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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.
And we surf slashdot rather than doing our own jobs
Any non-work internet activity is risking ones job.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
that in the case of the attorney, an ethics complaint is filed with the state bar. This is unconscionable behavior for an attorney and should result in disbarment.
Wow, talk about bureaucracy. There's no way I would have gotten away with downloading that much on a work connection, even if it was Linux ISOs or legal, harmless data. How did these guys get away with it for so long? Let's say this guy had a 500 GB hard drive...then stacks of DVDs at 4.7 GB each...that's a lot of smut a day. My network admins would have been knocking on my office door. Once they found out what it was, I'd never find a job again.
Something tells me the network admins for that government department must have been doing the same thing, or were incompetent, or playing WoW (or maybe some hellish combination).
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
Yep - watching people screwing, while the people they are supposed to be watching are screwing the public. Which makes the SEC like the glory hole in Wall Street.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
These poor bastards are going to be burned at the afraid-of-sexuality stake, instead of the do-your-damn-job-instead-of-goofing-off stake. They deserve to be fired like any other idiot who goofs off, but I'm sure they're going to be charged with sex crimes of some sort.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
If the regulators are basically at the whim of the industry, then clearly, they don't have much to do... The de-regulationists will say this is government waste and move to disband or "rightsize" the SEC. Meanwhile, everyone else is concerned about regulatory capture. This is a clear indicator.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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
I'm really curious as to when it's acceptable to look at someone’s history for productivity. I mean, Do you do regular checks of employees? Or do you wait until there is a problem and then use web history as another good reason as to why the employee shouldn't be working there?
Just from a union and fairness point of view, it seems a bit off to only check one person’s history. If one person gets regularly checked, so should everybody else... Right?
It's called a private office... and a mindset with a lot of imaginations that develop over time.
I'm sure IT was well aware of the situation by the time the hard drive was full.
Who watches the watchers? Ceiling cat does.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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
Kind of like reading /. at work?
"What is there a tank on the boat? WHY IS THERE A TANK ON THE BOAT?!?" L4D2
I don't know. Does any non-work phone use risking your job?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How many "watchers" that everything should be all right, in all sectors, are surfing porn right now? How many will enter into a paranoid state and delete everything in their hard drives, including critical info? And how many of them will try to show that they were working instead of surfing porn and or uncover something big, or take out a lot of somewhat normal people (probably more normal than them) becuase not following to the letter some law?
And, of course, who watches the watchers? 8 hours a day watching porn instead of working is a bad symptom.for any kind of work (unless you work is related with porn sites)
... SEC workers were found to suffer from an increased rate of blindness.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
When I was interning at the VA I noticed that one of the public computers for the vets to use had spyware on it. IT was contacted, ran their one program, but the spyware was still there. They said that's all they can do. Government IT people don't go crazy by not realizing that their marching orders are insane. Also have no undergrad at all probably doesn't help.
If this is that big a deal, I hope nobody finds out I've actually been having sex while the economy tanks.
Especially my wife.
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!
FTFA:
Anyone want to bet that certain right-wing news outlets are furiously trying to figure out a way to blame this on President Obama?
You are welcome on my lawn.
An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.
SEC employees of all walks of life and genders are united in their quest for superior porn while at work!
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
Are you surfing Slashdot at work?
... is that they wanted to diddle while rome burned?
Obviously, some organizations are just sclerotic and incompetent. Being a complex system is, actually, pretty tricky. However, some organizations are that way by design.
In this case, was the SEC basically just incompetent, or was their incompetence tolerated, abetted, nurtured by those who really didn't want them to find anything?
After all, in retrospect, it is fairly obvious that much of the apparent prosperity of the last decade or so was a bubble. Consumer spending based on imaginary wealth provided by homes appraised for large numbers, GDP numbers based on rampant construction of housing stock that nobody could actually afford to live in, various quite sophisticated flavors of financial chicanery and shell-gaming on Wall Street. Now, if you suspect that you are in a bubble, you have the option of trying to pop it before it gets any bigger, which provides the best long term outcome; but generally involves having it burst in your face, or riding it, and hoping that you can make it out of office/retire/move to a new job/cash out a big stack/etc. before it bursts. If you aren't excessively burdened in the ethics department, the latter is pretty sensible.
In situations where you cannot, for political reasons, eliminate a regulatory body outright, there are various ways of quietly gutting it. Just cutting its budget usually helps, appointing an incompetent crony to mismanage it also works pretty well(and rewards a crony), I suspect that allowing incompetence to fester probably works to.
Did the SEC manage to fuck up on its own, or was it permitted and tacitly encouraged to, since an SEC was needed; but nobody really wanted it to find anything?
Wrong. One of them *has* surfed porn at work at some point. They are not doing it necessarily right now. Times were different a few years ago when internet traffic was not routinely monitored and we had offices where no one could see our monitors.
Hell, I worked in a small office where the owner routinely mailed porn to everyone who worked there. I was asked about how I felt about porn when I interviewed there (in '96).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
the SEC is the host of our Strategic Porn Reserves. Then you'll thank that attorney's forward-thinking approach to preserving a domestic supply to reduce our vulnerability to the whims of foreign porn suppliers.
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.
It can help pick up ones mood.
A pretty picture can perk ones mood up better than a cup of coffee.
Surfed porn? Really. You couldnt find any better word that would rhyme with tanked. Sheesh.
that's true, and sad. Surfing for porn is just a form of escapism. They could be powerless, overwhelmed or drowning in the bureaucracy. Porn is the same thing as Facebook, doing your email or hanging out on Slashdot.
which reminds me... I should re-enable my Slashdot parental controls adn get back to work :-)
Yeah this is shocking given the typical government network is locked down to the Nth degree. When I contracted on site for the Dept. of Health they actually cut me off from the network because I used torrent to download a Linux ISO. I violated policy and it cut off soon after the download started, and the jack went dead. It wasn't just "you can't surf the internet anymore". It was "VIOLATER! KILL HIM!" and I got dressed down soon after. So they closely monitored it.
