Atlas Shrugged (2024)
david-jasso.comI'm sympathetic to the thesis, but I wish there were more details. For example, what could HP have done differently? Buying Compaq seems like "trying to win" to me--it was trying to expand its PC market share. Was that the wrong acquisition? What would have been better instead?
Fundamentally, however, we know that the markets HP was in were not growth markets: PCs, printers, enterprise consulting, etc. The growth markets at the time were phones (Apple), software (Microsoft), and cloud services (Amazon, Google, etc.) Could HP have succeeded in any of those businesses?
they bought palm. people were pretty happy with webos/hp touchpad. so there was at least some desire to within hp to go into that market.
instead they cut bait quickly. sold off WebOS to LG and that was it.
I watched this happen from the outside. I bought a Laserjet IV when it was first released; by the time it started to fail, many years later, USB had killed the older printer interfaces. It was a workhorse. I wouldn’t even look at an HP printer today.
I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today.
Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low.
I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.
I've had many Hewlett-Packard printers over the years, and I'd never buy another one.
The most common complaint about HP is its lock-in policy and its associated gutter business practices, not with the inks per se. If you reckon HP inks are the best for high quality art then I'm not going to argue, it's your decision and your money.
On the other hand, I've now an Epson WF-4830 which I only run in draft mode because of the outrageous cost of the inks. When I've finished with this current batch of inks I will do with this printer as I've done with its predecessors which is to chuck it out the window onto concrete two stories below and buy another (that's the cheapest and most effective option for upgrading printers nowadays—I'm onto my fourth printer in about 20 months).
Incidentally, my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet IV which I bought in the 1990s is still working perfectly (these days its Centronics interface goes through a converter to the PC).
The rubber rollers were degrading on mine, or I’d have done something similar.
They're a bit iffy on mine but I'm surprised they've held out so long. Fortunately, the printer's on an ancient XP box dedicated to a single task that doesn't require much printing. There's one spare cartridge, after that I'll likely call it quits.
BTW, I've heard there was a problem with fusers in LaserJets but never experienced it myself in any I've used.
I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of.
I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through.
I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.
Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering.
We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.
How Hewlett Packard destroyed its empire by listening to consultants
I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal.
The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it.
Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here.
The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc.
HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive.
Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call?
[1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs?
[2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing
[3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared
It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!Jensen...
feels like this really needs a subtitle like "An insider's view of HP's fall from grace" or something to that effect
And a sub subtitle "I didn't read the book, btw".
> Playing to win versus playing not to lose
I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels.
For example,
- We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices.
- Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.
There's a typo in the first line - the author's name should be 'Ayn Rand', not 'Ann Rand'
And the title of the book is "The Fountainhead," not "The Fountain Head."
And that reduces the length of the title by about 1/10. Something the rest of the book could have benefitted from as well.
Not only 1/10 though. That book's pretty much just a very painful to read piece of propaganda.
I would say a good editor could easily cut 1/3. A good writer could have cut 1/2.
What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.
A while since I read it, but it hides it's core ideas in an absurd story that goes on rather too long.
You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work".
My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.
What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.
So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.
In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.
Fountainhead was pretty decent imo. Certainly better written than atlas shrugged
> HP’s first product was an audio oscillator...
That reminded me that BBN started in acoustics. Any other significant tech companies get started in audio engineering?
I was wondering why HP was buying Compaq and then I read that fiorina was getting a 10% sales commission for making the deal.
Where did you read that? It’s not true.
- Originally she would have got 8 mil if the transaction closed
- She had to give that up due to bad press
- 10% would have been 2.5B so no way was that ever happening
- Her big score was the golden parachute tied to leaving the company. You could say the merger accelerated her exit indirectly, but there was no commission on the deal.
I must have read it in the bad press! I'm glad you missed her commission, sorry she got her golden parachute. It should have been made of lead
"was getting" doesn't necessarily imply that she got away with it; "got" implies that.
If you’re looking for a link to Atlas Shrugged, there isn’t any, except for the title… and the interpretation of the sentence “Atlas Shrugged” in this piece has nothing to do with the novel.
By an author who hadn't read the book, no less...
I’m not sure there could be something less like the “shrug” in the book and this comparison to corporate decline. It’s an inversion of quite a bit that was central to the theme.
The shrug in the book was people turning their back, walking away— people who thought their talents were either wasted or unequally compensated in some way, or footing an unfair portion of things, and the “shrug” was them walking away. A fundamental individual, not collective and corporate act. The central character felt exploited by the company he worked for.
