IT support is supposed to be a service wherebye the customer is provided with help so that they can use their computers productively.
Not an occupation which is closely modeled on the activities of Nazi doctors using their power and knowledge to torture and abuse people in the persuit of their own interests.
Notice the difference between the two occupations?
The user may be stupid but if you or the department you work for is unable to help that user then it is you and your department who has failed.
Making a joke of ignorance is fine between experts as part of the recognition that you and your collegues share the same burden - "blah blah blah hadnt switched the power on.. ha ha ha" But that doesnt mean that you are excused from having patience and being professional.
If you want to be taken seriously then start acting seriously. I dont notice medical doctors getting bored with their patients and for a joke amputating a leg instead of an ingrowing toenail because the patient was too stupid to cut their nails correctly and wear the right footware. Likewise your user may be stupid but you are never going to get paid diddly squat unless they think your service is worth more than the sh*t wages most so called IS departments think they can get away with.
Its not just a matter of touch typing these days though. A shorthand language is ideal for SMS text messaging on mobile phones where the entry method is by multiple key presses on the same key to get different letters. Even with predictive word completion you can get more on the screen if you use compressed spellings.
Of course all this may fade into ancient history when the phone can translate speech into text - or your voicemail gets translated into text.
Language mutates over time and has always done so, sub languages have the potential to appear more rapidly than ever before with the increase in transmission brought about by broadcast media. Major dictionaries recognise the importance of incorporating new and slang words because this reflects the actual use of language. There is no point trying to officialy reject modifications to language because the available standards bodies then lose the power to make those standards. What has to be made clear though to young people is the importance of recognising the difference between plain language and jargon language.
Jargon language is any subset which is unlikely to be understood outside a minority group. No one would deny the usefulness of shorthand writing for the manual transcription of speech into a written form, similarly the contractions used in chat forums have their place. I am sure that my parents would understand a text message that said "r u ok". Politeness would dictate though that I used their language to ask the question. Teaching should therefore allow the use of jargon in a controled manner - what we need is a recognised standards authority to publish a dictionary and frequency table of these words. Then a teacher can happily devote a couple of lessons to Chat room language and ban it from the rest of plain language communication.
As the Borg show, the handiest way to subdue a foe is to absorb them and make them one of us.
I shall imediately start construction of my own dot com disaster portal featuring a freqency scanned dictionary of jargon from text messaging, chat rooms and exciting subversive alternative words. Or maybe someone has already done it - let me know if they have.
Make sure that machine intelligence gets smarter than the monkeys first - and wipes out all other intelligent lifeforms Ha Ha Ha !!
Oh hang on a second....
On the other hand a talking monkey would be a wonderfull thing. If we can put Jellyfish genes into tomatoes to make the stretchy skins survive transport better - when is this talking gene going to get spliced into a monkey? After all once you had got them talking you could rent them out for MacJobs , cheaper than hiring people. I'm gonna be rich !! ha ha, lets find me a venture capitalist so I can build a talking monkey.....
There is also the rather interesting question of what the product should be in the first place.
Are we not living several decades after it was declared that "The medium is the message" - which to me says that new content is going to look different to the back catalogue.
If I want a cinematic experience I go to a theatre and watch fifty foot tall characters with my friends as an experience, I dont watch it on a 17" monitor. If I want to read that great new novel that everybodys talking about I dont wait for the copy to turn up on the library shelf, I buy myself a copy - and I dont try downloading it to read on a monitor (have you ever tried reading from a laptop on the commuter train, no, I didnt think so, I dont even want to try)
However the "made for tv" video can be just as desireable to see as the Hollywood blockbuster movie at the theatre. Edutainment and documentary content just wouldnt make economic sense if created by Hollywood blockbuster business models, it wouldnt exist if tv hadnt made it economically feasible.
Its time that everybody over the age of thirty in Hollywood and the music business was taken outside and shot (I'm 42 myself) Actually lets make that everybody over the age of twenty, kill all the rest of em.
- there is no way that the current business model of the Hollywood blockbuster movie can be allowed to modify our ability to duplicate information for free in the digital domain
- when the printing press was invented, the guild of illuminated manuscript makers were not able to prevent the comming of the paperback book and the Hollywood movie industry will not be able to stop the comming of digitally based product. Even though we havent figured out what it looks like yet.
So why hasnt Hollywood created a digitally based product and started making money out of it?
Answer - because their current business model is fundamentally based on monopoly. From the need to restrict copying of the product to the fact that availability has to be restricted to different regions at different times to take advantage of blanket marketing - its all dependant on monopolistic practises. No wonder Hollywood and the music business which works similarly hate the internet - instant and total freedom of information and no blanket advertising.
So what is the solution?
