Listen you stupid jackass, Obsidian is the latest flash-in-the-pan buzzword-heavy gimmick that lets newbies chip one edge and pretend they know what they're doing, which is fine if you live right next to a FREAKIN' VOLCANO.
For those of us who prefer not to tempt the wrath of the LavaGod, and oh yeah -- maybe make FIRE, HAVE YA HEARD OF THAT YET, YOU WHEEL-LESS SLED-DRAGGING DORK -- we'll remain with a proven technology with Spark(TM)!
Yeah, I never really got the "It's just a few bad apples" argument either, since the saying from Poor Richard's Almanac goes "One bad apple spoils the bunch."
"And surprise, surprise: individuals with the power to listen to things sometimes listen to things they're not supposed to,... there really isn't any easy way to prevent it.... But I guess sometimes immaturity and a cheap laugh at someone else's expense trumps common sense and the doing the right thing."
My response and my honest question would be, what the hell ever happened to discipline and accountability? When I got an order, it was the Voice of God and woe be unto the man who dreamed of disobeying his CO.
There isn't an easy way to prevent people screwing around? Is that a joke? All I ever got was a growl that said "Don't screw around!" and we didn't dare, not if we valued our sorry asses.
You're literally arguing that there's no such thing as a chain of command any more, that the commanders have lost control of their men. In my day, admitting you couldn't keep your men under control was a wonderful way to lose your rank.
"hot tech jobs beckon in China, India, E. Europe"
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Landing IT Work Overseas
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· Score: 4, Insightful
From the article:
"The U.S. and Europe are slowing down, but hot tech jobs beckon in China, India, and Eastern Europe."
Sure, which is precisely why all of our H1Bs returned home in waves and a large percentage of the available visas went begging this year.
Is you read a couple of paragraphs down, you'll find the story is a plant for a headhunting firm.
"According to Rob McGovern, CEO of JobFox, an international employment agency for IT, in today's global economy, people who truly understand how to do business globally are a minority."
They're FIVE years past the deadline. Fortunately, the judge is going to give them another year.
"Unfortunately, the company has consistently had trouble with producing complete and useful documentation. As noted above, the company struggled to satisfy EU authorities that it was complying with the agreementâ"that was 2006. By 2008, documentation was rearing its ugly head in the US court system. Microsoft's consent decree with the federal and state attorneys general was set to expire, and most of the conditions were allowed to. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003. As a result, the consent decree will remain in place at least until November of 2009. "
Can you imagine what would happen if you were say, five years late filing your taxes? Do you think they judge would decide to pick this issue up again next year? At what point do actual penalties come into play?
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law?:-)
Please ignore the frat-boy supermen and sad divorced bastards who are currently razzing you for this comment. I just wanted to stand in support of this post.
I've worked since I was fifteen (yes, illegally, shocking I know). I've supported myself since I was seventeen, starting out with a stint of homelessness. I paid for my own college. I hit every single damn step on the ladder. It took decades.
It's simple. If you don't want the next generation to be raised as feral animals, then Mom and Dad need to be involved in their life. Absentee parents mean children go looking in the wrong places for love and guidance.
As a society, our choices are clear. We can either allow parents the time to care for their children, or we can build prisons and pay in excess of $50,000 a year to care for that child for the rest of their life, to say nothing of the carnage they'll cause on the way there.
I'm tired of listening to clueless jackasses. Children are not a "consumption choice." They are not "crotchfruit." They are literally, whether they're your kids or someone else's, your future. Twenty years from now, those children will be crossing your path, and they can either do it as your smiling waiter or your grinning mugger knifing you for the fun of it.
I'm tired of listening to milk-fed idiots talking about the harsh realities of life when they've never missed one meal or spent a single night on concrete. My patience wears thin with Social Darwinists with 40 percent body fat.
Having a child is not the moral equivalent of a trip to Cancun. Making sure our next generation gets raised right is more important than Larry Ellison's next yacht.
Yes, and the obituary of every major public figure has already been written as well. Such prep pieces are responsible practice for newspapers that have to be ready on-the-spot.
This wasn't one of those pieces. This was an entire narrative complete with faked dialogue and details, such as being complete ahead of schedule. This wasn't preparation -- this was deception.
Unfortunately, lately we seem to have absolutely no room to talk, given the practices of our own "You-have-to-give-me-700-billion-dollars-right-now-no-questions-asked-or-there-will-be-disaster" government.
Courts routinely slap down punitive damages that are 10X the actual damages as being grossly unreasonable. Treble damages are the norm, so right now, she owes $72.
Yep, I completely agree. Usually, petty theft of something worth twenty bucks isn't even prosecuted -- it's not worth the court or DA's time. If some incredibly junior member of the DA's office decided he needed practice filling out the forms, then the normal result is Deferred Adjudication, basically "Promise not to do this again, or we'll actually charge you with something."
So, by your standards, this case should be settled with the Defendant promising not to do it again, and perhaps spending her Saturday attending a class.
This isn't about actually catching terrorists any more than polygraphs and Scientology's "e-meter" is about catching liars. It doesn't matter that it doesn't work.
What matters is that it's a "magic" box that looks "cool" and "high-tech." It gives the Department of Homeland Security an excuse to basically do whatever they want. When the judge asks, "Why did you detain this individual?" they can't answer "Because we felt like it." What they can answer, however, is "Our technology indicated this individual to be high risk with a risk factor of 98.8 percent."
This is nonsense, of course, but the judge will allow it because it sounds "scientific."
It serves the same function polygraphs do for people seeking a security clearance. Polygraphs are nonsense -- you have comparable accuracy looking at the suspect's face and guessing -- but it provides cover for the agency to deny security clearance's to people whose politics they don't like. "Oh no, your Honor, we didn't deny him clearance because he wouldn't swear allegiance to George Bush, we denied him clearance because he failed the polygraph."
It's got nothing to do with accuracy. It's got everything to do with bureaucratic cover.
I can intellectually understand your post, but I can't wrap my head around it.
I read your description of the MBA thought process, and it comes across like those sad bastards who throw bowling balls into traffic from overpass bridges and giggle. Maybe it's the way I was raised.
I was brought up by farmers, mechanics, builders and engineers. I was taught that "You WILL go the extra mile on this brake job, 'cause you don't want it to fail and kill somebody. You will wire this correctly, 'cause you don't want it to fail and kill somebody. You will do this the right way, 'cause you don't want it to kill somebody."
"'Cause you don't want it to kill somebody," were words of power, God's Holy Truth. I was taught that when I had power over someone, I was responsible for them. I was taught that older should look out for younger.
I was raised to believe that what I did Mattered. Drive like an idiot and there will be some mother crying at a funeral. Pay attention, because that radial saw would be just as happy to cut through bone as wood.
I read your description of an MBA, and I know you're right. I've seen it with my own eyes a million times.
What I don't know is how these men sleep at night. How do they live with themselves? I don't know. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they think it's all a game. Maybe they don't realize that other people aren't just sprites on a videogame screen. I've heard more than one psychology professor claim that psycho-and scoiopaths line our boardrooms. Maybe they're right.
Maybe it's time to bring back some of the old ideas like "blood money."
My goodness, I learned this rookie lesson within the first year of teaching. When a student mocks you in a juvenile fashion outside of class, you simply ignore it and remain in good humor. It doesn't affect you. It's beneath you. Not every piece of bait a kid gives you deserves a response.
Somehow, this little martinet missed that lesson, and decided to go to all-out war with this student. Which makes me wonder, how much did being called a pedophile string, and how close to the target are the accusations?
Reading this story, what I really want to know is how many of the young girls in his charge are in danger?
Have you ever wondered why corporations get special tax breaks and shielding from liability? Well, if you take a second to read some Articles of Incorporation, you'll find the answer. When the Corporation is founded, they make a very sepcific bargain, spelled out in black and white.
If the People of this State will allow us the legal fiction that we aren't really a group of specific people, but instead one single entity, if they will grant us tax benefits and protect us in court, then we will do something that benefits the People of this State. Our corporation will enhance the general welfare.
Nowhere in that language do you find a "duty to make money." You've bought into the Big Lie that Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens and all the other Raiders got laughed out of the room with when they first started spouting it in the 80s.
Corporations absolutely have a duty to the people of the state they were founded in, not because it would be pretty to think so, but because that was the deal they signed at the beginning. The shareholders don't even enter into it.
"So why do you expect that this proposed legislation should be any different?"
Specifically?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,..."
We Americans don't have rights because the government granted them to us. We have these rights because they are a natural part of us, like the color of our eyes.
These are the Natural Rights of Man, and if you don't get that, then go back and reread Jefferson and his cohorts. All men are free because they are born that way. You, me, and that poor Chinese bastard whose kidneys are being sold on the black market. Any one who can look to the sky and say "I will be free," is an American.
If the US government, my government, shouldn't do it to a citizen, then they shouldn't do it to anyone.
We're supposed to be the City on the Hill, a shining beacon of Liberty to the world. We're supposed to fight clean even when the other guy fights dirty, not because he doesn't deserve the head-butt, but because we don't sink to that level.
We don't squelch speech, not because some paper says we shouldn't but because we believe people should be free to speak their minds. We don't like to search people, not because some paper says we can't, but because subjecting someone to that indignity degrades them and degrades us.
The TSA is routinely stealing from luggage. Everybody knows. It's well-documented. Kip Hawley has basically said there's nothing to be done about it. This offends me not because some law somewhere says it's wrong, but because it means my beloved flag is being represented by THIEVES.
My Attorney General is famous for writing an opinion that says Torture is OK, and that specifically water-boarding is OK. We tried and executed Japanese officers for water-boarding our pilots during WWII, but somehow now we're going to use the tools of monsters because it's convenient?
We've lost our honor, and I want it back. I want to be able to hold my head high again when I go abroad. I want to be able to say, "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I DO come from the greatest country on Earth," again.
But right now, we're wrong. We're not righteous. And it is long past time to come to Jesus.
From the sales guy's point of view, with apologies
on
Tech Vs. Business?
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· Score: 1
Are you exclusively talking about dairy?
I got the impression from the question that he's talking about tech in general. In which case I can count myself. I work for $BIG_DAIRY as a cow and there's animosity here. On our side a lot of it stems from -
If our milk does really, really well in the marketplace then we might get a bucket of oats, whilst some of the guys on the business side get to retire from the profits, buy sports cars etc.
If our milk does badly, then there will be a trip to the slaughterhouse.
We tend to be herded, as if we're an inconvenience, not actually, you know, the guys that produce everything you goddamn sell.
We're smarter than them. In the bovine, don't-start-nothing-won't-be-nothing way. Many of them are overly loud, arrogant and annoying and bark a lot. Somehow they make more money and are always traveling places and have great cars though...
They're always telling us not to do fun grassy stuff (otherwise known as exercise) in favour of endless milking.
From their side, we probably moo too much.
Pens and stables. Been the same way in every company I worked for.
I read a news story some time back about a city manager who wanted to the city fire department into a revenue-generating ambulance company because "those guys aren't doing anything anyways..."
Even Sun Tsu noted that brilliant generals who maneuvered the enemy into surrendering before the fight even started were less esteemed than idiots who lost half their men to a clusterfuck, and therefore had a chance to display their "bravery..."
The moral of the story? Even so often generate a horrible "emergency" which you heroically "solve."
Sure, two or three decent guys could rappel in from helicopters, flash-bang the problematic idiots and have that network back up on it's feet in a couple of days.
The problem is it's a municipal network. Those bureaucrats would rather play turf-war than send successful pings any day of the week.
The one million dollar figure isn't about accurately reporting the damage done. It's about citing a figure (pinky in mouth, mind you) to inspire shock and awe.
Now they need Robert Wagner to remind them, it really isn't all that much any more...
I was raised in a nation of free people, but lately all I hear are the children of Alberto Gonzalez. It's terrifying.
We are the children of loud-mouthed pub brawlers. We throw tea into the harbor. We take potshots at the cops as they retreat. The Revolution was started when a bunch of cops shot at tax protesters in Boston. We wave pictures of snakes and scream "Don't tread on me." We incite riots with shouts of "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." We brag that we are men who are easy to govern, but impossible to rule. We're the only nation on Earth to turn a Naval clusterfuck into our National Bloody Anthem.
