Anyone screaming "UFO!" tells me that some idiots will believe anything...
Problem is, they're usually right when they say they saw an object flying and that it was unidentified to them. Where they get nutty is where they decide that any flying object that does not identify itself to them must contain aliens that are coming to do some anal probing or something or other.
Re:Or was it the Vogon Constructor Fleet? (Score:4, Insightful)
by Stile 65 (722451) on Thursday March 18, @11:29PM (#8603357)
(http://www.freestateproject.org/)
Remember your towel!
Only on slashdot:-)
.... would such a lame thread actually exist. You know, Douglas Adams was funny for a lot of reasons, but he was never predictable.
If you are going to make a post without numbers or facts then at least bash SCO or Microsoft. (j/k)
If you want to be moderated as Funny, don't ever put the letter j to the left of the letter k without any intervening words in your post. If we have to be told it's funny, it's not.
And yes, I do understand your musical comments. I play a lot of music like you described. I'd bet that a lot of others here do, too. But, interesting as this is, it isn't really relevant to a discussion of businesses using copyright and patent law to stifle creativity.
My post was completely on topic in relation to yours. And your post demonstrated that regardless of what you say, you do/did not understand the concepts you were using in your facetious proposal. See, had you used very poor grammar, some grammar nazi would have come along and corrected it.
Instead, you got spanked by a music nazi. And totally trolled to boot.:) Good day.
IP is just a generally difficult concept to deal with, with very few people agreeing on what it actually is. The reason history doesn't support us as well here as it does in other places (mind you, I frequently pull out history myself in discussions) is because it's such a tangled issue. History supports both sides of the discussion, and it's not really possible to invoke history for one side without ignoring history that supports the other side.
And, unfortunately, even after being decided in court and judged by history an issue still isn't always settled.:( (ref: Roe vs Wade on that one, and a fair amount of civil rights issues, sexual harassment, and so forth)
Don't get me wrong, when I come to a discussion early (which I didn't this time), I'm usually the first one invoking history. No sense trying to relearn the lessons history gives us for free, right? And it's also not that I disagree with you, I strongly agree with you. Ford just also has a history of being anticompetitive themselves......
Um, what does the law have to do with my reply? I noticed a couple of things about your post that indicated that you didn't know the things I wrote about, so I wrote about them. I wasn't even talking about law and crap.
oo, I didn't mean to leave out historical perspective entirely, we still need that. The problem with using historical perspective is that it winds up frequently being anecdotal evidence, and in this specific case there are lots of anecdotal examples on both sides of the fence.
the distinguished first phrase of Happy Birthday is just 5 notes, all the same length
That's funny, I always thought the first two notes of that melody were a dotted eigth followed by a sixteenth, followed by three quarters and ending with a dotted quarter "yoooooooooooooooou".
We probably can limit the melody to just an 8-note octave, or maybe make it 12 notes to be on the safe side.
Ah, I see where you were confused. You saw "oct" in "octave" and thought that meant an octave was 8 pitches. Well, it's not, exactly. There are 11 pitches at regular intervals in either direction before you repeat a pitch, in the western scale. The east as 23.
Consider your basic sound wave. It's just a sine wave, and it reverberates at certain frequencies. Well, when it reverberates at the rate of 440/second (or is it per minute? Well, Hertz, anyway), you have a pitch that guitarists generally refer to as "A". When that same sound wave reverberates at exactly twice the speed, or 880 Herz, you have another "A". Typically, those two A's are referred to as being an 'octave' apart from one another. But here in the west, including both A's, there are 12 pitches in an octave, not 8.
Now, there used to be 8. When Pope Gregor, famous for his Gregorian chants, figured out a way to use five lines and four spaces to represent pitch, he created a system of writing music that used only 8 pitches, uneventy spaced. Those original 8 pitches are now referred to as a 'major scale', and it is from here that the word 'octave' is derived. However, if you take the intervals of the major scale and try to play a major scale using each pitch in Gregor's original scale as a tonic, you will find a total of 11 unique pitches before one is repeated. That is why we now have an 'octave' that contains 12 pitches.
unless people are changing the author's name on the book, the author is getting recognition. It's not money, admittedly. Maybe this same person wrote the best book in the world, but people still overlooked it.
This is not a new idea either. It happened to Henry Ford back in 1906 when the other established car-makers tried to squash him.
Sorry bud, you'd have done better to cite Diesel instead. The Diesel engine was technically superior to the popular gasoline with spark plug engines, but the man was crushed under the burden of patent suits and died in poverty. The Diesel engine is still superior to gasoline engines, even if it smells bad, and remains in a niche market.
In any case, regardless of what you picked, the Wright Brothers very seriously and emphatically enforced their own patents. The result was that engineers had to work around their patents and ultimately built a better plane than the Wrights had, and built a foundation upon which solid planes were eventually built rather than the canvas pieces of junk the Wright brothers built. And the Wright Brothers sank off into la-la land. They should've spent less time enforcing their patents and more time fighting.
My only point is that there are plenty of examples where people have completely screwed up by enforcing their IP rights. What we need is proof that it's happening here and now, and crushing innovation and generally hurting society.
Not that I disagree with you, mind you, I just think we need more facts and a stronger argument and less historically based rhetoric.:)
Actually, I think recordings are considered as good as the writing stuff, with the added problem of identifying the parties. In fact, that's why some documents aren't strong in court without being notarized. The Notary isn't anybody special, just someone who checks IDs and makes sure both people are willingly signing the document, and witnesses the signing, that's all.
What's worse is that non-relative employees can't comment on the guy's effectiveness for fear of family retribution. Still, some family-owned businesses have done rather well.
Heh, I used to work for a guy who would bring his five year old son into the store and the kid would run around wild, pushing the button on the switchboard, throwing ketchup packets all over the place, and generally making a huge mess. The boss would never yell at him, would alwyas ask nicely, and so forth, and the kid never listened. He'd come into the kitchen (where I worked) and throw stuff in the friers, grab the spatula off the grill and pretend it was a sword, and all kinds of crap.
In the kitchen the boss would get stricter and take the kid out if he was being downright dangerous, it should be noted.
None of my coworkers ever got the guts to tell the boss that his kid was a problem. None at all. They were afraid they'd get fired, or they wouldn't get their next raise, or something or other.
So I pulled the boss aside and talked to him about it. He said "Well I'm not going to stop bringing my kid in here." I said "I'm not asking you, I'm just asking you to deal with the problem of him running around making a mess, and generally interfering." We made an agreement. Whenever his kid was causing trouble, I'd tell him and he'd deal with it. After that, coworkers started freaking out when I'd say "Boss, your kid's making a big mess in the lobby and it's pissing me off."
No retribution. In fact, the problem never got completely solved, but it did get bearable. As he put it, the kid would grow out of it, we just needed to have enough control over the situation to make it livable, that's all. And that's what we got, because I talked to him.
Not that I'm saying I'm a hero or anything. Fact is, and he knew this, if he didn't deal with the problem the same way he'd expect any employee to deal with a problem with their kid, I would've walked. He didn't think that was a reason someone should quit their job, so he was interested in not making it a reason.
She'll need to be a partner. A power inequality in the business side isn't going to work well with what should be an equitable relationship otherwise.
Well, i sure in the fuck don't want to work for you. What makes the boss better than the employees? Why does he have all the 'power' is therefore greater than the employees?
Nothing, from a behavioral standpoint. Sure, the boss has money on the line, and his whole future depends on the business. But if you use that as an excuse for not behaving equitably to your employees, then fuck off and die man, I don't want to be your slave.
In a family run business, more often than not, the boss will side with his or her family member.
If the boss is even-handed, you can't really argue with this. Family comes from similar roots (well, the same) and frequently have the same points of view, so you can expect the boss to take his family member's side because his point of view will be similar. If he's even-handed and doesn't play favorites, that is. But if he's truly even-handed, he won't take sides in any conflict, he'll just resolve the conflict.:)
If he's not even handed and he picks his family member's side "because they're family", you have a much more serious problem and should run off as soon as possible.
We had quite a few lovely exchanges, let me tell you! We are still together. And though we no longer work at the same firm, we have started a software company together. I'm the developer...she's the tester. I must be a glutton for punishment. Maybe this is some strange sort of S&M relationship, eh?
Actually, I think this shows that you can take criticism.:) Not that you always take it gracefully or nicely, just that you take it.
That is a trait that is essential in a marriage.:) Ever since my wife started taking criticism (I always had, I believe;) ), our marriage has been a lot better. Not that we spend all day bitching at each other. But then, criticism != bitching.
Honestly, when I've seen lawyers post, it's been accompanied by something like "I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice." When a lawyer posts, they generally make it clear that they are a lawyer, but aren't giving legal advice, just a somewhat educated $0.02 worth.
Well, just to be pedantic, if you give someone legal advice you could get into a lot of trouble. Now, no one's going to every admit they took legal advice they read on slashdot, right? I mean, come on, "Well judge, I thought it was perfectly ok when Anonymous Coward posted on slashdot and told me it was. he seemed competent." No, you get your ass laughed out of court, even if the person posted and said they were a lawyer.
But seriously, why do the lawyers post and say "This is not legal advice"? Because if they don't, they could lose their certification or whatever it is that allows them to practice law. You could get in the same trouble if you don't say you're not a lawyer and you give some damn credible advice.
Not that anyone's ever going to say "fucksl4shd0t should be sued for malpracticing as a lawyer, he never went to law school, he doesn't really know what he's talking about, but he's hurting a lot of people by giving them credible advice that doesn't hold water."
If the bad feeling reverberated into the family, and I caught shit for it, I'd just remind (or expain to) the person giving me a hard time that so and so has a history of not doing the job. I tried a bunch of times to talk to him and it didn't work out in the end. "basicly he wasn't doing his job and he was costing me money"
I'd tell 'em the same thing I tell them whenever someone gets uppity because I threw my brother out a long time ago. "none of your fuckin' business" The way I see it, I don't have to have a relationship at all with anyone in my family, and they all know that. So if they want a relationship with me, they either respect the boundaries I draw and stay out of them, or they can cry over the fact that I don't want to have anything to do with them. My family will give you a lot of bullshit if you let them, but they won't even try if you stand up for yourself.
And believe me, it's been a rough marriage as far as her and my family are concerned. They don't like each other, they don't like us (my family doesn't like her and her family doesn't like me), so we've had to deal with a lot of bullshit one way or another. If your family really cares about you, and you really have the balls to tell them to fuck off and die, they'll leave you alone and you don't have to make explanations or excuses.
Unless you're able to look your family or friends in the face as a boss/employee relationship, DON'T.
I really don't think this would be a problem for me. Fire my dad? No problem! Worthless little fuck. Fire my brother? Why not? I threw him out of my house a long time ago when he didn't pay any bills. Fire my wife? Hell yeah! I can't wait to have that make up sex.
It's not as hard as you might think. Fact is, to start a business, you've got to have what Mexicans like to call huevos. You've gotta have balls, and if you don't have enough balls to fire your family, you've really gotta ask yourself if you have enough balls to even run a business in the first place. That's the single trait that you must have and you can't do without. Every wonder why the really successful businessmen and women seem to have balls of steel? Because that's a requirement for the job.
I've been thinking about starting a business of some sort, and have seen a couple of my initial questions answered already.
Don't forget the other half, though. When you startup a business, you usually have some pretty limited resources. Who are your first customers going to be? Who are your first employees going to be?
You guessed it, family and friends. Without them on either side of the line, starting your business just got 10 times harder than it was.
Fact is, when you're a startup, you've got to be a lot more lenient with your employees, no matter who they are. You don't have the time or the resources to go out hiring replacements, and you're going to have a very hard time growing if you're always replacing customers and/or employees. In fact, you may not grow at all, you may shrink, and so much for your business.
The issues can be settled. Tell your girlfriend "I'll hire you, but I'm going to be harder on you than anyone else because I really know you well and I have high expectations." Then do it. Publicly dress her down, just once. If your relationship can't take it, forget her. If she can't understand that you have to have higher standards for her, and that the other employees have to see you chewing her out or they won't believe you, then move on. Find another girl. Or don't hire her in the first place.:) (Publicly dressing her down may not be necessary if you can drag her back into a more private place and people can see the effects of her ass-chewing when she comes back out)
Make it clear to your employees that the more you know them, the more familiar with them you are, the more you will expect out of them. Then just apply that reasoning to your family and friends and expect more out of them.
I worked at a place one time that was family owned and operated (well several, but this one is particularly notable). The father ran the business. Two of his sons worked in the shop with us hanging exhaust and fixing brakes. His third son (the one who went to school) worked in the office and came out into the shops to relieve the store manager so he could have a day off. The father pushed his sons much harder than he did any of us (he didn't push us hard at all, either). he might give a few words here and there to an employee when they screwed up, but if one of his sons screwed up he took them in the office and yelled at the poor guy for a long time.
Suffice it to say, we all worked very hard, and that family was a pretty strong family. I liked working there a lot.:)
I'd be worried about the way family members trust each other rather than have formally signed contracts and business agreements. This is great until something goes wrong then its horribly horribly messy.
That's a big problem, where you just trust your girlfriend to do something that you won't let someone who's been with you for 6 months do. It's also a problem when your family member expects 'extra understanding' because 'we're family'.
In my experience, you can't start up a business without your friends and family. They will be your first employees, your first customers, or both. There's a mutually beneficial relationship going on. It's easier to ask your family member to work for less money, for example. They want to help you out. They get some work experience for the job (if it's a new line of work for them, they could be getting a new career). In the long run, if things go well enough that the business grows and you've made mostly good decisions, your family member gets extra pay, or at least competitive pay.
I was in a business not too long ago with my best friend, and before that I was involved with my dad. WIth my dad, the problem was that he didn't trust my wife and wasn't willing to share half ownership of the company with me. I wasn't willing to be a puppet partner, and without half ownership I wasn't getting involved. With my best friend, it was a bit different. We hired his sister, his ex-wife (who is still a good friend of his), and immediately office politics came into play and I was the bad guy (his ex-wife doesn't trust me, and I don't believe she ever liked me, and his sister didn't know me well enough to make her own judgement).
In the past, when I worked with family at various jobs, there were no problems. I worked with my brother for a long time in the restauraunt business, and we lived together. No problems. We didn't have to draw a line between work and play. SOme days we'd spend the evening bitching about work and other days we spent our off hours playing our asses off. At work we didn't give each other any particularly special treatment. In fact, I was in a position of authority at that place, and I had much higher expectations from him than I did most of the others, so he got his ass chewed more and harder than the others.:)
There's no easy answer to this question, as much as we'd all like to think there is. You're right, Alan, that having everything clear and in writing is good. But if everything that is in writing is more than you have for other employees, it can be very bad. It can be bad when you give your brother a loan but the company policy is no loans (there are ways to work around this, of course, but not in a startup).
The way I figure it is this: When you hire somebody, you get to know them extremely well, from one side. You learn about their work ethic, you learn about their standards for living. You don't care about who they date, what they eat, what they read, what they do. You establish a working relationship that works, and frequently pushes cultural boundaries. You agree to have differences with regard to religion, politics, and other heated topics. With family, your relationship frequently depends on all of the things you set aside for the stranger who's working for you. And also with family, you don't know their work ethic, and that's the pivotal point.
The other problem that comes up has to do with the word "partnership". Marriage is a partnership, right? Well, partnership is just a two-person version of "team". One of the problems every couple, every team, and every workplace faces is figuring out how much work each person is individually responsible. In a partnership, it's common to say "We're each responsible for half, no problem, we agree on that, we know it in advance." Then, a few months or years or whatever down the road, you start getting angry because you think you're doing your half and the other person isn't doing theirs. If you've hired your girlfriend,
In reality, most verbal contracts are vague and writing them down tends to make people put a little more effort into specifying them.
Verbal contracts don't exist. Maybe they did at one time, when a man was as good as his word, but in this day full of deceit and corruption, there's no such thing.
Maybe some lawyer will chime in with "Yes, it's legally accepted" blah blah blah.
The purpose of a contract, and the *only* purpose of a contract, is to show a judge/jury while you're suing or being sued for breaking your word. At that time, the contract serves to define exactly what you gave your word for, and it becomes your best friend or your worst enemy.
You cannot show a judge/jury a verbal contract. If nobody heard it besides you and the other person, it didn't happen. In fact, even if you go and write detailed notes about a private conversation, those notes can be thrown out as lies because they can't be substantiated.
Now, if you don't trust your girlfriend enough that you can accept her word, you've got other issues either with yourself or your relationship. That's my personal objection to prenups. If I don't trust the woman with whom I'm about to spend the rest of my life with my personal finances, which I'm throwing in with hers, why am I marrying her in the first place? Oh yeah, sure, maybe she's just digging for gold and has got me totally swindled, but in a strong marriage a prenup isn't going to be worth the paper it's printed on. In a weak marriage, well, you should have thought it through some more. Marriage is never 'the next logical step in our relationship'.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Trek 8: First Contact :)
Anyone screaming "UFO!" tells me that some idiots will believe anything...
Problem is, they're usually right when they say they saw an object flying and that it was unidentified to them. Where they get nutty is where they decide that any flying object that does not identify itself to them must contain aliens that are coming to do some anal probing or something or other.
