He wasn't being rewarded for incompetence. He may have been rewarded by incompetents though. Even if you assume that the stock still has a ways to go down:
It grew by a factor of 8 in 30 years. That's at least decent performance. It's probably oversold, in which case that is an understatement of the performance. Anyway, I'm not really trying to establish that Mozillo deserves all the money that he was awarded, I'm just pointing out that back when everybody thought that the stock was worth $50 a share, they weren't pissed off about anything he did, and the claim that he sold based on insider knowledge, rather than for some other reasons, needs quite a bit of substantiation before you blame him for everything that Countrywide did(or had happen to them).
My tendency is to blame the people who shouldn't have been seeking mortgages, the companies that should have been more diligent in issuing mortgages, the companies that should have been more honest in packaging mortgages, the companies that should have been more careful in rating those packaged mortgages and the people bought the packaged mortgages, who should have been more careful about what they were buying. I also blame the government for doing a poor job of adjusting regulations(the failure shows that they did not understand the implications of the changes they made, and the sheer size of it is a pretty good argument that they should have been making smaller/more gradual changes).
So until it is well established that he acted in bad faith, I'm not going to blame him any more than I blame anyone else when his situation is just as easily explained by luck. And really, it's sort of hard to claim that he was acting in bad faith except for the first $20 million or so, at which point his position was pretty clear(now is a good time to allocate out of Countrywide) to anybody who was bothering to look. Take a look at how his sales were structured, I linked it above. He exercised options and sold the resulting stock over a period of more than a year, and at prices between $18 and $45. Here's a link with just his transactions:
Here's the kicker: I think executive compensation is often ridiculous, but I don't see it changing any, as people are expecting higher and higher levels of personal responsibility(what would it take to get you to take responsibility for $1 billion? A couple of hundred thousand wouldn't be very attractive to me, assuming I could find a similarly rewarding job with less exposure), and the field of potential candidates is kept small because of things like the outrage expressed over bad hires, and the lack of decent ways of estimating peoples ability to do the job leading to only hiring people with an extensive proven record(there is lots of demand for these people, and a small supply...).
Sure. I wasn't very clear, but what I was getting at is that comparing the amounts of steel from now and then isn't very meaningful, because the whats have changed so much. I was making the case that U.S. industry hasn't really fallen apart, and not really thinking about anything relative to Japan.
So the U.S. might not have the technology to make enormous forgings, but we could certainly pull together the resources if it became immediately important, which is how I interpret 'industrial base'(and then, resources assembled, set about working out the technology). It sort of sounds like no other foundry in Japan even has the technology.
A pipe and a wire aren't the same thing. Among other things, a broken power line presents a small local problem with few long term consequences, whereas a broken pipe presents a much larger problem, as it dumps pollution directly into the environment, and exposes the entire segment of pipe to fire risks. Also, you can nearly instantly take nearly all the energy out of an electrical grid of arbitrary size, something that isn't at all possible with fluid fuels. The electric analog of 'pumping losses' is such that you don't need to put booster pumps in all over the place. It's not a good analogy.
Also, much of the time, universities own their power plants because, in combination, they control enough facilities to make waste steam heat highly attractive, have irregular power needs for research, and find them useful for teaching.
As far as showing solid justification by reason and economic analysis, we wait with baited breath.
Understand what? That we haven't lost our industrial base? That we have a huge export economy?
(and Alcoa and Intel make stuff all over the world; this doesn't change the fact that they have significant production operations in the United States)
I'm wasn't responding to the lamentation that the U.S. is apparently incapable of producing one of these giant forgings, I was responding to the ridiculous idea that all the economic activity of whatever golden age of American industry up and disappeared. It didn't disappear, it shifted to other activity, and when you count things up, there is more industry here than there was 25 or 50 years ago. So yes, as a percentage of our overall economy, heavy industry has dropped, but the economy has grown so much that the actual amount of heavy industry has increased, and instead of just paying people to work in steel mills, we can pay them to do silly things like program computers.