God, I hear you mealy-mouthed equivocators whining and lawyering away your Liberty, the Liberty that my family has spent blood across generations protecting. You're undeserving of it.
Get this, and get this CFB. We're a free people.
We speak our minds. We don't like censorship, not in any way, shape or form.
We're honorable. We don't torture prisoners. We don't outsource torture. We don't play word games about whether or not waterboarding is torture.
We don't search your stuff until we've got damn good reason to think we're gonna find a dead body when we do.
We respect God enough not to drag Him into our stupid little political games. When you stand behind a pulpit, you stand in His Holy Presence and speak on His behalf. When I see politicians electioneering from the pulpit these days, I goggle at their brass, and make sure there's enough room between them and me for the lightning strike to miss.
What the Hell is wrong with you simpering, spineless, Stockhom-Syndrome, cellmate bitches? It pisses me off to no end to think that the time I spent on base was spent to protect the likes of you.
Time for remedial Civics, once again. I swear, it's like public schools are even working any more...
The First Amendment wasn't written in a vacuum. It was part of a centuries-old conversation in Europe that took place amongst people like Milton and Rousseau. Let me distill centuries of thought and arument down to a sentence for you.
Hiding the truth is bad.
It's bad when the government does it. It's bad when companies do it. The more power an entity has, the worse it is. Free men should be unafraid and unashamed to speak their minds. Anyone who tries to squelch that speech is evil.
The cure for bad speech is more speech. There needs to be free and open debate on everything, and when there is, only the Truth is strong enough to prevail.
We don't like censorship in this country. We don't like men who try to muzzle people. We don't stop the KKK by forbidding them to speak. We stop them by calling them a group of inbred idiots and laughing at them.
If you want to do public business in this country, then you need to learn to understand the rules. We don't squelch speech here. The Bills of Rights is merely a list of examples. It was made explicit that our freedom in this country is the DEFAULT setting.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
If not even the government has the right to stifle conversation, then it's for damn sure that mere companies can't either.
"Flooding the room" is something I've seen done frequently when there's conflict, especially when it's a legal one. Just last week, I was in a nonsense meeting called for someone else's pissing match. One of the jackasses involved -- mind you, there were jackasses on both sides, hence the pissing match -- pulled representatives from 12, yes a dozen, different companies. Our guy pulled in four. There were literally no fewer than 30 people in the room for a technical issue so small that me and one other guy could have knocked it out in a few hours.
When ego meets bureaucracy, even minor issues can explode into mushroom cloud clusterfraks. Hell, I once walked into a meeting with my kid's school and found the principal had stacked the room with 15 people from all over the district. She still lost, of course, but bureaucrats, lawyers and other ruminants feel safety in numbers.
I just read both the article and the retractions. A 10-year-old boy saw his 8-year-old little sister go under. He literally died trying to save her. That's Harry-fracking-Potter bravery right there, and Heaven is plus one lad tonight.
Two grown men are told two children are under the water. Wisdom is one set of eyes high, one set low. One man stays on the ground to watch the water and wave the paramedics over, one man gets in the water and prays to get lucky. You won't see squat in a pond's murk, but you sure as hell won't save anyone from the shore.
The natural inclination for good men would be for both to get in the water, and that would be a tactical mistake, since once you're in the water, you won't see bubbles and ripples.
According to all reports, both men stayed dry.
All I can imagine is that neither knew how to swim. I hope for their sake they were merely cowards. If this was just indifference, then this would be one of the few cases where I would support the death penalty.
EA learned precisely what the oil companies did after Katrina -- that bad PR means squat, and they are free to act as they choose.
They can still hire all the game developers they want. Yeah, yeah, whine all you want about the "quality" of the developers they hire. Quality isn't an immediate column in a spread sheet. No one who matters is going to say "Our games didn't sell because we hired the cheap developers," even if it's true. Especially if it's true.
The EA Widow took a mighty shot, and God bless her for it. But the lesson EA took away from it was that they were actually immune from those kinds of shots.
From the rumors I hear, things are worse than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen you stupid jackass, Obsidian is the latest flash-in-the-pan buzzword-heavy gimmick that lets newbies chip one edge and pretend they know what they're doing, which is fine if you live right next to a FREAKIN' VOLCANO.
For those of us who prefer not to tempt the wrath of the LavaGod, and oh yeah -- maybe make FIRE, HAVE YA HEARD OF THAT YET, YOU WHEEL-LESS SLED-DRAGGING DORK -- we'll remain with a proven technology with Spark(TM)!
Yeah, I never really got the "It's just a few bad apples" argument either, since the saying from Poor Richard's Almanac goes "One bad apple spoils the bunch."
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the insight.
"And surprise, surprise: individuals with the power to listen to things sometimes listen to things they're not supposed to, ... there really isn't any easy way to prevent it. ... But I guess sometimes immaturity and a cheap laugh at someone else's expense trumps common sense and the doing the right thing."
My response and my honest question would be, what the hell ever happened to discipline and accountability? When I got an order, it was the Voice of God and woe be unto the man who dreamed of disobeying his CO.
There isn't an easy way to prevent people screwing around? Is that a joke? All I ever got was a growl that said "Don't screw around!" and we didn't dare, not if we valued our sorry asses.
You're literally arguing that there's no such thing as a chain of command any more, that the commanders have lost control of their men. In my day, admitting you couldn't keep your men under control was a wonderful way to lose your rank.
From the article:
"The U.S. and Europe are slowing down, but hot tech jobs beckon in China, India, and Eastern Europe."
Sure, which is precisely why all of our H1Bs returned home in waves and a large percentage of the available visas went begging this year.
Is you read a couple of paragraphs down, you'll find the story is a plant for a headhunting firm.
"According to Rob McGovern, CEO of JobFox, an international employment agency for IT, in today's global economy, people who truly understand how to do business globally are a minority."
They're FIVE years past the deadline. Fortunately, the judge is going to give them another year.
"Unfortunately, the company has consistently had trouble with producing complete and useful documentation. As noted above, the company struggled to satisfy EU authorities that it was complying with the agreementâ"that was 2006. By 2008, documentation was rearing its ugly head in the US court system. Microsoft's consent decree with the federal and state attorneys general was set to expire, and most of the conditions were allowed to. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003. As a result, the consent decree will remain in place at least until November of 2009. "
Can you imagine what would happen if you were say, five years late filing your taxes? Do you think they judge would decide to pick this issue up again next year? At what point do actual penalties come into play?
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law? :-)
Please ignore the frat-boy supermen and sad divorced bastards who are currently razzing you for this comment. I just wanted to stand in support of this post.
I've worked since I was fifteen (yes, illegally, shocking I know). I've supported myself since I was seventeen, starting out with a stint of homelessness. I paid for my own college. I hit every single damn step on the ladder. It took decades.
It's simple. If you don't want the next generation to be raised as feral animals, then Mom and Dad need to be involved in their life. Absentee parents mean children go looking in the wrong places for love and guidance.
As a society, our choices are clear. We can either allow parents the time to care for their children, or we can build prisons and pay in excess of $50,000 a year to care for that child for the rest of their life, to say nothing of the carnage they'll cause on the way there.
I'm tired of listening to clueless jackasses. Children are not a "consumption choice." They are not "crotchfruit." They are literally, whether they're your kids or someone else's, your future. Twenty years from now, those children will be crossing your path, and they can either do it as your smiling waiter or your grinning mugger knifing you for the fun of it.
I'm tired of listening to milk-fed idiots talking about the harsh realities of life when they've never missed one meal or spent a single night on concrete. My patience wears thin with Social Darwinists with 40 percent body fat.
Having a child is not the moral equivalent of a trip to Cancun. Making sure our next generation gets raised right is more important than Larry Ellison's next yacht.
Yes, and the obituary of every major public figure has already been written as well. Such prep pieces are responsible practice for newspapers that have to be ready on-the-spot.
This wasn't one of those pieces. This was an entire narrative complete with faked dialogue and details, such as being complete ahead of schedule. This wasn't preparation -- this was deception.
Unfortunately, lately we seem to have absolutely no room to talk, given the practices of our own "You-have-to-give-me-700-billion-dollars-right-now-no-questions-asked-or-there-will-be-disaster" government.
