A team full of Michael Jordans will be so successful (assuming that there are not "leadership" clashes), no players will be dismissed.
A sports team does not trade or release their least promising player if they don't think they can acquire a more promising one (of course, factors like a player's position matters - a team might trade away their worst linebacker who is actually very good as part of a deal to get a really great running back because that's what they need the most).
The problem you describe is not a problem with stack rankings, it is a problem with those individuals and processes that create the stack rankings. If management is so bad in a technical field as to be fooled by good politicians on a regular basis, the company is going to fail anyway.
Most engineers (actually, most people) are pretty bad judges of their own skills and tend to think they are better than they are -- if you ask 1000 engineers in the SV if they are "better at their job than the median engineer in their company", I'll bet that 70% or more will say they are and many of the ones that don't think they are are actually wrong because they are underestimating themselves and/or are fooled by politics.
See "Illusory superiority" and "Downing effect".
As Charles Darwin supposedly stated: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".
If a salescritter spends too much time sabotaging other salescritter's orders, they are not spending as much time selling and will drop to the bottom of rankings and be gone - in sales, about the only question is "what have you done for me lately?" and that answer is measured in sales (and in quota achievement that is sometimes fine tuned to encourage sales of certain products).
(And, no, we don't "all hate salescritters". Without them, many of us wouldn't have jobs because there would not be enough revenue to keep the company going and paychecks coming.)
The problem is not just that eventually you'll be at the bottom of the ranking when the bottom gets culled regularly, regardless of how good you are.
No that is NOT a problem. An employer generally only fires someone if they either have no need for the person anymore or if they can replace them with a more productive worker who is a better fit. Yes, if most workers they hire to replace workers who are fired or quit on their own are better than you are, then you will eventually end up at the bottom of the rankings and be sent on your way (or, just enticed to leave because you don't get raises and bonuses) but that is typically a good thing for the company's success. Those that are more productive than the substantial majority of the industry pool from which a growing company hires workers is at little risk of dropping to the bottom of the stack rankings and getting culled. Why should an employer keep you around if, in their judgement, they can replace you with someone who will be more productive per unit of input (compensation, training, overhead etc)?
Typically routine mass "culling" for the sake of improving productivity is done at companies that are growing fairly rapidly and it's a technique to get rid of the hiring mistakes. Workers are, by necessity, usually hired with very incomplete information about their capabilities. A few hours of interviewing/screening/ref checks, even if done very well, doesn't reveal nearly as much about a worker's skills and, very importantly, "fit" as a few months on the job does.
Of course, this technique can be abused and misused, but I've worked at rapidly growing companies (in one case, about 20+% annual employee headcount growth - plus some attrition replacements so more than 1 in 5 of the employees on December 31 were not there on the previous January 1) where this technique was used to good purpose and improved the quality of the staff over time rather than degrade the quality of the staff (as is likely to happen if mishires are kept around -- they rarely leave because they have fewer options but they can result in annoying and frustrating the better workers who DO have many options in the industry). These mass cullings help avoid a death spiral of degrading worker talent in a rapidly growing company.
Individual managers, without incentives to do so, will often keep their mishires as long as they are not causing more harm than good -- if nothing else, in a growing company, they are usually perpetually shorthanded and don't want to spend yet more of their time in the screening/interview process. I've always tried to avoid this temptation when I've made a hiring mistake, but it is difficult to discipline oneself to do this in marginal cases.
It doesn't matter because people who don't care to think about the problem don't read past the first sentence that challenges their beliefs anyway.
In this case, the GP urges eliminating profit from all of medical care (interestingly, though, not from an even more essential industry - food - which we all need daily rather than just some people needing some of the time). Yet, he doesn't address how any new medications, for example, would get developed. There are very few (any?) of modern research intensive drugs being developed by non-profits anywhere in the world.
It's upon the person proposing the elimination of the international system through which drugs are developed to propose a viable alternative to maintain an acceptable rate of safe and effective drug development or to show that they accept the consequences of people dying prematurely because drug development slows dramatically. One way to show this acceptance (since he provided no alternative) is for him personally to accept the consequences the next generation will suffer by eschewing all drugs developed under the system he urges elimination of.
Why don't you start a movement to refuse all drugs and medical equipment that have been initially developed via venture capital? That would show the capitalists how sincere you are in your beliefs and perhaps they will come and put flowers on your (likely premature) grave every year (or, maybe, piss on it).
How would you suggest small startup companies that actually develop quite a few of the drugs (often to be acquired by Big Pharma for big bucks after/if their ideas actually pan out) get the money to fund their efforts? Or, would you prefer that we stall medical progress in the name of egalitarianism?
In most cases, expensive drugs with widespread applicability become much cheaper after they fall off patent - in most cases, people with limited resources can just eschew drugs that have been released on the market in the past ten years or so and still have far better results than someone fifteen years ago had the opportunity to have at any price. In 2067, don't you think it would be better that most everyone have access to off-patent drugs aggressively developed prior to 2057 rather than, due to stalling of progress in drug development, no one having access to drugs that the competitive market would have developed after perhaps 2032?
Many of these drugs developed by startup companies are not obviously going to be winners and many such ventures fail and investors lose all their investment so without a strong profit opportunity, only philanthropists would offer funds and there just are not very many of those (and a lot of them seem to be spending their money on very basic problems in the Third World where they feel can help a lot more people with their money and "bend the curve" for future generations in those areas). Do you think we would be better off with the politicians (perhaps Ryan and Trump aided by lobbyists?) picking which drugs to invest in because they are so knowledgeable?
(Yes, as PharmaBro demonstrated, some capitalists manage to manipulate the government's approval mechanism to jack the prices up on drugs long off patent -- do you really want the government and lobbyists that create such a broken approval mechanism also deciding what drugs get developed and which ones done. In my view, it's better for the government to fix what they broke before taking on more to break.)
Somehow big and sometimes bold decisions must be made in a company and direction and culture must be set. If not a CEO or other single human, how would this work? Some group of humans must make "life or death, bet-the-firm" decisions -- what is the advantage of that group having a cardinality greater than one? The more people in a group, the less likely it is to make bold decisions -- the larger the group, the more likely decisions will be "safe" (in the short term) watered down compromise decisions which will likely result in the company failing when some other company, managed by a strong leader, makes bolder decisions that pay off in the long term.
Who, for example, at Tesla should have had the final say on building the Gigafactory? Some group of people? And how would such a group be selected? How would continuity of culture and direction be maintained? How would investors be somewhat confident that the company would have and maintain a consistent approach and culture?
Who, for example, at Apple should have had the final say on moving into consumer electronics? Some group of people? And how would such a group be selected? How would continuity of culture and direction be maintained? How would investors be somewhat confident that the company would have and maintain a consistent approach and culture?
It's fine to dislike something that is largely working, but it's incumbent on the skeptic to propose an alternative. What alternative are you proposing and where has it worked reliably over the long term?
Unless the general voter population gets to vote on who gets to vote on accepting RFCs, they are not law. RFCs (hopefully only specific revisions of them) may be referenced by statutory law and they may be considered by the courts when determining what "industry standards" are (as would the fact that cell providers and others routinely prioritize traffic -- that's also an industry standard). However, the court's won't, nor should they, consider accepted RFCs to be "law" unless legislators specifically reference them in legislation or regulators, working under the specific authority of legislation, specifically incorporate them by reference.
I've not looked at details of what AT&T is asking the court in their appeal, but it is most likely legal rather than technical issues -- such as, does the legislation under which the FCC operates grant it the power to issue and enforce their net neutrality regulations and/or do the FCC's net neutrality regulations conflict with other statutory or case law.
The CEO is the most highly leveraged decision maker in the organization. A small error by a janitor in making the most important difficult decision they are tasked with making will probably never be noticed by anyone, let alone result in a company going bankrupt. A small error by a CEO in making the most important difficult decision they are tasked with making may ultimately sink the entire company - costing shareholder billions of dollars and tens or hundreds of thousands of employees their jobs.
This motivates each company to seek the "best" CEO they can afford and large companies with large revenue streams can afford a lot! The price they pay is secondary. This is analogous to two service jobs one may make decisions about. Consider if you need a haircut and there are two options - a $30 cut which is nothing spectacular and has 5% chance of being at least slightly embarrassing vs. a $300 cut which will be "spectacular" and only has a 0.01% chance of being embarrassing - most people who could afford the $300 haircut only by taking out a second mortgage on their house wouldn't do so -- they would select the $30 cut. However, consider if you need delicate brain surgery and there are two options -- a $3,000 procedure which has a 5% chance of disabling or killing you vs. a $30,000 procedure which has only a 0.01% chance of disabling or killing you - most people who could afford the $30,000 procedure only by taking out a second mortgage on their house would do so and select the $30,000 procedure.
In terms of "present value" compensation at the time of contracting for that compensation (for example stock options valued at the difference between strike price and market price at the time the CEO's employment contract is signed), in large established companies, the CEO draws a tiny percent of the total compensation pool.
For example, Walmart CEO's annual compensation in 2017 was about 22 million dollars. This works out to about $10/employee. If employees work half-time on the average, that amounts to about $0.01/hour -- at $10/hour, that's only 0.1% of an employee's wages. As long as they do their job marginally well, there is no decision that a stock clerk is tasked with making that will be likely to cost a single employee their job or change corporate profits even 0.001 cent per share. On the other hand, the CEO is tasked with all decisions (even if they don't make them, they get the blame -- it's doubtful, for example, that Richard Smith made the decision not to apply the patch that caused the data breach, but that decision cost him his job). In the case of Walmart, for example, the decision to enter the home delivery market would have been something the CEO would have had a hand in (at least to the extent of approving doing so) -- deciding to enter that market when it was a bad idea would be costly, the decision not to enter that market when it was a good idea to could be an absolute disaster, long term, and could end up with Walmart being another KMart or Sears.
The CEO position should be eliminated in favor of inside-track promoted Director drawing a salary tied to a fixed multiplier of average worker's salary. No pension or retirement contributions and no stock options.
That would be fine in an employee owned company where each employee owns a share of the company proportional to their salary -- they, of course, would then be called "shareholders". For a company owned by outsiders (i.e., individuals who put their money, directly or indirectly, at risk by investing in the company), why would they ever want to reward the person making corporate level decisions based on what the average employee was paid? This mythical director would be motivated to subcontract out all low wage jobs, pay millions a year to the few "on payroll" employees that remained even if those employees produced nothing useful. How, exactly, does this align with the shareholder's interests?
We need to get away from bonus and stock manipulation culture that creates direct incentives to CEOs that conflict with long-term shareholder interests.
Presumably the same logic applies to individual contributors -- no stock options, no 401(k) matching, and no ESPP program? Developers, for example, are far too willing to produce crap code quickly if they become convinced that it's necessary or helpful to the company's success and hence its stock price.
One knows that they have won the argument when the other party resorts to techniques such as ad hominem attacks. Of course, such a retreat is to be expected from one who thinks repeating "prisoner's dilemma" over and over rather than addressing real economic issues is a winning strategy. Have a nice day.
No it would be a government that is not directly controlled by this issue solving a classic game theory problem (prisoner's dilemma) by changing the rules to have a less destructive game.
For wealthy areas, the new game might be less "destructive" in some sense, but the new game would likely tend to condemn less wealthy areas to eternal poverty. The new game may also advantage the elite rather than the middle class and below in wealthy areas more than the current game.
A struggling city with high unemployment yet plenty of vacant (and perhaps even non revenue generating but revenue consuming abandoned and blighted land owned by the city/county due to tax liens) land has relatively few options to attract new business to allow the multiplier effect to return the area to prosperity. One of those options is to give preferential tax treatment to businesses who take a high risk by building a facility that provides jobs and, ultimately, more tax revenue. The decision to select this option is really up to the voters in the city/county/state just as it is up to them to set property, sales, business, and income taxes in the first place. Take that option away and it's more likely the city will wither away and die. This is great for real estate developers and land owners in the big cities as demand for their product increases because businesses have fewer incentives to expand in other areas. However as the cost of living as well as congestion rise faster in these big cities as a result, the middle class and below will be more likely to be hurt than helped.
Under a system where preferential tax treatment was not allowed, would a city also be banned from using general revenue to build a new sewer treatment plant and extending water, electricity, sewers, transportation and telecommunication infrastructure to an area in hopes of attracting businesses to the area with "shovel ready building pads" as that's as much of a subsidy as waiving property taxes for ten years for any company building a facility on that same land. Would California's expenditures on "High Speed Rail" count as a subsidy to new business and be banned -- after all, one of its selling points was to encourage higher value growth in the Central Valley so it would seem to be a subsidy to companies that then build new facilities in the Central Valley?
Attempting to restrict incentives such as state and local tax breaks would likely set off a scenario far more litigious and full of tricks than we see in trade wars between countries right now. If the regulations are light, they will simply be routed around. If they are heavy, the resulting issues will be decided by courts and constantly changing Federal legislation driven by lobbyists which will add uncertainty. After a few decades, the Federal regulations in this area could make the tax code look simple.
I never said that all governments were sane. Sometimes the democratic process creates insane governments. That's life. Democracy sucks, but until someone comes up with something better, it's still my favorite form of government as long as basic rights are protected.
Is Amazon shipping their HQ across state lines? I doubt it. If they are producing headquarters in one state and shipping the assembled headquarters to other states for sale to consumers or independent third parties, I stand corrected as I didn't see that in Amazon's statements.
Of course, the reality is that the Federal Government in the past 100 years has stepped way over the boundaries of what they have the power to do according to the United States Constitution.
In 1920, less than 100 years ago, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed to implement prohibition. That's downright quaint by today's standards where the Congress could simply ban alcohol production (possibly the FDA could do it without the help of Congress depending on the exact wording of the statutory law creating and "empowering" the FDA and on the luck of the draw of which judges end up interpreting those statutes).
I didn't assume that governments are sane, just that if they are, they would not offer incentives that would hurt them.
Voters elect politicians - one person, one vote. If eligible voters choose not to vote or choose to elect politicians that don't run a sane government, that is their prerogative (unless, of course, the city, county, or state has implemented in their bylaws or constitution something like the Electoral College to stop the voters from making stupid mistakes, but I don't know of any such city, county, or state that has such provisions). So, yes, governments in the United States ARE controlled by the voters. The voters may not always make the right (i.e., presumably, the one king neckbeard thinks is right) choice, but that doesn't mean they didn't make the choice. It's rather like people who choose to spend their paycheck at the roulette table may not have made a wise choice, but it is definitely a choice they made.
Of course neither governments nor voters have perfect information -- no one does. True, some voters choose not to get much information or education and just vote as their Union says to, but again, that is their choice.
These are all facts.
How is City A "compelled" to offer incentives to a private business any more than Best Buy is "compelled" to price match Walmart's prices? There is no rule that any city has to play the game that way or that any retailer has to engage in a race to the lowest price. Most cities survive very nicely without a single Fortune 500 headquarters in their city limits so claiming that cities are "compelled" to engage in bidding wars to attract corporate headquarters is absurd.
In almost every entity from large families to multinational religions to multinational companies to local governments to national governments, a small percentage of well connected people have more influence than the average. Even in most communities of non-human social mammals, a few members usually have the bulk of the influence. It's probably as much human nature as walking upright is.
If the Federal Government were to try to "fix" this (non)problem, it would be an action by an even smaller percentage of well connected people forcing their judgement on individual communities.
No city, county, or state is "compelled" to offer incentives to Amazon and no sane city, county, or state (all controlled by democratically elected voters) would do so if it hurt them.
Some cities, counties, and states will place a higher value on Amazon's presence - perhaps because they are trying to "move up" in the food chain and are therefore confident in offering incentives that will help them do so -- a rising tide lifts all boats so it's a win-win for everyone. Others may explicitly not want an Amazon HQ so would not offer any incentives or may have zoning laws that would make it impractical for Amazon to establish a HQ there.
[...] there should be federal law banning the practice outright.
Where in the Constitution is Congress granted the power to set state and local tax policy? I think you would need an amendment to the Constitution and that seems unlikely to happen as 3/4 of the states must approve that!
Mainframe manufacturers did this many decades ago. A different "boot" floppy on one mainframe I used would result in a substantially faster machine (of course, that floppy cost far more than the cost of manufacturing the floppy and the field engineers seemed really hard to bribe to "inadvertently leave the wrong floppy in the drive"). It was simply cheaper to give every machine the capability to run at the higher speed and "dumb it down" than it was to build two or more models and this manufacturer needed an array of models to compete at different price/performance points with IBM (who had baked enormous profits into every price point and, due to volume, could have more distinct model cost effectively).
Another mainframe had a feature (I don't recall the exact mechanism to enable it) where we could speed it up for some number of hours for a fee to the manufacturer - no hardware change nor (IIRC) a need to load new firmware or reboot.
I've not been around mainframes for 25+ years so I don't know, or care, if they still do this (I'm sure others here will know).
No, but it falls on the person claiming that someone broke the law to explain what that law is and how the person broke it.
For example, some people "believe" that if you walk down the street and see a stranger having a heart attack that legally you must render aid at least to the extent of calling 911 and that failing to do so is "illegal" -- yet, in the majority of jurisdictions in the United States, you have NO legal obligation to lift a finger to help the person and are not guilty of a crime if you fail to do so. The point is, many (perhaps most) things that people think are "wrong" are completely legal (and many things that many people think are/should be legal are not).
As well, the difference between criminal and civil statutes is important. There are many things that are "illegal" but only have civil penalties or which only expose you to financial liability when sued by the injured party, not criminal punishment - and you only can be put in the "slammer" for criminal violations.
"Surely there something that can be pinned on these assholes" is the first step of a witch-hunt and inappropriate. One should start with "this asshole did specifically X which is illegal" (and, hopefully, the person making the claim is willing to spend a few minutes with google to give some indication of where that law is found).
As far as I know, at this point we don't know if this breach happened due to several zero-day exploit of vulnerabilities in Intel and Cisco firmware that made the exploit invisible to the most sophisticated monitoring tools and techniques used anywhere in the industry and that Equifax only discovered it because one of their analysts had a brilliant insight that they should be looking for correlations in traffic that would reveal a highly improbable attack against a previously unimagined set of unknown vulnerabilities. No, I would not make an even money bet that is the case (as most such breaches are not that obscure), but before I conclude that some "assholes" should be found guilty of a crime, any crime, no matter how far we have to stretch the law, I would need to understand what really happened.
What criminal law are you proposing the CEO is guilty of? "Bad judgement", alone, is not a crime. The fact that something slipped through the cracks does not mean a crime occurred or that the CEO is guilty of a crime if somewhere in the corporation a crime was committed. We can only prosecute people for actual crimes that were a crime at the time they were committed (so, whatever changes to the law you think should be made wouldn't apply to this situation anyway).
I've had some a couple very good kernel level programmers working for me that were music majors in college. That alone does not make her unqualified. As well, an executive need not be an expert on every detail - if the executive in charge of manufacturing at GM were applying for a job on the manufacturing line s/he would likely not be hired - her/his job isn't turning wrenches, it's much more financial, planning/forecasting, vendor relations, legal etc.
A chief of security at a large corporation need not, themselves, be an expert on security implementation details. They simply don't have the time to keep up even if they were once experts in the area. That's why they hire people whose primary job IS the technical side and who effectively spend ALL their time on that side (vs. interacting with the board, doing budgets, planning, legal compliance issues, etc).
What criminal law do you think the "Equifax Security Cxx" broke?
"The other Cxx's are held personally liable, and get to eat based on how many cans they can dig out of trash dumpsters." -- if it turns out to have been the result of an oversight in administration or a programming bug, shouldn't the IT staff that failed to do their job and/or the programmer that caused the bug (or chose to use open source software which had the bug) also be be held personally liable? They are the subject matter experts. Depending on circumstances (which hopefully some Senate and House hearings get to the bottom of), what you are proposing may be like holding the CEO of GM personally responsible for an accident caused by an improperly tightened brake line because a line worker failed to tighten it properly.
"Equifax gets sued out of existence" - that would be a nice outcome but I'm not holding my breath.
DACA went way beyond "not enforcing" a law by giving it low enforcement priority. It created an entire new program (with regulations, applications, fees, documentation etc) to effectively exempt individuals from a law that Congress passed. It created an entire new immigration status that was never authorized by Congress -- which is the only entity that has the power to create such a immigration status.
It would be like if Trump decided to create "Orange Cards" which would grant "special economic residency" that confered all the benefits of a Green Card holder to anyone paying $10,000,000 to the Treasury thereby effectively bypassing all permanent residency laws passed by Congress.
Would you, for example, seriously suggest that because the IRS is in the Administrative branch that the President has the power to exempt individuals who qualify under criteria developed by him from paying any Federal Income Taxes because he thought it was "good for the economy and compassionate because it would create more jobs for poor people if wealthy people could invest more of their money rather than pay it in Federal Income Taxes"?
