I've always wondered about that phrase too since the only obvious negative connotation of "black" in this case is racist. I've always thought that the pot and kettle were cast-iron cookware, which would always be black.
I still use it a lot because there isn't a good replacement, but I occasionally reflect on whether or not it's a bad thing to say.
But because thits Google the press goes crazy with it. This is laughable to say the least.
It's because of the perceived hypocrisy. If your average company did this, no one would care because everyone expects your average company to be utterly amoral in its pursuit of profit so long as they don't break any laws.
Google staked their public reputation on "Don't be evil." That's an impossibly high standard for a publicly traded company thanks to shareholder value laws, and the press loves nothing more than to hound the heels of someone who takes the moral high ground and then does something against it.
Actually, I've had 3-4 jobs (depending on how you define jobs).
1) Crappy job with hourly pay as a student. 2) Hourly job with no benefits as a student. 3) Same job with employer #2 after graduation but with a salary and great benefits. 4) Hourly contract job with no benefits but with double my previous pay.
The last job was the one that tried to hard-sell me on the whole overtime only after 168 hrs/month nonsense. I negotiated hard for the full hourly rate since I knew the job involved oncall duty and I knew that I'd be utterly miserable if I felt taken advantage of. I was perfectly willing to blow off the job if they wouldn't negotiate on that, but they ended up folding after attempting to rattle me with rejecting my terms.
Most of my friends have had similar experiences in their pay schedules and benefits. I've never heard of a salaried job paying overtime, and I've never heard of time-and-a-half before the other two posters chimed in. Apparently there are people who get time-and-a-half according to that, but I've never heard of anyone getting it where I live. Personally, while I like putting my insurance & retirement savings where I feel like it, I'm definitely going back to salaried for less money in exchange for a normal 40-hour work week after bulking up my resume here. This job is merely a transitional job. Contract labor doesn't suit me.
he mentions how he's doing 2 different jobs without any sort of extra compensation but the overtime. maybe he should take it up with teh boss. maybe it would be cheaper for the boss to hire someone else at a lower pay rate than to be paying him all the overtime.
You must be new to this industry. If you're salaried, you don't get overtime pay -- ever. That's standard industry practice. If you're hourly, you might get a package where they only pay overtime beyond 28 hours per month in exchange for paid vacation and holidays that you'll never get a chance to use.
By federal regulations, even if they do pay you overtime, IT workers are exempt from time-and-a-half requirements. They can choose to only pay you the same rate as you're currently being paid. I've never heard of an IT worker getting paid time-and-a-half. It is no cheaper to hire another worker (and probably more expensive due to overhead costs) when you can just pay the same guy for more hours, especially if he's working less than 80 hours per week (16 hours per day without weekends). Even if he does get time-and-a-half, it's still cheaper unless he works over 66 hours. (13+ hours per day without weekends.)
In my opinion, you should always take one of two options -- salaried with good benefits and an expectation to work less than 45 hours per week or strictly hourly with all working hours paid and no non-working hours paid. Any other kind of job is a sucker's job, and I'm starting to think that the latter job type is one too if you can regularly expect to be on-call as per my current job. Taking job where you're hourly and they can still get free overtime out of you is a job where you're absolutely assured to get overtime work constantly.
You're forgetting the reprocessing is a great way to harvest fuel for nuclear weapons (in particular plutonium).
Also, while it does stretch our supplies of fissile materials, it produces a hell of a lot of radioactive, liquid, toxic waste that has to be stored until its safe to solidy and bury. There have been large leaks and spills of this material before.
Nuclear reprocessing in its current form is a bad idea and makes it harder to discourage in other states. Then again, it goes along great with the current President's "Do as I say, not as I do" foreign policy.
I'm not going to risk my vehicle and my life for a cheap thrill I could get by either playing a video game or going on a roller coaster.
The key words there are "my vehicle." These kids were racing their parents' Mercedes and are noting as attending and exclusive boys school. They're probably spoiled-rotten, little rich kids. I doubt their families have taught them a thing about responsibility. Maybe they would've valued those cars a little more if they'd earned the money to own them themselves.
Don't be surprised. I still remember when I was a little kid and people came to our church to tell us about how D&D encourages worship of the devil and spun stories about people who got demonically possessed or got burned or frostburned by using a Oujia board.
For the longest time, when I stared playing RPGs, I wasn't allowed to own D&D. Actually, you know as gaming influences go maybe I should thank crazy fundamentalists from saving me from the world of mindless, hack-n'-slash dungeon crawls.
If the parents make a peep about suing EA under the pretense that "they are just kids and didn't know what they were doing", charge them with child negligence -- first, with providing them access to such a dangerous video game, and second by providing them access to their cars.
I think you've hit the nail on the head right there. If video games are such a corrupting influence, then where's the parent's responsibility in such instances?
Look at all the great examples of kids who went crazy or did something stupid and the media blamed it on video games. What's the other common element behind them? Neglectful parents who fail to actually act as parents to their kids. With video game ratings in place, I think that any parent who whines, "But we didn't know!" should be slapped with negligence for failing to bother to get informed about the kind of thing their kids do.
To have FireWire 800 support, Apple would have to provide a custom chipset capable of supporting it. Since Apple doesn't exactly have fab capabilities, it's not on the MacBook.
Of course, Apple could've always just contracted out the fabrication like they have for the chipsets on every previous Mac since the first. Seriously, did you think that the PowerMac G5 used an off-the-shelf chipset? Apple has long been in the business of custom-designing chips for their motherboards, not the least of which would be the famous Mac ROM.
Fickle & finnicky, it sounds like you have an extremely narrow idea of what is funny. Please don't be a Neilsen family; I'm sick of people like you killing my favorite cartoons.
Bah. Don't presume to know a man's tastes purely by a single example. Family Guy's still funny, it's just not as funny as it used to be to me because I really happen to have a thing for mad scientist characters and find "naughty boy" humor less funny.
Then again, I can't be a Neilsen family because I don't have cable or satellite. Family Guy is just one of the few shows on TV that I like enough to watch.
At first Stewie was a megalomaniacal infant with Peter Lorre's voice, now he's some amalgamation of sleazy teenager/adult in an infant body with some of the imagination of a toddler.
There! You've nailed exactly why I don't think the Family Guy is nearly as funny as it was when it started out. Stewie's megalomania and hatred for his mother are very large parts of what drew me to the show. Now that he's just all confused about sex and more of a smartass than anyone his age could be, I really don't care for the character as much.
What about slashdotters who reflexively name groups of people who are considered "irrational"? Aren't you just doing the same thing here?
As a Christian and a Mac user, I'd say, "No."
Seriously though, there are topics that are more likely to attract zealots than others. Sometimes it's a single group that starts attracting the zealots and people arguing against them harden into zealots in response. Mac users started out pretty zealous and soon the defensive instincts of people that didn't own Macs started to create a thriving community of PC zealots who probably wouldn't have given a damn if they hadn't constantly been told that they were foolish, servile to Microsoft, and complete tools because of their product choice.
Similarly, the partisan divide in American politics has hardened severely after the period of rest after the civil rights movement thanks to the rise of Republican zealots in positions of power and influence in the government and media. Religion attracts zealots because most religions tell people either that they need to get out there and convert people or that other people aren't God's worthy chosen. Being right or wrong is simply a matter of being on the only side that matters to religious people and people who aren't on that side are inferior in a very codified way. Sports also draws zealots because there are clear sides and because loyalty to one's team has traditionally been a part of pride in one's local community.
In essence, anything that has obvious "sides" to it and a sense of belonging draws zealots like flies, especially if there's a moral components (like religion, politics, open source, economics, etc.). Religion, politics, sports, and product loyalty are just the most notorious in our modern culture.
Ever heard of the Southern Strategy? In essence, the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats switched sides over the civil rights movement. The Party of Lincoln was a liberal party, remember. Conservative Democrats revolted in the 40-60s over desegregation movements as the civil rights movement took over the Democrats, and Goldwater led the conservative push within the the Republicans that later led to Nixon courting the South by expressing support for "states rights," which in the 60s & 70s was well understood to be tacit support for segregation much like "family values" today primarily jargon for pro life and anti gay rights stances. Many Southern Democrats became life-long Republicans after that, with Strom Thurmond being the most infamous.
Overt racism is mostly dead in the Republican party as voters who have racist goals have become too much of a minority to be courted. The closest thing to overt racism lies in the kind speech used to bash welfare and programs to help the poor in right wing talk radio. They commonly use the spectre of the "lazy" and "criminal" urban poor (i.e. black people and hispanics) as a wedge to support the passage of laws that hurt the rural poor (which is a Republican base). As long as fear and disgust of the ghetto exists, people will support laws that take away programs that help them. "It's a shame, but it's all their fault for making it unuseable by abusing it." (Think of Reagan's fictional welfare queen for a good concrete example. Also go back and listen to Rush and Hannity during the weeks after Katrina.)
Remember, the Republicans and Democrats switched sides. It's not labels but values that matter. Social (not fiscal) conservatism and liberalism in my mind are best understood by mankind's innate instinct to form groups, praise the values of the group, and denigrate the values of those outside of it. Conservatives seek to "focus" the group to more closely adhere to its idealized core values and to ostracise those outside of it. They seek to strengthen "us" by driving out and defeating "them." Liberals seek to expand the groups as much as possible to make as many different people as possible "one of us." Liberals seek to eliminate the concept of "them" and suppress the natural tendency for a large enough "us" to divide into "thems" on its own. Social conservatives are insular; social liberals are embracing.
Racism is a socially conservative value just like sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry because it forments the divide between "right-thinking people like us" and "morally or inherently inferior people like them." The reason that racism doesn't have nearly as much sway over conservative politics as it used to is because liberals (whether Republican or Democratic) won that fight. Now the primary divisive issue is homosexuality, but it's still all about the division instead of the unification. Racism and indeed all forms of social division and partitioning is an inherently conservative value.
No, that's an excellent SCOTUS nominee: regardless of his beliefs and attitudes on a subject, a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to determine what the LAW says on a subject.
Oh, our bad. We were holding him to those same standards for his position as a Federal Appelate Court Justice. If we'd only realized that he was free to be a complete partisan hack when in offices other than the Supreme Court, we wouldn't even be bringing up that record.
've said for years that as the single best thing the US could do for the planet, tax the hell out of fuel oil (though possibly not heating oil, but that gets into a regulatory nightmare considering that you can use diesel and #2 interchangeably, sulfur emmissions aside) to put it at over $10/gallon.
You can't do this for the same reason that you can't tax heating oil. This is a regressive tax on an essential good that will mostly hurt the people for whom this expentiture is a larger portion of their budget (i.e. the poor). It's an unfortunate fact that people need cars to get to work in America's pedestrian-unfriendly, poor-mass transit world. In fact poor people are far, far more likely to need a car because affordable places to live are get further and further from where the good jobs are the less money you make. No one puts a good job in the ghetto, and those that are available are quickly snapped up.
The kind of changes in transportation infrastructure and city planning necessary to make this not hurt poor people take decades to complete which is an unacceptable lag on ending the pain for them.
Corporations aren't democratic because they're plutocratic republics. Shareholders get different levels of voting power based on how much they own of the company and elect a board to represent them and manage the company. You can't have a democracy when one-man-one-vote is not in effect.
The problem with corporate cronyism is that a large number of boards are made up of the largest investors or are close friends with the largest investors. Thus, the elite voters are close to the people being elected. This has trended towards a pattern of corruption in every single social group that has allowed elite voting rights.
If you want to investigate a democratic model of company management, look into syndicalism. Of course, nothing's perfect and syndicalism has a lot of flaws such as a lack of strong profit motive to keep the company alive and management being based on popularity and charisma instead of capability. (A truly meritocratic model of corporate governance simply doesn't exist and cannot exist due to the impossibility of objectively determining merit.)
Then again, even in a democratically run company, I still feel that publicly traded companies cannot have a higher ethical goal in the long run since the majority of shareholders will always have profit as their primary motive. That's a topic for a different discussion, though.
Works for large companies......but unfortunately, in my experience, it's the small businesses that have the worst bosses
Personally, I've only had three real corporate experiences myself: 1) A small company where all of management was rotten. 2) A small company where all of management was wonderful. 3) A large company where a few managers are great but most are rotten.
In my experience (and based on my friends' tales), in a small business you either get all horrible managers or mostly great managers. There's less bureaucracy for a parasite to hide in unless the entire bureacracy is made up of vermin. Small companies strongly attract management of the same temperment -- either complete sleaze or responsible, non-nonsense people.
Large companies, especially when working through several layers of contractors, are a real grab-bag. The petty and vile can isolate themselves from good management and vice versa due to the sheer size of the organization and the impossibility of VPs knowing all the managers under them and vice versa. When there are multiple layers of cogs in the machine above the grunt workers and multiple departments working on different products that don't talk to each other at all, what you really have is a slightly melted together stack of small companies, each with their own ethos.
If you work in a small company, your manager is scum, and you feel that the whole company is rotten, you're probably right. Get out -- right now -- and go find another company to work for. Personally, after I spend a couple of years bulking up my resume at my current job, I'm back off to small company land, and I'm never looking back (less I turn into a pillar of SOX). There's usually less money in working for small companies, but there can be a lot more peace of mind if you don't land in a snake pit.
Honestly, if we can get virtualization that lets a game have full access to the video card, then I see absolutely no need for dual-booting Windows that 99% of people who would otherwise try it would need.
I really wish people would get over this misconception that video games are only for kids.
I wish that people would get over their misconception that many parents won't end up buying this game for their kids. However, like I explicitly said, I don't support a ban on the game. The poster I was promoting and I were attacking the notion that this game is no different from kids playing "cops and robbers," which it is clearly an adult send-up of.
(Also, where have you been? People have been complaining about Get Rich or Die Tryin' already.)
I also wish groups like this would get over theirself and stop trampelling all over people's free speech rights.
Actually, the group involved is calling for a boycott and not a ban, so personally, I wish posters like this "would get over theirself and stop trampelling all over people's free speech rights." </tongue-in-cheek>
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered about that phrase too since the only obvious negative connotation of "black" in this case is racist. I've always thought that the pot and kettle were cast-iron cookware, which would always be black.
I still use it a lot because there isn't a good replacement, but I occasionally reflect on whether or not it's a bad thing to say.
But because thits Google the press goes crazy with it. This is laughable to say the least.
It's because of the perceived hypocrisy. If your average company did this, no one would care because everyone expects your average company to be utterly amoral in its pursuit of profit so long as they don't break any laws.
Google staked their public reputation on "Don't be evil." That's an impossibly high standard for a publicly traded company thanks to shareholder value laws, and the press loves nothing more than to hound the heels of someone who takes the moral high ground and then does something against it.
Actually, I've had 3-4 jobs (depending on how you define jobs).
1) Crappy job with hourly pay as a student.
2) Hourly job with no benefits as a student.
3) Same job with employer #2 after graduation but with a salary and great benefits.
4) Hourly contract job with no benefits but with double my previous pay.
The last job was the one that tried to hard-sell me on the whole overtime only after 168 hrs/month nonsense. I negotiated hard for the full hourly rate since I knew the job involved oncall duty and I knew that I'd be utterly miserable if I felt taken advantage of. I was perfectly willing to blow off the job if they wouldn't negotiate on that, but they ended up folding after attempting to rattle me with rejecting my terms.
Most of my friends have had similar experiences in their pay schedules and benefits. I've never heard of a salaried job paying overtime, and I've never heard of time-and-a-half before the other two posters chimed in. Apparently there are people who get time-and-a-half according to that, but I've never heard of anyone getting it where I live. Personally, while I like putting my insurance & retirement savings where I feel like it, I'm definitely going back to salaried for less money in exchange for a normal 40-hour work week after bulking up my resume here. This job is merely a transitional job. Contract labor doesn't suit me.
Wahoo, it was a secret DNA decoder ring...
Slashdot poster turned geneticist reveals that chromosome 12 decodes to "DRINK MORE OVALTINE."
he mentions how he's doing 2 different jobs without any sort of extra compensation but the overtime. maybe he should take it up with teh boss. maybe it would be cheaper for the boss to hire someone else at a lower pay rate than to be paying him all the overtime.
You must be new to this industry. If you're salaried, you don't get overtime pay -- ever. That's standard industry practice. If you're hourly, you might get a package where they only pay overtime beyond 28 hours per month in exchange for paid vacation and holidays that you'll never get a chance to use.
By federal regulations, even if they do pay you overtime, IT workers are exempt from time-and-a-half requirements. They can choose to only pay you the same rate as you're currently being paid. I've never heard of an IT worker getting paid time-and-a-half. It is no cheaper to hire another worker (and probably more expensive due to overhead costs) when you can just pay the same guy for more hours, especially if he's working less than 80 hours per week (16 hours per day without weekends). Even if he does get time-and-a-half, it's still cheaper unless he works over 66 hours. (13+ hours per day without weekends.)
In my opinion, you should always take one of two options -- salaried with good benefits and an expectation to work less than 45 hours per week or strictly hourly with all working hours paid and no non-working hours paid. Any other kind of job is a sucker's job, and I'm starting to think that the latter job type is one too if you can regularly expect to be on-call as per my current job. Taking job where you're hourly and they can still get free overtime out of you is a job where you're absolutely assured to get overtime work constantly.
You're forgetting the reprocessing is a great way to harvest fuel for nuclear weapons (in particular plutonium).
Also, while it does stretch our supplies of fissile materials, it produces a hell of a lot of radioactive, liquid, toxic waste that has to be stored until its safe to solidy and bury. There have been large leaks and spills of this material before.
Nuclear reprocessing in its current form is a bad idea and makes it harder to discourage in other states. Then again, it goes along great with the current President's "Do as I say, not as I do" foreign policy.
I'm not going to risk my vehicle and my life for a cheap thrill I could get by either playing a video game or going on a roller coaster.
The key words there are "my vehicle." These kids were racing their parents' Mercedes and are noting as attending and exclusive boys school. They're probably spoiled-rotten, little rich kids. I doubt their families have taught them a thing about responsibility. Maybe they would've valued those cars a little more if they'd earned the money to own them themselves.
Don't be surprised. I still remember when I was a little kid and people came to our church to tell us about how D&D encourages worship of the devil and spun stories about people who got demonically possessed or got burned or frostburned by using a Oujia board.
For the longest time, when I stared playing RPGs, I wasn't allowed to own D&D. Actually, you know as gaming influences go maybe I should thank crazy fundamentalists from saving me from the world of mindless, hack-n'-slash dungeon crawls.
If the parents make a peep about suing EA under the pretense that "they are just kids and didn't know what they were doing", charge them with child negligence -- first, with providing them access to such a dangerous video game, and second by providing them access to their cars.
I think you've hit the nail on the head right there. If video games are such a corrupting influence, then where's the parent's responsibility in such instances?
Look at all the great examples of kids who went crazy or did something stupid and the media blamed it on video games. What's the other common element behind them? Neglectful parents who fail to actually act as parents to their kids. With video game ratings in place, I think that any parent who whines, "But we didn't know!" should be slapped with negligence for failing to bother to get informed about the kind of thing their kids do.
But will their toothpicks include a root canal?
Fixed.
To have FireWire 800 support, Apple would have to provide a custom chipset capable of supporting it. Since Apple doesn't exactly have fab capabilities, it's not on the MacBook.
Of course, Apple could've always just contracted out the fabrication like they have for the chipsets on every previous Mac since the first. Seriously, did you think that the PowerMac G5 used an off-the-shelf chipset? Apple has long been in the business of custom-designing chips for their motherboards, not the least of which would be the famous Mac ROM.
I would just like to say that I am sorry for your loss.
I have a bunch of thoughts swirling around in my head from your story, but all I can coherently write is my condolences.
Just how the hell did I become 35?
An assiduous, practiced, daily routine of not dying?
Fickle & finnicky, it sounds like you have an extremely narrow idea of what is funny. Please don't be a Neilsen family; I'm sick of people like you killing my favorite cartoons.
Bah. Don't presume to know a man's tastes purely by a single example. Family Guy's still funny, it's just not as funny as it used to be to me because I really happen to have a thing for mad scientist characters and find "naughty boy" humor less funny.
Then again, I can't be a Neilsen family because I don't have cable or satellite. Family Guy is just one of the few shows on TV that I like enough to watch.
Whoops. That's not a feature of Photoshop. I was thinking of my last job's product which handled satellite and aerial photography.
The last two lines of the article:
Layered Photoshop files contain a history of the file.
At first Stewie was a megalomaniacal infant with Peter Lorre's voice, now he's some amalgamation of sleazy teenager/adult in an infant body with some of the imagination of a toddler.
There! You've nailed exactly why I don't think the Family Guy is nearly as funny as it was when it started out. Stewie's megalomania and hatred for his mother are very large parts of what drew me to the show. Now that he's just all confused about sex and more of a smartass than anyone his age could be, I really don't care for the character as much.
What about slashdotters who reflexively name groups of people who are considered "irrational"? Aren't you just doing the same thing here?
As a Christian and a Mac user, I'd say, "No."
Seriously though, there are topics that are more likely to attract zealots than others. Sometimes it's a single group that starts attracting the zealots and people arguing against them harden into zealots in response. Mac users started out pretty zealous and soon the defensive instincts of people that didn't own Macs started to create a thriving community of PC zealots who probably wouldn't have given a damn if they hadn't constantly been told that they were foolish, servile to Microsoft, and complete tools because of their product choice.
Similarly, the partisan divide in American politics has hardened severely after the period of rest after the civil rights movement thanks to the rise of Republican zealots in positions of power and influence in the government and media. Religion attracts zealots because most religions tell people either that they need to get out there and convert people or that other people aren't God's worthy chosen. Being right or wrong is simply a matter of being on the only side that matters to religious people and people who aren't on that side are inferior in a very codified way. Sports also draws zealots because there are clear sides and because loyalty to one's team has traditionally been a part of pride in one's local community.
In essence, anything that has obvious "sides" to it and a sense of belonging draws zealots like flies, especially if there's a moral components (like religion, politics, open source, economics, etc.). Religion, politics, sports, and product loyalty are just the most notorious in our modern culture.
Ever heard of the Southern Strategy? In essence, the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats switched sides over the civil rights movement. The Party of Lincoln was a liberal party, remember. Conservative Democrats revolted in the 40-60s over desegregation movements as the civil rights movement took over the Democrats, and Goldwater led the conservative push within the the Republicans that later led to Nixon courting the South by expressing support for "states rights," which in the 60s & 70s was well understood to be tacit support for segregation much like "family values" today primarily jargon for pro life and anti gay rights stances. Many Southern Democrats became life-long Republicans after that, with Strom Thurmond being the most infamous.
Overt racism is mostly dead in the Republican party as voters who have racist goals have become too much of a minority to be courted. The closest thing to overt racism lies in the kind speech used to bash welfare and programs to help the poor in right wing talk radio. They commonly use the spectre of the "lazy" and "criminal" urban poor (i.e. black people and hispanics) as a wedge to support the passage of laws that hurt the rural poor (which is a Republican base). As long as fear and disgust of the ghetto exists, people will support laws that take away programs that help them. "It's a shame, but it's all their fault for making it unuseable by abusing it." (Think of Reagan's fictional welfare queen for a good concrete example. Also go back and listen to Rush and Hannity during the weeks after Katrina.)
Remember, the Republicans and Democrats switched sides. It's not labels but values that matter. Social (not fiscal) conservatism and liberalism in my mind are best understood by mankind's innate instinct to form groups, praise the values of the group, and denigrate the values of those outside of it. Conservatives seek to "focus" the group to more closely adhere to its idealized core values and to ostracise those outside of it. They seek to strengthen "us" by driving out and defeating "them." Liberals seek to expand the groups as much as possible to make as many different people as possible "one of us." Liberals seek to eliminate the concept of "them" and suppress the natural tendency for a large enough "us" to divide into "thems" on its own. Social conservatives are insular; social liberals are embracing.
Racism is a socially conservative value just like sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry because it forments the divide between "right-thinking people like us" and "morally or inherently inferior people like them." The reason that racism doesn't have nearly as much sway over conservative politics as it used to is because liberals (whether Republican or Democratic) won that fight. Now the primary divisive issue is homosexuality, but it's still all about the division instead of the unification. Racism and indeed all forms of social division and partitioning is an inherently conservative value.
No, that's an excellent SCOTUS nominee: regardless of his beliefs and attitudes on a subject, a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to determine what the LAW says on a subject.
Oh, our bad. We were holding him to those same standards for his position as a Federal Appelate Court Justice. If we'd only realized that he was free to be a complete partisan hack when in offices other than the Supreme Court, we wouldn't even be bringing up that record.
've said for years that as the single best thing the US could do for the planet, tax the hell out of fuel oil (though possibly not heating oil, but that gets into a regulatory nightmare considering that you can use diesel and #2 interchangeably, sulfur emmissions aside) to put it at over $10/gallon.
You can't do this for the same reason that you can't tax heating oil. This is a regressive tax on an essential good that will mostly hurt the people for whom this expentiture is a larger portion of their budget (i.e. the poor). It's an unfortunate fact that people need cars to get to work in America's pedestrian-unfriendly, poor-mass transit world. In fact poor people are far, far more likely to need a car because affordable places to live are get further and further from where the good jobs are the less money you make. No one puts a good job in the ghetto, and those that are available are quickly snapped up.
The kind of changes in transportation infrastructure and city planning necessary to make this not hurt poor people take decades to complete which is an unacceptable lag on ending the pain for them.
Corporations aren't democratic because they're plutocratic republics. Shareholders get different levels of voting power based on how much they own of the company and elect a board to represent them and manage the company. You can't have a democracy when one-man-one-vote is not in effect.
The problem with corporate cronyism is that a large number of boards are made up of the largest investors or are close friends with the largest investors. Thus, the elite voters are close to the people being elected. This has trended towards a pattern of corruption in every single social group that has allowed elite voting rights.
If you want to investigate a democratic model of company management, look into syndicalism. Of course, nothing's perfect and syndicalism has a lot of flaws such as a lack of strong profit motive to keep the company alive and management being based on popularity and charisma instead of capability. (A truly meritocratic model of corporate governance simply doesn't exist and cannot exist due to the impossibility of objectively determining merit.)
Then again, even in a democratically run company, I still feel that publicly traded companies cannot have a higher ethical goal in the long run since the majority of shareholders will always have profit as their primary motive. That's a topic for a different discussion, though.
Works for large companies... ...but unfortunately, in my experience, it's the small businesses that have the worst bosses
Personally, I've only had three real corporate experiences myself:
1) A small company where all of management was rotten.
2) A small company where all of management was wonderful.
3) A large company where a few managers are great but most are rotten.
In my experience (and based on my friends' tales), in a small business you either get all horrible managers or mostly great managers. There's less bureaucracy for a parasite to hide in unless the entire bureacracy is made up of vermin. Small companies strongly attract management of the same temperment -- either complete sleaze or responsible, non-nonsense people.
Large companies, especially when working through several layers of contractors, are a real grab-bag. The petty and vile can isolate themselves from good management and vice versa due to the sheer size of the organization and the impossibility of VPs knowing all the managers under them and vice versa. When there are multiple layers of cogs in the machine above the grunt workers and multiple departments working on different products that don't talk to each other at all, what you really have is a slightly melted together stack of small companies, each with their own ethos.
If you work in a small company, your manager is scum, and you feel that the whole company is rotten, you're probably right. Get out -- right now -- and go find another company to work for. Personally, after I spend a couple of years bulking up my resume at my current job, I'm back off to small company land, and I'm never looking back (less I turn into a pillar of SOX). There's usually less money in working for small companies, but there can be a lot more peace of mind if you don't land in a snake pit.
Honestly, if we can get virtualization that lets a game have full access to the video card, then I see absolutely no need for dual-booting Windows that 99% of people who would otherwise try it would need.
I really wish people would get over this misconception that video games are only for kids.
I wish that people would get over their misconception that many parents won't end up buying this game for their kids. However, like I explicitly said, I don't support a ban on the game. The poster I was promoting and I were attacking the notion that this game is no different from kids playing "cops and robbers," which it is clearly an adult send-up of.
(Also, where have you been? People have been complaining about Get Rich or Die Tryin' already.)
I also wish groups like this would get over theirself and stop trampelling all over people's free speech rights.
Actually, the group involved is calling for a boycott and not a ban, so personally, I wish posters like this "would get over theirself and stop trampelling all over people's free speech rights." </tongue-in-cheek>