I'm fine with H1B sponsorship, so long as a company can show they put an equal about of time, money and resources into college hire and training programs.
It is not an employers job to make your labor a marketable commodity. That's your job, until you are hired into another one.
If everyone came to the table with zero ability in a given field, how should an employer know the difference between an untrained person who can be trained to the task, and an untrained person who is ineducable, and will never be equal to the task? Are you seriously suggesting hire/train/fire, hire/train/fire until they find a good employee?
When I first started programming it was very common for me to see programming interns and college hires. I consult with many mid and large companies, and I haven't seen a programming intern in 7 years. I've seen two college hires in that time as well.
I think you are perhaps working in a dying segment of the industry. If you are not seeing new blood coming in, then it's likely that where/what you're working on is on its way out. That's actually typically good news for a consultant, because it means that there will be consulting opportunities, but it also means that non-consulting opportunities will be rare, unless a position opens up through retirement or mishap.
I personally worked with a large number of interns and new graduate hires at IBM, again at Apple, and again at Google. I was increasingly involved in the interviewing and hiring process along the way, and had no problem recommending hiring a capable newly graduated person. In the past 10 years, I've worked with literally 50 or 60 interns, in advisory, partially supervisory, or fully supervisory roles.
That drives me crazy. Laying off thousands and then complaining they cannot get foreign workers. Talk about gall!
The don't want foreign workers, they just want someone who can do the job.
Why do you think someone who worked the last 15 years at an automotive assembly plant in Detroit, where their major skill set for the job was torquing down bolts on body panels on gas guzzlers designed by people with zero aesthetic sense, but who is now unemployed because no one wants the product of their labor, is magically capable of writing O(n log n) algorithms to sift through large amounts of data?
So it just happens to be that the unemployed American with no marketable skills is not the one they're going to hire for the job.
But just because you don't have the cash flow to make it worthwhile to do the same thing the companies are doing, doesn't make what the companies are doing illegal.
Correct. It makes it unethical.
I don't see how this follows, unless the laws themselves are unethical, since the laws themselves encourage the behaviour.
See Kant's Categorical Imperative on this. If you posit a behavioral norm that you can not simultaneously advocate equally applying to -everyone else-, it is not a rational stance, ethically.
Actually, the categorical imperative, of the first formulation, deals with morals, rather than ethics.
Ethics originate in the self, and are independent of morality. Morals originate in the imposition by society of behavioral mores (hence "morality") upon the individual, and while not always, generally result in punitive action by society, and are thus social tenets through threat and coercion. In a religious society, this may be the threat of hell; in a civil society, this may be the thread of fines, incarceration, corporal punishment up to and including death, etc..
In other words, we are ethical because we are wired that way, and we are moral under threat, unless a given more happens to coincide with one of our ethics.
The two concepts are often confused by amateur philosophers, since we tend, in English, to use the term "professional ethics" for what are in fact a set of morals (e.g. failure to follow codes of conduct for a lawyer can result in disbarrment, etc. - professional ethics are always backed by threat of punishment for misbehavior),
The fact "they" are incapable for practical reasons of reproducing your behavior, does not create an ethical exemption.
Leaving aside whether it would be an ethical or moral exception (if the former, it should be codified into law, so that it becomes a social more as well)...
Interpreting the term "universal law" in this fashion - which I believe is not how Kant intended it to be interpreted - leads very quickly to a reductio ad absurdum of the type Phillip K. Dick wrote in his "handicapper" story:
By this same argument, your ability to reproduce should be subservient to the ability of those who are sterile to reproduce, and therefore, it would be unethical for you to reproduce, if you could not offer that same ability to everyone else.
Your comment would have more value if Microsoft was actually being taxed on its overseas income somewhere but it is my understanding that they move all the money through Ireland and the Caribbean thereby avoiding any taxation. They are not being good US or world citizens. They take money from everywhere and pay a share of taxes nowhere.
This is actually incorrect. They pay a lower tax rate by doing this, they don't pay a zero tax rate. Depending on the corporate tax bracket, income tax is paid in Ireland at 25%, 12.5%, or 10%.
Then, because both it and Ireland are E.U. countries, the money is transferred to Belgium, which due to E.U. law does not have a tax applied on that transfer.
Then, due to treaty, it's transferred to the Bahamas, which like Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Central African Republic, Chile, Estonia, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Saudi Arabi (if you're a Saudi), Sri Lanka, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Arab Emirates, and the British Virgin Islands, all have a 0% corporate income tax rate.
Note that the other 0% countries are less desirable than the Bahamas, due to political instability, less friendly banking laws, and citizenship requirements on corporate ownership (some), but they are all viable ways, through one treaty or another, of transferring money from Ireland, and then out of the E.U. at low/no cost to the corporation.
The transfer is usually in the form of intellectual property licensing fees, which is a legitimate business expense in Ireland, and also in Belgium, but can also be in terms of contracted management services/consulting fees as well.
Second choices from Ireland would be Bulgaria (10% corporate tax) and Gibralter (10% corporate tax), since they are both E.U. member countries, followed by Latvia and Lithuania (15% corporate tax), also E.U. member states.
Not that all of this is perfectly legal, and you could do it too, if you wanted, but you'd need a pretty substantial cash flow to justify the set up costs for the corporate mechanisms you'd need to put in place to establish the pipeline.
I keep waiting for some company to establish the pipeline for individual consultants, who incorporate in the Bahamas and incorporate in their home countries, and then the middleman company takes a 1-2% fee of transfers through the pipeline as a service fee for establishing the pipeline connection between John Doe, Inc., Bahamas and John Doe, Inc., France/UK/Germany/wherever.
But just because you don't have the cash flow to make it worthwhile to do the same thing the companies are doing, doesn't make what the companies are doing illegal.
If you don't like them paying less taxes by scrupulously following the rules, then change the rules, but don't bitch about them being better at following the rules to their benefit than you are at following the rules to your own personal benefit.
No one is arguing that. What the right wing argues is that the rich people are investing their money and not stuffing it in their mattress. So the theory is that if you whack them, they won't invest as much. I have yet to see a real analysis that proves or disproves this.
Logically speaking, wouldn't whacking all the rich people leave an economic investment vacuum? If so, wouldn't all the poor people move in to fill that vacuum by investing their money in place of the rich peoples money?
Oh wait, I'm starting to see the proof you are missing as somewhat self-evident...
Yes, we know that it pisses you off that we've put these 15 things onto the naughty list, and that you have to think in terms of weaponizing your research to cure cancer in order to know whether or not that research could be Used For Evil(tm), not that we'd ever take this list as a handy list of items to keep on hand for future nefarious purposes ourselves, because, after all, we're The Good Guys(tm).
To show that our heart's in the right place, we're open to discussion about expanding this list to even more things! See how not-evil we are?!?! What other things, besides these 15 do you think you could weaponize? Think out of the box, folks, we're here to help you!
"We choose to go to the moon in the next two decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they will take attention away from what's happening with the Ukraine." -- V. Putin
Not all consulting entails selling. In fact, in any good consulting firm, you won't be doing any selling until you're near the top (e.g., Principal/Partner). You may not even get to present anything in front of the client until you have some experience under your belt -- as a new hire, the only client facing activity you'll do is take detailed notes.
This assumes getting hired into a lower level position in a larger consulting firm, rather than consulting on your own.
At which point they are back to exactly the same problem that they originally faced, which is getting hired for a job working for someone else. It doesn't matter whether that someone else hires them in order to farm them out to a third party, or hires them to do work in house, they are still facing the problem that they can't get hired in the first place because they are unable to sell themselves to a prospective employer.
Motivation notwithstanding, I would also suggest that you consider consulting.
That totally won't work.
Consulting requires selling, and they've already demonstrated an inability to sell the one product that they're intimately familiar with, and that it's currently their *only* job to sell right now, which is themselves to an employer.
If you can't sell yourself to an employer, how much harder is it going to be to sell your services into the much smaller services market, if you are incapable of selling in the first place?
Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things?
They liked the new things that coincided with their generation hitting their prime.
So, they'll like something any day now, then? We've kind of been waiting for them to hit their prime for a while now. I feel like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, I've been waiting so long for their generation to hit their prime...
It's kind of hard to use a GSM phone on a CDMA network, or vice versa. Internet dependence on EDGE vs. UTMS vs. LTE? Also kind of matters. 802.11a vs. 802.11n/g also kind of matters.
Global warming was caused by a simple thing: too damned many people consuming energy on this rock, and it gets worse every year.
I thought the cause was our unwillingness to reengineer the orbit of Earth to be a teensy bit further out. IT's not like we aren't going to have to do that anyway, as soon as the solar expansion phase starts in a bit...
Yeah, there's long term downside risk to the stock as a straight financial instrument (along with significant historical upside), but you know what? I don't really feel the need to destroy things just because that's they path to my highest ROI over time.
Which leads the question, how do we force management to stop aiming at short-term decisions that destroy companies/greater profits over the longer period?
My personal suggestion? Keep investors away from decisions impacting the day to day operations of the company. One good way of accomplishing this is having two classes of stock, voting and non-voting, and keeping the voting stock in the hands of people who care about the long term interests of the company.:)
Apple devices "degrade" with OS updates in the same way that Windows updates do on PCs, gradually. But even after an Apple starts no being upgradeable to the latest OS release, it stays useful for years to come. My mother is still using my hand-me-down 2002 desk-lamp iMac, which has the old PowerPC processor.
The problem is the Windows 98 SP2 effect.
The last service pack supporting Windows 98 turned it from a usable system into utter buggy crashing heap of crap, at coincidentally the same time they started trying to sell you Windows XP.
Note that generally I don't think this is an intention destruction of usability on the part of Microsoft (or Apple), I just think that all their testing takes place on newer hardware, better than what the user is actually using, and so the usability test engineers just never see how terrible it's going to be on (nominally) supported older devices.
When someone buys a share in Apple, they actually get an ownership share in Apple.
Apple, yes. Google or Facebook, no. Google and Facebook have two classes of stock. The class with all the voting rights is in both cases controlled by the founders. The publicly traded shares cannot outvote them, even if someone bought all of them.
Until recently, multiple classes of stock were prohibited for NYSE-listed companies, which tended to discourage doing this. (The classic exception was Ford, which has two classes of stock, the voting shares controlled by the Ford family. This predates that NYSE rule.)
This matters when the insiders make a big mistake and the stock starts going down. There's no way to kick them out.
It also matters when someone has built something of value, and then becomes publicly traded, since it keeps the financial vampires from descending on the company and sucking the blood out of it, leaving a husk which dies in 6 months. That's what's currently going on with the OliveGarden proxy fight, where a funds group has acquired a large position in the company, and now wants to spin off the real estate holdings to a separate company (taking about $1B in the $2.5B value portfolio as a one time dividend, and putting in their own sock puppets on the board to short-term pump the stock by changing employee mix, etc.).
The problem with Google and Facebook maintaining one class of stock is ISOs/RSUs. Stock given as incentives to employees, after the vesting period, can be sold on the open market, and if that stock position becomes larger than the founders, then the people who made the decisions that created the large value in the first place are no longer in control, and Gordon Gecko (or Carl Icahn) can come in and do what's best short term for the shareholders, rather than what's best long term for the shareholders, company, employees, and customers.
Who do I trust more to make the best decisions not totally motivated by short term profit, Carl Icahn, or Larry, Sergey, and Eric?
Yeah, there's long term downside risk to the stock as a straight financial instrument (along with significant historical upside), but you know what? I don't really feel the need to destroy things just because that's they path to my highest ROI over time.
For better or worse, I'd rather have the founders, not Wall Street, making the decisions that guide the future of the thing they built.
If a US company listed in the US decided to screw its shareholders, it and the board can be held accountable in US courts.
LOL, when has that ever happened
It's happened many times; it's called "malfeasance" or "misconduct", and it's punishable as criminal fraud.
This is why corporate board members these days are all about "fiduciary responsibility", even if they have to club baby seals to death in the shallow waters where they are coated in oil from the Exxon Valdez.
Outsource to a big company like Foxconn or Solectron that has already invested in all the expensive equipment and processes (in both cases, some of it actually paid for by Apple), and have them do your manufacturing for you.
The incremental cost ends up pretty tiny, relative to COGS, and you get a better finished product at only a fractionally higher cost than if you were stupid enough to do your own manufacturing. The argument in the article only holds up if you are stupidly building the widgets yourself.
I don't really follow Microsoft acquisitions enough to speculate on their reasoning, but the Facebook reasoning was pretty obviously that the WhatsApp company cost (predominantly non-US) telephone companies $19B in per-SMS charged revenue over a period of 2 years, and it therefore gave Facebook some incredible leverage with those phone companies to make the purchase in such a way that a small group of phone companies couldn't drive WhatsApp out of business by increasing data costs to compensate (which would hurt Facebook.
Given the relative percentages... it's likely that the "harassment escalating to assault" numbers for the men is underreported by a factor of 2.5, which would be about on a par with the underreporting of men being raped in the general population. There's a real cultural stigma to reporting by men, who are, by stereotype and therefore societal norms, "supposed to be" on the other end of the power equation.
They've published the source archive under the original TrueCrypt license. As a result, unless there's a legal entity (person or company) to which all contributors make an assignment of rights, or they keep the commit rights down to a "select group" that has agreed already to relicense the code, they will not be able to later release the code under an alternate license, since all contributions will be derivative works and subject to the TrueCrypt license (as the TrueCrypt license still in the source tree makes clear).
The way you do these things is: sanitize, relicense, THEN announce. Anyone who wants to contribute as a result of the announcement can't, without addressing the relicensing issue without having already picked a new license.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fine with H1B sponsorship, so long as a company can show they put an equal about of time, money and resources into college hire and training programs.
It is not an employers job to make your labor a marketable commodity. That's your job, until you are hired into another one.
If everyone came to the table with zero ability in a given field, how should an employer know the difference between an untrained person who can be trained to the task, and an untrained person who is ineducable, and will never be equal to the task? Are you seriously suggesting hire/train/fire, hire/train/fire until they find a good employee?
When I first started programming it was very common for me to see programming interns and college hires. I consult with many mid and large companies, and I haven't seen a programming intern in 7 years. I've seen two college hires in that time as well.
I think you are perhaps working in a dying segment of the industry. If you are not seeing new blood coming in, then it's likely that where/what you're working on is on its way out. That's actually typically good news for a consultant, because it means that there will be consulting opportunities, but it also means that non-consulting opportunities will be rare, unless a position opens up through retirement or mishap.
I personally worked with a large number of interns and new graduate hires at IBM, again at Apple, and again at Google. I was increasingly involved in the interviewing and hiring process along the way, and had no problem recommending hiring a capable newly graduated person. In the past 10 years, I've worked with literally 50 or 60 interns, in advisory, partially supervisory, or fully supervisory roles.
I would even go one step further: They can only hire an H1-B if they did not offer these jobs (and any training) to the 18,000 people laid off.
In other words, someone hacking on Office could be offered a job writing software for XBox with minimal re-training.
They aren't laying off Office hackers. The Office hackers are still employed, hacking Office.
They predominantly laid of former Nokia employees, who demonstrably were unable to produce products people wanted to buy.
That drives me crazy. Laying off thousands and then complaining they cannot get foreign workers. Talk about gall!
The don't want foreign workers, they just want someone who can do the job.
Why do you think someone who worked the last 15 years at an automotive assembly plant in Detroit, where their major skill set for the job was torquing down bolts on body panels on gas guzzlers designed by people with zero aesthetic sense, but who is now unemployed because no one wants the product of their labor, is magically capable of writing O(n log n) algorithms to sift through large amounts of data?
So it just happens to be that the unemployed American with no marketable skills is not the one they're going to hire for the job.
But just because you don't have the cash flow to make it worthwhile to do the same thing the companies are doing, doesn't make what the companies are doing illegal.
Correct. It makes it unethical.
I don't see how this follows, unless the laws themselves are unethical, since the laws themselves encourage the behaviour.
See Kant's Categorical Imperative on this. If you posit a behavioral norm that you can not simultaneously advocate equally applying to -everyone else-, it is not a rational stance, ethically.
Actually, the categorical imperative, of the first formulation, deals with morals, rather than ethics.
Ethics originate in the self, and are independent of morality. Morals originate in the imposition by society of behavioral mores (hence "morality") upon the individual, and while not always, generally result in punitive action by society, and are thus social tenets through threat and coercion. In a religious society, this may be the threat of hell; in a civil society, this may be the thread of fines, incarceration, corporal punishment up to and including death, etc..
In other words, we are ethical because we are wired that way, and we are moral under threat, unless a given more happens to coincide with one of our ethics.
The two concepts are often confused by amateur philosophers, since we tend, in English, to use the term "professional ethics" for what are in fact a set of morals (e.g. failure to follow codes of conduct for a lawyer can result in disbarrment, etc. - professional ethics are always backed by threat of punishment for misbehavior),
The fact "they" are incapable for practical reasons of reproducing your behavior, does not create an ethical exemption.
Leaving aside whether it would be an ethical or moral exception (if the former, it should be codified into law, so that it becomes a social more as well)...
Interpreting the term "universal law" in this fashion - which I believe is not how Kant intended it to be interpreted - leads very quickly to a reductio ad absurdum of the type Phillip K. Dick wrote in his "handicapper" story:
By this same argument, your ability to reproduce should be subservient to the ability of those who are sterile to reproduce, and therefore, it would be unethical for you to reproduce, if you could not offer that same ability to everyone else.
Your comment would have more value if Microsoft was actually being taxed on its overseas income somewhere but it is my understanding that they move all the money through Ireland and the Caribbean thereby avoiding any taxation. They are not being good US or world citizens. They take money from everywhere and pay a share of taxes nowhere.
This is actually incorrect. They pay a lower tax rate by doing this, they don't pay a zero tax rate. Depending on the corporate tax bracket, income tax is paid in Ireland at 25%, 12.5%, or 10%.
Then, because both it and Ireland are E.U. countries, the money is transferred to Belgium, which due to E.U. law does not have a tax applied on that transfer.
Then, due to treaty, it's transferred to the Bahamas, which like Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Central African Republic, Chile, Estonia, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Saudi Arabi (if you're a Saudi), Sri Lanka, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Arab Emirates, and the British Virgin Islands, all have a 0% corporate income tax rate.
Note that the other 0% countries are less desirable than the Bahamas, due to political instability, less friendly banking laws, and citizenship requirements on corporate ownership (some), but they are all viable ways, through one treaty or another, of transferring money from Ireland, and then out of the E.U. at low/no cost to the corporation.
The transfer is usually in the form of intellectual property licensing fees, which is a legitimate business expense in Ireland, and also in Belgium, but can also be in terms of contracted management services/consulting fees as well.
Second choices from Ireland would be Bulgaria (10% corporate tax) and Gibralter (10% corporate tax), since they are both E.U. member countries, followed by Latvia and Lithuania (15% corporate tax), also E.U. member states.
Not that all of this is perfectly legal, and you could do it too, if you wanted, but you'd need a pretty substantial cash flow to justify the set up costs for the corporate mechanisms you'd need to put in place to establish the pipeline.
I keep waiting for some company to establish the pipeline for individual consultants, who incorporate in the Bahamas and incorporate in their home countries, and then the middleman company takes a 1-2% fee of transfers through the pipeline as a service fee for establishing the pipeline connection between John Doe, Inc., Bahamas and John Doe, Inc., France/UK/Germany/wherever.
But just because you don't have the cash flow to make it worthwhile to do the same thing the companies are doing, doesn't make what the companies are doing illegal.
If you don't like them paying less taxes by scrupulously following the rules, then change the rules, but don't bitch about them being better at following the rules to their benefit than you are at following the rules to your own personal benefit.
No one is arguing that. What the right wing argues is that the rich people are investing their money and not stuffing it in their mattress. So the theory is that if you whack them, they won't invest as much. I have yet to see a real analysis that proves or disproves this.
Logically speaking, wouldn't whacking all the rich people leave an economic investment vacuum? If so, wouldn't all the poor people move in to fill that vacuum by investing their money in place of the rich peoples money?
Oh wait, I'm starting to see the proof you are missing as somewhat self-evident...
Yes, we know that it pisses you off that we've put these 15 things onto the naughty list, and that you have to think in terms of weaponizing your research to cure cancer in order to know whether or not that research could be Used For Evil(tm), not that we'd ever take this list as a handy list of items to keep on hand for future nefarious purposes ourselves, because, after all, we're The Good Guys(tm).
To show that our heart's in the right place, we're open to discussion about expanding this list to even more things! See how not-evil we are?!?! What other things, besides these 15 do you think you could weaponize? Think out of the box, folks, we're here to help you!
"We choose to go to the moon in the next two decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they will take attention away from what's happening with the Ukraine." -- V. Putin
Not all consulting entails selling. In fact, in any good consulting firm, you won't be doing any selling until you're near the top (e.g., Principal/Partner). You may not even get to present anything in front of the client until you have some experience under your belt -- as a new hire, the only client facing activity you'll do is take detailed notes.
This assumes getting hired into a lower level position in a larger consulting firm, rather than consulting on your own.
At which point they are back to exactly the same problem that they originally faced, which is getting hired for a job working for someone else. It doesn't matter whether that someone else hires them in order to farm them out to a third party, or hires them to do work in house, they are still facing the problem that they can't get hired in the first place because they are unable to sell themselves to a prospective employer.
Motivation notwithstanding, I would also suggest that you consider consulting.
That totally won't work.
Consulting requires selling, and they've already demonstrated an inability to sell the one product that they're intimately familiar with, and that it's currently their *only* job to sell right now, which is themselves to an employer.
If you can't sell yourself to an employer, how much harder is it going to be to sell your services into the much smaller services market, if you are incapable of selling in the first place?
This is coming from someone who has been in IT for 20 years, very successfully, and has never taken any computer courses...
The OP specifically stated "software development", not IT. Different field of endeavor.
Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things?
They liked the new things that coincided with their generation hitting their prime.
So, they'll like something any day now, then? We've kind of been waiting for them to hit their prime for a while now. I feel like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, I've been waiting so long for their generation to hit their prime...
FINALLY!
It's the "two years later" of the Linux desktop!
Comm specs matter.
It's kind of hard to use a GSM phone on a CDMA network, or vice versa. Internet dependence on EDGE vs. UTMS vs. LTE? Also kind of matters. 802.11a vs. 802.11n/g also kind of matters.
They're mostly a waste of time anyway everyone just strokes their own egos and you spend 2 days digesting information in an archaic inefficient way
lecture style
But dude! He gets to meet Stan Lee! THE Stan Lee!
Global warming was caused by a simple thing: too damned many people consuming energy on this rock, and it gets worse every year.
I thought the cause was our unwillingness to reengineer the orbit of Earth to be a teensy bit further out. IT's not like we aren't going to have to do that anyway, as soon as the solar expansion phase starts in a bit...
why assume that one or the other would not be willing or wanting to do the other you listed?
Shhhhh! Quit challenging his political stereotypes! People over 75 get cranky when you do that...
Yeah, there's long term downside risk to the stock as a straight financial instrument (along with significant historical upside), but you know what? I don't really feel the need to destroy things just because that's they path to my highest ROI over time.
Which leads the question, how do we force management to stop aiming at short-term decisions that destroy companies/greater profits over the longer period?
My personal suggestion? Keep investors away from decisions impacting the day to day operations of the company. One good way of accomplishing this is having two classes of stock, voting and non-voting, and keeping the voting stock in the hands of people who care about the long term interests of the company. :)
Apple devices "degrade" with OS updates in the same way that Windows updates do on PCs, gradually. But even after an Apple starts no being upgradeable to the latest OS release, it stays useful for years to come. My mother is still using my hand-me-down 2002 desk-lamp iMac, which has the old PowerPC processor.
The problem is the Windows 98 SP2 effect.
The last service pack supporting Windows 98 turned it from a usable system into utter buggy crashing heap of crap, at coincidentally the same time they started trying to sell you Windows XP.
