The preferred lifestyle for everyone is to have heat, clean and edible food and water, some sort of a cure if sick, and maybe some other things that I can't think of right off the top of my head
Hmmm. I'm glad to see you know my preferred lifestyle better than I do, since my list is quite a bit longer than yours. Thanks for the education. I guess the things I thought I prefered -- time and tools to create, the ability to connect to other thinking people, a chance to do more than subsist, access to great works of the past and new modes of thinking, etc. -- aren't really part of a lifestyle.
Sarcasm aside, I think that the original poster, and the current one, are missing a crucial fact: "Incremental" changes can precipitate revolutionary shifts. For example, as an educated, middle-class American, I have the reasonable expectation that I will never face starvation. So in one sense, no technology ever could "more solve" this problem.
Why do I have that expectation, though? In part because the advance of technology has created a demand for scientifically trained people and I happen to be a science teacher. Advances in productivity have given us enough leisure to make my job feasible. And beyond that, the IC and the computer have revolutionized my job, making it more meaningful and fulfilling for me and my students (I hope), who now have access to modes of knowing and thinking not available before.
If all you care about is the ability to satisfy the fundamentals (food, shelter, etc.) and you won't accept that making these more widespread counts as "major", then yes, I suppose you'll have to conclude that modern tech won't satisfy those needs any more than previous tech. Of course, the "previous tech" is not steam engine and fertilizer. It's wheel and agriculture... there's been no "progress" for 20,000 years.
Consider that the reason we develop technology is to support our preferred lifestyle. We have been inching ever closer to that lifestyle for seven thousand years, and the rate (in terms of ground covered) that we get closer is decreasing.
As if every person everywhere at all times shares the same monolithic ideal of a "preferred lifestyle"?? That is, sad to say, hogwash. What I want in life is different from what my grandparents want, in large part because so much more is open to me... due to technological innovation. My own "preferred lifestyle" continues to evolve. How can we be inching up to a moving target?
This post, like the article itself, seemed to me to have a curious myopia: The assumption that things we see now are all there is, that desires, motivations, and valuations somehow are static.
Give the guy a break, are slashdotters and all just that desperate for astounding visuals that just can't be topped?
After a quick perusal of the list, I think you've missed the point. Most slashdotters are saying that it isn't the visuals that maketh the movie, and that Lucas' sin is forgetting that: Loucas wants each one to top the previous one for FX. A laudable goal... if it can be done without sacrificing the plot. IMHO, in Ep I, he missed the mark.
Jabba was conceived as a human(oid) when E1 was shot, but then evolved (degenerated?) into a wormy-lookin-thing later. No problem, 'cause the scene had been cut from E1.
Minor factoid error: IIRC, Jabba was always imagined as a giant worm thingy. But the FX in 1977 weren't up to it, at least, not to Lucas' satisfaction. So the scene was dropped. The human actor (over whom the CGI Jabba was pasted) was there for precisely the reason alleged as a fake: To give Harrison Ford something to react to, and to preserve distances, etc. But in 1977 they couldn't matte over a convincing enough monster (esp. if it was going to be made of rubber and filmed, then overlaid).
When going back to do the Special Edition, Lucas realized that CGI had come far enough along to make possible his original intent... which was, after all, the point of the Special Edition.
Re:I know I'll be modded down, but bear with me he
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
I agree that we have the right to revolt,
secede, or move somewhere else
Didn't we have a litte war to settle the issue of whether one has the "right to secede"?
In the second case, in order to violate the DMCA, your package would have to have circumvention (i.e., unauthorized decryption) as its only commercially significant purpose, which does not sound likely, based on your scenario.
I don't believe the DCMA requires it to be the "only commecially significant purpose". In fact, I don't think intent figures in at all.
For example, if you're a pacifist, I don't believe you could be forced to
work on an arms project, for example.
Actually, I'm pretty sure you could be sued for breach of contract. Courts generally enforce contracts as take-it-or-leave-it. No one forced you to work for that company, or to sign their agreement. You could have said No. You'd not have gotten the job, but hey...
Conscientious objectors derive their right not to serve from the fact that conscription is not voluntary, by its nature. Therefore a civil society allows an option.
This has been universally conceded in academic circles for decades.
A few points:
This is far from "universally conceded", even in philosophical academe, much less the broad scope of scholarship.
