This is something that i’ve noticed in my job as an industrial farmer.
When growing chickpeas we use an special implement to cut the chickpea plant at a certain stage of growth to accelerate the drying process. By doing this you stop the natural cycle of the plant and thus the grain does not develop as much as it would by just letting it complete it’s cycle. But the grain dries much faster and is ready to be harvested earlier.
So why do we do this? It’s because the grain prices are better the sooner you harvest, so you make more profit by using more fuel to cut the plant and losing production. So every grower is racing others to harvest as soon as possible (some even start planting much earlier than the ideal date) and losing a lot of actual grain production by doing so.
So in summary; we use an extra implement, use extra fuel (imagine the amount of fuel used in tens of thousands of hectares…) AND get less yields because the market incentivizes us to do it.
EDIT: Forgot to say that by not accelerating the harvest process, you risk that grain buyers bins reach their max capacity and no one buys your grain!
Middlemen in basically every single service in Neo-liberal hells like the US. An example. Let’s say you need to get a clearance to work for some specific Government function. (yes clearances are a whole shit show of exclusions etc etc, but let’s ignore that for now.) There needs to be a process that you follow to make sure you meet the requirements for that clearance.
Ultimately all of this information the government already has on you. Criminal Records, possibly Fingerprints, relative wealth, family connections, etc etc. So much like a NCIS check, if the government was functional and no one needed to be a middleman, it would be a Yes/No immediately, with potentially the needs to fingerprint you, as that was written into the requirements. Unfortunately several security cottage industries have sprung up around that process and it is in those industries best interests to make sure the process can never be improved. So the government can never move beyond paper records. You have to go to a special “certified” and private fingerprinting place. You have to physically mail different packets to different state police agencies to get your background check done. You have to talk with different arms of the government to provide tax information, bank accounts, birth certificates, social security numbers. None of this should be necessary, but every middleman that has shoe-horned their way into the process ensures it will forever be necessary.
The ultimate consequence is that now everyone thinks government is “inefficient,” and more services become privatized.
For real, the “service” economy should be renamed to middlemen economy.
“Survival of the richest by rushkoff” is a fun read on how the tech industry boils down to a bunch of middlemen “going meta” between themselves, its a shallow critic but fun read.
You have to hand it to them, they know what they’re doing. Bastards.
And if you want something done? You ask one ‘provider’ who tells you it’s not in their remit so you have to go to a second ‘provider’ who tells you it’s not in their remit and they send you to the first ‘provider’ and so on. Both providers promised the government they can cut the cost of the service to basically zero and the government is happy to pay them for making the system ‘efficient’; which means driving service users to the market, where someone will charge a fee and still not provide the service because pretending to do so is still offering more than you’ll get from anywhere else.
And the owner of all these ‘provider’ companies is a parent corporation that will make the government decision-maker/legislator a board member with dividend rights for doing fuck all except funnelling public money into private hands. Did I mention they’re bastards?