That's why they are studying them.
Haha...Get it?
(It's a penis joke)
Unless you consider and can justify reading /. as part of your job (keeping abreast on technology news)...
SECsafeporn.com will have only the best available porn, for free, and certainly won't contain psychological manipulation techniques to increase my personal future profits.
As a side note, this is only further proof that hard working strippers and prostitutes are being downsized due to the electronic age catching up to their profession. I, for one, think this is outrageous and plan to visit my local establishments this weekend to show my support. Hopefully we can help prepare them financially for the outsourcing that's undoubtedly coming.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
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
Let's be honest... it's not a concubine in there. The odds are much better that there were malware problems in their system. Exceptions noted, but 33%? Even the Playboy offices aren't like that...
"Economy Tanked while the Government Wanked."
~Sticky
//No Karma, cause I stoled it.
Yeah, surely this isn't news to anyone here. How about a story about the ONE guy at the SEC that DIDN'T surf pr0n?
dial a sex line and find out...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The one funny thing about it is that SEC consists of mainly lawyers. That's right, not accountants, not economists, not inspectors but lawyers. This is on purpose, because they are just another captured/corrupt government organization that does not do its job. Example of them not doing its job is the story from Harry Markopolos, who by chance figured out the scheme Madoff was running and brought it to SEC's attention with all the evidence but they never did anything about it.
So they are incompetent people, who are working there not because they can do something, but specifically because they do nothing at all and this is a situation created on purpose by the system, it's a captured environment, SEC is not supposed to do anything that would hurt people who should really be afraid of the SEC.
So in that environment what are the workers there supposed to do? Anything at all except their actual jobs, so obviously nobody is going to blow a whistle on them surfing porn. Porn? Please, be my guest, as long as you don't investigate actual fraud cases. Again, I guess the only surprising thing is that they are lawyers.
You can't handle the truth.
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
FTFA:
Anyone want to bet that certain right-wing news outlets are furiously trying to figure out a way to blame this on President Obama?
A certain right wing news outlet? How about Slashdot? Where in the summary does it mention that this happened under Bush? Nowhere, it says 'recent.' This is meant to spread FUD about the SEC, in order to turn people against the idea of financial reform and regulation. "Why, if these fools are constantly surfing porn, how can we trust them to regulate Wall Street?" But they aren't anymore: the fellow appointed by this administration cracked down and stopped it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's sort of like medicare fraud. Private insurers struggle with insurance fraud all the time too, but people feel like money one or two steps away from the taxes they paid is actually still theirs, so they are more attached to it.
I mean, the full HDD lawyer's job is probably to prosecute people that the SEC examiners have found evidence against...So as far as I can tell, he was doing his job since they had failed to actually find anybody to prosecute before everything fell apart.
Also..SEC...the X key is surprisingly close to the C key
Bottles.
I think the key word here is "obsessed".
The characteristics you've ascribed to yourself are moderated, healthy behaviors. In contrast, true obsession is a psychological dysfunction.
That's the sense of it in a nutshell, no more or less than eating yourself to 600 pounds, owning 20 cats, or threatening murder over cartoons.
Well, AP is already reporting on GOP legislators trying to make the link:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hOvd2ZHpLgAEKjwU87acksA24EDQD9F8SEUO0
Didn't take long for them to start posturing on behalf of the family-values contingent.
I save everything I watch, because hard drives are so cheap. Who knows when you'll want to go through anything? Might as well keep it.
And this way, your kids won't have to start from zero.
My Sig: SEGV
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.
I'm sure they'll do just fine managing the health care system.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Boy, they sure took the Bush agenda seriously.
--
Toro
Depends on how much an ass your boss is. And which phone you're using.
Seeing as you are posting on /. should you be burned at the do-you-damn-job-instead-of-goofing-off stake?
Guilty as charged....
Private office or not, he had a government IT department.
keeping abreast on technology news
I see what you did there...
Here's an idea: contract out the regulatory oversight to a private company, and let them earn a share of any fiscal penalties for fraud that they uncover. Uncover a Bernie Madoff-sized scheme? You just earned a big payment. In other words, actually MOTIVATE people to do their job, and make any rewards they earn dependent upon their success in that job.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Right. They can police themselves.
I'll bet that if you'll take the otherside.
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
It seems that watching other people's money is less interesting than watching other people's bodies.
Display some adaptability.
that "Fanny May" was not a porn star.
You gotta be careful man. Every odd once in a while, someone won't know what that means, and you'll have to explain it.
So when they were studying boobs online they should have been studying the boobs that were busy running/ruining our financial and housing industries?
Since he got away with his scam for decades, even when he was head of NASDAQ, I wouldn't characterise Bernie Madoff as a "boob". You don't have to be stupid to be dishonest, you only have to love money.
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
According to the news on TV this morning, one of those high ranking men was a woman. Women like porn, too.
And if it is you, how stupid are you? Seriously? Seriously you'd jeopardize your job for that?
How stupid would you be to drink on the job? Yet people do.
Free Martian Whores!
Something tells me the network admins for that government department must have been doing the same thing, or were incompetent, or playing WoW (or maybe some hellish combination).
"The website is down"
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Got fired from Dell long, long time ago for surfing information regarding Everquest, excessively.
Any non-work internet use CAN put you at risk of being fired. I don't have to worry as much about it where I am now, but I make sure that my extra-curricular internet usage is none of my bosses business.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
Warning: NSFW
Is this about the right of politicians to look at porn on the job? :P
Well, porn is the most lucrative business on the internet... So basically, they were trying to figure out something out of it to help the economy.
Kind of like reading /. at work?
I work for a government agency, and we're allowed to use the internet for non-work purposes. In fact, Slashdot was specifically mentioned as an acceptable site to visit on our government-owned computers. The general guidelines are:
-Don't visit porn sites (an automatic firing offense, unless it was truly inadvertent)
-Don't do anything for personal profit (checking an eBay auction is okay, running an eBay-based business isn't)
-Don't behave unprofessionally
-Don't use excessive bandwidth
-Don't spend too much time online for non-work reasons (i.e. get your work done)
(sometime around 2025)
Attorney: "And to my son Jimmy, I leave my 750GB of porn."