Even where this has taken root, it has done so only in certain realms of academe. In areas that actually deal with the external world -- physics, chemistry, engineering -- this viewpoint is very nearly universally rejected.
Even if every PhD on the planet argued that this was so, it wouldn't make it so.
Here's my experiment for those who really believe that reality exists only in perception: Take a newborn; assume male for ease of language. Raise him in a specially constructed room, wherein a glass floor covers a thirty-foot drop. Allow the baby to explore the room but allow no vertical drops in his space... no shelves, no tables, etc. Thus his experience is that the world is flat and consists of one height only.
Now take away the glass floor. If the baby crawls over to edge, will he just continue to crawl across, floating on air? His whole world has said that he can do that. Of course, the baby would fall, because gravity really exists and doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
I can't believe I'm responding to this, but what the heck -- it's a slow day...
Blockquoth the poster:
By advocating such
blatently heathen, Atheist ideas as "transplanted our conscioussness into some form of computer technology." you
are advocating the refusal to acknowledge the wisdom and will of our Lord.
Personally, I think it's pretty arrogant to assume that you (or anyone) knows "the wisdom and will of our Lord". Life has changed in the past 2000 years and yet very few updates have come down from Heaven as to how to live. Even if you believe that the New Testament is the revealed Word, you should be able to see that God always chose to speak in the metaphors and memes comprehensible at the time. If He'd mentioned "transferring consciousness to a computer", it would've sounded like gibberish. Actually, it'd sound a lot like assumption into Heaven... Hmmm.
If you accept evolution, then humans using their brains (even for -- gasp! -- technology) is simply part of natural selection. If you're an evolutionary deist, then humans using their brains is a culmination of God's design. If you're a creationist, then it's silly to oppose technological innovation: You're alleging that God put a massive, wonderful, functioning brain in (nearly) every human, for the sole purpose of us ignoring it?? That's horribly inelegant.
I am amused and saddened by how many people believe that God is limited by their imaginations.
Oh, so you're the person who bought the other copy...:)
To veer slightly more on topic: I agree WRT the plot (or lack thereof) of The Matrix. It's funny -- slashdotters like to rise up in indignant ire over "obvious" patents that try to claim well-known "prior art". But The Matrix took a bunch of near-cliche conventions and hackneyed plots, stitched them together (and less aesthetically than Frankenstein did the monster), and splashed a lot of eye-candy across it. Yet it's hailed as visionary.
Don't get me wrong -- it was a fun movie to watch. (I absolutely love the shockwave in the glass after the helicopter hits the building). It just doesn't bear much thought.
Not that this, in itself, implies that Galaxy Quest should have won. But of course it appealed to the vanity of the sci-fi set.:)
Nobody can tell me that very long command lines with half a dozen switches and arguments (especially taking into
account one simple typo either renders the command invalid or worse can do serious damage) is easier than pointing
and clicking. It may be more POWERFUL, but it aint' EASIER.
Well, just call me Nemo, but... Try renaming 1000 files of the sort a001.blah to b001.blah, or converting 1000 GIFs to JPEGs, using point-and-click. I think it's time for us to come clean: The point-and-click model is just the silicon equivalent of QWERTY: chosen to slow the user down.
There are tasks wherein point and click is acceptable. Administration really isn't one of them, not in all its gory details.
But multivac was the result of a positronic brain designing a better computer, which then designed a better one, and so
forth a few times.
Actually, I believe all that "Multivac" and "positronic" have in common is that Asimov coined them via a simple extension of a then-hip word ("Univac" and "electronic", respectively). I'm pretty sure that the Multivac universe -- to the extent that the various Multivac stories even cohabit the same universe -- is distinct from the positronic robots / _Caves of Steel_ / Foundation universe.
It is true that Asimov was fascinated by the idea of using computers to design their own successors -- something common to Hitchiker's Guide and Hyperion, as well.:)
Like the summary I saw on the news about the ford/firestone recall: "6 million tires
have been recalled. If piled on atop the other, they would make a stack the height of the empire state building.... over
3000 times." WTF good does that do?
As a physics teacher I deal with issues of visualization a lot, and I have to disagree. Sure, 4.2e6 ft is the same as 3000 time the height of the Empire State Building. But (I would argue), contextually, they convey different information. People have a notion of the ESB as "big". It's a unit of reference for bigness. So taking their expectation of big -- the ESB -- and then saying it's three thousand times as big, conveys the overwhelming size.
