I don't think this will continue to be the case ; new tech creates new jobs only because humans are such flexible components of a working system.
Machine systems replace humans in a job when they approach or exceed the capabilities of the human in the same role. (They don't have to exceed the capability of a human to replace them - they just have to be more economic). As machines become capable of more, the number of roles in which a human can outperform a machine becomes smaller and smaller.
By definition, you need fewer workers for an economically viable system of robotic labour. And when you automate away cleaners (Roomba), register workers (self-service registers), and other menial jobs, you're not exactly opening up new working niches for these unskilled labourers.
A major news columnist, I forget who, recently proposed that maybe we are reaching the point where it is no longer a desirable social goal to have everyone in a job. I mean, the whole point of Progress is to eventually achieve a 100% unemployment rate, right? I'm libertarian to the core, but the idea struck me as one whose time may be coming.
You know, all that war, killing and hiding the truth could just end. Nah.
I think the problem here is that other countries intend to continue with the dirty deeds. If we intend to fight back (i.e. the CIA), our activities must remain secret, simply because most American's cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of "there are no good guys, not even us".
So you're trying to say that the only reason many employers are requiring degrees (or often experience levels) is to keep the black man down? Really? That's the reason?
Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity. Instead of some "keep certain minorities down" it seems far more likely that a trend got started where it might have made sense and then propagated, in the way of trends, on to areas where it makes less and less sense. Companies, or more likely HR departments, probably keep doing it for the same reasons they put out job requirements with insane lists of qualifications. Failure to research or think. Plus, possible company policies that a position over level X in the company requires a degree of level Y. A requirement that probably also got there in the same manner, a trend got started.
Your armchair conjecture does not hold up to scrutiny. The matter has actually been studied. Start with "Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing" by O'Keefe and Vedder.
Nope. Griggs simply said those tests have to be related to the job, and can't just be a way to weed out people whose skin color you don't like.
It is currently fashionable to believe that skin color (including culture) never has any correllation with one's value as an employee. So we are required to believe that we can ban tests as ethnic discrimination but leave them in place as skill discrimination.
Employers haven't done that. Written employment tests have been abandoned wholesale. So that tells us that there is more to the story... but in this ideological era, we are not allowed to investigate further.
Get rid of the social stigma attached to being non-degreed, get rid of the bogus requirement to have a degree, any degree, in order to 'succeed' (heh - and THAT's defining success as 'marginally above the poverty line and insured so that medical expenses are less likely to bankrupt you'), and we'll talk.
Until then this will continue.
We were put on this track by Griggs v. Duke Power Company. That decision banned employment tests because those tests were shown to discriminate against certain minorities. Without the test to filter out the applicants, employers sought for some other filter... and settled on the college degree, because the certain minorities tended to not have degrees. Full explanation here. The rest is history.
We'll only get out of this rut when we, as a society, find the will to say "Some groups of people have different abilities than others, and employers know this, so let them test and hire as they wish." Then we can drop the degree as a proxy test for whiteness, and stop wasting so many millions of manyears sending our youth through college.
My understanding is that the opposite is actually true. Silver for example has a lot more industrial uses than gold but the market is much more volatile. Admittedly part of the reason is that the silver market is much smaller than the gold market, but another major part has to do with the business cycle.
Your data about the silver market has been corrupted by JPMorgan and HSBC, acting in league with the Federal Reserve. Backstory here and many other places. Only recently, after their activities were exposed, is the silver market calming down and returning to the historical 15:1 price parity (arising from the metals' 15:1 geologic ratio) with gold.
No company can survive for very long once it becomes widely believed that they are serving as the clearinghouse/money laundering service for the criminals of the world. Banks would simply stop allowing people to wire their money to the company backing the cryptocurrency, and it would wither and die.
Other than the Vatican Bank of course. It is literally the "white collar" anonymous transfer service.
