Maybe I'm just sensitized to these kinds of headlines, but it sure seems like many, many officials in the US and UK governments will go to their graves without every having realized they were on the wrong side of history.
To be fair, those same officials would probably think the same of me. Or they would, if they gave a rat's ass about what ordinary people like myself think. The treatment of Snowden and Manning leads me to believe they have no interest in the opinion of hoi polloi. On the contrary, our officials seem little put out that they should have to answer to the unwashed masses.
It is sad to think that Obama's legacy as the first black President and as a health care reformer is being overshadowed by the institutionalization of the surveillance state and the persecution of those would challenge it.
I lived in Switzerland for a few years. To dispose of your trash, you bought specially marked garbage bags at a store. The cost of the bag included the cost of waste disposal. Fill up the bag with trash, leave it out on trash day, and it was hauled it away. There was an incentive to recycle because you did not need to place your recyclables in a trash bag.
In fact, if you put recyclables inside of your trash bag, you were mailed a fine for putting them in the wrong stream. (I never did understand how they knew who was responsible, but they did).
I saved a bundle switching from Comcast to Century Link. I get 8 Mbps/down which is fine for my Netflix and other streaming needs. If the price goes up, I'll just switch back to Comcast on one of their introductory plans. Then again, in a year from now, it is likely that HSPA+ and LTE wireless broadband will be competitive with Comcast and Century link in terms of price for my personal bandwidth needs.
It's a good time to be a customer.
PS: I'm lucky. My Century Link connection is still up.
Amen. There were engineers before there were accredited engineering programs. There were business professionals before there were business degrees. How was that even possible? Universities taught students to think well. After that, anything was possible.
There are different personality types. Throughout history there have always been inspectors or some others doing quality control. As a design/dev type, it would drive me nuts. But that's just me.
They pour strong drinks at the 5 Point. It's great dive bar, much safer than the Twilight Exit and more poorly lit than The Canterbury. And it's pretty small. I'm more than a little surprised the they made it onto Slashdot. I guess anything can happen when social media is involved.
The irony drips onto my tongue like drops of sweet honey. Best of all, irony is free. In all seriousness, $250K sounds like a fair deal. He should just pony up the scratch.
This is an orderly process to deal with financial institutions that have to be bailed out. They are put into receivership. As the lender of last resort, the government makes good on a company's debt, but puts the company into receivership. The company's assets are sold to pay down the debt. Effectively, the company can be broken up and its pieces sold. Trading of the company's stock is frozen and the stock becomes effectively worthless (provided the amount of the bailout exceeded company's assets).
This is how the dissolution of Washing Mutual was handled. Unfortunately, all of the company's assets were sold to JP Morgan Chase, another to-big-to-fail institution. IMHO, Washington Mutual should have been broken into pieces, and the pieces sold to community and regional banks.
Isn't there an economic argument in here somewhere? It sounds like glut. An over abundance of music drives down the prices. When a glut occurs in the housing market, it depresses home prices. Some home builders go out of business because they can't charge enough for their work to make ends meet. They find other employment, even if their passion was home building. Maybe there are too many people trying to earn a living from music all at the same time? Perhaps the market for music is saturated and cannot absorb everyone who would like a career in writing and performing music?
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Shares of rare earths producer Molycorp Inc. MCP -25.12% fell as much as 22% at the open Thursday after the company warned it expects lower cash flow and revenue in 2013 than earlier anticipated. The company also said it would not proceed with the planned next phase of development at its Mountain Pass, Calif., manufacturing complex until it saw an improvement in rare earths demand, prices, and easier access to capital.
I am not particularly talented in math(s). Math is hard for me. I do not use much math(s) in my day job. I consider math(s) the single most important subject I studied in my education, from third grade through Master's degree.
Education is not the same as training. One can train for a vocation. Coding is a vocation. Do not study math(s) or attend a university if training, not education, is the only goal.
