Still seems brilliant to me. If Trump ever does something brilliant, I'll call it brilliant. For example I think it's good that he took some measures to pull the ladders of corruption up behind his menagerie of swamp monsters:
To gain the experience and education and work ethic needed to be a CEO is much more rare than people like you seem to think.
I really don't think it's rare, and I don't see why it should be if you look at what's required of the job. It's just high-level management with some sales and PR mixed in. The idea that it's rare seems to be supported only by circular reasoning: CEOs get insane pay because they're rare skilled workers because they get insane pay. Ignoring the good ol' boys club of CEOs and directors jacking each other's pay up simply out of self-interest.
Most CEOs don't work their way up from the bottom of a company and are hilariously out of touch with lower-level work. Certainly not ideal but nobody complains about the results. I think hiring more mere mortals for the role could bring more real-world experience to the job and improve results.
There are famously terrible CEOs out there who don't get nearly as much flack as they deserve, and get punished for their awful performance with a golden parachute worth more than a good dedicated worker could make in several lifetimes. That's a terrible situation worth fixing, not an acceptable status quo.
And yet in the '60s (and likely stretching back to the '40s) in the US, CEOs did work for such sums of money. Making you a denialist of both basic economic facts AND history in addition to being a greedmonster's bootlicker.
There are plenty of decent and enterprising people who will happily do the job of CEO for a decent 6-figure salary. Good riddance to the psychopathic greedmonsters who demand to be paid like gods.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
Horse-fucking-shit he did all that on his own! He made a few high-level decisions and left an army of likely underpaid workers to actually *DO* all of that stuff. High-level decisions are not that valuable.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
Today's amazing insight, it's easy not to care about economic problems when you're a well-paid happy worker swaddled in privilege, thus solving inequality once and for all!
For the rest of us, that CEO's pay is a drain on the economy that is hurting us. That is why we care. That money comes from our paychecks and goes into overseas economic oubliettes, starving out the economy on both ends.
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
Only certain shareholders who own a large portion of the stock (which is madly expensive) can vote. They elect other CEOs to the board of directors who decide on the CEO's pay. You don't see a problem with this incestuous conflict of interest among a bunch of rich dudes that's led to runaway CEO pay?
The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
I've already explained why CEO pay matters - slowing growth at the top can directly aid growth at the bottom. Curious that you don't care about what's happening to most of the middle class at all though...but I guess a $120k/yr job will do that.
And what kind of job do you think they could get into with those skills where they might be MORE dangerous than they are now? I'm hoping they'll settle for decent plain-jane accounting jobs and switch to EVE Online to satisfy their urges.
On one hand I agree with you in principle, but on the other it's probably best that somebody set this kid straight before he went too far down the wrong path. This should serve as a valuable lesson on the dangers of Apple fanboyism.
You continue to downplay the message sent by creating the world's first explicitly space-based military branch in a world where space is not supposed to be militarized. This is not just some boring bureaucratic shuffle. It is a historically notable provocation, if only symbolic rather than practical in nature so far.
Sequestering atmosphere to trap a trace gas that's mixed in at ~400ppm seems very wasteful by volume, 99.9996% of the gas you'd be trapping would be stuff you don't need to trap. You'd be doing far more atmospheric thinning than CO2 sequestering.
I agree that SRM just seems like a bad idea from all the research on potential side effects. But we can power the CO2 sequestration infrastructure from renewable energy, so the CO2 cost there can be negligible.
Worst case of balance fallacy I've ever seen. The $200 valuation is plainly ludicrous (most of the windows in any of those buildings would cost over $200 to replace) and the $1B valuation is likely close to correct judging by the work history of the government tax assessors and the cost of other tech megacorp campuses.
But to hear you talk, it's like they are going to be incensed and be all that closer to entering a shooting war with us, JUST because we broke up the Air Force and created some "Space Force" from the pieces.
