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1 hour ago, nikisoko said:

open source software gets compromised all the time.

 

That's because it exists on the fringes of the software industry supported by either capitalist workers or volunteer workers currently.  If every worker was working on it and all work was done with security in mind things would be different.  This is pretty clear.

3 hours ago, chenGOD said:

If the masses all used Stallman OS, there would be many many infected stallman OS machines. Would it be as bad as windows? Probably not, but how many users would want to run in sudo because it’s convenient. How many would bother auditing source code? How many would install buggy packages? 
 

You want to blame it on anything, I’d take a look at the majority owners of SolarWinds (one of the companies in the article) selling off $286M worth of stock before the hack was announced. Greed, which exists outside of any political ideology or economic model, is likely the culprit. 

that's not true, it depends how Stallman OS is implemented, it could be done using a metamorphic compiler (something only practical with free open source software since it requires source distribution for technical reasons, something capitalism can never achieve)

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3 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

If every worker was working on it and all work was done with security in mind things would be different.

Man, if every worker working on windows did their work with security in mind, things would be different. Ask any hacker (white hat or black hat) the biggest vulnerability is people. 

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9 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Man, if every worker working on windows did their work with security in mind, things would be different. Ask any hacker (white hat or black hat) the biggest vulnerability is people. 

agreed, the reason they can't do that is capitalism.  capitalism forces workers to stop doing what is right and to start doing what is going to make money.  if workers had no boss, left to work to their own devices, all the software they made would be better, more useful, and more universally applicable.  instead we work on isolated throwaway code that only exists to make money now.  this is almost universal in the software industry except for companies working at lower levels of abstraction.

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doing what is right versus doing what makes money is a false dichotomy. things that make money are not necessarily wrong.

capitalism is freedom. it means you are free to make money. the alternative is not being free to make money. that sounds good to you?

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13 minutes ago, very honest said:

doing what is right versus doing what makes money is a false dichotomy. things that make money are not necessarily wrong.

capitalism is freedom. it means you are free to make money. the alternative is not being free to make money. that sounds good to you?

capitalism disincentivizes doing what is right any time it results in less profit aka capital extraction for those who control the specific means of production that the particular software worker is working on

claiming capitalism means "you are free to make money" is the dumbest oversimplification I've ever heard.  you are not free to make money actually, the vast majority of people have no way to make money except for becoming wage slaves for other people who are using them to make more money for themselves than the actual workers receive.  capitalism is vampirism.  your regurgitation of bourgeois talking points merely exposes your mental slavery to the whims and ideological frameworks themselves created by the bourgeoisie to allow their own liberation from the previous economic modes of production like feudalism and monarchism depending on the region.  yes it's true that it was an advancement, but you're using arguments which provide justification for capitalism's supremacy over previous economic modes of production as a defense for capitalism against future modes of production, not even realizing their inapplicability

people have certain types of freedom under capitalism entirely dependent upon their class, which, while fluid due to the decentralization of the private ownership of the means of production, albeit a decentralization which tends towards centralization due to the econophysical flows of entrenched capital, disenfranchises the vast majority of people because of the branching factor of the hierarchical power structures inherent to bourgeois wage worker management techniques and the economic incentive structures inherent to maintaining wage labor markets and the proletarianization of as many workers as possible

capitalism is not freedom, capitalism is wage slavery, because the public commons are controlled by the few rather than the many.  the tragedy of the commons is a problem we, through capitalism's radical and revolutionary industrialization, have gained the potential to solve, through the implementation of socialism and communism.  this is greater freedom even though it removes bourgeois economic freedom, which is really defined by private property rights and thus class partitioning of the population, resulting in exploitation, which is a removal of freedom for those subject to wage slavery.

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3 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

capitalism disincentivizes doing what is right any time it results in less profit aka capital extraction for those who control the specific means of production that the particular software worker is working on

it also rewards what people value through market competition. why would government control enforce what is right, any better?

