I used to work in a used bookstore and people -- I'm not making any blanket statements about what sort of people -- would come in with 40 brand-new copies of "Dianetics" and just give them to us since we wouldn't buy them (since, y'know, we already had eleventy three zillion.) That happened at least once a week for a while.
In other news, my girlfriend got a job interview the other day. Phone interview, went in for an actual interview, all gussied up in her business suit, for a consultant job looking for people who had communications and management background. The interviewer handed her a paper to read and sign at the beginning of the interview, and one of the items on it was "I will read, learn, and obey the rules of L. Ron Hubbard." I'm not sure whether they were recruiting for the church or recruiting communications majors with psychology backgrounds to become recruiters for the church, but either way that's not how you want an interview to go. (She walked out.)
What we NEED is the same thing pilots do: recurrent training and tests every other year to make sure you're still able to run a vehicle safely: medical, knowledge, and performance tests. You fail, you're out, until you've gotten your skills back into compliance.
I'm not sure I agree. I've claimed in the past, and I continue to maintain, that roughly two songs from the 20th century will still be played in the 24th: "Yesterday" by the Beatles, and "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin. From the 19th, probably only Scott Joplin.
See, I don't think it's hardwired, or at least not primarily hardwired, because (as I was on about in another post in the thread) the division point isn't the same between different people, or, more tellingly, different economic or societal groups. The idea of fairness might be innate/hardwired, but the implementation is much trickier. It requires an understanding of the future and a sense of expectation (or, as another poster put it, a sense of anticipation, that the money is already partly yours and an uneven division has stolen money from you, even if you never get the money.) But, as you say, it is a system for ensuring good behavior by others, at a cost to yourself.
By the way, there's extensive evidence animals *are* learning how to deal with humans, or human/animal interaction is selecting, on an evolutionary level, for animals that have more human-friendly behavior patterns. I've seen deer walk up to busy roads and look left/right before crossing. Likewise squirrels. There are lots of studies being done on coyote reintegration into suburban/urban environments, where the coyotes living/thriving in urban areas have markedly different behavior patterns than ones that haven't had any human contact. (I've had a lot of interactions with coyotes, including having interesting hunter/hunted transactions with wild ones and having an undomesticated/urban one living in my front yard and getting along peacably with me and my dog.)
I'd behave the same as you. As I recall, the original research indicated that -- and here I have to resort to incredibly biased words because I don't remember how they categorized things -- the higher the economic stability of A and B, the closer the refused decision would get to 50%. In the US or northern Europe it was in the 55-60% range, whereas if you asked people from tribes in the Amazon B would be fine only getting 5% of the total. They seemed to show that the concept of fairness was a byproduct of civilization, for lack of a better word.
You're using a different version of 'selfish', though. I agree with your reasoning (which is why I ended by saying that I think B is acting 'rationally' using different premises.) The point being, B's behavior doesn't make sense under a classic economist's view of behavior. No matter how much money B has, and no matter how much money B stands to get during this particular transaction, B will always get more money agreeing to the transaction than not agreeing. As such, for B to veto the transaction is against B's financial interest. Anyone who models the stock market, economy, or behavior in general as fundamentally about individuals maximizing their financial interest with little regard to anything else -- which many, many people do, and which is the behavior that the parent poster and I were/are on about -- doesn't acknowledge this behavior, and their model won't give correct answers.
People have also researched what I call reverse altruism, although unfortunately I can't find any good web cites. The experiment runs like this: you go somewhere and find two strangers, and sit them down, and say "I have (one year's wages) to give to you. Person A: you choose what percentage of it you want. Person B: you decide if you want to accept person A's division, in which case you both get your part of the money, or if you don't want to accept it, in which case neither of you gets any money."
If people were truly rational, if they were selfish actors, if they were motivated by self interest, *any* amount proposed by person A would immediately be agreed to by person B, because *any* money that person B gets, is greater than the amount person B gets if person B disagrees with the division.
In fact, the cutoff seems to be around 55-80%, depending on the society, but for any society, there is always a division point where person B would prefer to have no money at all, than to have a small amount of money where person A gets a large amount of money.
So much for selfish actors and 'rational' behavior. Their behavior is, indeed, rational, but with different premises than those of the free market advocates.
The person describing it as messy doesn't have access to the pointers, so doesn't see the organizational scheme.
However, a person's memory of pointers fades, and when NOBODY has access to the pointers, then it is, unequivocably, a mess. The task, then, is to organize marginally faster than your memory loss rate.
Okay, so you're saying the partial pressure is what makes us breathe, and I agree because it takes pressure to push oxygen across the lung membranes. Then you're saying that fire depends only on the percentage, not on the partial pressure. Why? I would think a molecule's willingness to react would be dependent on the concentration of the oxygen, and have little dependence on nitrogen at all since it doesn't enter into the reactants/products equation. More nitrogen will damp the start of a fire because there is more mass to heat up -- mass that doesn't give you anything back because it isn't involved in the reaction -- but I find it surprising it would actually stop a fire occurring at all, at such a small percentage change. It seems to me that at 20 atm, 5% oxygen would allow something to burn wildly. (In fact, wasn't this a plot point of Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"?)
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering why this would be the case. I think [reactants]/[products]. I know that at different pressures the thermodynamics will change, but this is the same pressure. The delta energy should be the same, so it seems like we'd see the delta-T be linearly dependent on the amount of nitrogen, since there's more mass per unit heat.
but hey, this is/. >Many of these were opposed by the President's Council on Bioethics.
Imagine the cognitive dissonance and heads exploding if someone managed to create mindless zombies that followed directions, didn't protest wiretapping or secret laws and secret courts, and voted Republican, but the creation used FETAL STEM CELLS?
owait that's already been done: the red states. Blast.
You're aiming a little low. It won't be the end of the USA, it'll be the end of civilization. Not humanity: some people will survive. But, imagine worldwide darkness for two years, while it's raining sulfuric acid. Two years' agricultural failure and the resultant unrest will probably do for any government (outside of North Korea, which seems to have figured out how to deal with that.) The weather would probably be okay five to eight years out, but it's unclear how many people would be there to enjoy it.
I hadn't thought about politicization per se, but that's a good point, and a very difficult one. There are sites like Wikipedia that try for NPOV, and on the opposite side of the fence there are people who listen to both fox and npr on the theory that they know the biases. It's harder for an individual running a company, where the experts' biases might not be worn on their sleeves.
The whole point of a board of directors is to be an independent guidance system for the CEO. One of the ideas HP was trying was to have the CEO independent of the BoD (which idea they discarded during this fiasco.) The problem is, of course, that all the BoD's of all the different companies are the same people, and they all use the same decision-making processes. Makes me wonder if a BoD shouldn't consist of people from outside the industry entirely -- but then they wouldn't make good business decisions. Or maybe it should have people from the company's rank-and-file, but that's not trouble-free either, because they have access to the business decisions and strategies, which is a company's true crown jewels.
Hm. I'm glad I'm just a small frog in a big pond some days, although I wouldn't mind the paychecks...
If I didn't live a stone's throw away from Yellowstone (by which I mean how far Yellowstone is going to throw stones when it goes) I'd be kind of cheering it on in that way I watch hurricanes or tidal waves and think "whoah, that's amazing." If Yellowstone went, we might expect "some 2,000 million tons of sulphuric acid were ejected into the atmosphere to block out sunlight over much of the planet causing global temperatures to plummet by between 10C and 20C." from here.
WMD's in Jackson's Hole: who would ever have thought? (Cue the Taco Bell jokes...)
>I'm also skeptical of the usual "but they told me it was OK" finger-pointing merry-go-round that seems to indicate that merely asking someone else's opinion of the ethics of an action clears you of responsibility. We get that from every corporate scandal, when in reality its always a situation of them getting the answer they were looking for in the first place or yet another culture of don't-ask-don't-tell where results matter only slightly less than not getting caught.
Not just corporate: look at the Iraq/WMD issue. People tell you what you want to hear (especially if they're you're employees) and when people talk you hear what you want them to say. That doesn't clear the decider of responsibility. But it raises a question, which I've been on about at length in this thread: how do you verify? You do the research, but if it's not your area of expertise, you ask experts. If they tell you what you want to hear, how do you know? What's a good mechanism to ensure data validity? Consider (as a few nutjobs have proposed) that you want to discredit the President so you place a bunch of moles in various positions and have them all feed false information about WMD's upwards, so that analysis of multiple sources of data returns similar summaries, all false. I'm quite sure that didn't happen, but if it did, could we blame the person who got stuck with all the false data and made a bad decision based on it? Now consider the more gray case where several people who are apparently experts all think something's legal, either because they've done it in the past or because they know other people who are doing it, so they all reply to inquiries about legality by saying it's legal, and they're the experts. Someone who is trying to find an answer gets the same tainted reply from several expert sources. How much can we blame the person for believing them?
Many people pooh-pooh the distinction, but I think this is a perfect case. He has no *guilt* for what he's done: he doesn't feel badly about any of it because he thinks everything he did was justified. He has tremendous *shame* being heaped on him because everyone else can see that he's a bottom-feeding hypocrite. He is embarrassed because he's ashamed.