Note that generally I don't think this is an intention destruction of usability on the part of Microsoft (or Apple), I just think that all their testing takes place on newer hardware, better than what the user is actually using, and so the usability test engineers just never see how terrible it's going to be on (nominally) supported older devices.
When someone buys a share in Apple, they actually get an ownership share in Apple.
Apple, yes. Google or Facebook, no. Google and Facebook have two classes of stock. The class with all the voting rights is in both cases controlled by the founders. The publicly traded shares cannot outvote them, even if someone bought all of them.
Until recently, multiple classes of stock were prohibited for NYSE-listed companies, which tended to discourage doing this. (The classic exception was Ford, which has two classes of stock, the voting shares controlled by the Ford family. This predates that NYSE rule.)
This matters when the insiders make a big mistake and the stock starts going down. There's no way to kick them out.
It also matters when someone has built something of value, and then becomes publicly traded, since it keeps the financial vampires from descending on the company and sucking the blood out of it, leaving a husk which dies in 6 months. That's what's currently going on with the OliveGarden proxy fight, where a funds group has acquired a large position in the company, and now wants to spin off the real estate holdings to a separate company (taking about $1B in the $2.5B value portfolio as a one time dividend, and putting in their own sock puppets on the board to short-term pump the stock by changing employee mix, etc.).
The problem with Google and Facebook maintaining one class of stock is ISOs/RSUs. Stock given as incentives to employees, after the vesting period, can be sold on the open market, and if that stock position becomes larger than the founders, then the people who made the decisions that created the large value in the first place are no longer in control, and Gordon Gecko (or Carl Icahn) can come in and do what's best short term for the shareholders, rather than what's best long term for the shareholders, company, employees, and customers.
Who do I trust more to make the best decisions not totally motivated by short term profit, Carl Icahn, or Larry, Sergey, and Eric?
Yeah, there's long term downside risk to the stock as a straight financial instrument (along with significant historical upside), but you know what? I don't really feel the need to destroy things just because that's they path to my highest ROI over time.
For better or worse, I'd rather have the founders, not Wall Street, making the decisions that guide the future of the thing they built.
If a US company listed in the US decided to screw its shareholders, it and the board can be held accountable in US courts.
LOL, when has that ever happened
It's happened many times; it's called "malfeasance" or "misconduct", and it's punishable as criminal fraud.
This is why corporate board members these days are all about "fiduciary responsibility", even if they have to club baby seals to death in the shallow waters where they are coated in oil from the Exxon Valdez.
This is why you outsource manufacturing.
Outsource to a big company like Foxconn or Solectron that has already invested in all the expensive equipment and processes (in both cases, some of it actually paid for by Apple), and have them do your manufacturing for you.
The incremental cost ends up pretty tiny, relative to COGS, and you get a better finished product at only a fractionally higher cost than if you were stupid enough to do your own manufacturing. The argument in the article only holds up if you are stupidly building the widgets yourself.
"How do you explain..."
I don't really follow Microsoft acquisitions enough to speculate on their reasoning, but the Facebook reasoning was pretty obviously that the WhatsApp company cost (predominantly non-US) telephone companies $19B in per-SMS charged revenue over a period of 2 years, and it therefore gave Facebook some incredible leverage with those phone companies to make the purchase in such a way that a small group of phone companies couldn't drive WhatsApp out of business by increasing data costs to compensate (which would hurt Facebook.
Given the relative percentages... it's likely that the "harassment escalating to assault" numbers for the men is underreported by a factor of 2.5, which would be about on a par with the underreporting of men being raped in the general population. There's a real cultural stigma to reporting by men, who are, by stereotype and therefore societal norms, "supposed to be" on the other end of the power equation.
They've already screwed the pooch.
They've published the source archive under the original TrueCrypt license. As a result, unless there's a legal entity (person or company) to which all contributors make an assignment of rights, or they keep the commit rights down to a "select group" that has agreed already to relicense the code, they will not be able to later release the code under an alternate license, since all contributions will be derivative works and subject to the TrueCrypt license (as the TrueCrypt license still in the source tree makes clear).
The way you do these things is: sanitize, relicense, THEN announce. Anyone who wants to contribute as a result of the announcement can't, without addressing the relicensing issue without having already picked a new license.