If that's how little they trusted you, why the devil did they hire you in the first place? You didn't say anything about why you left, but if it was for negative reasons, then I could sort of understand, and it already sounds like that might be the case. However, if you were a skilled "professional" and just found something better, there's no reason they should be surprised or anything about it.
Or maybe they're just practicing their bum's rush techniques on you as an easy target? In that case, maybe you should leave them a few bye-bye Trojans? Just for practice, of course.
Come to think of it... One more possibility. Maybe they knew they were screwing you, and their real fear is that you found out. That would also explain (from their perspective) why you're leaving, no matter what you said in your letter, and would also explain their urgency in cutting your access.
First, if you take any of this seriously you should read The Mismeasure of Man to learn about the high bogosity quotient of all of this kind of research. (Note that all of these 'IQ' tests consistently evaluate me near in the top 1%, except for the lawyers-only test that ranked me in the top 10%. Getting off the topic, but you can already make the obvious inference about lawyers and IQ--but would you want to be one?) Essentially, 'intelligence' is not well defined, and any attempt to reduce it to simple metrics such as single numbers is stupid at best, but rationalizing racist eugenics at worst.
My own take is that human variation within any population is way above what the genes can account for. If there was such a thing as 'good' or 'bad' genes, they might make it easier or more difficult to acquire certain skills, but no guarantees. The reason is that our human behavior is fundamentally related to our mental-model-building capacities, and there are only very weak linkages between our mental models and anything else, including the real world.
Please improve your writing. I really can't tell if you are trying to raise some valid discussion points or just trying to be a troll. For that reason, I'm going to ignore your questions, even though they might be authentic.
On the other hand, if you are a troll, please designate me as your "foe". It will save time in the future. I am quite content to ignore designated foes.
You mean 'no troll factor' posts like that little rightwing diatribe? Face it, you're an idiot, and it shows, and that's why you get modded down.
Tell you what. Why don't you do both of us the favor and set me as your foe? (Sorry, but my slots are limited, and mostly full of friends, for which there is a constructive reason. I'm confident constructive reasons have no relevance to you.) Once I see that red dot, I'll know to ignore you in the future, though my settings are such that mostly I'll never even see your posts once you have your red dot in place.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that I am occasionally targeted for negative moderation by rightwing lunatics like you, but of course it's impossible to tell given the anonymous nature of/. moderation--though I do regard it as another form of abuse of anonymity. I definitely think you ought to have the right to know 'who' your 'accusers' are. Specifically, my posts are routinely moderated favorably for the most part, but every so often I will suddenly get five, count them, five, unfavorable mods. That wouldn't be too surprising if they were for some particularly strongly worded post, but they are scattered at random among my recent posts, without any apparent regard for the content. The only apparent pattern is that they were issued at almost the same time.
My theory is that the modding troll (or trolls) 'thinks' that negative mods on unmoderated posts are somehow more effective in damaging karma. Joke's on the troll, however. I suspect the editors know about it, because those trivial posts often receive equally undeserved favorable moderations a day or two later--when by rights they should be quite moot.
Actually a related topic, but I've been wondering if they can go all the way to tracking you (including while you are driving) by keeping tabs on the location of your cellular phone. The GPS-capable phones could of course do quite a bit better than that. Does anyone know if these phones have capabilities to quietly report their locations even when they aren't in use?
No, I don't have any concrete evidence, but the ones I know about tend to run down the battery after about a week, even if no call is made on the phones. Just listening quietly for a wake-up signal ought not to take that much power, and you'd think they wouldn't draw much more than a digital watch. Given the much larger batteries in the phones, they should be able to sit quietly for a couple of months if that's all they're doing. So maybe the reason they run down more quickly is because they are emitting some "Here I am" chirps?
I think you're getting too paranoid to worry that anyone would want to trace any individual votes. Control of elections is done differently. The quasi-legal form involves lots of money (though much of that money is often used in unethical but persuasive ways), and the illegal forms generally involve large-scale vote manipulation (including aggresive disenfranchisement, which seems to be one of the most favored techniques these days).
On this topic, the notion of anonymous voting was actually a relatively recent innovation, and I'm not sure if it's really such a good one. While it does prevent personalized targeting of specific voters, it also makes it relatively easier to manipulate elections. You can't trace either the valid or invalid votes, which actually leads us back to Wikipedia, where the problem is with tracing the sources of valid and invalid information.
Well, it was slightly out of context, but yes, I do mean "justified" in the case of anonymity, but not for privacy. Rather, I think the default for privacy should be exactly the opposite. Your personal information should belong to you, and no one else should have any right to collect information about you without your knowledge and consent. The other person should be required to justify any intrusion on your privacy, and you should have the absolute right to deny those requests. (This is basically an extension of the American Bill of Rights as regards warrentless searches and the right not to incriminate yourself.)
Even beyond that, I believe in possession as nine points of the law, and even if you agree to let someone collect and use information about you, the default case should require that they store that information on YOUR own computer. You should have the right to change your mind at any time, even if you felt like letting them collect that information in the past.
In practical terms, I think this would generally be handled by your own privacy policies as stored in your computer, and the basic tradeoff would be convenience against privacy. Examples:
You might allow your bank to hold the information required to deduct a regular monthly payment, or you might require that the bank's request for the payment be held pending that information until they check with you each month.
You might agree to allow a company to have certain information in exchange for a discount, but you should be able to deny them any further access to that information if you decide for any reason that you no longer want to do business with them.
/. itself is a prime locus for the abuse of anonymity. There are a few cases where anonymity is reasonable, but in general, I'd estimate that 99% of the anonymous comments are made by people who would simply be too ashamed to want to be linked to the comment, even in the form of a link to their handle. The ACs (in/. parlance) apparently have various motivations and excuses, but all of them stink.
Go ahead and wail, you stupid ACs. My settings eagerly ignore your replies. One of the best little-known features of/., if you ask me.
Returning to the Wikipedia context, I can actually imagine a SINGLE case where anonymity would be justified. That is the case where someone wants to expose an important truth to the public, but would be subject to attack for telling that truth. However, in that case, Wikipedia is obviously the wrong place, since the same person or organization that wants to conceal that truth could just edit the Wikipedia article in question to remove or obfuscate the data.
This is actually the same kind of case where in the old (pre-Reagan) days you could have tried to find an actual journalist to pursue the story. Look at Bob Woodward to see how things have changed, eh? These days, I guess we just have to hope that the glut of data will allow enough of the truths to leak out? (But look at Iraq to see how well that works.)
Typical/. stupid moderation. Flamebait? Very valid points raised, not really flaming anyone in particular, though criticizing gullible voters as a class. Worth a discussion--except in the "mind" of some nameless moderator.
Root of the problem remains that the process of creating the copyright laws has been subverted and even perverted by one particular group that is only concerned about maximizing their own profits. The whole point of copyright was to benefit society by encouraging creativity, and the supposed targets of encouragement are the people who actually do the creative work. All this stuff about maximizing profits for the publishers was added later.
Me? I actually think it isn't a problem. The copyright system is so badly broken that no amount of legal life support can sustain it indefinitely. Death to Mickey Mouse!
Yes, I am flaming Mickey Mouse. It's not that I have anything against Walt Disney (even though Mickey Mouse is a derivative work that would be illegal under current copyright law), but he's dead, after all.
Weak jokes so far, and based on my keyword searches, no one has addressed the real problems. Kind of sad when you consider that the author of the main part is seriously and professionally involved in the business. These guys really are without clue.
Any news source has only two real assets. Integrity and credibility. Do they speak the truth? And do people believe what they say? As regards such mainstream news sources as today's newspapers, my own answers are "No" and "Hell, no!" That many other people agree with me is the explanation of the poor health of their industry.
The motivation is actually quite trivial. Some greedy people make lots of money by lying. They had no integrity, and quickly lose their credibility. You'd think they might be happy with the money, but they aren't. [Money in this context is often equated to power, but you can really use the two terms almost interchangably in this context.] Since they still want more money, they may then use their money to buy credibility from somewhere else. The sincere journalists in the MSM (MainStream Media) were actually quite aware of this and tried to resist it for many years, but they lost. FAUX News. I rest my case.
The particular mechanism that most interests me is the technical one: broadcast radio. The first viable economic model they came up with involved advertisers paying for the broadcasts in exchange for brainwashing time. That model was propagated into TV, the famous "glass teat", and now threatens the Internet, too.
S'oright. <How do you spell that?> Truth will win out, and the societies that do a better job of dealing with the truth are going to win out in the long run.
Well, you caught my attention, but you didn't answer my long-term question. Is there any computer that actually is "Built for Linux"? At least in the sense that some major maker promises that they will provide the drivers [for which distribution/s?] and make it painless to keep the machine alive and supported to a similar degree as for their Windows-installed models?
By the way, I have asked variations of this question a number of times, and never received any particularly useful responses. I do *NOT* want to spend a lot of time hacking the machine. Been there, done that, enough. I just want to get my work done in a reasonably reliable way, and I increasingly dislike doing it on Microsoft's 'owned' machines. I'm sort of considering Apple, though I've had some less than pleasant experiences with them in the past and I'm pretty skeptical.
As regards Microsoft, I hope they totally punt their next version of Office, and that at that very moment OpenOffice delivers a greatly performance-enhanced version that captures 75% of the market. Pretty much impossible to imagine, however, since most people are so resistant to such heavy changes. Microsoft would have to do something incredibly stupid, like allowing all of the network-dependent copies of Office to freeze and die because of some viral network crash. Hmm... Considering Microsoft's security track record, maybe there is something to hope for after all?
It's preposterous to say that the very possibility of crooked elections could be eliminated. However, given that reality, it is only all the more reason for companies in this business to be eager to add features that would make it harder to rig elections and easier to detect tampering when it has happened. Instead, Diebold has consistently clung to the "Trust us" defense.
Sorry, but I don't trust Diebold or their voting machines half as far as I could throw a truck.
You can't prove a negation, and just because Diebold has gone so far out of their way to avoid creating positive evidence that their voting machines are working properly does not, per se, prove anything. Suspicious, yes, but not proof. However, you are correct to note that there is no technological barrier to printing the ballot, letting the voter confirm that it represents his or her intentions, and then saving those ballots for sampled auditing and even complete recounting. Given the money involved in modern American politics, it would be a miniscule investment to help demonstrate that the elections are valid.
However, I myself was persuaded of the vote fraud simply because I believe in mathematics, and have studied a lot of statistics. While it is possible that the exit polls somehow became broken in spite of decades of careful refinement, no one has presented any serious evidence showing how that could have happened, and all of the statistical discrepancies have been in the same direction. At some point, it just becomes too improbable that it's an accident.
No, I can't say how it was done. In fact, given what I already know about Diebold's voting systems, I believe I could design several tampering protocols that would be guaranteed to leave no physical evidence. Reminds me of the Banks novel with the "deniable" battleship. They didn't care what rumors went around, just so long as no one could produce any solid evidence.
Diebold is one evil company, at least when it comes to voting machines. Read all about it--but mostly not in the MSM. I really hope they get caught and nailed for their vote tampering in the 2004 election.
Anyway, we're seeing a lot of iterations of various angles of this same story: Power gets abused. A number of my recent posts have addressed various aspects of this issue. Since I don't actually like repeating myself, my primary response is to try to refine my explanation of the solution, and explain how it applies in the particular case at hand.
The solution itself is simple. We need to firmly establish the legal principle that your personal information is your own property. To make this really work, I think it needs to be coupled with a right to physically possess your own personal information even when someone else wants to store it. In implemenation, if someone wants to store your personal information, they should be required to let you store it on *YOUR* own computer. They can sign it to prevent you from tampering with it, or even encrypt it if they have a good reason. However, if they want to see that information again, they must ask for your permission and explain why they need it. You should have the right to say yes or no to any such request.
As it applies in this situation, of course such a system would be very resistant to the kind of specific abuse described in this article. However, the reality is that this particular abuse is not a new problem, but only an erosion of already firmly established legal principles. The propsed system would create a power to resist this abuse, but right now the situation looks pretty bleak.
However, since I sincerely believe that freedom and democracy confer competitive advantage, then my conclusion is that either America will recover and fix the problems, or more free and democratic societies will win out in the long term.
Typical shite for brains moderation, eh? An "off topic" mod would be justified by the focus of the article on the European aspects of the same problems. THe "troll" and "flamebait" mods are just "I disagree" mods from typical Bushevik maroons.
Where's the red dot? After all some one might make a mistake and think "some dumb ass" is supposed to be a sarcasm handle rather than a simple statement of reality.
I feel like laughing at the idiots who voted for Dubya and are now waking up and smelling the roses--but they smell terrible. [How did Mr Spock word it in I, Mudd? Something about logic as a little bird?] Well, actually that's a bit of exaggeration and giving Dubya even more discredit than he deserves, since the music and movie and other publishing-related industies have been subverting and perverting the laws for decades. A lot of the worst damage was actually in the reign of Reagan, but now with Dubya's help it's just like pigs at the trough.
Anyway, insofar as there is any hope for the future (of America or of the world?), the solution is a new and improved legal principle. The default case for data retention should be "No", with an occasional "Hell, no" thrown in. The basic principle is not really all that new, but we need to make it explicit that "we, the people," should own our own personal data, and no one, and especially not private companies like the members of the RIAA should have ANY right to retain our personal information without OUR permission and without telling us what they want to know and what they are going to do with that information.
The natural solution is for the information, even including our personal business records, to be stored on OUR own computers. They can encrypt it and sign it and whatever to protect it, but possession is nine points of the law, and if they have possession, we have nothing to defend. If we are to have any semblance of privacy in the future, we better start thinking NOW about where it is going to be defended.
The next part needs a bit more thinking, but I suspect there is some intrinsic link between privacy and human dignity... However, regardless of those complexities, I'm certain I don't want the RIAA and f[r]iends meddling in my personal life.
Where's the red dot? I already know you believe in stupid crap that is provably false. That is sufficient reason to ignore you. It would be even better if you were a spammer or Internet drug dealer or both, but I don't actually care.
Scanning the thread, I don't see it clearly addressed in these terms, though public education and elite education have been mentioned from various perspectives. Basically, fast tracking "elite kids" or "prodigies" or whatever you want to call them is evil. This Reagan-era innovation is probably doing more to destroy America than anything else. Society is the cumulative total of all of its citizens, and providing "special" facilities for the "deserving geniuses" and converting the rest of the schools into brainwashing centers with many aspects of jails is impoverishing the society of the future.
The proponents of such systems of course believe that their own children are going to be the primary beneficiaries--and to heck with the rest of the people. The tragedy is that many people have been indoctrinated to accept the fate of mediocrity, not just for themselves, but for their own children.
The societies that avoid this are going to win out in the long term, and probably even in the mid term, though in the short term it may look "efficient" from the quarterly-profit MBA perspective.
I think the cure for bad moderation would be to open up the moderation system. Specifically, the anonymity should be stripped off, especially for the recipients of bad moderation to know who their "acusers" are. Yeah, given the abysmal quality of the moderation, there'd be a big burst of complaints, but with more information it would be easy enough to separate the troll posters from the troll moderators and deal with each appropriately. The troll posters would have their subsequent complaints ignored, and the troll moderators would be downgraded.
On the actual topic, that's a good point. Actually, I sometimes travel to Tokyo for the shareholders meeting. Usually near the end of June, as I recall. Unfortunately, it is conducted in Japanese. I once did ask a question, but it's an extremely intimidating experience to do so in front of thousands of people. They did have provisions for translation, but the answer was rather evasive. I wasn't satisfied, but I was too stressed out to press it.
Having said that, I think I should follow your advice, at least as far as attending the next annual meeting. However, I don't think I'll be willing to ask the question, unless absolutely no one else is willing to do so...
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they're just practicing their bum's rush techniques on you as an easy target? In that case, maybe you should leave them a few bye-bye Trojans? Just for practice, of course.
Come to think of it... One more possibility. Maybe they knew they were screwing you, and their real fear is that you found out. That would also explain (from their perspective) why you're leaving, no matter what you said in your letter, and would also explain their urgency in cutting your access.
My own take is that human variation within any population is way above what the genes can account for. If there was such a thing as 'good' or 'bad' genes, they might make it easier or more difficult to acquire certain skills, but no guarantees. The reason is that our human behavior is fundamentally related to our mental-model-building capacities, and there are only very weak linkages between our mental models and anything else, including the real world.
On the other hand, if you are a troll, please designate me as your "foe". It will save time in the future. I am quite content to ignore designated foes.
Tell you what. Why don't you do both of us the favor and set me as your foe? (Sorry, but my slots are limited, and mostly full of friends, for which there is a constructive reason. I'm confident constructive reasons have no relevance to you.) Once I see that red dot, I'll know to ignore you in the future, though my settings are such that mostly I'll never even see your posts once you have your red dot in place.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that I am occasionally targeted for negative moderation by rightwing lunatics like you, but of course it's impossible to tell given the anonymous nature of /. moderation--though I do regard it as another form of abuse of anonymity. I definitely think you ought to have the right to know 'who' your 'accusers' are. Specifically, my posts are routinely moderated favorably for the most part, but every so often I will suddenly get five, count them, five, unfavorable mods. That wouldn't be too surprising if they were for some particularly strongly worded post, but they are scattered at random among my recent posts, without any apparent regard for the content. The only apparent pattern is that they were issued at almost the same time.
My theory is that the modding troll (or trolls) 'thinks' that negative mods on unmoderated posts are somehow more effective in damaging karma. Joke's on the troll, however. I suspect the editors know about it, because those trivial posts often receive equally undeserved favorable moderations a day or two later--when by rights they should be quite moot.
No, I don't have any concrete evidence, but the ones I know about tend to run down the battery after about a week, even if no call is made on the phones. Just listening quietly for a wake-up signal ought not to take that much power, and you'd think they wouldn't draw much more than a digital watch. Given the much larger batteries in the phones, they should be able to sit quietly for a couple of months if that's all they're doing. So maybe the reason they run down more quickly is because they are emitting some "Here I am" chirps?
On this topic, the notion of anonymous voting was actually a relatively recent innovation, and I'm not sure if it's really such a good one. While it does prevent personalized targeting of specific voters, it also makes it relatively easier to manipulate elections. You can't trace either the valid or invalid votes, which actually leads us back to Wikipedia, where the problem is with tracing the sources of valid and invalid information.
Even beyond that, I believe in possession as nine points of the law, and even if you agree to let someone collect and use information about you, the default case should require that they store that information on YOUR own computer. You should have the right to change your mind at any time, even if you felt like letting them collect that information in the past.
In practical terms, I think this would generally be handled by your own privacy policies as stored in your computer, and the basic tradeoff would be convenience against privacy. Examples:
Go ahead and wail, you stupid ACs. My settings eagerly ignore your replies. One of the best little-known features of /., if you ask me.
Returning to the Wikipedia context, I can actually imagine a SINGLE case where anonymity would be justified. That is the case where someone wants to expose an important truth to the public, but would be subject to attack for telling that truth. However, in that case, Wikipedia is obviously the wrong place, since the same person or organization that wants to conceal that truth could just edit the Wikipedia article in question to remove or obfuscate the data.
This is actually the same kind of case where in the old (pre-Reagan) days you could have tried to find an actual journalist to pursue the story. Look at Bob Woodward to see how things have changed, eh? These days, I guess we just have to hope that the glut of data will allow enough of the truths to leak out? (But look at Iraq to see how well that works.)
Root of the problem remains that the process of creating the copyright laws has been subverted and even perverted by one particular group that is only concerned about maximizing their own profits. The whole point of copyright was to benefit society by encouraging creativity, and the supposed targets of encouragement are the people who actually do the creative work. All this stuff about maximizing profits for the publishers was added later.
Me? I actually think it isn't a problem. The copyright system is so badly broken that no amount of legal life support can sustain it indefinitely. Death to Mickey Mouse!
Yes, I am flaming Mickey Mouse. It's not that I have anything against Walt Disney (even though Mickey Mouse is a derivative work that would be illegal under current copyright law), but he's dead, after all.
Any news source has only two real assets. Integrity and credibility. Do they speak the truth? And do people believe what they say? As regards such mainstream news sources as today's newspapers, my own answers are "No" and "Hell, no!" That many other people agree with me is the explanation of the poor health of their industry.
The motivation is actually quite trivial. Some greedy people make lots of money by lying. They had no integrity, and quickly lose their credibility. You'd think they might be happy with the money, but they aren't. [Money in this context is often equated to power, but you can really use the two terms almost interchangably in this context.] Since they still want more money, they may then use their money to buy credibility from somewhere else. The sincere journalists in the MSM (MainStream Media) were actually quite aware of this and tried to resist it for many years, but they lost. FAUX News. I rest my case.
The particular mechanism that most interests me is the technical one: broadcast radio. The first viable economic model they came up with involved advertisers paying for the broadcasts in exchange for brainwashing time. That model was propagated into TV, the famous "glass teat", and now threatens the Internet, too.
S'oright. <How do you spell that?> Truth will win out, and the societies that do a better job of dealing with the truth are going to win out in the long run.
Sorry, but none of the ones I looked at were "well-known brands", but all appeared to be generic white-box machines.
By the way, I have asked variations of this question a number of times, and never received any particularly useful responses. I do *NOT* want to spend a lot of time hacking the machine. Been there, done that, enough. I just want to get my work done in a reasonably reliable way, and I increasingly dislike doing it on Microsoft's 'owned' machines. I'm sort of considering Apple, though I've had some less than pleasant experiences with them in the past and I'm pretty skeptical.
