A corporation is simply a group of people working together. The moral actions of the people participating are the moral actions of the corporation and vice versa.
I'm sorry, but this is too simplistic. A corporation (the kind we're talking about here, a national retail chain) is generally composed of several different groups of people, whose needs tend to conflict with each other. Also, some of those people are shielded from the consequences of the actions of others in such a way that they may benefit from moral decisions that other people are making, and responsible for.
Very roughly, you have Shareholders, upper management, and Store staff/management. These people all have different motives. Generally, the Shareholders want a better return on their investment. The Upper management want the bonuses that come with giving the shareholders what they want, and the store staff mostly just want to keep themselves and their families fed.
The upper management know what the lower-level staff need, and they use this knowledge as a stick to keep the staff in line. If you don't sell high-profit stuff, you lose your job. It's really that simple. The shareholders hold a similar stick over the heads of the upper management.
Morally, most of us consider that you have to do something immoral to survive, you're less blameworthy than someone who simply does immoral things for their own unnecessary gain. This isn't a universal truth, of course, but many consider this to make some kind of sense. The salesman who needs to lie to a customer so he can buy groceries this week is less blameworthy than someone who has no financial worries, but lies to the customer anyway, maybe to pay for opera tickets that week. But in a large corporation, it's the poor salesman who has to make the moral decisions.
The upper management is able to set store policies against this behaviour, and simply order the workings of the company in such a way that the sales force is always under pressure, and the sales force will do what they have to do to stay employed and fed.
The shareholder is even more removed from the immoral actions of the company. All they generally know is that they own shares in a corporation, and if that corporation underperforms, they sell their shares and move on. Most shareholders are not privy to the decisions of upper management, and if you happen to hold a mutual fund, which happens to own a piece of Best Buy, when you go to the store and get sold a bill of goods by the salesman, you will think you just got rooked by a greedy bastard, and not even realise that the salesman acted as he did because of policies put into place by upper management, and that those policies, in some small way, are for YOUR benefit.
When you add in the various legal protections that a corporation gives to shareholders and employees, what you end up having is a legal structure that protects people at all levels from the consequences of their moral choices. This is what's ultimately wrong with corporations. While I agree that you can't ignore the morality of your decisions, the corporate structure makes it far too easy to push the moral decisions off on the most desperate employees of the corporation.
My experience has been that low-priced accessories like cables, blank media, and the like are marked up, and the higher-priced electronics like cameras, computers and such are sold at paper-thin margins. I even recall a model of laptop at the Radio Shack I used to work at that landed in the store priced at a small loss.
The retailers don't actually make their margins at the store level, they take their cut at the distribution centre. A company like Best Buy gets to control the retail price and the "wholesale" price the store pays, meaning that the store itself often gets hosed at the expense of the corporation. Salesmen have to hustle to sell the high-margin, low price items, so that they don't lose their shitty, minimum wage jobs. It's the shareholders, and the upper management, who are laughing all the way to the bank.
Though I have no doubt about the lack of competence of the local Geek Squad, my experiences with newer viruses has been that if you're paying hourly for the repair work, it's cheaper just to replace and reinstall the drive.
Some time ago my wife managed a small live theatre venue, and they had a computer with a virus. I volunteered to clean it out, and ended up spending probably 20 hours working on it, as the virus was dug in deep, I couldn't get the automated repair tool on to the computer, and had to dig the infected files and reg entries out by hand. After all that, I still couldn't guarantee that the machine was virus-free.
If someone's putting together a machine with the kind of thermal demands you're thinking of, they're not spending $700 on their computer, they're probably spending that much just on their video cards. And if they're spending that much on video cards (note the plural) then they're probably doing something with the machine that you can't do with a $700 computer. Like playing DirectX (insert latest version here) games. Or maybe running CAD software. Or animation rendering.
This isn't for people who want to do some word processing, some surfing the net, and maybe play a rousing game of solitaire. This is for people who want to play Crysis (or the nearest non-buggy equivalent). Most people can get by with a low-end, commodity computer (if they don't mind replacing it every few years as the cheap parts fail), but some people really do need more power, and will pay accordingly to get it.
