There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
That's how it works in California. I had a 3 year non-compete with VMware after we sold a business to them. It was restricted to the specific market and technology our business covered but didn't limit activities in other areas. It seemed completely fair to me.
Besides, competing would have meant doing exactly the same thing over again. What's the fun in that?
It is not unheard of that employees leave a company to start their own precisely because the company is not addressing something specific leaving a gap in services. The startup begins to gain traction to the point the company the employees left buys the startup. It's like this is the only way for the company to "do it right", yet it would have been cheaper if they'd just let the employees do the thing as employees in the first place
But also a lot of people go off and try to create competitive businesses and fail, a lot of people also try to completely rework the business they're in and also fail (it's a disease in early stage startups)
The Three Musketeers is my favorite adventure story of all time. The story of how D'Artagnan insults all three musketeers in succession at their first meeting, challenges them to duels one after the other, and ends up fighting on their side in a melee against the royal guards is just one of countless, hilarious adventures. The book just gets better from there.
Unfortunately it seems quite believable. This is the same outfit that fired a bunch of people responsible for overseeing the US Nuclear Arsenal. [0] The combination of arrogance and stupidity was breathtaking.
Very bad hire. I’ve gently said as much to my manager and skip. But for some reason hiring is hard and firing is hard, and we’re a small team, so I’ve been told to just lower my standards. Yeah, I know
> What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
US healthcare is a leader in administration fees (e.g. paying health system executives) compared to other countries around the world. High US healthcare cost isn't because of increased usage, but because of the higher admin fees and higher prescription drug prices. Prices are fixed high because law prevents the government from negotiating prices (o.b.o. Medicare/aid), and those provisions were inserted on behalf of pharmaceutical companies so their executives could make more money.
Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy
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