfully I never heard from them again.

Wow. Most would be thrilled that an uninterested candidate is moving on
quickly rather than getting the job then immediately quitting or being
terminated (both of which are things I have seen).

Trying to _threaten_ a candidate into continuing an interview is just
psychotic.

~~~
organicmultiloc
Oh no they just threatened to "end my career" if I ever talked about the
interview or the company two days after I walked out. There are a lot of
dirtbags in tech.

------
mindcrime
I've been a "techie" as long as I can remember, and truly believe in the
potential of tech to make the world a better place. I put no stock in the AI
fear-mongering "summoning the demon" stuff, and harbor only modest concerns
about the long-term danger of "technological unemployment."

But this... this is the thing that gets me questioning if human nature is just
so broken that creating newer and better tech really is a net negative for the
world. This kind of story is the one thing that makes me want to wash my hands
of the whole lot of it, embrace anarcho-primitivism and go live in a shack in
the woods in Montana or something.

Depressing doesn't even start to describe this stuff.

------
baxtr
Holy... I’m pretty sure that most of these things are illegal in Germany.

In any case, my prediction is that once these things go mainstream, companies
with values that rely on trust as a core element of collaboration instead of
surveillance will gain an advantage in the job market. I hope I’m right

~~~
maxxxxx
My guess is that most people will happily (or not so happily) trade salary and
job stability for surveillance. Modern corporations are basically
authoritarian so the trend towards total surveillance will increase in my
view.

~~~
devoply
> job stability

i doubt it. surveillance means less stability as there are more reasons to
fire people.

~~~
droidist2
Or maybe more reasons not to fire? If you know someone's whole life maybe
you'll be more understanding. Or is that too optimistic?

~~~
sigkrieger
This assumes that somebody actually cares, if they do, they would know that
already by asking.

~~~
icebraining
That assumes they can trust the answer.

~~~
sigkrieger
This heavily depends on the environment and the culture of a company |
department. In my experience, managers that actually do care about their
employees tend to have much better results than the opposite.

------
dredmorbius
I'm increasingly of the view that increases in communications technology, at
the social scale, _undermine_ trust.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/)

Of course, Shoshana Zuboff beat me, and very nearly everyone else, to this in
the 1970s:

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-smart-
machine-t...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-smart-machine-the-
future-of-work-and-power/oclc/475660893)

(Her work began in the 1970s, though the book was published in 1984.)

Zuboff's laws:

1\. Everything that can be automated will be automated.

2\. Everything that can be informated will be informated.

3\. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control
will be used for surveillance and control.

------
svnsets
A company I used to work for once tried to measure the productivity of
developers by having a visible dashboard with each developer's amount of lines
of code written (or rather lines of code committed to our Git repo). Anyone
that knows anything about programming could tell you that quantity of code
means nothing in terms of productivity and likely will make the worst
programmers look best as a bad programmer will likely reinvent the wheel every
chance they get thus having more lines of code that a good programmer.

Also, this company would repeatedly under-scope projects, go over budget and
over the deadline in the design process, and then blame it all on developers
when the project was behind schedule and over budget.

------
nevatiaritika
My employer monitors tap in, tap out and break times too. It started with a
"good intention" from the HR and middle management started exploiting it in no
time.

Background:

There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was
starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We
always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the
timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that
in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically
entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked
for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and
overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.

What really happened:

While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8
hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the
new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to
all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being
sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1
hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00. When a colleague back
lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up
his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.

The work culture was never worse.

------
mrbill
I started out in the IT industry as the sole tech support guy for an ISP in
Oklahoma City in 1995. I eventually built it into a department of about 20
people answering phones and emails, then I eventually moved into sysadmin.

It was great when the goal was "solve the customer's problems and get them
online".

When they hired an official "Customer Support Manager", it started being all
about metrics and went downhill. "How many calls are you taking an hour" vs
"how many problems did you solve".

I hear that one of the large hosting providers here in town even does
screenshots of everyone's desktops every 30 seconds to a minute. That's
insane. My employer, on the other hand, doesn't care what you're doing in
another window as long as it's not illegal and you get your job done.

------
ravenstine
> “You may never want to be chipped but if you’re a millennial, you have no
> problems. They think it’s cool.”

If that's true to any appreciable degree, that really makes my generation the
biggest sellouts there ever were.

~~~
quasse
Luckily I've seen no evidence to support that claim other than the word of a
man trying to sell microchipping services.

If anything it's the people around me in their 40s and 50s who are most
cavalier about constantly sharing their location and activities with the world
ala Facebook checkins.

~~~
eertami
It’s rampant in the young as well, but they’re just doing it in circles you
aren’t a part of, on apps you don’t use or haven’t heard of.

------
Tloewald
Many years ago I was working on "electronic performance support" tools for
call center operators at a large retail financial services organization, and
someone proposed we install software on every worker's computer that measured
idle time, keystrokes, etc.

I was vehemently opposed to this on simple grounds -- we already measured
everything about the workers' performance that mattered to the organization's
bottom line (customer satisfaction, productivity, etc.) -- what did we care
_how_ they achieved their results? Measuring the wrong things is a total waste
of time and effort. It's a distraction.

Oh yeah, and it's hideous and creepy.

------
thinkingkong
Reminds me of this excellent short story called Manna[1]

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
clusmore
> In February, it was reported that Amazon had been granted patents for a
> wristband that ... could “read” their hand movements, buzzing or emitting a
> pulse to alert them when they were reaching for the wrong item.

Setting aside the privacy violations of the rest of the article, this part is
really depressing for me. I'm reminded of an episode of Mind Field [1] where
they steer live cockroaches through a mobile app by connecting a chip to its
antennae - the potential application being scouting of buildings, since it's
cheaper to use a live cockroach than build a tiny robot.

This to me feels like Amazon are working towards a fully robotic factory
worker - they have all the smarts done in software, but for now they need to
use a human for the body. Could you imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to
be the body of a robot?

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXNGvDdkXZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXNGvDdkXZE)
(YouTube Red subscription required, unfortunately)

------
glup
Besides the obvious ethical problems, I don't why companies are worried about
inducing stupid cognitive overhead with this. Employees will obviously change
their behavior in response, and that will require nontrivial mental energy.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
What cognitive overhead, exactly?

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon)

~~~
eeZah7Ux
...care to elaborate?

------
woodrowbarlow
this is tangential, but: the chips mentioned in the first section of the
article are simple RFID tags, similar to the chip a vet might implant in your
pet cat. they aren't GPS receivers, they aren't internet-connected, they don't
even have a battery. they just store a key which is insignificant without the
context of a larger system. i've seriously considering getting one of my own
(to pair with smart locks or my car's ignition). i'm very privacy-conscious
when it comes to technology, and people who know me are always shocked to hear
me express interest.

there's a lot of unwarranted FUD surrounding implantable RFID.

~~~
lostcolony
On that note though, while you up the convienence, you also lower the
security. Passive RFID can only broadcast a number; there's no compute to
adhere to any sort of security protocol that is resistant to replay attacks.
Meaning anyone with a reader that passes close enough to you will have the
keys to your house.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Passive RFID can only broadcast a number_

Nope, not anymore. Current UHF RFID tags are able to store enough charge from
the RF signal from the reader to have a half-duplex conversation with the
reader and do small amounts of computation. See
[https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-
iec:18000:-63:ed-2:v...](https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-
iec:18000:-63:ed-2:v1:en)

~~~
lostcolony
Cool! Has anyone shown that a subdermal sized RFID chip is able to adhere to
that? Further, does any RFID chip on the market have a real security story?
Ideally you'd have public/private key encryption with some programmability on
the part of both the readers and the chips themselves (so readers can be told
"here's the public key of ID#1234, so only trust that you've seen 1234 if you
get something decryptable with this key", so they can't be easily spoofed, and
RFID chips can be told "here's the public key of the reader(s) you should
respond to; anyone else ignore").

Until that happens, I just don't see it being secure.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Further, does any RFID chip on the market have a real security story?_

A few minutes of Googling would have told you that, yes, such things already
exist and have for a while. Slap one into a implantable tag and you're done.

------
ddtaylor
The disappointing part is that these practices can easily become standard.
It's a race to the bottom like sharing SSN numbers with employers, which
should have never been an acceptable practice, but people will "undercut" each
other.

------
zizek23
Every single business has associations, lobbies and industry groups.

The power of collective bargaining it seems is understood with clarity
everywhere in business. Except when it comes to labour suddenly the waters
become muddied.

