I think ROE will be out the window when sticking to it means losing.
And then there was the Vietnam war, a war that arrived after missiles obsoleted gun technology...we lost quite a few pilots before we remembered - again - that inflexible tactics are as deadly as inflexible strategies, and duct-taped a gun onto the F-4.
...of the supercomputer they were sold ostensibly to model the weather for the Beijing Olympics. According to officials, the clones have been particularly useful in defeating attempts to use obfuscation to bypass the Great Firewall...
You mean that same USPS that is going to have a $7 BILLION deficit this year?
Don't you find the following facts to be a little odd when taken in combination:
The infrastructure and business of the USPS is lusted over by "private investors" who see huge potential returns if they immediately cancel all of those pension and benefit plans after purchase
The USPS is a quasi-governmental organization whose board has nine governors appointed by the President with Senate consent
The Republicans gained control of the Congress and the Presidency - and that President believed in privatizing everything
Under that regime, the USPS suddenly created and sold billions and billions of "Forever" stamps that locked out the ability to adjust income to account for rising costs...and then the cost of energy/cost of shipping took off like a rocket under the twin pressures of oil speculation and artificially-created oil scarcity
The USPS' debt load soars to $7 billion, again primarily under the regime that claimed "Government should be run like a business!", making the thought of their sale more attractive when considered against the backdrop of war and other debt that same Republican President and Congress levied upon the taxpayer
I find it odd, indeed...
I think that last bunch in the WH was the most devious bunch the nation has ever had inflicted upon them. I mean, c'mon - under what business model to you fix income forevermore if you are not trying to go belly-up?
Somehow, the USPS can go in debt even as they reduce services in chunks...I'd really like to see their "contractor expenses", and the year to year change in them.
But China's "emerging" market has not yet "evolved" to the point where corporate buying decisions are based primarily upon who wines and dines the C-level suits the most with the best.
Don't worry - Red Flag Linux will be smothered by duck and wine soon enough...and when enough Chinese corporate decision-makers come complete with gravy on their tie, a concubine in every closet, and an executive pay system that allows them to determine each other's compensation with no regard for performance or the longevity of the corporation, China will be a true superpower!
Briefly; about 50 to 75 years, judging by my country's history.
What annoys me is that business chronically shrieks that the consumer should be ever more regulated and that the penalties for breaking those regulations should be ever harsher.
But when it comes to their own behavior, what I hear from Business is that they should be ever less regulated and the penalties for their noncompliance should range from weak to non-existent!
Now that kid over at the university who swiped 10 songs is costing me little or nothing...pennies, at most. But, at least here in America, the Businesses who have so successfully bought deregulation have cost my country, me, and my children trillions of dollars.
Give the citizens of North Korea some credit, it isn't really being brainwashed if there's a very real chance of you being sentenced to a few decades hard labor...
Or your family's food ration paperwork starts going missing a day here and there...far less expensive than maintaining prison camps.
...it bears repeating: When it comes right down to it, the ethics, the morality, the honor, the patriotism, even the religion of "the right" comes to a screeching halt right at the edge of their wallets.
Equally inevitably, said article provoked a storm of "Health care is not a right!" and the rumor-mongering of government control over who does and does not get health care from "the right". Questions of the national interest - of what is going to be the best course of action to take to protect America over the long term - simply cannot crack their walnut-like, short-term, and "Me First!" thinking.
To the point. This detachment of the mega-corporations was, to my mind, the entire goal of "free trade"; that fact is reflected in how inequitably free trade was structured. There is simply no way that the American worker with their cost of living can compete with an offshore worker whose cost of living is 1/5th, 1/10th or less of the American worker. It simply cannot be done.
The mega-corporations and America's wealthy few - the people who control really big money - wanted to isolate that money from the well-being of the American people and thus have the ability to sacrifice the national interest in order to further enrich themselves. (Although I am quite sure that they told themselves that they were just "distributing their risks through the expansion of their portfolios", those proud American worker/consumers - "labor" or "human resources", in their terms - have long been their most hated enemy.)
As this article and the state of our economy make apparent, they have achieved that goal.