And possibly killing him as well. Having a car die in the middle of a crowded freeway is not a zero-risk event.
That is a risk I'd be willing to take*.
Personally I'd just like to get one of those scrolling LED text displays mounted to the back of my car. "HEY DUDE, BACK THE FUCK OFF. I'M NOT INTO THAT."
Well, IANA Physicist, but I'd bet that they don't make bumpers like the ones you describe, because they're so rigid. The energy of the collision would be telegraphed through the bumper, into the frame, and eventually into the driver and passengers. Modern bumpers absorb more of that energy (when they get crushed), and that much less of it gets into the cockpit.
It might make sense to swap out a modern bumper for a steel monster if you know you're going to have a minor crash (let the passengers absorb the energy and save money on bumper replacement), but most of us don't have that kind of foresight.
Well, you might need to explain what astroturfing is. Most people here think that astroturfing is when you are satisfied with a mass-market product.
Really? My impression here has been that most people use "astroturfing" to mean "generating a (usually false) controversy around a particular product, to create exposure to (and possibly name-brand recognition of) that product." Am I missing something?
That's pretty stupid. There's no reason why Apple should accept inputs to its software that have been faked. A user may have rights to modify their hardware however they see fit, but that doesn't mean that third party software is obligated to take that at face value. There's an API available for third party hardware to sync with iTunes, Palm should have used that.
But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do they staff their stores highly because they have great sales per square foot, or do they get great sales per square foot because they staff the stores well (and keep the square footage down)?
I have a television that accepts component inputs. Oldish Panasonic Tau CRT television. Has inputs for co-ax, composite and component, no digital. Not everyone gives a shit about digital television, you know.
You know, I've been following your arguments for a while now, and they are so achingly bad, and you are so wilfully blind to the obvious, that I'm starting to wonder who pays your salary...maybe a little joe-job action going on here?
Incidentally I just checked, and as I suspected, Mexico is a civil law country, not a common-law country, so I doubt very much that case-law from anywhere else applies. So much for precedent.
I would point out that 1) Black's Law Dictionary, though useful, isn't a binding authority (at least, not in my jurisdiction). 2) I wasn't offering a precise definition, but a rule of thumb meant to illustrate the difference between precedent and persuasion.
Whether and to what extent a court is bound by the decisions in other jurisdictions varies from country to country, but generally, the common law countries do distinguish between precedent (past decisions of higher -- and to some extent equal -- courts) and persuasive material.
Since I (a Canadian law student) was discussing a Mexican incident, between an American individual and a Japanese record company, please forgive me if I spoke in general terms, instead of getting down to the brass tacks of what exactly constitutes precedent to the SCOTUS.
I had a friend who took a college course on record label contracts. His prof said that there was no way on earth a sane lawyer would recommend that a band sign the standard record deal. Of course, bands don't hire lawyers to vet them, and the record companies all use the same basic contract, so the bands often don't even realize they have a choice. Up until this proud new digital era, the bands didn't have a choice, if they wanted to make it big.
Foreign judgments aren't irrelevant, but they're not precedent either. A precedent (despite what a poster above thinks) is a ruling by a higher court in the same jurisdiction. A foreign judgment might be followed, but it would followed as a persuasive judgment, not as a precedent. The difference is that a judge has to follow precedent, but may follow a persuasive decision.
Generally speaking, only high courts feel comfortable adopting the decisions of other countries, especially if those decisions conflict with local precedents.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide your credentials if you want me to accept that you know more about magnetism than four separate physics research teams, two with articles in Science and two more with draft articles on arXiv.org, all of which show evidence of the existence of magnetic monopoles.
That's hilarious that he said that, because his theories put into practice have done a great deal of unnecessary harm, in South America, Thatcher's Britain, and Reagan's America.
Slashdot Mirror
A corporation is simply a group of people working together. The moral actions of the people participating are the moral actions of the corporation and vice versa.
I'm sorry, but this is too simplistic. A corporation (the kind we're talking about here, a national retail chain) is generally composed of several different groups of people, whose needs tend to conflict with each other. Also, some of those people are shielded from the consequences of the actions of others in such a way that they may benefit from moral decisions that other people are making, and responsible for.
Very roughly, you have Shareholders, upper management, and Store staff/management. These people all have different motives. Generally, the Shareholders want a better return on their investment. The Upper management want the bonuses that come with giving the shareholders what they want, and the store staff mostly just want to keep themselves and their families fed.
The upper management know what the lower-level staff need, and they use this knowledge as a stick to keep the staff in line. If you don't sell high-profit stuff, you lose your job. It's really that simple. The shareholders hold a similar stick over the heads of the upper management.
Morally, most of us consider that you have to do something immoral to survive, you're less blameworthy than someone who simply does immoral things for their own unnecessary gain. This isn't a universal truth, of course, but many consider this to make some kind of sense. The salesman who needs to lie to a customer so he can buy groceries this week is less blameworthy than someone who has no financial worries, but lies to the customer anyway, maybe to pay for opera tickets that week. But in a large corporation, it's the poor salesman who has to make the moral decisions.
The upper management is able to set store policies against this behaviour, and simply order the workings of the company in such a way that the sales force is always under pressure, and the sales force will do what they have to do to stay employed and fed.
The shareholder is even more removed from the immoral actions of the company. All they generally know is that they own shares in a corporation, and if that corporation underperforms, they sell their shares and move on. Most shareholders are not privy to the decisions of upper management, and if you happen to hold a mutual fund, which happens to own a piece of Best Buy, when you go to the store and get sold a bill of goods by the salesman, you will think you just got rooked by a greedy bastard, and not even realise that the salesman acted as he did because of policies put into place by upper management, and that those policies, in some small way, are for YOUR benefit.
When you add in the various legal protections that a corporation gives to shareholders and employees, what you end up having is a legal structure that protects people at all levels from the consequences of their moral choices. This is what's ultimately wrong with corporations. While I agree that you can't ignore the morality of your decisions, the corporate structure makes it far too easy to push the moral decisions off on the most desperate employees of the corporation.
My experience has been that low-priced accessories like cables, blank media, and the like are marked up, and the higher-priced electronics like cameras, computers and such are sold at paper-thin margins. I even recall a model of laptop at the Radio Shack I used to work at that landed in the store priced at a small loss.
The retailers don't actually make their margins at the store level, they take their cut at the distribution centre. A company like Best Buy gets to control the retail price and the "wholesale" price the store pays, meaning that the store itself often gets hosed at the expense of the corporation. Salesmen have to hustle to sell the high-margin, low price items, so that they don't lose their shitty, minimum wage jobs. It's the shareholders, and the upper management, who are laughing all the way to the bank.
Though I have no doubt about the lack of competence of the local Geek Squad, my experiences with newer viruses has been that if you're paying hourly for the repair work, it's cheaper just to replace and reinstall the drive.
Some time ago my wife managed a small live theatre venue, and they had a computer with a virus. I volunteered to clean it out, and ended up spending probably 20 hours working on it, as the virus was dug in deep, I couldn't get the automated repair tool on to the computer, and had to dig the infected files and reg entries out by hand. After all that, I still couldn't guarantee that the machine was virus-free.
If someone's putting together a machine with the kind of thermal demands you're thinking of, they're not spending $700 on their computer, they're probably spending that much just on their video cards. And if they're spending that much on video cards (note the plural) then they're probably doing something with the machine that you can't do with a $700 computer. Like playing DirectX (insert latest version here) games. Or maybe running CAD software. Or animation rendering.
This isn't for people who want to do some word processing, some surfing the net, and maybe play a rousing game of solitaire. This is for people who want to play Crysis (or the nearest non-buggy equivalent). Most people can get by with a low-end, commodity computer (if they don't mind replacing it every few years as the cheap parts fail), but some people really do need more power, and will pay accordingly to get it.
Come on, it wasn't a great joke, but surely you couldn't have missed it completely, could you? Could you?
And possibly killing him as well. Having a car die in the middle of a crowded freeway is not a zero-risk event.
