That's the weird part. The argument seems to be that any temporal failure of a system means we need to change the system wholesale. There is no argument for why a different system would be better, merely the belief that the current system has flaws, therefore...
This part confused me:
> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.
The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.
A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.
So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.
I think "stems from" is complicated in this instance by how much changed and how fast. Systems can take only so much change in a set period of time, and we've had a hell of a lot of change in under 2 years.
Populations movements (COVID), combined with personal spending habit changes (things over experiences), combined with who spends money (office -> work from home contributed to the toilet paper shortages), combined with labour market changes, combined with immigration changes (hospitality in Sydney is weird without foreign students and backpackers), combined with a lack of slack in the system (JIT etc), combined with probably hundreds of small law changes played a part in what is happening. That all these happened at once only makes it all the worse.
I often wonder: wouldn't fines paid as a percentage of stock be a better deterrent? Taking stock off shareholders changes the fraud equation from risk of fine vs the profitability upside, to shareholder's losing real value.
That's the role of shareholders AFAICT, to hold their board and the company accountable. Fail to do so and lose your shareholding seems the right direct risk.
The fines could also be a lot larger, because there is minimal risk of bankrupting a business from diluting existing shareholders. A 1% shareholder hit would be $4B at current market cap. Make it 5% and really make shareholders pay.
I think the articles problem is the lack of a definition of "crisis", and that leads to a bad mismatch between the headline and what is a reasonable look at the data.
My issues with the article are:
It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X.
Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots".
Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.
> last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or:
> “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put participants at risk.
I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear one.
Your first point is very hopeful, but not what I've experienced. The bigger the company, the more slack for bad decisions.
Your other points I think relate to scale. No advice can be universal, and if you read the article as absolutist, your take makes sense. If you read it as "hey, your mix is likely wrong", a lot of the criticism fades.
I think we've lost a bit of creativity in marketing. The Lego movie example is a really good one. I think it is probably good this happened, as a lot of creativity was performative (how do I win an ad award/impress my peers) and not about increasing sales, but we've perhaps shifted the balance too far, and there is likely some areas with good ROS that are now better bets.
That's the right direction, but the wrong policy. Basecamp's "no talking politics on work channels" is more likely to be effective, in part because spending work hours on other things - e.g. a political non-company slack - then becomes an issue of wasting time.
This part confused me:
> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.
The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.
A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.
So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.