When my father was young, he said he felt like every product was stamped "Made in Japan". When I was young, my toys were stamped "Make in Taiwan". Now I'm middle-aged and I talk about the "Make in China" mark. When my daughters are grown, products will probably have a different stamp. And people will still be debating what it means to the US (as they should). I'm pretty confident I won't be living in a post-apocalyptic bizarre-o US when it comes to pass.
There is wisdom in the parent post. All things being equal, the infrastructure and the populace of nation-state like the US is a bigger boon to business than the constraints imposed by its laws and regulations. If that were not true, Sealand and Somalia would be the greatest economic engines on the planet.
That sounds like a pretty clear-headed assessment. Now what does the US have to gain by establishing a military presence in Poland? Or for that matter, trying to bring Georgia into NATO? I don't understand how this advances US strategic interests, but I do see how it antagonizes Russia. Why goad Russia this way? What is the US trying to accomplish? It's a mystery to me.
I'm old enough to remember the days when companies had other goals in addition to increasing share holder value. The change came about in the 1980s and the credit is usually given to one man: Jack Welch, then CEO of GE. Check out the Wikipedia article on him:
"In 1981 he [Jack] made a speech in New York City called 'Growing fast in a slow-growth economy'.[6] This is often acknowledged as the 'dawn' of the obsession with shareholder value. "
I propose that we will make more progress in our inquiry if we re-frame how we approach the matter. These articles (viz. Apple and Microsoft) have generated a lot of traffic because there is a tacit expectation that corporations have moral responsibilities or are moral actors. I want to challenge those assumptions.
To assign feelings to corporations is anthropomorphic: Apple cannot hate (or love) America any more than a colony of bacteria can hate or love a petri dish. A corporation will seek to minimize its tax burden the same way a simple organism unpleasant stimulus in its environment. Casting that behavior as moral or immoral is a fallacy. It is an easy mistake to make because every behavior a company exhibits is an expression of a decision made by a person. People are moral actors endowed with individual wills, conscience, and (hopefully) a moral compass.
There does not have to be any conscious evil unpinning corporate behavior for a corporation to behave in ways that feels immoral or amoral to us. For example, if a finance executive can reduce a corporation's tax burden by taking steps that are not demonstrably illegal, that exec will prosper. His superiors will reward him and entrust him with more power. His rival will fall by the wayside. If a financial executive's moral compass caused him to make decisions that were not in the corporation's best interests, the corporate body will expel him, just as a living body might try to eliminate a cancer.
The system rules by which corporations act are observable and remarkably consistent. This might be useful. For example, the phenomenon that water tends to run down hill is also observable and remarkably consistent, and this simple observations leads us to build damns to store potential energy, irrigate crops and control flooding.
The turning point comes when we stop asking "how can we make corporations to behave like good citizens" and start asking "how can we best harness corporate behavior for the good of the citizens". If I had the answers, I'd try and write a book instead/. post. Approaching the problem from a new perspective might lead us to some new territory we haven't already covered.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking this. I used to work for the UBS, just outside of Zürich. The cantina had great food and the price was subsidized by the company. Hardly nefarious.
But for whatever reason, I had a flash back to the days of IBM golf courses, IBM private resorts, and even an IBM gun club. After all, IBM had great products, their competitors couldn't touch them, and their stock was better than bricks of gold. They might as well throw some money around, because nothing could ever threaten their empire, right? Right?
The answer to your question is that, IMHO, this is not much of a story. Yes, there is both apathy and discontent-- I'm no exception. But if my time at the university taught me anything, it taught me that this is a normal, and often healthy, part of the human condition.
I attended SC11 (sc11.supercomputing.org) last year. FORTRAN is still the work horse of (large-scale) numerical computing. C/C++ are popular. So are MATLAB and R. They was even a NumPy tutorial and some sessions on emerging languages like Chapel. But FORTRAN was king.
Off-topic:When it came to programming, the general drift of the conference was not toward new languages, but toward adding meta-information, vis-a-vi compiler directives.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just sensitized to these kinds of headlines, but it sure seems like many, many officials in the US and UK governments will go to their graves without every having realized they were on the wrong side of history.
To be fair, those same officials would probably think the same of me. Or they would, if they gave a rat's ass about what ordinary people like myself think. The treatment of Snowden and Manning leads me to believe they have no interest in the opinion of hoi polloi. On the contrary, our officials seem little put out that they should have to answer to the unwashed masses.
It is sad to think that Obama's legacy as the first black President and as a health care reformer is being overshadowed by the institutionalization of the surveillance state and the persecution of those would challenge it.
Even $1 of "screw you, Facebook" money must taste indescribably sweet.
I lived in Switzerland for a few years. To dispose of your trash, you bought specially marked garbage bags at a store. The cost of the bag included the cost of waste disposal. Fill up the bag with trash, leave it out on trash day, and it was hauled it away. There was an incentive to recycle because you did not need to place your recyclables in a trash bag.
In fact, if you put recyclables inside of your trash bag, you were mailed a fine for putting them in the wrong stream. (I never did understand how they knew who was responsible, but they did).
I saved a bundle switching from Comcast to Century Link. I get 8 Mbps/down which is fine for my Netflix and other streaming needs. If the price goes up, I'll just switch back to Comcast on one of their introductory plans. Then again, in a year from now, it is likely that HSPA+ and LTE wireless broadband will be competitive with Comcast and Century link in terms of price for my personal bandwidth needs.
It's a good time to be a customer.
PS: I'm lucky. My Century Link connection is still up.
Amen. There were engineers before there were accredited engineering programs. There were business professionals before there were business degrees. How was that even possible? Universities taught students to think well. After that, anything was possible.
There are different personality types. Throughout history there have always been inspectors or some others doing quality control. As a design/dev type, it would drive me nuts. But that's just me.
They pour strong drinks at the 5 Point. It's great dive bar, much safer than the Twilight Exit and more poorly lit than The Canterbury. And it's pretty small. I'm more than a little surprised the they made it onto Slashdot. I guess anything can happen when social media is involved.
Zuckerberg needs programmers like the LA Lakers need basketball players.
The irony drips onto my tongue like drops of sweet honey. Best of all, irony is free.
In all seriousness, $250K sounds like a fair deal. He should just pony up the scratch.
This is an orderly process to deal with financial institutions that have to be bailed out. They are put into receivership. As the lender of last resort, the government makes good on a company's debt, but puts the company into receivership. The company's assets are sold to pay down the debt. Effectively, the company can be broken up and its pieces sold. Trading of the company's stock is frozen and the stock becomes effectively worthless (provided the amount of the bailout exceeded company's assets).
This is how the dissolution of Washing Mutual was handled. Unfortunately, all of the company's assets were sold to JP Morgan Chase, another to-big-to-fail institution. IMHO, Washington Mutual should have been broken into pieces, and the pieces sold to community and regional banks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receivership
Isn't there an economic argument in here somewhere? It sounds like glut. An over abundance of music drives down the prices. When a glut occurs in the housing market, it depresses home prices. Some home builders go out of business because they can't charge enough for their work to make ends meet. They find other employment, even if their passion was home building. Maybe there are too many people trying to earn a living from music all at the same time? Perhaps the market for music is saturated and cannot absorb everyone who would like a career in writing and performing music?
Obligatory-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2fhNVQPb5I
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Shares of rare earths producer Molycorp Inc. MCP -25.12% fell as much as 22% at the open Thursday after the company warned it expects lower cash flow and revenue in 2013 than earlier anticipated. The company also said it would not proceed with the planned next phase of development at its Mountain Pass, Calif., manufacturing complex until it saw an improvement in rare earths demand, prices, and easier access to capital.
I am not particularly talented in math(s). Math is hard for me.
I do not use much math(s) in my day job.
I consider math(s) the single most important subject I studied in my education, from third grade through Master's degree.
Education is not the same as training.
One can train for a vocation.
Coding is a vocation.
Do not study math(s) or attend a university if training, not education, is the only goal.
When my father was young, he said he felt like every product was stamped "Made in Japan".
When I was young, my toys were stamped "Make in Taiwan".
Now I'm middle-aged and I talk about the "Make in China" mark.
