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Economy Tanked While Government Surfed Porn
unixan writes "In a report by the SEC Inspector General that smacks of fiddling while Rome burns, 33 recent ethics investigations all showed that the government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn — while the economy was tipping over. One cited example: 'A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office.'"
... government employees responsible for keeping an eye on the economy were instead obsessed with surfing porn ...
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries? Understandable how those orders could get confused.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Look at the man in the cubicle across from you. Now look at the two men to the left of you. Now look at the two men to the right of you. One of them is surfing porn at work.*
* Unless it's you. And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
My work here is dung.
Any non-work internet activity is risking ones job.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
As of 2007, the SEC employed 3798 people. They found 33 cases of apparently habitual porn surfing (I get the impression a single visit didn't count, but visiting a few times a week would get noticed). Is it actually news that ~1% of *any* organization consisting primarily of office workers with internet connections would surf for porn? Finding 1% of any given population with no damn common sense or self control is trivial. I'm not sure how it's any different because the SEC numbers are known.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Would the economy be OK now? Just asking.....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This puritan interpretation is just dumb.
Porn did not kill the economy, the SEC has way more than 30 employees. C'mon.... If porn was such a baaaad thing, no company would be doing anything and the economy wouldve.... oh wait!
NO SIG
As far as anyone can tell, not one of these people were fired for both not doing their job and for using work equipment in a HIGHLY non-work related manner.
Then again, we have the same thing around here. We know for a fact and have documented at least two people repeatedly, for over half an hour each day for months on end, trying to access porn and porn-related sites. Yet, like the SEC, none have been canned.
To use a tired comment, there used to be a time when one could work hard, get recognized and advance ones career through such work. No longer. Apparently failure is the new success.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
like a troll.
A) DO you think people watch the economy by looking out a window? no. It's worded like the think the economy is in a box and people are just watching in case it finds a way out.
B) They have no way of knowing what's going on in every board room in the financial industry
c) IT's a large organization, of course some people where surfing porn. People are people.
D) None of this excuse what they did. I'm only pointing out that just because it's "the government" doesn't mean the people running it aren't people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just a quick reminder to anyone thinking of condeming these people here on Slashdot - are you at work right now, reading Slashdot? Is that what you're paid for? The article reeks of sensationalism just because these people happened to be viewing porn instead of reading news, flicking through a book, watching YouTube, or a thousand and one other things that people do every day at work instead of actually working.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
I'm glad I don't work where you do.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The SEC's job was to go after fraud and general theft; they didn't do their job. The fact that a lot of them were caught surfing for pron isn't the point; the point is that they were not doing their jobs and the consequences were for the most part, felt by other people.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I cant believe people fill up their hardrives with the stuff. I mean porn is fine and all, but how much do you need. Are you ever going to go back and look at your archived porn. I mean, I can understand having some archived that particularly turns you on, or downloading some that you might look at later and then delete, but archiving hundreds of gigs of porn?
I just don't get it. Its not like there is going to be a shortage all of a sudden.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
You'd be surprised at what people get away with in corporations. This really isn't that surprising. People are just like 'ZOMG its gov't failure' instead of 'ZOMG it people failure'. I bet many large companies would have similar statistics (sadly).
or the guy had enough bureaucratic weight that it would flatten anyone that spoke up about it...
heck, sometimes i suspect the office rats that do not get replaced during a election cycle either collect stuff they can leak on a "temporary" boss in case he becomes to uppity, or just wait the term out and then go back to business as usual if said boss got voted out of office.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
This sounds very erudite and post-contemporary, but it's also nonsensical cruft.
Playing Tetris is slacking off. Browsing porn at work is a sign of really, really questionable, almost "flaming out" judgment.
I guarantee you that any competant IT department would not only be fully aware of what was going on, but also smart enough not to stir a pot that big.
If I came in tomorrow and the entire sales team was found to be mass downloading pron, what could we do? Get the entire team fired? Who is going to pick up the slack from that? Can't just replace people just like that. We could filter their content, but how long before that becomes a headache when they can't reach legit sites. We can throttle them but then there are complaints that they can't get any work done while they are chewing through bandwidth on a bit-torrent.
