Anschel

queer quaker commie cat

In addition to the blurb above, I'm a recovering mathematician, Jewish, and autistic as fuck--those didn't alliterate

Sometimes I write poems, mostly in English and Spanish

I feel weird putting my age in my bio but I am in fact a Grown Up if you were worried

רעד מיט מיר ייִדיש

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email
anschelsc@gmail.com

pervocracy
@pervocracy

"sustainable business" is a catchphrase now that kinda just means "eco" which in turn kinda just means recycled paper towels

which is a shame because what I'd find much more interesting is businesses that have a plan to reach a certain final form and then stay there.


i.e., our plan is to sell X widgets per year, which should provide a comfortable living for Y employees and pay off our loans slow-n-steady. QED. no claims made that X will go up every year or that widgets are only the beginning and we'll soon expand into also providing lawn care and satellite launches.

and I think there's lots of small local businesses that are essentially this, the corner liquor store guy probably isn't planning Jim Bob's Packie Empire

but it seems like for large or even middling businesses this isn't a thing. maybe not even allowed because of fiduciary duty stuff? your business plan has to be "every day we double the grains of rice on this chessboard"

and so the demand for demand rises much faster than real life demand possibly could, and customers and employees get squeezed for the last drops of money juice, and then it's like a surprise every time this doesn't work

wouldn't it be nice if it were politically/financially acceptable for the economy to reach a steady state that grew about as fast as population did, and then we just high-fived and said okay, good work everyone


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

I think about this all the time, because it shows up everywhere. I feel like every single thing I work on at Large Computer Corp jobplace has this metric applied to it, which is bananas because sometimes you just want to organize a wiki for 10 people, and needing to justify that in terms of “productivity growth” eats at your soul.

If you're not a small local business it's because you're already kinda built around growing past that point, and it's rare albeit not totally unheard of to start out with a business model of aggressive expansion and reinvesting in new franchises then just decide to stop doing that as soon as you've started to succeed.

There are plenty of niche businesses with a pretty low possible ceiling to growth, that expand to fill all possible space in that model and then just keep doing that without either pivoting to trying to be the next Amazon or immediately dying from a failure to do so. The country's biggest wet plate collodion supplier is not going to ever become a multibillion dollar empire but they nevertheless exist and are doin' fine. The all-consuming conglomerates that talk about exponential growth for all eternity rarely actually do anything but subcontract and resell the work of these middling businesses, occasionally they'll buy one and immediately ruin it because they're not equipped to run a business that does anything.

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