When my daughters are grown, products will probably have a different stamp.
And people will still be debating what it means to the US (as they should).
I'm pretty confident I won't be living in a post-apocalyptic bizarre-o US when it comes to pass.
There is wisdom in the parent post. All things being equal, the infrastructure and the populace of nation-state like the US is a bigger boon to business than the constraints imposed by its laws and regulations. If that were not true, Sealand and Somalia would be the greatest economic engines on the planet.
"Dangerous Waters" for geeks. Can't wait.
That sounds like a pretty clear-headed assessment. Now what does the US have to gain by establishing a military presence in Poland? Or for that matter, trying to bring Georgia into NATO? I don't understand how this advances US strategic interests, but I do see how it antagonizes Russia. Why goad Russia this way? What is the US trying to accomplish? It's a mystery to me.
I'm old enough to remember the days when companies had other goals in addition to increasing share holder value. The change came about in the 1980s and the credit is usually given to one man: Jack Welch, then CEO of GE. Check out the Wikipedia article on him:
"In 1981 he [Jack] made a speech in New York City called 'Growing fast in a slow-growth economy'.[6] This is often acknowledged as the 'dawn' of the obsession with shareholder value. "
I propose that we will make more progress in our inquiry if we re-frame how we approach the matter. These articles (viz. Apple and Microsoft) have generated a lot of traffic because there is a tacit expectation that corporations have moral responsibilities or are moral actors. I want to challenge those assumptions.
To assign feelings to corporations is anthropomorphic: Apple cannot hate (or love) America any more than a colony of bacteria can hate or love a petri dish. A corporation will seek to minimize its tax burden the same way a simple organism unpleasant stimulus in its environment. Casting that behavior as moral or immoral is a fallacy. It is an easy mistake to make because every behavior a company exhibits is an expression of a decision made by a person. People are moral actors endowed with individual wills, conscience, and (hopefully) a moral compass.
There does not have to be any conscious evil unpinning corporate behavior for a corporation to behave in ways that feels immoral or amoral to us. For example, if a finance executive can reduce a corporation's tax burden by taking steps that are not demonstrably illegal, that exec will prosper. His superiors will reward him and entrust him with more power. His rival will fall by the wayside. If a financial executive's moral compass caused him to make decisions that were not in the corporation's best interests, the corporate body will expel him, just as a living body might try to eliminate a cancer.
The system rules by which corporations act are observable and remarkably consistent. This might be useful. For example, the phenomenon that water tends to run down hill is also observable and remarkably consistent, and this simple observations leads us to build damns to store potential energy, irrigate crops and control flooding.
The turning point comes when we stop asking "how can we make corporations to behave like good citizens" and start asking "how can we best harness corporate behavior for the good of the citizens". If I had the answers, I'd try and write a book instead /. post. Approaching the problem from a new perspective might lead us to some new territory we haven't already covered.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking this. I used to work for the UBS, just outside of Zürich. The cantina had great food and the price was subsidized by the company. Hardly nefarious.
But for whatever reason, I had a flash back to the days of IBM golf courses, IBM private resorts, and even an IBM gun club. After all, IBM had great products, their competitors couldn't touch them, and their stock was better than bricks of gold. They might as well throw some money around, because nothing could ever threaten their empire, right? Right?
That 'Q' didn't look quite right.
I'll start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Archons
The answer to your question is that, IMHO, this is not much of a story. Yes, there is both apathy and discontent-- I'm no exception. But if my time at the university taught me anything, it taught me that this is a normal, and often healthy, part of the human condition.
I attended SC11 (sc11.supercomputing.org) last year. FORTRAN is still the work horse of (large-scale) numerical computing. C/C++ are popular. So are MATLAB and R. They was even a NumPy tutorial and some sessions on emerging languages like Chapel. But FORTRAN was king.
I thought this was an interesting thread about FORTRAN v. C -- http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169974
Off-topic:When it came to programming, the general drift of the conference was not toward new languages, but toward adding meta-information, vis-a-vi compiler directives.