Having gov't imposed regulations simply undermines economy and kills competition, whatever the competition is.
If there are indeed an infinite number of alternate universes in which every possible thing has happened, there may actually be one in which this statement is NOT painfully and obviously untrue to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history, and indeed in which someone uttering it such as yourself has NOT entertainingly exposed himself as being a fucking moron.
I would never pay for sex. Hell, I'd never even go in a strip club, I consider it degrading for both the stripper and the patron. (Hint - guys, she's DOESN'T like you.)
But I also have a problem with the government saying when and why two consenting adults can have sex.
Of course though, exploitation of women is rampant, and the situation is pretty grim except in some places perhaps where there's serious regulation, mandatory health screening, benefits and crap.
Possible solution - don't tell a woman (or man for that matter) they can't ask for money (instead of a dinner, some coke, or "let me crash here for a few days") in exchange for sex, because why someone chooses to have sex isn't the government's business... but
outlaw PIMPING. Or, because prohibition doesn't usually work well, make it legal but regulate the living fuck out of it.
I mean, prostitution is illegal - so when pointing to the problem of prostitution and how horrible it is, it really doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is to make it illegal - it already is. Must not be working?
Has to do with prohibition, WWII, all sorts of things. Basically before WWII Americans drank the same stuff as everyone else. Then when much of the male population went off to war, the brewing industry (still recovering from prohibition and which had mostly converted to soft drinks anyway) realized that they had to develop drinks that would appeal to women.
Hence the lighter beers, along with advertising made to appeal to women "The Champagne of Beers," Miller "High Life" etc., all designed to sort of equate to being a cheap "classy" light drink like champagne that would be accessible to women. After the war things stayed the same.
Another thing is... they screen all the passengers going on the planes.
But they don't screen the fucking MAIL being loaded into the plane's cargo hold.
Wanna have fun as a terrorist? Go in the airport, stand in line and watch all the passengers take off their shoes, show that their bottle of hair gel is only 3 ounces, no more, and have their jockstrap scanned... then wander over to the window and watch your first class USMail "present to Grandma" get loaded on the same plane.
In many towns, the sorters are not paid - they are people like shoplifters and other petty criminals that have received "community service" sentences. They have to spend a few saturdays sorting trash.
Well hey, conspiracies happen every day. Two guys talk about possibly robbing a liquor store, that's a conspiracy.
The US has an intelligence agency. It's a pretty important part of our government, you might even call it a central part. Now, unless they get all of their information legally by perusing magazines, going to the library and asking people in other countries very politely "hey, are you by any chance planning to do anything that we in the US wouldn't like?" then they are in fact in the conspiracy business. Tens of thousands of conspiracies running concurrently.
Not that loony stuff like faking moon landings or hiding aliens... just mundane everyday conspiracies involving depriving people of their civil rights and occasionally their lives, along with the occasional toppling of a foreign government or two.
The Govt. probably does limit the amount of conspiracies it engages in, though... only the bare necessity, like say about the same number as pennies in circulation.
They're lucky. On my "up to" something like 3-6 mbps (I've so long since given up paying attention that I don't remember) I get a maximum of about 760kbps.
In my experience, in most towns you have at best a choice between two broadband providers and they both usually suck in different ways... and both are vastly overpriced, though one is usually about 20% less expensive than the other, so that's who you go with.
If he got hold of Taliban secrets, would you argue that it would be unethical of him to release them because it put Taliban solder's lives at risk? I highly doubt it.
What you are demanding, in effect, is that someone who is not from the US, who has no duty to have a loyalty to the US, take the US's side.
Now, it may be that the US is actually the cowboy in the white hat here, with its hands clean. And maybe the Taliban is the cowboy in the black hat. The reality is, though the Taliban (or any theocratic movement) is dangerous to liberty, we are NOT some shining beacon of freedom in the world. We fucking CREATED the Taliban, essentially.
You can like what Assange does, you can hate it. But he has NO ethical obligation to take sides in a war and make sure he protects the lives of combatants on one side while not protecting those on the other (and in fact, by protecting one, likely cost lives of the other)
He, as a non-involved party, can actually, ethically just publish EVERYTHING he can get his hands on, and let the chips fall where they may with regard to the two sides fighting. It's THEIR war, not his, and the results of their war is their responsibility and their problem.
The heck with slander. I'm gonna proactively sue him for raping my goat. And I don't even HAVE a goat.
Yet.
Re:Wave could still catch on
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Thing is, though... Google DOES seem to give up on its failures. Hell, it even seems to give up on some of its minor successes.
It almost seems like Google has attention deficit disorder. Apart from Gmail and its base search business, almost everything else they have that's successful seems to have been bought from someone else after it already was a hit.
Yes, you can complain to the multi-billion dollar corporation and they will change their plans just for you, give up their ill-gotten gains, because you're just THAT special.
As far as switching providers... maybe you're not one of the millions of Americans without much choice. Maybe you actually have the option to move from Verizon, who is deliberately slowing down their competition... to your cable company... who is deliberately slowing down their competition.
The problem is that PIPELINE companies are allowed to be CONTENT companies and then now want to disadvantage other companies dependent on that pipeline.
Requiring one company to serve another without obstacle is ludicrous? Wrong, shithead, it's NORMAL, it's the LAW for example in the case of phone companies. They are required to allow competing long distance carriers to use the lines to your house without degradation... have been for decades... and more recently, were forced to allow competing LOCAL carriers to use their lines without degradation.
The result? Lower long distance prices, lower local call prices. More innovation. AT&T was essentially a monopoly, and breaking it up and forcing carriers to allow other companies equal access helped serve the public good.
You know what other effect it had?
Why, it created the FUCKING INTERNET as we know it - public access to it, that is.
Started with Carterphone, then Sprint. Govt. intervened to force AT&T to allow competing equipment to use its lines. Before this, the only plans for internet like systems were totally closed, corporate controlled lame-assed useless teletext plans that were delayed, years in the future. AT&T had no real plans. Cable companies had the idiotic Qube, for example.
What happened when anyone could use the lines for whatever, connect any equipment, without restriction, without degradation or prioritization?
MODEMS happened. The public embrace of the internet happened. There would BE no web you're using today if the government hadn't intervened and FORCED a company to allow equal access to its lines.
Government regulation of what are essentially monopolies or common carriers prevents total monopoly, consolidation, reduction of choice, services and quality, and massive price gouging, despite what your free market religion tells you.
How did the government deregulation of the financial industry work out, huh?
Same thing that happened with "Fair and Balanced," "Think Different," "You're in Good Hands with Allstate," "Change You Can Believe In" "Doctors Recommend Phillip Morris" and "Chemicals Make Life Possible."
It goes down in history as a successful slogan that did well in deceiving it's intended target.
You're not ordering a netflix download from verizon either... but they're controlling how well and competitively Netflix can deliver it. So, no analogy fail on my part. Comprehension fail on your part.
Wouldn't it be best to raise a fuss and (figuratively) bash a few CEOs and Congresswhore's heads in until corporations were no longer legally allowed to be persons, with the rights of people, and instead are treated as what they really are - organizations with no inherent legal rights, only those granted to them by the charter given them by government (ie, representatives of REAL people), a charter that is regulated, is conditional on their following certain rules, and which can be revoked should they break those rules?
Sure, that's handy. Verizon will not discriminate between Gmail and Hotmail. They will download at the same rate. Nice and speedy because Verizon doesn't make any money on email.
Verizon won't discriminate between Flickr and and Picasa, they will download at the same rate, pretty speedy because Verizon doesn't make any money selling photo hosting - but possibly a bit slower than email, because pics use more bandwidth which costs Verizon money.
Verizon won't discriminate between Hulu and Netflix or Amazon video downloads. They'll all download at the same rate - so slow as to be unusable, or at least so slow as to make Verizon's pay per view an attractive alternative, because Verizon sells video downloads and will have that incentive.
Sort of like giving McDonald's authority to set the prices on Wendys, Hardees, Burger King, Jack In The Box and Carl's Jr. hamburgers.
McDonald's promises they won't show favoritism in setting their competitor's prices, they'll do it uniformly across the board. And they will. All their competitor's burger prices will be set at $100 each.
Thanks Google.
You are right. It is enlightening to hear Google's side of the story. Not a surprising side, pretty much the same side as any corporation. Their side? "we will do whatever makes us the most money regardless of the damage it causes." Of course - not articulately that clearly, that honestly... because deliberately giving being deceptive and obfuscating the message better serves that amoral aim than being truthful.
"Don't be evil?" Marketing speak. Keep your prey, er I mean the public mislead. Better for profits. No different than Apple saying "Think Different" as they sell their products as the ultimate symbols of conformity, a conformity so important that people will literally line up at the doors waiting for a new product so as not to be seen for a second as being on the "outside" of what's desirable.
Same as Fox News, selling lies and propaganda with the slogan "Fair and Balanced."
Thanks, Google. Thanks for selling us all out. I hope your profits are worth it. And to the OP, I hope your bonus is worth the selling of your personal integrity, considering that the only thing a person has that can never be taken by force is their integrity. I wouldn't want you to have sold this one thing you truly would have owned forever too cheaply.
That's the same thing with digital projection. It SUCKS, it stopped me going to movies, because not only is the resolution far inferior to film (or even HDTV for that matter...) but the contrast ratio is lesser too, making movies look like shit. I can actually see pixels on the screen, and everything looks muddy unless it's a brightly colored Pixar cartoon. I get a better image on my PC at home from a fricken Xvid.
The reason digital projection was pushed out was NOT for any sort of improvement in the filmgoing experience, in fact detracts from it. It was pushed out purely for profit reasons - easier to "reproduce," easier to distribute. And the public loved it because they are a. clueless and b. have been trained to hear the buzzword "digital" and think it's superior.
But digital projection COULD be ok for most films, it was just rolled out way too soon before the tech was up to the task. And it might NEVER be quite right for certain kinds of films.
Same thing with 3D. The tech was rolled out way too early purely as a money decision, NOT as a creative decision. As a result it sucks for 99% of movies and is only "ok" for a type of film extremely narrowly defined with 3D in mind.
Some day that may change, some day there may be a 3D tech that DOESN'T look dark and cause headaches and get in the way of the story. And even then it will still not be a good choice for non-mainstreem bubblegum movies.
The stockholders OWN the company. They HIRED the CEO, they voted on the hire, etc. If an employee of a company commits fraud on behalf of the company, YES, the owners of the company have to bear the cost, because the COMPANY bears the cost.
If the owners of the company don't like that, then they'd better do a better job of controlling the company they own and its employees.
If the employee costs them money, they sue him. If the employee commits a crime, yes, that employee gets charged.
But the COMPANY has to pay for what the company does. You're arguing that the OWNERS OF THE COMPANY, the PEOPLE WHO REAP THE PROFITS, have no responsibility to pay the costs of the crimes that made their profits.
That's an obscenity. That you can just reap the benefits of corporate crime, make a nice profit off of it and then claim you have no liability when it's shown those profits are ill-gotten?
That's a sickness.
And suppose you bought into the company after the crimes happened and now you're paying the price. You know what? TOUGH fucking luck. That's the breaks. Next time do better research and know what you're getting into before you take on a responsibility. Sure, if you can, sue your predecessors for fraud in not fully disclosing the liabilities to you before you bought, but that's between you and them.
In short, stop treating business ownership as a fucking Las Vegas roulette wheel, where the only responsibility you bear is to collect your winnings if the ball lands on your number.
We bought a house last fall. There was an illegally constructed shed on the property, too close to the road and had been built without a permit. Who was responsible for the cost of demolition? WE WERE. We had nothing to do with building, but we're the owners now.
Underneath the shed we found asbestos/concrete conduit that some previous owner had stashed under there. Disposal of asbestos is expensive and complicated.
Who was responsible for doing that? WE WERE, because we're the owners. Doesn't matter that we didn't know it was there when we bought.
Stockholders have a too long had a culture of non-accountability and that has turned our entire economic system into a giant gambling parlor, has destroyed our manufacturing base as they've all turned the thing into a quick-money, get in and get out game where only profits matter and there is no responsibility by the owners of a company for the actions of that company.
That needs to change. Yes, CEOS need to be serving prison time, but enablers of crooked CEOS - stockholders, the owners of the business - whose only demand is fast profit, damned the long-term consequences, need to stop getting off scott-free also.
Slashdot Mirror
Having gov't imposed regulations simply undermines economy and kills competition, whatever the competition is.
If there are indeed an infinite number of alternate universes in which every possible thing has happened, there may actually be one in which this statement is NOT painfully and obviously untrue to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history, and indeed in which someone uttering it such as yourself has NOT entertainingly exposed himself as being a fucking moron.
Yes! We must get government out of the economy! Only THEN can we return to the glory days of the 1890s when every child could find a steady job!
Wow! Well you just gave the lie to the conceit in the US and Hollywood that the aliens would only ever decide to visit (or attack) in America!
I would never pay for sex. Hell, I'd never even go in a strip club, I consider it degrading for both the stripper and the patron. (Hint - guys, she's DOESN'T like you.)
But I also have a problem with the government saying when and why two consenting adults can have sex.
Of course though, exploitation of women is rampant, and the situation is pretty grim except in some places perhaps where there's serious regulation, mandatory health screening, benefits and crap.
Possible solution - don't tell a woman (or man for that matter) they can't ask for money (instead of a dinner, some coke, or "let me crash here for a few days") in exchange for sex, because why someone chooses to have sex isn't the government's business... but
outlaw PIMPING. Or, because prohibition doesn't usually work well, make it legal but regulate the living fuck out of it.
I mean, prostitution is illegal - so when pointing to the problem of prostitution and how horrible it is, it really doesn't necessarily follow that the solution is to make it illegal - it already is. Must not be working?
Compuserve. online at 300 baud in 1982.
Yes, in my dad's basement.
Has to do with prohibition, WWII, all sorts of things.
Basically before WWII Americans drank the same stuff as everyone else. Then when much of the male population went off to war, the brewing industry (still recovering from prohibition and which had mostly converted to soft drinks anyway) realized that they had to develop drinks that would appeal to women.
Hence the lighter beers, along with advertising made to appeal to women "The Champagne of Beers," Miller "High Life" etc., all designed to sort of equate to being a cheap "classy" light drink like champagne that would be accessible to women.
After the war things stayed the same.
Also, the shit is cheaper to make.
Another thing is... they screen all the passengers going on the planes.
But they don't screen the fucking MAIL being loaded into the plane's cargo hold.
Wanna have fun as a terrorist? Go in the airport, stand in line and watch all the passengers take off their shoes, show that their bottle of hair gel is only 3 ounces, no more, and have their jockstrap scanned... then wander over to the window and watch your first class USMail "present to Grandma" get loaded on the same plane.
In many towns, the sorters are not paid - they are people like shoplifters and other petty criminals that have received "community service" sentences. They have to spend a few saturdays sorting trash.
Well hey, conspiracies happen every day. Two guys talk about possibly robbing a liquor store, that's a conspiracy.
The US has an intelligence agency. It's a pretty important part of our government, you might even call it a central part. Now, unless they get all of their information legally by perusing magazines, going to the library and asking people in other countries very politely "hey, are you by any chance planning to do anything that we in the US wouldn't like?" then they are in fact in the conspiracy business. Tens of thousands of conspiracies running concurrently.
Not that loony stuff like faking moon landings or hiding aliens... just mundane everyday conspiracies involving depriving people of their civil rights and occasionally their lives, along with the occasional toppling of a foreign government or two.
The Govt. probably does limit the amount of conspiracies it engages in, though... only the bare necessity, like say about the same number as pennies in circulation.
How about NOT keeping an open mind? How about, when someone is accused of a crime, with no other information to go on, you consider them innocent?
Yes, a presumption of innocence. Unless and until they are PROVEN guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt?
Hey, I like the way I worded that. Someone should write that down. Like in a fucking LAW OR SOMETHING.
They're lucky. On my "up to" something like 3-6 mbps (I've so long since given up paying attention that I don't remember) I get a maximum of about 760kbps.
In my experience, in most towns you have at best a choice between two broadband providers and they both usually suck in different ways... and both are vastly overpriced, though one is usually about 20% less expensive than the other, so that's who you go with.
It's possible that radio where you live hasn't devolved into the entirely useless crap that it has here in the US.
All phones should have a telegraphy key! Western union demands it!
My uncle Mario was killed almost 30 years ago by a gorilla throwing barrels down the ladder he was climbing up.
I've been fighting to have that damned game banned all this time.
Assange is not an American citizen.
If he got hold of Taliban secrets, would you argue that it would be unethical of him to release them because it put Taliban solder's lives at risk? I highly doubt it.
What you are demanding, in effect, is that someone who is not from the US, who has no duty to have a loyalty to the US, take the US's side.
Now, it may be that the US is actually the cowboy in the white hat here, with its hands clean. And maybe the Taliban is the cowboy in the black hat. The reality is, though the Taliban (or any theocratic movement) is dangerous to liberty, we are NOT some shining beacon of freedom in the world. We fucking CREATED the Taliban, essentially.