But why would you do that in the first place? I don't often convert my money to rupees on Friday and back to dollars on Sunday. And if you transferred it back on Friday surely you locked the rate then?
if you are forced to use a such a volatile implement you hedge anyway. Costs very little.
Very insightful.
Now, can you provide an equally insightful answer to the following question: with what do you hedge a position in bitcoin? There isn't an options market for bitcoins yet, and I can't think of any other security that moves opposite to them (seeing as how the world of bitcoins is so insular).
There's no need for indexing or backing for a [national] currency. There's a built in limit to money printing so even the normal expectation of not printing obscene amounts is enforced.
That doesn't work when money can be created electronically, by the central bank simply making an unmatched entry in its balance sheet.
According to the data, the US money supply (M2) has doubled since the year 2000, during a time period in which the total size of the backing economy has not kept up. Inflation, in other words. That means that the US has pilfered back between one-third and one-half of the value of the $3 trillion US dollars held in China's central bank.
Funny, isn't it? For the last twenty years, they've told us to worry about China owning too much US debt... and now we just snatched back a huge chunk of it by having some guy in Washington add a row to a spreadsheet.
What if he is? He just made a perfectly good point. These people are standing around sipping their lattes with signs that talk about "toppling" all businesses and whatnot. I'm sure they'll be happy when the case of the clap they got under a blanket at the protest is treated instead with the antibiotics made by the guy down the street with whom they've bartered pumpkin seeds and some hand-drawn manga books, what with The Man and is money-handling and his employees-making-antibiotics-in-actual-laboratories-and-all being Eeeeeeevil.
Hypocrisy is not a major sin... at least, outside of Leftism, which recognizes it as the ONLY sin.
I will give them a pass on their minor hypocrisy in order to listen to their broader message about the very serious evil called regulatory capture. The related whining about our society's current level of equality is forgettable, but the regulatory capture issue is dead serious.
This is kind of off topic, but this reminds me of an article I read (maybe in time magazine) that was about how in the next 40 years or so we will have computers powerful enough to emulate a human brain. The point of the article was that once we reach that capability, humans will basically become immortal because we would just copy our brains onto a computer and not have to worry about our fragile organic bodies failing on us.
You'll have to resolve the unresolvable "transporter problem" raised by Star Trek: if we create an atom-by-atom copy of your body and brain, and then destroy you, does your consciousness transfer to the copy? Or do you just end? Either way, the copy is going to insist that he is you and that there was no interruption in consciousness... but he would say that simply because of his memories.
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
My brother could contribute to the project. He was a pedigreed professor of finance who could teach anywhere he chose. After a few years he was offered tenure. He realized then that his job had become the mass-production of MBAs, very very few of whom were at all receptive to the most crucial idea he tried to impart to them: you should make money, not merely get money.
Seeing then that the fruit of his labors were ruining our society, he quit to start over becoming a EE. I admire him for that.
Some will consider you flippant or flamebait, but I think you've spoke more truth than you'll get credit for. The leader's personality percolates and pervades through an organization, driving out (directly and indirectly) those not orthogonal to it. HP had a different personality after her tenure than it did before.
You don't; and neither does most children in the US. Our school system its horribly broken.
Whether it's broken depends on what you think its purpose is.
For the purpose of babysitting our kids while we go to work, it provides amazing bang-for-the-buck, compared to hiring a babysitter or daycare. Judging by the (un)willingness of American parents to forego the new SUV in order to pay for private school, it seems that babysitting is the primary purpose of public school.
Also, be careful how you measure success. American schoolkids still score at the top compared to other countries... if you have the political will to look at the scores of just one race at a time. You probably don't have the will, and are now feeling the urge to score points by shrieking at me.
Blacking out the secrets clearly isn't a good strategy. Next time, they should just put whiteout on the screen to cover up the secret parts.
Blacking out the secrets is excellent strategy if the data is actually misinformation.
The cheapest way to win an arms race is to trick your opponent into believing that you've got better gear, without actually wasting billions of dollars on said gear.
