But it IS the problem of someone else. It is the problem of the North Koreans, and by association due to physical proximity, the South Koreans and China. Drawing this up as an American problem is just an Imperial argument, and like all Imperial arguments, it only supports Imperial expansion for resources and security. (Hint: America is not liked around the world due to her use of her military. Go read Kwitney's "Endless Enemies" if you don't understand.)
What happened with the US Revolution is irrelevent. If I were in America at the time, I would have shot English and French alike. It is the responsibility of a native population to overthrow their own oppressors. Period.
And yet, despite all your Western ire, it is still the responsibility of the North Korean people to overthrow their own repressive government.
It pleases me immensely that your depraved and endless American interventionism is being destroyed by your own domestic economic policies. Soon enough, yelling on some blog is about all an American will be able to do. An Empire runs on Human blood and never understands its own atrocities; so, we must wait for the American Empire to die.
This is being used to automatically take attendance. That's it.
1. That's what's being said. But people have been known to lie. (Shocking, I know.)
2. Ever heard of things like RICO and the USA PATRIOT Act? They were used almost immediately to prosecute people for things other than what the legislation was designed for. The same thing goes for surveillance technology.
Hence, this student RFID thing will be abused. It's not just my guess; historically and culturally, it's a certainty. RFID can be used to not only note a person's attendence, but can (and WILL) be used to track their movements. In movement tracking, the availability of the information will then lead the school administrators to draw inferences, and soon enough the RFID will become a de facto enforcement mechanism. And we all know how schools treat students; suspicions are used as proof of wrongdoing, and their prosecutions proceed to completion solely on that basis.
We've all been exposed to enough philosophy and fiction to understand the end result of a police state and all other such Orwellianisms. The question is why people like YOU continue to deny the truth of it.
As we speak here, under the USA PATRIOT Act, quite a bit of your personal information could be under direct inspection by some local or federal official. You don't even have the right to know about it. Let that thought keep you warm tonight instead of your "tinfoil" spin.
Who the hell modded your rant insightful? Look, Roscoe, the police don't deal nightly with a crowd of teenagers looking to get into a bar, then looking to get a drink, and all at a near-zero cost for them if they are caught. THAT is why your experience is so slanted, and by definition, rare.
Yes, I know several cops, thanks for asking. I've been for "ride alongs", so I'm also not trusting what I'm told... I've SEEN them in action.
Furthermore, why on Earth would you think the cops would have a "nastier" problem? Cops have validation tools at their disposal. Did you have access to government databases while you were working in a bar? NO. So anyone who hands a teeny-bopper fake ID to a cop is going to get slammed, and doubly so: first, they'll get caught, and second, they'll get CHARGED with a crime.
Don't get me wrong. A professionally-made false ID will probably pass inspection during a routine traffic stop. But the pro IDs are expensive. They are also peculiar; if you use a false ID for another real person, you take the risk of being caught for something THEY did. To avoid that, you can obtain a false ID for a person who is dead (better yet, died shortly after birth)... which significantly increases the cost.
I had a friend who arranged his own pro false ID. He loved handing it to cops while he had it, since in his words (to me, not to the cops):
"I paid good money for that ID, I want to make sure it still passes inspection!"
The point I'm making about pro IDs is that you probably never saw one you recognized. If they can pass police inspection, and in fact can survive contact with government agencies, then there's no method that was available to you in a bar for verifying them. Hence, your view of false IDs is simply not realistic.
Will this change in the law make pro IDs harder to make? Probably. Will they be stopped? NO. Will we still have people in America driving around under false ID? YES. And your old bar will probably be confiscating the same number of teeny-bopper IDs every night.
I have 50% of my take-home pay in my pocket at the end of every month, do you?? So don't tell me it can't be done.
Funny you would use that number. Yes, that's about how much I save from my pay. So I'm practicing what I'm preaching. But my point is still in order: I'm not buying your company's product, Sir. If you really want to pull off the kid gloves and go to bare-fisted boxing, people like me might well bankrupt people like you (my home's at 60degF right now, how about yours?). So be careful in deriding the American consumer. We are each other's customers. Excessive debt aside -- and that's hardly where we disagree -- we must still respect each other's needs for prosperity.
Be careful what you wish for. People who cannot raise families because they canot afford them, pretty much join the criminal classes... either the criminal underclass (burglaries, holdups, etc.) or criminal overclass (executive, lawyer, etc.). Right-sizing the spendaholics is one thing. Massive foreclosures and bankruptcies is very much another. We must not accept the massive flight of capital from America. We must not accept the destruction of the middle class.
that gets them hired by the next sucker, who somehow failed to research far enough to realise that this MBA type actually KILLED their previous company
Look, do you actually believe that?
I've seen my share of dumb executives, but overall they are not an uneducated class. Nor are they unaware of current events, specifically cufrrent business events. They do spend inordinate amounts of time studying other companies.
So, to account for this trend of hiring proven company-killers, I can only conclude that Boards of Directors seek out the executives that will setup pump-and-dump schemes and allow the Directors to ride their own stockholdings to greater wealth. This sentiment can also be well pitched to the institutional investors, who have massive stockholders themselves, thus preserves the positions of the Board members. Even the little investor (with individual stocks or portions through a 401(k)) is bribed with the sexy business chic that the Board will promote.
Killing the company is just not the issue. The issue is that massive stock profits can be made in the short term, and in true roaring capitalist form -- like any cultist religion -- the most ruinous path is followed. Anyone who might have a faint concern about "well, this may kill the company like the CEO's methods killed his last 3 companies" can always be wiped away by the 3 following justifications:
1. Our company is different that those last 3.
2. The last 3 were just flukes.
3. And -- oh, yeah -- I can make $60K this year alone by selling my stocks.
There's always a way to justify doing something terrible to someone else. The mindset of immoral justification adequately explains why loser CxOs keep finding extremely lucrative positions.
You're sentiment is right. If what you outlined is truly capitalism, I don't want it. What we are advancing towards is outright Fascism (the merging of state and corporate power under a violent nationalism).
Make sure you let your feelings be well known up the chain of your stockholdings. Even institutional investors can be made to feel the heat of populism. HP's Board of Directors should have fired Fiorina 2 years ago, and when THAT didn't happen, the stockholders should have fired the Board. Still today, I really don't see much willpower on the part of the stockholders to actually fix the Board. Fiorina's leaving is important, true, but I'm fairly confident that HP's fatal cancer remains.
I can't really blame your sentiment, but I'd like to present the inevitable reality of the over-caution that you advertise:
I'm not buying your goddamned product.
How'd you like that one, Sir?
I'm not one for debts myself, but it is entirely rational to undertake some level of debt since we allegedly live in a First World nation that over the life of the loan, will never see a bomb or bullet fall upon the asset being purchased. With some level of debt, a worker can afford a good home that will utterly promote the prosperity and safety of a significant area. And this safety/wealth zone can grow... essentially the benefit of a large middle class.
But if people find they can't count on society being stable enough for them to buy a home over a 20-30 year mortgage term, then the stability of home ownership will suffer.
Part of the problem with America today is excessive consumer, business and government debt. But another source of the problem is that a company will close a manufacturing plant making 8% profit in Ohio and re-open it at 16% margin in Mexico. The Mexicans they hire simply cannot command the same purchasing power (cash- and credit-wise) as the Americans they threw away. Now, on top of said Americans finding themselves with reduced incomes, if they follow your implied savings plan, an atrocious hole will appear in the consumer market. In effect, "no one" buys your Mexico production. And that's a stupid move.
I'm preparing for the America you apparently so blithely accept is coming. Do you build homes? If so, I'm not your customer. Do you serve espresso? If so, I'm also not your customer. Etc. I'm very much an economic non-participant, due to being attacked and scared by the very forces you've accepted. Be very careful what you wish for, since I'd wager that you are significantly dependent upon the economic participation of your fellow man.
I've owned American computing equipment of many kinds. True, the last American printer I owned was probably a dot-matrix one.
Other than that, I'm simply saying that it's pretty risky to train your competitors (by hiring them for their low-cost labor) in your research and production methods for your products. Sure, you do save money now, but later on, they can pull the rug out from under even your best cost-cutting methods (since, after all, you trained them)... and then you find that you cannot compete for business in THEIR countries over their native efforts. They can underprice you at every turn, by combining their native market knowledge with your advanced manufacturing techniques.
I urge American and European companies to not indulge in offshoring to the extremes they are doing now. The benefits are short-term, and the liabilites are VERY long-term. Offshoring and globalism are not bad things, but just like with money, the love of the thing produces the evil results.
That's a good question. The partial answer is that for the 2 years after she was hired in July 1999, HP's share price climbed. Of course, this was part of the general market "irrational exuberance", but as far as the executive class was concerned, they were being rewarded by the market. After 2001, of course, the stock entered an era of decline that continues today.
The other part of the full answer is that Fiorina should have been fired by late 2002 or early 2003. She had had more than enough time after the general market crash to "show her stuff" and demonstrate that HP can innovate itself out of a general market malaise. She failed. And we can then firmly blame the BoD for not removing their highly non-performing CEO at that time.
Fiorina's departure in early 2005 -- FOUR YEARS INTO THE ERA OF TROUBLE -- only demonstrates the sheer incompetence of HP's BoD. If the stockholders have any real balls, they will replace the entire Board, invite Packard back, rebuild a Board around him for lean times, and then give the general order to go head-chopping through the HP-Compaq executive class (since there's another class of non-performers).
Do HP's stockholders have the minerals for it? I'm betting "no".
The question is, if you were HP, would you ALSO offshore and outsource your printer production, hence setting up many of your potential competitors overseas?
The current HP would suicide itself if all they did was printers, even with their capacity for innovation, due to their self-throat-cutting offshoring behavior. Careful what you wish for.
Carly: [...] technology is used to fulfill business requirements, and it adapts to changes in business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what all technology does?
Carly: No. Today, business needs are forced to adapt to technology, not the other way around.
Credit where it's due, she's right. I've been noticing a lot in the last decade that even with allegedly finished and mature products, we spend far too much time adapting our work and financial processes to them, instead of the other way around. My standard joke today is:
"Isn't this computer supposed to being doing work for me, instead of me doing work for it?"
Now, I can't claim that whatever Fiorina might have offered us under the aegis of an HP product line was anything that would serve business needs. It's all too likely that whatever crap she presided over the production of, would have been as thorny and irritating as anything else produced in the "enterprise solutions" industry.
Businesses need to stop investing in the ES scam and start investing in their own, controlled solutions. It would also help if they'd stop this continuing, goddamned M&A frenzy that gives them a lot of incentive not to have internal and proprietary solutions (which are difficult to adapt when businesses merge).
Yes, I've been watching aghast as our HP "LaserJet" 1300 printers (note I put the word in quotes) pull sheets of paper into themselves crooked, and merrily print on them, producing crooked output. These "LaserJets" are crap, in my opinion. If HP had called them "CheapJets", I would have had more respect for them. Meanwhile, our LaserJet 4000s are still ka-clunk-ing away. (I had one the other day that apparently caught some liquid inside it in the past, which led to severe rust in 3 roller bearings, which led to monstrous squeaking... but it still printed as well as it ever did. Now, that's a printer beast. It remainds me of another fine species called the LaserJet II.)
When Fiorina was indulging in fatal cost-cutting in her company, and the share price was rewarding her for it, then what can we say about her job then?
I say: We pay far too much attention to the prices of corporate stocks.
Fiorina and her ilk care nothing for anything that doesn't have the characteristics of modern business chic. It's got to be sexy, involved, seemingly important, and almost entirely without real value. People in expensive suits, jetting from meeting to meeting, rubbing elbows with "business leaders" and politicians, while dining on corporate credit... THAT'S what a Fiorina creature is all about. Hence, it becomes easy to understand why people like her would dump entire and profitable divisions. Actual work is a dirty enterprise that has little do with business chic.
I'd go so far to say that actual work (to develop products and service a customer base) is beyond the understanding of a "fad" CEO like Fiorina. I speculate that she probably doesn't actually understand paying engineers to make products. She probably also doesn't understand paying for a customer-support infrastructure to maintain the customers the company had. Her world seemed to consist of making economic threats to various groups (employees, suppliers, and yes, even customers) and then daring people to call her to see if she was bluffing.
People like Fiorina should never be given power over a thriving technology business. In some fashion, we should all be ashamed for having put up with her CEO term for as long as it went. Hopefully she will fall back into historical academia where she can't hurt as many people ever again.
That's the way I'm living my life. But in part it is due to the necessity of the current business environment. There was nothing wrong with getting a job at a place like HP, getting married, having kids, and buying a home, 1.5 cars and a pool. But that meant debt, and that meant dependency upon income for debt service. And today's "fuck the workers" environment is making that progressively impossible (at least, very irresponsible). And that's just lost business... so it's a bit like corporations cutting their own throats.
Which brings us back to HP, and Fiorina. I can clearly see that Fiorina and her crowd of institutional investors are "fatal cost-cutters". They will cut and cut until the company has little blood left to bleed. Controlling costs is a responsibility, but you have to spend money to make it, and the Carly Generation obviously doesn't understand that.
Yes, rust. It tends to happen with iron-based metals in an oxidizing atmosphere (which we happen to have on Earth). This is in some contrast to iron-based infrastructure in vacuum, which is a sensible environment for much industry. Since space structures should be largely built from asteroidal materials, and the likeliest item to be used is nickel-iron, then rust protection should prove to be of little concern.
Pro-gun wacko that I am, aside, I have to agree with you. People who don't want certain liberties will place restrictions on them, up to and including outright bans. This is why I particularly value things like sovereignty and jurisdictions. You can always opt to move away from the ones that offend you for whatever reason.
The original poster sounds like a bit of a nut, as if all of Humanity is going to settle on one mode of living that allows all sorts of liberties. Cultural differences are to be treasured, even if they result in things which irk us (in my case, gun bans), and even if they seem dictatorial or regressive (for example, Islamic treatment of women).
It's at least indeterminate whether a planetary surface is the right place to invest humanity's energy for development. We're stuck with Earth. But we don't have to accept Mars. We can just bypass Mars and exploit the resources of the Asteroid Belt, Saturn's moons, Oort and Kuiper objects, and even some of Jupiter's moons (although J's radiation belt is particularly fierce and may make it unfeasiable to live too near it).
The only thing that Mars can really offer us is an Earth-like surface (after terraformation) under sufficient gravity. But there are serious problems with a planetary surface, those being unwanted friction, storms, rust, unwanted gravity, and of course limited access to solar power.
Note also that interplanetary habitats would be even more immune to strikes. These habitats would make Humanity 100% unkillable except for interstellar events like a nearby supernova.
That's a pretty good list. My point revolves around speculation about how many people can come up with such a list and for what reasons. I can only posit that you are the exception that tests the rule.
Slashdot Mirror
But it IS the problem of someone else. It is the problem of the North Koreans, and by association due to physical proximity, the South Koreans and China. Drawing this up as an American problem is just an Imperial argument, and like all Imperial arguments, it only supports Imperial expansion for resources and security. (Hint: America is not liked around the world due to her use of her military. Go read Kwitney's "Endless Enemies" if you don't understand.)
