Is management unionized? The article makes it sound like the engineers themselves are frustrated with this system.

You can't just stop the gravy train by removing management. Bad culture is at all levels.

Bad culture is at all levels, but management control the factors that turn culture bad.

If you'd like to see a fine example of how changing the management and the management philosophy can turn a place around, look at NUMMI. There's a This American Life episode with extensive worker interviews: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

They are not.

Fire everyone at Agency A for shitty behavior. Then turn around and realize everyone at Agency B is cooking the books, so fire them. And so on.

Then turn around and realize basically every large institution humans have ever built relies on shady, selfish, behavior and stop caring about reforming individuals since thousands of years of policing have done jack and squat to remove the behavior from the species.

Seriously, this forum is the worst for overlooking relevant variables (human biology and contemporary culture as a whole) for their trite commentary, usually rooted in nothing more than culturally acceptable bullet points.

Hundreds of years of the same sort of thinking. Still happens.

So why does Tokyo’s system work so much better? They’re humans too, but apparently their transit system works much better.

I don't know, but Japanese companies are notorious for never firing people, so it's very unlikely to be because they "fired everyone" as DiabloD3 was suggesting.

They're privatized.

It seems like you're saying "it's impossible to achieve perfection, therefore you should never even try to improve."

Not saying I disagree with you - but assuming what you say is true, what would you propose?

I don't think it's the workers that are the problem, from the article they sound just as frustrated (and indeed seem to be the source of this article). The management is not in a union. How does firing the workers fix anything?

If you fire everyone, wouldn't that stop the trains? I mean, you have to hire new people and get them trained on what to do?

Doesn't a union make that easier? That's the point of unions.

A union makes it easier to fire workers? What?

It makes it easier to collectively fire workers.

Which will never happen. Yet another of China's many advantages: ease of optimization.

As long as you agree with the optimization that the man in charge is implementing.

If you don't, well, in China, sucks to be you.

It depends. You may not enjoy certain micro-optimizations, but to me it seems perfectly possible that even though living in a communist dictatorship has many negatives, the net benefits under a benevolent dictator could easily surpass the drawbacks, especially when compared to a free but largely corrupt Western society where the benefits may not make it outside the top 10%.

And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing.

> And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing.

I wasn't really that worried about China as they are automating extremely quickly and have shown no better ability to utilize the displaced people any better than anybody in the West--see the recent layoffs in steel and coal in China along with the corresponding strikes and protests.

Now with Xi Jinping being President for Life, I'm even less worried. Xi Jingping will regard striking and protesting workers as a threat to his power and he will suppress them. This will break what little feedback there is in China between the working class and the ruling class and the decisions will become increasingly unmoored from external reality.

If I were TSMC, I would start moving fab lines out of Taiwan.

I think I'm missing something - TSMC should move their fabs off the island because of some goings-on in the mainland? The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

> The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

China doesn't see it this way. And the only thing keeping China from steamrolling both Taiwan and Hong Kong are the fact that it would decimate the economies and businesses there.

However, once you have a leader more worried about his power rather than being beholden to the working class, that is no longer an obstacle.

Well, I guess, one could argument than after losing contact with working class and solidifying their rule, China's ruling class will what every non-democratic regime did --- try to expand territoriality. And they have grudges with Taiwan.

How do you know what individuals will do?

> benevolent dictator

First of all, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/cra...

Second of all, and this is probably something that was brought up in your high school civics class, the advantage of a democracy is that the overall quality of a government will be the average of all of the people in it. Speaking metaphorically, you can roll N dice and average the results together; doing this repeatedly, you'll notice that as N goes up, the resulting averages will follow a normal distribution more and more closely. If you have enough dice, you can assume that you'll hit the middle of the curve most of the time, instead of having to worry that you might roll a 1.

No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed. It is hard to imagine how it could exist; it seems that corruption is such a natural and apparently reasonable behavior that we will always see it.

Your a theoretical should be discarded.

Do you believe it is possible for outcomes to vary under different forms of government?

It's interesting how many people on HN seem to believe they are fortune tellers and mind readers now. Personally, I am speculating, but it sounds like all you guys know that I'm wrong.