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I've found with my students that comparing things to real-world objects -- even when it simply shifts the exponent by two -- can really help them grasp the immensities.
One solution might be to have a kind of application firewall inside the OS, which lets you
determine which apps should be allowed socket communications
This is damn rare. The only time you don't have a nuke sub armed is if you think it might sink in your backyard.
Things like inital testing and say testing a new weapon that your not sure about.
Or, perhaps, you're engaged in a wargame. I know it's not unprecedented, at least, that the nukes be off-loaded before a wargame.
5) In a case where a sub is not going to come back up, the sub crew will distory all sensitve things. This includes codebooks and the like. They use
termite which makes it very hard to breath.
OK, I'll self-call the foul for pointing out a spelling mistake, but I thought this particular mistake was humorous.
The RIAA will probably love this, since they can embed fingerprints in all their discs, and then just run around
sending cease & desists to anyone who distributes a file that contains a fingerprint that says "copyright RIAA
member"
Actually, this worried me at first. Now, I don't care. You see, this just lets the RIAA (or whoever) verify that the MP3 is a rendition of their song. So what? Until they finally succeed in completely rewriting copyright law, I have the right to make a copy (MP3 or otherwise) of anything I own, for my personal use. So if they find I've got this MP3, they still have to prove I am not entitled to it... exactly the situation they are in now.
Remember, current copyright law and current technology allow the RIAA to go after people who download songs to which they have no right. But hitting 20 million users is hard, so the RIAA wants to establish that they can choke the servers, too.
The major anti-piracy use of this, I suspect, would be to set up "stings": The RIAA posts anonymously a song whose fingerprint includes "I am not a legal copy!" to a site trading in songs. Then anyone found to have the copy can be assumed to have downloaded it or copied it from someone who did... but that sounds more like a watermark than a fingerprint.
Federal law requires that all websites USED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (that is to say, those created by government agencies and those intended for use by customers of companies who are government suppliers or contractors) must support access for the disabled.
I don't knwo the specific law you're using. If it's the Americans with Disabilities Act, you are contruing its scope too narrowly. The ADA applies to all "places of public accommodation". That's why it can be enforced against, say, private independent schools. (I'm a teacher at one -- trust me on this.) I don't know if a Web site is considered a "place of public accommodation" -- I very much suspect the courts haven't tried this one yet.
Anyway, since the site was for the Australian Olympics, (US) Federal law doesn't really apply...
Like a water-proof roof for an house, ALT tags are mandatory for a "usable" web site.
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Does everyone agree that Web sites have to have ALT tags so that they're accessible to the blind? Just reading the reaction on slashdot -- a self-selected technically knowledgable group -- the answer seems to be "no". There are a number of people who question the point of this. (I am not saying they're right; I'm just pointing out that they exist.)
To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.
Personally, I don't view accessibility by the blind -- especially for a major international site like the Olympics -- to be the same sort of frill as a gold doorknob. But the question is: What sort of features are expected by nearly everyone when you say "I'll make you a web site"? I think it can argued that accessibility, sadly, is not one of those features.
IBM should be smart enough to do this for free or at some nominal cost, just for the PR. But it's not clear they should be forced to do so.
That would be very, very dangerous. Insterstate
commerce would grind to an abrupt halt if such a practice were to be allowed.
OK, so if the CA court allows this, can the defendants appeal to a federal court, arguing unconstitutionality as this violates the Commerce Clause?
Of course, the MPAA have bought as many senators as they have local politicians, so it might not help. But on the whole, federal appeals courts have been stronger defenders of the Net than others.
I had actually decided not to respond further on this thread, but I had to change my mind...
It's exactly this "not my fault, I just work here" mentality that lets all the bad shit happen.
Interestingly enough (at least to me), we seem to deduce exactly the opposite outcomes from the given premise, although the actual prescription (taking personal responsibility) seems to be quite similar. You say, because corporations don't exist except as the sum of their employees/owners/etc., then all evil done must be the personal responsibility of the people at the top (acting individually?) and therefore one needs to evaluate any request and be willing to reject it.
On the other hand, I believe that the assumption that corporations are morally neutral allows people to adopt the "not my fault, I just work here" mentality. It enables a willing suspension of morality because, hey, corporations are intrinsically non-moral entities. Thus, it's not important to evaluate the corporate culture or to do one's part to ensure that the culture is a (if you'll excuse a bit of hokey terminology) "a force for good".
It seems that each of us wants people to demand higher accountability and greater moral sense from the corporations (or their top people), but we see the moral definition as effecting this in different ways. I'll have to ponder that some.
Perhaps some of the difference between us can be traced to
Doing anything to get ahead is not evil, it's neutral. Evil is doing these things because you enjoy causing harm. Good is avoiding them because you dislike causing harm. Doing things and not caring if you cause harm is not evil, it's neutral.
I do not and cannot accept this definition of evil. It is, I agree, evil to do things because they cause harm; to, as you say, enjoy doing harm. But the set of such things is merely (IMHO) a subset of the category "evil". As much as I am a child of the Enlightenment, as much as I revere the concept of the individual, I do not agree that self-interest is the only defining factor in Good v. Evil.
Evil comes about, in my opinion, when one adopts a skewed ratio of weights between Self and Other. A person must respect both himself/herself and others. Most garden-variety evil stems from an unbalanced assignment of importance to oneself, ignoring the other. Such people evaluate everything only according to how it benefits or harms themselves. Others exist only as means to one's own ends. This devalues the human dignity of other people and is a path to evil.
Less commoningly encountered or commented upon, evil can also arise when one assigns ultimate weight and authority to the Other, negating the Self. This can often be used to justify the most horrific actions ("It's for their own good") as well as buttress one's own selfish actions ("Look how much I'm willing to give up."). Others are seen only as ends, and one's own self only as a means to those ends. Swinging the balance this way also devlaues human dignity -- the value of your life itself -- and thus leads to evil.
The only true path lies between these. (Hmm. Virtue as the mean between extremes. I guess I'm Aristotelean at heart.) One must recognize that individuals be means and have ends of their own. A philosopher prof I knew (hi, Nell!) once made a profound statement to me: The Enlightment was the recongition that individuals are more than simply means. Of course, they are means to ends; heck, the philosophy prof was a means to my own end of attaining an education degree. But each individual has ends of his/her own, and is entitled to respect. I, too, am an individual and thus also deserve respect. Finding the balance between Other and Self is a lot harder than hewing to an extreme; but it's also much more morally grounded.
Of course, it's clear that our views of Evil are distinct and, to some extent, incompatible. Thus it's not too surprising we have different opinions on whether corporations are (or can be) Evil.
By the way, is it safe to conclude that you oppose the judicial interpretation that corporations possess rights under the Constitution like free speech and equal protection of the laws?
Corporations aren't fanatical, because they can't be. PEOPLE are fanatical, corporations are not.
Hmm. I guess all the millions spent by various companies on improving their "corporate culture" have actually been tossed into the ether... My entire point is, I disagree with your assumption that corporations are simply the vector sum of the motivations of their employees/owners/whatever. I think it is fallacious and dangerous to believe that corporations have no identity and no goals of their own.
Corporations raze millions of acre of rainforest. Corporations strip-mine the planet. Corporations sue to silence critics, intimidate competitiors, and distort justice. Corporations conduct unethical and uninformed experiments on people. Do none of these count as "evil" for you?
Are you seriously proposing that there aren't guys "in a three-piece-suit with no morals hunched over a desk analyzing bottom-lines on a print out and deciding which companies to take over and who to fire"?? So all the downsizing of the 1980s -- professional hatchet men and all -- was actually the result of ten million mom-and-pop decisions sweated over a kitchen table late at night? Wow. It must be very nice to live in your world.
In the actual real world, on the other hand, there are these things called multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. They have motivations of their own, they have decision processes of their own, and they have survival unlinked to any particular employee. They interact with other corporations in a rapidly-fluctuating hunter/prey mode and they make decisions that, as often as not, have more to do with maximizing their own short-term profit than to respecting the people they work for or sell to.
As for not knowing any of the corporate droids: Heck, I've seen high school friends turn into them. These people are still my friends. In their personal lives they are still relatively decent people who love their kids, donate at church, and send flowers to their moms on Mothers' Day. In their professional lives, they backstab co-workers, abuse suppliers, cheat customers, and dedicate all to the corporate (bottom) line. Why? Because, at work, they are just cogs in a larger organism.