Otherwise life would not be able to sustain itself. Its really quite obvious it really about translation from one for to another, and how much the translation process require in energy.
Look closer. Life is really powered by order. We take in high-order energy (carbohydrates) and exhaust low-order energy (heat, noise, movement). This allows us to maintain a high-order pattern (our body) in the face of entropy and decay.
Along these same lines, several additional survival courses are available:
Direct Meteor Strike Survival Course, offering tips on how to survive a massive meteorite landing on your city,
Ground Zero Nuclear Blast Survival Course, giving pointers and expert advice on surviving the nova-like heat and shock waves of a direct nuclear bomb hit, and
16-Ton Weight Falls On Your Head Survival Course, dispelling the myths and misconceptions that are common among people raised on Saturday morning
cartoons.
The news story also references an interesting article from researchers at Boston University School of Law (Bessen, James E. et al, 2011, 'The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls'), in which they analyze the effect of litigation on the wealth of the defendants via their stock's value before and after litigation, and given that such loss minimally translates into an increment in the wealth of the inventor, they determine that patent litigation harms society and removes incentives for innovation."
They find that litigation is a net financial loss, but they aren't including the attorney's fees, which probably balance it out to a net zero. However, an analysis of the movements of money is not sociologically interesting.
What is more interesting, is an analysis of the movements of wealth. First there is the matter of squandered wealth on the court proceeding itself, because that is a lot of manhours spent in producing useless arrangements of words on paper. And then there is the more serious question of who is using the wealth-behind-the-money more effectively... i.e. what was the defendent spending the money on versus what does the plaintiff end up spending the money on? Do plaintiffs invest their settlements into something comparably productive?
Remember, money is not wealth. Money is control of wealth. Moving money from wise hands into profligate hands is usually a net social loss.
Also, the article's implication is a non-sequitur. While it is true that patent trolling is a financial drag on the system, it does not follow that removing patents is a win. Without patents there would be problems with espionage, and the useless dissipation of wealth in protecting trade secrets.
However, the implication does not follow; it is NOT true that ending patents would
Because there is no GAAP way to express the value of customer loyalty,
Dude, I wish you the best of luck. Loyalty is the hot ass you crave after wedding the invisible hand.
Corporations bent on cultivating the next quarterly earnings report don't hold much enduring appeal to informed consumers wishing to build relationship equity with non-human entities. Where does the loyalty come to rest in this system? With suckers, if you can find them?
I agree that loyalty between a human and a corporation is, as a rule, farcical. And I am totally with you on the cynicism about the current socioeconomic patterns in the West.
There are exceptions, though. Not all corporations have reached the point of behaving 100% sociopathically. Some of them are still colored by the founders' personality. That coloration can be trusted -- certainly not 100%, and not forever, but not 0% either.
Also, corporations are not monolithic homogenous entities. I consider the Shell corporation to be sociopathic, but I know the owner of my local Shell station and I do trust him.
In summary, I agree with you that corn and corn byproducts are not good for anything but fattening up cows and pigs before slaughter, so I try to eat as little corn and corn byproducts as possible.
And it is hardly even suitable for that. I assume you already know about the stomach acidosis that afflicts corn-fed cows; this is why they require the large and continuous doses of antibiotics. There is also an important difference in fat type between corn-fed versus grass-fed meat. Grass-fed meat is high in the kinds of fats that are (this week) considered healthy, whereas corn-fed meat, being obese, is full of saturated fat.
I have to agree with you, food dosn't make people fat, people make themselves fat, parents deserve the full blame for childhood obiesity, not McDonnalds, not Doritos or Count Chocula.
When you can fully define the concept of 'choose', then you get the privilege of determining where blame lay for peoples' poor choices.
Your final definition must take into account the internal and external incentives, self-image and cognitive dissonance, peer pressure, blood sugar levels and nutritional effects, the apparent conflict between conscious and subconscious, the apparent notion that conscious decision-making occurs AFTER the action impulses have begun, the role of the pleasure center, and the problem of living in a clockwork universe built out of quantum indeterminacy.
Let us know when you've reached a conclusion, as it will shake the worlds of philosophy and religion right to their foundations.
Until then, the rest of us will continue to criticize those who knowingly manufacture substances that are carefully and intentionally engineered to overwhelm the consumer's self-discipline. And this is not just Doritos... I'm looking at you, Call of Duty.
Groupon is going to find itself in serious trouble soon due to an unsustainable business model and will be folding within the next 12-18 months?
Indeed. Groupon is in the same position that its retailer-customers are in: hooked on a ponzi-esque cycle of always needing another round of groupon signups. Businesses issue a groupon when they need the cash up front, and then later they get hit with the lossy customers, and need to do another groupon. Groupon itself seems to be in a similar situation.
In fairnes to Groupon, it seems like financial markets haven't yet worked out the right way to do valuations of companies like Groupon. Groupon is trying to explain that they have great potential that isn't quantifiable using GAAP. Everybody is mocking them for it, but how are they supposed to look good according to rules that were drawn up for brick-and-mortar, inventory-and-shelving companies?
Actually the same problem is writ even larger on the whole financial world. Because there is no GAAP way to express the value of customer loyalty, employee loyalty, brand loyalty, and so forth, MBAs come in and squander those precious things in order to increase items that GAAP does know how to express. "Look, realized earnings are up 12% this quarter because we moved production to China and in two years our customers will all leave when they realize we make junk now, where's my bonus?"
stop hiring out side MBA's and promote people from with in.
It may be better to get people who have / are working at HP to do CEO and VP level work then some out side person who does not know a lot about what goes on in the inside of HP.
That only works if your corporate culture is healthy. Unfortunately, personality pervades an organization from the top down, and HP has spent years under some comically dysfunctional personalities. Anyone who presently occupies a post in HP upper managment is, ipso facto, the problem rather than the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this will continue to be the case ; new tech creates new jobs only because humans are such flexible components of a working system.
Machine systems replace humans in a job when they approach or exceed the capabilities of the human in the same role. (They don't have to exceed the capability of a human to replace them - they just have to be more economic). As machines become capable of more, the number of roles in which a human can outperform a machine becomes smaller and smaller.
By definition, you need fewer workers for an economically viable system of robotic labour. And when you automate away cleaners (Roomba), register workers (self-service registers), and other menial jobs, you're not exactly opening up new working niches for these unskilled labourers.
A major news columnist, I forget who, recently proposed that maybe we are reaching the point where it is no longer a desirable social goal to have everyone in a job. I mean, the whole point of Progress is to eventually achieve a 100% unemployment rate, right? I'm libertarian to the core, but the idea struck me as one whose time may be coming.
You know, all that war, killing and hiding the truth could just end. Nah.
I think the problem here is that other countries intend to continue with the dirty deeds. If we intend to fight back (i.e. the CIA), our activities must remain secret, simply because most American's cannot handle the cognitive dissonance of "there are no good guys, not even us".
So you're trying to say that the only reason many employers are requiring degrees (or often experience levels) is to keep the black man down? Really? That's the reason?
Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity. Instead of some "keep certain minorities down" it seems far more likely that a trend got started where it might have made sense and then propagated, in the way of trends, on to areas where it makes less and less sense. Companies, or more likely HR departments, probably keep doing it for the same reasons they put out job requirements with insane lists of qualifications. Failure to research or think. Plus, possible company policies that a position over level X in the company requires a degree of level Y. A requirement that probably also got there in the same manner, a trend got started.
Your armchair conjecture does not hold up to scrutiny. The matter has actually been studied. Start with "Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing" by O'Keefe and Vedder.
Nope. Griggs simply said those tests have to be related to the job, and can't just be a way to weed out people whose skin color you don't like.