That's an overstatement but it is certainly provocative, I've made a good case for the reasons why. Let's not forget the effect a simple radio beacon in LEO once had on the US.
Mistake: that's global concrete consumption rather than global cement consumption. Concrete is the final stuff poured into moulds in building construction, cement is a component of that.
So currently humanity is emitting about 37 gigatons of CO2 per year, and that number is sadly increasing. Natural carbon absorption can take care of around half of that, so let's say 18.5 gigatons net is added to the atmosphere. To absorb that with this material, we need to produce and store 37 gigatons of magnesite per year.
To put that in scale, the Alberta sulfur ziggurats were collectively around 15 million tons in 2006 (although they're visibly much larger now), so we'd be looking at around 2500 Alberta sulfur ziggurat sets per year required. I can't find when the ziggurats were started.
Their collective footprint at that time looks like about a square kilometer, so if the magnesite were stacked up similarly and adjusting for the fact that sulphur is about 2/3 the density of magnesite, the ziggurats would take a storage area a bit smaller than Mauritius per year...which is a tiny dot of an island, so that could be reasonably buried at different locations around the world.
The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.
Indeed, a giant glowing corporate logo is the sign of being an enlightened thinker with refined tastes, don't you know? As long as it's a white apple. If it's an eye or an alien face on a gaming laptop, then it's just garish.
No, I'm saying that the mere PR effects of creating the "Space Force" are provocative, regardless of what happens with the actual capabilities behind it. When your opponent goes from secretly working on space weapons to making public statements of intent to create a space-focused branch of the military, that's provocative, and that's not even getting into the talk of militarily dominating space that came alongside those statements.
You build the bigger stick quietly and continue to speak softly rather than bragging or threatening, especially in an area that is such a gasoline-soaked tinderbox for escalation as space militarization. Space is not supposed to be militarized according to various international agreements, and the best way to keep it as peaceful and non-militarized as possible (and thus minimize the chance of space-based conflict) is for everyone involved to do their best at pretending they believe that. The statement of intent to create a "Space Force" is the biggest torch flicked at that tinderbox since the infamous Chinese satellite shootdown test.
Being provocative is a problem if provoking a response would be a negative development. Like provoking Russia into building an antisat laser or covert deorbit drive satellites for example. Those seem like negative developments.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick" is actually the opposite of provocation - it means peaceful negotiation (the "speak softly" part) but having overwhelming force as a fallback option (the "big stick"). It's not "threaten loudly and carry a big stick" or "carry a big stick and boast about it."
If you can't see how putting flashing neon lights on military space capabilities with the creation of a "Space Force" could be provocative...well maybe you're just hard to provoke. Much harder to provoke than Russia, obviously. Doing this also adds a dick-waving element to space militarization that wasn't there before (bringing the issue into the public spotlight when it was previously only well-known to the military and nerdy military observers), which is a very bad thing when there are dick-wavers in charge of both the US and Russia who both know that their voters admire a good dick-waving display.
If it's a reaction to Russian and Chinese activity, then it's an unnecessarily provocative one that will only lead to further escalation. The US - all countries in fact - would do well to keep their military space capabilities as low-key as possible, and one good way to do that is to place them under an existing branch of the military. Creating a new one called a "SPACE FORCE" is the opposite of that.
Welcome to capitalism, a force of pure chaos that is fueled by profit and completely indifferent to humanity's wellbeing. It sees no problem with sacrificing all of our best media companies to feed a giant clickbait-spewing mass surveillance engine, and it strongly disincentivizes the collective practice of freedom of association you propose.
Slashdot Mirror
From this article it seems that stakeholders are the shareholders plus employees and local residents:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/1...
Still seems brilliant to me. If Trump ever does something brilliant, I'll call it brilliant. For example I think it's good that he took some measures to pull the ladders of corruption up behind his menagerie of swamp monsters:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/2...
To gain the experience and education and work ethic needed to be a CEO is much more rare than people like you seem to think.