Now it may get far worse; the money-before-country thinking of our corporations and wealthy few does not exclude protecting the ability of our nation to be the dominant military force on the planet. For instance, what was the first thing that China did with the dual-use technology that our corporations transferred? They knocked a satellite out of the sky. Did any of our wealth few or our corporations evince any alarm whatsoever?
No.
It is pure conjecture at this point to suggest that the people who really control our "right" would flatly sell our country out. But I note that the man who runs the media conglomerate that has dedicated itself to promoting division in the United States and the philosophy of "Money justifies all actions." has dual citizenship; I would suggest that keeping an eye upon the number of our wealthy few who pick up additional citizenships might prove to be a useful barometer with which to gauge the future.
Deference. The curse of British society. We are conditioned by centuries of culture to defer to those of higher social classes.
The big mistake came when the evidence of one's "class" began being attained through inheritance or the mere possession of wealth, rather than because one's behavior and actions earned any distinction.
That is why I find the state of my nation - the U.S. - to be so troubling, for our right is attempting to recreate that fallacy here.
I fear that the U.S. is becoming like Britain, and increasingly having to rely upon the equivalent of Arthurian legend to point to a time when Americans earned the deference of others.
...that if you intend to feed yourself through proceeds derived from your own work, you might consider avoiding open source tools like the plague and go BSD with your final product - or even seek a standard patent and copyright - lest you get skinny 'cuz somebody who is as eager to see the GPL enforced as M$oft is to see its patent rights enforced detect 24 bytes that are common to a GPL product and come haunt you?
And finally, the main reason:
- replacement of almost all talented acts that produced good music, with hyperproduced kiddie-shit "artists" whose assets are not musical talent or singing voices, but barely-covered bikini bottoms and tits. Just you wait: in 4 years, tops, "Hannah Montana" will be pulling a Britney-style selfdestruct. And neither of them are capable of producing "music" even remotely worth listening to.
I tend to agree with that. Kids growing up these days are not exposed to a wide variety of music so much as they are trained by certain cable channels to prefer certain types of music featuring certain artists produced by certain labels owned by...the parent companies of certain cable channels.
but many times the junior ranks are beaten with the "conform stick"
Maybe it has changed, but IIRC they don't actually beat you with a stick. Rather, you paint rocks; lots and lots of rocks; rocks that already have lots and lots of layers of paint on them...
Oh, and as you get promoted anyway 'cuz of actual job performance, qualification tests and so forth, you find that you are the one who is always scheduled to cover Xmas, and Thanksgiving, and six straight months of 12-hour night shifts, and...
'cuz the games in general reflect some shade of reality, so a lot of 'em are variations of war games, and the reality of history is pretty blunt: It is us white guys who can't go 10 years without starting a war somewhere.
If I may, I would politely suggest that you not view Capitalism or any other model of political economy as an ideology that needs to be defended against some other ideology, as if it were a religion.
Capitalism per se has serious flaws, as do all other alternatives, and the variant that is practiced in the U.S. is flawed to the point of barbarism.
On the one hand, you ask me to assume that these individuals who abused the system and America for personal profit are smart inasmuch as they have suffered and will suffer no adverse affects due to their actions; I am not willing to assume the latter.
On the other hand, you suggest that I am defending capitalism as if it were a religion...I can find nothing in my statements to suggest such a conclusion.
I am aware that any form of government or political philosophy is only as good as its leaders. It is my observation that a good rule of thumb is that a failing form of government can be detected by attempts on the part of the leaders of that government to interfere in the course of other nations.
Thus, while I would admit that my - America's - government went into serious decline under the hand of Bush, Cheney, & PNAC, LLP, I am also forced to say the same of, for instance, Venezuela under the hand of Chavez.
Governments who interfere in the course of other nations fear that their leadership is not resulting in a nation and a people who are immune to the lure of other forms of government - and, more importantly, their leadership is not resulting in a form of government and a way of life that the peoples of other nations will envy and strive to emulate.
I would tend to say that they only look smart on paper.
As it turned out they weren't smart enough modify their actions to reflect - in Alan Greenspan's words - "enlightened self-interest". That is such a common sense concept that it is embedded in folklore; e.g., don't bite the hand that feeds you, don't crap in your own backyard, etc. etc. etc.