And the U.S. is actually a pretty popular place to do heavy industry. We are politically stable, have cheap, available energy(Coal!) and a good portion of the workforce is highly skilled. We certainly don't have a monopoly on any of those things, but it's hard to argue that we should.
You still haven't explained what it is about the current regulatory environment that is stopping a motivated capitalist from distributing power in giant batteries.
My personal speculation would be that it would be a great deal more expensive than the government imposed status quo, so no one is bothering. As far as the power distribution stuff, I'm pretty sure that private companies are perfectly capable of negotiating easements and building redundant power lines and power plants, but they simply don't because the number of people that would switch over to their system would never be justified by the increases in efficiency that they would expect.
Here's a thought. Milton Friedman is certainly smarter than I am, and there is at least a chance he is smarter than you are, and he is a huge advocate of free markets(and among the most highly credible), and he still believed in some government intervention.
On the other hand, the steel that U.S. Steel makes now is high quality, special purpose alloys, and Alcoa is refining quite a bit more aluminum than they were in 1902 and Caterpillar is doing 'OK' globally. No one scoffs at Intel chips, and they are among the most intensely manufactured objects in existence.
It really doesn't matter where cheap steel is coming from; it isn't particularly profitable to make, and it is the easiest capacity to add, so why should anybody be surprised that American companies aren't trying to compete with cheaper foreign labor for the title of biggest steel company?
The complete institutional failure of the federal government in responding to Katrina was not one person's fault.
Mozillo(the former Countrywide CEO that you are talking about) made a planned sale of stock(and soon to expire options) meeting the standards of Countrywide's compensation committee and the SEC. He spent 30 plus years building the company and sold when the stock was doing incredibly well, but it's not like he was hiding anything(because there are rules in place preventing him from hiding anything):
If I had the choice of exercising some options and making millions, or doing nothing and making nothing, I would exercise those options. Maybe the process that granted him those options needs improvement, but there isn't really anything offensive about him exercising them(unless you hate people making large sums of money).
Chuck Prince's compensation may be offensive, but somebody was on the other side of the negotiations and is at least as responsible as he is(not to mention everybody else involved in mismanaging Citigroup). Castigating him personally feels good, but it isn't like he was operating in some black hole, a company as large and diverse as Citigroup is subject to constant, intense scrutiny from both investors and regulators. They all failed right along with him.
(and I did hesitate to link to Popular Mechanics, as they are a bit rah rah patriotic for this here, but I doubt very much that they are outright lying)
I bet that the exponential growth from the 1% interest is a poor global model of your bank account, but that it is a good approximation between transactions.
The point? The overall model isn't quite meaningless.
Estimate the difference in the amount of time it would take you to farm, process and cook and brew, and the time it takes you to earn the money to pay for pizza and beer.
What exactly is it about the government imposed monopoly that is preventing your giant battery scenario? Are the giant battery capitalists unable to build their own power stations(or for that matter, buy power off the grid), are they unable to buy batteries, are they unable to interface with standard household electrical systems? Is it just a stupid idea?
And don't misunderstand, I think markets are a great way of allocating things, and I think that regulation is often bad. I just don't think it is necessarily bad.
What if the human equivalent required 31 days of processing time? I don't disagree with what you are saying about having a decent fundamental model, but wave your hands in the air and decide how much computation a human brain does between birth and age four. If you don't have some enormous multiple of that computing power just sitting around, you aren't going to be able to compare(or even develop) many models that are similar in complexity.
Then this whole thread was a waste of time. Here's how I started it: "If I own the copyright to some code and I release it under the GPL".
I was never questioning that code published under the GPL is pretty much GPL for life, I was clarifying that the GPL doesn't prevent a copyright holder from doing whatever the hell he wants, except trying to withdraw anything that has been distributed under GPL(including any ongoing obligation to provide source code).
To the extent that something can be put into the public domain, it is done by disclaiming rights. The GPL is an assertion that you will only exercise your rights against someone who fails to act in a certain way regarding your work. Principles regarding a disclaimer aren't going to obviously apply to something that is fundamentally a restriction(people wishing to distribute GPL code are restricted in the sense that they have to follow the GPL in doing so, public domain is the copyright analog to unrestricted).
All I am saying is that if I have thing A and I create copies B and C, and then say to the world "Let the GPL apply to C", I haven't done anything that has any implications on A or B, regardless of whether they are verbatim(modulo licensing text and whatnot) copies of C or not. I can't later try to say that the GPL no longer applies to C, but I can do whatever the heck I want with A and B. TrollTech did this for years, and I'm pretty sure they stopped for community reasons, not legal ones.
If I own the copyright to some code and I release it under the GPL, I do not give up my right to release it under a different license. I can't stop other people from using and distributing the code I released under the GPL, but I can make a derivative and release it under any license I choose. I think this is mostly a clearer way of stating what you meant in "basis of that code is GPL".
Another reply points out that there haven't been any court decisions about whether it can be withdrawn; the cphack case looks like a weak test of this to me, if the release wasn't agreed to by both copyright holders(are they joint holders?), then it isn't a question of the revocability of the GPL, but a question of whether the code was ever released under the GPL. I doubt any court will end up agreeing that someone can intentionally release work under something like the GPL and then later take it back, but that doesn't make the presence of GPL notice a magic provenance stick.
Saying that they worked closely with Apple, based on that article, is an enormous exaggeration. It's also a bit silly to say that Apple used their technology without providing specific backing evidence. It appears that Apple used an idea that they had discussed with whatever incarnation of ZapMedia, but an idea does not a technology make(calling something a technology pretty much requires an implementation).
(not a huge amount of output, but it has every appearance of being 'viable', it just isn't productive enough to satisfy demand so much that prices actually drop)
Roomba is a hit.
There are vaccines for the common cold. They aren't perfect, but they are either well marketed enough or effective enough that millions of people get them. If it's the marketing, they are vaporware, if they work, they aren't.
Solid state is growing capacities slightly faster. If that keeps up, they will eventually be cheaper per unit capacity, and larger, making reliability and power consumption the deciding factors.
Exercise won't be a waste of time when you hit 25. Especially if you drink.
Besides, your position is that strength *should* be irrelevant; as long as people occasionally get beaten by other people(I'm talking real world here, not idealism land), it can be handy to be the one who gets beaten less.
There are plenty of people who aren't all that creative and of relatively normal intelligence who know technology well. There are also plenty of people in the military who are creative and intelligent. Paul Graham argues like this: I'm imaginative and I don't like to lead or follow; this is therefore a property of imaginative people. It's a false generalization, and it is easy to simply consider the evidence that supports it while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. If you realize that he is writing a persuasive essay and simply using an informative tone(rather than writing an informative essay), his positions are usually quite a bit less compelling.
So the other way of asking your question is, how do you get someone who is politically tone deaf to do a political job. The answer is, you find someone who can do the job and is not politically tone deaf, because the tone deaf guy is hopeless. If you start with the silly dichotomy between 'hacker types' and 'PR types'(which is really just a way of calling someone who is aware enough to and willing to make political concessions an ass kisser), you won't believe that someone with both abilities exists. That's non-sense, especially when you have admitted that you see the necessity of acting in a political manner.
Of course, I would rather take the ninnies who think that people in the Pentagon shouldn't have opinions(because they have them, no matter what) and explain to them that it is probably better for them to be able to express their opinions than it is to require them to pretend that they don't have them, but there seems to be more ninnies than rational people, so acting political is necessary for lots of people.
Money is only one of any number of threats to the integrity of such an organization. People inside the organization subverting resources to their own ends, building little zones of control, and so on. You deal with them all the same way -- by operating as openly as possible. If people can see where the money is coming from, they can make up their own minds about its influence.
Underwater scenes. Denser and denser forest. Older and older historical recreations of the building site. A zoom out from Earth to the solar system, and so on. Skiing down a mountain. Parachuting.
Slashdot Mirror
He wasn't being rewarded for incompetence. He may have been rewarded by incompetents though. Even if you assume that the stock still has a ways to go down:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=CFC&t=my
It grew by a factor of 8 in 30 years. That's at least decent performance. It's probably oversold, in which case that is an understatement of the performance. Anyway, I'm not really trying to establish that Mozillo deserves all the money that he was awarded, I'm just pointing out that back when everybody thought that the stock was worth $50 a share, they weren't pissed off about anything he did, and the claim that he sold based on insider knowledge, rather than for some other reasons, needs quite a bit of substantiation before you blame him for everything that Countrywide did(or had happen to them).
My tendency is to blame the people who shouldn't have been seeking mortgages, the companies that should have been more diligent in issuing mortgages, the companies that should have been more honest in packaging mortgages, the companies that should have been more careful in rating those packaged mortgages and the people bought the packaged mortgages, who should have been more careful about what they were buying. I also blame the government for doing a poor job of adjusting regulations(the failure shows that they did not understand the implications of the changes they made, and the sheer size of it is a pretty good argument that they should have been making smaller/more gradual changes).
So until it is well established that he acted in bad faith, I'm not going to blame him any more than I blame anyone else when his situation is just as easily explained by luck. And really, it's sort of hard to claim that he was acting in bad faith except for the first $20 million or so, at which point his position was pretty clear(now is a good time to allocate out of Countrywide) to anybody who was bothering to look. Take a look at how his sales were structured, I linked it above. He exercised options and sold the resulting stock over a period of more than a year, and at prices between $18 and $45. Here's a link with just his transactions:
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/18/6026.html
Here's the kicker: I think executive compensation is often ridiculous, but I don't see it changing any, as people are expecting higher and higher levels of personal responsibility(what would it take to get you to take responsibility for $1 billion? A couple of hundred thousand wouldn't be very attractive to me, assuming I could find a similarly rewarding job with less exposure), and the field of potential candidates is kept small because of things like the outrage expressed over bad hires, and the lack of decent ways of estimating peoples ability to do the job leading to only hiring people with an extensive proven record(there is lots of demand for these people, and a small supply...).
Sure. I wasn't very clear, but what I was getting at is that comparing the amounts of steel from now and then isn't very meaningful, because the whats have changed so much. I was making the case that U.S. industry hasn't really fallen apart, and not really thinking about anything relative to Japan.
So the U.S. might not have the technology to make enormous forgings, but we could certainly pull together the resources if it became immediately important, which is how I interpret 'industrial base'(and then, resources assembled, set about working out the technology). It sort of sounds like no other foundry in Japan even has the technology.
I don't think Britney's celebrity status has a whole lot to do with how much she gets screwed.
A pipe and a wire aren't the same thing. Among other things, a broken power line presents a small local problem with few long term consequences, whereas a broken pipe presents a much larger problem, as it dumps pollution directly into the environment, and exposes the entire segment of pipe to fire risks. Also, you can nearly instantly take nearly all the energy out of an electrical grid of arbitrary size, something that isn't at all possible with fluid fuels. The electric analog of 'pumping losses' is such that you don't need to put booster pumps in all over the place. It's not a good analogy.
Also, much of the time, universities own their power plants because, in combination, they control enough facilities to make waste steam heat highly attractive, have irregular power needs for research, and find them useful for teaching.
As far as showing solid justification by reason and economic analysis, we wait with baited breath.
Understand what? That we haven't lost our industrial base? That we have a huge export economy?
(and Alcoa and Intel make stuff all over the world; this doesn't change the fact that they have significant production operations in the United States)
I'm wasn't responding to the lamentation that the U.S. is apparently incapable of producing one of these giant forgings, I was responding to the ridiculous idea that all the economic activity of whatever golden age of American industry up and disappeared. It didn't disappear, it shifted to other activity, and when you count things up, there is more industry here than there was 25 or 50 years ago. So yes, as a percentage of our overall economy, heavy industry has dropped, but the economy has grown so much that the actual amount of heavy industry has increased, and instead of just paying people to work in steel mills, we can pay them to do silly things like program computers.
And the U.S. is actually a pretty popular place to do heavy industry. We are politically stable, have cheap, available energy(Coal!) and a good portion of the workforce is highly skilled. We certainly don't have a monopoly on any of those things, but it's hard to argue that we should.
You still haven't explained what it is about the current regulatory environment that is stopping a motivated capitalist from distributing power in giant batteries.
My personal speculation would be that it would be a great deal more expensive than the government imposed status quo, so no one is bothering. As far as the power distribution stuff, I'm pretty sure that private companies are perfectly capable of negotiating easements and building redundant power lines and power plants, but they simply don't because the number of people that would switch over to their system would never be justified by the increases in efficiency that they would expect.
Here's a thought. Milton Friedman is certainly smarter than I am, and there is at least a chance he is smarter than you are, and he is a huge advocate of free markets(and among the most highly credible), and he still believed in some government intervention.
On the other hand, the steel that U.S. Steel makes now is high quality, special purpose alloys, and Alcoa is refining quite a bit more aluminum than they were in 1902 and Caterpillar is doing 'OK' globally. No one scoffs at Intel chips, and they are among the most intensely manufactured objects in existence.
It really doesn't matter where cheap steel is coming from; it isn't particularly profitable to make, and it is the easiest capacity to add, so why should anybody be surprised that American companies aren't trying to compete with cheaper foreign labor for the title of biggest steel company?
The complete institutional failure of the federal government in responding to Katrina was not one person's fault.
Mozillo(the former Countrywide CEO that you are talking about) made a planned sale of stock(and soon to expire options) meeting the standards of Countrywide's compensation committee and the SEC. He spent 30 plus years building the company and sold when the stock was doing incredibly well, but it's not like he was hiding anything(because there are rules in place preventing him from hiding anything):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=CFC
If I had the choice of exercising some options and making millions, or doing nothing and making nothing, I would exercise those options. Maybe the process that granted him those options needs improvement, but there isn't really anything offensive about him exercising them(unless you hate people making large sums of money).
Chuck Prince's compensation may be offensive, but somebody was on the other side of the negotiations and is at least as responsible as he is(not to mention everybody else involved in mismanaging Citigroup). Castigating him personally feels good, but it isn't like he was operating in some black hole, a company as large and diverse as Citigroup is subject to constant, intense scrutiny from both investors and regulators. They all failed right along with him.
They might be busy:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4249332.html
(and I did hesitate to link to Popular Mechanics, as they are a bit rah rah patriotic for this here, but I doubt very much that they are outright lying)
I bet that the exponential growth from the 1% interest is a poor global model of your bank account, but that it is a good approximation between transactions.
The point? The overall model isn't quite meaningless.
Estimate the difference in the amount of time it would take you to farm, process and cook and brew, and the time it takes you to earn the money to pay for pizza and beer.
Then make do with the nearly free beer and pizza.
What exactly is it about the government imposed monopoly that is preventing your giant battery scenario? Are the giant battery capitalists unable to build their own power stations(or for that matter, buy power off the grid), are they unable to buy batteries, are they unable to interface with standard household electrical systems? Is it just a stupid idea?
And don't misunderstand, I think markets are a great way of allocating things, and I think that regulation is often bad. I just don't think it is necessarily bad.
What if the human equivalent required 31 days of processing time? I don't disagree with what you are saying about having a decent fundamental model, but wave your hands in the air and decide how much computation a human brain does between birth and age four. If you don't have some enormous multiple of that computing power just sitting around, you aren't going to be able to compare(or even develop) many models that are similar in complexity.
There is a touch of the foolish and naive when it comes to politics in general.
Then this whole thread was a waste of time. Here's how I started it: "If I own the copyright to some code and I release it under the GPL".
I was never questioning that code published under the GPL is pretty much GPL for life, I was clarifying that the GPL doesn't prevent a copyright holder from doing whatever the hell he wants, except trying to withdraw anything that has been distributed under GPL(including any ongoing obligation to provide source code).
In that case, you are essentially arguing that holding the copyright is somehow a lesser grant of rights than the GPL. I doubt that this is true.
To the extent that something can be put into the public domain, it is done by disclaiming rights. The GPL is an assertion that you will only exercise your rights against someone who fails to act in a certain way regarding your work. Principles regarding a disclaimer aren't going to obviously apply to something that is fundamentally a restriction(people wishing to distribute GPL code are restricted in the sense that they have to follow the GPL in doing so, public domain is the copyright analog to unrestricted).
All I am saying is that if I have thing A and I create copies B and C, and then say to the world "Let the GPL apply to C", I haven't done anything that has any implications on A or B, regardless of whether they are verbatim(modulo licensing text and whatnot) copies of C or not. I can't later try to say that the GPL no longer applies to C, but I can do whatever the heck I want with A and B. TrollTech did this for years, and I'm pretty sure they stopped for community reasons, not legal ones.
If I own the copyright to some code and I release it under the GPL, I do not give up my right to release it under a different license. I can't stop other people from using and distributing the code I released under the GPL, but I can make a derivative and release it under any license I choose. I think this is mostly a clearer way of stating what you meant in "basis of that code is GPL".
Another reply points out that there haven't been any court decisions about whether it can be withdrawn; the cphack case looks like a weak test of this to me, if the release wasn't agreed to by both copyright holders(are they joint holders?), then it isn't a question of the revocability of the GPL, but a question of whether the code was ever released under the GPL. I doubt any court will end up agreeing that someone can intentionally release work under something like the GPL and then later take it back, but that doesn't make the presence of GPL notice a magic provenance stick.
Saying that they worked closely with Apple, based on that article, is an enormous exaggeration. It's also a bit silly to say that Apple used their technology without providing specific backing evidence. It appears that Apple used an idea that they had discussed with whatever incarnation of ZapMedia, but an idea does not a technology make(calling something a technology pretty much requires an implementation).
3, 4 and 5 are doing OK.
Oil Sands:
http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OurBusiness/oilsands.asp
(not a huge amount of output, but it has every appearance of being 'viable', it just isn't productive enough to satisfy demand so much that prices actually drop)
Roomba is a hit.
There are vaccines for the common cold. They aren't perfect, but they are either well marketed enough or effective enough that millions of people get them. If it's the marketing, they are vaporware, if they work, they aren't.
Solid state is growing capacities slightly faster. If that keeps up, they will eventually be cheaper per unit capacity, and larger, making reliability and power consumption the deciding factors.
Exercise won't be a waste of time when you hit 25. Especially if you drink.
Besides, your position is that strength *should* be irrelevant; as long as people occasionally get beaten by other people(I'm talking real world here, not idealism land), it can be handy to be the one who gets beaten less.
There are plenty of people who aren't all that creative and of relatively normal intelligence who know technology well. There are also plenty of people in the military who are creative and intelligent. Paul Graham argues like this: I'm imaginative and I don't like to lead or follow; this is therefore a property of imaginative people. It's a false generalization, and it is easy to simply consider the evidence that supports it while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. If you realize that he is writing a persuasive essay and simply using an informative tone(rather than writing an informative essay), his positions are usually quite a bit less compelling.
So the other way of asking your question is, how do you get someone who is politically tone deaf to do a political job. The answer is, you find someone who can do the job and is not politically tone deaf, because the tone deaf guy is hopeless. If you start with the silly dichotomy between 'hacker types' and 'PR types'(which is really just a way of calling someone who is aware enough to and willing to make political concessions an ass kisser), you won't believe that someone with both abilities exists. That's non-sense, especially when you have admitted that you see the necessity of acting in a political manner.
Of course, I would rather take the ninnies who think that people in the Pentagon shouldn't have opinions(because they have them, no matter what) and explain to them that it is probably better for them to be able to express their opinions than it is to require them to pretend that they don't have them, but there seems to be more ninnies than rational people, so acting political is necessary for lots of people.
Money is only one of any number of threats to the integrity of such an organization. People inside the organization subverting resources to their own ends, building little zones of control, and so on. You deal with them all the same way -- by operating as openly as possible. If people can see where the money is coming from, they can make up their own minds about its influence.
Underwater scenes. Denser and denser forest. Older and older historical recreations of the building site. A zoom out from Earth to the solar system, and so on. Skiing down a mountain. Parachuting.
Still, Hell would be a lot more fun.