Propaganda against organizing and unions remain at the level of one bad
restaurant or bank discrediting the entire idea of restaurants and banks and
people with IQ see this as credible. Yet without collective action it is
impossible to stop this kind of creep.

Capitalism and free markets is all about choice but working and a job is not a
choice for most people. Surviving is a compulsion not a choice. True choice
includes the choice not to do something which is where the economic power of
choice comes from.

If all companies in a race to the bottom adopt these practices what choice
does labour have and them being forced to accepting these conditions is
anything but meaningful 'choice'. It's coercion.

------
tomatotomato37
I don't understand why these articles always mention the ability of a company
to monitor what websites you're on as a new thing, considering that's
essentially been built in to the average network setup since the 80s; ditto
with working at home if you used a company laptop or VPNed in

------
denimnerd
my employer keylogs all computers and does sentiment analysis.

~~~
kaybe
If that's true, what do they do with that information?

~~~
dingo_bat
cat keylog_data_of_200k_employees > /dev/null

Seriously any company doing this is not competent enough to do any kind of
meaningful analysis on data of that scale.

------
rajeshpant
paranoia.

------
cproctor
Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956"
documents the process of imposing authoritarianism. Particularly important is
the combination of surveillance and the threat of violence. You can't have a
thug with a baton on every street corner, but with enough information, you can
credibly extend the threat of violence far beyond the number of thugs
available. The number of nodes in a tree grows much faster than its depth.

How should we compare this kind of upstream oppression--heading off free
expression, movement, association before they happen--with more localized
forms of assault? More concretely, what should we make of the software
developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building
these kinds of systems?

~~~
maxxxxx
I don't even want to consider how the world would look if Stalin or the Nazis
had had current technology. I think they would have succeeded.

~~~
notMick
There are a lot of people right now who want to stifle free speech. "Have a
different opinion, that's abuse - or a beating". While not restricted to
antifa, there seems lately a surge of "little Stalinists", who seem intent to
crush or silence any dissenting opinion.

In short, history repeats itself, and "experience is recognising a mistake the
second time you've made it."

~~~
XorNot
I like that "antifa" just gets sliced in there, ignoring that the phrase and
meaning is explicitly "anti-fascist", and it's only gained renewed visibility
because there are _actual_ fascists openly demonstrating and threatening
people in the US.

You've always had a right to free speech, you sure as hell have never had a
right not to be criticized for what you say.

~~~
mmt
> you sure as hell have never had a right not to be criticized for what you
> say.

I think that _this_ is insufficiently emphasized.

Personally, I think what's even more importantly forgotten and has led to the
rather ridiculous situation on college campuses[1] is that there is _no right
not to be offended_. I would even go so far as to say that such a right would
be the _opposite_ of freedom of speech.

[1] e.g. trigger warnings

~~~
XorNot
Trigger warnings are about not acting like a jackass to people. And the angry
response to those who cavaliery show a disregard for the feelings of others
are just as valid if you want to go down that path.

~~~
mmt
If I understand correctly, you're supporting my point.

Free speech is very much about allowing someone to act like a jackass (or
worse!) to people with words and ideas.

It doesn't protect those speakers from the repercussions.

Trigger warnings aren't repercussions, however. They're prior restraint, and
that's a no-no.

------
aylmao
What's with the U.S.'s obsession with efficiency? Life is much more than that.
So what if your employees are not working at full efficiency? I doubt a lot of
these execs work without taking breaks.

~~~
marnett
The sole ethic of a corporation is increased production, profits, and value
for the shareholders.

This myopic view is the religion of capitalism.

~~~
mindcrime
_This myopic view is the religion of capitalism._

There are plenty of capitalists who don't support this kind of degrading,
dehumanizing shit. And for that matter, capitalism doesn't even require
corporations at all. It would be more fair to say:

"This myopic view is a disease that infects some organizations in a capitalist
economy".

The question is, how do we eradicate the disease without killing the host(s)?

~~~
skummetmaelk
The issue is that companies carrying the disease often grow and "prosper"
while companies which do not get left in the dust. Thus the trend goes towards
every company becoming diseased.

The only way to solve this is regulation. If you don't impose non-negotiable
standards on everybody, the ones most willing to bend laws and morals succeed.

~~~
mindcrime
_The issue is that companies carrying the disease often grow and "prosper"
while companies which do not get left in the dust._

I'm sure that happens sometimes, but I don't think it's been demonstrated -
not do I think it's true - that companies prosper _because_ they do this kind
of stuff. In fact, I'd argue that it's actually self-defeating over a
sufficiently long time-scale.