What happened with the US Revolution is irrelevent. If I were in America at the time, I would have shot English and French alike. It is the responsibility of a native population to overthrow their own oppressors. Period.
And yet, despite all your Western ire, it is still the responsibility of the North Korean people to overthrow their own repressive government.
It pleases me immensely that your depraved and endless American interventionism is being destroyed by your own domestic economic policies. Soon enough, yelling on some blog is about all an American will be able to do. An Empire runs on Human blood and never understands its own atrocities; so, we must wait for the American Empire to die.
This is being used to automatically take attendance. That's it.
1. That's what's being said. But people have been known to lie. (Shocking, I know.)
2. Ever heard of things like RICO and the USA PATRIOT Act? They were used almost immediately to prosecute people for things other than what the legislation was designed for. The same thing goes for surveillance technology.
Hence, this student RFID thing will be abused. It's not just my guess; historically and culturally, it's a certainty. RFID can be used to not only note a person's attendence, but can (and WILL) be used to track their movements. In movement tracking, the availability of the information will then lead the school administrators to draw inferences, and soon enough the RFID will become a de facto enforcement mechanism. And we all know how schools treat students; suspicions are used as proof of wrongdoing, and their prosecutions proceed to completion solely on that basis.
We've all been exposed to enough philosophy and fiction to understand the end result of a police state and all other such Orwellianisms. The question is why people like YOU continue to deny the truth of it.
As we speak here, under the USA PATRIOT Act, quite a bit of your personal information could be under direct inspection by some local or federal official. You don't even have the right to know about it. Let that thought keep you warm tonight instead of your "tinfoil" spin.
Who the hell modded your rant insightful? Look, Roscoe, the police don't deal nightly with a crowd of teenagers looking to get into a bar, then looking to get a drink, and all at a near-zero cost for them if they are caught. THAT is why your experience is so slanted, and by definition, rare.
... I've SEEN them in action.
... which significantly increases the cost.
Yes, I know several cops, thanks for asking. I've been for "ride alongs", so I'm also not trusting what I'm told
Furthermore, why on Earth would you think the cops would have a "nastier" problem? Cops have validation tools at their disposal. Did you have access to government databases while you were working in a bar? NO. So anyone who hands a teeny-bopper fake ID to a cop is going to get slammed, and doubly so: first, they'll get caught, and second, they'll get CHARGED with a crime.
Don't get me wrong. A professionally-made false ID will probably pass inspection during a routine traffic stop. But the pro IDs are expensive. They are also peculiar; if you use a false ID for another real person, you take the risk of being caught for something THEY did. To avoid that, you can obtain a false ID for a person who is dead (better yet, died shortly after birth)
I had a friend who arranged his own pro false ID. He loved handing it to cops while he had it, since in his words (to me, not to the cops):
"I paid good money for that ID, I want to make sure it still passes inspection!"
The point I'm making about pro IDs is that you probably never saw one you recognized. If they can pass police inspection, and in fact can survive contact with government agencies, then there's no method that was available to you in a bar for verifying them. Hence, your view of false IDs is simply not realistic.
Will this change in the law make pro IDs harder to make? Probably. Will they be stopped? NO. Will we still have people in America driving around under false ID? YES. And your old bar will probably be confiscating the same number of teeny-bopper IDs every night.
Pregnant? Why didn't you outsource that and focus on your core compentencies?
So, what's the real story behind Carly getting the axe?
With many thousands of people showing highly evident interest, perhaps someone will smell money and write a book:
"High Priced: How Carly Fiorina Did a Charlie Foxtrot on HP"
Now, there is a market force at work.
I have 50% of my take-home pay in my pocket at the end of every month, do you?? So don't tell me it can't be done.
... either the criminal underclass (burglaries, holdups, etc.) or criminal overclass (executive, lawyer, etc.). Right-sizing the spendaholics is one thing. Massive foreclosures and bankruptcies is very much another. We must not accept the massive flight of capital from America. We must not accept the destruction of the middle class.
Funny you would use that number. Yes, that's about how much I save from my pay. So I'm practicing what I'm preaching. But my point is still in order: I'm not buying your company's product, Sir. If you really want to pull off the kid gloves and go to bare-fisted boxing, people like me might well bankrupt people like you (my home's at 60degF right now, how about yours?). So be careful in deriding the American consumer. We are each other's customers. Excessive debt aside -- and that's hardly where we disagree -- we must still respect each other's needs for prosperity.
Be careful what you wish for. People who cannot raise families because they canot afford them, pretty much join the criminal classes
that gets them hired by the next sucker, who somehow failed to research far enough to realise that this MBA type actually KILLED their previous company
Look, do you actually believe that?
I've seen my share of dumb executives, but overall they are not an uneducated class. Nor are they unaware of current events, specifically cufrrent business events. They do spend inordinate amounts of time studying other companies.
So, to account for this trend of hiring proven company-killers, I can only conclude that Boards of Directors seek out the executives that will setup pump-and-dump schemes and allow the Directors to ride their own stockholdings to greater wealth. This sentiment can also be well pitched to the institutional investors, who have massive stockholders themselves, thus preserves the positions of the Board members. Even the little investor (with individual stocks or portions through a 401(k)) is bribed with the sexy business chic that the Board will promote.
Killing the company is just not the issue. The issue is that massive stock profits can be made in the short term, and in true roaring capitalist form -- like any cultist religion -- the most ruinous path is followed. Anyone who might have a faint concern about "well, this may kill the company like the CEO's methods killed his last 3 companies" can always be wiped away by the 3 following justifications:
1. Our company is different that those last 3.
2. The last 3 were just flukes.
3. And -- oh, yeah -- I can make $60K this year alone by selling my stocks.
There's always a way to justify doing something terrible to someone else. The mindset of immoral justification adequately explains why loser CxOs keep finding extremely lucrative positions.
You're sentiment is right. If what you outlined is truly capitalism, I don't want it. What we are advancing towards is outright Fascism (the merging of state and corporate power under a violent nationalism).
Make sure you let your feelings be well known up the chain of your stockholdings. Even institutional investors can be made to feel the heat of populism. HP's Board of Directors should have fired Fiorina 2 years ago, and when THAT didn't happen, the stockholders should have fired the Board. Still today, I really don't see much willpower on the part of the stockholders to actually fix the Board. Fiorina's leaving is important, true, but I'm fairly confident that HP's fatal cancer remains.
I can't really blame your sentiment, but I'd like to present the inevitable reality of the over-caution that you advertise:
... essentially the benefit of a large middle class.
I'm not buying your goddamned product.
How'd you like that one, Sir?
I'm not one for debts myself, but it is entirely rational to undertake some level of debt since we allegedly live in a First World nation that over the life of the loan, will never see a bomb or bullet fall upon the asset being purchased. With some level of debt, a worker can afford a good home that will utterly promote the prosperity and safety of a significant area. And this safety/wealth zone can grow
But if people find they can't count on society being stable enough for them to buy a home over a 20-30 year mortgage term, then the stability of home ownership will suffer.
Part of the problem with America today is excessive consumer, business and government debt. But another source of the problem is that a company will close a manufacturing plant making 8% profit in Ohio and re-open it at 16% margin in Mexico. The Mexicans they hire simply cannot command the same purchasing power (cash- and credit-wise) as the Americans they threw away. Now, on top of said Americans finding themselves with reduced incomes, if they follow your implied savings plan, an atrocious hole will appear in the consumer market. In effect, "no one" buys your Mexico production. And that's a stupid move.