Courts routinely slap down punitive damages that are 10X the actual damages as being grossly unreasonable. Treble damages are the norm, so right now, she owes $72.
Yep, I completely agree. Usually, petty theft of something worth twenty bucks isn't even prosecuted -- it's not worth the court or DA's time. If some incredibly junior member of the DA's office decided he needed practice filling out the forms, then the normal result is Deferred Adjudication, basically "Promise not to do this again, or we'll actually charge you with something."
So, by your standards, this case should be settled with the Defendant promising not to do it again, and perhaps spending her Saturday attending a class.
This isn't about actually catching terrorists any more than polygraphs and Scientology's "e-meter" is about catching liars. It doesn't matter that it doesn't work.
What matters is that it's a "magic" box that looks "cool" and "high-tech." It gives the Department of Homeland Security an excuse to basically do whatever they want. When the judge asks, "Why did you detain this individual?" they can't answer "Because we felt like it." What they can answer, however, is "Our technology indicated this individual to be high risk with a risk factor of 98.8 percent."
This is nonsense, of course, but the judge will allow it because it sounds "scientific."
It serves the same function polygraphs do for people seeking a security clearance. Polygraphs are nonsense -- you have comparable accuracy looking at the suspect's face and guessing -- but it provides cover for the agency to deny security clearance's to people whose politics they don't like. "Oh no, your Honor, we didn't deny him clearance because he wouldn't swear allegiance to George Bush, we denied him clearance because he failed the polygraph."
It's got nothing to do with accuracy. It's got everything to do with bureaucratic cover.
I can intellectually understand your post, but I can't wrap my head around it.
I read your description of the MBA thought process, and it comes across like those sad bastards who throw bowling balls into traffic from overpass bridges and giggle. Maybe it's the way I was raised.
I was brought up by farmers, mechanics, builders and engineers. I was taught that "You WILL go the extra mile on this brake job, 'cause you don't want it to fail and kill somebody. You will wire this correctly, 'cause you don't want it to fail and kill somebody. You will do this the right way, 'cause you don't want it to kill somebody."
"'Cause you don't want it to kill somebody," were words of power, God's Holy Truth. I was taught that when I had power over someone, I was responsible for them. I was taught that older should look out for younger.
I was raised to believe that what I did Mattered. Drive like an idiot and there will be some mother crying at a funeral. Pay attention, because that radial saw would be just as happy to cut through bone as wood.
I read your description of an MBA, and I know you're right. I've seen it with my own eyes a million times.
What I don't know is how these men sleep at night. How do they live with themselves? I don't know. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they think it's all a game. Maybe they don't realize that other people aren't just sprites on a videogame screen. I've heard more than one psychology professor claim that psycho-and scoiopaths line our boardrooms. Maybe they're right.
Maybe it's time to bring back some of the old ideas like "blood money."
My goodness, I learned this rookie lesson within the first year of teaching. When a student mocks you in a juvenile fashion outside of class, you simply ignore it and remain in good humor. It doesn't affect you. It's beneath you. Not every piece of bait a kid gives you deserves a response.
Somehow, this little martinet missed that lesson, and decided to go to all-out war with this student. Which makes me wonder, how much did being called a pedophile string, and how close to the target are the accusations?
Reading this story, what I really want to know is how many of the young girls in his charge are in danger?
Have you ever wondered why corporations get special tax breaks and shielding from liability? Well, if you take a second to read some Articles of Incorporation, you'll find the answer. When the Corporation is founded, they make a very sepcific bargain, spelled out in black and white.
If the People of this State will allow us the legal fiction that we aren't really a group of specific people, but instead one single entity, if they will grant us tax benefits and protect us in court, then we will do something that benefits the People of this State. Our corporation will enhance the general welfare.
Nowhere in that language do you find a "duty to make money." You've bought into the Big Lie that Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens and all the other Raiders got laughed out of the room with when they first started spouting it in the 80s.
Corporations absolutely have a duty to the people of the state they were founded in, not because it would be pretty to think so, but because that was the deal they signed at the beginning. The shareholders don't even enter into it.
Lipstick.
"So why do you expect that this proposed legislation should be any different?"
Specifically?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,..."
We Americans don't have rights because the government granted them to us. We have these rights because they are a natural part of us, like the color of our eyes.
These are the Natural Rights of Man, and if you don't get that, then go back and reread Jefferson and his cohorts. All men are free because they are born that way. You, me, and that poor Chinese bastard whose kidneys are being sold on the black market. Any one who can look to the sky and say "I will be free," is an American.
If the US government, my government, shouldn't do it to a citizen, then they shouldn't do it to anyone.
We're supposed to be the City on the Hill, a shining beacon of Liberty to the world. We're supposed to fight clean even when the other guy fights dirty, not because he doesn't deserve the head-butt, but because we don't sink to that level.
We don't squelch speech, not because some paper says we shouldn't but because we believe people should be free to speak their minds. We don't like to search people, not because some paper says we can't, but because subjecting someone to that indignity degrades them and degrades us.
The TSA is routinely stealing from luggage. Everybody knows. It's well-documented. Kip Hawley has basically said there's nothing to be done about it. This offends me not because some law somewhere says it's wrong, but because it means my beloved flag is being represented by THIEVES.
My Attorney General is famous for writing an opinion that says Torture is OK, and that specifically water-boarding is OK. We tried and executed Japanese officers for water-boarding our pilots during WWII, but somehow now we're going to use the tools of monsters because it's convenient?
We've lost our honor, and I want it back. I want to be able to hold my head high again when I go abroad. I want to be able to say, "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I DO come from the greatest country on Earth," again.
But right now, we're wrong. We're not righteous. And it is long past time to come to Jesus.
Are you exclusively talking about dairy?
I got the impression from the question that he's talking about tech in general. In which case I can count myself. I work for $BIG_DAIRY as a cow and there's animosity here. On our side a lot of it stems from -
If our milk does really, really well in the marketplace then we might get a bucket of oats, whilst some of the guys on the business side get to retire from the profits, buy sports cars etc.
If our milk does badly, then there will be a trip to the slaughterhouse.
We tend to be herded, as if we're an inconvenience, not actually, you know, the guys that produce everything you goddamn sell.
We're smarter than them. In the bovine, don't-start-nothing-won't-be-nothing way. Many of them are overly loud, arrogant and annoying and bark a lot. Somehow they make more money and are always traveling places and have great cars though...
They're always telling us not to do fun grassy stuff (otherwise known as exercise) in favour of endless milking.
From their side, we probably moo too much.
Pens and stables. Been the same way in every company I worked for.
I read a news story some time back about a city manager who wanted to the city fire department into a revenue-generating ambulance company because "those guys aren't doing anything anyways..."
Even Sun Tsu noted that brilliant generals who maneuvered the enemy into surrendering before the fight even started were less esteemed than idiots who lost half their men to a clusterfuck, and therefore had a chance to display their "bravery..."
The moral of the story? Even so often generate a horrible "emergency" which you heroically "solve."
Sure, two or three decent guys could rappel in from helicopters, flash-bang the problematic idiots and have that network back up on it's feet in a couple of days.
The problem is it's a municipal network. Those bureaucrats would rather play turf-war than send successful pings any day of the week.
The one million dollar figure isn't about accurately reporting the damage done. It's about citing a figure (pinky in mouth, mind you) to inspire shock and awe.
Now they need Robert Wagner to remind them, it really isn't all that much any more...
I was raised in a nation of free people, but lately all I hear are the children of Alberto Gonzalez. It's terrifying.
We are the children of loud-mouthed pub brawlers. We throw tea into the harbor. We take potshots at the cops as they retreat. The Revolution was started when a bunch of cops shot at tax protesters in Boston. We wave pictures of snakes and scream "Don't tread on me." We incite riots with shouts of "Give me Liberty or Give me Death." We brag that we are men who are easy to govern, but impossible to rule. We're the only nation on Earth to turn a Naval clusterfuck into our National Bloody Anthem.
God, I hear you mealy-mouthed equivocators whining and lawyering away your Liberty, the Liberty that my family has spent blood across generations protecting. You're undeserving of it.
Get this, and get this CFB. We're a free people.
We speak our minds. We don't like censorship, not in any way, shape or form.
We're honorable. We don't torture prisoners. We don't outsource torture. We don't play word games about whether or not waterboarding is torture.
We don't search your stuff until we've got damn good reason to think we're gonna find a dead body when we do.
We respect God enough not to drag Him into our stupid little political games. When you stand behind a pulpit, you stand in His Holy Presence and speak on His behalf. When I see politicians electioneering from the pulpit these days, I goggle at their brass, and make sure there's enough room between them and me for the lightning strike to miss.
What the Hell is wrong with you simpering, spineless, Stockhom-Syndrome, cellmate bitches? It pisses me off to no end to think that the time I spent on base was spent to protect the likes of you.
Time for remedial Civics, once again. I swear, it's like public schools are even working any more...
The First Amendment wasn't written in a vacuum. It was part of a centuries-old conversation in Europe that took place amongst people like Milton and Rousseau. Let me distill centuries of thought and arument down to a sentence for you.
Hiding the truth is bad.
It's bad when the government does it. It's bad when companies do it. The more power an entity has, the worse it is. Free men should be unafraid and unashamed to speak their minds. Anyone who tries to squelch that speech is evil.
The cure for bad speech is more speech. There needs to be free and open debate on everything, and when there is, only the Truth is strong enough to prevail.
We don't like censorship in this country. We don't like men who try to muzzle people. We don't stop the KKK by forbidding them to speak. We stop them by calling them a group of inbred idiots and laughing at them.
If you want to do public business in this country, then you need to learn to understand the rules. We don't squelch speech here. The Bills of Rights is merely a list of examples. It was made explicit that our freedom in this country is the DEFAULT setting.
It's not that since the First Amendment pertains to government, then companies can squelch speech. It's that nothing GIVES companies the right to do it.
If not even the government has the right to stifle conversation, then it's for damn sure that mere companies can't either.
"Flooding the room" is something I've seen done frequently when there's conflict, especially when it's a legal one. Just last week, I was in a nonsense meeting called for someone else's pissing match. One of the jackasses involved -- mind you, there were jackasses on both sides, hence the pissing match -- pulled representatives from 12, yes a dozen, different companies. Our guy pulled in four. There were literally no fewer than 30 people in the room for a technical issue so small that me and one other guy could have knocked it out in a few hours.
When ego meets bureaucracy, even minor issues can explode into mushroom cloud clusterfraks. Hell, I once walked into a meeting with my kid's school and found the principal had stacked the room with 15 people from all over the district. She still lost, of course, but bureaucrats, lawyers and other ruminants feel safety in numbers.
I believe in Adam Savage.
Grown men, on the other hand, are expected to have the strength and courage to take risks when the situation calls for it.
I just read both the article and the retractions. A 10-year-old boy saw his 8-year-old little sister go under. He literally died trying to save her. That's Harry-fracking-Potter bravery right there, and Heaven is plus one lad tonight.
Two grown men are told two children are under the water. Wisdom is one set of eyes high, one set low. One man stays on the ground to watch the water and wave the paramedics over, one man gets in the water and prays to get lucky. You won't see squat in a pond's murk, but you sure as hell won't save anyone from the shore.
The natural inclination for good men would be for both to get in the water, and that would be a tactical mistake, since once you're in the water, you won't see bubbles and ripples.
According to all reports, both men stayed dry.
All I can imagine is that neither knew how to swim. I hope for their sake they were merely cowards. If this was just indifference, then this would be one of the few cases where I would support the death penalty.
How the hell do you NOT get in the water?
EA learned precisely what the oil companies did after Katrina -- that bad PR means squat, and they are free to act as they choose.
They can still hire all the game developers they want. Yeah, yeah, whine all you want about the "quality" of the developers they hire. Quality isn't an immediate column in a spread sheet. No one who matters is going to say "Our games didn't sell because we hired the cheap developers," even if it's true. Especially if it's true.
The EA Widow took a mighty shot, and God bless her for it. But the lesson EA took away from it was that they were actually immune from those kinds of shots.
From the rumors I hear, things are worse than ever.