The problem is deeper than insufficient testing. Over the years, the sense of personal responsibility enshrined by such sayings as "the buck stops here" has all but withered away. The epidemic of poor drivers is just another symptom.
All too many drivers will give half-assed attention to their own driving under the (usually subconscious?) assumption that it is the job of everyone else to look out for them rather than the other way around. In my experience, this is especially apparent with the drivers of larger vehicles, though certainly not limited to them.
Really, they just need to put their date of birth and address. Since many people do not move far from their birthplace, you can use those two pieces of information to extrapolate their social security number to within a couple digits.
I more enjoy the senate hearings over the rich people stealing billions of dollars from the public at large... and getting bailed out for their trouble.
The only fair penalty that still achieves its purpose as a deterrent is as the GP describes - take away the license.
If speeding tickets were set at a fixed price, nearly everyone whose income makes that price trivial will simply ignore the speed limit whenever it becomes inconvenient, particularly since you only get pulled over a small fraction of the times you speed. The same is true for any other type of ticket. The risk/reward ratio would be stacked in favor of ignoring the law.
The bigger problem is that many people buy their cars with a laundry list of "what ifs". I know a few guys at work that bought huge trucks because they might have to haul a lot of things (they rarely if ever do). Here in the US, people have had that luxury because of our artificially low gas prices. Another dollar or two tacked onto a gallon of gas will eventually break people of that habit.
That seems an odd inequality to base your position on, given that x > x - y even [especially] in cases where the value of y exceeds that of x (a scenario where yelling fire is of net benefit). Just as an example, if x means that a couple people get bruises and scrapes by shouting fire, and y means that everyone in the theater dies a horrible fiery death, x is still greater than x - y.
I'm sorry, your honor, but the documents were electronic, and one of our interns wiped out our document server including our backup system.
I seem to recall several years of White House emails disappearing in a similar manner when they were requested for some legal proceedings. I see no reason why it couldn't turn out the same here.
Part of that is also carry-over from a past era where taxes were calculated based upon a stair-step-like system (at least in some states), rather than calculated exactly. $9.99 and $10.00 would be in two different brackets, resulting in a greater difference in sales tax than it is now, so it made a meaningful impact to drop the penny.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that there was a psychological effect on the customer as well. That is likely why the practice continues.
The real problem is that we have seen a number of examples of little or un- regulated markets, and nearly every time they cause some problem or another. The most recent example is the banking industry which put is in the current recession.
The reason the invisible hand is invisible is because it doesn't exist.
The meaning of the quote is more about making people dependent upon your generosity than it is about trying to help someone who wants to attack you. In this case, the well-intentioned help has actually done more harm than good.
...you want quality assurance. Testing is a part of the whole. Good QA is involved throughout the process and involves more than just "pressing ctrl-a while in high-DPI mode with the program maximized caused the DVD tray to pop out instead of display an about box."
Again, it largely depends on the metric used. If the metric program is merely looking at the global repository and not distinguishing branches, one could easily create a branch that serves only as a honeypot for gamed commit activity.
Another reason why people hate lawyers as individuals:
Lawyers appear to have no morality. This is not really the fault of the lawyer - in fact, one could say it is the job of a lawyer to check his/her sense of morality at the door so he/she can properly represent their client. That makes it incredibly difficult to separate out those lawyers who are decent people only doing their job and those lawyers who really have no morals. The obvious, emotional/knee-jerk response is to assume that they are all sociopaths.
That is ultimately how my team does it. We use chat (originally IRC, but recently XMPP chat on a company server). There is no requirement that anyone be in at a particular time, and we have logs that keep track of what was discussed automatically. It takes all of about 1-2 minutes of anyone's time each day at most.
Contrast that sharply to another team in the building that's 3-4 times our size and insists upon having actual meetings. It is not uncommon to see them spend over an hour and a half discussing what they're going to do for the day, only to realize that there's now no longer enough time to bother starting anything until after lunch.
