Seriously, I'm not sure imnproving efficiency will help the unemployment rate, at least not in the short term. Generally, improved efficiency means fewer jobs. Of course, the idea is that the company makes more money, and there is more wealth to spread around.
Improved efficiency does apply a downward pressure on wages, but it also applies a downward pressure on prices. The stark evidence of this is the PC. In the mid 1980s a decent entry-level PC setup cost about $2,000. Today you can buy a decent entry-level setup for 1/3 of that price. That means that many workers who could not afford a PC in 1985, while many that are in a similar place economically can afford one now. Since more people can afford a PC, they are in real terms richer.
The US Department of Agriculture pays farmers not to grow crops. Under modern agricultural techniques, the maximum grain production of a few states in the midwest could feed the world. I would bet that the entire agricultural potential of the US/Canada could feed 15 billion alone.
Don't forget that the Great Plains of North America are just one of the major food producing regions of the world. The Ukraine has immense potential, as does Brazil. In Asia, many of the river deltas have immense rice growing potential.
I would think that the world could support well over 25 billion.
And you don't think the "17%" who are under the poverty line in the U.S. are better off than most of the rest of the world?
My wife is close friends with a family originally from the Dominican Republic. Until very recently they lived in a poor, high crime, area of New York City. They quite frequently pointed out that they were living far better as a poor person in NY City than many rich people in the Dominican Republic.
A fundamental illustration of your point: The number of people that emigrate from the US every year is neglibible. If people were doing better someplace else, there would be substantial emmigration.
US government is fast heading towards 3rd world status. There's only so much debt a government can have before they can't get any more because the lenders aren't confident they can pay it back.
How is the risk of a debt measured? In the "price" of the loan aka the interest rate. Think about the fact that people with good credit (low risks) right now have mortgages that charge about 6% and people with bad credit (high risks) are charges 8-10-15% whatever.
The federal government gets loans by selling treasury bills, notes, and bonds. For our discussion they are all the same thing. The different names indicate the duration of the loan. A bond basicly works like this. The treasury department holds an auction. At that auction various lenders bid to lend the government money. The winning bidder give the federal government, say, $100,000. In exchange he recieves an interest payment once or twice a year for perhaps fifteen years. At the end of the term he gets the $100,000 back. The bidding is done on the basis of interest rate. The lender who offers the lowest interest rate wins the auction.
Here is the important point: US Treasury Bonds have the lowest interest rates of any major bond in the world. Investors believe that the US government is more likely to pay its debts than any other entity in the entire world. And this is not a recent thing, this has been the situation since WWII. the US Treasury is the yardstick that the rest of the worlkd measures against as far a financial security.
Because I don't see US expenses (especially military) getting any smaller very fast, and I don't see a big tax raise in near future either, which means more and more debt...
There is a very important point to be made here too. The amount of debt we are carrying is not very relevant. What is relevant is the long term growth of debt versus our national income. As long as the economic output of our nation grows at least at the same rate as our debt, it really doesn't matter. Say you made $50,000 a year in income and had to pay $10,000 a year in debt service, you'd have $40,000 in disposable income. Then you got a big raise and were earning $75,000 a year. If you doubled your debts so you were paying $20,000 a year, you'd still have $55,000 in disposable income. You'd still be richer.
The USA has run up gargantuan debts, but - over the long term - has grown tremendously as well. There is no reason to panic over our debt.
IBM is on the side of the GPL because they don't have much of a choice : they don't really have an OS of their own, and they had already invested millions in promoting Linux before this whole SCO idiocy.
They do have an OS of their own. In fact the have more than one. They have OS390 and AIX.
What is really happening here is that IBM missed the last paradigm change. When the PC market exploded with quality clones, IBM was always 6 months late and $1000 too expensive. IBM didn't manage to bring a really respectable PC product to market from the tim eof the IBM AT until the first ThinkPads hit.
The reality is that there isn't much money in either PCs or OS and Application Development. The real money is in enterprise hardware and consulting services. As long as the linux market continues to grow, IBM Global Services is sitting pretty doing implementations.
I might also recommend the Nokia 3565 and 3390 as phones that appear to be relatively simple.
I like the 82xx series from Nokia. It does the cell phone thing just right for me. It is small enough to be unobtrusive, but large enough that the buttons are easy to use. It has very good battery life. The UI for the phone book and such is intuitive.
Just don't ask it to be anything other than a phone.
For the record, I'm using the 8265 on an AT&T TDMA network.