For example... A new retail CVS pharmacy with about 15,000 sq ft is being constructed at 1804 Saratoga Ave San Jose, CA. The exterior walls of the main structure are constructed with reinforced CMU and are about 28' high. The CMU will probably be covered w/facade material (mostly stucco and brick veneers) soon, so look quick!
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A team full of Michael Jordans will be so successful (assuming that there are not "leadership" clashes), no players will be dismissed.
A sports team does not trade or release their least promising player if they don't think they can acquire a more promising one (of course, factors like a player's position matters - a team might trade away their worst linebacker who is actually very good as part of a deal to get a really great running back because that's what they need the most).
The problem you describe is not a problem with stack rankings, it is a problem with those individuals and processes that create the stack rankings. If management is so bad in a technical field as to be fooled by good politicians on a regular basis, the company is going to fail anyway.
Most engineers (actually, most people) are pretty bad judges of their own skills and tend to think they are better than they are -- if you ask 1000 engineers in the SV if they are "better at their job than the median engineer in their company", I'll bet that 70% or more will say they are and many of the ones that don't think they are are actually wrong because they are underestimating themselves and/or are fooled by politics.
See "Illusory superiority" and "Downing effect".
As Charles Darwin supposedly stated: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".
If a salescritter spends too much time sabotaging other salescritter's orders, they are not spending as much time selling and will drop to the bottom of rankings and be gone - in sales, about the only question is "what have you done for me lately?" and that answer is measured in sales (and in quota achievement that is sometimes fine tuned to encourage sales of certain products).
(And, no, we don't "all hate salescritters". Without them, many of us wouldn't have jobs because there would not be enough revenue to keep the company going and paychecks coming.)
No that is NOT a problem. An employer generally only fires someone if they either have no need for the person anymore or if they can replace them with a more productive worker who is a better fit. Yes, if most workers they hire to replace workers who are fired or quit on their own are better than you are, then you will eventually end up at the bottom of the rankings and be sent on your way (or, just enticed to leave because you don't get raises and bonuses) but that is typically a good thing for the company's success. Those that are more productive than the substantial majority of the industry pool from which a growing company hires workers is at little risk of dropping to the bottom of the stack rankings and getting culled. Why should an employer keep you around if, in their judgement, they can replace you with someone who will be more productive per unit of input (compensation, training, overhead etc)?
Typically routine mass "culling" for the sake of improving productivity is done at companies that are growing fairly rapidly and it's a technique to get rid of the hiring mistakes. Workers are, by necessity, usually hired with very incomplete information about their capabilities. A few hours of interviewing/screening/ref checks, even if done very well, doesn't reveal nearly as much about a worker's skills and, very importantly, "fit" as a few months on the job does.
Of course, this technique can be abused and misused, but I've worked at rapidly growing companies (in one case, about 20+% annual employee headcount growth - plus some attrition replacements so more than 1 in 5 of the employees on December 31 were not there on the previous January 1) where this technique was used to good purpose and improved the quality of the staff over time rather than degrade the quality of the staff (as is likely to happen if mishires are kept around -- they rarely leave because they have fewer options but they can result in annoying and frustrating the better workers who DO have many options in the industry). These mass cullings help avoid a death spiral of degrading worker talent in a rapidly growing company.
Individual managers, without incentives to do so, will often keep their mishires as long as they are not causing more harm than good -- if nothing else, in a growing company, they are usually perpetually shorthanded and don't want to spend yet more of their time in the screening/interview process. I've always tried to avoid this temptation when I've made a hiring mistake, but it is difficult to discipline oneself to do this in marginal cases.
It doesn't matter because people who don't care to think about the problem don't read past the first sentence that challenges their beliefs anyway.
In this case, the GP urges eliminating profit from all of medical care (interestingly, though, not from an even more essential industry - food - which we all need daily rather than just some people needing some of the time). Yet, he doesn't address how any new medications, for example, would get developed. There are very few (any?) of modern research intensive drugs being developed by non-profits anywhere in the world.
It's upon the person proposing the elimination of the international system through which drugs are developed to propose a viable alternative to maintain an acceptable rate of safe and effective drug development or to show that they accept the consequences of people dying prematurely because drug development slows dramatically. One way to show this acceptance (since he provided no alternative) is for him personally to accept the consequences the next generation will suffer by eschewing all drugs developed under the system he urges elimination of.
Why don't you start a movement to refuse all drugs and medical equipment that have been initially developed via venture capital? That would show the capitalists how sincere you are in your beliefs and perhaps they will come and put flowers on your (likely premature) grave every year (or, maybe, piss on it).
How would you suggest small startup companies that actually develop quite a few of the drugs (often to be acquired by Big Pharma for big bucks after/if their ideas actually pan out) get the money to fund their efforts? Or, would you prefer that we stall medical progress in the name of egalitarianism?
In most cases, expensive drugs with widespread applicability become much cheaper after they fall off patent - in most cases, people with limited resources can just eschew drugs that have been released on the market in the past ten years or so and still have far better results than someone fifteen years ago had the opportunity to have at any price. In 2067, don't you think it would be better that most everyone have access to off-patent drugs aggressively developed prior to 2057 rather than, due to stalling of progress in drug development, no one having access to drugs that the competitive market would have developed after perhaps 2032?
Many of these drugs developed by startup companies are not obviously going to be winners and many such ventures fail and investors lose all their investment so without a strong profit opportunity, only philanthropists would offer funds and there just are not very many of those (and a lot of them seem to be spending their money on very basic problems in the Third World where they feel can help a lot more people with their money and "bend the curve" for future generations in those areas). Do you think we would be better off with the politicians (perhaps Ryan and Trump aided by lobbyists?) picking which drugs to invest in because they are so knowledgeable?
(Yes, as PharmaBro demonstrated, some capitalists manage to manipulate the government's approval mechanism to jack the prices up on drugs long off patent -- do you really want the government and lobbyists that create such a broken approval mechanism also deciding what drugs get developed and which ones done. In my view, it's better for the government to fix what they broke before taking on more to break.)
Somehow big and sometimes bold decisions must be made in a company and direction and culture must be set. If not a CEO or other single human, how would this work? Some group of humans must make "life or death, bet-the-firm" decisions -- what is the advantage of that group having a cardinality greater than one? The more people in a group, the less likely it is to make bold decisions -- the larger the group, the more likely decisions will be "safe" (in the short term) watered down compromise decisions which will likely result in the company failing when some other company, managed by a strong leader, makes bolder decisions that pay off in the long term.
Who, for example, at Tesla should have had the final say on building the Gigafactory? Some group of people? And how would such a group be selected? How would continuity of culture and direction be maintained? How would investors be somewhat confident that the company would have and maintain a consistent approach and culture?
Who, for example, at Apple should have had the final say on moving into consumer electronics? Some group of people? And how would such a group be selected? How would continuity of culture and direction be maintained? How would investors be somewhat confident that the company would have and maintain a consistent approach and culture?
It's fine to dislike something that is largely working, but it's incumbent on the skeptic to propose an alternative. What alternative are you proposing and where has it worked reliably over the long term?
Unless the general voter population gets to vote on who gets to vote on accepting RFCs, they are not law. RFCs (hopefully only specific revisions of them) may be referenced by statutory law and they may be considered by the courts when determining what "industry standards" are (as would the fact that cell providers and others routinely prioritize traffic -- that's also an industry standard). However, the court's won't, nor should they, consider accepted RFCs to be "law" unless legislators specifically reference them in legislation or regulators, working under the specific authority of legislation, specifically incorporate them by reference.
I've not looked at details of what AT&T is asking the court in their appeal, but it is most likely legal rather than technical issues -- such as, does the legislation under which the FCC operates grant it the power to issue and enforce their net neutrality regulations and/or do the FCC's net neutrality regulations conflict with other statutory or case law.
The CEO is the most highly leveraged decision maker in the organization. A small error by a janitor in making the most important difficult decision they are tasked with making will probably never be noticed by anyone, let alone result in a company going bankrupt. A small error by a CEO in making the most important difficult decision they are tasked with making may ultimately sink the entire company - costing shareholder billions of dollars and tens or hundreds of thousands of employees their jobs.
This motivates each company to seek the "best" CEO they can afford and large companies with large revenue streams can afford a lot! The price they pay is secondary. This is analogous to two service jobs one may make decisions about. Consider if you need a haircut and there are two options - a $30 cut which is nothing spectacular and has 5% chance of being at least slightly embarrassing vs. a $300 cut which will be "spectacular" and only has a 0.01% chance of being embarrassing - most people who could afford the $300 haircut only by taking out a second mortgage on their house wouldn't do so -- they would select the $30 cut. However, consider if you need delicate brain surgery and there are two options -- a $3,000 procedure which has a 5% chance of disabling or killing you vs. a $30,000 procedure which has only a 0.01% chance of disabling or killing you - most people who could afford the $30,000 procedure only by taking out a second mortgage on their house would do so and select the $30,000 procedure.
In terms of "present value" compensation at the time of contracting for that compensation (for example stock options valued at the difference between strike price and market price at the time the CEO's employment contract is signed), in large established companies, the CEO draws a tiny percent of the total compensation pool.
For example, Walmart CEO's annual compensation in 2017 was about 22 million dollars. This works out to about $10/employee. If employees work half-time on the average, that amounts to about $0.01/hour -- at $10/hour, that's only 0.1% of an employee's wages. As long as they do their job marginally well, there is no decision that a stock clerk is tasked with making that will be likely to cost a single employee their job or change corporate profits even 0.001 cent per share. On the other hand, the CEO is tasked with all decisions (even if they don't make them, they get the blame -- it's doubtful, for example, that Richard Smith made the decision not to apply the patch that caused the data breach, but that decision cost him his job). In the case of Walmart, for example, the decision to enter the home delivery market would have been something the CEO would have had a hand in (at least to the extent of approving doing so) -- deciding to enter that market when it was a bad idea would be costly, the decision not to enter that market when it was a good idea to could be an absolute disaster, long term, and could end up with Walmart being another KMart or Sears.
That would be fine in an employee owned company where each employee owns a share of the company proportional to their salary -- they, of course, would then be called "shareholders". For a company owned by outsiders (i.e., individuals who put their money, directly or indirectly, at risk by investing in the company), why would they ever want to reward the person making corporate level decisions based on what the average employee was paid? This mythical director would be motivated to subcontract out all low wage jobs, pay millions a year to the few "on payroll" employees that remained even if those employees produced nothing useful. How, exactly, does this align with the shareholder's interests?
Presumably the same logic applies to individual contributors -- no stock options, no 401(k) matching, and no ESPP program? Developers, for example, are far too willing to produce crap code quickly if they become convinced that it's necessary or helpful to the company's success and hence its stock price.