It is currently fashionable to believe that skin color (including culture) never has any correllation with one's value as an employee. So we are required to believe that we can ban tests as ethnic discrimination but leave them in place as skill discrimination.
Employers haven't done that. Written employment tests have been abandoned wholesale. So that tells us that there is more to the story... but in this ideological era, we are not allowed to investigate further.
Get rid of the social stigma attached to being non-degreed, get rid of the bogus requirement to have a degree, any degree, in order to 'succeed' (heh - and THAT's defining success as 'marginally above the poverty line and insured so that medical expenses are less likely to bankrupt you'), and we'll talk.
Until then this will continue.
We were put on this track by Griggs v. Duke Power Company. That decision banned employment tests because those tests were shown to discriminate against certain minorities. Without the test to filter out the applicants, employers sought for some other filter... and settled on the college degree, because the certain minorities tended to not have degrees. Full explanation here. The rest is history.
We'll only get out of this rut when we, as a society, find the will to say "Some groups of people have different abilities than others, and employers know this, so let them test and hire as they wish." Then we can drop the degree as a proxy test for whiteness, and stop wasting so many millions of manyears sending our youth through college.
My understanding is that the opposite is actually true. Silver for example has a lot more industrial uses than gold but the market is much more volatile. Admittedly part of the reason is that the silver market is much smaller than the gold market, but another major part has to do with the business cycle.
Your data about the silver market has been corrupted by JPMorgan and HSBC, acting in league with the Federal Reserve. Backstory here and many other places. Only recently, after their activities were exposed, is the silver market calming down and returning to the historical 15:1 price parity (arising from the metals' 15:1 geologic ratio) with gold.
Daffodils are a better investment.
Unless you take the time to dig up your tulip bulbs each year- the number of tulips each consecutive year goes down.
Daffodils on the other hand increase the size of their investment- you plant 10 this year- you'll have 15 next year.
Muscari bulbs would be better yet. You plant one this year- you'll have 12 trillion of them next year... they're like the tribbles of the bulb-world.
Actually I've seen hard data showing that the optimal cash-crop flower is the poppy. :)
No company can survive for very long once it becomes widely believed that they are serving as the clearinghouse/money laundering service for the criminals of the world. Banks would simply stop allowing people to wire their money to the company backing the cryptocurrency, and it would wither and die.
Other than the Vatican Bank of course. It is literally the "white collar" anonymous transfer service.
But why would you do that in the first place? I don't often convert my money to rupees on Friday and back to dollars on Sunday. And if you transferred it back on Friday surely you locked the rate then?
if you are forced to use a such a volatile implement you hedge anyway. Costs very little.
Very insightful.
Now, can you provide an equally insightful answer to the following question: with what do you hedge a position in bitcoin? There isn't an options market for bitcoins yet, and I can't think of any other security that moves opposite to them (seeing as how the world of bitcoins is so insular).
There's no need for indexing or backing for a [national] currency. There's a built in limit to money printing so even the normal expectation of not printing obscene amounts is enforced.
That doesn't work when money can be created electronically, by the central bank simply making an unmatched entry in its balance sheet.
According to the data, the US money supply (M2) has doubled since the year 2000, during a time period in which the total size of the backing economy has not kept up. Inflation, in other words. That means that the US has pilfered back between one-third and one-half of the value of the $3 trillion US dollars held in China's central bank.
Funny, isn't it? For the last twenty years, they've told us to worry about China owning too much US debt... and now we just snatched back a huge chunk of it by having some guy in Washington add a row to a spreadsheet.
What if he is? He just made a perfectly good point. These people are standing around sipping their lattes with signs that talk about "toppling" all businesses and whatnot. I'm sure they'll be happy when the case of the clap they got under a blanket at the protest is treated instead with the antibiotics made by the guy down the street with whom they've bartered pumpkin seeds and some hand-drawn manga books, what with The Man and is money-handling and his employees-making-antibiotics-in-actual-laboratories-and-all being Eeeeeeevil.
Hypocrisy is not a major sin... at least, outside of Leftism, which recognizes it as the ONLY sin.
I will give them a pass on their minor hypocrisy in order to listen to their broader message about the very serious evil called regulatory capture. The related whining about our society's current level of equality is forgettable, but the regulatory capture issue is dead serious.
This is kind of off topic, but this reminds me of an article I read (maybe in time magazine) that was about how in the next 40 years or so we will have computers powerful enough to emulate a human brain. The point of the article was that once we reach that capability, humans will basically become immortal because we would just copy our brains onto a computer and not have to worry about our fragile organic bodies failing on us.
You'll have to resolve the unresolvable "transporter problem" raised by Star Trek: if we create an atom-by-atom copy of your body and brain, and then destroy you, does your consciousness transfer to the copy? Or do you just end? Either way, the copy is going to insist that he is you and that there was no interruption in consciousness... but he would say that simply because of his memories.
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
My brother could contribute to the project. He was a pedigreed professor of finance who could teach anywhere he chose. After a few years he was offered tenure. He realized then that his job had become the mass-production of MBAs, very very few of whom were at all receptive to the most crucial idea he tried to impart to them: you should make money, not merely get money.
Seeing then that the fruit of his labors were ruining our society, he quit to start over becoming a EE. I admire him for that.
It's soul was eaten by Carly.
Some will consider you flippant or flamebait, but I think you've spoke more truth than you'll get credit for. The leader's personality percolates and pervades through an organization, driving out (directly and indirectly) those not orthogonal to it. HP had a different personality after her tenure than it did before.
You don't; and neither does most children in the US. Our school system its horribly broken.
Whether it's broken depends on what you think its purpose is.
For the purpose of babysitting our kids while we go to work, it provides amazing bang-for-the-buck, compared to hiring a babysitter or daycare. Judging by the (un)willingness of American parents to forego the new SUV in order to pay for private school, it seems that babysitting is the primary purpose of public school.
Also, be careful how you measure success. American schoolkids still score at the top compared to other countries... if you have the political will to look at the scores of just one race at a time. You probably don't have the will, and are now feeling the urge to score points by shrieking at me.
Blacking out the secrets clearly isn't a good strategy. Next time, they should just put whiteout on the screen to cover up the secret parts.
Blacking out the secrets is excellent strategy if the data is actually misinformation.
The cheapest way to win an arms race is to trick your opponent into believing that you've got better gear, without actually wasting billions of dollars on said gear.
[Patent litigation is] not wasted money if you're a lawyer. It's income.
Certainly such lawyers are getting money... but they are doing so without making money. Likewise HFT.
Enlightened economies attempt to keep such jobs at an absolute minimum, since they represent toil that adds no wealth to the collective pile.
Otherwise life would not be able to sustain itself. Its really quite obvious it really about translation from one for to another, and how much the translation process require in energy.
Look closer. Life is really powered by order. We take in high-order energy (carbohydrates) and exhaust low-order energy (heat, noise, movement). This allows us to maintain a high-order pattern (our body) in the face of entropy and decay.
Along these same lines, several additional survival courses are available:
Sign up now, spaces are limited!
They find that litigation is a net financial loss, but they aren't including the attorney's fees, which probably balance it out to a net zero. However, an analysis of the movements of money is not sociologically interesting.
What is more interesting, is an analysis of the movements of wealth. First there is the matter of squandered wealth on the court proceeding itself, because that is a lot of manhours spent in producing useless arrangements of words on paper. And then there is the more serious question of who is using the wealth-behind-the-money more effectively... i.e. what was the defendent spending the money on versus what does the plaintiff end up spending the money on? Do plaintiffs invest their settlements into something comparably productive?
Remember, money is not wealth. Money is control of wealth. Moving money from wise hands into profligate hands is usually a net social loss.
Also, the article's implication is a non-sequitur. While it is true that patent trolling is a financial drag on the system, it does not follow that removing patents is a win. Without patents there would be problems with espionage, and the useless dissipation of wealth in protecting trade secrets. However, the implication does not follow; it is NOT true that ending patents would
Dude, I wish you the best of luck. Loyalty is the hot ass you crave after wedding the invisible hand.
Corporations bent on cultivating the next quarterly earnings report don't hold much enduring appeal to informed consumers wishing to build relationship equity with non-human entities. Where does the loyalty come to rest in this system? With suckers, if you can find them?
I agree that loyalty between a human and a corporation is, as a rule, farcical. And I am totally with you on the cynicism about the current socioeconomic patterns in the West.
There are exceptions, though. Not all corporations have reached the point of behaving 100% sociopathically. Some of them are still colored by the founders' personality. That coloration can be trusted -- certainly not 100%, and not forever, but not 0% either.
Also, corporations are not monolithic homogenous entities. I consider the Shell corporation to be sociopathic, but I know the owner of my local Shell station and I do trust him.
In summary, I agree with you that corn and corn byproducts are not good for anything but fattening up cows and pigs before slaughter, so I try to eat as little corn and corn byproducts as possible.
And it is hardly even suitable for that. I assume you already know about the stomach acidosis that afflicts corn-fed cows; this is why they require the large and continuous doses of antibiotics. There is also an important difference in fat type between corn-fed versus grass-fed meat. Grass-fed meat is high in the kinds of fats that are (this week) considered healthy, whereas corn-fed meat, being obese, is full of saturated fat.
I have to agree with you, food dosn't make people fat, people make themselves fat, parents deserve the full blame for childhood obiesity, not McDonnalds, not Doritos or Count Chocula.
When you can fully define the concept of 'choose', then you get the privilege of determining where blame lay for peoples' poor choices.
Your final definition must take into account the internal and external incentives, self-image and cognitive dissonance, peer pressure, blood sugar levels and nutritional effects, the apparent conflict between conscious and subconscious, the apparent notion that conscious decision-making occurs AFTER the action impulses have begun, the role of the pleasure center, and the problem of living in a clockwork universe built out of quantum indeterminacy.
Let us know when you've reached a conclusion, as it will shake the worlds of philosophy and religion right to their foundations.
Until then, the rest of us will continue to criticize those who knowingly manufacture substances that are carefully and intentionally engineered to overwhelm the consumer's self-discipline. And this is not just Doritos... I'm looking at you, Call of Duty.
Groupon is going to find itself in serious trouble soon due to an unsustainable business model and will be folding within the next 12-18 months?
Indeed. Groupon is in the same position that its retailer-customers are in: hooked on a ponzi-esque cycle of always needing another round of groupon signups. Businesses issue a groupon when they need the cash up front, and then later they get hit with the lossy customers, and need to do another groupon. Groupon itself seems to be in a similar situation.
In fairnes to Groupon, it seems like financial markets haven't yet worked out the right way to do valuations of companies like Groupon. Groupon is trying to explain that they have great potential that isn't quantifiable using GAAP. Everybody is mocking them for it, but how are they supposed to look good according to rules that were drawn up for brick-and-mortar, inventory-and-shelving companies?
Actually the same problem is writ even larger on the whole financial world. Because there is no GAAP way to express the value of customer loyalty, employee loyalty, brand loyalty, and so forth, MBAs come in and squander those precious things in order to increase items that GAAP does know how to express. "Look, realized earnings are up 12% this quarter because we moved production to China and in two years our customers will all leave when they realize we make junk now, where's my bonus?"
stop hiring out side MBA's and promote people from with in.
It may be better to get people who have / are working at HP to do CEO and VP level work then some out side person who does not know a lot about what goes on in the inside of HP.
That only works if your corporate culture is healthy. Unfortunately, personality pervades an organization from the top down, and HP has spent years under some comically dysfunctional personalities. Anyone who presently occupies a post in HP upper managment is, ipso facto, the problem rather than the solution.