Yet, they still pissed in their own well. Hence, they were and are idiots.
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
When I read articles like this SlashDot entry - or just look around me at America - I can only conclude that our corporate culture's reliance upon "networking" and "interpersonal skills" (i.e., office politics) to select leaders is flawed in that it yields an overabundance of idiots.
Efficient price discovery is the purpose of the market. Liquidity is essential to that end. Traders provide that liquidity and, overall, the market benefits because of it.
Perhaps "the market" benefits; unfortunately, the American economy doesn't.
Wall Street drives corporations to ever higher profits - a good thing, if the playing field is level. But it isn't; some countries have a cost of living that is 1/5th or less of ours; thus, their worker/consumer can survive on correspondingly lower wages than an American worker/consumer can.
So the net effect of Wall Street's "efficiency" in quickly reflecting the success of their demands for ever higher profits from publicly-held corporations is to ever more efficiently drive jobs out of our country, eliminating U.S. workers...who are U.S. consumers.
Wall Street is the albatross around the neck of the American people and their economy. (Banks are the cement shoes on their feet, but that is another story.)
But none of the above matters or is even considered to be relevant to anyone who works on Wall Street; they accept no responsibility for any repercussions from their actions, or for anything at all except "the efficiency of the market".
And that "efficiency", curiously, is measured - in reality - by how much money they themselves are making at whatever form of market-making or -manipulation they themselves are involved in.
In short, the politicians said that "government should be run like a business", and then they ran America like a business.
Poorly, while selling off its core assets and embezzling the proceeds...leaving only a shell company which they use to launder money - and the taxpayer's money, all too often, at that.
....not the source code, but the triggering events and the nature of all inputs. I'm more curious to know if the source code is really just one big bloat that only serves to cover GS themselves' gaming of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think ROE will be out the window when sticking to it means losing.
And then there was the Vietnam war, a war that arrived after missiles obsoleted gun technology...we lost quite a few pilots before we remembered - again - that inflexible tactics are as deadly as inflexible strategies, and duct-taped a gun onto the F-4.
...of the supercomputer they were sold ostensibly to model the weather for the Beijing Olympics. According to officials, the clones have been particularly useful in defeating attempts to use obfuscation to bypass the Great Firewall...
Instead we can attach a device to each person's brain which will immediately kill them upon sensing murderous thinking.
What are we going to do about politicians, then, since you insist that the device be attached to a brain?
You mean that same USPS that is going to have a $7 BILLION deficit this year?
Don't you find the following facts to be a little odd when taken in combination:
I find it odd, indeed...
I think that last bunch in the WH was the most devious bunch the nation has ever had inflicted upon them. I mean, c'mon - under what business model to you fix income forevermore if you are not trying to go belly-up?
Interesting piece of paper at http://www.prc.gov/(S(ajpn4e45pbxy3u55drmkep45))/Docs/64/64174/Answers%20CIR.1.USPS.X.pdf.
Somehow, the USPS can go in debt even as they reduce services in chunks...I'd really like to see their "contractor expenses", and the year to year change in them.
But China's "emerging" market has not yet "evolved" to the point where corporate buying decisions are based primarily upon who wines and dines the C-level suits the most with the best.
Don't worry - Red Flag Linux will be smothered by duck and wine soon enough...and when enough Chinese corporate decision-makers come complete with gravy on their tie, a concubine in every closet, and an executive pay system that allows them to determine each other's compensation with no regard for performance or the longevity of the corporation, China will be a true superpower!
Briefly; about 50 to 75 years, judging by my country's history.
What annoys me is that business chronically shrieks that the consumer should be ever more regulated and that the penalties for breaking those regulations should be ever harsher.
But when it comes to their own behavior, what I hear from Business is that they should be ever less regulated and the penalties for their noncompliance should range from weak to non-existent!
Now that kid over at the university who swiped 10 songs is costing me little or nothing...pennies, at most. But, at least here in America, the Businesses who have so successfully bought deregulation have cost my country, me, and my children trillions of dollars.
The system is whacked!
