And don't give any BS about them just obeying the law in China
I never did. I grew in Soviet Union, so I will be the last to defend the laws of any communist regime. I know people who's neighbours dissappeared overnight after a visit from NKVD (the future KGB) in the late evening. By morning the whole family vanished...kids and all.
So, sorry , no sympathy for China here and no sympathy for Google either, for that matter.
I have mentioned this in other of my posts , but I'll say it again. Many people make the mistake and treat companies like they treat individuals: they expect honesty, integrity, feelings ("How could they fire me! I have a family!"), charity and so on. All those things are true of very small companies when image/character of the company = image/character of owners. As the companies get bigger they become money machines. That is all the comanies are and the only reason why they exist - to make $$$ at whatever cost.
The tricky part is that no company will ever want you to know that. They will go to great lengths to put up a nice fake front. "Oh we care about the comunity", "Oh we'll do not evil" and so on. But as soon as it comes down to $$$ , all that goes out of the door. People are fired, plants are being closed, whole towns left without jobs, censorships is supported and so on.
I know, I know... "many companies will donate money to charities" but that is only because they have done some cost analysis and determined that if they donate money to a local museum and create a "Google Exhibit Room" or a "P&G Hall" it will be pretty good advertisement too. Try and find out to see how often those corporation would give money to local homeless shelters if that meant having absolutely no publicity? -None.
And I am sure Google has been very smart about its image. Someone at Google, (Sergei or Larry) said "Hey let's make our company the nicest! We'll win the market that way. Everyone will be mean and evil, but we'll stick for the "little guy", we'll be super nice!" People believed (like you did) and then they got dissapointed.
I am not against capitalism and big corporations, and I am not pro government control or communism. I just hope people see companies for what they are: money making machines and that's it. No niceness, no honesty not other "virtues" should be expected from them, no matter what they claim and whatever publicity front they put up.
The problem is not with me but with your "you must be... therefore you are..." type arguments. So instead of evaluating the argument you just guessed and put me into a category (I never said I was anything) then attacked that category. So that still doesn't say how my argument or opinion is invalid, it doesn't say anything about me it just shows that you are ignorant. No wonder your score is 1. Learn to talk to people and provide constructive criticism if you want to be taken seriously...
People don't have to stop having sex, they just need to be careful. It is like saying that "because driving kills most adults in US -- driving should be stopped". But all that needs to happen is for people to be careful. and here is where education comes into play. Dating doesn't have to be stopped, people should just not have unprotected sex on the 3rd date. Honest prostitution should be legalized. The number of the truly stupid would have to be reduced. On a large scale, education and better living standards might help. But if they choose not to listen, they will eventually end up in jail or dead -- it is their choice. They should be informed about and then decide.
Those who are extremely stupid will end up in jails anyway -- it will be expensive to feed them but so be it, I'll pay taxes to keep my white trash neighbours in jail before I'll pay taxes to fund their drug use and their welfare checks.
We do live in a world of self denial, we are even in denial about our denial (the same thing really...). Everyone today will defend their and others behaviors as "just natural" -- the animals do it, so I will do it too, It's in my genes and I can't help it. "The genes made me rob that store, your honor!" Pesonal responability and restraint is something that is fading away and there is not sign of it coming back.
They why not try to raise the living standards in those countries. Don't you think that if we vaccinate them for AIDS and leave them to be the way they are, we are not helping them that much. For them there will always be "another AIDS", it could be an STD, it could be Malaria, or substance abuse of just starvation. Finding an AIDS vaccine will make some drug company very-very rich. And then when another disease comes, some other company will become wealthy and so on, but the people who suffer the most will still be living in the same conditions, just dying from a different disease.
But I think that is the real problem, not AIDS. A cure for AIDS would be just a small band-aid, there will always be "another AIDS" that comes after it, and will affect the same segment of the population. Don't you think that poverty, starvation, a total lack of education, explotation of human beings is a much larger problem, that if fixed, will also get rid of AIDS.