Jimmy: "Only 750GB? My SDU optidrive is 100 times bigger than that!"
We have graphs and reports that we turn into management.
It shows bandwidth used by the user, high data conversations to domains.
It easily shows people downloading porn, browsing youtube, streaming audio etc.
Then it becomes a management decision to impose restrictions or disciplinary actions.
If the person is smart enough to run everything through a proxy that just waves a I'm hiding something flag.
Mr. Lippman: It's come to my attention that you and the cleaning woman have engaged in sexual intercourse on the desk in your office. Is that correct?
George Costanza: Who said that?
Mr. Lippman: She did.
George Costanza: [pause] Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorence on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon... you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time.
Mr. Lippman: You're fired!
George Costanza: Well, you didn't have to say it like that.
He, like you, post AC for obvious reasons........
You know that should be a felony charge. Using taxpayers money to jack off! :(
I feel obligated to mention that I lump myself into the "radical free-market zealot" category. Bush, Greenspan, and the other hypocritical neo-cons aren't anywhere in the ballpark.
Despite their lies about moving toward a free market, they (working with Congress) clamped down unprecedented levels of regulation over pretty much everybody. Surely most of the people reading this are at least vaguely familiar with SOX.
Sure, subsidizing certain corporations, lifting some of their limits, then selectively failing to enforce the rules that are left is a recipe for disaster. But it also only vaguely resembles a free market. Bush's original bail-out pretty much completely wiped out that resemblance.
Government creates problems. Then it gives itself the power to fix them. When it [inevitably] fails, it creates more problems and convinces people that the only possible solution is to give the government more power.
The real tragedy, in my mind, is that people keep falling for this cyclical scam.
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.
No, it isn't. You have no idea what you're talking about. Many large employers allow casual net use, as long as it is incidental, doesn't interfere with your work and doesn't hog the resources. These same employers, of course, also have ethics guidelines prohibiting watching porn, of course. Or using the company computers for political activity or for anything illegal.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I just read the last word in you post as "dismemberment".
"How did these guys get away with it for so long?"
The data is from internal probes. The SEC did in fact know about these cases and was investigating (and dealing with) them, or else we wouldn't know about them.
The fact that they take their time and don't react immediately doesn't necessarily strike me as so surprising. Especially if it's to the point of a firing offense, they probably need to build a pretty good case.
So you watch as much porn as half of everyone in the government combined? Wow.
One might argue that government employees doing NOTHING is better than a government employee trying to do their job.
Boot-strappy intelligent independence right?
It's the ones that were actually doing their jobs that did the damage.
Or, you know, the greedy fuckwads handing all the frighteningly stupid loans, then bundling this tremendously high risk stuff together and selling it as "investments".
Somehow methinks porn was not the problem, or even a tiny part of the problem.
Whomever came up with this shit is an ass bleeding fucking moron.
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.
Fuck it, I'll be at the beach. I'll have to think about coming back. I'm pretty sure sobriety isn't going to enter into that decision.
ideopath @ play
If they try and go to a porn site and see a company or official logo from the OpenDNS page with a message that says it was blocked for pornography, most get the picture. Most don't want to confront you about it either.
It might not have been their job to get someone fired (who gets fired from a gov't position anyway, besides teachers?) but an IT dept could do something to help that situation out without stirring the pot.
They deserve to be fired like any other idiot who goofs off, but I'm sure they're going to be charged with sex crimes of some sort.
They're all blind now, from all the wanking that they were doing, while looking at all that porn.
Sounds like just punishment to me.
Nero just fiddled while Rome burned down. These guys were "polishing the Bishop" while the world economy went to Hell in a hand-basket.
Some companies give their employees fitness center vouchers to get them to exercise after work. If I was running a company, I'd give them porn vouchers. Look at porn and wank on your own time.
Of course, all my employees would have hairy palms . . . but, what can you do . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
When I was a Network Admin at GSA, we were contractors with very little control over the government employees. To top it off we had 2 consecutive years where the contract was lost to a lower bit, that amounted to a 30% pay cut. The team of 12 guys in my region spent a full year playing HALO on the work network, 8 hours a day for a full year. doing only the bare minimum of trouble resolution, not a single upgrade or enhancement. If it wasn't broke we didn't fix it. I finally quit, when the gov't boss installed security cameras in our work areas with a monitor on her desk, you know "To make sure we were safe".
Yeah, well I used to work for a company that basically acknowledged that so long as work got done in expected timeframes they didn't care what you did. Furthermore, since it was a design house that included women's swimwear, we were all issued calendars that included hot models in bikinis. That's right, we could browse youtube all day on slow days and we had company-issued softcore calendars. I would have never left that company if my wife hadn't been transferred to another state (and no, I'm not naming names).
Where I am now is not nearly as nice, but they don't get on our cases too much, and we're so short-staffed and in such specially-trained positions that there's no way any of us are in jeopardy.
If you don't like your working conditions, you should look for other work. The end. There are places out there that are awesome to work for.
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
At the time, they didn't realize it was pornography. They'd been accustomed to watching banks and investment firms do that to their customers; so, it just seemed like another training video.
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.
I'm on a horse.
Republicans say that the government doesn't work, and when they get elected, they set out to prove it.
Laugh all you want but, if you'd uncovered evidence of financial irregularities, and every time you raised it, your politically appointed bosses said "Shut up and let the free market work," how long would it be until you found other ways to entertain yourself at work?
That is all.
In a certain way of thinking, it's not really a case of bureaucracy, but rather a case of too little bureaucracy. Sounds like they weren't being monitored or forced through a series of arbitrary rules and procedures, but rather that they were left to their own devices, without rules and procedures. It's the opposite of bureaucracy.