I really don't think it's rare, and I don't see why it should be if you look at what's required of the job. It's just high-level management with some sales and PR mixed in. The idea that it's rare seems to be supported only by circular reasoning: CEOs get insane pay because they're rare skilled workers because they get insane pay. Ignoring the good ol' boys club of CEOs and directors jacking each other's pay up simply out of self-interest.
Most CEOs don't work their way up from the bottom of a company and are hilariously out of touch with lower-level work. Certainly not ideal but nobody complains about the results. I think hiring more mere mortals for the role could bring more real-world experience to the job and improve results.
There are famously terrible CEOs out there who don't get nearly as much flack as they deserve, and get punished for their awful performance with a golden parachute worth more than a good dedicated worker could make in several lifetimes. That's a terrible situation worth fixing, not an acceptable status quo.
And yet in the '60s (and likely stretching back to the '40s) in the US, CEOs did work for such sums of money. Making you a denialist of both basic economic facts AND history in addition to being a greedmonster's bootlicker.
There are plenty of decent and enterprising people who will happily do the job of CEO for a decent 6-figure salary. Good riddance to the psychopathic greedmonsters who demand to be paid like gods.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
Horse-fucking-shit he did all that on his own! He made a few high-level decisions and left an army of likely underpaid workers to actually *DO* all of that stuff. High-level decisions are not that valuable.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
Today's amazing insight, it's easy not to care about economic problems when you're a well-paid happy worker swaddled in privilege, thus solving inequality once and for all!
For the rest of us, that CEO's pay is a drain on the economy that is hurting us. That is why we care. That money comes from our paychecks and goes into overseas economic oubliettes, starving out the economy on both ends.
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
Only certain shareholders who own a large portion of the stock (which is madly expensive) can vote. They elect other CEOs to the board of directors who decide on the CEO's pay. You don't see a problem with this incestuous conflict of interest among a bunch of rich dudes that's led to runaway CEO pay?
The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
I've already explained why CEO pay matters - slowing growth at the top can directly aid growth at the bottom. Curious that you don't care about what's happening to most of the middle class at all though...but I guess a $120k/yr job will do that.
For myself, I don't care that some people have much more than me, I am more worried that I don't have more.
It's funny that you don't see the connection between the two. This would please our C-suite overlords.
Recently Elizabeth Warren came out with a brilliant plan to make capitalism viable for the 99% for a while longer that could correct this madness:
https://www.theguardian.com/us...
And what kind of job do you think they could get into with those skills where they might be MORE dangerous than they are now? I'm hoping they'll settle for decent plain-jane accounting jobs and switch to EVE Online to satisfy their urges.
On one hand I agree with you in principle, but on the other it's probably best that somebody set this kid straight before he went too far down the wrong path. This should serve as a valuable lesson on the dangers of Apple fanboyism.
He's not really cool with it:
https://newrepublic.com/minute...
You continue to downplay the message sent by creating the world's first explicitly space-based military branch in a world where space is not supposed to be militarized. This is not just some boring bureaucratic shuffle. It is a historically notable provocation, if only symbolic rather than practical in nature so far.
Sequestering atmosphere to trap a trace gas that's mixed in at ~400ppm seems very wasteful by volume, 99.9996% of the gas you'd be trapping would be stuff you don't need to trap. You'd be doing far more atmospheric thinning than CO2 sequestering.
I agree that SRM just seems like a bad idea from all the research on potential side effects. But we can power the CO2 sequestration infrastructure from renewable energy, so the CO2 cost there can be negligible.
Worst case of balance fallacy I've ever seen. The $200 valuation is plainly ludicrous (most of the windows in any of those buildings would cost over $200 to replace) and the $1B valuation is likely close to correct judging by the work history of the government tax assessors and the cost of other tech megacorp campuses.
The scale of that analogy is all wrong. It's more like having a horse and claiming it's a flea.