And this is where we, as a community of hackers, need to put energy into doing
the "stuff" that makes that sort of behavior self-defeating. We need to be the
ones figuring out more clever ways to decentralize things and use all this
cool tech we've created to allow individuals greater autonomy, and more
ability to proper without requiring the trappings of the big enterprise.

If Coase[1] was right[2], then the main reason "firms" exist is to reduce
transaction costs. So the question becomes - how can we use tech to make
reduce those same transaction costs, allowing smaller firms (down to the level
of the individual, ideally) to proper just as well, without needing to build
some byzantine, bureaucratic, behemoth?

 _The only way to solve this is regulation._

Regulation is just another disease, which is arguably a more dangerous
variation of the first. Regulation leads to regulatory capture, franchise
agreements, taxpayer subsidized firms that can out compete the unsubsidized
ones, ginormous military/industrial contracts, the F-35 debacle, Navy
destroyers running Windows, all manners of corruption and artificial
monopolies, etc.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

~~~
aylmao
Very insightful comment. Some thoughts:

> I don't think it's been demonstrated - not do I think it's true - that
> companies prosper because they do this kind of stuff

I don't think it's _because_ of this always, but it's certainly an advantage
for companies that do.

> I'd argue that it's actually self-defeating over a sufficiently long time-
> scale

How long though, and how many people will have suffered by then? I mean,
polluting the environment is self-defeating over a sufficiently long term, but
we don't want to let this self-regulation happen because it will come with
extinction. We should strive for things being fixed sooner rather than later.

> We need to be the ones figuring out more clever ways to decentralize things
> and use all this cool tech we've created to allow individuals greater
> autonomy, and more ability to proper without requiring the trappings of the
> big enterprise.

I agree 100%.

> If Coase[1] was right[2], then the main reason "firms" exist is to reduce
> transaction costs.

Oh, thanks for the link. I don't know enough about this to comment.

> Regulation is just another disease, which is arguably a more dangerous
> variation of the first.

Regulation refers to a setting rules. It's dangerous because the state is
powerful, but it can also exist devoid of private interests for this reason.
Like the FDA ensuring food is safe, or urban planning ensuring all buildings
get water, electricity and other basic services.

> Regulation leads to regulatory capture,

Like running leads to injuries; I mean, if done wrong things will fail.

> franchise agreements,

These sound like regulatory capture.

> taxpayer subsidized firms that can out compete the unsubsidized ones,

Is this necessarily wrong? Subsidized fire departments and public libraries
certainly out-perform unsubsidized ones. On certain industries subsidies might
not make sense, but if it's an industry where a business model is hard to
maintain (like a fire department) then why oppose it? Part of the reason
regulation exists is to avoid market failure; sometimes private actors don't
suffice.

> ginormous military/industrial contracts, the F-35 debacle, Navy destroyers
> running Windows

This sounds like government doing business poorly, not like government setting
rules for better management and avoiding market failure.

> all manners of corruption and artificial monopolies, etc.

Well, if you have a corrupt government then yeah. There's instances of
regulation done well too, though.

------
gaius
Who are the programmers writing this stuff? People even Facebook found too
sleazy?

------
logicallee
I only just skimmmed the article, but a helluvalot more employers need to be
monitoring emotions. In fact if no matter who you are, I bet you would do well
to immediately agree to take a 20% pay cut starting at the end of reading this
paragraph (I know I would) in exchange for nothing more than the sure
knowledge that soon, somehow your employer will start monitoring your
emotions.

Also by the by your dating life will improve by 500% if you do nothing else
than start monitoring your date's emotions better than however you're doing it
now. It's the single best thing you can do to start managing literally anyone
and anything, including yourself. Do you know how you feel now? I bet until I
asked you, you didn't, and now that I did, I bet you realize you're
procrastinating doing something. (Not necessarily true, you could be taking a
break for a few minutes.)

~~~
psetq
Emotions are extremely complex, and the thought that _anyone_ can easily turn
"monitoring emotions" into actionable data is laughably wrong.

/Acknowledging/ emotions may be much more useful, in case that's more along
the lines of what you meant...

~~~
logicallee
You're right and making those things actionable isn't trivial. but even trying
to do so is a good start.