Good point. It wouldn't have been better for us if they were sitting around posting on discussion boards or something.
There is no person that does not like porn. The only thing that separates us is whether he like fat girls, thin girls, men, children, donkeys or the dead. We might like different things in porn but we all like porn.
This just smacks of a hit piece. If it is true, there is a reason why people were able to neglect their duties on the job. If it is false, the accused are most likely being held to the fire in some hidden aspect no one wants you to know about. This type of journalistic integrity is what I would expect from Fox but it wouldn't surprise me coming from any of the massive news conglomerates.
You're nothing; like me.
Perhaps they were trying to regulate the porn industry so they had to archive the "data" for further "research"? Or they were just screwing around at work... but who knows what secrets the government has... maybe they have tons of random departments...
In corporations people surfing porn all day are screwing that corporation's shareholders who are paying their salary. When gov't employees do the same guess who is getting screwed.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Any non-work internet activity is risking ones job.
Except in the Federal (and some state) governments, where damn little useful work occurs anyway.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
The real issue here is shitty management. This is typical government incompetence, and it is bipartisan. Republicans are corporate shills; Democrats are corporate shills. Guess who was the second biggest campaign supporter for Obama?
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Sure, the government makes mistakes but they've also helped bring us cleaner and safer food, cleaner and safer water, and cleaner and safer air. They had to did these things because unregulated private industry was all too comfortable poisoning people to save a little money and they'd still be doing it if they could get away with it.
It's fair to argue over the details behind the new regulation but the financial services industry earned these modest restrictions because they've proven that they are, as an industry, completely unable to reign in the sorts of behavior that led to this crisis.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
No in companies, surfing porn can and often gets you fired. In Government doing the same just gets you transferred to the next site/department.
It is just too f'n hard to fire people in government.
See the difference?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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
Incidentally, it was Slashdot that keyed us into the source of our problems (McAfee) on Wednesday. If that's not justification for my constant screwing around^W^W research on Slashdot every day, I don't know what is.
Agreed, every solution is imperfect. What solution do you suggest?
I'm pretty sure these aren't the kinds of positions that get replaced every election. I'm sure they get to keep their jobs for life, if they were so inclined.
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.
What if "we can inform managers, but its definately NOT our job to go and get people fired" are mutually exclusive options? IT shouldn't make itself less than it is either. If the IT department is asked to implement content filtering and detect repeated attempts to circumvent it, then you're acting on instructions not your own initiative. It's not very different from a parent installing a content filter and checking logs on a child's computer, except that in a large company it's delegated to IT people that implement the actual filtering. Many times that's a mandate handed down to the IT department already and doesn't need a board room decision.
Forget that this is IT, imagine if it's just two horizontal departments in different parts of the company. How much would you ignore as "not your department's business"? Ultimately the department manager can't always know the truth of all things, let's say for example you hear a bunch of coders making fun of their boss because their "all night coding crunch" is actually their "all night fps gaming and pizza party night". Or that they're stealing office supplies. Or that they're operating a shadow business on company time. At some point it becomes a responsibility to tell on them even though it'll go up and down the chain of command and someone might get fired. That is equally true for IT.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Where is this "unregulated private industry" of which you speak? Not in the Unites States, surely.
And if you think government "brings us" a better environment, let's compare the track record of governments that have total control over industry, versus those with relatively less controls.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
They weren't doing their job because that was the administrative philosophy at the time. So, they *were* doing their jobs. Let the Free Market work it out, remember?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Whoever broke this story got it backward.
First, the regulations against bucket-shops* was repealed.
Then the SEC discovered it couldn't even ask for data from these operations, much less regulate them.
Then the people at the SEC, having nothing interesting to work on, discovered they could fill their time and use their vast network and computing resources in an interesting manner, while waiting for the party in charge of ripping off the consumer to be thrown out of power.
* - A bucket shop is a betting parlor in which the game of choice is stock prices. You don't buy and sell the stock, or options in the stock, you just make a wager against the house that the price of a certain stock will rise or fall by a certain amount by a certain time. When the law was repealed, it allowed the creation of "derivatives" that had no tie to the underlying equity whatsoever. The same change in the law allowed almost unlimited borrowing to make these bets; this is prohibited to equity buyers by the margin-open and margin-hold restrictions, but the new bucket shops being run in hedge funds sold this service like it was the gold mine it was until the credit-multiplier got so stretched there wasn't a real dollar left to lend. The same change in the law required no reporting of any of this activity to the government. That is how a market worth tens of trillions of dollars in transactions per day grew from nothing in just a few years without you or me or the SEC or our congressmen having a clue it was happening. In the end, when all the funny-money transactions were unwound, nearly a $Trillion in real money had disappeared into accounting cul de sacs, requiring the government to issue the TARP bailouts to provide solvency to banks that were unsure if they were still operational. This is why "financial regulation" is a hideously inadequate euphemism for the sort of hangings we should be scheduling on the gallows down the center of Wall St. right now. Failure to pass a major reform package demanding transparency and accountabiltiy will simply allow this stuff to occur again.
When did Slashdot stop requiring people to take a basic logic and math test before assigning them a UID?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Justifying bad behavior by pointing to bad behavior is just stupid. The fact is, regardless who's "watch" it came on, is this is completely unacceptable.
However neither the (R) or (D) is going to step up and say what is really needed. We need to cut government back to an almost unhealthy level, before we can address how to make it better. Hiring more incompetent and lazy people is not going to solve the problems we are facing. And leaving things as they are isn't solving them either.
We need the equivalence of a forest fire to burn through, and while it hurts temporarily, it is ultimately healthy (healthier) for the forest.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I suggest more freedom, less government. Where there is competition, and the freedom not to do business with entities with whom you disagree, there is the maximum accountability.
Governments -- even democratically-elected ones -- are a pale shade of the accountability that comes from true capitalism. If I disagree with Walmart, I withold my business from them, I shop elsewhere. If I disagree with my government, I'm allowed to say all I want, and in 4 years I cast one in a few tens of millions of votes, and all the while I better keep paying -- else they send guys with guns to lock me up.
