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Oct 25Liked by Russil Wvong

Once an idea gets approved at all, the profit-driven system then drives that design to exhaustion, to its logical limits. Also, see: giant trucks with the hood the height of your shoulder.

They only find out when they go a step too far - the Airbus that could fly 800 people did not make money, they'd finally gone Too Big.

We'll be finding out from one of these buildings what "too big" for stairs capacity is - if not from existing designs like this, then very soon when one step bigger is approved.

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There's a post by Joseph Politano that I really like, discussing Janos Kornai's comparison between capitalist economies and centrally planned economies. https://www.apricitas.io/p/capitalism-and-the-surplus-economy

"Where the soft budget constraints of planned economies cause firms to hoard factors of production, the hard budget constraints of market economies forces them to idle surplus capacity and desperately hawk their wares. Where the firms of the socialist system struggled to diffuse government technical innovations or develop innovations of their own, dynamic firms in capitalist economies are in desperate struggles to invent and deploy new technology. Where the labor markets of the centrally planned economies had slow productivity growth and extremely high employment levels, market economies encourage productivity growth while pushing unemployed workers to the sidelines. In Kornai’s view the capitalist system is one of surplus; surplus inventories, surplus capacity, and surplus workers.

"... The interaction between rivalry and demand-constrained production creates the surplus economy, most visible in the surplus capacity and inventories of firms. Firms are unable to accurately predict consumer demand and constantly keep surplus inventories to account for this fact. Firms keep some capacity in reserve in the event that they need to pounce on an opportunity for greater market share or need to respond to a shock that increases consumer demand for their products. The result is fully stocked grocery stores with rotting produce being thrown in the garbage and sprawling industrial parks where some assembly lines are unused."

Of course the huge shortage of housing in Metro Vancouver (we're short about 1/4 of the housing we need) strongly suggests that our system of homebuilding is working more like a centrally planned system than a market-based system.

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