Could I suggest you change references from "consumers" to "citizens"? The idea of citizenship is already massively eroded by current corporate culture; we don't need to add to that.
Remember: Citizens have rights. Consumers have only wallets.
Slashdot Mirror
Sarcasm aside, I think that the original poster, and the current one, are missing a crucial fact: "Incremental" changes can precipitate revolutionary shifts. For example, as an educated, middle-class American, I have the reasonable expectation that I will never face starvation. So in one sense, no technology ever could "more solve" this problem.
Why do I have that expectation, though? In part because the advance of technology has created a demand for scientifically trained people and I happen to be a science teacher. Advances in productivity have given us enough leisure to make my job feasible. And beyond that, the IC and the computer have revolutionized my job, making it more meaningful and fulfilling for me and my students (I hope), who now have access to modes of knowing and thinking not available before.
If all you care about is the ability to satisfy the fundamentals (food, shelter, etc.) and you won't accept that making these more widespread counts as "major", then yes, I suppose you'll have to conclude that modern tech won't satisfy those needs any more than previous tech. Of course, the "previous tech" is not steam engine and fertilizer. It's wheel and agriculture... there's been no "progress" for 20,000 years.
This post, like the article itself, seemed to me to have a curious myopia: The assumption that things we see now are all there is, that desires, motivations, and valuations somehow are static.
When going back to do the Special Edition, Lucas realized that CGI had come far enough along to make possible his original intent ... which was, after all, the point of the Special Edition.
Conscientious objectors derive their right not to serve from the fact that conscription is not voluntary, by its nature. Therefore a civil society allows an option.
Blockquoth the poster:
Personally, I think it's pretty arrogant to assume that you (or anyone) knows "the wisdom and will of our Lord". Life has changed in the past 2000 years and yet very few updates have come down from Heaven as to how to live. Even if you believe that the New Testament is the revealed Word, you should be able to see that God always chose to speak in the metaphors and memes comprehensible at the time. If He'd mentioned "transferring consciousness to a computer", it would've sounded like gibberish. Actually, it'd sound a lot like assumption into Heaven... Hmmm.If you accept evolution, then humans using their brains (even for -- gasp! -- technology) is simply part of natural selection. If you're an evolutionary deist, then humans using their brains is a culmination of God's design. If you're a creationist, then it's silly to oppose technological innovation: You're alleging that God put a massive, wonderful, functioning brain in (nearly) every human, for the sole purpose of us ignoring it?? That's horribly inelegant.
I am amused and saddened by how many people believe that God is limited by their imaginations.
To veer slightly more on topic: I agree WRT the plot (or lack thereof) of The Matrix. It's funny -- slashdotters like to rise up in indignant ire over "obvious" patents that try to claim well-known "prior art". But The Matrix took a bunch of near-cliche conventions and hackneyed plots, stitched them together (and less aesthetically than Frankenstein did the monster), and splashed a lot of eye-candy across it. Yet it's hailed as visionary.
Don't get me wrong -- it was a fun movie to watch. (I absolutely love the shockwave in the glass after the helicopter hits the building). It just doesn't bear much thought.
Not that this, in itself, implies that Galaxy Quest should have won. But of course it appealed to the vanity of the sci-fi set. :)
There are tasks wherein point and click is acceptable. Administration really isn't one of them, not in all its gory details.
It is true that Asimov was fascinated by the idea of using computers to design their own successors -- something common to Hitchiker's Guide and Hyperion, as well. :)
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I've found with my students that comparing things to real-world objects -- even when it simply shifts the exponent by two -- can really help them grasp the immensities.
Remember, current copyright law and current technology allow the RIAA to go after people who download songs to which they have no right. But hitting 20 million users is hard, so the RIAA wants to establish that they can choke the servers, too.
The major anti-piracy use of this, I suspect, would be to set up "stings": The RIAA posts anonymously a song whose fingerprint includes "I am not a legal copy!" to a site trading in songs. Then anyone found to have the copy can be assumed to have downloaded it or copied it from someone who did... but that sounds more like a watermark than a fingerprint.
Anyway, since the site was for the Australian Olympics, (US) Federal law doesn't really apply...
To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.
Personally, I don't view accessibility by the blind -- especially for a major international site like the Olympics -- to be the same sort of frill as a gold doorknob. But the question is: What sort of features are expected by nearly everyone when you say "I'll make you a web site"? I think it can argued that accessibility, sadly, is not one of those features.