As bad as Walmart or pick-your-antifavorite company might be, they just aren't going to send men with guns to make you give them money even when you want no part of their product or service.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
The SEC employees have simply come face-to-face with the fact that the debt, which has handcuffed our economy, now has us down on our knees, and that our continued monetary domination depends on our being whipped into shape through very strong, painful discipline.
Whatever comes, the SEC knows how to beat this thing, and they simply rose to the occasion like men.
Ah...Is it getting hot in here?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Sad isn't it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nooooo... Doing it in a cubicle, in a heavy traffic area, with the Kleenex and hand lotion out is really, really questionable and almost "flaming out" judgment.
A locked office door with the blinds drawn is somewhat less questionable, unless your a screamer or grunter, then is more questionable.
Also, if you are one of those "fire and forget" guys then that just brings you to whole other level of sociopathic behavior.
I feel like making a chart in Excel right now.....
There are many different government offices, with IT departments run by many different kinds of people. You can't lump them all in the same category.
At any of the places I've worked (all government) IT would have been tipped by network admin software sending warnings triggered by the near-full hard drive. On finding -any- amount of porn higher-ups would have been notified. Said porn would have been removed. Of course acquiring it in the first place would have been difficult with all the restrictive content filtering in place.
Could be they didn't have much of an onsite IT department. Doesn't sound like routine maintenance was even being done on this guy's computer if nobody noticed the full hard drive.
Sounds like the VA office in the above post needs to get new IT people, but I definitely wouldn't consider that the norm.
Huh?
It was a joke...
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.
Uh, yeah. No, sorry.
See, I work in an office where people aren't weirdos who feel it's okay to look at porn in a public space (as opposed to in private where it obviously belongs).
But, hey, maybe my office is unique, somehow...
OK, but I don't think I can set my humor detector that far without it causing a huge false positive rate!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The fact of the matter is, porn is the third leg (pun intended) of this economy. Its very existence drives technical innovation, and indirectly employs millions of workers. Not only workers in the industry, but workers that work in industries that support it (i.e. networking equipment, IPS, banks, etc). Certainly porn has created some moral problems but nobodsy can argue that porn itself has hurt this economy in any way.
If you work in a call center and it is not during one of your breaks, yes.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Something tells me the government version of "The Girls of the SEC" would make a lot less money than Playboy's.
Some people collect porn like others collect movies or TV shows. It's just not being able to delete. In real life it's called diogenes syndrome.
Understandable. After all, it wasn't a very funny joke.
So what you're asking is, who regulates the regulators?
Everyone rent Breach.
Even the CIA has its bandwidth leeches.
Ok, so we know why these 33 employees failed to prevent the meltdown, what about the thousands of other SEC employees? At least these guys have something to show for their time at the SEC.
What a surprisingly reasonable policy.
We were at a point that the majority of our traffic was non-business related internet browsing. Something had to be done because it was affecting the business. We started with an executive mandate to do the right thing, then we policed the traffic and educated people who were noncompliant. That was messy and political but we were at the point it affected running the business.
Move forward two or three years. We now subscribe to a content-filtering service on the firewall which also allows filtering by protocol. A very small number of people are allowed unrestricted access. Everyone else can't access a blacklisted site or a site which triggers the content filter. They get a "blocked" page along with the reason, with a link to email the help desk (which fills in the message, URL etc).
On receipt we may outright approve or reject the request or investigate it depending on what we know about the site. If the site was blocked by mistake (rare but it happens), we whitelist it and it's instantly available for everyone. In many cases, the person just wants one-time access (perhaps they clicked on a DoubleClick advertisement rather than going to that vendor's page directly) so if the request is reasonable we visit the site and retrieve the item for that person.
This policy was not easy to implement, but it's been very positive in the two or three years since. Bandwidth usage is way down and because it's a neutral third party it's no longer a polarizing political issue.
We've had people request access for things that are obviously not business-related, such as sports sites. They are rejected and the reply email is cc'd to their supervisor. Doesn't take long for people to figure it out.
Sounds pretty sane and enlightened.
Is this a fairly common policy, or is this specific to your agency?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Senior staff positions at places like the SEC are exactly the types of position that change when a new Administration comes to power. In comparison to a country like Britain, where the civil service is largely tenured and only the Cabinet changes, American presidents appoint literally thousands of people throughout the Executive Branch.
I thought the comments from the Republicans in the article were rather surprising. All of these events took place during the Bush administration, and many of the staff involved were probably Bush appointees.
The real scandal here is the staffing of regulatory agencies by opponents of regulation, a common practice during the Bush Administration. One of the most effective "deregulatory" actions of that Administration was having their appointees to regulatory bodies sit on their hands for four or eight years. For another example, see this article contrasting antitrust policies at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
I feel like whoever wrote this article things that there are government employees sitting in front of a giant machine called "The Economy" that has dials and buttons for them to adjust it with.
The fact of the matter is that the government has very little control over the economy.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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."
After the last big screw up (aka Great Depression), the government stepped in an created a whole slew of legislations and regulations (including creating SEC) that has kept things in check and economy humming for many many decades. It is when Reagan started spouting "government is the problem" and other BS and started gutting all the safeguards - including repealing of Glass-Steagall Act - that bubble started growing to epic proportions and the economy crashed.
Spouting "why people continue to believe they need government to save them is beyond me" may make you libertarian-chic, anyone who has any cursory knowledge of what cause the Great Recession can point out that lack of regulation (especially of the derivatives market) was THE reason why things got so bad.
This is also where my tax dollars are going? I have yet to find something good out of paying taxes.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
Obviously the GP is paraphrasing the policy, but it sounds to me like it's so vague and subjective as to be useless as well. If you need to fire someone because of the policy, you need to be able to show not only that they clearly breached the policy, but that they knew where the boundaries of the policy are. If "excessive bandwidth" or "too much time" are not quantified, you can't safely fire someone (depending on your local employment law of course, you might be allowed to fire someone simply for losing the toss of a coin in your area).
