No, what we have is a broken form of Capitalism in which the corporations get to skew the rules, change them as they wish, have governments entrench things in law which fuck up the system and tilt the playing field in their favor.
They get to have H1B visas, a government who keeps extending copyright so multi-billion dollar corporations can continue to profit, and actually be the agency to enforce those copyrights.
What we have now is an oligarchy, in which the multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations are being represented in this treat, at the expense of everybody.
We have an inherently corrupt and broken version of Capitalism, which pretty much demonstrates that Capitalism will always be broken, and there is no possibility of there ever being a "free" market; because markets are never free. They're always manipulated, controlled, distorted, or subject to trade groups who ensure nobody else can come in and play.
It gives us a trend in which the top few percent of the world population own well over half the wealth.
It is not a healthy system, it is not a sustainable system, it is not a fair system.
What we have now is a demonstration that, with bullshit treaties like this, societies are being raped and pillaged for maximizing shareholder value.
What we have now is destroying what we had, and putting us all in a race to the bottom to compete for the lowest possible wages, undoing decades of progress on working conditions and wages.
I used to believe the bullshit you say, and I have the shelf full of books sitting behind me,
It's all fucking lies. In its current incarnation, Capitalism is a fucking death spiral for all but the wealthy and the corporations.
This is yet another example of idiot governments rolling over and giving corporations everything they want, and utterly failing to serve the people who voted for them.
This shit needs to stop. Because governments should be looking out for our interests, instead of lying to us and telling us what is good for corporations benefits us.
Welcome to the oligarchy kids. We're all pretty much fucked now.
The true geeks all left a long time ago. The dumbed-down folksy style is a perfect fit for the wannabe geeks and Teatards who still largely inhabit this place
Hmmmm... if not A, then (B|C)... so which of 'wannabe geeks' or Teatards are you including yourself in?
This also means the massive stars (with masses greater than 1.4 solar masses) must shed most of their mass as planetary nebula or the final contraction to a white dwarf cannot be stopped by the degenerate electrons.
So, I'm more inclined to believe there is loss of actual mass going on.
It certainly sounds like changes in mass are part of the explanation for the mechanics of this. (Not that I claim to actually understand that.)
Fortunately for them, there are apparently plenty of people who still prefer to shop for things in a physical store.
Last time I was on vacation we were thrilled to discover a Walmart Neighborhood Market across street from our condo.
We could buy beer, wine, groceries.. all right across the street. The other Walmart locations had sunscreen, clothes, BBQ stuff, batteries... and beer, wine, groceries, and everything else you'd expect.
Walmart has correctly identified that there will always be things people will buy at brick and mortar stores.
Unless you are looking for something very specific, and for which you can spend some time comparison shopping to know what it is you're looking for, online shopping is limited to specific kinds of purchases.
Could Walmart move more into online shopping? Sure, probably. Will they ever stop being a brick and mortar store? No way in hell.
It's not like online shopping is going to replace actual physical stores.
The third option, and the one which I think is more plausible AND more scary... "sure, they're lying weasels, but they have established brand, and you can't become lying weasels as cheaply as you can buy lying weasels".
I mean, if you're trying to get into the lying-weasel business, why not just buy an established player?
Walmart employees really hope that no one will show up and just abandon that
I'm sorry, is this different from any of the rest of it?
My general experience is trying to find someone help you and getting told "oh, I don't work in this department".
Oh yeah, then who the hell does? You're the only employee anywhere near this department. Oh, I see, your job is to figure out how to block as many fucking aisles as possible so people can't get through.
Oddly enough, I've known no less than 3 people who were "the third" and put the "III" after their name.
For legal purposes, and not confusing the shit out of everybody, knowing the difference between "Robert Smith", "Bob Smith Jr.", and "Little Bobby Smith" can be an actual thing.
By the time you're "the third", the roman numerals are really the only way to do it.
The real problem is parents who feel the need to make their children "the third", thereby necessitating this in the first place. I generally think that ego is attributable to the previous generation than the poor schmuck who has to do it.
There will always be people who say "we look forward to our new era of corporate benevolence"... and there will always be people on the sideline saying "yeah, right, whatever bullshit lies float your boat".
Slashdot is so weird. Big companies are, for the most part, evil [unless they're run by young, hip, smart guys who promise that they won't be evil].
No, we're pretty consistent... we're just as convinced the companies are evil when they're run by young, hipster douchebags, and we don't believe them when they promise to not be evil.
Long established companies have just managed to grow into lumbering beasts with no clue of what they're doing, but who have repeatedly established their evil. The ones ran by the young hipster douchebags are just more focused on a narrower field of business, and can pretend to not be evil hipster douchebags yet.
Lots of us think it's just a matter of how the evil manifests itself.