It is not only true of Africa, poor kids in the NY "Projects" are not too far from that condition. But the thing is if we vaccinate them for AIDS, don't you think there will be another disease like Malaria, or say some STD, even substance abuse, that will eventually shorten the lives of those people? So why not try and raise the living standards in those countries.
Here is when a good number of people will object and say: "Who are we to impose our democracy and education system on some tribe in Africa, their way of living is their business!" -- and to that I would say that "if there there are human rights violations, if children are starving, if girls are forced into prostitution or early marriage, if life expectancy is only 30 years then we have the duty to help." If we would ask those 12 year old brides: "Would you like to go to school and learn a trade so you can be independent? Would you like to have a choice to whom you will marry?", I bet most of them will say "Yes" to that. Now that will increase her life expectancy by much longer than just vaccinating her against AIDS.
With HIV/AIDS plus Herpes and other STDs casual sex without protection has become inherently unhealthy. It is kind of like smoking. If one chooses to engage is unprotected sex with random partners, the odds are that person eventually will get a nice bouqet of STD and perhaps AIDS, just like if one smokes for the most part of their lives, they should not be surprized if they eventually get lung cancer. This needs to be told to everyone, which involves of course raising the living standards and improving education anywhere from Africa to the NY "Projects." I'll agree to funnel my tax money into that rather than to pay to save those who already decided to throw their lives away.
Well, it works for me: I will not have sex with a stranger now that I know about HIV/AIDS and all those STDs! Most people that I know would probably do likewise. The thing is that people don't need to have sex, they want to have sex. The good thing is, they can still have sex but they just need to know to protect themselves. Why should my tax money pay for someone who can't keep it in their pants and doesn't want to be bothered with a condom, and then gets AIDS. Most often than not AIDS is a choice (albeit, an indirect one) not an accident. When someone says -- 'I will have unprotected sex with stragners and I don't care what happens', they might as well sign a medical insurance waver that says 'If I get AIDS, don't waste public money and research time treating me, I wanted this!'. By the way, if there is proof that cancer and heart disease is also mostly environmental, then I would also argue that less money should be funneled into that research as well.
People just need to know about consequences and making choices, that's the point.
Good point. That is why I always wonder why so much research time and money is put in to HIV/AIDS. It seems to be a completely preventable disease. Why isn't all that money put into educating people and controlling blood transfusions. If the money must be used for research, why not study the Avian Flu or Malaria -- things that could spread without individuals being able to do much about it.
Speaking of dumptrucks full of money, I still don't understand why are so many resourses being poured into HIV/AIDS research? I would think all that money could go into educating people and focusing on prevention. AIDS seems to be a completely preventable disease -- all that needs to change is sexual behavior and blood transfusion methods. It is not a disease that someone gets from shaking hands or riding on a bus with others, or eating contaminated food, not even by being bitten by insects. In other words the individuals, except in very rare circumstances have control whether will get HIV/AIDS or not. I understand that the infants born with it have no choice -- but the mothers do. Educating the children or the mothers could help stop the spread.
The point is not that AIDS research should be completely stopped but that it should be proportional to how contageous it is and how much the individuals can prevent it. It seems that research should be more focused on Avian Flu, SARS, Malaria and such.
I would also argue that cancer and heart disease to a certain degree is preventable, if the invididuals care enough to lead a healthy life-style, but with these two it is not as clear cut and there might be a strong genetic component to them but there isn't a one-time event of infection that can be obviously avoided.
To put it another way, if I smoke, eat fried fatty foods and have sex with anyone without protection, knowing what that will do to me -- why should I be shocked if I get cancer, AIDS or die of a heart disease. And why should researchers spend years on end and millions of tax money to save my sorry ass if I clearly made my choice?
If Moller's sky-cars work, why aren't we seeing them flying around? -- That is what they are designed for, isnt' it? One can argue that not too many people see the NASA satelites, but we all know they work. But that is because they were designed to go into orbit and not be seen by very many people, but these Moller cars were supposed to replace the cars that people use every day, so if they work we would see zoom by in the sky every morning while we are stuck in traffic.