You can like what Assange does, you can hate it. But he has NO ethical obligation to take sides in a war and make sure he protects the lives of combatants on one side while not protecting those on the other (and in fact, by protecting one, likely cost lives of the other)
He, as a non-involved party, can actually, ethically just publish EVERYTHING he can get his hands on, and let the chips fall where they may with regard to the two sides fighting. It's THEIR war, not his, and the results of their war is their responsibility and their problem.
The heck with slander. I'm gonna proactively sue him for raping my goat. And I don't even HAVE a goat.
Yet.
Thing is, though... Google DOES seem to give up on its failures. Hell, it even seems to give up on some of its minor successes.
It almost seems like Google has attention deficit disorder. Apart from Gmail and its base search business, almost everything else they have that's successful seems to have been bought from someone else after it already was a hit.
Yes, you can complain to the multi-billion dollar corporation and they will change their plans just for you, give up their ill-gotten gains, because you're just THAT special.
As far as switching providers... maybe you're not one of the millions of Americans without much choice.
Maybe you actually have the option to move from Verizon, who is deliberately slowing down their competition... to your cable company... who is deliberately slowing down their competition.
The problem is that PIPELINE companies are allowed to be CONTENT companies and then now want to disadvantage other companies dependent on that pipeline.
Requiring one company to serve another without obstacle is ludicrous? Wrong, shithead, it's NORMAL, it's the LAW for example in the case of phone companies. They are required to allow competing long distance carriers to use the lines to your house without degradation... have been for decades... and more recently, were forced to allow competing LOCAL carriers to use their lines without degradation.
The result? Lower long distance prices, lower local call prices. More innovation. AT&T was essentially a monopoly, and breaking it up and forcing carriers to allow other companies equal access helped serve the public good.
You know what other effect it had?
Why, it created the FUCKING INTERNET as we know it - public access to it, that is.
Started with Carterphone, then Sprint. Govt. intervened to force AT&T to allow competing equipment to use its lines. Before this, the only plans for internet like systems were totally closed, corporate controlled lame-assed useless teletext plans that were delayed, years in the future. AT&T had no real plans. Cable companies had the idiotic Qube, for example.
What happened when anyone could use the lines for whatever, connect any equipment, without restriction, without degradation or prioritization?
MODEMS happened. The public embrace of the internet happened. There would BE no web you're using today if the government hadn't intervened and FORCED a company to allow equal access to its lines.
Government regulation of what are essentially monopolies or common carriers prevents total monopoly, consolidation, reduction of choice, services and quality, and massive price gouging, despite what your free market religion tells you.
How did the government deregulation of the financial industry work out, huh?
as I understand it, the granting of corporate personhood was essentially an accident.
What ever happened to Do No Evil
Same thing that happened with "Fair and Balanced," "Think Different," "You're in Good Hands with Allstate," "Change You Can Believe In" "Doctors Recommend Phillip Morris" and "Chemicals Make Life Possible."
It goes down in history as a successful slogan that did well in deceiving it's intended target.
You're not ordering a netflix download from verizon either... but they're controlling how well and competitively Netflix can deliver it. So, no analogy fail on my part. Comprehension fail on your part.
Wouldn't it be best to raise a fuss and (figuratively) bash a few CEOs and Congresswhore's heads in until corporations were no longer legally allowed to be persons, with the rights of people, and instead are treated as what they really are - organizations with no inherent legal rights, only those granted to them by the charter given them by government (ie, representatives of REAL people), a charter that is regulated, is conditional on their following certain rules, and which can be revoked should they break those rules?
Sure, that's handy. Verizon will not discriminate between Gmail and Hotmail. They will download at the same rate. Nice and speedy because Verizon doesn't make any money on email.
Verizon won't discriminate between Flickr and and Picasa, they will download at the same rate, pretty speedy because Verizon doesn't make any money selling photo hosting - but possibly a bit slower than email, because pics use more bandwidth which costs Verizon money.
Verizon won't discriminate between Hulu and Netflix or Amazon video downloads. They'll all download at the same rate - so slow as to be unusable, or at least so slow as to make Verizon's pay per view an attractive alternative, because Verizon sells video downloads and will have that incentive.
Sort of like giving McDonald's authority to set the prices on Wendys, Hardees, Burger King, Jack In The Box and Carl's Jr. hamburgers.
McDonald's promises they won't show favoritism in setting their competitor's prices, they'll do it uniformly across the board. And they will. All their competitor's burger prices will be set at $100 each.
