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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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    • Short term interest: this is just human nature. All economic models work around human nature and desires. People desire short-term gains in pretty much any endeavor. If this was a communist society, they’d still rush to get this thing out as fast as possible so they could meet state quotas/meet whatever other incentive is being offered to finish the job. The problem comes not from the motivations, but how they respond to it. Rushing deadlines and ignoring the need for testing and quality code is a universal human constant.
    • Commercial focus: we have a much better idea of how much an endeavor, product, service, etc. will cost under capitalism because we have a decentralized and automatic way to calculate its value in the form of prices. Miscalculations - or simple human errors, like pushing bad code by accident - happen though, and hopefully this company has learned that prioritizing pushing something out can risk losing them money vs. testing it and coming out with a quality product.
    • Antagonist interests: this is another question of short-term vs. long-term interests. Say you have a factory. If you crank up the machines to double speed, you’re potentially doubling your production, right? It isn’t that simple, actually. You can end up with a lot more workplace accidents that way, which will destroy your productivity extremely quickly. Same deal here. This will, hopefully, be a lesson learned by the industry in not pushing garbage code. M$ can’t serve ads to people who can’t boot their PCs, and will instead lose boatloads of money suddenly having to fulfill tech support contracts because of their screw-up, for example. Crowdstrike is going to have its competitors look a lot more appealing from here on out because they’ve been exposed as fools. (If they have no competitors - IT people, this is your sign!) Mistakes will happen until the end of time, of course, but that doesn’t mean fat-fingering the keyboard is a fault of the Western economic system.

    Capitalism is, in essence, the ability for people to exchange their goods freely. It isn’t dependent on corporations or some weird hierarchy of managers and workers. Those are facts of living in this system, but it isn’t a direct consequence of “capitalism.” If everyone worked only for themselves and produced something to bring to the exchange, that would still be capitalism.