The thing is though, it would need to produce enough positive net output to justify the costs of building and running it over its lifetime, but at this time, even with enough budget, it doesn't seem that it could happen.
The Law of the Hydrogen Fusion (LHF) is therefore this: "No matter what time/date/place it is -- Hydrogen Fusion is only 30-45 years away."
In pre-historic times: a chimp useses a stick as a tool -- all the other chimps: "Holy Crap, Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep..."
Exponential fast-forward to 1950s: first H-Bomb is detonated -- everyone else: "Cool, we can bomb the hell out of each other, oh and we almost forgot: Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep Hooray!"
2006: After everyone else has tried to contain/control hydrogen fusion, the Chinese announce they will build a cheaper and funtional Hydrogen Fusion Reactor -- everyone else "Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! W00t!"
My reply was written by a program I wrote on punchcards and ran it on an IBM mainframe -- so there! I'll see your Fortran and raise it by a punchard reader!
I agree about the point about the small businesses. For a family-owned company, the company is the family: if they are charitable and honest then the company will be charitable and honest. But the bigger the company gets the more this sense of company morality/culture gets diluted.
This is partly true with any group of individuals. Try and assign a group of a 100 people to care for a homeless man say teach him to dress, talk, get a job, take care of himself and so on. One would expect that man to be taken care of 100x better than if it was just a single worker trying to help him, but in reality it might be just the opposite, because the sense of responsibility gets diluted. An interesting observation from psychology is that large groups tend to regress and act more brutal than individuals alone, in other words the totals are less than the sum of its individual parts.
I think the same applies to large corporations. And although there are many small businesses most money out there is probably in the hands of those huge companies.
You are right about the company culture, every single one has "company values", "common vision", "company mottos", "constitutions" and so on. I am sure even Enron and WorldCom had them. In other words, there are no companies out there that will say "we don't car e about anyone, we are here only to make money."
The difficulty is to really find out the inner motive for certain apparently charitable works done by companies. Of course they will say that it comes out of good values, each company will try to project itself as a great benefactor for the society. I contend that large companies even when they engage in such things it is still as a result of a cost-analysis and it is all about the bottom line.
Also, as you mentioned, when the company is in trouble the employees go first. BUT WHY? Why not, try to cut the salaries of the CEOs (do they really do 100x as hard of a work than a programmer in the cubicle? - Can you put the programmer from the cubicl in a tux and have him run meetings and drive in limos to expensive lunches at 5 star restaurants, I think so with just a little social coaching!). What if the CEO agreed to be payed $3 million as opposed to $5 million, but save 1000 employees from being fired? A truly good and charitable company would do that. Another interesting thing would be to find out how many companies would donate anonymously. Say, shell out $1 million dollars they wanted to use to build a "P&G Exhibit" or "Enron Hall" at the local musem for a local program to increase the police patrols in the poor areas of the neighbourhood, or to a local homeless shelter. Do you think they would do it, if they could not use it somehow for a self-promotion? - I think not!
I was just trying to provide my view how companies function. I think I was mostly agreeing with you.
But as far as the Ford example -- Ford himself might have been altruistic -- but companies as a whole cannot -- as seen by the reaction of the shareholders. I even doubt how altruistic Ford had been, given that he still made good profits perhaps exactly because he took the risk to sell for a lot less than people at the time thought he should.
In the case of Google, I do think they are nice guys too, and I admire them. But at the same time -- I can argue that it pays well to make yourself look like a nice guy. So we don't really know if Sergei and Larry are just very nice or they know that being nice will help and thus they want to project that image.
There is another issue here of company size. If the company is small and it is just a family run business, the there is still this equivalence between a person and company. So the face of the owner = face of the company. If the owner is nice - the company is nice and vice-versa. As the organization gets larger, and it is ruled by chairmen and a zillion CEO/CFO/COOs and shareholder votes, then the company looses the person behind it and it turn into a purely money making machine. I am not saying capitalism is bad, I just wish people regarded the corporations for what they really are.
People always forget and try to deal with large companies as if they are individuals with morals, feeling and so on. The companies are not like that, they exist only to make money and will only do whatever makes them more money (I am talking about for-profit organisations only here).
Here is when everyone will say, but isn't such and such company donating to such and such charity? -Yes, but only because they did a cost/marketing analysis and determined that it will generate good publicity to do just that. How come a lot charitable giving from companies is to museums, operas, local TV stations and not as much to soup kitchens for the homeless or rehabilitation of drug addicts and such? - Because that would not generate as much good publicity!
The same with Google. Everyone thinks - "Oh Google, the defender of the consumers, we love you!" - but Google needs that attitude too, that is in part why they are so profitable. It is (or it should) be every company's dream to be perceived like a noble, charitable, honest and good entity - existing solely to help and benefit everyone else, but in reality there is not such thing - there is just $$$. Microsoft can afford to be bully and be mean -- because it already secured most of the software market, I think they will loose out in the end but that's not because they are just a "mean bad bully" but because their strategy/marketing team did bad forecasting .
Thanks for Prokudin-Gorskii link. I grew up in Russia but didn't hear much about him. His work is absolutely stunning - to have such great vibrant color photographs taken at the turn of the century!
Slashdot Mirror
I never did. I grew in Soviet Union, so I will be the last to defend the laws of any communist regime. I know people who's neighbours dissappeared overnight after a visit from NKVD (the future KGB) in the late evening. By morning the whole family vanished...kids and all.
So, sorry , no sympathy for China here and no sympathy for Google either, for that matter.
The tricky part is that no company will ever want you to know that. They will go to great lengths to put up a nice fake front. "Oh we care about the comunity", "Oh we'll do not evil" and so on. But as soon as it comes down to $$$ , all that goes out of the door. People are fired, plants are being closed, whole towns left without jobs, censorships is supported and so on. I know, I know ... "many companies will donate money to charities" but that is only because they have done some cost analysis and determined that if they donate money to a local museum and create a "Google Exhibit Room" or a "P&G Hall" it will be pretty good advertisement too. Try and find out to see how often those corporation would give money to local homeless shelters if that meant having absolutely no publicity? -None.
And I am sure Google has been very smart about its image. Someone at Google, (Sergei or Larry) said "Hey let's make our company the nicest! We'll win the market that way. Everyone will be mean and evil, but we'll stick for the "little guy", we'll be super nice!" People believed (like you did) and then they got dissapointed.
I am not against capitalism and big corporations, and I am not pro government control or communism. I just hope people see companies for what they are: money making machines and that's it. No niceness, no honesty not other "virtues" should be expected from them, no matter what they claim and whatever publicity front they put up.
Verizon, not to be outdone, patents the "Send" button
The problem is not with me but with your "you must be ... therefore you are..." type arguments. So instead of evaluating the argument you just guessed and put me into a category (I never said I was anything) then attacked that category. So that still doesn't say how my argument or opinion is invalid, it doesn't say anything about me it just shows that you are ignorant. No wonder your score is 1. Learn to talk to people and provide constructive criticism if you want to be taken seriously...
Those who are extremely stupid will end up in jails anyway -- it will be expensive to feed them but so be it, I'll pay taxes to keep my white trash neighbours in jail before I'll pay taxes to fund their drug use and their welfare checks.
We do live in a world of self denial, we are even in denial about our denial (the same thing really...). Everyone today will defend their and others behaviors as "just natural" -- the animals do it, so I will do it too, It's in my genes and I can't help it. "The genes made me rob that store, your honor!" Pesonal responability and restraint is something that is fading away and there is not sign of it coming back.
They why not try to raise the living standards in those countries. Don't you think that if we vaccinate them for AIDS and leave them to be the way they are, we are not helping them that much. For them there will always be "another AIDS", it could be an STD, it could be Malaria, or substance abuse of just starvation. Finding an AIDS vaccine will make some drug company very-very rich. And then when another disease comes, some other company will become wealthy and so on, but the people who suffer the most will still be living in the same conditions, just dying from a different disease.
