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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Sort-of. What I’m imagining is a small selection of vehicle sizes from small hatchback to estate/people carrier to van/kei-sized pickup that have a common battery pack size, motor, and inverter.

    You’d choose the type of vehicle that has just the basics built-in like safety and AC.

    The rest is customisable and allows for 3rd party manufacturers to make ancillary products for it. Do this by using existing standards for 3rd party automotive parts and then create new standards with open sourced designs for things that aren’t: i.e. the battery pack size and interface, and inverter size and interface.

    Eventually what I’d like to see is a market where people can keep these vehicles running by upgrading, repairing, recycling.

    If I had a billion dollars laying around I’d sink it into trying to create an automotive co-operative to get at least 3 different sized vehicles with a common battery, motor, and inverter made, through certification, and then released. Then let the market do it’s thing when presented with a new opportunity: adopt and grow.

    And I know that I’m certainly missing a lot of issues with this idea but that’s just what it is, an idea and it’ll probably stay that way unless someone else has the resources to make it.














  • Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.

    The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:

    1. Anyone who’s focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn’t always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.

    2. It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.

    This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that’s left of the company’s institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.

    If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.