 

5 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

claiming capitalism means "you are free to make money" is the dumbest oversimplification I've ever heard. 

rude and inaccurate. 

image.thumb.png.cda0a8cd6641c9f4e3001be72d0ac441.png

7 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

you are not free to make money actually, the vast majority of people have no way to make money except for becoming wage slaves for other people who are using them to make more money for themselves than the actual workers receive.  capitalism is vampirism. 

you describe work. you prefer a tunnel with no light at the end?

7 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

your regurgitation of bourgeois talking points merely exposes your mental slavery to the whims and ideological frameworks themselves created by the bourgeoisie to allow their own liberation from the previous economic modes of production like feudalism and monarchism depending on the region. 

invoking words like "bourgeois" doesn't make your argument any more coherent. you're arguing for government control while claiming to oppose monarchism? feudalism is distinct from capitalism. you assume i'm not a free-thinker... which demonstrates your own carelessness about reaching conclusions.

10 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

yes it's true that it was an advancement, but you're using arguments which provide justification for capitalism's supremacy over previous economic modes of production as a defense for capitalism against future modes of production, not even realizing their inapplicability

capitalism is a very general word, it just means private ownership. your qualms can be addressed with regulation. safety nets can be provided in capitalist societies. capitalism is not your enemy. the alternative to capitalism is a lack of freedom, and an unwise forfeit of control to government.

13 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

people have certain types of freedom under capitalism entirely dependent upon their class, which, while fluid due to the decentralization of the private ownership of the means of production, albeit a decentralization which tends towards centralization due to the econophysical flows of entrenched capital, disenfranchises the vast majority of people because of the branching factor of the hierarchical power structures inherent to bourgeois wage worker management techniques and the economic incentive structures inherent to maintaining wage labor markets and the proletarianization of as many workers as possible

i think this is the source of your error. i think you incorrectly place the blame for this problem on capitalism. it could easily be resolved with changed tax rates and improved social services, within a capitalist society. it makes no sense to me to throw out private ownership when other solutions exist.

15 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

capitalism is not freedom

by definition, capitalism is the freedom to own your own business.

15 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

capitalism is wage slavery, because the public commons are controlled by the few rather than the many. 

again, you misplace the blame. society not being perfect does not mean that capitalism is incorrect.

17 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

the tragedy of the commons is a problem we, through capitalism's radical and revolutionary industrialization, have gained the potential to solve, through the implementation of socialism and communism. 

here you acknowledge benefits of capitalism. i address the other part by again saying that social programs can be implemented in a capitalist society.

18 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

this is greater freedom even though it removes bourgeois economic freedom, which is really defined by private property rights and thus class partitioning of the population, resulting in exploitation, which is a removal of freedom for those subject to wage slavery.

the error here is that it unwisely puts faith in governmental authority, while removing power from individuals.

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42 minutes ago, very honest said:

it also rewards what people value through market competition. why would government control enforce what is right, any better?

 

rude and inaccurate. 

image.thumb.png.cda0a8cd6641c9f4e3001be72d0ac441.png

you describe work. you prefer a tunnel with no light at the end?

invoking words like "bourgeois" doesn't make your argument any more coherent. you're arguing for government control while claiming to oppose monarchism? feudalism is distinct from capitalism. you assume i'm not a free-thinker... which demonstrates your own carelessness about reaching conclusions.

capitalism is a very general word, it just means private ownership. your qualms can be addressed with regulation. safety nets can be provided in capitalist societies. capitalism is not your enemy. the alternative to capitalism is a lack of freedom, and an unwise forfeit of control to government.

i think this is the source of your error. i think you incorrectly place the blame for this problem on capitalism. it could easily be resolved with changed tax rates and improved social services, within a capitalist society. it makes no sense to me to throw out private ownership when other solutions exist.

by definition, capitalism is the freedom to own your own business.

again, you misplace the blame. society not being perfect does not mean that capitalism is incorrect.

here you acknowledge benefits of capitalism. i address the other part by again saying that social programs can be implemented in a capitalist society.

the error here is that it unwisely puts faith in governmental authority, while removing power from individuals.