But to hear you talk, it's like they are going to be incensed and be all that closer to entering a shooting war with us, JUST because we broke up the Air Force and created some "Space Force" from the pieces.
That's an overstatement but it is certainly provocative, I've made a good case for the reasons why. Let's not forget the effect a simple radio beacon in LEO once had on the US.
Mistake: that's global concrete consumption rather than global cement consumption. Concrete is the final stuff poured into moulds in building construction, cement is a component of that.
Good question, I ran some numbers here:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
To add some more, global cement consumption in 2009 was 25 gigatons, so global magnesite production would have to be almost 50% greater than that.
So currently humanity is emitting about 37 gigatons of CO2 per year, and that number is sadly increasing. Natural carbon absorption can take care of around half of that, so let's say 18.5 gigatons net is added to the atmosphere. To absorb that with this material, we need to produce and store 37 gigatons of magnesite per year.
To put that in scale, the Alberta sulfur ziggurats were collectively around 15 million tons in 2006 (although they're visibly much larger now), so we'd be looking at around 2500 Alberta sulfur ziggurat sets per year required. I can't find when the ziggurats were started.
Their collective footprint at that time looks like about a square kilometer, so if the magnesite were stacked up similarly and adjusting for the fact that sulphur is about 2/3 the density of magnesite, the ziggurats would take a storage area a bit smaller than Mauritius per year...which is a tiny dot of an island, so that could be reasonably buried at different locations around the world.
The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.
Indeed, a giant glowing corporate logo is the sign of being an enlightened thinker with refined tastes, don't you know? As long as it's a white apple. If it's an eye or an alien face on a gaming laptop, then it's just garish.
But a sheep's clothing can be very useful >:-)
No, I'm saying that the mere PR effects of creating the "Space Force" are provocative, regardless of what happens with the actual capabilities behind it. When your opponent goes from secretly working on space weapons to making public statements of intent to create a space-focused branch of the military, that's provocative, and that's not even getting into the talk of militarily dominating space that came alongside those statements.
You build the bigger stick quietly and continue to speak softly rather than bragging or threatening, especially in an area that is such a gasoline-soaked tinderbox for escalation as space militarization. Space is not supposed to be militarized according to various international agreements, and the best way to keep it as peaceful and non-militarized as possible (and thus minimize the chance of space-based conflict) is for everyone involved to do their best at pretending they believe that. The statement of intent to create a "Space Force" is the biggest torch flicked at that tinderbox since the infamous Chinese satellite shootdown test.
Being provocative is a problem if provoking a response would be a negative development. Like provoking Russia into building an antisat laser or covert deorbit drive satellites for example. Those seem like negative developments.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick" is actually the opposite of provocation - it means peaceful negotiation (the "speak softly" part) but having overwhelming force as a fallback option (the "big stick"). It's not "threaten loudly and carry a big stick" or "carry a big stick and boast about it."
If you can't see how putting flashing neon lights on military space capabilities with the creation of a "Space Force" could be provocative...well maybe you're just hard to provoke. Much harder to provoke than Russia, obviously. Doing this also adds a dick-waving element to space militarization that wasn't there before (bringing the issue into the public spotlight when it was previously only well-known to the military and nerdy military observers), which is a very bad thing when there are dick-wavers in charge of both the US and Russia who both know that their voters admire a good dick-waving display.
If it's a reaction to Russian and Chinese activity, then it's an unnecessarily provocative one that will only lead to further escalation. The US - all countries in fact - would do well to keep their military space capabilities as low-key as possible, and one good way to do that is to place them under an existing branch of the military. Creating a new one called a "SPACE FORCE" is the opposite of that.
Welcome to capitalism, a force of pure chaos that is fueled by profit and completely indifferent to humanity's wellbeing. It sees no problem with sacrificing all of our best media companies to feed a giant clickbait-spewing mass surveillance engine, and it strongly disincentivizes the collective practice of freedom of association you propose.