Re:Or was it the Vogon Constructor Fleet? (Score:4, Insightful) by Stile 65 (722451) on Thursday March 18, @11:29PM (#8603357) (http://www.freestateproject.org/) Remember your towel!
Only on slashdot :-)
.... would such a lame thread actually exist. You know, Douglas Adams was funny for a lot of reasons, but he was never predictable.
but I'm sure the necessary Impossibilium we're buying to glue it all together will only take a little longer.
Dude, don't use the name brands. Improbabilium is just as good and a helluva lot cheaper.
If you are going to make a post without numbers or facts then at least bash SCO or Microsoft. (j/k)
If you want to be moderated as Funny, don't ever put the letter j to the left of the letter k without any intervening words in your post. If we have to be told it's funny, it's not.
And yes, I do understand your musical comments. I play a lot of music like you described. I'd bet that a lot of others here do, too. But, interesting as this is, it isn't really relevant to a discussion of businesses using copyright and patent law to stifle creativity.
My post was completely on topic in relation to yours. And your post demonstrated that regardless of what you say, you do/did not understand the concepts you were using in your facetious proposal. See, had you used very poor grammar, some grammar nazi would have come along and corrected it.
Instead, you got spanked by a music nazi. And totally trolled to boot. :) Good day.
IP is just a generally difficult concept to deal with, with very few people agreeing on what it actually is. The reason history doesn't support us as well here as it does in other places (mind you, I frequently pull out history myself in discussions) is because it's such a tangled issue. History supports both sides of the discussion, and it's not really possible to invoke history for one side without ignoring history that supports the other side.
And, unfortunately, even after being decided in court and judged by history an issue still isn't always settled. :( (ref: Roe vs Wade on that one, and a fair amount of civil rights issues, sexual harassment, and so forth)
Don't get me wrong, when I come to a discussion early (which I didn't this time), I'm usually the first one invoking history. No sense trying to relearn the lessons history gives us for free, right? And it's also not that I disagree with you, I strongly agree with you. Ford just also has a history of being anticompetitive themselves......
All very true, and legally irrelevant.
Um, what does the law have to do with my reply? I noticed a couple of things about your post that indicated that you didn't know the things I wrote about, so I wrote about them. I wasn't even talking about law and crap.
oo, I didn't mean to leave out historical perspective entirely, we still need that. The problem with using historical perspective is that it winds up frequently being anecdotal evidence, and in this specific case there are lots of anecdotal examples on both sides of the fence.
the distinguished first phrase of Happy Birthday is just 5 notes, all the same length
That's funny, I always thought the first two notes of that melody were a dotted eigth followed by a sixteenth, followed by three quarters and ending with a dotted quarter "yoooooooooooooooou".
We probably can limit the melody to just an 8-note octave, or maybe make it 12 notes to be on the safe side.
Ah, I see where you were confused. You saw "oct" in "octave" and thought that meant an octave was 8 pitches. Well, it's not, exactly. There are 11 pitches at regular intervals in either direction before you repeat a pitch, in the western scale. The east as 23.
Consider your basic sound wave. It's just a sine wave, and it reverberates at certain frequencies. Well, when it reverberates at the rate of 440/second (or is it per minute? Well, Hertz, anyway), you have a pitch that guitarists generally refer to as "A". When that same sound wave reverberates at exactly twice the speed, or 880 Herz, you have another "A". Typically, those two A's are referred to as being an 'octave' apart from one another. But here in the west, including both A's, there are 12 pitches in an octave, not 8.
Now, there used to be 8. When Pope Gregor, famous for his Gregorian chants, figured out a way to use five lines and four spaces to represent pitch, he created a system of writing music that used only 8 pitches, uneventy spaced. Those original 8 pitches are now referred to as a 'major scale', and it is from here that the word 'octave' is derived. However, if you take the intervals of the major scale and try to play a major scale using each pitch in Gregor's original scale as a tonic, you will find a total of 11 unique pitches before one is repeated. That is why we now have an 'octave' that contains 12 pitches.
unless people are changing the author's name on the book, the author is getting recognition. It's not money, admittedly. Maybe this same person wrote the best book in the world, but people still overlooked it.
PLease, please, please, Read what some authors really think about this.
Yes, Eric Flint seems to agree with you, but he also proves, well, I guess you should all go read it yourself. :)
From the Committee to Re-Elect the President: "Don't change horsemen, mid-apocalypse."
From the Committee to throw out the President: "There wasn't a horseman named 'Stupid', stupid."
This is not a new idea either. It happened to Henry Ford back in 1906 when the other established car-makers tried to squash him.
Sorry bud, you'd have done better to cite Diesel instead. The Diesel engine was technically superior to the popular gasoline with spark plug engines, but the man was crushed under the burden of patent suits and died in poverty. The Diesel engine is still superior to gasoline engines, even if it smells bad, and remains in a niche market.
In any case, regardless of what you picked, the Wright Brothers very seriously and emphatically enforced their own patents. The result was that engineers had to work around their patents and ultimately built a better plane than the Wrights had, and built a foundation upon which solid planes were eventually built rather than the canvas pieces of junk the Wright brothers built. And the Wright Brothers sank off into la-la land. They should've spent less time enforcing their patents and more time fighting.
My only point is that there are plenty of examples where people have completely screwed up by enforcing their IP rights . What we need is proof that it's happening here and now, and crushing innovation and generally hurting society.
Not that I disagree with you, mind you, I just think we need more facts and a stronger argument and less historically based rhetoric. :)
Actually, I think recordings are considered as good as the writing stuff, with the added problem of identifying the parties. In fact, that's why some documents aren't strong in court without being notarized. The Notary isn't anybody special, just someone who checks IDs and makes sure both people are willingly signing the document, and witnesses the signing, that's all.
What's worse is that non-relative employees can't comment on the guy's effectiveness for fear of family retribution. Still, some family-owned businesses have done rather well.
Heh, I used to work for a guy who would bring his five year old son into the store and the kid would run around wild, pushing the button on the switchboard, throwing ketchup packets all over the place, and generally making a huge mess. The boss would never yell at him, would alwyas ask nicely, and so forth, and the kid never listened. He'd come into the kitchen (where I worked) and throw stuff in the friers, grab the spatula off the grill and pretend it was a sword, and all kinds of crap.
In the kitchen the boss would get stricter and take the kid out if he was being downright dangerous, it should be noted.
None of my coworkers ever got the guts to tell the boss that his kid was a problem. None at all. They were afraid they'd get fired, or they wouldn't get their next raise, or something or other.
So I pulled the boss aside and talked to him about it. He said "Well I'm not going to stop bringing my kid in here." I said "I'm not asking you, I'm just asking you to deal with the problem of him running around making a mess, and generally interfering." We made an agreement. Whenever his kid was causing trouble, I'd tell him and he'd deal with it. After that, coworkers started freaking out when I'd say "Boss, your kid's making a big mess in the lobby and it's pissing me off."
No retribution. In fact, the problem never got completely solved, but it did get bearable. As he put it, the kid would grow out of it, we just needed to have enough control over the situation to make it livable, that's all. And that's what we got, because I talked to him.
Not that I'm saying I'm a hero or anything. Fact is, and he knew this, if he didn't deal with the problem the same way he'd expect any employee to deal with a problem with their kid, I would've walked. He didn't think that was a reason someone should quit their job, so he was interested in not making it a reason.
She'll need to be a partner. A power inequality in the business side isn't going to work well with what should be an equitable relationship otherwise.
Well, i sure in the fuck don't want to work for you. What makes the boss better than the employees? Why does he have all the 'power' is therefore greater than the employees?
Nothing, from a behavioral standpoint. Sure, the boss has money on the line, and his whole future depends on the business. But if you use that as an excuse for not behaving equitably to your employees, then fuck off and die man, I don't want to be your slave.
In a family run business, more often than not, the boss will side with his or her family member.
If the boss is even-handed, you can't really argue with this. Family comes from similar roots (well, the same) and frequently have the same points of view, so you can expect the boss to take his family member's side because his point of view will be similar. If he's even-handed and doesn't play favorites, that is. But if he's truly even-handed, he won't take sides in any conflict, he'll just resolve the conflict. :)
If he's not even handed and he picks his family member's side "because they're family", you have a much more serious problem and should run off as soon as possible.
I'm not a shrink, but...
or for me to blame myself for anything.
This is the root cause of all your problems.
We had quite a few lovely exchanges, let me tell you! We are still together. And though we no longer work at the same firm, we have started a software company together. I'm the developer...she's the tester. I must be a glutton for punishment. Maybe this is some strange sort of S&M relationship, eh?
Actually, I think this shows that you can take criticism. :) Not that you always take it gracefully or nicely, just that you take it.
That is a trait that is essential in a marriage. :) Ever since my wife started taking criticism (I always had, I believe ;) ), our marriage has been a lot better. Not that we spend all day bitching at each other. But then, criticism != bitching.
Honestly, when I've seen lawyers post, it's been accompanied by something like "I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice." When a lawyer posts, they generally make it clear that they are a lawyer, but aren't giving legal advice, just a somewhat educated $0.02 worth.
Well, just to be pedantic, if you give someone legal advice you could get into a lot of trouble. Now, no one's going to every admit they took legal advice they read on slashdot, right? I mean, come on, "Well judge, I thought it was perfectly ok when Anonymous Coward posted on slashdot and told me it was. he seemed competent." No, you get your ass laughed out of court, even if the person posted and said they were a lawyer.
But seriously, why do the lawyers post and say "This is not legal advice"? Because if they don't, they could lose their certification or whatever it is that allows them to practice law. You could get in the same trouble if you don't say you're not a lawyer and you give some damn credible advice.
Not that anyone's ever going to say "fucksl4shd0t should be sued for malpracticing as a lawyer, he never went to law school, he doesn't really know what he's talking about, but he's hurting a lot of people by giving them credible advice that doesn't hold water."
If the bad feeling reverberated into the family, and I caught shit for it, I'd just remind (or expain to) the person giving me a hard time that so and so has a history of not doing the job. I tried a bunch of times to talk to him and it didn't work out in the end. "basicly he wasn't doing his job and he was costing me money"
I'd tell 'em the same thing I tell them whenever someone gets uppity because I threw my brother out a long time ago. "none of your fuckin' business" The way I see it, I don't have to have a relationship at all with anyone in my family, and they all know that. So if they want a relationship with me, they either respect the boundaries I draw and stay out of them, or they can cry over the fact that I don't want to have anything to do with them. My family will give you a lot of bullshit if you let them, but they won't even try if you stand up for yourself.
And believe me, it's been a rough marriage as far as her and my family are concerned. They don't like each other, they don't like us (my family doesn't like her and her family doesn't like me), so we've had to deal with a lot of bullshit one way or another. If your family really cares about you, and you really have the balls to tell them to fuck off and die, they'll leave you alone and you don't have to make explanations or excuses.
Unless you're able to look your family or friends in the face as a boss/employee relationship, DON'T.
I really don't think this would be a problem for me. Fire my dad? No problem! Worthless little fuck. Fire my brother? Why not? I threw him out of my house a long time ago when he didn't pay any bills. Fire my wife? Hell yeah! I can't wait to have that make up sex.
It's not as hard as you might think. Fact is, to start a business, you've got to have what Mexicans like to call huevos. You've gotta have balls, and if you don't have enough balls to fire your family, you've really gotta ask yourself if you have enough balls to even run a business in the first place. That's the single trait that you must have and you can't do without. Every wonder why the really successful businessmen and women seem to have balls of steel? Because that's a requirement for the job.
I've been thinking about starting a business of some sort, and have seen a couple of my initial questions answered already.
Don't forget the other half, though. When you startup a business, you usually have some pretty limited resources. Who are your first customers going to be? Who are your first employees going to be?
You guessed it, family and friends. Without them on either side of the line, starting your business just got 10 times harder than it was.
Fact is, when you're a startup, you've got to be a lot more lenient with your employees, no matter who they are. You don't have the time or the resources to go out hiring replacements, and you're going to have a very hard time growing if you're always replacing customers and/or employees. In fact, you may not grow at all, you may shrink, and so much for your business.
The issues can be settled. Tell your girlfriend "I'll hire you, but I'm going to be harder on you than anyone else because I really know you well and I have high expectations." Then do it. Publicly dress her down, just once. If your relationship can't take it, forget her. If she can't understand that you have to have higher standards for her, and that the other employees have to see you chewing her out or they won't believe you, then move on. Find another girl. Or don't hire her in the first place. :) (Publicly dressing her down may not be necessary if you can drag her back into a more private place and people can see the effects of her ass-chewing when she comes back out)
Make it clear to your employees that the more you know them, the more familiar with them you are, the more you will expect out of them. Then just apply that reasoning to your family and friends and expect more out of them.
I worked at a place one time that was family owned and operated (well several, but this one is particularly notable). The father ran the business. Two of his sons worked in the shop with us hanging exhaust and fixing brakes. His third son (the one who went to school) worked in the office and came out into the shops to relieve the store manager so he could have a day off. The father pushed his sons much harder than he did any of us (he didn't push us hard at all, either). he might give a few words here and there to an employee when they screwed up, but if one of his sons screwed up he took them in the office and yelled at the poor guy for a long time.