I think your point is a good one, but it is a little more broad than it needs to be. Certain fixes are relatively easy, others are not. For instance, many of the buffer-overflow security holes that always pop up can be fixed pretty easily. They are isolated to small segments of code and a sophisticated techie should be able to handle them no problem, especially if the exploit has already been identified.
If there is a fundamental architectural problem with the code then, yeah, it will be a cold day in hell before a network/system admin can do anything about it.
For the medium scale bugs, the admin has the ability to take any "early" patch from an untrusted source, inspect the patch, and apply it instead of waiting for his vendor to produce an approved patch. With closed software, he might find an "early" patch, but will have no way of seeing whether it contains a trojan. His only option is to wait until his vendor provides him a patch, assuming the vendor is interested.
The advantage of opensource is that you can examine the internals yourself, and fix it yourself.
The more sophisticated the user, the more valuable opensource is. If you're a low level admin who can't do anything more than apply pre-canned patches, opensource may be cheaper but it isn't defacto better. If you can participate in the patch process by either writing your own patches or applying patches from the developers directly or from other users, rather than waiting for a vendor, you can be way ahead of the game.
It's still phone service. Phone service that's delivered over airwaves, and often is digital these days, is called cellular and that's been taxed since the day it started. Why does VoIP's phone service deserve an exemption?
If you read the articles more closely, you'll see that internet based VoIP is not really their worry.
MTC officials say the change could easily be interpreted to mean voice or other telecommunications services offered through packet switching technology. With telecommunications companies expected to move much of their voice services from land-line to voice over IP services, the impact to state and local governments could grow significantly, says Loren Chumley, Tennessee's revenue commissioner.
States don't object to a narrow ban on Internet access taxes, Chumley adds. "The new, multibillion losses for state and local governments would result from language in the House bill as courts interpret it as providing a blanket exemption for non-federal taxes for the telecommunications industry, granting that industry an unprecedented church-like exemption status," Chumley says.
As more and more telephone companies switch their internal networks to VoIP, they begin to look more like "internet" companies. The states are (wrongly, IMO) concerned that they'll lose the ability to charge sales/income/proprty taxes on telcos the way they could tax any other business.
What the moratorium does is block internet s[ecific taxes. Fot instance, you can't be charged more taxes for a phone line that is used for internet access than for a regular voice line. You can't be charged a higher sales tax rate because you purchased an item over the internet rather than on the phone. Internet oriented businesses can't be discriminated against.
I agree that there is some legislative bizzareness going on here...
The Do-Not-Call Implementation Act does not authorize the FTC to create a Do-Not-Call database. It authorizes the FTC to collect fees to support the operation of the database.
The authorization to regulate telemarketing call (including creating a Do-Not-Call database) was explicitly given to the FCC in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act "TCPA" of 1991. The FTC was given authority to make rules concerning fraud, harrassment, and abuse in telemarketing By the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud Abuse and Prevention Act "TCFAP" of 1994. The authorization to create a Do-Not-Call registry was not part of the TCFAP.
So congress screwed up. The FCC has the authority. The FTC has the money. The FTC cannot usurp the power explicitly granted to the FCC, just because they feel like it. Neither can the FCC get the money from the FTC.
Congress needs to fix this, but it should be easily fixable, either by shifting the authority form the FCC to the FTC or by shift ing the money from the FTC to the FCC.
What's interesting to me is that Illinois is supposed to use the national list as their list. I wonder how that's going to interact with this block.
One would suspect that this should not be a problem. Do-Not-Call lists are legal, the problem here is that the FTC exceded the authority granted to them by congress. The FTC does not have the ability to enforce their Do-Not-Call regulations unless/until congress authorizes them to do so. That should not prevent the FTC from publishing the list to Illinois. Illinois can implement their own enforcement actions.
Actually his ruling just stated that it is perfectly legal for you to call him and try to sell him stuff. It's a matter of free speech.
No. His ruling did not state that it was a matter of free speach. His ruling stated that Congress did not give the FTC the authority to create a Do-Not-Call registry when they authorized the FTC to make rules concerning telemarketing fraud. He held that the FTC overreached their rule making authority and actually crossed the line into law making. Laws are passed by the legislative branch. The executive branch has the power to make administrative rules in order to implement the laws authorized by congress, but cannot make their own laws.
More so than at any time in history,
American English plays a dominant role
internationally, exporting words from technical fields
to street slang and everything in between.
The OED's North American Editorial Unit (NAEU) is
ensuring that American terms can be edited in America
by Americans who are familiar with the peculiarities of
American English, its dialects, and its history. The
extensive scholarship devoted to American English can
be more efficiently monitored from here, and we stay
in touch with leading scholars and current research by
attending the major academic conferences.
For its first two years, the NAEU made do with a single
editor, who had to handle everything, leaving little
time for broad-based editorial attention to the OED text.
In November, the office appointed Madeline McDonnell
and Abigail Zitin as its first two Assistant Editors. Now
that they have completed their preliminary training,
they are able to make a substantial contribution to the
OED's coverage of American English. Rather than
merely glancing over the entries that are labelled 'U.S.',
the NAEU now has the opportunity to review all
editorial text, ensuring that American nuances are not
missed through being unfamiliar to the British editor
who originally reviewed the word.
So, it would appear that the venerable OED includes both North American and British English.
American English is a nonstandard mutation of standard (British) English. Hence, I use the British forms of things. That includes slang.
You know, the people of England have a lot of nerve naming their country after my language.
Unlike some other languages, there is really no standards body that maintains the English language. Modern English, regardless, is a creole of French and Germanic languages with a whole lot of seasoning thrown in. It is impossible to speak of a "standard" English, and the UK is famous for having very distinct regional slang, so it is downright silly to speak about a standard slang.
The court held that it was "inappropriate" for Congress to have allowed the FTC to interpret the congressional orders on its own, saying it "raises serious constitutional questions."
Recent US Supreme Court decisions have ruled that Do-Not-Call registries are legal, so there is no free speach issue no matter what the DMA wants to argue.
The constitutional issue is the seperation of legislative and executive power. The congress granted the FTC the authority to make rules concerning telemarketing fraud. The court felt that this rule was outside the authority granted by congress. An executive branch agency does not have the ability to make law, but the do have the ability to make the rules used to implement a law. The court held that the FTC overreached, it tried to make law instead of rules.
Congress now needs to make a law authorizing the FTC to implement a Do-Not-Call registry.
It is important to our system of checks and balances that executive rule making authority not be unchecked.
knifeh = new KnifeHandle knifeb = new KnifeBlade k = new Knife k.Attach(knifeh) k.Attach(knifeb)
Actually, first you'd get an "Initital Context" - a connection to your directory service. Then, you'd use that initial context to look up an instance of KitchenToolAbstractFactory. Then using KitchenToolAbstractFactory, you'd get an instance of KnifeFactory. Using KnifeFactory, you'd get a knife.
Yes, it "Puffs the Purple Dragon" when you are trying to rapidly develop a simple app. However, when you are trying to build a scalable, fault tolerant, secure, heterogeneous, distributed system that supports a high throughput, you'll find that these constructs have value.
Perl is my favorite tool. I use it for all my one-off jobs, as well as proof of concepts, etc. But Java provides a framework that allows for resource pooling, security, fail-over, etc.
This is brilliant stuff. All those poor corporations sued for nothing more than knowingly exposing their employees to carcinogens and not giving their employees protective gear - or even telling them they are at risk - because it might chop into their profits. My heart bleeds.
And as for McDonald's, read the actual details sometime. McD's was serving their coffee 20 degrees hotter than everyone else, even though that meant third degree burns in 3 seconds as opposed to 20 seconds. The victim was hospitalized for 7 days and required several skin grafts. They didn't bother to review their procedures even after they had previously been found liable in other coffee scald cases. They refused to take the $225,000 settlement recommenended by the court appointed mediator. Instead they offered the victim $800. McD's own employee testified that they decided not to warn customers of the likelihood of severe burns, even though most people would not think it possible.
The victim was awarded $160,000 in compensatory damages - compensation for pain, distress, medical bills, etc. The victim was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages - damages meant to punish a company for, in the words of one juror, "callous disregard for the safety of the people." In legalese, McD's was guilty of engaging in "willful, reckless, malicious or wanton conduct."
But maybe you are right. Maybe big corporations shouldn't be liable for the callous disregard of the safety of their employees and customers.
When we got the IBM ThinkPad 600 at work several years ago, most people gave up their CRTs. The LCD display was sharp, and large enough to use as the everyday display. I sat my laptop on a $50 keyboard drawer and then used a full size keyboard while attached.
Since then I've had a 600E, a T22, and a T30. They keep getting better. GO IBM.
Sorry to reply twice... I thought of somethine else, though.