Firstly the Hollywood movie belongs in the theatre and it should stay there where it may well wither and die as a performance art form, though I note that opera still seems to be hanging around. ( I would like to see CNN being run by experienced opera producers.. one bulletin per week, six hand made sets per show, 98 hand sewn costumes and a 50 piece live orchestra to make the background noise.. and possibly firsthand reports of world events as recounted by people who were there, last year).
Secondly the movie and music business need to find a business model that can cope with unrestricted copying of their material. A video that links to material on a subscription site - the video is freely copyable, the realtime content on the subscription site isnt, and trying to rip the data and make a snapshot will make no sense - because someone else would navigate it differently. A new business model, there are others. As with the comming of television, new forms will evolve.
All this means that the traditional industry is under threat. Well STUFF EM ! - If progress means that we have to stop building ships, making steel, digging minerals out of the ground and making clothes - because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. Then why the hell does the music business and Hollywood get protective law passed to maintain their outmoded business model. Its progress man, get used to it or get out the way.
Good luck to anyone out there who has the immagination to invent one of these new business models - it wont necessarily start out big, but it will one day, inevitably, change the world.
The power to tell people what they want then make them pay for it is in direct conflict with the freedom of digital information. Hollywood is history
You make some interesting points about the lack of accountability of government under the law - whether the details of the examples you quote are accurate or not I believe that you are correct that in general it is far more difficult to hold agents of the government to account under the law.
This is not a good thing of course as you point out it, means that oppressive and unjust behaviour can occur. In this case the ballot box is not enough.
You cite human rights as enshrined in law as an appropriate arbiter of actions of institutions (and business). This I admit has some validity in your country as your legal system has some initial laws set down by the constitution which have evolved by case law into a set of rules which could be described as human rights. I come from the UK and we have no such set of rules with a defined root, merely accumulated case law and new law brought in by politicians. - If I dont like the law I have to vote for a politician who will change the law, in your case you would have to take your complaint to the courts and hope that your cause can be aligned to "human rights" as initialy set out in the constitiution.
Your American system does have the advantage that if you have enough money you can get things done as an individual, the political route has the advantage that it reflects the majority interest. Neither system is perfect and a continious struggle to refine or improve them is inevitable.
This raises another point about the treatment of minorities by any democracy - they tend to get trampled by the majority interest. This is as far as I know an unsolved political problem which no system of government has managed to deal with adequately. You seem to be advocating for the primacy of the individuals rights on the basis of how much personal power they have accrued in the form money to engage in court action, this does not seem to me to be any better way of guarding minority interest than normal politics, as it only empowers one specific minority group - those with money. I have sympathy for the cause of individuals who are discriminated against by the majority because of their money, why indeed should punitive taxation be applied to the rich - its just another form of discrimination.
However lets suppose for a momment that your analysis is correct - government is reduced in power and we can rely on recourse to the law to control behaviour in the human sphere. You then advocate the company as the major actor because
"Companies operate- completely and totally- by free choice of exchange and association. All employees are free to resign, all customers are free to not buy, all shareholders are free to sell the stock. They are beholden to these three groups".
This is true enough and in classic anarchic fashion we will get exactly what we want because of freedom of personal choice. However there are some pitfalls that the theory runs into. Every business would like to be a monopoly because they can control their market and get the best profits by so doing. If you are a large sucessfull business then you can achieve this - take for example Microsoft and its removal of competing businesses like Netscape from the new market of Internet clients - Microsoft won that battle and despite legal disputes have become a monopoly. In this case the business has taken control of part of the market and the law failed to protect the customer. Microsoft is in an odd situation in that the government is not particularly interested in getting involved either as the monopoly extends outside the home market and therefore there are considerations of worldwide competitiveness to consider also - a typical example where the business controls the government.
On balance I prefer the flaws in the system we have currently to any improvement brought about by giving more power to large corporations.
I may be wrong, it could be that we live in a time of change (where just as when the church was removed from power by the invention of the secular state)that it is now the time that power was taken substantialy away from democratic institutions and invested in the process of law driven by a contestable menue of human rights.
I await developments with interest, theres certainly a great deal of scepticism about the current system - which is only going to grow as the tide of work flows from the west to developing countries.
"Yes, we need the government deciding what companies can and can't do-- after all the government owns them!"
The gov certainly doesnt own companies which is a good thing - but maybe you should be a little concerned that the companies own the government.
The shareholders rightly demand the maximum return from a business which means that the company will be forced to do socialy unaceptable things if there were no checks and balances
The people vote for a government which creates the checks and balances which restrict the behaviour of business where appropriate. If the restrictions on business are wrong then the people can change the government - this is called democracy.
It is an idiotic suggestion to propose that the shareholders should be able to override the power of government - since the majority of shares are owned by institutions this would then put the behaviour of business totaly under the control of unelected executives running financial institutions. You cannot seriously be suggesting that you want your whole country run by Enron Executives?