Unfortunately, while that is a nice thought, it doesn't bear out in practice. The removal of any personal responsibility by the staff for any action taken part by the corporation as a whole means that every action is a simple business decision. If the cost of breaking a law is less than the reward, then the simple decision is to flout the law. Strictly speaking, the corporation is actually irresponsible if it doesn't break the law in those situations.
We lost the ethics battle as soon as a corporate charter became an impenetrable shield against holding individuals accountable for their actions.
The first quote is an implied admission of guilt of a past crime. The second quote is a threat of committing a violent crime in the future if certain conditions hold (uttered in true internet tough guy flair). It could be argued that both warrant a little attention, but let's face it - the first quote is actually the worse of the two.
Funny story - the president of my company recently got an iPhone 4. For convenience, he decided he wanted to set it up to work with his BMW for hands-free use. Sounds simple, right?
I suppose with any other phone, it would have been. He found out that he would have to update the firmware on his car's computer systems (yes, plural - 16, in fact!). Not to be deterred by this, he had the dealer go ahead and apply the updates. In the end, they bricked his car trying to get it to inter-operate with his phone.
Both corporations and government rely on an intelligent, well-informed group of people (customers/shareholders:corporation::voters:government) who are willing to take action when their interests are not served fully so they do not get out of line.
Unfortunately, even if you can argue that people in general are intelligent, more often than not they are ignorant of the issues and generally apathetic when someone tries to inform them of any issue that does not have a dire, immediately personal effect.
The initial creation of infrastructure, even in the case of the internet, has always and probably will always work better as either a government project or a government-subsidized project. All those privatization perks you point out happened after the phone network was already built.
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The problem is deeper than insufficient testing. Over the years, the sense of personal responsibility enshrined by such sayings as "the buck stops here" has all but withered away. The epidemic of poor drivers is just another symptom.
All too many drivers will give half-assed attention to their own driving under the (usually subconscious?) assumption that it is the job of everyone else to look out for them rather than the other way around. In my experience, this is especially apparent with the drivers of larger vehicles, though certainly not limited to them.
Really, they just need to put their date of birth and address. Since many people do not move far from their birthplace, you can use those two pieces of information to extrapolate their social security number to within a couple digits.
I more enjoy the senate hearings over the rich people stealing billions of dollars from the public at large... and getting bailed out for their trouble.
The only fair penalty that still achieves its purpose as a deterrent is as the GP describes - take away the license.
If speeding tickets were set at a fixed price, nearly everyone whose income makes that price trivial will simply ignore the speed limit whenever it becomes inconvenient, particularly since you only get pulled over a small fraction of the times you speed. The same is true for any other type of ticket. The risk/reward ratio would be stacked in favor of ignoring the law.
That whole deal sounds suspiciously like the deal made with Apple Records...
The bigger problem is that many people buy their cars with a laundry list of "what ifs". I know a few guys at work that bought huge trucks because they might have to haul a lot of things (they rarely if ever do). Here in the US, people have had that luxury because of our artificially low gas prices. Another dollar or two tacked onto a gallon of gas will eventually break people of that habit.
That seems an odd inequality to base your position on, given that x > x - y even [especially] in cases where the value of y exceeds that of x (a scenario where yelling fire is of net benefit). Just as an example, if x means that a couple people get bruises and scrapes by shouting fire, and y means that everyone in the theater dies a horrible fiery death, x is still greater than x - y.
I'm sorry, your honor, but the documents were electronic, and one of our interns wiped out our document server including our backup system.
I seem to recall several years of White House emails disappearing in a similar manner when they were requested for some legal proceedings. I see no reason why it couldn't turn out the same here.
Part of that is also carry-over from a past era where taxes were calculated based upon a stair-step-like system (at least in some states), rather than calculated exactly. $9.99 and $10.00 would be in two different brackets, resulting in a greater difference in sales tax than it is now, so it made a meaningful impact to drop the penny.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that there was a psychological effect on the customer as well. That is likely why the practice continues.
The real problem is that we have seen a number of examples of little or un- regulated markets, and nearly every time they cause some problem or another. The most recent example is the banking industry which put is in the current recession. The reason the invisible hand is invisible is because it doesn't exist.
If it makes you feel better, he got a little stock, too.
The meaning of the quote is more about making people dependent upon your generosity than it is about trying to help someone who wants to attack you. In this case, the well-intentioned help has actually done more harm than good.
...you want quality assurance. Testing is a part of the whole. Good QA is involved throughout the process and involves more than just "pressing ctrl-a while in high-DPI mode with the program maximized caused the DVD tray to pop out instead of display an about box."
Again, it largely depends on the metric used. If the metric program is merely looking at the global repository and not distinguishing branches, one could easily create a branch that serves only as a honeypot for gamed commit activity.
Another reason why people hate lawyers as individuals:
Lawyers appear to have no morality. This is not really the fault of the lawyer - in fact, one could say it is the job of a lawyer to check his/her sense of morality at the door so he/she can properly represent their client. That makes it incredibly difficult to separate out those lawyers who are decent people only doing their job and those lawyers who really have no morals. The obvious, emotional/knee-jerk response is to assume that they are all sociopaths.
That is ultimately how my team does it. We use chat (originally IRC, but recently XMPP chat on a company server). There is no requirement that anyone be in at a particular time, and we have logs that keep track of what was discussed automatically. It takes all of about 1-2 minutes of anyone's time each day at most.
Contrast that sharply to another team in the building that's 3-4 times our size and insists upon having actual meetings. It is not uncommon to see them spend over an hour and a half discussing what they're going to do for the day, only to realize that there's now no longer enough time to bother starting anything until after lunch.
Unfortunately, while that is a nice thought, it doesn't bear out in practice. The removal of any personal responsibility by the staff for any action taken part by the corporation as a whole means that every action is a simple business decision. If the cost of breaking a law is less than the reward, then the simple decision is to flout the law. Strictly speaking, the corporation is actually irresponsible if it doesn't break the law in those situations.
We lost the ethics battle as soon as a corporate charter became an impenetrable shield against holding individuals accountable for their actions.
The first quote is an implied admission of guilt of a past crime. The second quote is a threat of committing a violent crime in the future if certain conditions hold (uttered in true internet tough guy flair). It could be argued that both warrant a little attention, but let's face it - the first quote is actually the worse of the two.
Funny story - the president of my company recently got an iPhone 4. For convenience, he decided he wanted to set it up to work with his BMW for hands-free use. Sounds simple, right?
I suppose with any other phone, it would have been. He found out that he would have to update the firmware on his car's computer systems (yes, plural - 16, in fact!). Not to be deterred by this, he had the dealer go ahead and apply the updates. In the end, they bricked his car trying to get it to inter-operate with his phone.
Both corporations and government rely on an intelligent, well-informed group of people (customers/shareholders:corporation::voters:government) who are willing to take action when their interests are not served fully so they do not get out of line.
Unfortunately, even if you can argue that people in general are intelligent, more often than not they are ignorant of the issues and generally apathetic when someone tries to inform them of any issue that does not have a dire, immediately personal effect.
I wonder how many people realize that Apple lately has been trading places back and forth with Exxon as the largest corporation on the planet.
Reality seems to contradict you. The US healthcare system is neither cheap (most expensive on the planet) nor efficient/good (usually towards the bottom of the list when ranking 1st world countries). In contrast, many of the cheapest and best systems for healthcare are either national healthcare systems (e.g., Canada and UK) or hybridized systems (e.g., the Netherlands).
and The Internet.
You had me until that last part.
The initial creation of infrastructure, even in the case of the internet, has always and probably will always work better as either a government project or a government-subsidized project. All those privatization perks you point out happened after the phone network was already built.
Don't forget that money = speech, too. It is not the corporation's fault that it can speak much louder than you.
Considering the cause of the latest recession, I can think of quite a few legitimate uses of dynamite in a banking environment :)