 

Market competition is not good, it results in duplication of work and lower quality work since it forces a rush of new commodities and services to market, which decreases their quality because of the short time horizon being optimized for by capital.  It would be better for all workers to cooperate and avoid duplicated work.

I'm not "arguing for government controls" I'm arguing for communism which is the abolition of the state through making it obsolete, since it exists only as an enforcer of bourgeois property relations.

Capitalism can't be fixed through regulation for various reasons.  Capital captures bourgeois electoral democratic institutions.  Capital actively opposes workers rights movements.  You're right, theoretically we could get this increase in quality of life through regulations and social safety nets under capitalism - the material reality and production capacity of capitalism does not disallow it - but economically the class conflict inherent to capitalism results in this not being an actual practical option, since these fetters upon capitalism will be broken by it, through any means necessary, by the bourgeoisie

I am not incorrectly blaming the problem on capitalism.  It cannot be cured with social democratic reform.

Capitalism is not "the freedom to own your own business" if the vast majority of people are so poor they WILL be forced into a lifetime of wage slavery, providing them little more than destitution.  You're also ignoring the clear ideological contradiction of the existence of national boundaries and geopolitical conflicts which result in the supposed moral ideals applied domestically being completely ignored when deployed in a colonial context, to serve imperialist capitalist aims

Social programs can't be implemented in a capitalist society.  We've just had a global pandemic and the largest protests movements in the US in decades and guess what, we can't even get a floor vote for Medicare For All let alone actually implementing it.  You say it can happen, but this is only in theory if the bourgeoisie lets it happen.  It's idealism.  "If we just beg maybe they will give us scraps and decrease our exploitation a bit" is idealism since you're banking on the decisions of our opposing class being made for our benefit, when that will never happen due to the nature of the contradictions inherent even to the bourgeois class itself which requires them to exploit us mercilessly to avoid losing their capital

In essence capitalism is a cybernetic system which humanity itself has no control over, this is clearly reflected in markets whose behaviors are still not understood and cannot be, since it requires like-kind economic calculations on industrial and labor processes acting upon raw materials as well as precise knowledge of consumer demands.  This is the supposed goal of market efficiency and yet it can only be achieved by communism, a superior economic mode of production.

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2 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

if workers had no boss, left to work to their own devices, all the software they made would be better, more useful, and more universally applicable.

That is some wild shit you’re smoking. 

 

1 hour ago, cyanobacteria said:

I'm not "arguing for government controls" I'm arguing for communism which is the abolition of the state through making it obsolete, since it exists only as an enforcer of bourgeois property relations

Oh you’re at the anarcho-communist phase already. Well, you’ll either make it through that and understand that well-regulated markets along with private capital investments provide better outcomes than communism, or you’ll end up like Richard Stallman. 

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53 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

That is some wild shit you’re smoking. 

 

Oh you’re at the anarcho-communist phase already. Well, you’ll either make it through that and understand that well-regulated markets along with private capital investments provide better outcomes than communism, or you’ll end up like Richard Stallman. 

Not really, it's an almost universal complaint of the software industry among actual workers.  Systems become spaghetti garbage due to business people pushing for implementation of changes meant to fulfill the arbitrary whims of customers on short timelines, resulting in garbage code.

I'm not sure what phases you're talking about or what progression of phases you're implying by the word "already" but I'm not sure where you're getting this justification that capitalism provides better outcomes than communism.  I'm also not sure why you think this linear progression of ideas you've projected into me will result into me "ending up like Richard Stallman".  I wish to God that I could be as influential and important as him, I promise I will never end up like him, due to my own failures.  It's strange that you'd imply "end[ing] up" like him is a bad thing.