But I think that is the real problem, not AIDS. A cure for AIDS would be just a small band-aid, there will always be "another AIDS" that comes after it, and will affect the same segment of the population. Don't you think that poverty, starvation, a total lack of education, explotation of human beings is a much larger problem, that if fixed, will also get rid of AIDS.
It is not only true of Africa, poor kids in the NY "Projects" are not too far from that condition. But the thing is if we vaccinate them for AIDS, don't you think there will be another disease like Malaria, or say some STD, even substance abuse, that will eventually shorten the lives of those people? So why not try and raise the living standards in those countries.
Here is when a good number of people will object and say: "Who are we to impose our democracy and education system on some tribe in Africa, their way of living is their business!" -- and to that I would say that "if there there are human rights violations, if children are starving, if girls are forced into prostitution or early marriage, if life expectancy is only 30 years then we have the duty to help." If we would ask those 12 year old brides: "Would you like to go to school and learn a trade so you can be independent? Would you like to have a choice to whom you will marry?", I bet most of them will say "Yes" to that. Now that will increase her life expectancy by much longer than just vaccinating her against AIDS.
With HIV/AIDS plus Herpes and other STDs casual sex without protection has become inherently unhealthy. It is kind of like smoking. If one chooses to engage is unprotected sex with random partners, the odds are that person eventually will get a nice bouqet of STD and perhaps AIDS, just like if one smokes for the most part of their lives, they should not be surprized if they eventually get lung cancer. This needs to be told to everyone, which involves of course raising the living standards and improving education anywhere from Africa to the NY "Projects." I'll agree to funnel my tax money into that rather than to pay to save those who already decided to throw their lives away.
People just need to know about consequences and making choices, that's the point.
The point is not that AIDS research should be completely stopped but that it should be proportional to how contageous it is and how much the individuals can prevent it. It seems that research should be more focused on Avian Flu, SARS, Malaria and such.
I would also argue that cancer and heart disease to a certain degree is preventable, if the invididuals care enough to lead a healthy life-style, but with these two it is not as clear cut and there might be a strong genetic component to them but there isn't a one-time event of infection that can be obviously avoided.
To put it another way, if I smoke, eat fried fatty foods and have sex with anyone without protection, knowing what that will do to me -- why should I be shocked if I get cancer, AIDS or die of a heart disease. And why should researchers spend years on end and millions of tax money to save my sorry ass if I clearly made my choice?
If Moller's sky-cars work, why aren't we seeing them flying around? -- That is what they are designed for, isnt' it? One can argue that not too many people see the NASA satelites, but we all know they work. But that is because they were designed to go into orbit and not be seen by very many people, but these Moller cars were supposed to replace the cars that people use every day, so if they work we would see zoom by in the sky every morning while we are stuck in traffic.
The thing is though, it would need to produce enough positive net output to justify the costs of building and running it over its lifetime, but at this time, even with enough budget, it doesn't seem that it could happen.
In pre-historic times: a chimp useses a stick as a tool -- all the other chimps: "Holy Crap, Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep..."
Exponential fast-forward to 1950s: first H-Bomb is detonated -- everyone else: "Cool, we can bomb the hell out of each other, oh and we almost forgot: Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep Hooray!"
2006: After everyone else has tried to contain/control hydrogen fusion, the Chinese announce they will build a cheaper and funtional Hydrogen Fusion Reactor -- everyone else "Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! W00t!"
My reply was written by a program I wrote on punchcards and ran it on an IBM mainframe -- so there! I'll see your Fortran and raise it by a punchard reader!
Also if you convert it to EBCDIC it looks like gibberish, so -- 'No' don't mod (grand) parent up as funny...
I would think for such a claim one would need more than just simple calculations .
But anyway, in other news: "Dark matter coming to a store near you."
Well, some people are cold in the winter you know...