Awwwww... just threw my ceiling cat away:-(
I finally quit, when the gov't boss installed security cameras in our work areas with a monitor on her desk, you know "To make sure we were safe".
This isn't anything to be proud of. Not only did you waste money and develop poor ethics, but the skills and growth over the year could of helped land the next great job. Not sure I would ever do this even if I had the freedom to.
The SEC kept the economy going?
I think I have a cursory understanding of the cause of the Great Recession, and it started with government deciding more people should be be able to afford mortgages.
Freddie and Fannie destroyed so much wealth... and everyone who pays taxes are paying for it.
Do not believe for a second that the crisis is over. Just wait till US sovereign debt matures over the next 5 years. The US dollar is going to tank, bigtime. No amount of legislation can fix that.
At the end of the day, we can be free to disagree -- but anyone calling for a government solution needs to understand, they're willing to send men with guns to enforce their vision of how things should work.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
If "excessive bandwidth" or "too much time" are not quantified, you can't safely fire someone (depending on your local employment law of course, you might be allowed to fire someone simply for losing the toss of a coin in your area).
But he made it pretty clear what "too much time" constitutes. If you're not getting your work done, and are messing around on the net instead, that's too much time. Excessive bandwidth should, however, be quantified.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
You've convinced me. 33 cases of people surfing porn in an organization with over 3000 employees is what collapsed the economy. Instant +5!
I have yet to find something good out of paying taxes.
I'm a big fan of the local fire department and building code inspector. Likewise national defense, the court system, and the police are all important. However, one would have to be pretty out of touch to claim that most of what the military does is defensive; or that the American court system is competent at delivering justice; or that the police (in any city I have lived) are either effective or ethical.
I'm not so sure the fire department really warrants 1/3 of my income...
This is also where my tax dollars are going? I have yet to find something good out of paying taxes.
From your sig: "Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something - Plato." Perhaps you should ponder that for a moment. You have no idea what I do, nor how much extra time (salary, no overtime) I put in to make sure it gets done right. Yet because I'm allowed to browse Slashdot while I wait for my code to finish compiling or for a batch job to be scheduled and run (or just to rest my brain because I've been working for weeks to solve a difficult problem), I'm wasting your tax dollars?
If they spent less time looking at porn, perhaps their job wouldn't be so hard.
But he made it pretty clear what "too much time" constitutes. If you're not getting your work done, and are messing around on the net instead, that's too much time. Excessive bandwidth should, however, be quantified.
As for bandwidth, we're not supposed to do anything that negatively impacts the network. We're specifically told not to stream audio or video for personal use.
Oops, they really got you strung tight over there.
Are't you using an IDE like Eclipse? It compiles in real-time so to speak. Unless you meant to say build.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
Actually, with police around, people here in Chicago are still getting killed. I'd much rather have an automatic to defend myself.
Fire....ummm, they will never get there in time to save my home or family. I have smoke detectors and fire insurance.
Court system. Coruption. I served as a juror for a drunk and driving case. The jury just wanted to go home, and not lose another day of pay. He clearly deserved a DUI, but we found him not guilty because the state attorney did a terrible job of finding him 'guilty without reasonable doubt'.
I'd much rather keep my tax dollars and fend for myself.
Read Patri Freedman
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
I suggest more freedom, less government
More is always better? No government is better than some government? How about a concrete proposal rather than a theory.
Want concrete proposals? Okay:
* eliminate the FDA, TSA, NEA, SEC, and DEA
* tell congress to go home, no new laws for the next 12 months (gasp! how will we live?!?!?!)
* That's enough for day one.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
No problem. Our IT manager downloads the porn and sends it to a list of people. Both me and my boss are in the list.
The actual policy is you can do whatever the heck you want as long as you get your job done. But if you pissed someone off enough that they want to fire you they will look at your internet history as a justification.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Speaking as someone who worked in a federal bureaucracy and was frustrated by management, I can tell you that the temptation to goof off is tremendous. My solution was to quit, however these people were a bit more clever I think. 1800 sites in two weeks, a hard drive full of porn and dvd's burned with not but porn??? A dollar to a dime this was done in protest. Think of the irony: an agency full of naked people where they are cloaked from above.
Why fire insurance? Without a court system the insurance would never pay unless you forced them at gunpoint - and they most likely can afford more guns than you do. Then again, you would be paying them fore "fire insurance" because they have more guns than you do.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Playboy sucks,(no pun intended). The real porn industry is privately held. No stocks. No dividends. No prospectus for investors. No reliable profit/loss statements. However, some major corporations invest in porn since it shows steady returns during bear and bull markets. To know more, get into the industry and work it from the inside.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Are't you using an IDE like Eclipse? It compiles in real-time so to speak.
The code I work on the most is a large scientific code that is mostly heavily-templated C++ with lots of dependencies. It can't be compiled "in real time". A full build takes at least an hour, sometime much more, depending on the architecture/OS. Even a very minor change with relatively few dependencies (which, unfortunately, is rarely the case) takes 5 or 10 minutes to re-build the executable. Running a simulation with the code takes anywhere from an hour to a few months. Of course, I usually have something else to work on while I'm waiting, but there's a limit to the number of problems my brain can handle at a given time.
Unless you meant to say build.
Huh? Most folks I know use 'compile' and 'build' interchangeably, except when it's necessary to distinguish between compiling the translation units and linking them.
It's funny that Eliot Spitzer got tossed from his job for screwin' hoores on his own time and with his own money.
The reason? Spitzer was on top (no pun intended) of the wall street debacle before it was fashionable.
When bringing this information to the government, federal laws from 1865 were invoked stating that Washington had jurisdiction over the issue.
Washington did nothing (thanks george and dick)
The official response discredited Spitzer thereby eliminating him as a presidential hopeful
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
The actual policy is you can do whatever the heck you want as long as you get your job done. But if you pissed someone off enough that they want to fire you they will look at your internet history as a justification.
That is so true. And even if your internet history is spotless, they will keeping digging till they find a reason to fire you.
Far out.
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.
Technically, wouldn't it be UP time? At least, that's the direction mine points when it's in that "state"
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Based on my government experience, IT most likely knew about it, and were told to do nothing. Happens all the time. (Although I've never seen anything that extreme.)
Making the possible totally impossible.
Geesh, you really need to do better than just spouting back Faux News talking points.
First, Freddie and Fannie was not part of the government. There was an implicit understanding that government would back Freddie and Fannie, but they were run by CEO's and boards. Not senators or bureaucrats.
Second, if it was just another housing bubble, it would not have crashed the entire system. US has gone through many housing bubbles since the Great Depression, some just as harsh or even worse than what we just went through. But they didn't cause the whole financial system to crash. But it did this time, why? Because Wall Street created these CDO's and other derivatives that leveraged and concentrated these risks to ungodly levels. And it was all done outside any regulation. If there were ANY KIND of regulation (or if Glass-Steagal was never repealed), this whole thing could have been easily avoided.
It is fine to wish for smaller government, but it is idiotic to blame the government for something that Wall Street created outside regulatory purview.
The SEC is an independent agency. There are 5 SEC commissioners appointed by the President to a 5 year term. The terms are staggered so each June one commissioner is replaced. Other than that I think it's pretty much up to the commissioners how the agency is run.
Porn usage actually stimulates the economy.
Is that what you kids are calling it these days?
There's no point limiting net use. Just tell them that everything is logged.
I had a guy exactly like that in one workplace but due to poor records when I got there it was tricky to work out who had which computer, so he was doing it for at least a few weeks and actually slowing down net access for everyone in that office before he was tracked down. We were badly starved of bandwidth so he had to be confronted, but a simple "we're using a lot of bandwidth and your name comes up a lot in the logs we have of all traffic" did the job and nobody had to mention eight hours of weird granny porn a day.
That's a difficult thing to get a useful number for. If somebody saturates the link at 3am and delays incoming email for a couple of hours nobody cares. In my view excessive bandwidth is whatever slows things down enough for other users to notice and complain about and has no work related purpose.
IMHO it should never be in the network admins power to fire you, instead you give the info to the guys manager and they do whatever they want with it. If the link is charged by the GB or if you have to move to a faster connection just because somebody is always looking at porn that's a different story and you make more noise about it if the supervisor won't take action.
Network admins are there to keep the network running - if somebody isn't working that is not their problem, it's the problem for that person's supervisor.
Perhaps you missed this part:
In fact, Slashdot was specifically mentioned as an acceptable site to visit
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Please, can we stop calling it "smut?" Smut is really, really, really gross.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Of course that's not the only thing it stimulates.
Then you find you've fired the only guy that knows how to drive the forklift.
Having weird loops around the chain of command is a pretty stupid idea. If you are not a persons boss then you should have no right to fire them.
I'm sorry, but this is hilarious.
I don't know if it's the phrasing of the title that's killing me or just the concept itself. I don't know, man, I don't know.
This whole sitch kind of reminds me of those librarians who were busted a year or two back for playing Nintendo Wii ALL FREAKIN' DAY LONG in their library, instead of actually working. They were caught on camera and busted in front of their entire community. Does anybody else remember that story?
--
http://www.limbocomics.com/
The tagline: "COMICS! HOT ACTION! (Mostly comics.) And a little ACTION!"
the male brain is highly responsive to visual stimulation of the sex response. in the real world, this was limited by the relatively low numbers of proximate, real, naked humans. with the advent of streaming porn, the male brain is faced with a surplus and no instinct to stop. most men can voluntarily control this, but those that cant are like people who overeat. we are programmed to eat as much as we can as food often went scarce in prehistoric times. until we evolve a few more instincts (which will take millenia, and wont happen if people have access to childrearing resources who arent good genetic choices for furthering the species), we are stuck with impulse control disorders related to the surpluses our industrial society creates. thats why voluntary simplicity may be necessary, unless someone can genetically engineer us to be more controlled...
You hear about the person who didn't rely on anecdotal evidence to support his belief system?
Fire....ummm, they will never get there in time to save my home or family. I have smoke detectors and fire insurance.
Fully privatized fire services have been tried (e.g., in London up until the 19th century) but they're imperfect solutions for a number of reasons. Firstly, fire spreads; your neighbor's fire problem has a tendency to become your fire problem shortly after if it isn't tackled quickly. Secondly, having a bunch of profit-making companies going round saying "Gee, that looks like a very flammable building to me, Joe. Want to buy some insurance?" Well, I don't like where that's going...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
More likely they were aware of it but the people doing the downloading were the same ones who sign the IT departments paychecks and wrote the very policy about company computer usage.
The regulatory environment created by regulation virtually guaranteed that unscrupulous individuals on Wall Street would take chances they otherwise would never have done.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
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.
Nope, but if they cut your internet off and all you have is a naked pic of some ugly chick, you'll wish you had hundreds of gigs of porn to go back thru.
Be seeing you...
I'm a poor Java guy that will write an Ant script to run a build that inside of it has a compile task (subset). We (past two companies I worked at) do not use compile and build interchangeably.
/. comments are on the comments, not the person.
Anyway, from your original comment, my reply was a sad attempt at humor, not a personal attack on you personally. I think most
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
Point well taken.
But I will play the numbers and bet that my house or my neighbors house will never start on fire.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Sig.setCleverSig(Sig.java:42)
>>>I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
I just lost my job due to the following reasons:
- Reports that I eat too much food at the lunch buffet
- Fellow engineer reported I was reading slashdot "during work hours"
The first reason is so funny I almost laughed-out loud when my boss told me. I weigh just 140 pounds - hardly a food addict. And if anybody cared, they could have just asked me to stop eating so much. Reason #1 amounts to just hearsay & gossip, and is most likely about somebody else not me. ----- The second reason I tried to explain away by saying, "Not during work hours. I read slashdot during my lunch break to keep up with the news. That is what the engineer noticed." But she said she didn't believe me, besides she already "made-up her mind and will not reverse it, even if I made a mistake."
I later learned that my position is not being replaced, so I suspect she was just looking for a reason to cut staff & her budget, now that two departments have merged into one. So she accepted whatever BS gossip/excuses she could cling to. In other words, if you're doing something like surfing /. or eating too much food, and the management wants to get rid of you, they WILL use it as justification.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, this is a manufactured controversy issue by the GOP. They are attacking the SEC because its attacking Goldman Sachs and trying to regulate the industry that almost took the economy down. Republicans have no shame.
They don't have any memory either (or more accurately: they're counting on the rest of us to have no memory).
Let's review once again WHEN the economy was tanking, and WHEN these people were surfing porn.
It was in the 8th year of the Bush interregnum, where we had
1. A Republican Controlled Senate
2. A Republican Controlled House of Representatives
3. A Republican President
4. An SEC led and managed by Republican Appointees, appointed by a Republican president and confirmed by a Republican congress.
Amusing that they are now making an issue out of, to put not too fine a point on it, the surfing habits of an organisation that had been Republican dominated for the better part of 8 years (longer, actually, when you factor in the Republican congress beneath Clinton, and the influence peddling the Banks, and the Right, have had on the SEC for many years prior).
Basically, it's misbehavior by part of a Republican administration for which the Republicans are now raising hell and brazenly pointing the figure at the Democrat who has gone some way in his first fifteen months cleaning their mess up, as if their misbehavior is somehow their successor's fault.
Shameless indeed.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
But goofing off by who? Perhaps by those who are raising the SEX issues... could be...
These people are going to be because it is politically popular to use this issue to raise money and support based on the hot button issue of SEX and probably because SEX beats GREED in a head to head competition. So an issue such as those "GREEDY people at Goldman" will likely be displaced by "All that SEX at the SEC". The Devils Casino is a look at internal culture at Lehman Brothers in reputed to combine GREED and SEX so we need to through SEX at the SEC to remain "fair and balanced" .
I think the real big issues here are Systemic Risk, To Big to Fail and undoing of Glass-Steagall there should be a debate about those types of issues. Remember The Republicans claimed at the time that Bill Clintons attempt at an attack on Bin Laden was just an attempt to divert attention from the Lewinsky Scandal sex scandal. This is playing politics on the short side as seen after Sept 11, 2001.
Beware of the SEX card
>>>Not only did you waste money and develop poor ethics, but the skills and growth over the year could [have] helped land the next great job.
Irony.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How much power did the SEC really have to stop this 2007-8 collapse? None.
The Clinton-era HUD has already mandated that banks *must* give loans to poor people, and that was the root cause of the housing bubble, followed by its collapse when the poor people defaulted on the loans. There was little the SEC could have done to stop that bubble, because the root cause came from a managerial decision at the top.
In other words even if the SEC had been run by Puritans who never touched the internet, the collapse would still have occurred.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No but one can argue that porn is not really important. In the same way that they exaggerate women's ages as "18" when they are actually 30, or men as "12 inches" when they are actually just 7, the porn industry has exaggerated their own impact on the net economy, which is less than 1% total revenue.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You don't check your mail just before going to bed? Hand your card in on the way out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Playboy did do a pictorial of the Girls of Washington DC. It was quite nice.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
1/ Traffic shaping to let ssh in even if the link is saturated so I can use pine on the mailbox.
2/ If it's not from something inside the network sending notifications by email I don't care - forget people from the outside I only want email from machines chatting about how they are going in one neat subject line.
Can I get that card back now?
It sounds like you might have a case, if you got those reasons in writing.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
"No in companies, surfing porn can and often gets you fired. In Government doing the same just gets you transferred to the next site/department."
I really wish that people would stop with this idea that somehow corporations are magically different than government. I've been in very large corporations where surfing porn was perfectly acceptable and in government offices where doing so would result in termination. It's all about the culture of the organization-if supported or enabled by management it will happen. Likewise, if management doesn't want it to happen, it won't. The fact that it is a private or government organization is really irrelevant.
"It is just too f'n hard to fire people in government."
Not really. All it requires is the desire and documentation. Pretty much the same thing any intelligent private organization will do in an attempt to prevent a lawsuit. The real problem is that most managers are lazy and unwilling to do their job. The great thing about having lots of rules and regulations is that it is easy to find violations (you don't thing the employee handbook is there to help the employee do you?).
I think they were innocently looking for information on President Bush. After all, he was their boss at the time this happened. ;-p
-Eric
Take all men off porn, and anarchy will ensue. Take all women off porn, and the sexual freedom advances weve seen so far, will die.
Porn is reality, after all. We may like it, we may not like it. We may find it appropriate or not that it is so available, or even that it exists. But it is, like any kind of content with a public, an expression of humans, and has been so since weve been able to depict desires in paint.
We give it this or that moral weight depending on our culture but the fact of the matter is since ancient grece, people bought sexy vases with people having sex for whatever purposes.
I thus argue porn interchange, as well as plain prostitution, are one of the most ancient economic activities we have had and no ammount of law will ever be able to, and for that reason we probably need not make any laws against (big word here) them, thwart or in any way diminish either buyers of sellers of real or depicted sex.
The ammount of the economy they make? Its not really that important: they have a market, a good one, of die hards. They cover a social and personal need. They are here because we (for diferent vaules of "we") need them.
NO SIG
Equivalent statistics, please, for the number of bankers engaged in surfing for porn instead of carefully considering the riskiness of their investment activities.
It WAS my job, to surf porn, you insensitive clod!
Seriously. Part of me and my colleague’s jobs was QA. Which included our porn channel.
Also, private surfing was never a problem, as long as you did get your job done and the team worked. Which is all that counts.
Doesn’t matter if it is porn, or some other essential most basic human interest.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.