Thanks Google.
You are right. It is enlightening to hear Google's side of the story. Not a surprising side, pretty much the same side as any corporation. Their side? "we will do whatever makes us the most money regardless of the damage it causes." Of course - not articulately that clearly, that honestly... because deliberately giving being deceptive and obfuscating the message better serves that amoral aim than being truthful.
"Don't be evil?" Marketing speak. Keep your prey, er I mean the public mislead. Better for profits. No different than Apple saying "Think Different" as they sell their products as the ultimate symbols of conformity, a conformity so important that people will literally line up at the doors waiting for a new product so as not to be seen for a second as being on the "outside" of what's desirable.
Same as Fox News, selling lies and propaganda with the slogan "Fair and Balanced."
Thanks, Google. Thanks for selling us all out. I hope your profits are worth it. And to the OP, I hope your bonus is worth the selling of your personal integrity, considering that the only thing a person has that can never be taken by force is their integrity. I wouldn't want you to have sold this one thing you truly would have owned forever too cheaply.
That's the same thing with digital projection.
It SUCKS, it stopped me going to movies, because not only is the resolution far inferior to film (or even HDTV for that matter...) but the contrast ratio is lesser too, making movies look like shit. I can actually see pixels on the screen, and everything looks muddy unless it's a brightly colored Pixar cartoon. I get a better image on my PC at home from a fricken Xvid.
The reason digital projection was pushed out was NOT for any sort of improvement in the filmgoing experience, in fact detracts from it. It was pushed out purely for profit reasons - easier to "reproduce," easier to distribute. And the public loved it because they are a. clueless and b. have been trained to hear the buzzword "digital" and think it's superior.
But digital projection COULD be ok for most films, it was just rolled out way too soon before the tech was up to the task. And it might NEVER be quite right for certain kinds of films.
Same thing with 3D. The tech was rolled out way too early purely as a money decision, NOT as a creative decision. As a result it sucks for 99% of movies and is only "ok" for a type of film extremely narrowly defined with 3D in mind.
Some day that may change, some day there may be a 3D tech that DOESN'T look dark and cause headaches and get in the way of the story. And even then it will still not be a good choice for non-mainstreem bubblegum movies.
The stockholders OWN the company. They HIRED the CEO, they voted on the hire, etc.
If an employee of a company commits fraud on behalf of the company, YES, the owners of the company have to bear the cost, because the COMPANY bears the cost.
If the owners of the company don't like that, then they'd better do a better job of controlling the company they own and its employees.
If the employee costs them money, they sue him.
If the employee commits a crime, yes, that employee gets charged.
But the COMPANY has to pay for what the company does.
You're arguing that the OWNERS OF THE COMPANY, the PEOPLE WHO REAP THE PROFITS, have no responsibility to pay the costs of the crimes that made their profits.
That's an obscenity. That you can just reap the benefits of corporate crime, make a nice profit off of it and then claim you have no liability when it's shown those profits are ill-gotten?
That's a sickness.
And suppose you bought into the company after the crimes happened and now you're paying the price. You know what? TOUGH fucking luck. That's the breaks. Next time do better research and know what you're getting into before you take on a responsibility. Sure, if you can, sue your predecessors for fraud in not fully disclosing the liabilities to you before you bought, but that's between you and them.
In short, stop treating business ownership as a fucking Las Vegas roulette wheel, where the only responsibility you bear is to collect your winnings if the ball lands on your number.
We bought a house last fall. There was an illegally constructed shed on the property, too close to the road and had been built without a permit. Who was responsible for the cost of demolition? WE WERE. We had nothing to do with building, but we're the owners now.
Underneath the shed we found asbestos/concrete conduit that some previous owner had stashed under there. Disposal of asbestos is expensive and complicated.
Who was responsible for doing that? WE WERE, because we're the owners. Doesn't matter that we didn't know it was there when we bought.
Stockholders have a too long had a culture of non-accountability and that has turned our entire economic system into a giant gambling parlor, has destroyed our manufacturing base as they've all turned the thing into a quick-money, get in and get out game where only profits matter and there is no responsibility by the owners of a company for the actions of that company.
That needs to change. Yes, CEOS need to be serving prison time, but enablers of crooked CEOS - stockholders, the owners of the business - whose only demand is fast profit, damned the long-term consequences, need to stop getting off scott-free also.