The small lean but evil corporation is evil in a different way than the huge organization which isn't sure how to remain relevant.
This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades.
Well, they're in a feedback loop now.. the MBAs are the ones saying you need to bring in MBAs.
Much like how CEO pay climbed to stupid levels because CEOs and their cronies sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs, when the sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs.
The people making the bad decisions are hiring people just like them to help make the decisions, because thay mostly want like-minded people. Their compensation is separated from their performance, and they only look at the next quarter so they can take their bonuses and run like hell.
Corporations are almost incapable of long-term planning, because they really only give a damn about the next 3-4 months, and ensuring they maximize their own compensation.
My personal opinion, like you having seem it for the last bunch of years, is that C-level management and MBAs are pretty much uniformly fucking up corporations by doing the same stupid stuff over and over again. But by the time anybody realizes these clowns have been promoted, or received their golden parachute.
Other than CEOs, who really believes CEOs are worth anywhere near what they get paid? Oh, of course, the people who aspire to be CEOs so they too can get overpaid.
It's the emperor's new clothes. It's lies and stupidity piled on top of one another.
As far as I understand it, they're actually breaking out the exceedingly lucrative "consumer" divisions, but I'm not 100% sure.
Which potentially means they've made such a hash out of everything else they couldn't possibly have had any idea of what the hell they've been doing the last decade or so.
No whooshing... the MBA wankers call it "leveraging synergies". Selling you both the problem and the cure is very lucrative, as it ensures you can "monetize the product lifecycle throughout its various phases while having complementary product offerings providing multiple revenue streams from the same user".
Let's face it, probably more malware and spam has been passed through x86 machines than any other platform on the planet. Intel definitely had skin in the game.
As Hewlett-Packard (HPQ - Get Report) prepares to break apart its enterprise unit from its division that produces personal computers and printers, the tech institution said Wednesday that it will sell cyber security unit Tipping Point to Tokyo-based Trend Micro International for $300 million.
Splitting up and selling off are not exactly indicators everything is going swimmingly.
As I said, companies grow, companies buy, companies fuck up what they buy, and then realize they no longer have much of an idea what they are anymore.
I think the M+A craze in tech for the last 20 years has been a lot of short term profit seeking, but is overall really bad in the long run. It maximizes executive compensation, but it doesn't actually achieve the outcomes they claim it does.
HP's decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company
HP has been in decline for years.
Quality is down. Innovation is down. A series of seemingly incompetent CEOs. A couple of bad purchases. Some stupid decisions. Some utterly failed products.
Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.
Welcome to the modern world of tech, where you buy everything in sight, fuck it up, have a bunch of bad management, and then eventually implode as you realize nobody in your organization measures up to the people who got you there.
One wonders how many good companies have been swallowed up and ruined in trying to make huge companies more profitable, only to find out the huge companies have no idea what they're doing.
Over and over again, we see big corporations who really just keep changing CEOs, and utterly failing to understand just how badly they're all screwing up the company.
Unless, of course, prisons were motivated to rehabilitate prisoners rather than keep them locked up
They haven't been asked to do that. That's not how they've been directed.
Prison in the US is essentially puritan dictated punishment and suffering, and there is no mandate to change anything.
The for-profit prison industry isn't going to counteract a parent society which says "lock 'em up, make 'em suffer, too fucking bad what happens after they get out".
This is why there is no rehabilitation. Because the people who want mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes don't give a crap about such things.
You can't give them incentives when you have a significant portion of social conservatives who believe the entire point of incarceration is punishment and not rehabilitation.
As long as people continue to believe this stuff should be ran as profit centers, this is what will happen. The Sheriff gets kickbacks, the companies who run the prisons get kickbacks.
It has nothing to do with punishment or rehabilitation, but ensuring you have as many people in prison as possible to maximize profits.
America has 20% of the world prisoner population, because America has made it profitable to keep people in prison; it's an industry worth tens of billions of dollars, and which uses prisoners as cheap labor.
It's far too profitable to stop. And it has nothing at all to do with the reason for prisons in the first place.
Essentially it's a giant tax-payer funded industry which doesn't offer much benefits to the tax-payer, and doesn't solve any problems.
But states look at them as revenue sources, and keep doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, what we have is a broken form of Capitalism in which the corporations get to skew the rules, change them as they wish, have governments entrench things in law which fuck up the system and tilt the playing field in their favor.
They get to have H1B visas, a government who keeps extending copyright so multi-billion dollar corporations can continue to profit, and actually be the agency to enforce those copyrights.
What we have now is an oligarchy, in which the multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations are being represented in this treat, at the expense of everybody.
We have an inherently corrupt and broken version of Capitalism, which pretty much demonstrates that Capitalism will always be broken, and there is no possibility of there ever being a "free" market; because markets are never free. They're always manipulated, controlled, distorted, or subject to trade groups who ensure nobody else can come in and play.
It gives us a trend in which the top few percent of the world population own well over half the wealth.
It is not a healthy system, it is not a sustainable system, it is not a fair system.
What we have now is a demonstration that, with bullshit treaties like this, societies are being raped and pillaged for maximizing shareholder value.
What we have now is destroying what we had, and putting us all in a race to the bottom to compete for the lowest possible wages, undoing decades of progress on working conditions and wages.
I used to believe the bullshit you say, and I have the shelf full of books sitting behind me,
It's all fucking lies. In its current incarnation, Capitalism is a fucking death spiral for all but the wealthy and the corporations.
No, more like by the horse they rode in on.
This is yet another example of idiot governments rolling over and giving corporations everything they want, and utterly failing to serve the people who voted for them.
This shit needs to stop. Because governments should be looking out for our interests, instead of lying to us and telling us what is good for corporations benefits us.
Welcome to the oligarchy kids. We're all pretty much fucked now.
Meh, Kaufman is easy .. just have it stand there awkwardly staring at the audience for 20 minutes.
And then a bunch of hipsters will rave about how cutting edge it was. Everyone else will want their damned money back.
Just like in real life.
LOL .. crap. So, it's high school all over again?
Hmmmm ... if not A, then (B|C) ... so which of 'wannabe geeks' or Teatards are you including yourself in?
Or are you just saying small values of A?
Look, let's be honest here ... at that point, "family name" means "multiple generations of ego".
Or, you do what George Foreman did, and name all your kids after yourself. He's got a Jr, an III, an IV, a V, and a VI.
It's just a lot more ego. ;-)
Well, the actual Nasa article talks about changes in mass, and stars pretty constantly eject material.
And this says:
So, I'm more inclined to believe there is loss of actual mass going on.
It certainly sounds like changes in mass are part of the explanation for the mechanics of this. (Not that I claim to actually understand that.)
Last time I was on vacation we were thrilled to discover a Walmart Neighborhood Market across street from our condo.
We could buy beer, wine, groceries .. all right across the street. The other Walmart locations had sunscreen, clothes, BBQ stuff, batteries ... and beer, wine, groceries, and everything else you'd expect.
Walmart has correctly identified that there will always be things people will buy at brick and mortar stores.
Unless you are looking for something very specific, and for which you can spend some time comparison shopping to know what it is you're looking for, online shopping is limited to specific kinds of purchases.
Could Walmart move more into online shopping? Sure, probably. Will they ever stop being a brick and mortar store? No way in hell.
It's not like online shopping is going to replace actual physical stores.
The third option, and the one which I think is more plausible AND more scary ... "sure, they're lying weasels, but they have established brand, and you can't become lying weasels as cheaply as you can buy lying weasels".
I mean, if you're trying to get into the lying-weasel business, why not just buy an established player?
Sure, I'll need your credit card details .. my consulting rates are $5000/hr, with a minimum billing of 5 hours.
LOL, my wife did something like this to me ... I was in a bookstore, and I was like "I want to buy this book".
She whips out her phone, looks it up on Amazon, finds it for less money, orders it, and says "it'll be delivered in two days".
I'm standing there like an idiot wondering WTF happened. Now we often check her phone while in a store.
And, yes, we've seen cases where the on-line price doesn't match the store price and they won't match.
I'm sorry, is this different from any of the rest of it?
My general experience is trying to find someone help you and getting told "oh, I don't work in this department".
Oh yeah, then who the hell does? You're the only employee anywhere near this department. Oh, I see, your job is to figure out how to block as many fucking aisles as possible so people can't get through.
Oddly enough, I've known no less than 3 people who were "the third" and put the "III" after their name.
For legal purposes, and not confusing the shit out of everybody, knowing the difference between "Robert Smith", "Bob Smith Jr.", and "Little Bobby Smith" can be an actual thing.
By the time you're "the third", the roman numerals are really the only way to do it.
The real problem is parents who feel the need to make their children "the third", thereby necessitating this in the first place. I generally think that ego is attributable to the previous generation than the poor schmuck who has to do it.
LOL, sure ... did either of us believe it?
There will always be people who say "we look forward to our new era of corporate benevolence" ... and there will always be people on the sideline saying "yeah, right, whatever bullshit lies float your boat".
No, we're pretty consistent ... we're just as convinced the companies are evil when they're run by young, hipster douchebags, and we don't believe them when they promise to not be evil.
Long established companies have just managed to grow into lumbering beasts with no clue of what they're doing, but who have repeatedly established their evil. The ones ran by the young hipster douchebags are just more focused on a narrower field of business, and can pretend to not be evil hipster douchebags yet.
Lots of us think it's just a matter of how the evil manifests itself.
The small lean but evil corporation is evil in a different way than the huge organization which isn't sure how to remain relevant.
Make no mistake, all companies converge on evil.
Well, they're in a feedback loop now .. the MBAs are the ones saying you need to bring in MBAs.
Much like how CEO pay climbed to stupid levels because CEOs and their cronies sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs, when the sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs.
The people making the bad decisions are hiring people just like them to help make the decisions, because thay mostly want like-minded people. Their compensation is separated from their performance, and they only look at the next quarter so they can take their bonuses and run like hell.
Corporations are almost incapable of long-term planning, because they really only give a damn about the next 3-4 months, and ensuring they maximize their own compensation.
My personal opinion, like you having seem it for the last bunch of years, is that C-level management and MBAs are pretty much uniformly fucking up corporations by doing the same stupid stuff over and over again. But by the time anybody realizes these clowns have been promoted, or received their golden parachute.
Other than CEOs, who really believes CEOs are worth anywhere near what they get paid? Oh, of course, the people who aspire to be CEOs so they too can get overpaid.
It's the emperor's new clothes. It's lies and stupidity piled on top of one another.
As far as I understand it, they're actually breaking out the exceedingly lucrative "consumer" divisions, but I'm not 100% sure.
Which potentially means they've made such a hash out of everything else they couldn't possibly have had any idea of what the hell they've been doing the last decade or so.
No whooshing ... the MBA wankers call it "leveraging synergies". Selling you both the problem and the cure is very lucrative, as it ensures you can "monetize the product lifecycle throughout its various phases while having complementary product offerings providing multiple revenue streams from the same user".
Let's face it, probably more malware and spam has been passed through x86 machines than any other platform on the planet. Intel definitely had skin in the game.
Oddly enough, I can see the direct link between firearms and the market for blood substitutes, what with the bleeding which follows shooting.
Well, "which HP?" is a good question.
Splitting up and selling off are not exactly indicators everything is going swimmingly.
As I said, companies grow, companies buy, companies fuck up what they buy, and then realize they no longer have much of an idea what they are anymore.
I think the M+A craze in tech for the last 20 years has been a lot of short term profit seeking, but is overall really bad in the long run. It maximizes executive compensation, but it doesn't actually achieve the outcomes they claim it does.
HP has been in decline for years.
Quality is down. Innovation is down. A series of seemingly incompetent CEOs. A couple of bad purchases. Some stupid decisions. Some utterly failed products.
Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.
Welcome to the modern world of tech, where you buy everything in sight, fuck it up, have a bunch of bad management, and then eventually implode as you realize nobody in your organization measures up to the people who got you there.
One wonders how many good companies have been swallowed up and ruined in trying to make huge companies more profitable, only to find out the huge companies have no idea what they're doing.
Over and over again, we see big corporations who really just keep changing CEOs, and utterly failing to understand just how badly they're all screwing up the company.
Well, in case you're only just joking ... the governments have been ignoring the Constitution at an accelerating rate for quite some time.
They're fully into "don't give a fuck" by now.
All those people who have taken an oath to "defend and uphold the Constitution"? That means "except where inconvenient".
Are you still laboring under the belief you live in a free and just society? You should get over that.
They haven't been asked to do that. That's not how they've been directed.
Prison in the US is essentially puritan dictated punishment and suffering, and there is no mandate to change anything.
The for-profit prison industry isn't going to counteract a parent society which says "lock 'em up, make 'em suffer, too fucking bad what happens after they get out".
This is why there is no rehabilitation. Because the people who want mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes don't give a crap about such things.
You can't give them incentives when you have a significant portion of social conservatives who believe the entire point of incarceration is punishment and not rehabilitation.
As long as people continue to believe this stuff should be ran as profit centers, this is what will happen. The Sheriff gets kickbacks, the companies who run the prisons get kickbacks.
It has nothing to do with punishment or rehabilitation, but ensuring you have as many people in prison as possible to maximize profits.
America has 20% of the world prisoner population, because America has made it profitable to keep people in prison; it's an industry worth tens of billions of dollars, and which uses prisoners as cheap labor.
It's far too profitable to stop. And it has nothing at all to do with the reason for prisons in the first place.
Essentially it's a giant tax-payer funded industry which doesn't offer much benefits to the tax-payer, and doesn't solve any problems.
But states look at them as revenue sources, and keep doing it.
This has been true for a very long time.
Essentially they've run out of ideas and need to get on with rehashing everything?
And here I though this might be limited to Hollywood, with their endless reboots because they lack anyone who can up with something new.
Because, really, we don't need to see the Spider Man origin story again.