Give the citizens of North Korea some credit, it isn't really being brainwashed if there's a very real chance of you being sentenced to a few decades hard labor...
Or your family's food ration paperwork starts going missing a day here and there...far less expensive than maintaining prison camps.
...it bears repeating: When it comes right down to it, the ethics, the morality, the honor, the patriotism, even the religion of "the right" comes to a screeching halt right at the edge of their wallets.
There is an article on third-world diseases showing up in the U.S. http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/08/22/1910245/Developing-Worlds-Parasites-Diseases-Enter-US. It is, of course, accompanied by observations that the lack of a national health care system is a threat to national security from those who think rationally.
Equally inevitably, said article provoked a storm of "Health care is not a right!" and the rumor-mongering of government control over who does and does not get health care from "the right". Questions of the national interest - of what is going to be the best course of action to take to protect America over the long term - simply cannot crack their walnut-like, short-term, and "Me First!" thinking.
To the point. This detachment of the mega-corporations was, to my mind, the entire goal of "free trade"; that fact is reflected in how inequitably free trade was structured. There is simply no way that the American worker with their cost of living can compete with an offshore worker whose cost of living is 1/5th, 1/10th or less of the American worker. It simply cannot be done.
The mega-corporations and America's wealthy few - the people who control really big money - wanted to isolate that money from the well-being of the American people and thus have the ability to sacrifice the national interest in order to further enrich themselves. (Although I am quite sure that they told themselves that they were just "distributing their risks through the expansion of their portfolios", those proud American worker/consumers - "labor" or "human resources", in their terms - have long been their most hated enemy.)
As this article and the state of our economy make apparent, they have achieved that goal.
Now it may get far worse; the money-before-country thinking of our corporations and wealthy few does not exclude protecting the ability of our nation to be the dominant military force on the planet. For instance, what was the first thing that China did with the dual-use technology that our corporations transferred? They knocked a satellite out of the sky. Did any of our wealth few or our corporations evince any alarm whatsoever?
No.
It is pure conjecture at this point to suggest that the people who really control our "right" would flatly sell our country out. But I note that the man who runs the media conglomerate that has dedicated itself to promoting division in the United States and the philosophy of "Money justifies all actions." has dual citizenship; I would suggest that keeping an eye upon the number of our wealthy few who pick up additional citizenships might prove to be a useful barometer with which to gauge the future.
Deference. The curse of British society. We are conditioned by centuries of culture to defer to those of higher social classes.
The big mistake came when the evidence of one's "class" began being attained through inheritance or the mere possession of wealth, rather than because one's behavior and actions earned any distinction.
That is why I find the state of my nation - the U.S. - to be so troubling, for our right is attempting to recreate that fallacy here.
I fear that the U.S. is becoming like Britain, and increasingly having to rely upon the equivalent of Arthurian legend to point to a time when Americans earned the deference of others.
...that bacteria do a lot of coke.
...that if you intend to feed yourself through proceeds derived from your own work, you might consider avoiding open source tools like the plague and go BSD with your final product - or even seek a standard patent and copyright - lest you get skinny 'cuz somebody who is as eager to see the GPL enforced as M$oft is to see its patent rights enforced detect 24 bytes that are common to a GPL product and come haunt you?
So much for my grand plan to blast Australia back to snail mail by spamming the entire country with the first 64KB of Microsoft Word.
You understand - as revenge for inflicting Rupert Murdoch upon America?
And finally, the main reason: - replacement of almost all talented acts that produced good music, with hyperproduced kiddie-shit "artists" whose assets are not musical talent or singing voices, but barely-covered bikini bottoms and tits. Just you wait: in 4 years, tops, "Hannah Montana" will be pulling a Britney-style selfdestruct. And neither of them are capable of producing "music" even remotely worth listening to.
I tend to agree with that. Kids growing up these days are not exposed to a wide variety of music so much as they are trained by certain cable channels to prefer certain types of music featuring certain artists produced by certain labels owned by...the parent companies of certain cable channels.
It's like using the Edsel to represent Ford, its just old and stale. time for slashdot to get with the times.
Seriously. You should use a Pontiac to represent Ford.
but many times the junior ranks are beaten with the "conform stick"
Maybe it has changed, but IIRC they don't actually beat you with a stick. Rather, you paint rocks; lots and lots of rocks; rocks that already have lots and lots of layers of paint on them...
Oh, and as you get promoted anyway 'cuz of actual job performance, qualification tests and so forth, you find that you are the one who is always scheduled to cover Xmas, and Thanksgiving, and six straight months of 12-hour night shifts, and...
Hey, wait...is the "conform stick" a euphemism?
'cuz the games in general reflect some shade of reality, so a lot of 'em are variations of war games, and the reality of history is pretty blunt: It is us white guys who can't go 10 years without starting a war somewhere .
...or actually secret is NASA activities cause ozone holes...or...
If I may, I would politely suggest that you not view Capitalism or any other model of political economy as an ideology that needs to be defended against some other ideology, as if it were a religion. Capitalism per se has serious flaws, as do all other alternatives, and the variant that is practiced in the U.S. is flawed to the point of barbarism.
On the one hand, you ask me to assume that these individuals who abused the system and America for personal profit are smart inasmuch as they have suffered and will suffer no adverse affects due to their actions; I am not willing to assume the latter.
On the other hand, you suggest that I am defending capitalism as if it were a religion...I can find nothing in my statements to suggest such a conclusion.
I am aware that any form of government or political philosophy is only as good as its leaders. It is my observation that a good rule of thumb is that a failing form of government can be detected by attempts on the part of the leaders of that government to interfere in the course of other nations.
Thus, while I would admit that my - America's - government went into serious decline under the hand of Bush, Cheney, & PNAC, LLP, I am also forced to say the same of, for instance, Venezuela under the hand of Chavez.
Governments who interfere in the course of other nations fear that their leadership is not resulting in a nation and a people who are immune to the lure of other forms of government - and, more importantly, their leadership is not resulting in a form of government and a way of life that the peoples of other nations will envy and strive to emulate.
I would tend to say that they only look smart on paper.
As it turned out they weren't smart enough modify their actions to reflect - in Alan Greenspan's words - "enlightened self-interest". That is such a common sense concept that it is embedded in folklore; e.g., don't bite the hand that feeds you, don't crap in your own backyard, etc. etc. etc.
Yet, they still pissed in their own well. Hence, they were and are idiots.
Capitalism is like any other tool in that in the hands of idiots it can be deadly.
When I read articles like this SlashDot entry - or just look around me at America - I can only conclude that our corporate culture's reliance upon "networking" and "interpersonal skills" (i.e., office politics) to select leaders is flawed in that it yields an overabundance of idiots.
You will be assimilated.
Efficient price discovery is the purpose of the market. Liquidity is essential to that end. Traders provide that liquidity and, overall, the market benefits because of it.
Perhaps "the market" benefits; unfortunately, the American economy doesn't.
Wall Street drives corporations to ever higher profits - a good thing, if the playing field is level. But it isn't; some countries have a cost of living that is 1/5th or less of ours; thus, their worker/consumer can survive on correspondingly lower wages than an American worker/consumer can.
So the net effect of Wall Street's "efficiency" in quickly reflecting the success of their demands for ever higher profits from publicly-held corporations is to ever more efficiently drive jobs out of our country, eliminating U.S. workers...who are U.S. consumers.
Wall Street is the albatross around the neck of the American people and their economy. (Banks are the cement shoes on their feet, but that is another story.)
But none of the above matters or is even considered to be relevant to anyone who works on Wall Street; they accept no responsibility for any repercussions from their actions, or for anything at all except "the efficiency of the market".
And that "efficiency", curiously, is measured - in reality - by how much money they themselves are making at whatever form of market-making or -manipulation they themselves are involved in.
In short, the politicians said that "government should be run like a business", and then they ran America like a business.
Poorly, while selling off its core assets and embezzling the proceeds...leaving only a shell company which they use to launder money - and the taxpayer's money, all too often, at that.
Subtract your "in hindsight" knowledge and crack Enigma..or japan's blue code.
....not the source code, but the triggering events and the nature of all inputs. I'm more curious to know if the source code is really just one big bloat that only serves to cover GS themselves' gaming of the system.