The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.
> The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.
So you’re saying Rand wouldn’t have been happy with Citizens United. You may want to inform her acolytes like Clarence Thomas.
You just described a union. One of the things that’s wild to me about the book is that it’s pushed as a proponent of individualism and libertarianism but Gault’s Gulch is just the wealthy unionizing. There’s nothing individualistic about it. If just John Galt had walked away nothing would have happened.
The French translator didn't miss the contradiction and as such in the translated title is «La grève» (“the strike”).
This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name.
https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...
I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:
Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help
them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”
OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".
Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.
Look at this quote from the letter:
I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ... why
are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company
exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of
a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real
reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish
something collectively which they could not accomplish separately.
They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution
to society .... You can look around and still see people who are
interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives
come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to
give a service—generally to do something which is of value.
And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.
To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:
In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
true objective.
Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care.
It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd.
Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3
I always thought there was a perfect cure for objectivist nonsense. Just exist for a year without the benefits of society. No legal protections, no police, no fire brigade, no roads, no currency, no markets. Thing is, I'm bigger than a lot of them, and it would make me happy to steal their property.
> Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care.
There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
Perhaps at that point she realized that her ideas were shit, and a system where you contribute to a public safety net is not a bad idea, it's what society is for.
Or perhaps she was still a dense prick to the end of her days. Who knows?
This doesn’t contribute very much to the discussion. Dang could we take a look at this one as well? Thank you!
I disagree. I think it does contribute plenty.
You are probably just butthurt at this ridiculous ideology being exposed for what it is.
1. I’m not an objectivist. 2. Looks like the comment I replied to is heavily downvoted and soon to be flagged. Seems like I’m not the only one that agrees that it doesn’t contribute. I expect a similar thing to happen to yours shortly as well.
My comments may be upvoted, downvoted, or ignored.
Either outcome is meaningless. I'll worry about it when the bank accepts internet points as mortgage repayments.
> She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
That's not how “the system” works though. She paid so other people could benefit from it, then when she benefited it, she became part of a scheme that took money from working people to give it to her: she become one of the parasites she hated in good years.
I don't blame her for preferring hypocrisy to suicide, but it's still fair to call her hypocrisy for what it is.
It’s not hypocrisy though, under her moral framework it’s merely partial recovery of stolen property.
I think my comment explains this pretty clearly, I’d recommend reading it more carefully and in good faith before responding.
> It’s not hypocrisy though, under her moral framework it’s merely partial recovery of stolen property.
If you steal from some people make up for the loss that some other people inflicted on you, you're still a thieve no matter the moral framework.
> I think my comment explains this pretty clearly, I’d recommend reading it more carefully and in good faith before responding.
There's no bad faith on my side, your argument just ain't valid.
> If you steal from some people make up for the loss that some other people inflicted on you, you're still a thieve no matter the moral framework.
She’s not, she’s stealing from the same entity that caused the loss - the state.
Except she isn't stealing the state in any way, the state is more than willing to give her back.
If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
Had she become a burglar, stealing directly from the senior public servants[1] houses, then it would have been somehow consistent. But I'm pretty sure she would still have agreed that this was theft and immoral.
The reality is simple, at the end of her life, she simply couldn't afford to live in a way that matched her individualist ideology.
[1]: because even though Rand claims she hates the State, it's pretty clear from the writing that her main personal issues are the civil servants themselves.
I’m sorry but I’m unable to parse this.
> she isn’t stealing the state in any way
I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
> If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it. This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
> I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
Not a native speaker, what's the difference between those two?
> I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
Wait you did, right above “I claimed that she was stealing from the state”.
> The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it.
No, in reality the state redistributed her money, then the state handed other people's money to her.
> This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
You keep saying that but you've failed to make a convincing argument.
How would accepting stolen money handed over by your nemesis be consistent with anything?
If we consider the state stole her money earlier, then the state is again stealing someone's money by the time it gives it to her. If taxes are theft, then late Ayn Rand was in “Possession of property obtained by crime”, which isn't morally more defensible than the theft itself.
[flagged]
This comment doesn’t make any point that I haven’t already addressed in my reply to the parent comment. I’d recommend reading it a little more carefully before downvoting.
While we disagree on Rands work, I do respect a reasoned opinion.
I agree down-voting just makes people emotional, and doesn't add anything.
Personally, I saw Rands writing as lazy thinly veiled fictional despotism, and targeted peoples need for simple answers in a chaotic world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero
This doesn't mean both perspectives can't seem true =3
I didn't downvote you FWIW
I was talking about your reply, as burying your comment was not polite.