And don't forget the charge for 'kilocore ticks'.
A very compelling case you make there and here
and here
One knows that they have won the argument when the other party resorts to techniques such as ad hominem attacks. Of course, such a retreat is to be expected from one who thinks repeating "prisoner's dilemma" over and over rather than addressing real economic issues is a winning strategy. Have a nice day.
For wealthy areas, the new game might be less "destructive" in some sense, but the new game would likely tend to condemn less wealthy areas to eternal poverty. The new game may also advantage the elite rather than the middle class and below in wealthy areas more than the current game.
A struggling city with high unemployment yet plenty of vacant (and perhaps even non revenue generating but revenue consuming abandoned and blighted land owned by the city/county due to tax liens) land has relatively few options to attract new business to allow the multiplier effect to return the area to prosperity. One of those options is to give preferential tax treatment to businesses who take a high risk by building a facility that provides jobs and, ultimately, more tax revenue. The decision to select this option is really up to the voters in the city/county/state just as it is up to them to set property, sales, business, and income taxes in the first place. Take that option away and it's more likely the city will wither away and die. This is great for real estate developers and land owners in the big cities as demand for their product increases because businesses have fewer incentives to expand in other areas. However as the cost of living as well as congestion rise faster in these big cities as a result, the middle class and below will be more likely to be hurt than helped.
Under a system where preferential tax treatment was not allowed, would a city also be banned from using general revenue to build a new sewer treatment plant and extending water, electricity, sewers, transportation and telecommunication infrastructure to an area in hopes of attracting businesses to the area with "shovel ready building pads" as that's as much of a subsidy as waiving property taxes for ten years for any company building a facility on that same land. Would California's expenditures on "High Speed Rail" count as a subsidy to new business and be banned -- after all, one of its selling points was to encourage higher value growth in the Central Valley so it would seem to be a subsidy to companies that then build new facilities in the Central Valley?
Attempting to restrict incentives such as state and local tax breaks would likely set off a scenario far more litigious and full of tricks than we see in trade wars between countries right now. If the regulations are light, they will simply be routed around. If they are heavy, the resulting issues will be decided by courts and constantly changing Federal legislation driven by lobbyists which will add uncertainty. After a few decades, the Federal regulations in this area could make the tax code look simple.
Yep - and that's what should have been required for much of what the Federal government now has taken control over.
I never said that all governments were sane. Sometimes the democratic process creates insane governments. That's life. Democracy sucks, but until someone comes up with something better, it's still my favorite form of government as long as basic rights are protected.
Is Amazon shipping their HQ across state lines? I doubt it. If they are producing headquarters in one state and shipping the assembled headquarters to other states for sale to consumers or independent third parties, I stand corrected as I didn't see that in Amazon's statements.
Of course, the reality is that the Federal Government in the past 100 years has stepped way over the boundaries of what they have the power to do according to the United States Constitution.
In 1920, less than 100 years ago, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed to implement prohibition. That's downright quaint by today's standards where the Congress could simply ban alcohol production (possibly the FDA could do it without the help of Congress depending on the exact wording of the statutory law creating and "empowering" the FDA and on the luck of the draw of which judges end up interpreting those statutes).
I didn't assume that governments are sane, just that if they are, they would not offer incentives that would hurt them.
Voters elect politicians - one person, one vote. If eligible voters choose not to vote or choose to elect politicians that don't run a sane government, that is their prerogative (unless, of course, the city, county, or state has implemented in their bylaws or constitution something like the Electoral College to stop the voters from making stupid mistakes, but I don't know of any such city, county, or state that has such provisions). So, yes, governments in the United States ARE controlled by the voters. The voters may not always make the right (i.e., presumably, the one king neckbeard thinks is right) choice, but that doesn't mean they didn't make the choice. It's rather like people who choose to spend their paycheck at the roulette table may not have made a wise choice, but it is definitely a choice they made.
Of course neither governments nor voters have perfect information -- no one does. True, some voters choose not to get much information or education and just vote as their Union says to, but again, that is their choice.
These are all facts.
How is City A "compelled" to offer incentives to a private business any more than Best Buy is "compelled" to price match Walmart's prices? There is no rule that any city has to play the game that way or that any retailer has to engage in a race to the lowest price. Most cities survive very nicely without a single Fortune 500 headquarters in their city limits so claiming that cities are "compelled" to engage in bidding wars to attract corporate headquarters is absurd.
In almost every entity from large families to multinational religions to multinational companies to local governments to national governments, a small percentage of well connected people have more influence than the average. Even in most communities of non-human social mammals, a few members usually have the bulk of the influence. It's probably as much human nature as walking upright is.
If the Federal Government were to try to "fix" this (non)problem, it would be an action by an even smaller percentage of well connected people forcing their judgement on individual communities.
No city, county, or state is "compelled" to offer incentives to Amazon and no sane city, county, or state (all controlled by democratically elected voters) would do so if it hurt them.
Some cities, counties, and states will place a higher value on Amazon's presence - perhaps because they are trying to "move up" in the food chain and are therefore confident in offering incentives that will help them do so -- a rising tide lifts all boats so it's a win-win for everyone. Others may explicitly not want an Amazon HQ so would not offer any incentives or may have zoning laws that would make it impractical for Amazon to establish a HQ there.
