society

by Chris on Web Bookmarks

Bookmarks for May 4th

  • Considerations on Cost Disease | Hacker News – The question I'd ask in response to this post is "So where did the money actually go?"
    I suspect inequality and wealth transfer explains much more of the observed trends than the author acknowledges at the end. In each of the verticals discussed, there have been strong (albeit sometimes less obvious) trends for consolidation among institutions and organizations. This includes companies, government contractors, and even vendors in ecosystems we tend to think of as decentralized like local schools, where significant consolidation might be occurring over time at the level of food suppliers like Aramark, utility companies, or diesel fuel suppliers for school buses.
    These organizations' compensation and capital structures, in turn, likely grew increasingly unequal over time. Stockholders, stakeholders like executives, and intermediaries like insurance companies in those organizations likely extracted more and more capital relative to traditional stakeholders like the college students, physicians, and teachers addressed in the post.
    Wealth transfer from traditional stakeholders (college students, physicians, teachers) to organizational stakeholders (execs, stockholders, suppliers in consolidating markets) seems like both a cause and a consequence of the 'cost disease' discussed in the post.
  • wal-e/wal-e: Continuous Archiving for Postgres – WAL-E is a program designed to perform continuous archiving of PostgreSQL WAL files and base backups.
  • Against Willpower | Hacker News –
 
by Chris on Web Bookmarks

Bookmarks for January 2nd