The Internet is a big place, and some people are always having a bad day. =3
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that the philosophy of Ayn Rand - that an elite few held up society and the rest were pretty much just parasites - has been used at great length to justify the gutting of social programs.
Please read my comment in good faith. There is no contradiction with Rand’s philosophy here. According to her framework, the state stole from her throughout her life. Using public assistance is merely retrieving a small piece of that stolen money.
I agree that it was in her philosophical framework to accept social security - apologies if my comment seemed in bad faith due to that not being clearer. The irony does not lie with her, but rather those that use her philosophy to eliminate the safety net that she herself ended up using.
Sure, she could have used the money she had put into social security to invest, and maybe would have come out better off. But for those of us who see how public services can enrich an entire society, there is irony to how this all played out.
> I agree that it was in her philosophical framework to accept social security
Then where exactly is the irony or hypocrisy here?
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she believed in stealing your stolen property back from a thief, which is itself thievery."
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she was OK accepting when the thieve gave her your property to make up for the theft she suffered earlier"
FTFY.
She didn't steal from the thieve, she became complicit with the thieve stealing other people's work to get their money back (gracefully handed by the thieve).
And the gutting is done by the people she described as the parasites.
She believed that even wealthy kids that just live off their trust funds were parasites too. It was about consuming vs producing, not elite vs non-elite.
Indeed, dehumanizing people shouldn't be the foundation of a logical argument.
Have a wonderful day =3
It's pretty clear which group she would place Elon Musk into, probably the most Randian character out there.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals).
If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC
I believed this quote when I first read it.
I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
The central mythical figure in the novel is John Galt, a great inventor. What more critical piece of machinery could Rand have him contribute than an engine, the driver of the industrial revolution? It doesn't work to simply remove it from the plot. It would need to be replaced by something else, like Taggart's railroads, Rearden's steel or Roark's buildings.
It didn't have to be a mythical engine that ignores the most basic laws of physics. Just like with Rearden's steel, a more optimized version is often sufficient to change the world.
Both Elon and Bezos have significantly decreased cost to orbit and are very close to full reusability. This is alongside their other feats like a global logistic network that gets pretty much any product in the world to your doorstep in 1-2 days, self-driving cars, neural implants that enable mind-controlled computing. If that were in the novel, no one would believe it.
See also Heinlein's Waldo (1942) where the hero invents a receiver for an inexhaustible ambient energy source. I wonder if Rand read Astounding. To me, a good hard scifi story is allowed up to one impossibility anyway, as long as taken seriously.
A MacGuffin is just something that drives the narrative.
I think this quote is the kind of thing that sounds smart, but is actually devoid of meaningful criticism.
As you said, Atlas Shrugged touched a real conflicts that are rarely addressed. Is it kind of obtuse/allegorical? Yes. Would I like it to be a bit shorter? Yes. But it’s ideas seem generally right, the subject matter important, and under discussed.
But the "heroes" of Atlas Shrugged are, in fact, the villains of our modern world.
Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad. Without even mostly unknown inventions like the Haber process, over half of humanity would be starving right now.
Industrialists and inventors are the great heroes of our time.
> Strong disagree, the true villains have always been those attempting to convince you that human ingenuity and invention is bad.
Those don't exist. Effectively nobody actually believes that, or is trying to convince anyone else of it.
And if you think that "we should make sure no one person or small group has too much power (with wealth being a form of power), because we've seen the bad outcomes that produces" equates to "human ingenuity and invention is bad", you have been swallowing propaganda whole.
Which one is which?
"A is sometimes F"
OK me trying to be funny failed /s
Yes because all the teenagers reading Marxist works are well adjusted and based in reality.
It's humorous how debased from reality John roger's quote is. It doesn't challenge Rand's ideas it just insults it's readers. There's this stigma among her work as if it's dangerous, just like any other right wing idea. But reality is she only asks that one better themselves. She doesn't tell her readers to make a tort against another to right some perceived systematic wrong. Unlike many modernly accepted ideas her works have never been used to justify throwing people in the gulag, ethnic genocide,or insurrection. She tells one that you are not entitled to money, sleezy money grabs do not pay in the long run, and that being hardworking + innovative will payoff in the end.
Also Tokens works are now considered xenophobic and racist by many people as well because the orcs are portrayed as this dark evil race that invades this quent European landscape. so nothing really passes the purity test.