Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong.
My point is that the majority of people would support the idea in theory, but not in personal practice. I am not the arbitor of what's best, I am pointing out that belief of an idea in the abstract often does not translate to action in accordance with that idea. I think most people would agree that educating people is good (or does this make me an anti-democratic evil baby-killer), yet many would not make that active choice to give money for it.
If you honestly believe that taking money from poor white's and asians and giving it to poor blacks and hispanics is good for the country, then go make it happen the "right" way. If cou honestly beleieve that race should be a basis for deciding who can go to school and who can't then go out and convince those poor white kids that they don't deserve the money because theywere born with the wrong skin color.
I have not mentioned race at all. I have referred to helping poor students by levying a small fee on people who are able to pay for college. I specifically did not talk about race, as I see it being a very complicated side issue. Ideally, socioeconomic status would be the deciding factor not race...as it happens, though race is actually a pretty reasonable predictor of SES. You can't honestly suggest that $1/credit hour is going to burden the vast majority of students.
Explain to them why they really, really need to be donating to the others and let them choose it. Don't force them, that's evil.
Bullshit again. We as a society frequently force people to do things. Hell, thats what laws are for. We offer tax deductions for charitable donations in order to convince people to do it, this is merely another form of coercion. As much as I wish it were true that frank discussion would get people to act in the best manner, it isn't.
Please get off your race high horse, as that is very much not what I am saying. This issue is very much the NIMBY phenomenon (Not In My BackYard...referring to where we should build necessary but distasteful buildings like prisons and dumps). Everybody agrees we should help poor students (of any race), but start raising taxes and they howl.
And this is an argument why should keep it!? 90% of the people don't like it so it must be good? Where does that logic come from?
And here I assumed financial support for poor, disadvantaged students was a good thing.
The point is that, like taxes, when presented as such a question, few people would choose to pay. Rather than making you pay, we are asking you to contribute 20to40-some percent of your income to the [county|state|federal] government? There's a reason things don't work that way.
I would bet that most people would also admit that scholarships for disadvantaged students are a good thing, while at the same time declining to contribute.
I guess I just worry that with our justice system, having a meritorious claim does not mean you are going to win. In a loser-pays setup, you need to be absolutely sure, have a 100% slam-dunk case if you are suing a large entity as the cost of loss will be severe. While I agree that will certainly decrease the number of frivolous lawsuits, but it would seem to also greatly reduce the number of cases that, while not frivolous, are also not absolutely clear-cut. If we had a perfect justice system (a fact I think everybody agrees is not the case), then I could see how loser-pays would work.
Another question about a loser-pays system, does the losing law firm pay? If not, then the lawyers have little incentive not to behave as they do now...it just means the clients will get screwed harder. If the law firm is fiscally responsible, then you can bet they will limit the types of cases filed to ones with 3 eyewitnesses, a bystanding police officer, on video tape with perfect DNA evidence. This is essentially limiting the value of the judicial system if it only deals in cases that are so obvious it would take braindead jurors to find against. As is clear juries can do strange things, return results seemingly at odds with popular perception (OJ's innocence, etc etc), it just seems like loser-pays would not work.
I would also agree that our society if far too litigious as a whole. I guess I'm not convinced though, that loser-pays is the best solution in a rather squishy justice system. I wish there were a better one, but it seems the lack of such an idea is the reason tort reform is so complicated.
The counter-argument in the US, which somehow manages to convince all of the morons, it that a "loser-pays" system will somehow keep poor plaintiffs from being able to sue.
All of the above are altruistic pursuits. While open source development only serves to inflate your ego.
Not true. While it may inflate your ego, it does not *only* do that. To even attempt that claim is just silly.
You may think you are doing a good thing but companies which can afford to buy application software would buy software as a matter of regular business and treat it as a business expense.
Yet now that they don't have to spend money on a commercial product, they can spend more money on R&D, improved product design, etc etc, or just pocket it as profit for shareholders. Whatever happens, the company has become more economically efficient.
If you create Application software which replaces software produced by smaller companies as closed source, you eliminate the following jobs: programmer, various support staff at the company, executives, advertising jobs, sales clerks, delivery/shipping jobs as well as all of the trickle down jobs in the community.
So what? If a company is being outcompeted, then it is supposed to die. It is just asinine to suggest *not* being productive in order to save a company. As for those shipping jobs/etc, they will just need to move on to another company (perhaps one that is now viable as it doesnt have to spend money for a closed-source software package).
Oh and that non-software company that saves money with open source will most likely will not buy support from you and the principles will pocket the money instead of creating even Mc Jobs to support it.
Have anything at all to back up that claim? Or are you just spewing bullshit to try and support your point?
Why not contribute to society instead of contributing to its problems by putting more people on the street?
Again, eliminating a company that is unable to compete is *not* the same as putting people out on the street. Efficiency and wealth are not zero-sum games.
I completely agree that more people should do the type of volunteer work you mention. To suggest that contributing to open-source projects is bad, however, is just flat-out wrong. Arguing that open-source development is "stealing jobs" just shows an incredibly poor understanding of how capitalism works.
"Potentially a year in jail for videotaping a movie?" Yes, he did the crime, now he's got to do the time.... but it's a fact. He did the crime, he knew it was illegal (of course he did, how could you NOT), now he's got to do the time.
It's a fact? Really? Care to tell us how you can be that certain? Surely, to be so confident, you are privy to more information than a single article posted to a newspaper's website. Oh, right, I forgot...if it's on the internet it must be true.
Well, even assuming he did it the way it was written (which is an assumption), I think the parent's point was that a year in jail seems excessive. You can tell a lot about a society by the levels of punishment certain crimes reap. Sure, Singapore has got clean streets, but is it worth caning litterers to accomplish that? The level of punishment copyright infringement laws have behind them in the US is scandalous. This kid would've been better off driving drunk, buying some crack, or torturing an animal. I for one, would tend to consider those crimes worse than taping a crappy cam copy of a movie that is guananteed to make hundreds of millions of dollars regardless. I have the hardest time imagining that watching a telesync copy of spiderman 2 is really going to substitute for an actual movie-going experience. Those who are satisfied with a usenet version are not likely to be those who would go see it in a theater anyway.
Oh c'mon, you just wanted the first "Gmail is dying" post, didn't you?
We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more
Or maybe it'll do to Yahoo mail what Google did to Yahoo search.
I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail.
Superior? To what? The still beta Gmail filter about which very little is really known? Doesn't it seem likely that a company as into research as Google would be able to create a damn fine filter technology? (Beyond which, I wouldn't even call yahoo's spam filter that good...)
There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period.
Make a killing off of all those users of its free email system?
Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.
I don't buy it, but more to the point, Gmail is still in beta. Still will be for a while, and making any predictions of how things will go is just kind of silly.
Plenty of people use it that way, therefore it's perfectly valid
Plenty of people say "ain't" and "mute point" as well, that doesn't change the fact that you come across as ignorant if you do. You can say your radio is busted, or your car is broke. You can use irregardless all you want, but doing so will make you sound like an idiot, regardless of whether you are or not. "Begs the question" has an established meaning that refers to presupposing your conclusion by how you state the question. You can (and many do) use it, of course, to mean 'raises the question,' or 'makes you wonder.' If you don't mind some of your audience thinking you are a poor speaker (or writer), or just plain stupid, then go right ahead. While you are at it, feel free to mispronounce it "lye-nucks."
the TV audience that day was denied its right to choose what it wanted to watch.
Huh? It chose to watch an event with a half-time show produced by MTV. That was far from a secret, in fact it had been advertised as such. What it got was, frankly, pretty tame for MTV. Had it been a half-time show produced by PAX TV or ABC Family, then perhaps they'd have a reason to complain.
not the regulatory agency that is chartered to represent that audience.
Was there a survey I missed? Did we somehow establish that the 1.5 seconds of barely distinguishable nipple actually upset more than 50% of the super bowl watching population? Or, more to the point, when was the last time the FCC actually asked the audience what it was upset by? This regulatory agency administration has no mandate from the public whatsoever. It has an appointed leader who gets to decide when to what he thinks is ok, the public has essentially no input or recourse.
You keep saying the FCC has a duty to be the maintain a level of decency for population, but there is nothing to suggest it determines that level by anything more encompassing than its leader's personal opinion of indecency. So while Mr Powell may take issue with a *gasp* nipple, it remains to be determined if the majority of us were offended (& the prevalence of barely clothed cheerleaders as a common promo background seems to suggest otherwire).
restating the opinions of a Mr. Alexis de Toqueville. de Toqueville argued that one of the inherent dangers of democracy was the tyranny of the majority. In short, that those who are in the majority can and will create laws which are designed not only to keep themselves in the majority but to oppress those that disagree with them.
Yeah, add that to Ibsen's suggestion that the majority is always wrong, and things start looking pretty gloomy.
Free speech != you have to run someone's advertisement or distribute someone's films. This whole argument barely touches on free speech (or truth, for that matter).
No, you don't have to be silent about your disagreeing with one person's representation of the truth, but asking an entire community to boycott a website due to the advertisements which it runs is a dangerous, dangerous slide into the sort of polarity we see in the United States today.
Baloney. Forcing an entire community to do something might be cause for concern (if you could do it), but explaining the reason & then asking is exactly the way to start a boycott.
What they don't seem to get is that you can't simply stuff the genie back in the bottle. If the only way to get music were to either buy the cd, or have a friend copy the cd, then this strategy of 'eliminate the casual copiers' might very well have a major effect. Yet until they find an effective way to deal with file-sharing networks, there is a major backdoor to obtaining music without buying the cd.
On a grander scale it is interesting to watch the industry deal with a drastically changing landscape. Ignore, deny, sue, try band-aid solutions, begin to accept while still trying to do the rest... I really can't wait to see where we are 10 years from now.
'Cos if he doesn't, the federal government will sling his sorry ass in jail!
Yes, a public company MUST put its shareholders first. Government regulation requires them to do so.
Please show me what law/regulation requires a public company to earn as much money as possible, as fast as possible, with no regard for anything else.
The reason I say you're funny is this: the people who complain about heartless corporations are the SAME PEOPLE who insist on government regulation of corporations. In other words, people like you created the very problem that people like you complain about!
Gov't regulation that requires a CEO to work with the company's best interest at heart, as opposed to the CEO's best interest, are not what causes heartless corporate attitudes. A company's interests can be served by (and a CEO would not be sucessfully sued for) acting responsibly with regards to employees, consumer, the environment, and society at large. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people think a CEO/company is legally obligated to obliterate morals in the pursuit of infinite money.
If you want corporations to give a shit about morality, you're going to have to legislate it, and legislating morality always goes badly awry.
I disagree. You merely have to change this 'businesses are supposed to be amoral blood-sucking single-minded greenback whores' meme. Behavior can be legislated, though that rarely works well; but behavior can also be modified by other means.
Anyway thus, don't bring morality into this, unless you're talking about honest to god sweatshops where people are essentially slaves forced to do labor.
Why not? Moral behavior does not mean only avoiding the most horrendous acts.
As for the specific behavior of outsourcing jobs, I am very much of two minds. My original point isn't that outsourcing is evil and shouldn't ever be done...it's that people who proclaim 'Companies are amoral, and are only supposed to maximize profit' are wrong.
Not only is it pervasive, it's the law and called fiduciary responsibility. If the CEO does anything not in the financial best interest of the company, the company can be sued by the shareholders.
No. No. No. This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. Fiduciary responsibility does not equal make the biggest, quickest buck possible. Please show me where in the U.S. Code there is a law stating otherwise. I wish you luck in trying to sue any company for trying to (not downsize|not ship jobs overseas|be environmentally sensitive|offer better than normal benefits|plan for the long term with possible short term detriment|etc etc). CEO's are supposed to act in the best interests of the company, but that is an incredibly fuzzy requirement. Take Ben & Jerry's back in the good ole days...buying milk only from family-owned farms. They paid a pretty penny, and could have lowered costs if they bought from a large dairy conglomerate. Are you suggesting this was illegal?
Companies aren't there to solely to exist as 'damn the torpedos, full steam ahead' amoral corporatist whores. They often act that way, but there has never been a mandate that businesses must do that. Companies, like people are entities that make choices that have consequences. To suggest they have no responsibility for behavior is frightening. That is the exact attitude that I mentioned, and the one that should be adjusted. Just because the government is there to clean up the shit left behind does not mean you (or your business) should just feel free to crap everywhere.
Yes they would show him to the door, because his job is to make money for the shareholders.
If your bank sent you a letter and told you that they had decided that a new policy would be to reduce 20% of your savings annually in order to increase the wages of their local branch tellers so they could match cost of living increases and ensure employee comfort would you (or the average joe) keep banking there? Nope... so why would any shareholders keep money in Intel if they can make more money elsewhere... answer... they won't.
I hate this unfortunately pervasive attitude. The point of a company/CEO/board is not, and should not be to make as much money as quick as possible, at any cost to anyone. Morality ought to be a consideration in business decisions. Why do so many people seem to think that companies should be faceless money-grubbing automatons? That makes me vomit in my own mouth.
There is a place for responsible companies, ones that treat employees, consumers, the environment, etc with respect. There are variouslists that suggest this idea of responsible business isn't totally foreign.
What if you, as a CEO, could make more money by shipping programming jobs to India, should you? What if you could make more by using child labor in Burma? How about if you could make more by dealing with an apartheid supporting regime in South Africa, or a dictatorial regime in the Sudan, or North Korea, or Iraq? How about if you could make more money by overstating earnings reports? What if your motthoople widget would cost a little less if you buy from company A rather than company B, only company A tests it by anally raping baby seals?
Not only is moral behavior a good thing to do, just because; it actually can be good in terms of reputation, public image, and employee karma. If you prefer the Gordon Gecko style of business, so be it... But don't cloak that in the bullshit of 'responsibility to the stockholders.'
What they have done, which is cool, clever and generally admirable, is to add an input (detect protein A, or RNA strand B, etc.) that triggers an appropriate output (synthesise protein C, or make enzyme D to release drug E).
While I agree what they've done is cool and clever, your comment (as well as the linked article, and even the paper itself) are somewhat overstating the actual accomplishment. The original Nature paper this refers to is pretty confusing as it really tries to keep the computer analogy up throughout the whole thing. As best as I can decipher through a quick read-through (and IAABiochemist), they synthesized some long single-stranded DNA molecules. Period. The clever part about it was designing a sequence that, when bound to certain mRNA molecules, will present a known restriction enzyme cleavage site. The restriction enzyme cleaves at that site, and the resultant, shorter molecule can repeat this with a different mRNA molecule. Wash rinse repeat.
This system, and mind you, this is only a model system created in a test tube, free of all the myriad cellular components that might muck it up, only involves inputs and outputs that are small nucliec acids. They do nothing to synthesize, make, or create any proteins (or drugs in the typical sense). The "drug" in this case, is simply a short strand of ssDNA that can prevent the translation of a specific mRNA sequence. The fact that you can do that is, in itself, tremendously cool and potentially therapeutically useful, but is far from novel.
My beef with this it that, while in the strictest sense it might be a "computer," that is a loaded word that implies far more than this research actually delivers. It is a computer in the same sense that the door lock on your car is. It can distinguish a pre-designed set of inputs (certain mRNA sequences vs. a certain set of hills and valleys on your key), and react by either doing something (get cleaved to release a toxic DNA sequence vs. allowing you to physically turn the lock) or not. So, while a novel application of nucleic acid binding, all this talk of 'inputs, computation modules, logical control, and autonomous biomolecular computers' is mostly fluff. (Granted, to get published in Nature or Science you generally need a level of such fluff).
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Bullshit.
Doing "what's best because you think it is" against the will of 90% of the people is wrong.
My point is that the majority of people would support the idea in theory, but not in personal practice. I am not the arbitor of what's best, I am pointing out that belief of an idea in the abstract often does not translate to action in accordance with that idea. I think most people would agree that educating people is good (or does this make me an anti-democratic evil baby-killer), yet many would not make that active choice to give money for it.
If you honestly believe that taking money from poor white's and asians and giving it to poor blacks and hispanics is good for the country, then go make it happen the "right" way. If cou honestly beleieve that race should be a basis for deciding who can go to school and who can't then go out and convince those poor white kids that they don't deserve the money because theywere born with the wrong skin color.
I have not mentioned race at all. I have referred to helping poor students by levying a small fee on people who are able to pay for college. I specifically did not talk about race, as I see it being a very complicated side issue. Ideally, socioeconomic status would be the deciding factor not race...as it happens, though race is actually a pretty reasonable predictor of SES. You can't honestly suggest that $1/credit hour is going to burden the vast majority of students.
Explain to them why they really, really need to be donating to the others and let them choose it. Don't force them, that's evil.
Bullshit again. We as a society frequently force people to do things. Hell, thats what laws are for. We offer tax deductions for charitable donations in order to convince people to do it, this is merely another form of coercion. As much as I wish it were true that frank discussion would get people to act in the best manner, it isn't.