IBM should be smart enough to do this for free or at some nominal cost, just for the PR. But it's not clear they should be forced to do so.
Of course, the MPAA have bought as many senators as they have local politicians, so it might not help. But on the whole, federal appeals courts have been stronger defenders of the Net than others.
On the other hand, I believe that the assumption that corporations are morally neutral allows people to adopt the "not my fault, I just work here" mentality. It enables a willing suspension of morality because, hey, corporations are intrinsically non-moral entities. Thus, it's not important to evaluate the corporate culture or to do one's part to ensure that the culture is a (if you'll excuse a bit of hokey terminology) "a force for good".
It seems that each of us wants people to demand higher accountability and greater moral sense from the corporations (or their top people), but we see the moral definition as effecting this in different ways. I'll have to ponder that some.
Perhaps some of the difference between us can be traced to
I do not and cannot accept this definition of evil. It is, I agree, evil to do things because they cause harm; to, as you say, enjoy doing harm. But the set of such things is merely (IMHO) a subset of the category "evil". As much as I am a child of the Enlightenment, as much as I revere the concept of the individual, I do not agree that self-interest is the only defining factor in Good v. Evil.Evil comes about, in my opinion, when one adopts a skewed ratio of weights between Self and Other. A person must respect both himself/herself and others. Most garden-variety evil stems from an unbalanced assignment of importance to oneself, ignoring the other. Such people evaluate everything only according to how it benefits or harms themselves. Others exist only as means to one's own ends. This devalues the human dignity of other people and is a path to evil.
Less commoningly encountered or commented upon, evil can also arise when one assigns ultimate weight and authority to the Other, negating the Self. This can often be used to justify the most horrific actions ("It's for their own good") as well as buttress one's own selfish actions ("Look how much I'm willing to give up."). Others are seen only as ends, and one's own self only as a means to those ends. Swinging the balance this way also devlaues human dignity -- the value of your life itself -- and thus leads to evil.
The only true path lies between these. (Hmm. Virtue as the mean between extremes. I guess I'm Aristotelean at heart.) One must recognize that individuals be means and have ends of their own. A philosopher prof I knew (hi, Nell!) once made a profound statement to me: The Enlightment was the recongition that individuals are more than simply means. Of course, they are means to ends; heck, the philosophy prof was a means to my own end of attaining an education degree. But each individual has ends of his/her own, and is entitled to respect. I, too, am an individual and thus also deserve respect. Finding the balance between Other and Self is a lot harder than hewing to an extreme; but it's also much more morally grounded.
Of course, it's clear that our views of Evil are distinct and, to some extent, incompatible. Thus it's not too surprising we have different opinions on whether corporations are (or can be) Evil.
By the way, is it safe to conclude that you oppose the judicial interpretation that corporations possess rights under the Constitution like free speech and equal protection of the laws?
Corporations raze millions of acre of rainforest. Corporations strip-mine the planet. Corporations sue to silence critics, intimidate competitiors, and distort justice. Corporations conduct unethical and uninformed experiments on people. Do none of these count as "evil" for you?
Are you seriously proposing that there aren't guys "in a three-piece-suit with no morals hunched over a desk analyzing bottom-lines on a print out and deciding which companies to take over and who to fire"?? So all the downsizing of the 1980s -- professional hatchet men and all -- was actually the result of ten million mom-and-pop decisions sweated over a kitchen table late at night? Wow. It must be very nice to live in your world.
In the actual real world, on the other hand, there are these things called multibillion-dollar multinational corporations. They have motivations of their own, they have decision processes of their own, and they have survival unlinked to any particular employee. They interact with other corporations in a rapidly-fluctuating hunter/prey mode and they make decisions that, as often as not, have more to do with maximizing their own short-term profit than to respecting the people they work for or sell to.
As for not knowing any of the corporate droids: Heck, I've seen high school friends turn into them. These people are still my friends. In their personal lives they are still relatively decent people who love their kids, donate at church, and send flowers to their moms on Mothers' Day. In their professional lives, they backstab co-workers, abuse suppliers, cheat customers, and dedicate all to the corporate (bottom) line. Why? Because, at work, they are just cogs in a larger organism.
Remember: Citizens have rights. Consumers have only wallets.