Jerry Pournelle

Absolutely: Steve Ciarcia is a true god!

http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/

On the other hand, Jerry Pournelle was notorious for threatening companies with bad reviews (and carrying out his threats) if they didn't give him free products.

So in that sense, he was a pioneer in the field of Entitlement Blogging.

https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/2049013308712608

>The sense of entitlement is just too strong in the blogging community and the nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie is giving your whole industry a bad name. I never thought we would be inundated with negative reviews for the simple reason that somebody was required to pay for goods received or services rendered.

Not only did he feel entitled to free (as in LOTS OF beer) hardware and software, but also to free ARPANET access, which he bragged about in Chaos Manor.

And then he would make incoherent drunken accusations and threats in public to his benevolent benefactors at MIT, who finally got sick of him and flushed him.

"How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET": http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html

He was so far ahead of his time, he would be working for the Trump administration if he were younger. They would have loved his enthusiasm for social darwinism. "Think of it as evolution in action." -POURNE

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candidate-2/

"So what do I do?…

> My main point is that a company is going to follow the interests of its board and its shareholders. Why do you think these are misaligned?

Fundamentally the company's success depends on the product, right? Sure, the shareholders are what needs to be appeased but they set their price on the excitement of what's to come. We can abuse this by creating artificial hype but do you not think that growth is better sustained with hype over worthwhile new products?

The investors are fickle and do not have the interest of the company in mind. They only have that interest so long as they hold their shares and they couldn't care less when they sell. But a business should not think in the moment, but the trend over time. Those investors will come and go and we want them to. You don't do that by appeasing the small subset of investors that invest now, especially those who are looking to get in and out as fast as possible. If the investors are the "real customer" then how do you sustain them in the long term? Certainly this is highly aligned with sustaining the people actually buying the products.

This seems highly related to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. Those who voice are the first group, devoted to the goals of the organization. Those who care about the quarter and no further are the second. Loyal to the organization. Worse, loyal only while it suits them. And that's no loyalty at all.

[0] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1] presents a problem for anyone seeking to rectify the problem of an organization having too much power. In order to fix the problem, you first need power, which means that you need to create the institutional structures needed to secure that power, which means you have just exacerbated the problem. If you then actually follow-through with your original goal, nobody will listen to you, because you have (by definition) removed your power. More pithily, "Organizations whose top priority is not the continued existence of the organization are replaced by organizations whose top priority is."

The only way to fix an organization that's outgrown its social purpose is for that organization to fail, outright, and then have its functions subsumed by other entities outside of the organization that can pick up the pieces. Sometimes the failure comes from internal dysfunction, sometimes it comes from external competition, but most of the time it's a mix of both, as internal dysfunction drives away competent insiders who then form the locus of external resistance.

[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

RIM is now a textbook case of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html) in action. Group one, the goal seekers, have been or are being forced out or converted to members of group two, the organization supporters. Those anonymous letters coming from the current and former employees? Just desperate attempts from group one employees to be heard over the crushing silence of the group two management structure.

Don't expect RIM's fortunes to turn around any time soon. Only a catastrophic business failure is going to shake up the management structure. With RIM's financials and market position, it could be years before that event comes to pass. Even then, there's no guarantee that RIM would really make a recovery. Most likely RIM will be absorbed by a larger competitor (and the current RIM top brass removed) before anything like real business failure can occur.

It's so painful to watch this. RIM has really made some great products and services.

Yes making the actual product is very very secondary to successfully appeasing Congress, produce 'jobs', and follow the litany of rules in place about now the money is used and paperwork after to check boxes.

These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.

Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.

This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

The Iron Law of Oligarchy [0], Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [1], and the Iron Law of Institutions [2] are all closely related. They are essential to understanding how the modern world works and doesn't work and why.

The Iron Law of Wages is how Marx and others described the key consequence of the great Thomas Malthus's Principle of Population. [3]

Google finds various Iron Laws of the Market, Valuation, Prohibition, Finance, Volunteering, and more, but the only ones I hear in regular conversation are the ones I mentioned above. The one from sociological evaluation in OP is interesting to see also.

What Iron Laws are there in your field or conversation?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
[1] http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
[2] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_institutions
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages