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A Reflection On Sun Executive Payouts For Failure
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."
+1, Owes Bruce a Beer
Ferris: [to the camera] If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?
[beat]
Ferris: Neither would I.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
I don't believe an econometrics class was available at the time. Certainly not at the undergraduate level, and I suspect not at the graduate level either because if I recall correctly, one of the grumps badmouthing econometrics was the department chair. He was ready, willing, and able to stamp out any appearance of econometrics.
I'm aware of what econometrics is and what it can do (and not do) (and wishes it could do). My complaint was that economics is useless because it fails to be an even remotely reasonable model of reality. Reducing the price of a product may increase the demand for said product, holding all else constant, but first, it's essentially impossible to hold all else constant in reality, and second there are cases where that's not true. Decrease the price of a high priced fashion product enough and the demand will first spike and then collapse. Not once was the phenomenon ever mentioned in my classes, and so no attempt was made to show a model that matched it.
Now I suppose that graduate level classes involved models of sufficient complexity to begin addressing such issues, but I have my doubts. The framework I was taught was too simplistic and too fragile to extend to that degree of complexity, and I question the likelihood of introducing a complete discontinuity in the educational process of economists when moving from undergraduate to graduate classes.
Incidentally, the demand curve I described is decidedly non-linear. It looks more like a piece of a cubic polynomial. A linear regression will dramatically fail to match the actual data. I sincerely hope you're looking beyond multivariate linear regression if you ever hope to accurately predict corn prices next quarter.