Oh please. Poor you for tying happiness to salary. Cry me a river.
My stress comes from the stupid requirements that are made and inept management. Actually, it's pretty much because the market asks for the impossible.
I'll admit that techies move onto management to get salaries and less stress, but hey, no wonder management in the IT industry blows so badly.
I've worked in this industry for 5 years, and I can tell you that I'd rather be a stressed worker doing what I enjoy rather than put myself in the line-of-fire that is management. I can't think of an easier way to get people to start disliking me.
>Expensive needs to off-set said Stress?
Again, sorry you equate the quest for material gain as a means of avoiding stress. Me, at the end of the day, I give the middle finger to the market, recognize that all this shit isn't that important, and abjectly refuse to comprimise my happiness for the sake of a job.
You'd be amazed at how many managers cant say a freaking thing once you've owned a code base for a year or so, and you put your foot down when your abilities are being abused like some inhuman swiss army knife. Fuck em. If their business plan can't work without me taking it up the ass, it's a lousy business plan, and they were doomed to fail from the beginning.
It's you who feels that just getting some more DVDS, or skydiving more, or whatever you seem to think is the solution for stress, doesn't seem to be work.
Money doesn't give me happiness. Doing what I enjoy doing, and not compromising my working conditions is what kicks ass. Working in inhuman conditions does not justify asking for higher wages - it just makes you a sucker for working like that.
It's quite circular. They are treated like shit (frogs, frenchies, made fun of for being drunks, terrible drivers, cultural 'extremeists'.. ) by the Anglophone community, and so they vice-versa it. By this point, its pointless to argue who started it, but just be aware that they are treated very poorly by the english speaking communities in Canada.
It makes sense here. English speaking Canada seems like its in a rush to dump its own heritage and become, for all intents and purposes, culturally American. The French have AMAZING culture, music, art, etc, so they have every right to try and protect it, but it does tend to end up in inter-cultural tension.
Oh well. I just hope you can appreciate that Canada treats the francophone community in the same way they treated you. I certainly am not condoning your treatment, but the really do get no respect, despite being on the leading edge of many of the cultural movements that eventually get popularized in the english culture. I can understand the source of their frusteration..
Tim Hortons does well, not because of their donuts, but because of their coffee. I dont see too many people buying donuts, but to this day, despite only offering a house blend, they still seem to be everybit as popular a destination for coffee as the million-flavour Stabucks' et all..
Fear, uncertainty and doubt. I mean, here we are, trying to convince to casual consumers that MS intentionally attempts to confuse people, and we wrap it in a confusing acronym?!
Good. Techies who work for salary alone are going to be the ones I'll hold resposible for implementing the SSSCA.....
Work for the love, not the money. Techies are overpaid anyhow, although I will admit that they do tend to need to buy expensive toys for the home in order to stay competative in their industry as an exmplouee....
>Not to mention that the tech workforce there is subsidized by the Canadian government
Depends what industry. Obviously, our social programs which are not privatized are indeed paid by the government. The film industry gets breaks, not in salary subsidizing, but in tax breaks, mostly.
Other than that, the lower expectations of standards of living, cheaper services (postal, health) has alot to do with lower salary demands. Make no mistake, too much privatization leads to higher costs of living, albeit maybe better products and services.
... US immigration saying enough is enough. It wasn't a totally secretive technique by US companies to fool immigration into saying that the talent wasnt available stateside - it was, but salaries being damanded were too high. So the immigration dept was pressured into giving out more and more B1s (?).. ie, work visas to immigrants, whether they were Indian or Canadian.
Old hat tho. It happens (happened) in every industry. As the tech market becomes more 'bricks and mortar', the US will likely outsource much of its labour, although, as usual, not its executive staff.;)
Re:Who cares what america does? America != The Wor
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SSSCA Hearing
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Tsk tsk.
Imperialist nations gained wealth by colonizing. Coperate imperialism is essentially the same thing:
a) Replace colonization with foreign investment. b) Replace the imperial armies with the WTO (which has more international legal power than the UN, to put that in perspective) c) Colonization usually occured when a country had no means of protecting themselves. Today, most countries have guns (tho, ironically, this is in part thanks to American industries), and thus colonization by force would be much more bloody and descructive to the colonizers than it was in many other situations. (I'm talking about the intial colonizations, as many colonies staged a revolt once they had sufficient firepower.) d)Infmation and media gets around much quicker these days, so colonization must be more undercover and subtle. (See the IMF... )
> one in five people in the U.S. is either an immigrant or a first-generation American
Not much of a point if you accept (and this is of course very subjective):
a) That the conditions in many countries are due to economic conditions and pressures stemming from the scale and success of the American economy. People have to move because much of the conditions in their home countries are due to governments being bought by large multinationals or multinationals investing in a country, only to pollute it or destroy the quality of life there through competition or otherwise.
b) People's impressions of the US come through the media, which is heavily filtered. I don't know how many immigrants I've met who had a totally different view of what living in North America would be like.
c) The US offers high salaries to educated folks. Hell, in Canada, where no doctor is in *any* danger of starving, our doctors are moving down there for the higher wages, which is much of the reason your healthcare is expensive, and our health care has extremely long wait times. (Which is interesting, as it runs counter to the American economic system's usual 'most efficient use of resources' claim.)
You can't paint imperialist nations as evil war mongers, and then say the US is all good because they dont send over an army to take over countries. The US has far more efficient, effective, and equally destructive means' (see Columbia) of taking over other nations.
Which isn't to say the US is evil. It's just to say that you're only judging the 'goodness' of the US by comparing its practices against practices of old. Different times, different cultures, different economic system, different everything. The end result is the same tho - the US enjoys unprecedented power over the entire world. Even the other Imperialist nations didn't have the economic (which is to say power over policy and decision making world-wide) might the US currently enjoys. Compare China today to China 300 years ago, and you could say they are 'saints' today. Yet we know better (although it didn't stop the US from letting them into the WTO, interestingly enough.)
Rewarding for 'good behaviour' removes the social meaning behind the behaviour. People will karma-whore like you've never seen, if it means getting credit towards subscriptions, etc.
You'd end up with a self-affirming group of posters who only post ideas thatare supported by the active moderatorship's ideology, which does a disservice to any attempt at objective discourse.
Okay, so they arn't all execs, but you get the idea. The house is packed! What a fun looking club to be in! I mean, its still a pretty damn tight family......
From www.michaelmoore.com (opens in new window.. his report has links to all sources):
> The only thing that surprises me more than all the Enron henchmen who ended up in your cabinet and administration is how our lazy media just rolled over and didn't report it. The list of Enron people on your payroll is impressive. Lawrence Lindsey, your chief economic advisor? A former advisor at Enron! Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill? Former CEO of Alcoa, whose lobbying firm, Vinson and Elkins, was the #3 contributor to the your campaign! Who is Vinson and Elkins? The law firm representing Enron! Who is Alcoa? The top polluter in Texas. Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army? A former vice-chair of Enron Energy! Robert Zoellick, your Federal Trade Representative? A former advisor at Enron! Karl Rove, your main man at the White House? He owned a quarter-million dollars of Enron stock.
Then there's the Enron lawyer you have nominated to be a federal judge in Texas, the Enron lobbyist who is your chair of the Republican Party, the two Enron officials who now work for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and the wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm who sits on Enron's board. And there's the aforementioned Mr. Pitt, the former Arthur Andersen attorney whose job it is now as SEC head to oversee the stock markets. George, it never stops! My fingers are getting tired typing all this up -- and there's lots more.
I agree. They're both the same. The difference is that Republicans can be bought for cheaper.
> Enron-is-connected-to-Bush-and-Cheney
Connected? There's, what, 10 former Enron execs on Bush's cabinet? His campaign jet was from Enron. Connected, maybe, if you mean like how men and women make babies...
The real crisis that Americans seem loathe to deal with is that there is too much centralized power and wealth. Whether you think its the companies, the gov, the companies vicariously through the gov.. the point is, the system is getting fucked worse and worse each day, and people's answer seems to be, "Well, give all the power to X!" Howabout giving (relatively) no power to ALL, you know, how your used-to-be-great country started out, as I understand it.
Power corrupts. Not legislative powers, nor resource to profit. Any power corrupts, and yet getting power is the motus operandi of the post-80s economy. The vision was that any Joe Shmoe could get rich, but now everyone's finding out that even Joe Shmoe turns into a self-affirming mantra-spewing gov-buying asshole once he gets rich.
Wiked dude, thanks. The tidbit about attempting to keep their bandwidth costs low is an interesting insight I hadn't considered.
Google certainly represents the kind of corperate vision I wished there was more of. They actually seem to be interested in sustaining off the virtue of their technology and public image, not their sales & marketing departments.:)
1) Duh. And MS could turn nice. But while "Their goal is to make a profit, not benefit the community." is, of course true, the question really should be "What are they willing to do to grow?" You'll note that the most unethical companies tend to be the ones that have the largest visions of grandeur. Some companies are content to stay the same size if it allows them to serve their market's needs sustainably while still turning a profit. It's usually the unmitigated desire to grow, grow, grow that turns companies into scammers. So long as Google doesn't want to expand their services horizontaly, the risk of them compromising their current ethical standards is fairly low.
2) Duh.
3) Sounds fun to me, although I'd support just forcing them to rename themselves a la Yellow Pages instead of a Search Engine. But culture jamming is cool, no args here.
4) Nothing. I think I recall a story about them having bought "Linux". As for "monopoly", why on earth would they do that? I mean, do you think they'd buy links for "companies with anti-competative practices"? But "Linux" and "open Source".. I'm sure they've already investaged the opportunity, if not done so.
>"Yellow pages pay for the printing and distribution of white pages"
Sigh. Yeah, but the Yellow Pages are not called a "Search Engine". They are called a "Directory Listing". It's much more obvious to people that ads are ads, listings are listings, and none of the entries are there out of the goodness of the Yellow Page publishers' hearts.
A better analogy would be to 'merge' the yellow pages with the white pages. Assume there are 425,432 people named 'Mike Smith'. Finding Mike Smith's phone number is annoying. But now you have to deal with 500,000 more bought (even if indicated on the page) 'Mike Smiths'. Its not even so much that people are fooled into thinking commercial entries with non-commercial, but rather that the sponsorship of the product is getting in the way of the original intent of the product. In this case, now you have one million Mike Smith entries to check out. In the case of web searches, that page with the result you wanted might have been the 4th page without sponsored entries, but now it's on the 30th page.
There's nothing wrong with sponsorship, but everything wrong with it when it reduces the effectiveness of the product or service it's financially supporting. I mean, whats the point?
How long until the laws of (current) economics catch up with Google, and they can no longer afford to do the right thing?
Does anyone have any insight into Google's money situation? Where the money comes from? Are they are taking losses on traffic? Could they economically handle disillutioned surgers from all the other search engines?
Or is it just that the other search engines will do anything for a buck?
Society honours is live conformists (Balmer, Gates) and it's dead trouble makers (ESR).
It really doesn't matter if people buy a zealot's rants. It's the ideological equivilent of 'branding'. The ideas will assume a much more moderate and socially applicable tone should the seeds the ESRs and RMSs are planting today take cultural root in the next few decades, and thats what matters.
Nothing changes in one day by the work of one person. Sadly, those who stand up and talk for forward-thinking principals are usually branded as extremists today, but only a fool doesn't aknolwedge the fact that they themselves are more interested in starting a slow social shift in attitudes rather than expecting the world to drop everything and follow their lead tommorow.
I agree to a point. The software world is dangerously sales-driven (My uncle coined the term "Real Time Sales Driven Development", or RTSDD for short. It makes extreme programming look like a gentle stroll through the park.), and defiantely could do with some professional ceritifcation regulations that slow down the clamour to develop the latest buzzword. To some degree, I'm sure the situation is much better at insitutions that have used software systems for many years (ie, banks, etc) than consumer-facing industries ('net access providers, ASP providers, OS *cough* vendor). The CS degree seems to be how companies evaluate the 'professionalism' of a programmer, but I think its a misplaced faith. More important than that would be audits and guidelines that must be adhered to by a regulatory body.
Of course, those addicted to the worderful world of 'slave-to-the-market innovation at the speed of e-business and shit' probably shudder to the thought, but can you imagine if designing buildings were subjected to the kind of rush-out-the-door development tempo that many dev houses have? Sure buildings have people, but softweare systems hold processes and business logic, which surplanted people long ago in terms of marketplace value.
It'd probably result in greater long range vision for the software industry as a whole as well.
> Humans are way too good at altering their environment to have natural selection play a role in expressing genes
Says who? Gene selection may ultimately see the shucking of gene's responsible for our desire to control our enviornment.
Also, our species is young, and our 'control' experiment is *extremely, extremely* young.
> Once science gets good enough at it EVERYONE will be smart and healthy
Except that while we may wish to blend in, we are also driven by a need to stand out. If everyone's 'smart', we simply offload our judgements of whats 'smart' or 'good' onto other things we have no control over. (Maybe back to racism? Oh, then we can ask our kids to have a non-hate-inviting skin tone.)
All control we execise is an illusion. We solve problems, more crop up as a result. That's the human experience, although our economy relies so heavily on ignoring that simple fact that we can't possibly conceed to it until we experience the next major shift in cultural and social values and beliefs.
> So I can go out and make 100 copies of a Brittney Spears CD and hand them out at about $0.50 a copy
Wow! Really! You can! Man, you must be able to make a killing! Wow, everyone must be doing this! Geez, our whole economy is going to collapse, because suddenly everyone can copy shit really easily! (Unlike cassettes, of course.) Oh boy! The sky is falling! Hey, and I just figured out that you could sneak out at night, paint everyone's car in your neighbourhood green with a 5$ can of paint, and sell them 'Original FInish Recovery' systems the next day for 50$ a pop! OH MY GOD! THE WORLD IS GOING TO GO CRAZY UNLESS WE MAKE SURE CARS HAVE ROBOTIC ARMS THAT SLAP AWAY PEOPLE APPROACHING THEM WITH A PAINT CAN!
(Ok, get my drift? If it's so easy to burn and profit off other people's work, why have I yet to see __anyone__ selling Britanny Spears' CDs? Sure, we copy them for free, but I've yet to come into contact with any kind of piracy-for-profit story that has a significant impact (cause its always been going on, bootlegs, et al.. ) on the industries bottom line.) The total misrepresentation of heman behaviour du jour seems to be 'if you can rip someone off, you will'. Untrue. Untrue untrue untrue. Sure, you can come up with tons of examples of people who do rip off [insert whatever]. But think about it - the people that dont are totally unheard. The counter case is the totally silent case, so it's easy to buy the falsity that if people CAN get away with unethical behaviour, they will, and must be stopped by means of force at all costs.
> .. The Matrix, or Lord of the Rings. We'd have cheap crap like Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Yeah! And we get Pearl Harbour, and Roller Ball, and Jar Jar Binks! Man, am I glad we dont get any cheapo movies like "The Sting" or "Oceans Eleven" or "Being John Malkovitch"! You're attitude is the very reason the industry is scrambling.... they want to keep growing, and they can't accept the reality that Quality of Product does not increase proportionally with scale, size of budgets, size of industry.. etc. It doesn't. It simply does NOT.
I mean, holy crap dude. Do you really believe the garbage you're spewing here?
Ever since we started coutning things and writing them down, we act like piracy et al never existed before we started tracking it. And as piracy increases, we act like its only because people/can/, not because the quality of whats being sold (nevermind that tons of the songs are __about__ getting your own and getting the leg up on the next sucker) and that the social climate has changed. I mean, culture seems to be infatuated with America's favorite passtime: ripping someone else off. There is very little discussion of whether this has been happenning all along, all century - and whether or not its always just been a Cost of Doing Business. I content that seeking to 'correct' the 'problem' will do society far more harm than good.
If you really beleive we/need/ encryption to keep these industries viable, you have very little faith in humanity and a grossly misplaced faith in the purpoded 'needs' of an already overblown and overrrated model of an economy. The economy should reflect the social needs of the people operating under it - there is no way that people should be forced to BEND for that economy; because the whole purpose of the economy in the first place is to facilitate happiness. Don't you think it's a little twisted to change the laws for 300 million people to help (at most) 60,000 people make a higher standard of living?
The problem is, we need to be/paid/ to 'bounty hunt each other', which leads me to believe there is NOTHING wrong.
Think about it. You simply can't hold a nation hostage for breaking laws designed to protect a small minority of content producers and distributors. The economy's purpose is to serve the behavior of society (ie, its true purpose is supposedly to allow us to gain the resources required to do the things that make us happy, from surviving to sky diving.. ), not the other way around. We really need to get around this mentality that people should bend to the economy. Really, the economy should bend to the behaviour of the people. If they are copying content illegally to an extend that damages the viability of the business, that tells me that record companies should stop spending so much money on their projects, to help bring down the cost of sales.
Record execs always take the 'people will take it for free, if they can'. That is hogwash. We all know it. History has borne that people have no problem volounteering payment for something if they feel its worth it. If they are stealing it in such droves as to destroy the viability of the industry, then there is something wrong with how the industry is conducting is business, not something wrong with technology facilitating the supposed 'unmitigated greed' of the consumer.
I've always laughed at the notion of boycotts as a form of protest. The protest is in seeking out the product at lower cost. Yes, as long as the choices are too expensive, or not high quality, or something along those lines, and free, people will take the free, because there is no middle ground to offer a fair price. Once we stop legislating technology laws to regulate social behaviour, and start respecting that our behaviour is a reflection of the value we place on things, we will find the proper balances in these types of over-grown industries.
To sum up: What would it take for a large industry like the music industry to recognize (at great cost) that they are perhaps over estimating the viability of the scale and manners in which they go about their business? When will we say, "Hey, people just dont seem to buy into that?" Do we need to legislate ourselves to death, and then watch profits drop off the face of the earth? I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be justified in drawing the same conclusions pre-legislation. Bounty hunters would be a bandaid on a pattern of social behavior that pretty much prooves that the consumer is being held ransom for the basic human need to listen to music.
Awesome ad. I agree. I'm in Canada, and I can only thank god that while we endevour to treat the problem in the same manner of the states (ie, drug problems as criminal problems), we tend to do it on a smaller scale and are generally less religeous about the whole issue. More socialist, although its quickly fading...
Anyhow, fascinating ad. It will surely be passed on.
Forget that they are unenforcable. You know as well as I do that our sports stars, our movie stars, your friends, family.. etc.. would go to jail if they actually enforced the law.
The laws are there only to justify the industry they support (the drug war industry is massive.. I think the American drug war organization gets like 20 BILLION dollars a year, and thats the government organzation alone.. forget the industries who rely on technological means of solving the drug problem in the US). This is why it is in the best interests of the board that fights this war not to conceed in either reductions in drug uses, nor conceed that the way it is being fought is unsustainable in the long run.
Anyhow, same for Hollywood. They want to fight what is essentially, a social war, as a technological one. As the war on drugs has shown, they will fail, and yet, we will lose by virtue of their impotant efforts.
Oh yeah. Make an industry out of persecuting copyright infringment. Then we'll have to make sure people keep breaking the law (or just keep tightening the law) to keep the industry viable, JUST like the war on drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please. Poor you for tying happiness to salary. Cry me a river.
My stress comes from the stupid requirements that are made and inept management. Actually, it's pretty much because the market asks for the impossible.
I'll admit that techies move onto management to get salaries and less stress, but hey, no wonder management in the IT industry blows so badly.
I've worked in this industry for 5 years, and I can tell you that I'd rather be a stressed worker doing what I enjoy rather than put myself in the line-of-fire that is management. I can't think of an easier way to get people to start disliking me.
>Expensive needs to off-set said Stress?
Again, sorry you equate the quest for material gain as a means of avoiding stress. Me, at the end of the day, I give the middle finger to the market, recognize that all this shit isn't that important, and abjectly refuse to comprimise my happiness for the sake of a job.
You'd be amazed at how many managers cant say a freaking thing once you've owned a code base for a year or so, and you put your foot down when your abilities are being abused like some inhuman swiss army knife. Fuck em. If their business plan can't work without me taking it up the ass, it's a lousy business plan, and they were doomed to fail from the beginning.
It's you who feels that just getting some more DVDS, or skydiving more, or whatever you seem to think is the solution for stress, doesn't seem to be work.
Money doesn't give me happiness. Doing what I enjoy doing, and not compromising my working conditions is what kicks ass. Working in inhuman conditions does not justify asking for higher wages - it just makes you a sucker for working like that.
It's quite circular. They are treated like shit (frogs, frenchies, made fun of for being drunks, terrible drivers, cultural 'extremeists' .. ) by the Anglophone community, and so they vice-versa it. By this point, its pointless to argue who started it, but just be aware that they are treated very poorly by the english speaking communities in Canada.
..
It makes sense here. English speaking Canada seems like its in a rush to dump its own heritage and become, for all intents and purposes, culturally American. The French have AMAZING culture, music, art, etc, so they have every right to try and protect it, but it does tend to end up in inter-cultural tension.
Oh well. I just hope you can appreciate that Canada treats the francophone community in the same way they treated you. I certainly am not condoning your treatment, but the really do get no respect, despite being on the leading edge of many of the cultural movements that eventually get popularized in the english culture. I can understand the source of their frusteration
Tim Hortons does well, not because of their donuts, but because of their coffee. I dont see too many people buying donuts, but to this day, despite only offering a house blend, they still seem to be everybit as popular a destination for coffee as the million-flavour Stabucks' et all ..
Why, you might ask?
Fear, uncertainty and doubt. I mean, here we are, trying to convince to casual consumers that MS intentionally attempts to confuse people, and we wrap it in a confusing acronym?!
I mean, how counter-purpose can you get?
Good. Techies who work for salary alone are going to be the ones I'll hold resposible for implementing the SSSCA .....
....
Work for the love, not the money. Techies are overpaid anyhow, although I will admit that they do tend to need to buy expensive toys for the home in order to stay competative in their industry as an exmplouee
>Not to mention that the tech workforce there is subsidized by the Canadian government
Depends what industry. Obviously, our social programs which are not privatized are indeed paid by the government. The film industry gets breaks, not in salary subsidizing, but in tax breaks, mostly.
Other than that, the lower expectations of standards of living, cheaper services (postal, health) has alot to do with lower salary demands. Make no mistake, too much privatization leads to higher costs of living, albeit maybe better products and services.
Old hat tho. It happens (happened) in every industry. As the tech market becomes more 'bricks and mortar', the US will likely outsource much of its labour, although, as usual, not its executive staff.
Tsk tsk.
... )
Imperialist nations gained wealth by colonizing. Coperate imperialism is essentially the same thing:
a) Replace colonization with foreign investment.
b) Replace the imperial armies with the WTO (which has more international legal power than the UN, to put that in perspective)
c) Colonization usually occured when a country had no means of protecting themselves. Today, most countries have guns (tho, ironically, this is in part thanks to American industries), and thus colonization by force would be much more bloody and descructive to the colonizers than it was in many other situations. (I'm talking about the intial colonizations, as many colonies staged a revolt once they had sufficient firepower.)
d)Infmation and media gets around much quicker these days, so colonization must be more undercover and subtle. (See the IMF
> one in five people in the U.S. is either an immigrant or a first-generation American
Not much of a point if you accept (and this is of course very subjective):
a) That the conditions in many countries are due to economic conditions and pressures stemming from the scale and success of the American economy. People have to move because much of the conditions in their home countries are due to governments being bought by large multinationals or multinationals investing in a country, only to pollute it or destroy the quality of life there through competition or otherwise.
b) People's impressions of the US come through the media, which is heavily filtered. I don't know how many immigrants I've met who had a totally different view of what living in North America would be like.
c) The US offers high salaries to educated folks. Hell, in Canada, where no doctor is in *any* danger of starving, our doctors are moving down there for the higher wages, which is much of the reason your healthcare is expensive, and our health care has extremely long wait times. (Which is interesting, as it runs counter to the American economic system's usual 'most efficient use of resources' claim.)
You can't paint imperialist nations as evil war mongers, and then say the US is all good because they dont send over an army to take over countries. The US has far more efficient, effective, and equally destructive means' (see Columbia) of taking over other nations.
Which isn't to say the US is evil. It's just to say that you're only judging the 'goodness' of the US by comparing its practices against practices of old. Different times, different cultures, different economic system, different everything. The end result is the same tho - the US enjoys unprecedented power over the entire world. Even the other Imperialist nations didn't have the economic (which is to say power over policy and decision making world-wide) might the US currently enjoys. Compare China today to China 300 years ago, and you could say they are 'saints' today. Yet we know better (although it didn't stop the US from letting them into the WTO, interestingly enough.)
Rewarding for 'good behaviour' removes the social meaning behind the behaviour. People will karma-whore like you've never seen, if it means getting credit towards subscriptions, etc.
You'd end up with a self-affirming group of posters who only post ideas thatare supported by the active moderatorship's ideology, which does a disservice to any attempt at objective discourse.
Okay, so they arn't all execs, but you get the idea. The house is packed! What a fun looking club to be in! I mean, its still a pretty damn tight family ......
From www.michaelmoore.com (opens in new window .. his report has links to all sources):
> The only thing that surprises me more than all the Enron henchmen who ended up in your cabinet and administration is how our lazy media just rolled over and didn't report it. The list of Enron people on your payroll is impressive. Lawrence Lindsey, your chief economic advisor? A former advisor at Enron! Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill? Former CEO of Alcoa, whose lobbying firm, Vinson and Elkins, was the #3 contributor to the your campaign! Who is Vinson and Elkins? The law firm representing Enron! Who is Alcoa? The top polluter in Texas. Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army? A former vice-chair of Enron Energy! Robert Zoellick, your Federal Trade Representative? A former advisor at Enron! Karl Rove, your main man at the White House? He owned a quarter-million dollars of Enron stock.
Then there's the Enron lawyer you have nominated to be a federal judge in Texas, the Enron lobbyist who is your chair of the Republican Party, the two Enron officials who now work for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and the wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm who sits on Enron's board. And there's the aforementioned Mr. Pitt, the former Arthur Andersen attorney whose job it is now as SEC head to oversee the stock markets. George, it never stops! My fingers are getting tired typing all this up -- and there's lots more.
Uhoh. Someont bit the bait. Read again:
...
.. the point is, the system is getting fucked worse and worse each day, and people's answer seems to be, "Well, give all the power to X!" Howabout giving (relatively) no power to ALL, you know, how your used-to-be-great country started out, as I understand it.
> Republicrats
I agree. They're both the same. The difference is that Republicans can be bought for cheaper.
> Enron-is-connected-to-Bush-and-Cheney
Connected? There's, what, 10 former Enron execs on Bush's cabinet? His campaign jet was from Enron. Connected, maybe, if you mean like how men and women make babies
The real crisis that Americans seem loathe to deal with is that there is too much centralized power and wealth. Whether you think its the companies, the gov, the companies vicariously through the gov
Power corrupts. Not legislative powers, nor resource to profit. Any power corrupts, and yet getting power is the motus operandi of the post-80s economy. The vision was that any Joe Shmoe could get rich, but now everyone's finding out that even Joe Shmoe turns into a self-affirming mantra-spewing gov-buying asshole once he gets rich.
Wiked dude, thanks. The tidbit about attempting to keep their bandwidth costs low is an interesting insight I hadn't considered.
:)
Google certainly represents the kind of corperate vision I wished there was more of. They actually seem to be interested in sustaining off the virtue of their technology and public image, not their sales & marketing departments.
1) Duh. And MS could turn nice. But while "Their goal is to make a profit, not benefit the community." is, of course true, the question really should be "What are they willing to do to grow?" You'll note that the most unethical companies tend to be the ones that have the largest visions of grandeur. Some companies are content to stay the same size if it allows them to serve their market's needs sustainably while still turning a profit. It's usually the unmitigated desire to grow, grow, grow that turns companies into scammers. So long as Google doesn't want to expand their services horizontaly, the risk of them compromising their current ethical standards is fairly low.
.. I'm sure they've already investaged the opportunity, if not done so.
2) Duh.
3) Sounds fun to me, although I'd support just forcing them to rename themselves a la Yellow Pages instead of a Search Engine. But culture jamming is cool, no args here.
4) Nothing. I think I recall a story about them having bought "Linux". As for "monopoly", why on earth would they do that? I mean, do you think they'd buy links for "companies with anti-competative practices"? But "Linux" and "open Source"
>"Yellow pages pay for the printing and distribution of white pages"
Sigh. Yeah, but the Yellow Pages are not called a "Search Engine". They are called a "Directory Listing". It's much more obvious to people that ads are ads, listings are listings, and none of the entries are there out of the goodness of the Yellow Page publishers' hearts.
A better analogy would be to 'merge' the yellow pages with the white pages. Assume there are 425,432 people named 'Mike Smith'. Finding Mike Smith's phone number is annoying. But now you have to deal with 500,000 more bought (even if indicated on the page) 'Mike Smiths'. Its not even so much that people are fooled into thinking commercial entries with non-commercial, but rather that the sponsorship of the product is getting in the way of the original intent of the product. In this case, now you have one million Mike Smith entries to check out. In the case of web searches, that page with the result you wanted might have been the 4th page without sponsored entries, but now it's on the 30th page.
There's nothing wrong with sponsorship, but everything wrong with it when it reduces the effectiveness of the product or service it's financially supporting. I mean, whats the point?
> Another reason to love the Google thang
How long until the laws of (current) economics catch up with Google, and they can no longer afford to do the right thing?
Does anyone have any insight into Google's money situation? Where the money comes from? Are they are taking losses on traffic? Could they economically handle disillutioned surgers from all the other search engines?
Or is it just that the other search engines will do anything for a buck?
Someone hire him in bizdev!
Society honours is live conformists (Balmer, Gates) and it's dead trouble makers (ESR).
It really doesn't matter if people buy a zealot's rants. It's the ideological equivilent of 'branding'. The ideas will assume a much more moderate and socially applicable tone should the seeds the ESRs and RMSs are planting today take cultural root in the next few decades, and thats what matters.
Nothing changes in one day by the work of one person. Sadly, those who stand up and talk for forward-thinking principals are usually branded as extremists today, but only a fool doesn't aknolwedge the fact that they themselves are more interested in starting a slow social shift in attitudes rather than expecting the world to drop everything and follow their lead tommorow.
I agree to a point. The software world is dangerously sales-driven (My uncle coined the term "Real Time Sales Driven Development", or RTSDD for short. It makes extreme programming look like a gentle stroll through the park.), and defiantely could do with some professional ceritifcation regulations that slow down the clamour to develop the latest buzzword. To some degree, I'm sure the situation is much better at insitutions that have used software systems for many years (ie, banks, etc) than consumer-facing industries ('net access providers, ASP providers, OS *cough* vendor). The CS degree seems to be how companies evaluate the 'professionalism' of a programmer, but I think its a misplaced faith. More important than that would be audits and guidelines that must be adhered to by a regulatory body.
Of course, those addicted to the worderful world of 'slave-to-the-market innovation at the speed of e-business and shit' probably shudder to the thought, but can you imagine if designing buildings were subjected to the kind of rush-out-the-door development tempo that many dev houses have? Sure buildings have people, but softweare systems hold processes and business logic, which surplanted people long ago in terms of marketplace value.
It'd probably result in greater long range vision for the software industry as a whole as well.
> Humans are way too good at altering their environment to have natural selection play a role in expressing genes
Says who? Gene selection may ultimately see the shucking of gene's responsible for our desire to control our enviornment.
Also, our species is young, and our 'control' experiment is *extremely, extremely* young.
> Once science gets good enough at it EVERYONE will be smart and healthy
Except that while we may wish to blend in, we are also driven by a need to stand out. If everyone's 'smart', we simply offload our judgements of whats 'smart' or 'good' onto other things we have no control over. (Maybe back to racism? Oh, then we can ask our kids to have a non-hate-inviting skin tone.)
All control we execise is an illusion. We solve problems, more crop up as a result. That's the human experience, although our economy relies so heavily on ignoring that simple fact that we can't possibly conceed to it until we experience the next major shift in cultural and social values and beliefs.
> So I can go out and make 100 copies of a Brittney Spears CD and hand them out at about $0.50 a copy
.. ) on the industries bottom line.) The total misrepresentation of heman behaviour du jour seems to be 'if you can rip someone off, you will'. Untrue. Untrue untrue untrue. Sure, you can come up with tons of examples of people who do rip off [insert whatever]. But think about it - the people that dont are totally unheard. The counter case is the totally silent case, so it's easy to buy the falsity that if people CAN get away with unethical behaviour, they will, and must be stopped by means of force at all costs.
.. The Matrix, or Lord of the Rings. We'd have cheap crap like Plan 9 from Outer Space.
.... they want to keep growing, and they can't accept the reality that Quality of Product does not increase proportionally with scale, size of budgets, size of industry .. etc. It doesn't. It simply does NOT.
/can/, not because the quality of whats being sold (nevermind that tons of the songs are __about__ getting your own and getting the leg up on the next sucker) and that the social climate has changed. I mean, culture seems to be infatuated with America's favorite passtime: ripping someone else off. There is very little discussion of whether this has been happenning all along, all century - and whether or not its always just been a Cost of Doing Business. I content that seeking to 'correct' the 'problem' will do society far more harm than good.
/need/ encryption to keep these industries viable, you have very little faith in humanity and a grossly misplaced faith in the purpoded 'needs' of an already overblown and overrrated model of an economy. The economy should reflect the social needs of the people operating under it - there is no way that people should be forced to BEND for that economy; because the whole purpose of the economy in the first place is to facilitate happiness. Don't you think it's a little twisted to change the laws for 300 million people to help (at most) 60,000 people make a higher standard of living?
Wow! Really! You can! Man, you must be able to make a killing! Wow, everyone must be doing this! Geez, our whole economy is going to collapse, because suddenly everyone can copy shit really easily! (Unlike cassettes, of course.) Oh boy! The sky is falling! Hey, and I just figured out that you could sneak out at night, paint everyone's car in your neighbourhood green with a 5$ can of paint, and sell them 'Original FInish Recovery' systems the next day for 50$ a pop! OH MY GOD! THE WORLD IS GOING TO GO CRAZY UNLESS WE MAKE SURE CARS HAVE ROBOTIC ARMS THAT SLAP AWAY PEOPLE APPROACHING THEM WITH A PAINT CAN!
(Ok, get my drift? If it's so easy to burn and profit off other people's work, why have I yet to see __anyone__ selling Britanny Spears' CDs? Sure, we copy them for free, but I've yet to come into contact with any kind of piracy-for-profit story that has a significant impact (cause its always been going on, bootlegs, et al
>
Yeah! And we get Pearl Harbour, and Roller Ball, and Jar Jar Binks! Man, am I glad we dont get any cheapo movies like "The Sting" or "Oceans Eleven" or "Being John Malkovitch"! You're attitude is the very reason the industry is scrambling
I mean, holy crap dude. Do you really believe the garbage you're spewing here?
Ever since we started coutning things and writing them down, we act like piracy et al never existed before we started tracking it. And as piracy increases, we act like its only because people
If you really beleive we
The problem is, we need to be /paid/ to 'bounty hunt each other', which leads me to believe there is NOTHING wrong.
.. ), not the other way around. We really need to get around this mentality that people should bend to the economy. Really, the economy should bend to the behaviour of the people. If they are copying content illegally to an extend that damages the viability of the business, that tells me that record companies should stop spending so much money on their projects, to help bring down the cost of sales.
Think about it. You simply can't hold a nation hostage for breaking laws designed to protect a small minority of content producers and distributors. The economy's purpose is to serve the behavior of society (ie, its true purpose is supposedly to allow us to gain the resources required to do the things that make us happy, from surviving to sky diving
Record execs always take the 'people will take it for free, if they can'. That is hogwash. We all know it. History has borne that people have no problem volounteering payment for something if they feel its worth it. If they are stealing it in such droves as to destroy the viability of the industry, then there is something wrong with how the industry is conducting is business, not something wrong with technology facilitating the supposed 'unmitigated greed' of the consumer.
I've always laughed at the notion of boycotts as a form of protest. The protest is in seeking out the product at lower cost. Yes, as long as the choices are too expensive, or not high quality, or something along those lines, and free, people will take the free, because there is no middle ground to offer a fair price. Once we stop legislating technology laws to regulate social behaviour, and start respecting that our behaviour is a reflection of the value we place on things, we will find the proper balances in these types of over-grown industries.
To sum up: What would it take for a large industry like the music industry to recognize (at great cost) that they are perhaps over estimating the viability of the scale and manners in which they go about their business? When will we say, "Hey, people just dont seem to buy into that?" Do we need to legislate ourselves to death, and then watch profits drop off the face of the earth? I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be justified in drawing the same conclusions pre-legislation. Bounty hunters would be a bandaid on a pattern of social behavior that pretty much prooves that the consumer is being held ransom for the basic human need to listen to music.
Awesome ad. I agree. I'm in Canada, and I can only thank god that while we endevour to treat the problem in the same manner of the states (ie, drug problems as criminal problems), we tend to do it on a smaller scale and are generally less religeous about the whole issue. More socialist, although its quickly fading ...
Anyhow, fascinating ad. It will surely be passed on.
Forget that they are unenforcable. You know as well as I do that our sports stars, our movie stars, your friends, family .. etc .. would go to jail if they actually enforced the law.
.. I think the American drug war organization gets like 20 BILLION dollars a year, and thats the government organzation alone .. forget the industries who rely on technological means of solving the drug problem in the US). This is why it is in the best interests of the board that fights this war not to conceed in either reductions in drug uses, nor conceed that the way it is being fought is unsustainable in the long run.
The laws are there only to justify the industry they support (the drug war industry is massive
Anyhow, same for Hollywood. They want to fight what is essentially, a social war, as a technological one. As the war on drugs has shown, they will fail, and yet, we will lose by virtue of their impotant efforts.
>3rd party Copyright bounty hunters
Oh yeah. Make an industry out of persecuting copyright infringment. Then we'll have to make sure people keep breaking the law (or just keep tightening the law) to keep the industry viable, JUST like the war on drugs.
Sigh.