If your government is as bad as you suggest then I begin to wonder whether the ranting lunatics in the "Axis of evil" may have a point when they claim that Western civilisation is bankrupt and about to collapse from within. On the other hand you could just be wrong.
- we could do with this sort of entreprenurial spirit in big business, imagine a whole economy based on this drive!
- oh s**t no imagination required, my pension funds invested in it.....
Still at least the smug baby boomers get to do some real work working the checkout at wallmart instead of retiring ! - every cloud has a silver lining !
You may have a point. Strikes me that Sysamin day is likely to be greeted with the same kind of appreciation that "Estate agent day" or "Tax collector day".
This would certainly be the case for any business that I have worked for, as the main role of the other company that the Sysadmin works for seems to be to deny services.
Things have moved on since the days of the punch card fed data center maybe. But looking at the syllabus for computer science courses it strikes me that things are starting badly when 50% of them are about security and just slightly more than a gnats whisker is about capture and analysis of user requirements.
Of course the value for money culture doesnt help, we dont know what they do so lets sack as many as possible and see if the lights go out.....
First off there is gravity, this is going to dump most of the stuff back into the atmosphere if we can wait long enough. Thats going to be too long.
Second off there is the solar wind which may be causing some of the lighter orbital junk to change direction as its a constant low pressure dependant on the cross-sectional area of the debris.
Third off there is electric charge which at long range is not going to do very much.
What I wonder is if you could manufacture something on the moon which you could launch into long spiraling orbits which outgassed a molecule which stuck to space debris and enhanced its likelyhood of being deflected by one of the existing forces.
Dont suppose astronomers would like it much though as the clouds would ionise and light up like a christmas tree, would look pretty spectacular at night though - 'northern lights' all year round.
Filed behind door marked 'Beware of the Leopard'
on
Digital Dark Ages?
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Reminds me of the entry for Earth in the HHGTTG
- "Harmless" - later upgraded to "Mostly Harmless"
I wonder what constitutes something worth recording for history in the first place. After all we seem to have very little interest in the last ten years never mind the last thousand - so we rely on an expert to summarise and precis our history in digestible chunks.
For example -
20'th Century Faschism and communism briefly vie for power before religion regains power globaly. Computers and fast food invented - curry, tacho's, stir-fry, sushi.
21'st Century China returns to global power and mandarin becomes the official world language. Red Flag software invents Linux.
Rather teaches the lesson of what strategy is all about. It starts with planning, first define an objective then determine the optimum course to achieve the objective.
The boasts here telling stories of how political role playing games were won by deceit show only one thing. The primacy of win at all cost philosophy. Which in this case has actually blinded the participants to the meaning of the word 'win'. Winning a political role playing game means getting re-elected and trying to make some effort to improve what you have been put in charge of. Running a large business similarly means earning a big fuck off cut for yourself whilst trying to improve the function and value of the business.
Without the improvements then politics and business decline. Doesnt anyone know about the decline of the Roman Empire? Strikes me that without some pretty sharp changes the whole American dream thing is going to ooze down the drain. Maybe we would be better off with absolute dictators like Sadam Hussain - its far more likely that he would have the boss of Enron shot for disgracing the country than 'democracy' is going to imprision any of the wrongdoers at Enron
I'm gonna laugh my tits off from my wheelchair when the Chinese finaly put a man on Mars, melt the polar icecaps to irrigate China and accidentally flood the USA.
Competition is what you want and competition is what your gonna get - just remember that your not guaranteed to win forever.
Its also an interesting fact that most of the wars in the world are between countries with highly elevated numbers of people in the 15 - 25 age bracket. Young people have always been easy to motivate to fight - and conveniently they are expendable - For example just ask Iraq and Iran how many hundreds of thousands of youths they slaughtered in their WW1 trench war style confrontation from a few years back. Cut back the overpopulation problem nicely though.
I dont think that calling people names will necessarily prove your belief by categorising the people as unlike you. Its always easy to call on emotions in order to get people to group together and fight - see historical data on Hitler.
Rational people will consider the information as well as the media characterisation of its source.
WWF - The wildlife lobby bring you information about damage to the environment which threatens the survival of your species.
WWF - The wrestling entertainment gives young boys role models of posturing fighters who act out agression without actually harming each other.
Strikes me that whichever WWF you 'believe' they are both engaged in valuable educational social activities.
Maybe you shouldnt take the posturing of the westlers too much to heart, your arguments might become more persuasive if you came down off that branch, stopped shrieking and pulling faces.
Primates have to move on if they want to continue to be the dominant species on this planet.
Japanese economy doing just fine, only problem is boom ended and some debts left to pay off. Now making same sensible growth rate as you Western idiots 2% or so a year.