That is a risk I'd be willing to take*.
Personally I'd just like to get one of those scrolling LED text displays mounted to the back of my car. "HEY DUDE, BACK THE FUCK OFF. I'M NOT INTO THAT."
That sounds like fun too.
*okay, not really, but wouldn't you want to?
Well, IANA Physicist, but I'd bet that they don't make bumpers like the ones you describe, because they're so rigid. The energy of the collision would be telegraphed through the bumper, into the frame, and eventually into the driver and passengers. Modern bumpers absorb more of that energy (when they get crushed), and that much less of it gets into the cockpit.
It might make sense to swap out a modern bumper for a steel monster if you know you're going to have a minor crash (let the passengers absorb the energy and save money on bumper replacement), but most of us don't have that kind of foresight.
A well-deserved "whoosh". I'm going to go hang my head in shame now.
Well, you might need to explain what astroturfing is. Most people here think that astroturfing is when you are satisfied with a mass-market product.
Really? My impression here has been that most people use "astroturfing" to mean "generating a (usually false) controversy around a particular product, to create exposure to (and possibly name-brand recognition of) that product." Am I missing something?
Apple does allow others to sync with iTunes.
That's pretty stupid. There's no reason why Apple should accept inputs to its software that have been faked. A user may have rights to modify their hardware however they see fit, but that doesn't mean that third party software is obligated to take that at face value. There's an API available for third party hardware to sync with iTunes, Palm should have used that.
But that's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do they staff their stores highly because they have great sales per square foot, or do they get great sales per square foot because they staff the stores well (and keep the square footage down)?
I think Penny Arcade got this one right.
Must....not....fap....
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM..."
I have a television that accepts component inputs. Oldish Panasonic Tau CRT television. Has inputs for co-ax, composite and component, no digital. Not everyone gives a shit about digital television, you know.
You know, I've been following your arguments for a while now, and they are so achingly bad, and you are so wilfully blind to the obvious, that I'm starting to wonder who pays your salary...maybe a little joe-job action going on here?
Don't you mean Africanized avian SARS bees?
Incidentally I just checked, and as I suspected, Mexico is a civil law country, not a common-law country, so I doubt very much that case-law from anywhere else applies. So much for precedent.
I would point out that 1) Black's Law Dictionary, though useful, isn't a binding authority (at least, not in my jurisdiction). 2) I wasn't offering a precise definition, but a rule of thumb meant to illustrate the difference between precedent and persuasion.
Whether and to what extent a court is bound by the decisions in other jurisdictions varies from country to country, but generally, the common law countries do distinguish between precedent (past decisions of higher -- and to some extent equal -- courts) and persuasive material.
Since I (a Canadian law student) was discussing a Mexican incident, between an American individual and a Japanese record company, please forgive me if I spoke in general terms, instead of getting down to the brass tacks of what exactly constitutes precedent to the SCOTUS.
I had a friend who took a college course on record label contracts. His prof said that there was no way on earth a sane lawyer would recommend that a band sign the standard record deal. Of course, bands don't hire lawyers to vet them, and the record companies all use the same basic contract, so the bands often don't even realize they have a choice. Up until this proud new digital era, the bands didn't have a choice, if they wanted to make it big.
Foreign judgments aren't irrelevant, but they're not precedent either. A precedent (despite what a poster above thinks) is a ruling by a higher court in the same jurisdiction. A foreign judgment might be followed, but it would followed as a persuasive judgment, not as a precedent. The difference is that a judge has to follow precedent, but may follow a persuasive decision.
Generally speaking, only high courts feel comfortable adopting the decisions of other countries, especially if those decisions conflict with local precedents.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide your credentials if you want me to accept that you know more about magnetism than four separate physics research teams, two with articles in Science and two more with draft articles on arXiv.org, all of which show evidence of the existence of magnetic monopoles.
That's hilarious that he said that, because his theories put into practice have done a great deal of unnecessary harm, in South America, Thatcher's Britain, and Reagan's America.
I guess America's corporatism would be "planned economy with privately owned governments."