Please get off your race high horse, as that is very much not what I am saying. This issue is very much the NIMBY phenomenon (Not In My BackYard...referring to where we should build necessary but distasteful buildings like prisons and dumps). Everybody agrees we should help poor students (of any race), but start raising taxes and they howl.
-Ted
Do you actually believe that?
That the amount of concern = amount of influence? Seriously, I assume this is a joke.
-Ted
And here I assumed financial support for poor, disadvantaged students was a good thing.
The point is that, like taxes, when presented as such a question, few people would choose to pay. Rather than making you pay, we are asking you to contribute 20to40-some percent of your income to the [county|state|federal] government? There's a reason things don't work that way.
I would bet that most people would also admit that scholarships for disadvantaged students are a good thing, while at the same time declining to contribute.
-Ted
Inherently fair is rather loose concept. Is it inherently fair that some are able to afford college and others aren't?
-Ted
Because 90% of those you ask would say no.
-Ted
Another question about a loser-pays system, does the losing law firm pay? If not, then the lawyers have little incentive not to behave as they do now...it just means the clients will get screwed harder. If the law firm is fiscally responsible, then you can bet they will limit the types of cases filed to ones with 3 eyewitnesses, a bystanding police officer, on video tape with perfect DNA evidence. This is essentially limiting the value of the judicial system if it only deals in cases that are so obvious it would take braindead jurors to find against. As is clear juries can do strange things, return results seemingly at odds with popular perception (OJ's innocence, etc etc), it just seems like loser-pays would not work.
I would also agree that our society if far too litigious as a whole. I guess I'm not convinced though, that loser-pays is the best solution in a rather squishy justice system. I wish there were a better one, but it seems the lack of such an idea is the reason tort reform is so complicated.
-Ted
Pray tell why you don't believe that argument?
-Ted
Not true. While it may inflate your ego, it does not *only* do that. To even attempt that claim is just silly.
You may think you are doing a good thing but companies which can afford to buy application software would buy software as a matter of regular business and treat it as a business expense.
Yet now that they don't have to spend money on a commercial product, they can spend more money on R&D, improved product design, etc etc, or just pocket it as profit for shareholders. Whatever happens, the company has become more economically efficient.
If you create Application software which replaces software produced by smaller companies as closed source, you eliminate the following jobs: programmer, various support staff at the company, executives, advertising jobs, sales clerks, delivery/shipping jobs as well as all of the trickle down jobs in the community.
So what? If a company is being outcompeted, then it is supposed to die. It is just asinine to suggest *not* being productive in order to save a company. As for those shipping jobs/etc, they will just need to move on to another company (perhaps one that is now viable as it doesnt have to spend money for a closed-source software package).
Oh and that non-software company that saves money with open source will most likely will not buy support from you and the principles will pocket the money instead of creating even Mc Jobs to support it.
Have anything at all to back up that claim? Or are you just spewing bullshit to try and support your point?
Why not contribute to society instead of contributing to its problems by putting more people on the street?
Again, eliminating a company that is unable to compete is *not* the same as putting people out on the street. Efficiency and wealth are not zero-sum games.
I completely agree that more people should do the type of volunteer work you mention. To suggest that contributing to open-source projects is bad, however, is just flat-out wrong. Arguing that open-source development is "stealing jobs" just shows an incredibly poor understanding of how capitalism works.
-Ted
Damn straight, that space is reserved for Backdoor Sluts 9.
-Ted
It's a fact? Really? Care to tell us how you can be that certain? Surely, to be so confident, you are privy to more information than a single article posted to a newspaper's website. Oh, right, I forgot...if it's on the internet it must be true.
Well, even assuming he did it the way it was written (which is an assumption), I think the parent's point was that a year in jail seems excessive. You can tell a lot about a society by the levels of punishment certain crimes reap. Sure, Singapore has got clean streets, but is it worth caning litterers to accomplish that? The level of punishment copyright infringement laws have behind them in the US is scandalous. This kid would've been better off driving drunk, buying some crack, or torturing an animal. I for one, would tend to consider those crimes worse than taping a crappy cam copy of a movie that is guananteed to make hundreds of millions of dollars regardless. I have the hardest time imagining that watching a telesync copy of spiderman 2 is really going to substitute for an actual movie-going experience. Those who are satisfied with a usenet version are not likely to be those who would go see it in a theater anyway.
-Ted
Let's see, 4.5gb * 166 = 747gb
747gb * 12mon/8mon = 1120.5 gb/year.
You know, at some point, you can have too much porn.
-Ted
Oh c'mon, you just wanted the first "Gmail is dying" post, didn't you?
We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more
Or maybe it'll do to Yahoo mail what Google did to Yahoo search.
I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail.
Superior? To what? The still beta Gmail filter about which very little is really known? Doesn't it seem likely that a company as into research as Google would be able to create a damn fine filter technology? (Beyond which, I wouldn't even call yahoo's spam filter that good...)
There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period.
Make a killing off of all those users of its free email system?
Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.
I don't buy it, but more to the point, Gmail is still in beta. Still will be for a while, and making any predictions of how things will go is just kind of silly.
-Ted
Plenty of people say "ain't" and "mute point" as well, that doesn't change the fact that you come across as ignorant if you do. You can say your radio is busted, or your car is broke. You can use irregardless all you want, but doing so will make you sound like an idiot, regardless of whether you are or not. "Begs the question" has an established meaning that refers to presupposing your conclusion by how you state the question. You can (and many do) use it, of course, to mean 'raises the question,' or 'makes you wonder.' If you don't mind some of your audience thinking you are a poor speaker (or writer), or just plain stupid, then go right ahead. While you are at it, feel free to mispronounce it "lye-nucks."
-Ted
-Ted
Huh? It chose to watch an event with a half-time show produced by MTV. That was far from a secret, in fact it had been advertised as such. What it got was, frankly, pretty tame for MTV. Had it been a half-time show produced by PAX TV or ABC Family, then perhaps they'd have a reason to complain.
not the regulatory agency that is chartered to represent that audience.
Was there a survey I missed? Did we somehow establish that the 1.5 seconds of barely distinguishable nipple actually upset more than 50% of the super bowl watching population? Or, more to the point, when was the last time the FCC actually asked the audience what it was upset by? This regulatory agency administration has no mandate from the public whatsoever. It has an appointed leader who gets to decide when to what he thinks is ok, the public has essentially no input or recourse.
You keep saying the FCC has a duty to be the maintain a level of decency for population, but there is nothing to suggest it determines that level by anything more encompassing than its leader's personal opinion of indecency. So while Mr Powell may take issue with a *gasp* nipple, it remains to be determined if the majority of us were offended (& the prevalence of barely clothed cheerleaders as a common promo background seems to suggest otherwire).
-Ted
Yeah, add that to Ibsen's suggestion that the majority is always wrong, and things start looking pretty gloomy.
-Ted
No, you don't have to be silent about your disagreeing with one person's representation of the truth, but asking an entire community to boycott a website due to the advertisements which it runs is a dangerous, dangerous slide into the sort of polarity we see in the United States today.
Baloney. Forcing an entire community to do something might be cause for concern (if you could do it), but explaining the reason & then asking is exactly the way to start a boycott.
-Ted
On a grander scale it is interesting to watch the industry deal with a drastically changing landscape. Ignore, deny, sue, try band-aid solutions, begin to accept while still trying to do the rest... I really can't wait to see where we are 10 years from now.
-Ted
Fucklaod?
Fucklode?
-Ted
Well, if the point of a fine is to prevent behavior, then you would be stupid not to.
-Ted
Yes, a public company MUST put its shareholders first. Government regulation requires them to do so.
Please show me what law/regulation requires a public company to earn as much money as possible, as fast as possible, with no regard for anything else.
The reason I say you're funny is this: the people who complain about heartless corporations are the SAME PEOPLE who insist on government regulation of corporations. In other words, people like you created the very problem that people like you complain about!
Gov't regulation that requires a CEO to work with the company's best interest at heart, as opposed to the CEO's best interest, are not what causes heartless corporate attitudes. A company's interests can be served by (and a CEO would not be sucessfully sued for) acting responsibly with regards to employees, consumer, the environment, and society at large. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people think a CEO/company is legally obligated to obliterate morals in the pursuit of infinite money.
-Ted
I disagree. You merely have to change this 'businesses are supposed to be amoral blood-sucking single-minded greenback whores' meme. Behavior can be legislated, though that rarely works well; but behavior can also be modified by other means.
Anyway thus, don't bring morality into this, unless you're talking about honest to god sweatshops where people are essentially slaves forced to do labor.
Why not? Moral behavior does not mean only avoiding the most horrendous acts.