As regards Microsoft, I hope they totally punt their next version of Office, and that at that very moment OpenOffice delivers a greatly performance-enhanced version that captures 75% of the market. Pretty much impossible to imagine, however, since most people are so resistant to such heavy changes. Microsoft would have to do something incredibly stupid, like allowing all of the network-dependent copies of Office to freeze and die because of some viral network crash. Hmm... Considering Microsoft's security track record, maybe there is something to hope for after all?
Sorry, but I don't trust Diebold or their voting machines half as far as I could throw a truck.
However, I myself was persuaded of the vote fraud simply because I believe in mathematics, and have studied a lot of statistics. While it is possible that the exit polls somehow became broken in spite of decades of careful refinement, no one has presented any serious evidence showing how that could have happened, and all of the statistical discrepancies have been in the same direction. At some point, it just becomes too improbable that it's an accident.
No, I can't say how it was done. In fact, given what I already know about Diebold's voting systems, I believe I could design several tampering protocols that would be guaranteed to leave no physical evidence. Reminds me of the Banks novel with the "deniable" battleship. They didn't care what rumors went around, just so long as no one could produce any solid evidence.
Diebold is one evil company, at least when it comes to voting machines. Read all about it--but mostly not in the MSM. I really hope they get caught and nailed for their vote tampering in the 2004 election.
The solution itself is simple. We need to firmly establish the legal principle that your personal information is your own property. To make this really work, I think it needs to be coupled with a right to physically possess your own personal information even when someone else wants to store it. In implemenation, if someone wants to store your personal information, they should be required to let you store it on *YOUR* own computer. They can sign it to prevent you from tampering with it, or even encrypt it if they have a good reason. However, if they want to see that information again, they must ask for your permission and explain why they need it. You should have the right to say yes or no to any such request.
As it applies in this situation, of course such a system would be very resistant to the kind of specific abuse described in this article. However, the reality is that this particular abuse is not a new problem, but only an erosion of already firmly established legal principles. The propsed system would create a power to resist this abuse, but right now the situation looks pretty bleak.
However, since I sincerely believe that freedom and democracy confer competitive advantage, then my conclusion is that either America will recover and fix the problems, or more free and democratic societies will win out in the long term.
Typical shite for brains moderation, eh? An "off topic" mod would be justified by the focus of the article on the European aspects of the same problems. THe "troll" and "flamebait" mods are just "I disagree" mods from typical Bushevik maroons.
Where's the red dot? After all some one might make a mistake and think "some dumb ass" is supposed to be a sarcasm handle rather than a simple statement of reality.
Anyway, insofar as there is any hope for the future (of America or of the world?), the solution is a new and improved legal principle. The default case for data retention should be "No", with an occasional "Hell, no" thrown in. The basic principle is not really all that new, but we need to make it explicit that "we, the people," should own our own personal data, and no one, and especially not private companies like the members of the RIAA should have ANY right to retain our personal information without OUR permission and without telling us what they want to know and what they are going to do with that information.
The natural solution is for the information, even including our personal business records, to be stored on OUR own computers. They can encrypt it and sign it and whatever to protect it, but possession is nine points of the law, and if they have possession, we have nothing to defend. If we are to have any semblance of privacy in the future, we better start thinking NOW about where it is going to be defended.
The next part needs a bit more thinking, but I suspect there is some intrinsic link between privacy and human dignity... However, regardless of those complexities, I'm certain I don't want the RIAA and f[r]iends meddling in my personal life.
Red dot? I don't need anything else from lying assholes such as yourself.
Where's the red dot? I already know you believe in stupid crap that is provably false. That is sufficient reason to ignore you. It would be even better if you were a spammer or Internet drug dealer or both, but I don't actually care.
Red dot?
Where's the red dot?
The proponents of such systems of course believe that their own children are going to be the primary beneficiaries--and to heck with the rest of the people. The tragedy is that many people have been indoctrinated to accept the fate of mediocrity, not just for themselves, but for their own children.
The societies that avoid this are going to win out in the long term, and probably even in the mid term, though in the short term it may look "efficient" from the quarterly-profit MBA perspective.
On the actual topic, that's a good point. Actually, I sometimes travel to Tokyo for the shareholders meeting. Usually near the end of June, as I recall. Unfortunately, it is conducted in Japanese. I once did ask a question, but it's an extremely intimidating experience to do so in front of thousands of people. They did have provisions for translation, but the answer was rather evasive. I wasn't satisfied, but I was too stressed out to press it.
Having said that, I think I should follow your advice, at least as far as attending the next annual meeting. However, I don't think I'll be willing to ask the question, unless absolutely no one else is willing to do so...