I'm preparing for the America you apparently so blithely accept is coming. Do you build homes? If so, I'm not your customer. Do you serve espresso? If so, I'm also not your customer. Etc. I'm very much an economic non-participant, due to being attacked and scared by the very forces you've accepted. Be very careful what you wish for, since I'd wager that you are significantly dependent upon the economic participation of your fellow man.
I've owned American computing equipment of many kinds. True, the last American printer I owned was probably a dot-matrix one.
... and then you find that you cannot compete for business in THEIR countries over their native efforts. They can underprice you at every turn, by combining their native market knowledge with your advanced manufacturing techniques.
Other than that, I'm simply saying that it's pretty risky to train your competitors (by hiring them for their low-cost labor) in your research and production methods for your products. Sure, you do save money now, but later on, they can pull the rug out from under even your best cost-cutting methods (since, after all, you trained them)
I urge American and European companies to not indulge in offshoring to the extremes they are doing now. The benefits are short-term, and the liabilites are VERY long-term. Offshoring and globalism are not bad things, but just like with money, the love of the thing produces the evil results.
That's a good question. The partial answer is that for the 2 years after she was hired in July 1999, HP's share price climbed. Of course, this was part of the general market "irrational exuberance", but as far as the executive class was concerned, they were being rewarded by the market. After 2001, of course, the stock entered an era of decline that continues today.
The other part of the full answer is that Fiorina should have been fired by late 2002 or early 2003. She had had more than enough time after the general market crash to "show her stuff" and demonstrate that HP can innovate itself out of a general market malaise. She failed. And we can then firmly blame the BoD for not removing their highly non-performing CEO at that time.
Fiorina's departure in early 2005 -- FOUR YEARS INTO THE ERA OF TROUBLE -- only demonstrates the sheer incompetence of HP's BoD. If the stockholders have any real balls, they will replace the entire Board, invite Packard back, rebuild a Board around him for lean times, and then give the general order to go head-chopping through the HP-Compaq executive class (since there's another class of non-performers).
Do HP's stockholders have the minerals for it? I'm betting "no".
when you have a million companies [then] "eventually" happens every day
Hmm. You know, I hadn't thought of that in that exact way. I'll give my sloganeering some more thought.
The question is, if you were HP, would you ALSO offshore and outsource your printer production, hence setting up many of your potential competitors overseas?
The current HP would suicide itself if all they did was printers, even with their capacity for innovation, due to their self-throat-cutting offshoring behavior. Careful what you wish for.
Carly: [...] technology is used to fulfill business requirements, and it adapts to changes in business needs.
Interviewer: Isn't that what all technology does?
Carly: No. Today, business needs are forced to adapt to technology, not the other way around.
Credit where it's due, she's right. I've been noticing a lot in the last decade that even with allegedly finished and mature products, we spend far too much time adapting our work and financial processes to them, instead of the other way around. My standard joke today is:
"Isn't this computer supposed to being doing work for me, instead of me doing work for it?"
Now, I can't claim that whatever Fiorina might have offered us under the aegis of an HP product line was anything that would serve business needs. It's all too likely that whatever crap she presided over the production of, would have been as thorny and irritating as anything else produced in the "enterprise solutions" industry.
Businesses need to stop investing in the ES scam and start investing in their own, controlled solutions. It would also help if they'd stop this continuing, goddamned M&A frenzy that gives them a lot of incentive not to have internal and proprietary solutions (which are difficult to adapt when businesses merge).
Yes, I've been watching aghast as our HP "LaserJet" 1300 printers (note I put the word in quotes) pull sheets of paper into themselves crooked, and merrily print on them, producing crooked output. These "LaserJets" are crap, in my opinion. If HP had called them "CheapJets", I would have had more respect for them. Meanwhile, our LaserJet 4000s are still ka-clunk-ing away. (I had one the other day that apparently caught some liquid inside it in the past, which led to severe rust in 3 roller bearings, which led to monstrous squeaking ... but it still printed as well as it ever did. Now, that's a printer beast. It remainds me of another fine species called the LaserJet II.)