IT's job is to make sure that everyone is up and running. Its the managers job to make sure that people are doing their work. When people start treating IT like a police force, then something is seriously wrong, and you need to look at the power structure and layout of your company. We can be eyes and ears, we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired.
should they have, god forbid, attempted to * gasp * regulate wall street while wall street was doing all those scams ?
all in a country, and a political environment which have been brainwashed to the core by decades of yelps of "deregulation - you'll cost americans jobs !!" ?
and all the while having a right wing, 'hands off business' administration looming over their head ?
how many of you would dare attempt do actually, god forbid, do your job and try to question wall street in such an environment, and lose all future career options, even if not directly your job ? note that you would probably lose your job, had it been under bush administration, flat out.
even the most left wing politicians were not able to dare speak against wall street, and this 'deregulation - hands off' business, until it became as clear as day that wall street actually perpetrated scams. EVEN during the period wall street was dragging all the world down, there were still 'experts', 'pundits' who were coming up in news channels and delivering opinion on how this was not a crisis and no regulation was needed and attacking whomever dare talked about any regulation. remember how peter schiff was ridiculed right 2-3 months after crisis, despite all the stuff he has said has come to pass and he was right.
leave it aside, there are STILL some totally out of touch right wingers coming up in senate or house floor, and saying 'deregulation', even after it came out that goldman sachs actually perpetrated not 1, but 5 different kinds of scam in one mortgage backed hedge fund.
so, tell me, what would you do in such an environment, if you were them ?
you would watch porn. or play games. because, noone who put you there, wanted you to do your job.
Read radical news here
Sheila Bair hasn't enforced the (non-discretionary) Prompt Corrective Action law on any of the largest TBTF banks.
Henry Paulson lobbied for the repeal of the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall while he worked for Goldman Sachs and then committed extortion by threatening Congress with martial law unless they handed over $700 billion to a group of unapprehended felons.
The FBI warned about about an epidemic of mortgage fraud back in 2004 yet the last two administrations have not indicted a single major player in the industry.
But by all means, ignore them and pay attention to the small fry browsing porn.
I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
Saved countless hours of problems.
Besides, the IT department just wants the good porn to go into the shared collection and for the job to be done. If I am waiting for a long-ass process to happen and would otherwise be left picking my nose or jabbering at someone who is trying to work, a bit of down time with a browser is not a big deal.
Interesting that this years-old story rears up now, when the SEC is suing Goldman and the administration is pushing financial industry reform.
Sounds like there certainly was (is?) a porn problem at SEC. Convenient that is was such a non-story, until needed.
Oh for christsake, it's not nonsensical, it's true. People are terrified of 'sex,' and anything sex related. It's the latest hip-craze to hate crimes involving sexuality. I can almost hear the hissing masses reading this article "Sssssssseeex offendderrssssss!" Bad judgement, yes; It's just as bad as playing Farmville or WoW. Not worse though.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Or addicted to the hormone rush from viewing porn in the same way that people get addicted to the physiological reactions to alcohol. An addiction is a low-level conditioned response that bypasses conscious thought. Tiger Woods and Jesse James addicted to sex because they spent at most few hours a week having sex with someone other than their wife? Probably not. Some guy who is surfing porn 8 hours a day? Yeah, that's getting Pavlovian.
The guy Bush appointed hired these clowns. They were high level folks. Bush hired cronies, who hired their cronies, and so on, regardless of skill level. "Heckuva job, Brownie!" Bush was a clown in a chimp suit, so were the people he appointed, and the departments they ran were jokes, especially the SEC. If Bush could have just gutted it and shut it down , he would have, so his bestest buddies on Wall Street wouldn't have to worry about those pesky investigations. Instead, he did the next best thing: made sure it was staffed with incompetents.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Bush was absolutely and without a doubt the worst president this country has ever had. He will be remembered as such forever. Everyone who voted for him should feel mortified by their choices, if they have any decency, patriotism, or respect for the office of president.
If Bush had wanted a functional SEC, he could have created one. He obviously either did not care, or was not competent enough to do it, because Obama sure as hell did.
Important take away from this: the SEC under Bush was incompetent. Obama fixed that. Got it? Is that fucking clear enough for you brain damaged simians? Got that through your thick, slope browed Republican skulls? Good, now please waste your fucking mod points on me, you can't touch my karma, bitches.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sad isn't it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They covered all their bases by contributing to everyone. But yes, Obama is a corporate centrist and will likely pass a toothless, watered down financial reform bill.
Funny, you say that a president can't do anything about the departments that are under his direct control. Bill Clinton certainly did a good job policing his departments, that's how he managed to build up a surplus, by cutting the fat in the departments.
There have been presidencies where the SEC was a real tiger, going after the crooks on Wall Street. There could be again. Is this one? I doubt it, but I'm still hoping Obama and the Dems might do the right thing and regulate the hell out of these assholes. What I'd really like to see is the top tax rate going back up to what it was in the fifties, nearly 90%.
Fuck those Wall Street assholes. Fuck them right where it hurts: their wallets.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What a surprisingly reasonable policy.
By giving people a false sense of security, the SEC keeps people from even making the barest attempt at due diligence before handing over their money to the Bernie Madoffs of the world. If you're going to delegate this responsibility to anyone, it should be to a private agency that has something to lose if they fuck up, not to a bureaucracy which will in all likelihood get a budget increase after a major failure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Liar. Clinton cut fat, he was famous for it. Google 'clinton budget cuts.' Of course, Republicans won't admit he was a better fiscal conservative than any of them ever were.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton