Um no. If they were actually trying to legislate a limit on workers' salaries, while fighting legislation to limit executive salaries, that'd be hypocrisy. But they're not.
The issue is that you CANNOT uninstall IE. It's been deliberately entangled coreward to prevent that from being doable, even with third party tools.
I'm not sure where you get this FUD, but yes, you can uninstall it. I think the "entanglement" you're referring to is the fact that there are several DLLs that provide the Windows HTML rendering engine that don't disappear when you uninstall IE. They don't go away because other applications use them.... *grumble*
I mean, you're just talking about the small potatoes, here! What about all the other crap that IE leaves laying around? What about that pesky TCP/IP implementation!? You wouldn't believe the pain in the ass it was for me to get rid of that when I uninstalled IE! I mean, heck, IE uses scrollbars, right? So why doesn't uninstalling IE remove the scrollbar GUI component from Windows? No More Bloat!
How is this "greedy" or "cruel" at all? It's roughly the same thing as being given too much change at a store. There are about a half-dozen posts above yours that talk about the government (or is it "greedy corporate American government"?) making exactly the same type of mistake.
Nice that you pointed out that Microsoft is not the first and only company or organization to ever make a payroll error. But where did you come up with the anti-"big evil corporate America! Waaah!" jab, based on this event?
Nice story, but the reality is that Apple managed to develop a proprietary personal computer architecture, which they did. IBM tried and failed several times to enter the PC market, and on its last try chose to use 3rd party, OTS hardware and develop a non-proprietary architecture, which was, of course, rapidly adopted (because anyone could build one).
Apple is now relegated to a small niche of the total person computing market (including home and business use) because of this, not because of an ideological choice.
The second amendment is the part of the constitution which guarantees the right of militias to bear arms in their own defense. The amendment does not at any point grant an explicit individual right to gun ownership. Interpreting it as such requires a purposeful misreading of the amendment.
Sooo... Your interpretation of the Second Amendment is that nobody should be allowed to possess firearms, unless they're part of a militia. What makes a "militia?" What if I declare that I'm the founding member of the "1st Doohickian Irregulars," and go out and buy a tent and a machine gun? Is that OK in your book? If your answer to that question is, "No, because you're not 'well-regulated,'" then you'd better come up with a definition of what you mean by "well-regulated," and who checks my "regularity."
Your argument breaks down in the specifics. Either the second amendment affords all Americans the right to bear arms ("with restrictions," as Antonin Scalia said in the majority opinion of the D.C. gun ban thing a while back), or it applies to "militias." So, either we as a nation are doing this all wrong, or you're wrong. Which is it?
Thanks for the condescending attitude. Do you actually try to understand the posts you reply to? Maybe you misunderstood what I meant by "Environmentalist Movement." I'm not referring to the actual real science behind any of it. The fact that "Global Cooling" never had significant scientific support did not stop it from getting put on the cover of Newsweek, and that's exactly my point - the "New Environmentalists" don't want to wait for evidence, they'll jump on just about any alarmist bandwagon as long as it can be used to increase their power.
Furthermore, the response to "Silent Spring" did not stop the sale of DDT to third-world nations
Wrong. The response to "Silent Spring" was that anti-DDT donor organizations who funded the bulk of many third-world countries' public health budgets refused to continue donating if they used DDT.
So there are no "tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections." That claim is made up by businesses with a vested interest in the production and use of DDT as part of a smear campaign.
Ah, the always excellent: "It's funded by eevil corporations and therefore false!" argument. Nice one. No, again, wrong. It's not just the eeeevil corporations that Wikipedia told you were eeevil:
According to Dr Donald Roberts, professor of medical entomology at the Uniformed Services Hospital of the Health Sciences in Maryland, USA, the huge drop in houses sprayed with DDT has resulted in an average annual increase of 4.8 malaria cases per 1000 of the population in Latin America, from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s.
For the whole of Latin America, a minimum of 1.8million additional cases of malaria were occurring each year up to 1996. Case rates have continued to grow since 1996, and according to Dr Roberts, 'we can reasonably expect that the number of excess cases is now much greater than in 1996'. Only Ecuador, which has continued to use DDT, has seen a reduction in the number of malaria cases in recent years.
Other mosquito-borne diseases are also on the rise. Until the 1970s, DDT was used to eradicate the aedes aegypti mosquito from most tropical regions of the Americas. The reinvasion of aedes aegypti since then has brought devastating outbreaks of dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and a renewed threat of urban yellow fever.
Should they all believe that overpopulation is a problem, just like global warming?
I dunno man. The hardcore environmentalist movement is kind of running out of new material. The overpopulation scare turned out to be stupid scaremongering. The Global Cooling crisis also turned out to be more stupid scaremongering. I think they tried something about a "silent spring" a little before that, but all that did was cause first-world nations to stop selling effective pesticides to the third-world nations who still needed them, which has caused the death of tens of millions of people. So maybe that was kind of a "half-win" for real hardcore environmentalists, who view humankind as a sort of plague anyways.
Despite the environmentalists cornucopia of dire warnings about the terrible consequences of our awful behavior over the last half-century, we didn't overpopulate the world, we didn't freeze it to death, and we didn't poison it to death (well, at least we didn't poison the birds and bees and mosquitoes. The tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections might be pissed about that). If the environmentalist movement's track record for predicting catastrophe is any indication, we're probably pretty safe from frying the world to death. So I guess my question is, if global warming turns out to be yet another one of their lame-ass chicken-little scenarios, what's left for the environmentalist scaremongers?
Maybe they could take on the epidemic of Global Hypocrisy. Oh wait, never mind. That would require the accusers to actually change their *own* behavior first, before lobbying to require that everyone do as they say (not as they do). Bono would *not* approve of that.
No doubt - once again, big government rears its ugly head. Actually, that's a pretty common tactic going on in Russia right now, where the industry leaders use complaints to government bureaucracies to quash competition. It's pretty ugly. And in the EU, anti-trust/competition laws and regulations are regularly abused by companies to handicap competitors, even though the intent is to protect individuals.
As long as the government stays out of it, sure. But that's not happening.
Amen to that. I think we can probably agree that government intervention in the form of "bailouts" for poorly-performing companies reduces the ability of the market to correct things like overpaid CEOs.
Your "barrier-to-entry" argument is another interesting thought - If you try to imagine one person going from the idea of, "Huh... I'd like to make cars for a living," to, say, becoming a competitor of Toyota, or Ford, you'd probably conclude that there's no way one person could ever hope to compete with an industry giant like those, in their lifetime.
But the reality is that the "barrier-to-entry", even into big industries like that, isn't as steep as you'd think. The next competitor is always breathing down your neck, whether you realize it or not. While it's inconceivable for, say, you or I, to decide to become the next big car manufacturer in a decade or so, consider how long it took Ford or Toyota to attain their respective positions in the auto industry - that didn't happen in one human lifetime. So think, instead of, say, a large machine-shop owner, who manufactures a lot of Toyota's precision-machined engine parts (this is common practice, even for big auto manufacturers, and I know specifically that Toyota does this, at least with their Georgetown, KY plant). How much of a "barrier" do they have to becoming a premier engine manufacturer? Not that much - a few more machines, a few more engineers, and they're making engines. Buy up a few more machines, and they're making almost whole cars. Another generation of success, and they're making cars. Not that hard to believe.
OK, take a step back, then... Say a smaller machine shop with less complicated, simpler machines, that the bigger shop hires to do the "blanks" (i.e., the rough machining from metal stock) for their precision parts. What's *their* barrier to becoming a competitor to the shop that hires them? Well, just save up and buy a few more machines. You're there. OK, so one more step back...
You're a machinist, operating a machine in that small shop. What's your barrier to having your own shop? Well, save up and buy, for starters, maybe just one machine. Instead of making an hourly wage for making those parts, you now make a per-part fee, and you own your own teeny business.
My point is that the "barrier to entry" argument is fallacious. It's like saying that Major League Baseball has an "unrealistic" barrier to entry for you or I to be the next pitcher for the Reds. Sure it does. But that barrier isn't so steep for the superstar triple-A Louisville Riverbats starting pitcher. One good season, and he might make it into the majors. Same for the pitcher one league lower, and so on...
Anyway, good point on the government interventionism!
The fact that there are industries that put a price cap on CEO wages doesn't mean that that's the right answer. My point was that CEO wages cap themselves at an amount that companies are willing to pay, and they're not going to pay more than they can afford if they don't think they're going to get an acceptable amount of value for their payment.
If a company, or a group of companies, or even a significant subset of companies that compete with one another within a particular industry, all make bad business decisions and hire over-valued, over-priced CEOs, then they'll pay the consequence of going out of business. My point is that successful companies cannot engage in a senseless "relentless wage spiral" for CEO compensation, and still remain in business.
Like any market trend, there are fluctuations in CEO salaries. Maybe right now we're on the upward-slope of that trend - a "CEO Salary Bubble," even. But at some point, every company reaches a point of diminishing return for hiring superstar executives - No matter how much the executive compensation consultants advise you to pay, or no matter how much the Other Big Corporation is paying, a company always has multiple options it must weigh when it comes to hiring a new CEO:
1) They decide that the "superstar" CEO is worth the risk of investing that much money into one person, and hire them.
2) They decide that it'd be more effective to hire a non "superstar" CEO, and then spend their money instead on developing new technology/expanding and/or hiring new people
3) They realize that they can't even afford to hire the "superstar," so they don't, and go looking elsewhere.
Look - if companies pay too much for chief executives because they're corrupt, or their board is somehow unduly influenced to overpay for leadership, they'll go out of business because there are innumerable other, leaner, less-stupid companies just raring to take their place as industry leaders. You can bank on that.
Now, don't get me wrong - the idea that one individual person could possibly be worth an annual salary of millions, or hundreds of millions even, is totally mind-boggling to me. But what I feel that another person deserves to be compensated for his or her labors is an entirely subjective judgment on my part. Believe me, I'm just as flabbergasted as you are about how a single person could manage to spend $50 Million in a single year, and I hardly think that a person would actually need even a fraction of that amount to live a marvelously luxurious life. But even though it strains my ability to understand, I refuse to substitute my personal prejudices for rational thought.
That's actually interesting, because whenever you quiz a board of directors about high CEO pay, they always say the same thing: it's to be competitive with what other companies are also doing.
Huh... That's actually kinda funny, because the last time *I* quizzed a board of directors about high CEO pay, they told me to shut up and look up the difference between competition and collusion.
CEO salaries are determined by CEO salary consultants, who base them on average CEO salaries plus a bit (to attract an above average CEO)
Gee, sign me up for that job - sounds pretty easy. No, executive compensation consultants do more than that. They help companies decide what compensation to offer not just for their chief executives, but also for lower-level salaried employees. The service they provide is to do compensation research for various positions nationally and globally, and to give their client an idea of the kinds of things they need to offer in order to be competitive with other companies that are trying to hire from the same pool of candidates.
The result is not a "relentless upward spiral of CEO salaries," as you said. If that were the case, then we'd be seeing "a relentless upward spiral" of *all* salaries. Your faulty assumption is that companies will never say, "No, we can't afford that much money to pay for an employee to fill that role." In reality, this happens all the time, even with CEOs. There are actual, bottom-line, dollar-based, limits on how much a company can pay to hire a superstar CEO, or superstar software engineer, or top-notch middle-manager, or even a really good janitor. A company *has* to be competitive with its peers in terms of the labor it purchases: Offer too little, and you get worse employees (including CEOs), and therefore worse productivity. Offer too much, and your competitors have additional resources to spend on other personnel or technology to give them a competitive advantage. The point of compensation consultants is to provide their clients with the "market price" of the particular labor (yes, "labor" includes CEOs, too) they're trying to purchase. They help enforce market value, not some out-of-control "relentless upward spiral" of compensation.
That having been said, I think the role of "compensation consultant," is something that has to be on its way out due to the interwebs. Their major role nowadays is to collect data about compensation, analyze it, and provide recommendations. With increasing accessibility to that information, and the ability to perform algorithmic analysis, just about the only place these consultants have left is small, local markets where they can obtain otherwise-unobtainable information through personal means (i.e., "Hey, Jim-Bob's Traffic-Cone Emporium down the street just hired a new CEO and gave him free traffic cones for life! Better come up with a good counter-offer!).
The steps of treating a combat casualty, as taught to medics nowadays, are: 1) Remove them from direct and indirect fire. 2) Perform regular paramedic A/B/C/D treatment stuff. You don't do anyone a favor by getting yourself shot, as a medic, nor do you help your patient if he or she is still getting lit up while you're trying to treat them. So until CMU's snakey-arm can drag a casualty away from danger in a combat situation, CMU's researchers are inappropriately hyping what their arm can do if they claim it can "keep medics safe".
I think that the point of the snake thing is to allow physicians to remotely diagnose and provide augmented treatment guidance to the combat medics that are actually there. From TFA, the point is:
so that a doctor at a remote clinic may move the robot to any point on a soldier's body to assess his injuries as he's being carried to a safe location. The robot's serpentine flexibility allows it to maneuver within tight confines, so that, in case a casualty can't be extracted from the battlefield immediately, the robot can perform an initial medical assessment in the field.
... which is great! Combat medics are not physicians, so they can benefit from the doc having tele-presence, giving them additional treatment guidance. The docs can also prepare their aid stations to receive casualties with the advance diagnosis. The point of this thing is not to slither around on the battlefield and treat casualties while the medics cower behind cover, it's to allow physicians an advance view of incoming casualties.
I think you got that backwards. A chief executive does not pick the board - the board picks, and evaluates the performance of the CEO. In turn, the board is elected by shareholders to represent their interests.
I'm sure some CEOs are worthless turds, but I'm sure there are others that *are* worth their exorbitant salaries. I mean, businesses fail all the time. In a competitive market, it's not like companies have a whole lot of cash to throw around for things that don't return the investment. The argument that CEO salaries are typically so huge that just one could pay for an n-dollar raise for all the other employees actually highlights my point - Unless *every* single company is engaging in some sort of "CEO Salary collusion," the ones who pay big money for turd-CEOs instead of more, or better paid workers, or else a CEO that performs, will fail.
Personal incredulity that, "one person can't possibly make such a big difference to justify those salaries," isn't really a valid argument. I mean, really? *You* could run GE, or Microsoft, or Lockheed-Martin, or whatever just as well as anyone? That's what everyone who's never led, or been close to the top-level leadership of an organization thinks...
That's a really, really good point... I mean, unless the EU intends for everyone to roll their own FTP or HTTP client, there's got to be *some* way to access stuff over a network that comes "bundled" with the OS, like yum or whatever. I'm sure that if it were a Microsoft "Network-Accessibility Application Downloader," Opera would go crying back to mommy about that.
I agree, that it ought to be *some* browser. But now it *can't* be IE. So it has to be one of Microsoft's competitors' browsers. This is beyond the stupid. This is like Burger King complaining to the EU and so now anytime you buy a McDonald's value meal it has to come with Burger King onion rings. If you want the McDonald's fries, you have to get them separately. Retarded.
Seriously? Is trying out other browsers such a life-altering experience that we need to shake the unwashed masses out of their stupor and force them to download FF or Opera? People who care about which browser they use and how fast it, I don't know, parses Javascript or whatever, know how to get them already. People who don't care about which browser they use will not be helped by this, just inconvenienced.
I think you're most bothered by the fact that most people really, genuinely don't, and will never care about "trying alternative products," when it comes to personal computing. If you think that makes them stupid, or inferior somehow, that's your own elitist attitude's fault. If you think that their apathy is somehow *caused* by Microsoft, then I've got a whole line of hats (made of tinfoil) for you to browse.
This issue is all about Opera wanting more money and more market share, so they're abusing the EU's laws to hurt one of their competitors. They don't want *more* competition - they want less! How come patent-trolls are so reviled, yet anti-trust-trolls are revered?
Absolutely nothing. The problem is that Opera is abusing anti-competition laws in the EU. The intent of anti-monopoly/trust/competition laws is to protect individual consumers, not to give companies a government-enforced weapon to bash each other over the heads with. There are a few reasons why this is a messed-up situation:
First, enforcing these gray-area "anti-competition" laws puts the EU in the position of having to decide the optimal amount of "competition" in the market in a given industry. They also, implicitly, then have to make decisions about what is a "fair" amount of market share for a particular company, for a particular product line. It becomes a situation where they're like the "cosmic fairness arbiter," and companies petition them for favors. Entrenched bureaucracy, untouchable by voters, results in corruption.
Second, the assumption is made that lost revenue for Microsoft translates directly into "more jobs for the rest of us" (somehow). It doesn't, and here's why. Some of that lost revenue is going to be the fact that Microsoft has to expend resources to comply with EU rulings - they're going to have to spend developer time altering software, dealing with EU trustees, etc. That's just resources down the drain. Nobody benefits from that. Now, if the EU rulings result in an artificial shifting of market share away from Microsoft to other companies, consumers only benefit if those resources flow to a competitor who creates value more efficiently than Microsoft. Ignoring mindless MS-bashing ("DUURR - M$ is soo inefficient."), I don't think that anyone could legitimately make the blanket statement that "all software development companies that compete with Microsoft in this product line are more efficient than Microsoft."
The key thing to remember is that anti-monopoly/trust/competition laws are there to benefit individual people, not other companies. Opera's pretense that they just want "more competition" is hypocritical. They don't want "more competition," they want less of it from Microsoft. They want more money. There's nothing wrong about that, but abusing laws intended to benefit consumers is not an OK way to go about it.
The absurdity of this is overwhelming. Nobody ever thinks about why Opera is doing this - it isn't because they love "the people" and want to ensure they get a good browser. It's because they really want some more of that money (yes, yes, Opera is free - I understand their revenue model). What a great way to abuse a bloated bureaucracy - if you can't defeat your competitors in the open market, then get government to handicap them for you.
But seriously, how the does EU "law" even work? I'm not even going to insult Hammurabi by calling them "laws." I'm going to henceforth refer to EU ruling as "Lord Fauntleroy's Whims".
So lemme get this straight: They ruled in 2002 that MS had to decouple IE from Windows, and allow users not to have it as the default browser, yadda yadda yadda, all so other browser makers could "compete." And I'm really sure that your average user, when confronted with an OS with *no* browser is really going to go comparison-shopping. No, I'm pretty sure it goes like this: "WTF!? Der Komputer hat keine browser!?! Ich moechte god damned IE!" *downloads IE.*
Anyway, so now, the commission has *further* decided that Microsoft can't even include IE at all, because Opera bitched about it? Seriously, when does it end? When Opera's happy? What's next?
"EU rules that Microsoft Windows 7 runs too fast, looks too pretty. Due to a complaint from Sun who said that Microsoft is abusing their ability to produce good software that runs well, the EU has ruled that Microsoft must write an "Uglification and Slowification" patch within 15 minutes or else be fined 1 Hojillion Euro per second until they do." Ugh.
I guess it depends on if that particular "moment in time" is what the AP wants to capture. Fake "reenactments" and staged photo events of "tragedies" in the middle east that are used to support false allegations? Yep, those are apparently capture just the types of "moments in time" that the AP is OK with.
But this example is clearly out of bounds!... Seriously, have any of you ever seen the standard Army photo portrait? It's a picture of a Soldier in uniform, from mid-chest on up, in front of an American flag. Most individuals in leadership positions need to have one taken for publication purposes. If she hadn't had the chance to have one of these taken, clearly the intent was to simulate that it was a standard "official" portrait.
Maybe if they had included a few live people draped with sheets to simulate corpses, or perhaps a live person being carried as though he were dead in the background the AP would have been OK with it. But a fake flag? Oh, no. That's right out.
Having spent time in call centers observing work behaviors, he said most employees boot the computer, then engage in nonwork activities. "They go have a smoke, talk to friends, get coffee -- they're not working, and all they've done at that point is press a button to power up their computer, or enter in a key word," Rosenblatt said.
The impression you get from reading the article summary is that there are legions of poor tech workers who show up to work, turn on their computers, and then sit there idly in their cubes, twiddling their thumbs for a half an hour waiting for their computer to boot, and their employers dock them for that time.
But once you hear the other side of the story, it sounds to me like these "poor victimized employees" come in, hit the power button, and then walk off to do other stuff which occupies them for the better part of an hour, because booting takes (realistically - c'mon, now) more than ten or twenty seconds (which is longer than the average attention span of say, a college grad with a business degree), and that management is trying to get a handle on it as best they can.
This is a classic case of "blame the technologies for my laziness (because my boss doesn't understand it, either, and he'll buy it!)" This isn't anything new, it's an internal management issue.
In the US, they stopped bothering with incremental regulations. They just get the first increment, then ignore the limits (see NSA security letters, secret wiretapping, PATRIOT act misuse).
Right, because none of those laws have anything at all to do with actually preventing hostile organizations from attacking the US. This is self-evident, because since those laws and directives were enacted, there have been no terrorist attacks on US soil. It couldn't possibly be that the measures taken to prevent terrorist attacks in the US actually prevented terrorist attacks in the US.
Besides, everybody knows that the reason that those fascists enacted these measures was to listen in on your conversations with your bro about how much Bush suxxor, and then arrest you! And also, Cheney really intended to read your emails, for the same purpose. And the whole administration just wanted to spy on your internet browsing habits, and arrest you if you "accidentally" look at too much gay porn.
...
You want to talk about "foot in the door?" How about Social Security? How about Welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid? What about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? These are all Democrat inventions, and they've all failed spectacularly. The intent of the Democrats in these cases was (in your own words), "To keep you safe, we need to..." So the real world is rife with examples of liberal policies, implemented in incremental steps, that have failed.
We have evidence that Democrat policies like that fail, and do so horribly. Sorry to digress, but rest assured that if you know anything about history, you'll be able to figure out I didn't digress too far.
Anyway, you're claiming that this awful intrusion into your "right" to look at porn in private is of the same ilk. OK, so when has this been misused? Has it ruined our national economy yet? Are you in jail now, because you emailed something critical of Bush to your buddy, or looked at the wrong kind of porn? Seriously! You probably can't name one example where a completely innocent American citizen has been detained under one of these homeland-security-type acts for a reason totally unrelated to the prevention of another terrorist attack on US soil.
And, in your mind, your imaginary, never-before-seen abuse of this power is worse than the violence it is intended to prevent, and has prevented.
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Um no. If they were actually trying to legislate a limit on workers' salaries, while fighting legislation to limit executive salaries, that'd be hypocrisy. But they're not.
The issue is that you CANNOT uninstall IE. It's been deliberately entangled coreward to prevent that from being doable, even with third party tools.
I'm not sure where you get this FUD, but yes, you can uninstall it. I think the "entanglement" you're referring to is the fact that there are several DLLs that provide the Windows HTML rendering engine that don't disappear when you uninstall IE. They don't go away because other applications use them. ... *grumble*
I mean, you're just talking about the small potatoes, here! What about all the other crap that IE leaves laying around? What about that pesky TCP/IP implementation!? You wouldn't believe the pain in the ass it was for me to get rid of that when I uninstalled IE! I mean, heck, IE uses scrollbars, right? So why doesn't uninstalling IE remove the scrollbar GUI component from Windows? No More Bloat!
How is this "greedy" or "cruel" at all? It's roughly the same thing as being given too much change at a store. There are about a half-dozen posts above yours that talk about the government (or is it "greedy corporate American government"?) making exactly the same type of mistake.
Nice that you pointed out that Microsoft is not the first and only company or organization to ever make a payroll error. But where did you come up with the anti-"big evil corporate America! Waaah!" jab, based on this event?
Nice story, but the reality is that Apple managed to develop a proprietary personal computer architecture, which they did. IBM tried and failed several times to enter the PC market, and on its last try chose to use 3rd party, OTS hardware and develop a non-proprietary architecture, which was, of course, rapidly adopted (because anyone could build one).
Apple is now relegated to a small niche of the total person computing market (including home and business use) because of this, not because of an ideological choice.
Hey, that's a pretty cool piece of knowledge. I did not know that. But I wonder why there's only one company in the world that does it...
The second amendment is the part of the constitution which guarantees the right of militias to bear arms in their own defense. The amendment does not at any point grant an explicit individual right to gun ownership. Interpreting it as such requires a purposeful misreading of the amendment.
Sooo... Your interpretation of the Second Amendment is that nobody should be allowed to possess firearms, unless they're part of a militia. What makes a "militia?" What if I declare that I'm the founding member of the "1st Doohickian Irregulars," and go out and buy a tent and a machine gun? Is that OK in your book? If your answer to that question is, "No, because you're not 'well-regulated,'" then you'd better come up with a definition of what you mean by "well-regulated," and who checks my "regularity."
Your argument breaks down in the specifics. Either the second amendment affords all Americans the right to bear arms ("with restrictions," as Antonin Scalia said in the majority opinion of the D.C. gun ban thing a while back), or it applies to "militias." So, either we as a nation are doing this all wrong, or you're wrong. Which is it?
Furthermore, the response to "Silent Spring" did not stop the sale of DDT to third-world nations
Wrong. The response to "Silent Spring" was that anti-DDT donor organizations who funded the bulk of many third-world countries' public health budgets refused to continue donating if they used DDT.
So there are no "tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections." That claim is made up by businesses with a vested interest in the production and use of DDT as part of a smear campaign.
Ah, the always excellent: "It's funded by eevil corporations and therefore false!" argument. Nice one. No, again, wrong. It's not just the eeeevil corporations that Wikipedia told you were eeevil:
According to Dr Donald Roberts, professor of medical entomology at the Uniformed Services Hospital of the Health Sciences in Maryland, USA, the huge drop in houses sprayed with DDT has resulted in an average annual increase of 4.8 malaria cases per 1000 of the population in Latin America, from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s.
For the whole of Latin America, a minimum of 1.8million additional cases of malaria were occurring each year up to 1996. Case rates have continued to grow since 1996, and according to Dr Roberts, 'we can reasonably expect that the number of excess cases is now much greater than in 1996'. Only Ecuador, which has continued to use DDT, has seen a reduction in the number of malaria cases in recent years.
Other mosquito-borne diseases are also on the rise. Until the 1970s, DDT was used to eradicate the aedes aegypti mosquito from most tropical regions of the Americas. The reinvasion of aedes aegypti since then has brought devastating outbreaks of dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and a renewed threat of urban yellow fever.
I'm not the one making stuff up here.
Should they all believe that overpopulation is a problem, just like global warming?
I dunno man. The hardcore environmentalist movement is kind of running out of new material. The overpopulation scare turned out to be stupid scaremongering. The Global Cooling crisis also turned out to be more stupid scaremongering. I think they tried something about a "silent spring" a little before that, but all that did was cause first-world nations to stop selling effective pesticides to the third-world nations who still needed them, which has caused the death of tens of millions of people. So maybe that was kind of a "half-win" for real hardcore environmentalists, who view humankind as a sort of plague anyways.
Despite the environmentalists cornucopia of dire warnings about the terrible consequences of our awful behavior over the last half-century, we didn't overpopulate the world, we didn't freeze it to death, and we didn't poison it to death (well, at least we didn't poison the birds and bees and mosquitoes. The tens of millions of humans who died of preventable malaria infections might be pissed about that). If the environmentalist movement's track record for predicting catastrophe is any indication, we're probably pretty safe from frying the world to death. So I guess my question is, if global warming turns out to be yet another one of their lame-ass chicken-little scenarios, what's left for the environmentalist scaremongers?
Maybe they could take on the epidemic of Global Hypocrisy. Oh wait, never mind. That would require the accusers to actually change their *own* behavior first, before lobbying to require that everyone do as they say (not as they do). Bono would *not* approve of that.
No doubt - once again, big government rears its ugly head. Actually, that's a pretty common tactic going on in Russia right now, where the industry leaders use complaints to government bureaucracies to quash competition. It's pretty ugly. And in the EU, anti-trust/competition laws and regulations are regularly abused by companies to handicap competitors, even though the intent is to protect individuals.
If you keep carrying on like this, the next batch of mosquitoes Bill releases *will* have malaria.
As long as the government stays out of it, sure. But that's not happening.
Amen to that. I think we can probably agree that government intervention in the form of "bailouts" for poorly-performing companies reduces the ability of the market to correct things like overpaid CEOs.
Your "barrier-to-entry" argument is another interesting thought - If you try to imagine one person going from the idea of, "Huh... I'd like to make cars for a living," to, say, becoming a competitor of Toyota, or Ford, you'd probably conclude that there's no way one person could ever hope to compete with an industry giant like those, in their lifetime.
But the reality is that the "barrier-to-entry", even into big industries like that, isn't as steep as you'd think. The next competitor is always breathing down your neck, whether you realize it or not. While it's inconceivable for, say, you or I, to decide to become the next big car manufacturer in a decade or so, consider how long it took Ford or Toyota to attain their respective positions in the auto industry - that didn't happen in one human lifetime. So think, instead of, say, a large machine-shop owner, who manufactures a lot of Toyota's precision-machined engine parts (this is common practice, even for big auto manufacturers, and I know specifically that Toyota does this, at least with their Georgetown, KY plant). How much of a "barrier" do they have to becoming a premier engine manufacturer? Not that much - a few more machines, a few more engineers, and they're making engines. Buy up a few more machines, and they're making almost whole cars. Another generation of success, and they're making cars. Not that hard to believe.
OK, take a step back, then... Say a smaller machine shop with less complicated, simpler machines, that the bigger shop hires to do the "blanks" (i.e., the rough machining from metal stock) for their precision parts. What's *their* barrier to becoming a competitor to the shop that hires them? Well, just save up and buy a few more machines. You're there. OK, so one more step back...
You're a machinist, operating a machine in that small shop. What's your barrier to having your own shop? Well, save up and buy, for starters, maybe just one machine. Instead of making an hourly wage for making those parts, you now make a per-part fee, and you own your own teeny business.
My point is that the "barrier to entry" argument is fallacious. It's like saying that Major League Baseball has an "unrealistic" barrier to entry for you or I to be the next pitcher for the Reds. Sure it does. But that barrier isn't so steep for the superstar triple-A Louisville Riverbats starting pitcher. One good season, and he might make it into the majors. Same for the pitcher one league lower, and so on...
Anyway, good point on the government interventionism!
The fact that there are industries that put a price cap on CEO wages doesn't mean that that's the right answer. My point was that CEO wages cap themselves at an amount that companies are willing to pay, and they're not going to pay more than they can afford if they don't think they're going to get an acceptable amount of value for their payment.
If a company, or a group of companies, or even a significant subset of companies that compete with one another within a particular industry, all make bad business decisions and hire over-valued, over-priced CEOs, then they'll pay the consequence of going out of business. My point is that successful companies cannot engage in a senseless "relentless wage spiral" for CEO compensation, and still remain in business.
Like any market trend, there are fluctuations in CEO salaries. Maybe right now we're on the upward-slope of that trend - a "CEO Salary Bubble," even. But at some point, every company reaches a point of diminishing return for hiring superstar executives - No matter how much the executive compensation consultants advise you to pay, or no matter how much the Other Big Corporation is paying, a company always has multiple options it must weigh when it comes to hiring a new CEO:
1) They decide that the "superstar" CEO is worth the risk of investing that much money into one person, and hire them.
2) They decide that it'd be more effective to hire a non "superstar" CEO, and then spend their money instead on developing new technology/expanding and/or hiring new people
3) They realize that they can't even afford to hire the "superstar," so they don't, and go looking elsewhere.
Look - if companies pay too much for chief executives because they're corrupt, or their board is somehow unduly influenced to overpay for leadership, they'll go out of business because there are innumerable other, leaner, less-stupid companies just raring to take their place as industry leaders. You can bank on that.
Now, don't get me wrong - the idea that one individual person could possibly be worth an annual salary of millions, or hundreds of millions even, is totally mind-boggling to me. But what I feel that another person deserves to be compensated for his or her labors is an entirely subjective judgment on my part. Believe me, I'm just as flabbergasted as you are about how a single person could manage to spend $50 Million in a single year, and I hardly think that a person would actually need even a fraction of that amount to live a marvelously luxurious life. But even though it strains my ability to understand, I refuse to substitute my personal prejudices for rational thought.
That's actually interesting, because whenever you quiz a board of directors about high CEO pay, they always say the same thing: it's to be competitive with what other companies are also doing.
Huh... That's actually kinda funny, because the last time *I* quizzed a board of directors about high CEO pay, they told me to shut up and look up the difference between competition and collusion.
CEO salaries are determined by CEO salary consultants, who base them on average CEO salaries plus a bit (to attract an above average CEO)
Gee, sign me up for that job - sounds pretty easy. No, executive compensation consultants do more than that. They help companies decide what compensation to offer not just for their chief executives, but also for lower-level salaried employees. The service they provide is to do compensation research for various positions nationally and globally, and to give their client an idea of the kinds of things they need to offer in order to be competitive with other companies that are trying to hire from the same pool of candidates.
The result is not a "relentless upward spiral of CEO salaries," as you said. If that were the case, then we'd be seeing "a relentless upward spiral" of *all* salaries. Your faulty assumption is that companies will never say, "No, we can't afford that much money to pay for an employee to fill that role." In reality, this happens all the time, even with CEOs. There are actual, bottom-line, dollar-based, limits on how much a company can pay to hire a superstar CEO, or superstar software engineer, or top-notch middle-manager, or even a really good janitor. A company *has* to be competitive with its peers in terms of the labor it purchases: Offer too little, and you get worse employees (including CEOs), and therefore worse productivity. Offer too much, and your competitors have additional resources to spend on other personnel or technology to give them a competitive advantage. The point of compensation consultants is to provide their clients with the "market price" of the particular labor (yes, "labor" includes CEOs, too) they're trying to purchase. They help enforce market value, not some out-of-control "relentless upward spiral" of compensation.
That having been said, I think the role of "compensation consultant," is something that has to be on its way out due to the interwebs. Their major role nowadays is to collect data about compensation, analyze it, and provide recommendations. With increasing accessibility to that information, and the ability to perform algorithmic analysis, just about the only place these consultants have left is small, local markets where they can obtain otherwise-unobtainable information through personal means (i.e., "Hey, Jim-Bob's Traffic-Cone Emporium down the street just hired a new CEO and gave him free traffic cones for life! Better come up with a good counter-offer!).
so that a doctor at a remote clinic may move the robot to any point on a soldier's body to assess his injuries as he's being carried to a safe location. The robot's serpentine flexibility allows it to maneuver within tight confines, so that, in case a casualty can't be extracted from the battlefield immediately, the robot can perform an initial medical assessment in the field.
I think you got that backwards. A chief executive does not pick the board - the board picks, and evaluates the performance of the CEO. In turn, the board is elected by shareholders to represent their interests.
I'm sure some CEOs are worthless turds, but I'm sure there are others that *are* worth their exorbitant salaries. I mean, businesses fail all the time. In a competitive market, it's not like companies have a whole lot of cash to throw around for things that don't return the investment. The argument that CEO salaries are typically so huge that just one could pay for an n-dollar raise for all the other employees actually highlights my point - Unless *every* single company is engaging in some sort of "CEO Salary collusion," the ones who pay big money for turd-CEOs instead of more, or better paid workers, or else a CEO that performs, will fail.
Personal incredulity that, "one person can't possibly make such a big difference to justify those salaries," isn't really a valid argument. I mean, really? *You* could run GE, or Microsoft, or Lockheed-Martin, or whatever just as well as anyone? That's what everyone who's never led, or been close to the top-level leadership of an organization thinks...
he's certainly made of different stuff to every other politician in power at the present time.
Yeah, because we don't already have a boatload of corrupt machine-politics hucksters in power. Er... Great. Now one's President. Again.
Yeah, that's the one situation where a DivBy0 error is good news.
That's a really, really good point... I mean, unless the EU intends for everyone to roll their own FTP or HTTP client, there's got to be *some* way to access stuff over a network that comes "bundled" with the OS, like yum or whatever. I'm sure that if it were a Microsoft "Network-Accessibility Application Downloader," Opera would go crying back to mommy about that.
I agree, that it ought to be *some* browser. But now it *can't* be IE. So it has to be one of Microsoft's competitors' browsers. This is beyond the stupid. This is like Burger King complaining to the EU and so now anytime you buy a McDonald's value meal it has to come with Burger King onion rings. If you want the McDonald's fries, you have to get them separately. Retarded.
Seriously? Is trying out other browsers such a life-altering experience that we need to shake the unwashed masses out of their stupor and force them to download FF or Opera? People who care about which browser they use and how fast it, I don't know, parses Javascript or whatever, know how to get them already. People who don't care about which browser they use will not be helped by this, just inconvenienced.
I think you're most bothered by the fact that most people really, genuinely don't, and will never care about "trying alternative products," when it comes to personal computing. If you think that makes them stupid, or inferior somehow, that's your own elitist attitude's fault. If you think that their apathy is somehow *caused* by Microsoft, then I've got a whole line of hats (made of tinfoil) for you to browse.
This issue is all about Opera wanting more money and more market share, so they're abusing the EU's laws to hurt one of their competitors. They don't want *more* competition - they want less! How come patent-trolls are so reviled, yet anti-trust-trolls are revered?
Absolutely nothing. The problem is that Opera is abusing anti-competition laws in the EU. The intent of anti-monopoly/trust/competition laws is to protect individual consumers, not to give companies a government-enforced weapon to bash each other over the heads with. There are a few reasons why this is a messed-up situation:
First, enforcing these gray-area "anti-competition" laws puts the EU in the position of having to decide the optimal amount of "competition" in the market in a given industry. They also, implicitly, then have to make decisions about what is a "fair" amount of market share for a particular company, for a particular product line. It becomes a situation where they're like the "cosmic fairness arbiter," and companies petition them for favors. Entrenched bureaucracy, untouchable by voters, results in corruption.
Second, the assumption is made that lost revenue for Microsoft translates directly into "more jobs for the rest of us" (somehow). It doesn't, and here's why. Some of that lost revenue is going to be the fact that Microsoft has to expend resources to comply with EU rulings - they're going to have to spend developer time altering software, dealing with EU trustees, etc. That's just resources down the drain. Nobody benefits from that. Now, if the EU rulings result in an artificial shifting of market share away from Microsoft to other companies, consumers only benefit if those resources flow to a competitor who creates value more efficiently than Microsoft. Ignoring mindless MS-bashing ("DUURR - M$ is soo inefficient."), I don't think that anyone could legitimately make the blanket statement that "all software development companies that compete with Microsoft in this product line are more efficient than Microsoft."
The key thing to remember is that anti-monopoly/trust/competition laws are there to benefit individual people, not other companies. Opera's pretense that they just want "more competition" is hypocritical. They don't want "more competition," they want less of it from Microsoft. They want more money. There's nothing wrong about that, but abusing laws intended to benefit consumers is not an OK way to go about it.
The absurdity of this is overwhelming. Nobody ever thinks about why Opera is doing this - it isn't because they love "the people" and want to ensure they get a good browser. It's because they really want some more of that money (yes, yes, Opera is free - I understand their revenue model). What a great way to abuse a bloated bureaucracy - if you can't defeat your competitors in the open market, then get government to handicap them for you.
But seriously, how the does EU "law" even work? I'm not even going to insult Hammurabi by calling them "laws." I'm going to henceforth refer to EU ruling as "Lord Fauntleroy's Whims".
So lemme get this straight: They ruled in 2002 that MS had to decouple IE from Windows, and allow users not to have it as the default browser, yadda yadda yadda, all so other browser makers could "compete." And I'm really sure that your average user, when confronted with an OS with *no* browser is really going to go comparison-shopping. No, I'm pretty sure it goes like this: "WTF!? Der Komputer hat keine browser!?! Ich moechte god damned IE!" *downloads IE.*
Anyway, so now, the commission has *further* decided that Microsoft can't even include IE at all, because Opera bitched about it? Seriously, when does it end? When Opera's happy? What's next?
"EU rules that Microsoft Windows 7 runs too fast, looks too pretty. Due to a complaint from Sun who said that Microsoft is abusing their ability to produce good software that runs well, the EU has ruled that Microsoft must write an "Uglification and Slowification" patch within 15 minutes or else be fined 1 Hojillion Euro per second until they do." Ugh.
I guess it depends on if that particular "moment in time" is what the AP wants to capture. Fake "reenactments" and staged photo events of "tragedies" in the middle east that are used to support false allegations? Yep, those are apparently capture just the types of "moments in time" that the AP is OK with.
... Seriously, have any of you ever seen the standard Army photo portrait? It's a picture of a Soldier in uniform, from mid-chest on up, in front of an American flag. Most individuals in leadership positions need to have one taken for publication purposes. If she hadn't had the chance to have one of these taken, clearly the intent was to simulate that it was a standard "official" portrait.
But this example is clearly out of bounds!
Maybe if they had included a few live people draped with sheets to simulate corpses, or perhaps a live person being carried as though he were dead in the background the AP would have been OK with it. But a fake flag? Oh, no. That's right out.
Having spent time in call centers observing work behaviors, he said most employees boot the computer, then engage in nonwork activities. "They go have a smoke, talk to friends, get coffee -- they're not working, and all they've done at that point is press a button to power up their computer, or enter in a key word," Rosenblatt said.
The impression you get from reading the article summary is that there are legions of poor tech workers who show up to work, turn on their computers, and then sit there idly in their cubes, twiddling their thumbs for a half an hour waiting for their computer to boot, and their employers dock them for that time.
But once you hear the other side of the story, it sounds to me like these "poor victimized employees" come in, hit the power button, and then walk off to do other stuff which occupies them for the better part of an hour, because booting takes (realistically - c'mon, now) more than ten or twenty seconds (which is longer than the average attention span of say, a college grad with a business degree), and that management is trying to get a handle on it as best they can.
This is a classic case of "blame the technologies for my laziness (because my boss doesn't understand it, either, and he'll buy it!)" This isn't anything new, it's an internal management issue.
In the US, they stopped bothering with incremental regulations. They just get the first increment, then ignore the limits (see NSA security letters, secret wiretapping, PATRIOT act misuse).
Right, because none of those laws have anything at all to do with actually preventing hostile organizations from attacking the US. This is self-evident, because since those laws and directives were enacted, there have been no terrorist attacks on US soil. It couldn't possibly be that the measures taken to prevent terrorist attacks in the US actually prevented terrorist attacks in the US.
...
Besides, everybody knows that the reason that those fascists enacted these measures was to listen in on your conversations with your bro about how much Bush suxxor, and then arrest you! And also, Cheney really intended to read your emails, for the same purpose. And the whole administration just wanted to spy on your internet browsing habits, and arrest you if you "accidentally" look at too much gay porn.
You want to talk about "foot in the door?" How about Social Security? How about Welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid? What about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? These are all Democrat inventions, and they've all failed spectacularly. The intent of the Democrats in these cases was (in your own words), "To keep you safe, we need to..." So the real world is rife with examples of liberal policies, implemented in incremental steps, that have failed. We have evidence that Democrat policies like that fail, and do so horribly. Sorry to digress, but rest assured that if you know anything about history, you'll be able to figure out I didn't digress too far.
Anyway, you're claiming that this awful intrusion into your "right" to look at porn in private is of the same ilk. OK, so when has this been misused? Has it ruined our national economy yet? Are you in jail now, because you emailed something critical of Bush to your buddy, or looked at the wrong kind of porn? Seriously! You probably can't name one example where a completely innocent American citizen has been detained under one of these homeland-security-type acts for a reason totally unrelated to the prevention of another terrorist attack on US soil.
And, in your mind, your imaginary, never-before-seen abuse of this power is worse than the violence it is intended to prevent, and has prevented.