wheno

Seems pretty common to me. I have worked in smaller companies where everyone was an integral part of the business, and that isn't most large companies I worked at since then. I think it is partly a cargo cult thing. Very successful business can afford to threat people as disposable, be elitist or inflexible. So they end up thinking that is part of what makes them successful, without realizing they are throwing away opportunities. Maybe there are some larger companies that does things differently, but I haven't really seen it.

I think that is something that tends to be underestimated. The reason Electron is popular is because of the success rate in creating things. While projects that are trying to be better takes far longer or fails outright, making them less common. So it isn't necessarily that people are choosing so much as surviving.

Something like Electron isn't primarily for CAD programs or 3D modeling, it is for "information" applications. That is what many millions of dollars have gone into developing and educating people about web technologies.

> Can't we do better than this?

Honestly the answer is probably no. People just don't understand how much work goes into something like this. Who is going to, or even can, spend the time and money to do it?

That is something has always confused me a bit. Many people tend to object to universal system on the basis that it leaves it up to the government. But if you don't have universal systems the government, and the companies operating in the market, have little incentive to take care of its citizens. Because the cost of not doing so is left to you. Even if you want to argue that a health care system is a factor of how healthy people are, it is the universal systems that have the incentive that people are healthy. It is those systems that more often regulate things like transportation or drugs as public health issues.

The US political spectrum is such that many Democrats are right wing by European, or at least Nordic, standards. What people tend to characterize as "utopia" is the socialist welfare state, where means are tested to a much lesser degree. What countries like Norway have increasingly done is to move from that system to a more liberal one. That is where you find yourself "begging the government for help", because you don't fit into the market.

This is a bit of a long paste, but people don't generally understand the differences:

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There are three measures for welfare-state regime stratification: conservative, liberal and social democratic. For the conservative welfare-state regimes, the traditional societal class model is a prevalent idea, but also the rejection of capitalism. Which leaves conservatism between the market based ideology of liberalism and the social democratic wish for social leveling. EspingAndersen distinguishes between two branches of conservatism: corporatism and etatism. Corporatism is described as a response to industrialism and its effects: social fragmentation and individualization. In modern societies, corporatism is described as "...built around occupational groupings seeking to uphold traditionally recognized status distinctions and use these as the organizational nexus for society and economy". Corporatism was mostly influential in the continental European nations, as a response to the Church’s strong position. Etatism, on the other hand, focuses on the primacy of the state. Esping-Andersen illustrates etatism with Bismarck’s wish to tie workers directly to the state with social benefits, instead of tying workers to the guilds, as in the corporatist model. Today, etatism can be traced in two areas of welfare state stratification, where one is giving generous welfare provision to civil servants, giving state servants an elevated position in society, as in countries such as Austria, Germany and France. The other area where etatism can be noted today is the relatively generous poor-relief or income protection, based on the idea of noblesse oblige.

The liberal response to the conservative ideas of etatism was the opposite. The state and the stratified society were seen as something that had gotten in the way of market emancipation, and in extension, individual liberty. Social policy were to be replaced by the market in order to achieve social leveling, not to eliminate aid, but to have a less active state. Today, liberalism does accept income-tested social benefits, although it is associated with social stigma to be a social assistance beneficiary. Due to the core liberal idea of the smallest state possible, benefits are usually means-tested and modest, given only to those that are genuinely poor, creating the stigma. The liberal welfare-state system is based on the notion that those who are entrepreneurial and self-reliant should be rewarded. Social insurances exists, but they are privately held and paid for.

The socialist movement started as a response both to conservative and liberal reforms. The most important notion of socialism was to change the societal stratification and achieve social leveling. The primary target was to change the means-tested poor laws since they created a stigma within the proletariat and that beneficiaries were disenfranchised. The social democratic idea of universal benefit system as a prolongation of democratic rights was most evident in the Scandinavian countries and particularly in the Swedish "People’s home". The universal benefit system came to include even the middle-class in order to "preserve the solidarity of a universalistic welfare state". A universal benefit system denotes a system where social aid is for everyone. This picture is somewhat simplified, although benefits are universal in general, and more general than the means-tested system where only a limited group qualifies for benefits. Moreover, the socialist movement focused on the concept of solidarity and in extension, one of its most distinctive features: centralized bargaining trough trade unions.

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Do Capitalist Welfare States Still Consist of ”The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?” http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordO...