No... he remains just as culpable by his silence on the matter (albeit as the Governor of Mass.) when fellow party-member Bush instituted this particular little policy.
If all else fails and you want something more concrete, get someone to ask him point-blank. Any answer less than dissembling or qualifiers is to be interpreted as assent.
So far, the only politician of note to speak out against it directly is Ron Paul, who obviously has no hope of winning this (or any) presidential election.
...when talking to the guy that didnt bother mention Microsoft at all?
Last I checked, the guy was actively defending Steve Ballmer. Guess where Mr. Ballmer works?
I get the non-RTFA meme, but when you don't even RTFP? Maybe you should just go lie down or something?
You are fucking amazing.
Damned right I am.;)
As for the rest, hey - if you want to claim that Microsoft is experiencing golden days and that Ballmer can run with the big boys, go for it. Oh, by the way, the Carpathia just radioed in - they said they'll be by shortly to pick everyone up, so you just have a seat on that nice comfy deck chair over there and listen to the band...
Microsoft is pushing record revenue numbers. [google.com] Sure, not as much as Apple.. but then thats just cherry picking the guy at the top.
Wow - speaking of cherry-picking! Seems you do a bit of that yourself up there. After all, why did you reach back to April for MSFT numbers? We have a perfect comparison to make in this recent quarter, after all:
Meanwhile, in spite of eating a larger ($12.5bn) write-down on their part from buying Motorola, Google actually grew their revenue by 35 percent YoY over the same period (21% if it was minus Moto) (same link, BTW).
Seriously... your buddies in Redmond have a lot ot worry about, and the sooner they actually do something about it, the better.
Over the past 10 years we have watched some CEOs "of that level" run their tech companies straight into the toilette. How is Sun Microsystems doing? How is RIM doing? How is Palm.. err USRobots.. no wait.. thats 3Com.. err.. PalmOne.. err.. Hows the hell is that Palm brand that Hewlett-Packard acquired doing these days?
By contrast, how are Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, RedHat, Samsung, IBM, Google, VMWare/EMC, NetApp, Canonical, and about 100 other tech companies doing? Most are still stable-to-growing, even in this economic climate. Their brands are still very strong in the tech community, unlike the weakening Microsoft brand(s). They have growing mindshare, unlike Microsoft. They have greater *growth*, and they manage to do it without fudging numbers, channel-stuffing, or counting "downgrade licenses" as sales of their new goods.
Hell - Apple (a so-called premium brand!) and Google are almost printing their own money at this point, so don't go blaming the economy, either.
It's too easy to compare Ballmer with the short-sheeted dual-CEOs at RIM, the egomaniac (but vision-less) former CEO/lunatic of Sun, or the Eternal Microsoftie that's currently running Nokia.
Problem is, you illustrate my point for me, by comparing Ballmer to other, greater losers. Now compare him to the winners, and you'll notice that he comes up way the hell short...
No, a well managed company does this when it starts, and does it continually throughout the life of the company. It often changes, too. That's all normal, good stuff.
Yes and no.
If you're re-evaluating your vision and direction over time, keeping an eye on what's coming and how to best take advantage of that, then yeah - good stuff, and very necessary. If your changes are what's driving the market, even better.
If OTOH you're reacting to market changes and/or to your competition with 'me too!' or 'OMG I have to wrestle that back!' seismic company mission changes, then it ain't good stuff at all.
Microsoft seems more and more to be the latter, where they were once the former, yanno?
Err, given Ballmer's performance when compared to other CEOs of that level? It doesn't take a super-analyst or a wildly successful peer to see that Ballmer got his job thanks to the luckiest college dorm room assignment in the history of mankind (where he met Mssr. Gates...)
Many PC users will not tolerate the astronomical prices of Apple hardware.
Old myth. Spec out a *decent* OEM-built PC sometime... the prices are damned close, and the Apple product usually wins when they release their updated models.
Sure, you can save a mountain of cash if you build your own off of Newegg (hell, I do), but when you talk about Joe Sixpack and buying a quality brand, things start getting extremely close, price-wise.
I've had a Microsoft mouse for almost 20 years! It's the most reliable product of theirs that I've ever had!
Given that the mouse is a rebranded Logitech, you could've had the same thing w/o the Microsoft tag on it, and it would have likely lasted just as long...
I don't see Microsoft dying off quite yet. They still rake in an obscene amount of money from the enterprise half of the tech world, and that's where all the money is. After all, what's $50/seat for a consumer OS license when they're raking in $5,000 or more for each Enterprise-tagged SKU?
I can however see them losing the consumer side, and hard. That in turn will start creeping into the Enterprise side of things - first as a trickle (iPhones at work, anyone?) then as a flood.
It'll take about 10 years, but by then I think that unless Microsoft does something drastic and effective, they will be reduced to selling Exchange servers/services/licenses, and that's about it (unless GMail takes over even that...)
MS has lost it's ability to turn on a dime it appears.
To be fair, only when Microsoft sees itself hurtling towards a cliff does it gain the ability to turn on anything resembling a dime. Even then the results are usually half-assed, with just enough marketing, copying, company-purchasing, and sometimes outright BS to pull it off. See also the late 1990's and Windows TCP/IP stack, IE, et al.
Gates had one other advantage that Ballmer does not: Microsoft was a whole lot more streamlined in 1996 than it is today.
In analogy terms?
Microsoft of 1996 was like turning a commercial fishing vessel: you could see it took effort, but it could turn quickly enough if it had to.
Microsoft of 2012 is like six oil supertankers welded together side by side, with two of them welded on backwards.
Still in the red money-wise, and R&D for the XBox 720 will probably drive it back deeper towards the wrong side of ROI.
Microsoft may fail often but every now and then they hit it out of the park.
Approx. $3-5bn in the hole (even after annual profits to date, bringing the total down from ~$7bn) means that the XBox "hit it out of the park" with everyone but the accounting department, the bottom line, and future profitability.
Put it this way - I can make the most badassed and popular widget on the planet, but if it's bleeding my bank account dry (even if slowly), then it isn't a winner in my own book(s).
You know? The funniest argument I ever heard against Linux back in the day was that you had all these wildly different desktops (GNOME, KDE, WM, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc...) and that Windows was supposedly superior because Joe Sixpack had a consistent desktop experience - Windows was Windows no matter where you went, etc.
I wonder where those people are now, who were making that argument back in 1998... ?
The difference is in price. Even discounting inflation, that 1997 laptop likely cost you (or whoever bought it first) well over $2500 or more. Now you can get the same relative level of bleeding-edge badass for less than half the price. Hell, look at the 1980's-era machines... At the high end, those things cost you almost as much as a new compact car at the time. Nowadays, you can use one to scare the kids into eating their vegetables, but that's about it. ("Now Johnny, you either eat that effing broccoli or you'll be talking to facebook over a 9600-baud modem for a month - you hear me, boy!?" )
One other thing, though - not all new items die off in 5-6 years. Instead, we just get bored with it and move on. I have an old 1994-era dual G5 Mac that I can pull out of the closet and, in full confidence, expect it to come right up. Same story with the 2001-era Dell Inspiron 8100 I bought, then eventually gave to my mother - and she still uses the damned thing almost daily (yes the battery is pretty much dead weight by now, but it still works just fine otherwise).
I'd elaborate on the parent post, but it's hard to, since he covered a mountain of ground.
I'm approaching my mid-40s. I'm still learning new things, almost on a weekly basis as new things pop up. In my humble opinion, OP is approaching the question wrong - it's not "should I re-train", it rather should be: "...why did I let my otherwise continuous training slip so horribly?"
I know the answer, sort of. It's hard to get deep into a new language when the kids bug you with requests or questions that never end, and the wife wants to know when you are going to put that damned laptop down and cuddle with her in front of some stupid chick flick that you'll instantly forget once it's over. On the other hand, in this biz, you have to keep the training continuous. Slow down, and you fall behind... unless you specialize in COBOL or FORTRAN, falling behind too much is pretty detrimental to one's career.
As for the management thing, maybe it was just a shit position? I've done the management thing, and still do when the job calls for it... I find that the 'people person' skills are a minor (albeit powerful) part of it - the majority is paper-shoveling and leadership, coupled with a knack for keeping a billion disparate tasks prioritized as they arise and (hopefully) in deadline. I've seen asshats with a complete lack of people skills succeed wildly in management, simply because they can keep ten thousand different priorities and tasks all wired tight and done on time. May want to give that another go, but do it in a way that you report to other people - hopefully under people who are good mentors this time around.
Overall, yeah... it sounds like a life change/decision. Personally, follow what you love to do, and to hell with the rest. Dying a happy old retired garbageman or janitor is far preferable to dying as a miserable middle-aged CEO, yanno? It's your life - do what *you* want to do with it. Even if you (eventually) retire as a code-monkey? If you enjoy it, then for heaven sakes - do it!
I'm pretty sure that wikileaks might have a difference of an opinion. Granted their bank account wasn't closed but credit card companies did their best to prevent them from getting any more money.
That actually proves my point, as it's government that is driving the whole Wikileaks affair. Do you think Visa/Mastercard/etc are doing that on a whim, especially given that they were ordered to hamper things from the (drumroll please...) government?
Except when they were Blackwater operating in Iraq.
So... anyone thinking of tinkering with a kernel that supports the Apple ARM chips?
(been a long while since I bothered with ARM, so maybe something out there already works with it... dunno. Still, it'd be hella funny to walk around with an iPad that sports a Linux distro on it:) )
I suspect that with "good behavior" and prison overcrowding, he could be out on parole in as little as 18 months...now how he intends to feed himself and make a living after that is another question entirely.
...incidentally, I don't mean the theft part, which is pretty dumb on its own. What I mean is, he should have been socking that money into Cayman Island accounts (or maybe Venezuelan bank accounts and such), then get out of dodge once he hit the $2m mark or so. Get enough scratch and live in a 3rd-world country that doesn't do extradition, and you can get an entire flock of local women instead of having to throw a ton of money on just one.
Then again, dunno how much money he himself got, as the $4.5m figure could be what Cisco values the parts to be, which given Cisco's pricing could be as little as three fans and a 6509 power supply w/ SmartNet support.:p
I am curious as to WTF these guys think when they start pulling stunts like this, however. I mean, if you're gonna flirt with PMITA Prison time, you'd best be damned smart about it, do at least some research, and get your shit planned in advance...
You are more likely to win a suit against the government than against a corporation. Even in the US.
...meanwhile you stay hamstrung by whatever binding and/or regulation they say you've broken. After all, no corporation can freeze your bank accounts, remove your right to drive a car, take your children, shut off your home's power/water supply, force you to remain in certain areas (and be barred from others) or lock you in jail while you pursue said lawsuits.
Government can do all of that and then some, depending on the nature and severity of the incompetent/deranged action. Hell, the government can even assault your property with armed squads and shoot at your family. Sure, Randy Weaver won the eventual lawsuit, but his wife and daughter are still rather dead...
Perhaps it should say "bureaucrat" instead of "bureau", but the point still stands. As evidence, I present to you such wonders as Child Protective Services, Contempt of Court, and various other bureaus and concepts where force of law has been both used and abused to extend vendettas, incompetence, and worse - with little-to-no repercussion against the instigator of the fault.
And the said managers can fuck up as much as they want that they'll never be made accountable for anything, whether they did it in a public office or private one. You just have to reach a particular level in the hierarchy and you're basically inimputable
Not necessarily:
* If a fuck-up angered shareholders or really hurt the company's public image, the private manager can be fired as fast as the requisite electrons can hurl themselves at the screen displaying such a demand from the Board of Directors, majority shareholder(s), etc.
* Removing a judge's fuck-up requires a lot of procedure, time, appeals, and burden of proof.
Corporate bureaucracy tends to be deranged in worse ways than state bureaucracy..
...says the man who has never had to work with the VA Medical System, the DMV, etc...
Half-jokes aside, there is one diff between a deranged corporation and a deranged government department: You can tell the deranged corporate department to piss off, or take them to court if their actions warrant it. Try doing that to a governmental entity and see how far that gets you.
Even if your hypothesis were 100% correct in every aspect, a half-deranged government bureau is a hell of a lot more dangerous to individual rights and freedoms than a completely apeshit company.
Something about having the force of law backing up the mental trouble that makes it at least two orders of magnitude more disturbing, truth be told.
Well, FWIW, if Hendrik Schön hadn't gotten stupid and made some pretty massive (and physics-defying) claims in his paper, and stuck with semi-muddy results that looked pretty (as opposed to sexy), but were harder to replicate? His career would have likely lasted years, if not decades, before he got caught.
It all depends, from the fraudster's point-of-view, whether he wants rockstar status, or to make a comfortable living...
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm going to donate to any such site, it's gonna be to Cryptome, who has managed to do the gov't leaks thing since 1996.
Unlike Assange, the guy has been doing this the whole time without being an attention whore.
I mean, shit - Cryptome takes donations too, but instead of a stupid hat or t-shirt, you get a DVD with their entire site archive on it.
You know, something *useful*...
No... he remains just as culpable by his silence on the matter (albeit as the Governor of Mass.) when fellow party-member Bush instituted this particular little policy.
If all else fails and you want something more concrete, get someone to ask him point-blank. Any answer less than dissembling or qualifiers is to be interpreted as assent.
So far, the only politician of note to speak out against it directly is Ron Paul, who obviously has no hope of winning this (or any) presidential election.
Seriously - I'd love to see both candidates try and wriggle out of owning that one in the upcoming debates, since both are (by now) equally culpable.
Too bad there isn't a moderator with sufficient testicular fortitude to hold their feet to that particular fire...
...when talking to the guy that didnt bother mention Microsoft at all?
Last I checked, the guy was actively defending Steve Ballmer. Guess where Mr. Ballmer works?
I get the non-RTFA meme, but when you don't even RTFP? Maybe you should just go lie down or something?
You are fucking amazing.
Damned right I am. ;)
As for the rest, hey - if you want to claim that Microsoft is experiencing golden days and that Ballmer can run with the big boys, go for it. Oh, by the way, the Carpathia just radioed in - they said they'll be by shortly to pick everyone up, so you just have a seat on that nice comfy deck chair over there and listen to the band...
Microsoft is pushing record revenue numbers. [google.com] Sure, not as much as Apple.. but then thats just cherry picking the guy at the top.
Wow - speaking of cherry-picking! Seems you do a bit of that yourself up there. After all, why did you reach back to April for MSFT numbers? We have a perfect comparison to make in this recent quarter, after all:
Microsoft just recently reported a quarterly loss this last period. Sure, they had to write-down a $6.2bn bite in the advertising arse (because, well, they admitted that a part of their company was, as I said, weak), but...
Meanwhile, in spite of eating a larger ($12.5bn) write-down on their part from buying Motorola, Google actually grew their revenue by 35 percent YoY over the same period (21% if it was minus Moto) (same link, BTW).
Seriously... your buddies in Redmond have a lot ot worry about, and the sooner they actually do something about it, the better.
Over the past 10 years we have watched some CEOs "of that level" run their tech companies straight into the toilette.
How is Sun Microsystems doing?
How is RIM doing?
How is Palm.. err USRobots.. no wait.. thats 3Com.. err.. PalmOne.. err.. Hows the hell is that Palm brand that Hewlett-Packard acquired doing these days?
By contrast, how are Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, RedHat, Samsung, IBM, Google, VMWare/EMC, NetApp, Canonical, and about 100 other tech companies doing? Most are still stable-to-growing, even in this economic climate. Their brands are still very strong in the tech community, unlike the weakening Microsoft brand(s). They have growing mindshare, unlike Microsoft. They have greater *growth*, and they manage to do it without fudging numbers, channel-stuffing, or counting "downgrade licenses" as sales of their new goods.
Hell - Apple (a so-called premium brand!) and Google are almost printing their own money at this point, so don't go blaming the economy, either.
It's too easy to compare Ballmer with the short-sheeted dual-CEOs at RIM, the egomaniac (but vision-less) former CEO/lunatic of Sun, or the Eternal Microsoftie that's currently running Nokia.
Problem is, you illustrate my point for me, by comparing Ballmer to other, greater losers. Now compare him to the winners, and you'll notice that he comes up way the hell short...
Dude. It was the Gates-Borg. As in, the Borg from ST:TNG.
Please turn in your geek-card at the courtesy desk, because your UID is low enough that you should've known better than that. :p
No, a well managed company does this when it starts, and does it continually throughout the life of the company. It often changes, too. That's all normal, good stuff.
Yes and no.
If you're re-evaluating your vision and direction over time, keeping an eye on what's coming and how to best take advantage of that, then yeah - good stuff, and very necessary. If your changes are what's driving the market, even better.
If OTOH you're reacting to market changes and/or to your competition with 'me too!' or 'OMG I have to wrestle that back!' seismic company mission changes, then it ain't good stuff at all.
Microsoft seems more and more to be the latter, where they were once the former, yanno?
Err, given Ballmer's performance when compared to other CEOs of that level? It doesn't take a super-analyst or a wildly successful peer to see that Ballmer got his job thanks to the luckiest college dorm room assignment in the history of mankind (where he met Mssr. Gates...)
Many PC users will not tolerate the astronomical prices of Apple hardware.
Old myth. Spec out a *decent* OEM-built PC sometime... the prices are damned close, and the Apple product usually wins when they release their updated models.
Sure, you can save a mountain of cash if you build your own off of Newegg (hell, I do), but when you talk about Joe Sixpack and buying a quality brand, things start getting extremely close, price-wise.
I've had a Microsoft mouse for almost 20 years! It's the most reliable product of theirs that I've ever had!
Given that the mouse is a rebranded Logitech, you could've had the same thing w/o the Microsoft tag on it, and it would have likely lasted just as long...
I don't see Microsoft dying off quite yet. They still rake in an obscene amount of money from the enterprise half of the tech world, and that's where all the money is. After all, what's $50/seat for a consumer OS license when they're raking in $5,000 or more for each Enterprise-tagged SKU?
I can however see them losing the consumer side, and hard. That in turn will start creeping into the Enterprise side of things - first as a trickle (iPhones at work, anyone?) then as a flood.
It'll take about 10 years, but by then I think that unless Microsoft does something drastic and effective, they will be reduced to selling Exchange servers/services/licenses, and that's about it (unless GMail takes over even that...)
MS has lost it's ability to turn on a dime it appears.
To be fair, only when Microsoft sees itself hurtling towards a cliff does it gain the ability to turn on anything resembling a dime. Even then the results are usually half-assed, with just enough marketing, copying, company-purchasing, and sometimes outright BS to pull it off. See also the late 1990's and Windows TCP/IP stack, IE, et al.
Gates had one other advantage that Ballmer does not: Microsoft was a whole lot more streamlined in 1996 than it is today.
In analogy terms?
Microsoft of 1996 was like turning a commercial fishing vessel: you could see it took effort, but it could turn quickly enough if it had to.
Microsoft of 2012 is like six oil supertankers welded together side by side, with two of them welded on backwards.
XBox?
Still in the red money-wise, and R&D for the XBox 720 will probably drive it back deeper towards the wrong side of ROI.
Microsoft may fail often but every now and then they hit it out of the park.
Approx. $3-5bn in the hole (even after annual profits to date, bringing the total down from ~$7bn) means that the XBox "hit it out of the park" with everyone but the accounting department, the bottom line, and future profitability.
Put it this way - I can make the most badassed and popular widget on the planet, but if it's bleeding my bank account dry (even if slowly), then it isn't a winner in my own book(s).
You know? The funniest argument I ever heard against Linux back in the day was that you had all these wildly different desktops (GNOME, KDE, WM, XFCE, Fluxbox, etc...) and that Windows was supposedly superior because Joe Sixpack had a consistent desktop experience - Windows was Windows no matter where you went, etc.
I wonder where those people are now, who were making that argument back in 1998... ?
The difference is in price. Even discounting inflation, that 1997 laptop likely cost you (or whoever bought it first) well over $2500 or more. Now you can get the same relative level of bleeding-edge badass for less than half the price. Hell, look at the 1980's-era machines... At the high end, those things cost you almost as much as a new compact car at the time. Nowadays, you can use one to scare the kids into eating their vegetables, but that's about it. ("Now Johnny, you either eat that effing broccoli or you'll be talking to facebook over a 9600-baud modem for a month - you hear me, boy!?" )
One other thing, though - not all new items die off in 5-6 years. Instead, we just get bored with it and move on. I have an old 1994-era dual G5 Mac that I can pull out of the closet and, in full confidence, expect it to come right up. Same story with the 2001-era Dell Inspiron 8100 I bought, then eventually gave to my mother - and she still uses the damned thing almost daily (yes the battery is pretty much dead weight by now, but it still works just fine otherwise).
I'd elaborate on the parent post, but it's hard to, since he covered a mountain of ground.
I'm approaching my mid-40s. I'm still learning new things, almost on a weekly basis as new things pop up. In my humble opinion, OP is approaching the question wrong - it's not "should I re-train", it rather should be: "...why did I let my otherwise continuous training slip so horribly?"
I know the answer, sort of. It's hard to get deep into a new language when the kids bug you with requests or questions that never end, and the wife wants to know when you are going to put that damned laptop down and cuddle with her in front of some stupid chick flick that you'll instantly forget once it's over. On the other hand, in this biz, you have to keep the training continuous. Slow down, and you fall behind... unless you specialize in COBOL or FORTRAN, falling behind too much is pretty detrimental to one's career.
As for the management thing, maybe it was just a shit position? I've done the management thing, and still do when the job calls for it... I find that the 'people person' skills are a minor (albeit powerful) part of it - the majority is paper-shoveling and leadership, coupled with a knack for keeping a billion disparate tasks prioritized as they arise and (hopefully) in deadline. I've seen asshats with a complete lack of people skills succeed wildly in management, simply because they can keep ten thousand different priorities and tasks all wired tight and done on time. May want to give that another go, but do it in a way that you report to other people - hopefully under people who are good mentors this time around.
Overall, yeah... it sounds like a life change/decision. Personally, follow what you love to do, and to hell with the rest. Dying a happy old retired garbageman or janitor is far preferable to dying as a miserable middle-aged CEO, yanno? It's your life - do what *you* want to do with it. Even if you (eventually) retire as a code-monkey? If you enjoy it, then for heaven sakes - do it!
I'm pretty sure that wikileaks might have a difference of an opinion. Granted their bank account wasn't closed but credit card companies did their best to prevent them from getting any more money.
That actually proves my point, as it's government that is driving the whole Wikileaks affair. Do you think Visa/Mastercard/etc are doing that on a whim, especially given that they were ordered to hamper things from the (drumroll please...) government?
Except when they were Blackwater operating in Iraq.
Hired and given orders by... whom? ;)
So... anyone thinking of tinkering with a kernel that supports the Apple ARM chips?
(been a long while since I bothered with ARM, so maybe something out there already works with it... dunno. Still, it'd be hella funny to walk around with an iPad that sports a Linux distro on it :) )
I suspect that with "good behavior" and prison overcrowding, he could be out on parole in as little as 18 months ...now how he intends to feed himself and make a living after that is another question entirely.
...incidentally, I don't mean the theft part, which is pretty dumb on its own. What I mean is, he should have been socking that money into Cayman Island accounts (or maybe Venezuelan bank accounts and such), then get out of dodge once he hit the $2m mark or so. Get enough scratch and live in a 3rd-world country that doesn't do extradition, and you can get an entire flock of local women instead of having to throw a ton of money on just one.
Then again, dunno how much money he himself got, as the $4.5m figure could be what Cisco values the parts to be, which given Cisco's pricing could be as little as three fans and a 6509 power supply w/ SmartNet support. :p
I am curious as to WTF these guys think when they start pulling stunts like this, however. I mean, if you're gonna flirt with PMITA Prison time, you'd best be damned smart about it, do at least some research, and get your shit planned in advance...
Ah, but thats the US. You people can't seem to get government even halfway right, for some weird reason. I'm not even going to mention gun control.
May not want to get too smug there, sport...
http://www.datalite.org/european-union-eu-bureaucracy-kills-uk-business.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2135851/91-days--petty-bureaucrats-control-freak-sponsors-squeezing-fun-Olympics.html
http://www.votersrevolt.org.uk/?tab=V7
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston/4284070/British-bureaucracy-is-growing-out-of-control.html
You are more likely to win a suit against the government than against a corporation. Even in the US.
...meanwhile you stay hamstrung by whatever binding and/or regulation they say you've broken. After all, no corporation can freeze your bank accounts, remove your right to drive a car, take your children, shut off your home's power/water supply, force you to remain in certain areas (and be barred from others) or lock you in jail while you pursue said lawsuits.
Government can do all of that and then some, depending on the nature and severity of the incompetent/deranged action. Hell, the government can even assault your property with armed squads and shoot at your family. Sure, Randy Weaver won the eventual lawsuit, but his wife and daughter are still rather dead...
Perhaps it should say "bureaucrat" instead of "bureau", but the point still stands. As evidence, I present to you such wonders as Child Protective Services, Contempt of Court, and various other bureaus and concepts where force of law has been both used and abused to extend vendettas, incompetence, and worse - with little-to-no repercussion against the instigator of the fault.
And the said managers can fuck up as much as they want that they'll never be made accountable for anything, whether they did it in a public office or private one. You just have to reach a particular level in the hierarchy and you're basically inimputable
Not necessarily:
* If a fuck-up angered shareholders or really hurt the company's public image, the private manager can be fired as fast as the requisite electrons can hurl themselves at the screen displaying such a demand from the Board of Directors, majority shareholder(s), etc.
* Removing a judge's fuck-up requires a lot of procedure, time, appeals, and burden of proof.
Corporate bureaucracy tends to be deranged in worse ways than state bureaucracy..
...says the man who has never had to work with the VA Medical System, the DMV, etc...
Half-jokes aside, there is one diff between a deranged corporation and a deranged government department: You can tell the deranged corporate department to piss off, or take them to court if their actions warrant it. Try doing that to a governmental entity and see how far that gets you.
Even if your hypothesis were 100% correct in every aspect, a half-deranged government bureau is a hell of a lot more dangerous to individual rights and freedoms than a completely apeshit company.
Something about having the force of law backing up the mental trouble that makes it at least two orders of magnitude more disturbing, truth be told.
Well, FWIW, if Hendrik Schön hadn't gotten stupid and made some pretty massive (and physics-defying) claims in his paper, and stuck with semi-muddy results that looked pretty (as opposed to sexy), but were harder to replicate? His career would have likely lasted years, if not decades, before he got caught.
It all depends, from the fraudster's point-of-view, whether he wants rockstar status, or to make a comfortable living...