This is partly true with any group of individuals. Try and assign a group of a 100 people to care for a homeless man say teach him to dress, talk, get a job, take care of himself and so on. One would expect that man to be taken care of 100x better than if it was just a single worker trying to help him, but in reality it might be just the opposite, because the sense of responsibility gets diluted. An interesting observation from psychology is that large groups tend to regress and act more brutal than individuals alone, in other words the totals are less than the sum of its individual parts.
I think the same applies to large corporations. And although there are many small businesses most money out there is probably in the hands of those huge companies.
You are right about the company culture, every single one has "company values", "common vision", "company mottos", "constitutions" and so on. I am sure even Enron and WorldCom had them. In other words, there are no companies out there that will say "we don't car e about anyone, we are here only to make money."
The difficulty is to really find out the inner motive for certain apparently charitable works done by companies. Of course they will say that it comes out of good values, each company will try to project itself as a great benefactor for the society. I contend that large companies even when they engage in such things it is still as a result of a cost-analysis and it is all about the bottom line.
Also, as you mentioned, when the company is in trouble the employees go first. BUT WHY? Why not, try to cut the salaries of the CEOs (do they really do 100x as hard of a work than a programmer in the cubicle? - Can you put the programmer from the cubicl in a tux and have him run meetings and drive in limos to expensive lunches at 5 star restaurants, I think so with just a little social coaching!). What if the CEO agreed to be payed $3 million as opposed to $5 million, but save 1000 employees from being fired? A truly good and charitable company would do that. Another interesting thing would be to find out how many companies would donate anonymously. Say, shell out $1 million dollars they wanted to use to build a "P&G Exhibit" or "Enron Hall" at the local musem for a local program to increase the police patrols in the poor areas of the neighbourhood, or to a local homeless shelter. Do you think they would do it, if they could not use it somehow for a self-promotion? - I think not!
But as far as the Ford example -- Ford himself might have been altruistic -- but companies as a whole cannot -- as seen by the reaction of the shareholders. I even doubt how altruistic Ford had been, given that he still made good profits perhaps exactly because he took the risk to sell for a lot less than people at the time thought he should.
In the case of Google, I do think they are nice guys too, and I admire them. But at the same time -- I can argue that it pays well to make yourself look like a nice guy. So we don't really know if Sergei and Larry are just very nice or they know that being nice will help and thus they want to project that image.
There is another issue here of company size. If the company is small and it is just a family run business, the there is still this equivalence between a person and company. So the face of the owner = face of the company. If the owner is nice - the company is nice and vice-versa. As the organization gets larger, and it is ruled by chairmen and a zillion CEO/CFO/COOs and shareholder votes, then the company looses the person behind it and it turn into a purely money making machine. I am not saying capitalism is bad, I just wish people regarded the corporations for what they really are.
did you do it with the same body and same settings, otherwise it might just not be only the resultion...
Here is when everyone will say, but isn't such and such company donating to such and such charity? -Yes, but only because they did a cost/marketing analysis and determined that it will generate good publicity to do just that. How come a lot charitable giving from companies is to museums, operas, local TV stations and not as much to soup kitchens for the homeless or rehabilitation of drug addicts and such? - Because that would not generate as much good publicity!
The same with Google. Everyone thinks - "Oh Google, the defender of the consumers, we love you!" - but Google needs that attitude too, that is in part why they are so profitable. It is (or it should) be every company's dream to be perceived like a noble, charitable, honest and good entity - existing solely to help and benefit everyone else, but in reality there is not such thing - there is just $$$. Microsoft can afford to be bully and be mean -- because it already secured most of the software market, I think they will loose out in the end but that's not because they are just a "mean bad bully" but because their strategy/marketing team did bad forecasting .
Thanks for Prokudin-Gorskii link. I grew up in Russia but didn't hear much about him. His work is absolutely stunning - to have such great vibrant color photographs taken at the turn of the century!
Light can be hard to keep out. Anyone using a 4x5 or 8x10 large format camera (the one with the bellows) can tell you...
Assembler instructions... ADD AX,BX ?