Where in the Constitution is Congress granted the power to set state and local tax policy? I think you would need an amendment to the Constitution and that seems unlikely to happen as 3/4 of the states must approve that!
Mainframe manufacturers did this many decades ago. A different "boot" floppy on one mainframe I used would result in a substantially faster machine (of course, that floppy cost far more than the cost of manufacturing the floppy and the field engineers seemed really hard to bribe to "inadvertently leave the wrong floppy in the drive"). It was simply cheaper to give every machine the capability to run at the higher speed and "dumb it down" than it was to build two or more models and this manufacturer needed an array of models to compete at different price/performance points with IBM (who had baked enormous profits into every price point and, due to volume, could have more distinct model cost effectively).
Another mainframe had a feature (I don't recall the exact mechanism to enable it) where we could speed it up for some number of hours for a fee to the manufacturer - no hardware change nor (IIRC) a need to load new firmware or reboot.
I've not been around mainframes for 25+ years so I don't know, or care, if they still do this (I'm sure others here will know).
No, but it falls on the person claiming that someone broke the law to explain what that law is and how the person broke it.
For example, some people "believe" that if you walk down the street and see a stranger having a heart attack that legally you must render aid at least to the extent of calling 911 and that failing to do so is "illegal" -- yet, in the majority of jurisdictions in the United States, you have NO legal obligation to lift a finger to help the person and are not guilty of a crime if you fail to do so. The point is, many (perhaps most) things that people think are "wrong" are completely legal (and many things that many people think are/should be legal are not).
As well, the difference between criminal and civil statutes is important. There are many things that are "illegal" but only have civil penalties or which only expose you to financial liability when sued by the injured party, not criminal punishment - and you only can be put in the "slammer" for criminal violations.
"Surely there something that can be pinned on these assholes" is the first step of a witch-hunt and inappropriate. One should start with "this asshole did specifically X which is illegal" (and, hopefully, the person making the claim is willing to spend a few minutes with google to give some indication of where that law is found).
As far as I know, at this point we don't know if this breach happened due to several zero-day exploit of vulnerabilities in Intel and Cisco firmware that made the exploit invisible to the most sophisticated monitoring tools and techniques used anywhere in the industry and that Equifax only discovered it because one of their analysts had a brilliant insight that they should be looking for correlations in traffic that would reveal a highly improbable attack against a previously unimagined set of unknown vulnerabilities. No, I would not make an even money bet that is the case (as most such breaches are not that obscure), but before I conclude that some "assholes" should be found guilty of a crime, any crime, no matter how far we have to stretch the law, I would need to understand what really happened.
What criminal law are you proposing the CEO is guilty of? "Bad judgement", alone, is not a crime. The fact that something slipped through the cracks does not mean a crime occurred or that the CEO is guilty of a crime if somewhere in the corporation a crime was committed. We can only prosecute people for actual crimes that were a crime at the time they were committed (so, whatever changes to the law you think should be made wouldn't apply to this situation anyway).
I've had some a couple very good kernel level programmers working for me that were music majors in college. That alone does not make her unqualified. As well, an executive need not be an expert on every detail - if the executive in charge of manufacturing at GM were applying for a job on the manufacturing line s/he would likely not be hired - her/his job isn't turning wrenches, it's much more financial, planning/forecasting, vendor relations, legal etc.
A chief of security at a large corporation need not, themselves, be an expert on security implementation details. They simply don't have the time to keep up even if they were once experts in the area. That's why they hire people whose primary job IS the technical side and who effectively spend ALL their time on that side (vs. interacting with the board, doing budgets, planning, legal compliance issues, etc).
What criminal law do you think the "Equifax Security Cxx" broke?
"The other Cxx's are held personally liable, and get to eat based on how many cans they can dig out of trash dumpsters." -- if it turns out to have been the result of an oversight in administration or a programming bug, shouldn't the IT staff that failed to do their job and/or the programmer that caused the bug (or chose to use open source software which had the bug) also be be held personally liable? They are the subject matter experts. Depending on circumstances (which hopefully some Senate and House hearings get to the bottom of), what you are proposing may be like holding the CEO of GM personally responsible for an accident caused by an improperly tightened brake line because a line worker failed to tighten it properly.
"Equifax gets sued out of existence" - that would be a nice outcome but I'm not holding my breath.
DACA went way beyond "not enforcing" a law by giving it low enforcement priority. It created an entire new program (with regulations, applications, fees, documentation etc) to effectively exempt individuals from a law that Congress passed. It created an entire new immigration status that was never authorized by Congress -- which is the only entity that has the power to create such a immigration status.
It would be like if Trump decided to create "Orange Cards" which would grant "special economic residency" that confered all the benefits of a Green Card holder to anyone paying $10,000,000 to the Treasury thereby effectively bypassing all permanent residency laws passed by Congress.
Would you, for example, seriously suggest that because the IRS is in the Administrative branch that the President has the power to exempt individuals who qualify under criteria developed by him from paying any Federal Income Taxes because he thought it was "good for the economy and compassionate because it would create more jobs for poor people if wealthy people could invest more of their money rather than pay it in Federal Income Taxes"?
For example... A new retail CVS pharmacy with about 15,000 sq ft is being constructed at 1804 Saratoga Ave San Jose, CA. The exterior walls of the main structure are constructed with reinforced CMU and are about 28' high. The CMU will probably be covered w/facade material (mostly stucco and brick veneers) soon, so look quick!