When Fiorina was indulging in fatal cost-cutting in her company, and the share price was rewarding her for it, then what can we say about her job then?
I say: We pay far too much attention to the prices of corporate stocks.
And that's the ugliness of capitalism. People don't need to eat "eventually"; they need to eat 3 times a day.
Fiorina and her ilk care nothing for anything that doesn't have the characteristics of modern business chic. It's got to be sexy, involved, seemingly important, and almost entirely without real value. People in expensive suits, jetting from meeting to meeting, rubbing elbows with "business leaders" and politicians, while dining on corporate credit ... THAT'S what a Fiorina creature is all about. Hence, it becomes easy to understand why people like her would dump entire and profitable divisions. Actual work is a dirty enterprise that has little do with business chic.
I'd go so far to say that actual work (to develop products and service a customer base) is beyond the understanding of a "fad" CEO like Fiorina. I speculate that she probably doesn't actually understand paying engineers to make products. She probably also doesn't understand paying for a customer-support infrastructure to maintain the customers the company had. Her world seemed to consist of making economic threats to various groups (employees, suppliers, and yes, even customers) and then daring people to call her to see if she was bluffing.
People like Fiorina should never be given power over a thriving technology business. In some fashion, we should all be ashamed for having put up with her CEO term for as long as it went. Hopefully she will fall back into historical academia where she can't hurt as many people ever again.
That's the way I'm living my life. But in part it is due to the necessity of the current business environment. There was nothing wrong with getting a job at a place like HP, getting married, having kids, and buying a home, 1.5 cars and a pool. But that meant debt, and that meant dependency upon income for debt service. And today's "fuck the workers" environment is making that progressively impossible (at least, very irresponsible). And that's just lost business ... so it's a bit like corporations cutting their own throats.
Which brings us back to HP, and Fiorina. I can clearly see that Fiorina and her crowd of institutional investors are "fatal cost-cutters". They will cut and cut until the company has little blood left to bleed. Controlling costs is a responsibility, but you have to spend money to make it, and the Carly Generation obviously doesn't understand that.
Can't be worse? A bunch of Bush's prior cabinet are looking for work. Don't tempt fate.
Yes, rust. It tends to happen with iron-based metals in an oxidizing atmosphere (which we happen to have on Earth). This is in some contrast to iron-based infrastructure in vacuum, which is a sensible environment for much industry. Since space structures should be largely built from asteroidal materials, and the likeliest item to be used is nickel-iron, then rust protection should prove to be of little concern.
Pro-gun wacko that I am, aside, I have to agree with you. People who don't want certain liberties will place restrictions on them, up to and including outright bans. This is why I particularly value things like sovereignty and jurisdictions. You can always opt to move away from the ones that offend you for whatever reason.
The original poster sounds like a bit of a nut, as if all of Humanity is going to settle on one mode of living that allows all sorts of liberties. Cultural differences are to be treasured, even if they result in things which irk us (in my case, gun bans), and even if they seem dictatorial or regressive (for example, Islamic treatment of women).
It's at least indeterminate whether a planetary surface is the right place to invest humanity's energy for development. We're stuck with Earth. But we don't have to accept Mars. We can just bypass Mars and exploit the resources of the Asteroid Belt, Saturn's moons, Oort and Kuiper objects, and even some of Jupiter's moons (although J's radiation belt is particularly fierce and may make it unfeasiable to live too near it).
The only thing that Mars can really offer us is an Earth-like surface (after terraformation) under sufficient gravity. But there are serious problems with a planetary surface, those being unwanted friction, storms, rust, unwanted gravity, and of course limited access to solar power.
Note also that interplanetary habitats would be even more immune to strikes. These habitats would make Humanity 100% unkillable except for interstellar events like a nearby supernova.
That's a pretty good list. My point revolves around speculation about how many people can come up with such a list and for what reasons. I can only posit that you are the exception that tests the rule.