Take a look at how these "well-regulated" markets affect people outside those markets and those exploited by the wage labor employed by those markets, as well as how capital itself is what modifies the regulations more than the workers.  Your views espoused here are very idealistic and don't seem to translate into reality

It's also interesting that you didn't bother replying to any of my points which were already themselves replies to the points you were making in response to the cherry-picked subset of posts you selected from my post.  I don't really see the point of making such a post

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The assumption that workers, left to their own devices, would make coherent systems to meet the needs of enterprise, is a wild leap of faith based on nothing at all. 
 

The justification that well-regulated capitalism provides better outcomes than communism is evident throughout history. 
Simply because you live in a country that refuses to regulate industry and enforce those regulations doesn’t mean it can’t be done. 
Eliminating competitive markets is like trying to practice autarky, which has proven its failures numerous times throughout history. 
 

Stallman is influential, kind of, but he’s also not really taken seriously by many in computing anymore. He’s an isolated dude who spends a lot of his time tilting at windmills. 

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7 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

The assumption that workers, left to their own devices, would make coherent systems to meet the needs of enterprise, is a wild leap of faith based on nothing at all. 
 

The justification that well-regulated capitalism provides better outcomes than communism is evident throughout history. 
Simply because you live in a country that refuses to regulate industry and enforce those regulations doesn’t mean it can’t be done. 
Eliminating competitive markets is like trying to practice autarky, which has proven its failures numerous times throughout history. 
 

Stallman is influential, kind of, but he’s also not really taken seriously by many in computing anymore. He’s an isolated dude who spends a lot of his time tilting at windmills. 

Workers self-organized under socialism can create coherent industrial systems to meet the needs of people, with no regard for capitalist conceptions of enterprise.

Capitalism providing better outcomes is not any more evident than claims that feudalism provides better outcomes than capitalism during the initial revolutionary periods of attempts to establish capitalism

It's clear that reform can be done to a capitalist country and it might help the people, but it's very clear that reform is not the solution to escape the problems caused by capitalism because it does not work to solve all of the problems and it does not generate sustainable solutions.  Social programs can be cut by bourgeois elected officials, and this routinely happens

Your claim that the only alternative to competitive markets is autarky is first off ridiculous considering the existence of central planning

Calling Stallman "kind of" influential is a sad.  He created trillions of dollars of wealth for others, for no personal gain.

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4 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

if workers had no boss, left to work to their own devices, all the software they made would be better, more useful, and more universally applicable. 

This is lol. Do you even FOSS bro? Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but assuming folks will make better code because they're doing it for l'oeuf is straight delusional. I think strong priorities, stakeholders, requirements, review, and QA are a lot more important for quality software than a particular business model (or lack thereof). Capital goes a long way within each of these categories.

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2 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:

This is lol. Do you even FOSS bro? Don't get me wrong, I love open source, but assuming folks will make better code because they're doing it for l'oeuf is straight delusional. I think strong priorities, stakeholders, requirements, review, and QA are a lot more important for quality software than a particular business model (or lack thereof). Capital goes a long way within each of these categories.

I disagree.  It's quite clear that a Global Software Workers Union with organized software design goals each fitting concrete mathematical and computational needs, to increase the ratio of low level software development to client level software development, would increase code quality significantly, especially when the entire global codebase is auditable and editable by anyone.  The issue is that there's simply too much code that does not need to exist, all spread out in separate companies, many of which are doing basically the same thing as each other, repeatedly in different ways.  This is the nature of "competition" and other nonsensical concepts.  Competition is good in software if it's done as a social behavior whereby the winner is chosen and their implementation is disseminated freely to everyone else, who uses it when they meet that same problem.  But "competition" whereby many companies do the same thing over and over, and repeat the same mistakes over and over, is nonsensical. 

You're not even addressing the binary blob issue and the fact that it's a technical issue that quite literally cannot be solved by capitalism because of the economic incentives it puts on hiding source code.  Quite literally the structure of capitalism itself holds back technological progress in a way which creates a class structure of those who have access to the source code and the cryptographic rights to push auto-updates to end-users, and those end-users themselves whose computation, nowadays a clear transhumanistic extension of the self, is controlled by those entities

Look I'm sure things are working great for you and you don't really care about these issues but they're issues and they need to be solved before things continue getting worse and worse

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1 hour ago, cyanobacteria said:

Systems become spaghetti garbage due to business people pushing for implementation of changes meant to fulfill the arbitrary whims of customers on short timelines, resulting in garbage code.

This is a thing but has more to do with unclear/conflicting requirements and leadership being unwilling to listen to engineers and/or make tough decisions about the product: loss of focus on core competency. One has to be able to just say "no" to stupid requests from customers, but that's not a flaw of capitalism itself (although it does have many flaws).

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Just now, sweepstakes said:

This is a thing but has more to do with unclear/conflicting requirements and leadership being unwilling to listen to engineers and/or make tough decisions about the product: loss of focus on core competency. One has to be able to just say "no" to stupid requests from customers, but that's not a flaw of capitalism itself (although it does have many flaws).

It is a flaw of capitalism itself, that of the alienation of the worker from the process of their labor.  Their freedom is taken and their ability to say "No" to their boss when they tell them to do nonsense is taken from them.  The eternal illusion of capitalism is one described by "Yes capitalism can solve that problem in theory, if the people in charge decide to forego profit in the short-term and long-term" which is contradictory to capitalism's own ideology, and in fact contradictory to the market dynamics of the accumulation of capitals

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9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

It's quite clear that a Global Software Workers Union with organized software design goals each fitting concrete mathematical and computational needs, to increase the ratio of low level software development to client level software development, would increase code quality significantly

wat

9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

the entire global codebase is auditable and editable by anyone.

- Not everything is on GitHub
- Most things on GitHub nobody gives a shit about and you could hardly pay someone to look at them

9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

there's simply too much code that does not need to exist, all spread out in separate companies, many of which are doing basically the same thing as each other, repeatedly in different ways. 

OK, you have half a point here, but you kind of buried the lede.

9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

This is the nature of "competition" and other nonsensical concepts.  Competition is good in software if it's done as a social behavior whereby the winner is chosen and their implementation is disseminated freely to everyone else, who uses it when they meet that same problem.  But "competition" whereby many companies do the same thing over and over, and repeat the same mistakes over and over, is nonsensical.

Why "freely"? AWS, anyone? Also free libraries/frameworks are a thing too.

You completely lost me on the rest.

 

6 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

It is a flaw of capitalism itself, that of the alienation of the worker from the process of their labor.  Their freedom is taken and their ability to say "No" to their boss when they tell them to do nonsense is taken from them.  The eternal illusion of capitalism is one described by "Yes capitalism can solve that problem in theory, if the people in charge decide to forego profit in the short-term and long-term" which is contradictory to capitalism's own ideology, and in fact contradictory to the market dynamics of the accumulation of capitals

Workers can still vote with their feet though. At least in software engineering, jobs are still plentiful.

Also leadership isn't completely full of dickheads in every single company. Sometimes they do actually listen and make smart, informed decisions.

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1 minute ago, sweepstakes said:

wat

- Not everything is on GitHub
- Most things on GitHub nobody gives a shit about and you could hardly pay someone to look at them

OK, you have half a point here, but you kind of buried the lede.

Why "freely"? AWS, anyone? Also free libraries/frameworks are a thing too.

You completely lost me on the rest.

 

I'm not talking about Github.  I want Github abolished.  It's a private company.  All code should be distributed freely because it removes the requirement of expending effort to implement the same code twice, so other code which still needs to be implemented can be worked on instead.  It also gives auditability and eliminates the existence of binary blobs except as internal implementation details generated by FOSS code i.e. deterministically generatable binary blobs.  I don't see how I completely lost you on the rest, everything I'm saying is a very standard cybersocialist critique of the software industry under capitalism, specifically, as well as one for which a more generalized form could be applied to any industry.