A number of years ago I read an article about "Ben & Jerry's" Ice Cream. Part of their corporate policy is that there is a salary multiple of seven. Their highest placed executive could not earn more that 7 times what their lowest worker earned. So having a janitor that earned $25,000 meant that an executive could not earn more than $175,000.
The same article also noted that young executives would rise through the ranks at Ben & Jerry's then get poached by other ice cream makers because of the salary cap.
I remember thinking to myself, "If I was that janitor, I'd rather they got rid of the salary multiple, kept their talented executives, and grew the company. Maybe I could get $28,000. Or, even if they didn't raise my salary, maybe they'd grow enough that they'd need to hire more people and I could get my brother-in-law a steady job here."
In the end, what objectively happens to you is more important that what comparitively happens to other people.
[litanty of layoffs and cuts affecting the lower 90%] An increase in salary and bonuses to the top 10% of salary grades here
There is a consistent oversimplification here that bugs me.
Two Facts: 1) In the long run, if an employee feels that they can do better elsewhere, they are going to leave, 2) The job of a corporation is to protect and grow shareholder value.
It is easy to imagine that the markets would react negatively if much of the senior management jumped ship. The news headlines would be "Corp. X about to go belly up!" Everyone would dump stock, the corporation would be unable to raise new capital, and alternate financing would be difficult to find. A troubled company might actually go belly up as a result.
Also look at it another way. What was the alternative? Say that 20% of the workforce is layed off and middle management was forced to take a 15% cut in pay. Had a less skilled management team been in controll of the company, it may have required a 40% layoff and a 20% cut in pay to right the ship. In that view, the management team saved the jobs of 20% and kept the salaries 5% higher than they would have been. Senior management did a good job, and deserves to be rewarded.
Of course, I don't discount the possibility that senior management is just looking out for themselves and screwing the little guy. That happens too. The fact that senior management is not feeling the same cuts that lower grades are feeling is not surefire evidence of this, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Improved efficiency does apply a downward pressure on wages, but it also applies a downward pressure on prices. The stark evidence of this is the PC. In the mid 1980s a decent entry-level PC setup cost about $2,000. Today you can buy a decent entry-level setup for 1/3 of that price. That means that many workers who could not afford a PC in 1985, while many that are in a similar place economically can afford one now. Since more people can afford a PC, they are in real terms richer.
Don't forget that the Great Plains of North America are just one of the major food producing regions of the world. The Ukraine has immense potential, as does Brazil. In Asia, many of the river deltas have immense rice growing potential.
I would think that the world could support well over 25 billion.
My wife is close friends with a family originally from the Dominican Republic. Until very recently they lived in a poor, high crime, area of New York City. They quite frequently pointed out that they were living far better as a poor person in NY City than many rich people in the Dominican Republic.
A fundamental illustration of your point: The number of people that emigrate from the US every year is neglibible. If people were doing better someplace else, there would be substantial emmigration.
US government is fast heading towards 3rd world status. There's only so much debt a government can have before they can't get any more because the lenders aren't confident they can pay it back.
How is the risk of a debt measured? In the "price" of the loan aka the interest rate. Think about the fact that people with good credit (low risks) right now have mortgages that charge about 6% and people with bad credit (high risks) are charges 8-10-15% whatever.
The federal government gets loans by selling treasury bills, notes, and bonds. For our discussion they are all the same thing. The different names indicate the duration of the loan. A bond basicly works like this. The treasury department holds an auction. At that auction various lenders bid to lend the government money. The winning bidder give the federal government, say, $100,000. In exchange he recieves an interest payment once or twice a year for perhaps fifteen years. At the end of the term he gets the $100,000 back. The bidding is done on the basis of interest rate. The lender who offers the lowest interest rate wins the auction.
Here is the important point: US Treasury Bonds have the lowest interest rates of any major bond in the world. Investors believe that the US government is more likely to pay its debts than any other entity in the entire world. And this is not a recent thing, this has been the situation since WWII. the US Treasury is the yardstick that the rest of the worlkd measures against as far a financial security.
Because I don't see US expenses (especially military) getting any smaller very fast, and I don't see a big tax raise in near future either, which means more and more debt...
There is a very important point to be made here too. The amount of debt we are carrying is not very relevant. What is relevant is the long term growth of debt versus our national income. As long as the economic output of our nation grows at least at the same rate as our debt, it really doesn't matter. Say you made $50,000 a year in income and had to pay $10,000 a year in debt service, you'd have $40,000 in disposable income. Then you got a big raise and were earning $75,000 a year. If you doubled your debts so you were paying $20,000 a year, you'd still have $55,000 in disposable income. You'd still be richer.
The USA has run up gargantuan debts, but - over the long term - has grown tremendously as well. There is no reason to panic over our debt.
They do have an OS of their own. In fact the have more than one. They have OS390 and AIX.
What is really happening here is that IBM missed the last paradigm change. When the PC market exploded with quality clones, IBM was always 6 months late and $1000 too expensive. IBM didn't manage to bring a really respectable PC product to market from the tim eof the IBM AT until the first ThinkPads hit.
The reality is that there isn't much money in either PCs or OS and Application Development. The real money is in enterprise hardware and consulting services. As long as the linux market continues to grow, IBM Global Services is sitting pretty doing implementations.
I like the 82xx series from Nokia. It does the cell phone thing just right for me. It is small enough to be unobtrusive, but large enough that the buttons are easy to use. It has very good battery life. The UI for the phone book and such is intuitive.
Just don't ask it to be anything other than a phone.
For the record, I'm using the 8265 on an AT&T TDMA network.
If there is a fundamental architectural problem with the code then, yeah, it will be a cold day in hell before a network/system admin can do anything about it.
For the medium scale bugs, the admin has the ability to take any "early" patch from an untrusted source, inspect the patch, and apply it instead of waiting for his vendor to produce an approved patch. With closed software, he might find an "early" patch, but will have no way of seeing whether it contains a trojan. His only option is to wait until his vendor provides him a patch, assuming the vendor is interested.
Very true.
The advantage of opensource is that you can examine the internals yourself, and fix it yourself.
The more sophisticated the user, the more valuable opensource is. If you're a low level admin who can't do anything more than apply pre-canned patches, opensource may be cheaper but it isn't defacto better. If you can participate in the patch process by either writing your own patches or applying patches from the developers directly or from other users, rather than waiting for a vendor, you can be way ahead of the game.
If you read the articles more closely, you'll see that internet based VoIP is not really their worry.
As more and more telephone companies switch their internal networks to VoIP, they begin to look more like "internet" companies. The states are (wrongly, IMO) concerned that they'll lose the ability to charge sales/income/proprty taxes on telcos the way they could tax any other business.What the moratorium does is block internet s[ecific taxes. Fot instance, you can't be charged more taxes for a phone line that is used for internet access than for a regular voice line. You can't be charged a higher sales tax rate because you purchased an item over the internet rather than on the phone. Internet oriented businesses can't be discriminated against.
The Do-Not-Call Implementation Act does not authorize the FTC to create a Do-Not-Call database. It authorizes the FTC to collect fees to support the operation of the database.
The authorization to regulate telemarketing call (including creating a Do-Not-Call database) was explicitly given to the FCC in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act "TCPA" of 1991. The FTC was given authority to make rules concerning fraud, harrassment, and abuse in telemarketing By the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud Abuse and Prevention Act "TCFAP" of 1994. The authorization to create a Do-Not-Call registry was not part of the TCFAP.
So congress screwed up. The FCC has the authority. The FTC has the money. The FTC cannot usurp the power explicitly granted to the FCC, just because they feel like it. Neither can the FCC get the money from the FTC.
Congress needs to fix this, but it should be easily fixable, either by shifting the authority form the FCC to the FTC or by shift ing the money from the FTC to the FCC.
One would suspect that this should not be a problem. Do-Not-Call lists are legal, the problem here is that the FTC exceded the authority granted to them by congress. The FTC does not have the ability to enforce their Do-Not-Call regulations unless/until congress authorizes them to do so. That should not prevent the FTC from publishing the list to Illinois. Illinois can implement their own enforcement actions.
No. His ruling did not state that it was a matter of free speach. His ruling stated that Congress did not give the FTC the authority to create a Do-Not-Call registry when they authorized the FTC to make rules concerning telemarketing fraud. He held that the FTC overreached their rule making authority and actually crossed the line into law making. Laws are passed by the legislative branch. The executive branch has the power to make administrative rules in order to implement the laws authorized by congress, but cannot make their own laws.
He said it again! Chortle! Chortle!
I would like to offer this quote from the Oxford English Dictionary Newsletter for June 2002.
So, it would appear that the venerable OED includes both North American and British English.Game-Set-Match!
You know, the people of England have a lot of nerve naming their country after my language.
Unlike some other languages, there is really no standards body that maintains the English language. Modern English, regardless, is a creole of French and Germanic languages with a whole lot of seasoning thrown in. It is impossible to speak of a "standard" English, and the UK is famous for having very distinct regional slang, so it is downright silly to speak about a standard slang.
C'mon, those people get laid even less than geeks.
Thanks for the explanation. Every time someone from the UK mentions a road designation, I spend a few moments thinking it is a nebula or star cluster.
The court held that it was "inappropriate" for Congress to have allowed the FTC to interpret the congressional orders on its own, saying it "raises serious constitutional questions."
Recent US Supreme Court decisions have ruled that Do-Not-Call registries are legal, so there is no free speach issue no matter what the DMA wants to argue.
The constitutional issue is the seperation of legislative and executive power. The congress granted the FTC the authority to make rules concerning telemarketing fraud. The court felt that this rule was outside the authority granted by congress. An executive branch agency does not have the ability to make law, but the do have the ability to make the rules used to implement a law. The court held that the FTC overreached, it tried to make law instead of rules.
Congress now needs to make a law authorizing the FTC to implement a Do-Not-Call registry.
It is important to our system of checks and balances that executive rule making authority not be unchecked.
Yes, it "Puffs the Purple Dragon" when you are trying to rapidly develop a simple app. However, when you are trying to build a scalable, fault tolerant, secure, heterogeneous, distributed system that supports a high throughput, you'll find that these constructs have value.
Perl is my favorite tool. I use it for all my one-off jobs, as well as proof of concepts, etc. But Java provides a framework that allows for resource pooling, security, fail-over, etc.
And as for McDonald's, read the actual details sometime. McD's was serving their coffee 20 degrees hotter than everyone else, even though that meant third degree burns in 3 seconds as opposed to 20 seconds. The victim was hospitalized for 7 days and required several skin grafts. They didn't bother to review their procedures even after they had previously been found liable in other coffee scald cases. They refused to take the $225,000 settlement recommenended by the court appointed mediator. Instead they offered the victim $800. McD's own employee testified that they decided not to warn customers of the likelihood of severe burns, even though most people would not think it possible.
The victim was awarded $160,000 in compensatory damages - compensation for pain, distress, medical bills, etc. The victim was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages - damages meant to punish a company for, in the words of one juror, "callous disregard for the safety of the people." In legalese, McD's was guilty of engaging in "willful, reckless, malicious or wanton conduct."
But maybe you are right. Maybe big corporations shouldn't be liable for the callous disregard of the safety of their employees and customers.
Since then I've had a 600E, a T22, and a T30. They keep getting better. GO IBM.
A number of years ago I read an article about "Ben & Jerry's" Ice Cream. Part of their corporate policy is that there is a salary multiple of seven. Their highest placed executive could not earn more that 7 times what their lowest worker earned. So having a janitor that earned $25,000 meant that an executive could not earn more than $175,000.
The same article also noted that young executives would rise through the ranks at Ben & Jerry's then get poached by other ice cream makers because of the salary cap.
I remember thinking to myself, "If I was that janitor, I'd rather they got rid of the salary multiple, kept their talented executives, and grew the company. Maybe I could get $28,000. Or, even if they didn't raise my salary, maybe they'd grow enough that they'd need to hire more people and I could get my brother-in-law a steady job here."
In the end, what objectively happens to you is more important that what comparitively happens to other people.
There is a consistent oversimplification here that bugs me.
Two Facts: 1) In the long run, if an employee feels that they can do better elsewhere, they are going to leave, 2) The job of a corporation is to protect and grow shareholder value.
It is easy to imagine that the markets would react negatively if much of the senior management jumped ship. The news headlines would be "Corp. X about to go belly up!" Everyone would dump stock, the corporation would be unable to raise new capital, and alternate financing would be difficult to find. A troubled company might actually go belly up as a result.
Also look at it another way. What was the alternative? Say that 20% of the workforce is layed off and middle management was forced to take a 15% cut in pay. Had a less skilled management team been in controll of the company, it may have required a 40% layoff and a 20% cut in pay to right the ship. In that view, the management team saved the jobs of 20% and kept the salaries 5% higher than they would have been. Senior management did a good job, and deserves to be rewarded.
Of course, I don't discount the possibility that senior management is just looking out for themselves and screwing the little guy. That happens too. The fact that senior management is not feeling the same cuts that lower grades are feeling is not surefire evidence of this, however.
Maybe she's running virtual PC?
Don't forget the most important step... Disable every service that you don't actually need.