I've continued to be mostly right for the last decade, I think I'm going to stick with my predictions rather than those of people who don't take too kindly to disagreement.

I think that under all forms of government powerful people are going to try to accrete more power to themselves. Difference of outcomes therefore are based in the ability to restrict that.

A benevolent dictatorship cannot exist et alia because a person cannot live for ever and I simply don't know how you could assure that the transition from one benevolent dictator to another when the first one ceases to be competent. For instance, let's presume that Xi Jinping is the perfect president of China. When he dies or retires or becomes too ill to govern, will the PRC be able to select a new perfect president to replace him? or will they choose someone who is inclined to serve their own interests and was able to benefit from Xi's time? This is the ultimate problem of a benevolent dictorship: it cannot assure state continuity and stability beyond the effective lifespan of the dictatorship.

People also tend to become more habitual as they do something for a long time. Politeness and friendships limit them from being able to introduce policies that will benefit the country at the expense of those who have their ears. So it's possible that a governing style which served the state and the country well for many years will need hard revisions. Periodic changes in governor (as democracies have) mean it's more likely the incoming team will be able to retain what is still fresh and discard what is now stale, and they will be connected with different people and therefore not too worried about upsetting some of them. (I think this is a good part of what's wrong at the moment: major parties around the world are connected too much to the same interests, so a change of government doesn't result in as much upset as needs to happen. Votes will gradually transfer from the establishment to the anti-establishment parties. They will be able to upset the entrenchment, but it remains to be seen whether they will do so in the interests of the nation or the interests of an alternative elite.)

As for your last sentence, I think I misunderstand it. I disagreed with you and straightforwardly stated my opinion, and then it seems that you attacked me: it reads like you're accusing me of not being able to handle disagreement. I don't think I attacked you. Perhaps you would clarify it, or highlight the place where you think I "don't take too kindly to disagreement".

> A benevolent dictatorship cannot exist et alia because a person cannot live for ever and I simply don't know how you could assure that the transition from one benevolent dictator to another when the first one ceases to be competent. For instance, let's presume that Xi Jinping is the perfect president of China. When he dies or retires or becomes too ill to govern, will the PRC be able to select a new perfect president to replace him? or will they choose someone who is inclined to serve their own interests and was able to benefit from Xi's time? This is the ultimate problem of a benevolent dictorship: it cannot assure state continuity and stability beyond the effective lifespan of the dictatorship.

Agreed, this is why a dictatorship is generally not a wise idea. I certainly cannot assure a transition to another benevolent dictator, but what's interesting if you peruse the comments here, the overwhelming sentiment of people is that they can assure that a successful transition can not and will not happen, ever, full stop. As you may have noticed, I often have a bit of an issue with self-proclaimed mind-reading, future-telling, and other supernatural capabilities. You would expect this sort of thing among the general public or on Reddit, is it too much to ask for a higher standard on HN? It would seem so.

As for my last sentence, admittedly I'm guilty of taking out my frustrations with HNers in general (for the above stated reasons) on you, in response to your absolutist stance (No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed); perhaps no major nation in recorded history been led by a purely benevolent dictator, but if we had access to a truly omniscient being to settle this disagreement, I'd happily throw down a $100 wager that many truly benevolent (to the best of their abilities) dictators have led smaller, less famous groups of people on many occasions throughout history. Perhaps I have too much faith in humanity at its best.

> No benevolent dictatorship has ever existed.

I can quibble with this just a little. A truly benevolent dictator will recognize how harmful dictatorship is and will immediately remove himself from it.

http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/mdstatehouse/html/gwresignation....

I think if someone can foresee that they won't be a benevolent dictator and refuses the office, I don't think that's the same as being a benevolent dictator.

Maybe we're playing semantic games, but Americans worship their leaders in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't think it's necessary for me to limit my statement in order to participate in your religion.

> Yet another of China's many advantages

Yes, you can fire everyone in China, throw them in a work camp, take their property for the greater good, etc.

Funny thing happens when you walk all over people that way for the "greater good" ... a few people at the top, who define what the "greater good" is, tend to become extremely wealthy and powerful. The society becomes lopsided. The peasants become frustrated. Then there's violence.

Not that the people at the top are idiots. They understand this.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-spends-more-on-domestic-s...