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4 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:

Workers can still vote with their feet though. At least in software engineering, jobs are still plentiful.

Also leadership isn't completely full of dickheads in every single company. Sometimes they do actually listen and make smart, informed decisions.

You're right, in theory every worker can "vote with their feet" and quit their specific job if its rulers don't behave well.  This can be extended to the entire software industry as a whole through radical unionism and general software worker strikes.  This all ignores the fact that the software industry does not exist in isolation though but as part of a larger political economic system in which it finds itself embedded and whose requirements shape it and alienate it from itself just as the individual workers are themselves alienated from their labor.  This is caused by the division of labor itself which must be abolished.  You're making a false dilemma here by saying it's about "smart, informed decisions" when in reality the issue here is that of selfless vs selfish decisions, and capitalism makes that choice for every CEO.  It's a game theoretical problem that capitalist societies find themselves trapped in, and the only way to overcome it is through a radical reorganization of the entire relations of production, through radical means.

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9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

All code should be distributed freely because it removes the requirement of expending effort to implement the same code twice, so other code which still needs to be implemented can be worked on instead. 

OK, so build the code for free (which does precisely the thing the prospective customers want in precisely the way they want it) and then start sniping the capitalists' customers. And make sure you talk to the ones with the wallets. If you somehow manage to do this with sufficient precision, scale, and communication skills, then in theory you can destroy the profitability of the software industry. Best of luck!

9 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

everything I'm saying is a very standard cybersocialist critique of the software industry under capitalism, specifically, as well as one for which a more generalized form could be applied to any industry.

Never heard of it, but if this is so very standard, then why don't you stop jumping up and down and stomping your feet and just post a link? "If you build it they will come", etc.

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5 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

You're making a false dilemma here by saying it's about "smart, informed decisions" when in reality the issue here is that of selfless vs selfish decisions, and capitalism makes that choice for every CEO.  It's a game theoretical problem that capitalist societies find themselves trapped in, and the only way to overcome it is through a radical reorganization of the entire relations of production, through radical means.

What's the dilemma?

I think there are like 5 or 6 different things being conflated in this thread where somehow the conclusion is simply "capitalism is bad". Taken one-by-one, I would almost certainly agree with a point or two being posited here, but en masse it feels like the guy on the corner screaming at passers by.

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23 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

A)Workers self-organized under socialism can create coherent industrial systems to meet the needs of people, with no regard for capitalist conceptions of enterprise.

B)Capitalism providing better outcomes is not any more evident than claims that feudalism provides better outcomes than capitalism during the initial revolutionary periods of attempts to establish capitalism

C)It's clear that reform can be done to a capitalist country and it might help the people, but it's very clear that reform is not the solution to escape the problems caused by capitalism because it does not work to solve all of the problems and it does not generate sustainable solutions.  Social programs can be cut by bourgeois elected officials, and this routinely happens

D)Your claim that the only alternative to competitive markets is autarky is first off ridiculous considering the existence of central planning

E)Calling Stallman "kind of" influential is a sad.  He created trillions of dollars of wealth for others, for no personal gain

A) No they can’t. Not to meet demand on a global scale (enterprise simply means work or project, nothing to do with an economic theory). Leadership and decision making is required, otherwise you get stalled in process. Democratic processes on projects will be far less efficient than having specialized roles, leading to waste and delay. 
 

B) This is 100% inaccurate, as any cursory glance at economic history will show. As well, we have the benefit of looking at communist economies (I’m not talking about political side of things here) and we can make the comparison based on that history. 
 

C) Socialist countries fall prey to the same issue, with even worse outcomes, and worse mechanisms to resolve bad leadership. 
 

D) Central planning is an even worse example of how to develop an economy, again, as any reading of economic history would show. 
 

E) So yeah, not a great outcome.  

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