You call that a recession, you also just lost your job working at worldcom - and all the suppliers who now have to dump their people on street. Do not think American business expertise needed by civilised people.
So Japan is not following stupid Westerners all the time. Took Western good ideas and made them work, now Japanese manufacturing techniques SPC, right first time, DFM, team oriented problem solving have to be taught back to dumb Westerners who dont have the culture to do these things automatically.
Another thing - Japans cities very crowded and appartments very small - so small gadgets obvious. ( Im guessing about this as I'm english and i live in Stockholm Sweden & the appartments are small here, never could understand why anyone wanted those micro hi-fi things when I lived in the UK, in my 30 meter square flat I understand absolutely).
US currency is going down plughole, no one wants to emulate that.
"Its not dying, its dead" Reminds me of a parrot sketch I once heard
Point of fact though a supernova is all about life. Almost all of the elements heavier than iron were made in Supernova and the rest of the stuff that walks about thinking its alive came out of novas. -As all the elements heavier than hydrogen are made in stars. So if you wind the clock along quick enough in some sense you are looking at the birth of life. Mind you it probably didnt do much good to the local wildlife when it went off.
It all depends on your sense of perspective realy. (I used to have one of those before windows networking problems).
The best mathematics text that I have come across is KA Strouds book http://www.palgrave.com/stroud/
This book has a very practical hands on approach with everything broken up into manageable steps. It is also full of questions and examples - making it ideal for working through on your own.
I should buy a copy myself and work my way through it again.
So how come these peasant children have to work for 80 cents a day on a product that costs two dollars to make and you pay two hundred dollars for it?
Also what happened to the US workforce that used to make your sneakers for a decent living wage?
"Exploitation equals good" is a mantra which will come back and bite you in the decades to come when the people you are treading on now will be part of economys bigger than yours - China and India for example. No wonder half the world wants to kill westerners when people have such simplistic beliefs as you.
Actualy capitalism has won the battle with centralised state controled communism - I dont see anyone advocating that here.
What people are complaining about is particular aspects of the way we are running capitalism now. - Allowing laws to be broken, stock markets which appear to function for the interests of the investors in the market whilst causing socialy unaceptable behaviour in the companies quoted on the market.
- any number of complaints about what we dont like about the current mechanisms of the free market. If you equated the 'free market' with anarchy then I might even be tempted to agree with you on philosophical grounds. But actualy what you mean by the 'free market' is a well defined system which you personally expect to do well from - I can tell this because you expect your enemy to be someone you have disadvantaged by your activities and is calling for more social justice - a commie. Your guilt gives you away, you want a system where you can personaly exploit other people.
What most of the world also wants is the sucess of capitalism - thats no reason to allow serious crime to undermine the rest of your social order by failing to curb its excesses.
(If its obvious that the telecom market is going to end up with only a few players - why has the market poured so much cash into the value of telecom shares. Something has gone seriously wrong here).
Guppy06 makes an interesting point about the effect of US trading conditions on the world markets. I as a European see no difference between the US market and the European one. The business I work for sells into the US market amongst others, the industry I work for does its accounting in US$. I live in a state which politcally may as well be in the US. The only difference is that my 'local government' has slightly more leeway than one in the US. On the other hand I personaly have absolutely no representation with the leadership of the US.
So much for the politics of the 'free world' - makes you wonder where its all going to end up...
Its not a science when the perception of the people valuing the stock is misled by crime or the people valuing the stock are participating in events of mass hallucination.
Quite - I care what is going on for several reasons
firstly my pension is invested in these crap shares
secondly the company I work for has to give improving shareholder value in a market place where the yardsticks we are measured against are either businesses which are lying, or businesses which have share values based on the judgement of morons wearing designer clothing (cost to make $2 cost in the store $200).
Thirdly if this realy gets out of hand we will have an old fashioned recession - you know no jobs, no food, no fun
What the markets need is regulation. No business should have to compete in an environment where their competitors can break the law, cheat and lie.
Slashdot Mirror
/rant on
IT support is supposed to be a service wherebye the customer is provided with help so that they can use their computers productively.
Not an occupation which is closely modeled on the activities of Nazi doctors using their power and knowledge to torture and abuse people in the persuit of their own interests.
Notice the difference between the two occupations?
The user may be stupid but if you or the department you work for is unable to help that user then it is you and your department who has failed.
Making a joke of ignorance is fine between experts as part of the recognition that you and your collegues share the same burden - "blah blah blah hadnt switched the power on.. ha ha ha" But that doesnt mean that you are excused from having patience and being professional.
If you want to be taken seriously then start acting seriously. I dont notice medical doctors getting bored with their patients and for a joke amputating a leg instead of an ingrowing toenail because the patient was too stupid to cut their nails correctly and wear the right footware. Likewise your user may be stupid but you are never going to get paid diddly squat unless they think your service is worth more than the sh*t wages most so called IS departments think they can get away with.
rant off/
Could get the UN to announce a competetion . . .
Whichever religion takes posssion will by world wide consensus be adopted as the official religion of planet Earth.
Should keep everybody occupied with something reasonably constructive for the next half century or so.
Meanwhile the rest of us can get back to drinking, eating, changing the wallpaper, reproducing, paying taxes and getting off our heads.
With luck we can then extend the rules to Barnards star so the kids have some reasonably harmless diversion to keep them occupied too.
Alternately - if that doesnt appeal, why waste time with Iraq, lets nuke the chinese first before they get round to doing it to us.
?
Its not just a matter of touch typing these days though. A shorthand language is ideal for SMS text messaging on mobile phones where the entry method is by multiple key presses on the same key to get different letters. Even with predictive word completion you can get more on the screen if you use compressed spellings.
Of course all this may fade into ancient history when the phone can translate speech into text - or your voicemail gets translated into text.
Language mutates over time and has always done so, sub languages have the potential to appear more rapidly than ever before with the increase in transmission brought about by broadcast media. Major dictionaries recognise the importance of incorporating new and slang words because this reflects the actual use of language. There is no point trying to officialy reject modifications to language because the available standards bodies then lose the power to make those standards. What has to be made clear though to young people is the importance of recognising the difference between plain language and jargon language.
Jargon language is any subset which is unlikely to be understood outside a minority group. No one would deny the usefulness of shorthand writing for the manual transcription of speech into a written form, similarly the contractions used in chat forums have their place. I am sure that my parents would understand a text message that said "r u ok". Politeness would dictate though that I used their language to ask the question. Teaching should therefore allow the use of jargon in a controled manner - what we need is a recognised standards authority to publish a dictionary and frequency table of these words. Then a teacher can happily devote a couple of lessons to Chat room language and ban it from the rest of plain language communication.
As the Borg show, the handiest way to subdue a foe is to absorb them and make them one of us.
I shall imediately start construction of my own dot com disaster portal featuring a freqency scanned dictionary of jargon from text messaging, chat rooms and exciting subversive alternative words. Or maybe someone has already done it - let me know if they have.
End of the Economic philosophy conflict i.e. Victory of Capitalism over Communism
Rise of the Culture philosophy conflict i.e. War on Terror, Anti globalisation
Next step in the democratisation of information (Illuminated manuscript, Printed book, Radio, Television, Internet...)
Widespread acceptance that environmental damage should be limited or even reversed
The rise of China
Loss of adherence to the nuclear family in the west
Rap music and the return of dance music designed for and suitable for dancing to for the first time since Rock and Roll.
Global cusine
Baby boomers become grey power
The end of space exploration
Genetic medicine arrives
Otherwise nothing much has changed, come to think of it all of the above is detail anyway as the Romans had flushing toilets and running water....
Make sure that machine intelligence gets smarter than the monkeys first - and wipes out all other intelligent lifeforms Ha Ha Ha !!
Oh hang on a second....
On the other hand a talking monkey would be a wonderfull thing. If we can put Jellyfish genes into tomatoes to make the stretchy skins survive transport better - when is this talking gene going to get spliced into a monkey? After all once you had got them talking you could rent them out for MacJobs , cheaper than hiring people. I'm gonna be rich !! ha ha, lets find me a venture capitalist so I can build a talking monkey.....
There is also the rather interesting question of what the product should be in the first place.
Are we not living several decades after it was declared that "The medium is the message" - which to me says that new content is going to look different to the back catalogue.
If I want a cinematic experience I go to a theatre and watch fifty foot tall characters with my friends as an experience, I dont watch it on a 17" monitor. If I want to read that great new novel that everybodys talking about I dont wait for the copy to turn up on the library shelf, I buy myself a copy - and I dont try downloading it to read on a monitor (have you ever tried reading from a laptop on the commuter train, no, I didnt think so, I dont even want to try)
However the "made for tv" video can be just as desireable to see as the Hollywood blockbuster movie at the theatre. Edutainment and documentary content just wouldnt make economic sense if created by Hollywood blockbuster business models, it wouldnt exist if tv hadnt made it economically feasible.
Its time that everybody over the age of thirty in Hollywood and the music business was taken outside and shot (I'm 42 myself) Actually lets make that everybody over the age of twenty, kill all the rest of em.
- there is no way that the current business model of the Hollywood blockbuster movie can be allowed to modify our ability to duplicate information for free in the digital domain
- when the printing press was invented, the guild of illuminated manuscript makers were not able to prevent the comming of the paperback book and the Hollywood movie industry will not be able to stop the comming of digitally based product. Even though we havent figured out what it looks like yet.
So why hasnt Hollywood created a digitally based product and started making money out of it?
Answer - because their current business model is fundamentally based on monopoly. From the need to restrict copying of the product to the fact that availability has to be restricted to different regions at different times to take advantage of blanket marketing - its all dependant on monopolistic practises. No wonder Hollywood and the music business which works similarly hate the internet - instant and total freedom of information and no blanket advertising.
So what is the solution?
Firstly the Hollywood movie belongs in the theatre and it should stay there where it may well wither and die as a performance art form, though I note that opera still seems to be hanging around. ( I would like to see CNN being run by experienced opera producers.. one bulletin per week, six hand made sets per show, 98 hand sewn costumes and a 50 piece live orchestra to make the background noise.. and possibly firsthand reports of world events as recounted by people who were there, last year).
Secondly the movie and music business need to find a business model that can cope with unrestricted copying of their material. A video that links to material on a subscription site - the video is freely copyable, the realtime content on the subscription site isnt, and trying to rip the data and make a snapshot will make no sense - because someone else would navigate it differently. A new business model, there are others. As with the comming of television, new forms will evolve.
All this means that the traditional industry is under threat. Well STUFF EM ! - If progress means that we have to stop building ships, making steel, digging minerals out of the ground and making clothes - because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. Then why the hell does the music business and Hollywood get protective law passed to maintain their outmoded business model. Its progress man, get used to it or get out the way.
Good luck to anyone out there who has the immagination to invent one of these new business models - it wont necessarily start out big, but it will one day, inevitably, change the world.
The power to tell people what they want then make them pay for it is in direct conflict with the freedom of digital information. Hollywood is history
You make some interesting points about the lack of accountability of government under the law - whether the details of the examples you quote are accurate or not I believe that you are correct that in general it is far more difficult to hold agents of the government to account under the law.
This is not a good thing of course as you point out it, means that oppressive and unjust behaviour can occur. In this case the ballot box is not enough.
You cite human rights as enshrined in law as an appropriate arbiter of actions of institutions (and business). This I admit has some validity in your country as your legal system has some initial laws set down by the constitution which have evolved by case law into a set of rules which could be described as human rights. I come from the UK and we have no such set of rules with a defined root, merely accumulated case law and new law brought in by politicians. - If I dont like the law I have to vote for a politician who will change the law, in your case you would have to take your complaint to the courts and hope that your cause can be aligned to "human rights" as initialy set out in the constitiution.
Your American system does have the advantage that if you have enough money you can get things done as an individual, the political route has the advantage that it reflects the majority interest. Neither system is perfect and a continious struggle to refine or improve them is inevitable.
This raises another point about the treatment of minorities by any democracy - they tend to get trampled by the majority interest. This is as far as I know an unsolved political problem which no system of government has managed to deal with adequately. You seem to be advocating for the primacy of the individuals rights on the basis of how much personal power they have accrued in the form money to engage in court action, this does not seem to me to be any better way of guarding minority interest than normal politics, as it only empowers one specific minority group - those with money. I have sympathy for the cause of individuals who are discriminated against by the majority because of their money, why indeed should punitive taxation be applied to the rich - its just another form of discrimination.
However lets suppose for a momment that your analysis is correct - government is reduced in power and we can rely on recourse to the law to control behaviour in the human sphere. You then advocate the company as the major actor because
"Companies operate- completely and totally- by free choice of exchange and association. All employees are free to resign, all customers are free to not buy, all shareholders are free to sell the stock. They are beholden to these three groups".
This is true enough and in classic anarchic fashion we will get exactly what we want because of freedom of personal choice. However there are some pitfalls that the theory runs into. Every business would like to be a monopoly because they can control their market and get the best profits by so doing. If you are a large sucessfull business then you can achieve this - take for example Microsoft and its removal of competing businesses like Netscape from the new market of Internet clients - Microsoft won that battle and despite legal disputes have become a monopoly. In this case the business has taken control of part of the market and the law failed to protect the customer. Microsoft is in an odd situation in that the government is not particularly interested in getting involved either as the monopoly extends outside the home market and therefore there are considerations of worldwide competitiveness to consider also - a typical example where the business controls the government.
On balance I prefer the flaws in the system we have currently to any improvement brought about by giving more power to large corporations.
I may be wrong, it could be that we live in a time of change (where just as when the church was removed from power by the invention of the secular state)that it is now the time that power was taken substantialy away from democratic institutions and invested in the process of law driven by a contestable menue of human rights.
I await developments with interest, theres certainly a great deal of scepticism about the current system - which is only going to grow as the tide of work flows from the west to developing countries.
"Yes, we need the government deciding what companies can and can't do-- after all the government owns them!"
The gov certainly doesnt own companies which is a good thing - but maybe you should be a little concerned that the companies own the government.
The shareholders rightly demand the maximum return from a business which means that the company will be forced to do socialy unaceptable things if there were no checks and balances
The people vote for a government which creates the checks and balances which restrict the behaviour of business where appropriate. If the restrictions on business are wrong then the people can change the government - this is called democracy.
It is an idiotic suggestion to propose that the shareholders should be able to override the power of government - since the majority of shares are owned by institutions this would then put the behaviour of business totaly under the control of unelected executives running financial institutions. You cannot seriously be suggesting that you want your whole country run by Enron Executives?
If your government is as bad as you suggest then I begin to wonder whether the ranting lunatics in the "Axis of evil" may have a point when they claim that Western civilisation is bankrupt and about to collapse from within. On the other hand you could just be wrong.
Ah the creative business mind at work
- we could do with this sort of entreprenurial spirit in big business, imagine a whole economy based on this drive!
- oh s**t no imagination required, my pension funds invested in it.....
Still at least the smug baby boomers get to do some real work working the checkout at wallmart instead of retiring ! - every cloud has a silver lining !
You may have a point. Strikes me that Sysamin day is likely to be greeted with the same kind of appreciation that "Estate agent day" or "Tax collector day".
This would certainly be the case for any business that I have worked for, as the main role of the other company that the Sysadmin works for seems to be to deny services.
Things have moved on since the days of the punch card fed data center maybe. But looking at the syllabus for computer science courses it strikes me that things are starting badly when 50% of them are about security and just slightly more than a gnats whisker is about capture and analysis of user requirements.
Of course the value for money culture doesnt help, we dont know what they do so lets sack as many as possible and see if the lights go out.....
Lets see, what forces are already have available?
First off there is gravity, this is going to dump most of the stuff back into the atmosphere if we can wait long enough. Thats going to be too long.
Second off there is the solar wind which may be causing some of the lighter orbital junk to change direction as its a constant low pressure dependant on the cross-sectional area of the debris.
Third off there is electric charge which at long range is not going to do very much.
What I wonder is if you could manufacture something on the moon which you could launch into long spiraling orbits which outgassed a molecule which stuck to space debris and enhanced its likelyhood of being deflected by one of the existing forces.
Dont suppose astronomers would like it much though as the clouds would ionise and light up like a christmas tree, would look pretty spectacular at night though - 'northern lights' all year round.
Reminds me of the entry for Earth in the HHGTTG
- "Harmless" - later upgraded to "Mostly Harmless"
I wonder what constitutes something worth recording for history in the first place. After all we seem to have very little interest in the last ten years never mind the last thousand - so we rely on an expert to summarise and precis our history in digestible chunks.
For example -
20'th Century
Faschism and communism briefly vie for power before religion regains power globaly.
Computers and fast food invented - curry, tacho's, stir-fry, sushi.
21'st Century
China returns to global power and mandarin becomes the official world language. Red Flag software invents Linux.
All depends on the historian realy...
Rather teaches the lesson of what strategy is all about. It starts with planning, first define an objective then determine the optimum course to achieve the objective.
The boasts here telling stories of how political role playing games were won by deceit show only one thing. The primacy of win at all cost philosophy. Which in this case has actually blinded the participants to the meaning of the word 'win'. Winning a political role playing game means getting re-elected and trying to make some effort to improve what you have been put in charge of. Running a large business similarly means earning a big fuck off cut for yourself whilst trying to improve the function and value of the business.
Without the improvements then politics and business decline. Doesnt anyone know about the decline of the Roman Empire? Strikes me that without some pretty sharp changes the whole American dream thing is going to ooze down the drain. Maybe we would be better off with absolute dictators like Sadam Hussain - its far more likely that he would have the boss of Enron shot for disgracing the country than 'democracy' is going to imprision any of the wrongdoers at Enron
Well said. Made me laugh too
I'm gonna laugh my tits off from my wheelchair when the Chinese finaly put a man on Mars, melt the polar icecaps to irrigate China and accidentally flood the USA.
Competition is what you want and competition is what your gonna get - just remember that your not guaranteed to win forever.
Its also an interesting fact that most of the wars in the world are between countries with highly elevated numbers of people in the 15 - 25 age bracket. Young people have always been easy to motivate to fight - and conveniently they are expendable - For example just ask Iraq and Iran how many hundreds of thousands of youths they slaughtered in their WW1 trench war style confrontation from a few years back. Cut back the overpopulation problem nicely though.
I dont think that calling people names will necessarily prove your belief by categorising the people as unlike you. Its always easy to call on emotions in order to get people to group together and fight - see historical data on Hitler.
Rational people will consider the information as well as the media characterisation of its source.
WWF - The wildlife lobby bring you information about damage to the environment which threatens the survival of your species.
WWF - The wrestling entertainment gives young boys role models of posturing fighters who act out agression without actually harming each other.
Strikes me that whichever WWF you 'believe' they are both engaged in valuable educational social activities.
Maybe you shouldnt take the posturing of the westlers too much to heart, your arguments might become more persuasive if you came down off that branch, stopped shrieking and pulling faces.
Primates have to move on if they want to continue to be the dominant species on this planet.
Japanese economy doing just fine, only problem is boom ended and some debts left to pay off. Now making same sensible growth rate as you Western idiots 2% or so a year.
You call that a recession, you also just lost your job working at worldcom - and all the suppliers who now have to dump their people on street. Do not think American business expertise needed by civilised people.
So Japan is not following stupid Westerners all the time. Took Western good ideas and made them work, now Japanese manufacturing techniques SPC, right first time, DFM, team oriented problem solving have to be taught back to dumb Westerners who dont have the culture to do these things automatically.
Another thing - Japans cities very crowded and appartments very small - so small gadgets obvious. ( Im guessing about this as I'm english and i live in Stockholm Sweden & the appartments are small here, never could understand why anyone wanted those micro hi-fi things when I lived in the UK, in my 30 meter square flat I understand absolutely).
US currency is going down plughole, no one wants to emulate that.
"Its not dying, its dead"
Reminds me of a parrot sketch I once heard
Point of fact though a supernova is all about life. Almost all of the elements heavier than iron were made in Supernova and the rest of the stuff that walks about thinking its alive came out of novas. -As all the elements heavier than hydrogen are made in stars. So if you wind the clock along quick enough in some sense you are looking at the birth of life. Mind you it probably didnt do much good to the local wildlife when it went off.
It all depends on your sense of perspective realy.
(I used to have one of those before windows networking problems).
The best mathematics text that I have come across is KA Strouds book
http://www.palgrave.com/stroud/
This book has a very practical hands on approach with everything broken up into manageable steps. It is also full of questions and examples - making it ideal for working through on your own.
I should buy a copy myself and work my way through it again.
So how come these peasant children have to work for 80 cents a day on a product that costs two dollars to make and you pay two hundred dollars for it?
Also what happened to the US workforce that used to make your sneakers for a decent living wage?
"Exploitation equals good" is a mantra which will come back and bite you in the decades to come when the people you are treading on now will be part of economys bigger than yours - China and India for example. No wonder half the world wants to kill westerners when people have such simplistic beliefs as you.
Actualy capitalism has won the battle with centralised state controled communism - I dont see anyone advocating that here.
What people are complaining about is particular aspects of the way we are running capitalism now. - Allowing laws to be broken, stock markets which appear to function for the interests of the investors in the market whilst causing socialy unaceptable behaviour in the companies quoted on the market.
- any number of complaints about what we dont like about the current mechanisms of the free market. If you equated the 'free market' with anarchy then I might even be tempted to agree with you on philosophical grounds. But actualy what you mean by the 'free market' is a well defined system which you personally expect to do well from - I can tell this because you expect your enemy to be someone you have disadvantaged by your activities and is calling for more social justice - a commie. Your guilt gives you away, you want a system where you can personaly exploit other people.
What most of the world also wants is the sucess of capitalism - thats no reason to allow serious crime to undermine the rest of your social order by failing to curb its excesses.
(If its obvious that the telecom market is going to end up with only a few players - why has the market poured so much cash into the value of telecom shares. Something has gone seriously wrong here).
Guppy06 makes an interesting point about the effect of US trading conditions on the world markets. I as a European see no difference between the US market and the European one. The business I work for sells into the US market amongst others, the industry I work for does its accounting in US$. I live in a state which politcally may as well be in the US. The only difference is that my 'local government' has slightly more leeway than one in the US. On the other hand I personaly have absolutely no representation with the leadership of the US.
So much for the politics of the 'free world' - makes you wonder where its all going to end up...
You have my total sympathy - I have just watched the semiconductor sector in the UK and now Sweden go down the tubes in the latest 'downturn'.
Watching thousands of jobs being destroyed in the high tech sector makes me wonder if their are going to be any engineering jobs left.
Maybe high tech is going the way of shipbuilding, something that people do somewhere else.
Its not a science when the perception of the people valuing the stock is misled by crime or the people valuing the stock are participating in events of mass hallucination.
Quite - I care what is going on for several reasons
firstly my pension is invested in these crap shares
secondly the company I work for has to give improving shareholder value in a market place where the yardsticks we are measured against are either businesses which are lying, or businesses which have share values based on the judgement of morons wearing designer clothing (cost to make $2 cost in the store $200).
Thirdly if this realy gets out of hand we will have an old fashioned recession - you know no jobs, no food, no fun
What the markets need is regulation. No business should have to compete in an environment where their competitors can break the law, cheat and lie.