As for the specific behavior of outsourcing jobs, I am very much of two minds. My original point isn't that outsourcing is evil and shouldn't ever be done...it's that people who proclaim 'Companies are amoral, and are only supposed to maximize profit' are wrong.
-Ted
No. No. No. This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. Fiduciary responsibility does not equal make the biggest, quickest buck possible. Please show me where in the U.S. Code there is a law stating otherwise. I wish you luck in trying to sue any company for trying to (not downsize|not ship jobs overseas|be environmentally sensitive|offer better than normal benefits|plan for the long term with possible short term detriment|etc etc). CEO's are supposed to act in the best interests of the company, but that is an incredibly fuzzy requirement. Take Ben & Jerry's back in the good ole days...buying milk only from family-owned farms. They paid a pretty penny, and could have lowered costs if they bought from a large dairy conglomerate. Are you suggesting this was illegal?
Companies aren't there to solely to exist as 'damn the torpedos, full steam ahead' amoral corporatist whores. They often act that way, but there has never been a mandate that businesses must do that. Companies, like people are entities that make choices that have consequences. To suggest they have no responsibility for behavior is frightening. That is the exact attitude that I mentioned, and the one that should be adjusted. Just because the government is there to clean up the shit left behind does not mean you (or your business) should just feel free to crap everywhere.
-Ted
If your bank sent you a letter and told you that they had decided that a new policy would be to reduce 20% of your savings annually in order to increase the wages of their local branch tellers so they could match cost of living increases and ensure employee comfort would you (or the average joe) keep banking there? Nope... so why would any shareholders keep money in Intel if they can make more money elsewhere... answer... they won't.
I hate this unfortunately pervasive attitude. The point of a company/CEO/board is not, and should not be to make as much money as quick as possible, at any cost to anyone. Morality ought to be a consideration in business decisions. Why do so many people seem to think that companies should be faceless money-grubbing automatons? That makes me vomit in my own mouth.
There is a place for responsible companies, ones that treat employees, consumers, the environment, etc with respect. There are various lists that suggest this idea of responsible business isn't totally foreign.
What if you, as a CEO, could make more money by shipping programming jobs to India, should you? What if you could make more by using child labor in Burma? How about if you could make more by dealing with an apartheid supporting regime in South Africa, or a dictatorial regime in the Sudan, or North Korea, or Iraq? How about if you could make more money by overstating earnings reports? What if your motthoople widget would cost a little less if you buy from company A rather than company B, only company A tests it by anally raping baby seals?
Not only is moral behavior a good thing to do, just because; it actually can be good in terms of reputation, public image, and employee karma. If you prefer the Gordon Gecko style of business, so be it... But don't cloak that in the bullshit of 'responsibility to the stockholders.'
-Ted
While I agree what they've done is cool and clever, your comment (as well as the linked article, and even the paper itself) are somewhat overstating the actual accomplishment. The original Nature paper this refers to is pretty confusing as it really tries to keep the computer analogy up throughout the whole thing. As best as I can decipher through a quick read-through (and IAABiochemist), they synthesized some long single-stranded DNA molecules. Period. The clever part about it was designing a sequence that, when bound to certain mRNA molecules, will present a known restriction enzyme cleavage site. The restriction enzyme cleaves at that site, and the resultant, shorter molecule can repeat this with a different mRNA molecule. Wash rinse repeat.
This system, and mind you, this is only a model system created in a test tube, free of all the myriad cellular components that might muck it up, only involves inputs and outputs that are small nucliec acids. They do nothing to synthesize, make, or create any proteins (or drugs in the typical sense). The "drug" in this case, is simply a short strand of ssDNA that can prevent the translation of a specific mRNA sequence. The fact that you can do that is, in itself, tremendously cool and potentially therapeutically useful, but is far from novel.
My beef with this it that, while in the strictest sense it might be a "computer," that is a loaded word that implies far more than this research actually delivers. It is a computer in the same sense that the door lock on your car is. It can distinguish a pre-designed set of inputs (certain mRNA sequences vs. a certain set of hills and valleys on your key), and react by either doing something (get cleaved to release a toxic DNA sequence vs. allowing you to physically turn the lock) or not. So, while a novel application of nucleic acid binding, all this talk of 'inputs, computation modules, logical control, and autonomous biomolecular computers' is mostly fluff. (Granted, to get published in Nature or Science you generally need a level of such fluff).
-Ted