

Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, Life Gets Faster - wallflower
http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west

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dools
One thing that astounds me is that technology has reduced the need for human
labour in manufacturing which deals with very physical problems, but hasn't
done anything to reduce demand for bureaucratic labour which deals with
information!

How can it be that information technology is so bad at making bureaucracy
redundant?

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nhebb
I don't know if it's so much that information technology is bad at reducing
bureaucracy. I think it just hasn't been applied to the same degree. In my
former life as a manufacturing engineer, every company I worked for focused on
making manufacturing more efficient, but few focused on improving the
efficiency of indirect labor.

The ones that were efficient with indirect labor divided labor into core
product teams that handled all operations from procurement to shipping. The
ones that split the responsibilities into specialized departments typically
added layers of overhead and bureaucracy to the organization.

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btilly
Their comments about corporations reminded me of Steve Blank's definition: _a
startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable
business model._ (See [http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-
princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/)
for the full context.) And once you've found your model, then in scaling it
you need a very different corporate structure.

This fits well with what they found.

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soitgoes
Very interesting video. There is also a good Radiolab podcast about this
research with respect to cities.

<http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/>

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chipsy
It would be nice if we collected this kind of data for social news sites so
that we can put a pulse to the "xxx is dying" meme.

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ctdonath
"one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy
people."..."Crazy people are fired."

In cities, "crazy" gets incarcerated or fined into oblivion. Each
organization, city or company, as it grows defines "crazy" and implements ways
to suppress it.

You may see diversity in cities. I see institutionalized intolerance.

~~~
katovatzschyn
Here's a recently popular video of a man licking his shoe on the NY subway and
nobody nearby reacting:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-1lao5UUac>

I don't think I could easily imagine a more categorical example of tolerance
and diversity. Have you lived in a big city? New York is possibly among the
most the most tolerant places on earth- virtually nobody cares how crazy you
or what you're doing are as long as you're not invading their personal space.
This type of behavior is the "norm."

