On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 05:29:59AM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
The reason you need a boss to make a pencil is that almost no one knows how to make pencils
On 2019-09-20 04:59, Punk wrote:
unhinged nonsense
Let us see you make a pencil.
I am confident I could learn to make a pencil, work to obtain required tools and inputs, and make a pencil. "So you could be the boss" perhaps you say? Possibly I could be a reasonably competent coordinator for some number of other humans, although I am at times brash, fail to listen sufficiently, get impatient and subsequently angry, and other interpersonal traits which aren't so good in a "boss", though these negatives are softened somewhat by a significant capacity to listen and empathize when I put such a hat on. I know those who who struggle to cope just when looking at a mathematical formule such as volume of a cylinder. That's a gulf of consciousness differential right there. And there are those with so much capacity/ natural ability on various axii that I wonder at the gulfs I can only hope to cross. Some of the concepts inherent in the word "boss" are useful to grok and apply in the world. Some of the common (mis/)conceptions arising in people's minds when the word "boss" is used, are useful to avoid. It appears far too easy to hold intensely to words which convey unnecessary dichotomies. There may be more effective ways to communicate, such as getting grounded in actual (possible) plans, hopes, intentions. I am not particularly interested in rockets or establishing a colony on Mars. I would like to see the sovereignty, rights and inherent dignity of humans upheld, rather than quashed as is often the case within our current schooling and political "democratic" systems for example. When a competent human with sufficient clarity of communication, and apparent persistence, patience, empathy (and perhaps one or two other traits) shows up, there I carefully consider contributing, supporting and or in some way working with. You may call this treating that person as "a boss", but that term is a little too overloaded for my taste.
by the way, arguments regarding the ANARCHIC and distributed nature of 'knowledge in society' are usually presented as arguments against central planning. Notice how the fascist shitbag donald is trying to turn them on their head.
They are arguments against one big central plan, arguments for having lots of plans by lots of people, rather than one big plan. But to build a rocket, build a building, or make a pencil, or run a restaurant, the *restaurant* needs one man with one plan, and everyone working at the restaurant follows his plan.
A business, like a family, has to be internally socialist, has to be externally market oriented. But that a father has to run his family does not mean it is a good idea for the King, or the family court, to run everyone's family.
Knowledge is necessarily distributed, but that does not mean that everyone knows everything. It means that very few people know anything of value. And those people have to run stuff, or stuff just does not get produced.
Recollect all the attempts to build a gun in a home workshop entirely from plastic and metal that was not already shaped into gun parts.
For a long time, no one could build a complete gun. They always had to buy some of the parts, or else the gun would blow up. Eventually Ivan the Troll succeeded, using subtractive electrolytic machining on the parts that had to be made of high strength, high melting point, steel. But an awful lot of very talented people failed.
If we for a moment set aside technicalities of minutiae objections to particular words, and say hypothetically you're right on each of the above positions, we can now ask "what of it?" - a functional family requires interpersonal cohesion - a functional restaurant ditto - functional manufacturer ditto Got it. Of course we can agree with such a principle. Lack of group cohesion means effectively a dysfunctional group, at whatever granularity we look at - and the Communist central government steps on many heads, thus betrays national cohesion and asks for its demise (as does "Western democracy", may be not quite as badly). We can have cohesive groups, whilst also respecting absolutely the sovereignty (freedom to act) of the individual. As long as we're not communisticly imposing (by fiat and force), various "bosses" over those who don't consent, we might be able to find some common ground. Again, the free software movement (thank you RMS for the GPL manifesto), was a significant cause for globally distributed cohesion within the self selected anarchic group "free software community". Highly functional indidivudal humans were attracted to this group, gave enormously of their time, attention and efforts, over decades, in the face of (in the early days) gargantuan opposition, to overcome most all obstacles and literally dominate the world of computer software today. Anarchic/ anarchism success story par excellence. - RMS was a "boss" in the sense that he held staunch the grounds laid out so clearly in the GPL, encouraged (often times in quite confronting ways) those he spoke with to do likewise, and in the early days was the primary worker (coder) coding up Emacs, GCC and other software. - RMS was not a "boss" in the sense that he had no power to force anyone to "work for the cause/ group" and likewise had no power to fire anyone from the group for any reason. So, the word "boss" is not the most apropos word by a long shot... Good luck, and create our world,