Suffice it to say, we all worked very hard, and that family was a pretty strong family. I liked working there a lot. :)
I'd be worried about the way family members trust each other rather than have formally signed contracts and business agreements. This is great until something goes wrong then its horribly horribly messy.
That's a big problem, where you just trust your girlfriend to do something that you won't let someone who's been with you for 6 months do. It's also a problem when your family member expects 'extra understanding' because 'we're family'.
In my experience, you can't start up a business without your friends and family. They will be your first employees, your first customers, or both. There's a mutually beneficial relationship going on. It's easier to ask your family member to work for less money, for example. They want to help you out. They get some work experience for the job (if it's a new line of work for them, they could be getting a new career). In the long run, if things go well enough that the business grows and you've made mostly good decisions, your family member gets extra pay, or at least competitive pay.
I was in a business not too long ago with my best friend, and before that I was involved with my dad. WIth my dad, the problem was that he didn't trust my wife and wasn't willing to share half ownership of the company with me. I wasn't willing to be a puppet partner, and without half ownership I wasn't getting involved. With my best friend, it was a bit different. We hired his sister, his ex-wife (who is still a good friend of his), and immediately office politics came into play and I was the bad guy (his ex-wife doesn't trust me, and I don't believe she ever liked me, and his sister didn't know me well enough to make her own judgement).
In the past, when I worked with family at various jobs, there were no problems. I worked with my brother for a long time in the restauraunt business, and we lived together. No problems. We didn't have to draw a line between work and play. SOme days we'd spend the evening bitching about work and other days we spent our off hours playing our asses off. At work we didn't give each other any particularly special treatment. In fact, I was in a position of authority at that place, and I had much higher expectations from him than I did most of the others, so he got his ass chewed more and harder than the others. :)
There's no easy answer to this question, as much as we'd all like to think there is. You're right, Alan, that having everything clear and in writing is good. But if everything that is in writing is more than you have for other employees, it can be very bad. It can be bad when you give your brother a loan but the company policy is no loans (there are ways to work around this, of course, but not in a startup).
The way I figure it is this: When you hire somebody, you get to know them extremely well, from one side. You learn about their work ethic, you learn about their standards for living. You don't care about who they date, what they eat, what they read, what they do. You establish a working relationship that works, and frequently pushes cultural boundaries. You agree to have differences with regard to religion, politics, and other heated topics. With family, your relationship frequently depends on all of the things you set aside for the stranger who's working for you. And also with family, you don't know their work ethic, and that's the pivotal point.
The other problem that comes up has to do with the word "partnership". Marriage is a partnership, right? Well, partnership is just a two-person version of "team". One of the problems every couple, every team, and every workplace faces is figuring out how much work each person is individually responsible. In a partnership, it's common to say "We're each responsible for half, no problem, we agree on that, we know it in advance." Then, a few months or years or whatever down the road, you start getting angry because you think you're doing your half and the other person isn't doing theirs. If you've hired your girlfriend,
In reality, most verbal contracts are vague and writing them down tends to make people put a little more effort into specifying them.
Verbal contracts don't exist. Maybe they did at one time, when a man was as good as his word, but in this day full of deceit and corruption, there's no such thing.
Maybe some lawyer will chime in with "Yes, it's legally accepted" blah blah blah.
The purpose of a contract, and the *only* purpose of a contract, is to show a judge/jury while you're suing or being sued for breaking your word. At that time, the contract serves to define exactly what you gave your word for, and it becomes your best friend or your worst enemy.
You cannot show a judge/jury a verbal contract. If nobody heard it besides you and the other person, it didn't happen. In fact, even if you go and write detailed notes about a private conversation, those notes can be thrown out as lies because they can't be substantiated.
Now, if you don't trust your girlfriend enough that you can accept her word, you've got other issues either with yourself or your relationship. That's my personal objection to prenups. If I don't trust the woman with whom I'm about to spend the rest of my life with my personal finances, which I'm throwing in with hers, why am I marrying her in the first place? Oh yeah, sure, maybe she's just digging for gold and has got me totally swindled, but in a strong marriage a prenup isn't going to be worth the paper it's printed on. In a weak marriage, well, you should have thought it through some more. Marriage is never 'the next logical step in our relationship'.