I think they knew very well that they were walking a dangerous line, but they had a hard problem: to stop a leak. (They did need to stop the leak, I would argue, based on other stuff I've read, to ensure that their high-level planning wasn't also getting out. Carly Fiorino seems to have indicated that part of her departure was because of infighting because of leak issues.) What they were doing, discussing leaks and what problems they caused, with the other board members as a group and individually, wasn't working. So they resorted to using outside investigators and authorizing their illegal activities. So the question (which is unanswerable if you're not one of the involved board members) becomes: were they repeatedly trying to get assurance of the legality of their actions because they wanted to know, or because they wanted to appear concerned as a CYA? In any case, leaving extensive paper trail documenting your concern about the legality of behavior clearly indicates they knew what they were doing was borderline. Their problem was: the perceived reward (stopping the leak) was great compared to their perceived risk (lots of other people/companies/governments were pretexting, so why shouldn't they?)
The government has guns, and apparently sufficient approval that they can seemingly get away with anything they want (which is a damn shame.) I have to wonder if perceived governmental laxity was part of what made people think it was okay to do something similar on a corporate realm.
Part of this -- I was thinking about this on the way home from work -- is also that justice isn't smooth. When people do something borderline and get away with it, other people see that and do something just a little worse that stands to line their pockets or fix problems. At some point, justice suddenly lurches in, tromples on someone, and makes a statement to everyone else that the line has been crossed. Lay and Skilling got massacred for their completely awful behavior, and maybe the HP thing is Justice redrawing the lines, and Dunn was just unlucky enough to be the one in the hot seat.
People in higher positions have (and should be held accountable for) much higher responsibility, as a result of their high pay and power. As you say, they should be shrewd and experienced. I think this situation was somewhat unusual in that board members don't leak stuff on an ongoing basis. That was one of the recurring points of the New Yorker article: that's a serious betrayal of trust and isn't something that boards of directors have to deal with. I don't think they DID have much experience with this situation, so they looked for a way to fix the leak (for good reason) and after a year of discussing it with other board members as a group and in private they started using other, lower methods.
Maybe this'll taint the entire idea of deceptive methods of getting information... but I doubt it.
>This isn't about micromanaging. These were executive level decisions.
But it *is*. Managing: "make this happen." Micromanaging: "do it this way."
You'd have to be dumb to not consider that things might go awry, and have a contingency plan in case they DO go wrong. They're not dumb. I'm sure they had a backup plan, and it's very possible what we're seeing is exactly that. But at some point, second-guessing becomes tautologic: if a person is guilty because there's clear evidence, but also guilty because evidence sufficient to exonerate the person is itself evidence that the person guiltily manufactured exonerating evidence -- then what evidence is sufficient to exonerate the person?
Don't get me wrong: I think they did ordered something illegal and there should be repercussions. But I think those repercussions should be shared among a lot more people.
>There's a difference between "I don't remember what happened" and "I don't know what happened." They darn sure as heck knew what was going on.
Obviously I don't *know* what was actually happening, but the writer's claim was that, yes, they knew exactly what was going on, were sufficiently worried about its legality to spend time researching it, and in the end, were repeatedly reassured by people who were more expert than they, that it was legal.
>There's something wrong if people in Dunn and Hurd's positions aren't able to identify a yes-man or an outright liar. How much were they being paid? The more likely explanation is that they asked only for the purpose of creating an auditable paper trail to try and cover their behinds if the scam was every exposed.
That's a real possibility, and I can't tell one way or the other. But, in essence, a manager *must* rely on the manager's employees. A manager who goes and verifies every little decision, does all the research on everything being done... doesn't need employees because that manager's just done all the work. The employee is the expert on the job in question, and the manager is the expert in how that job fits into the grand scheme of the corporation. When a manager doubts a particular employee's answer, and goes and asks another employee, who is likewise more of an expert in the field than the manager, and gets the same answer, then what? If my manager refused to take both my and my coworker's assurances that what we were doing was the right thing, I'd consider my manager a micromanaging PHB.
To paraphrase King Henry V: every man's duty is to his king, but every man's soul is his own. The people who broke the law are responsible for breaking the law. A person who orders illegal actions, without knowing that those actions are illegal and having gone to some lengths to investigate whether they were actually illegal -- and having been told by corporate lawyers that the behavior is fine -- is much harder to find guilty.
That makes sense. I took three years' english comp/writing in college, and was thoroughly immersed in this at one point, but it was pretty much from the vantage you describe. MR is fundamentally fantasy: positing something that doesn't/can't happen and exploring how people deal with that. Postmodern is more like performance art: writing to play with the medium and make statements using style. Both are innately limited in what part of the human condition they can address. There are a lot of people writing what I call New Yorker fiction, though: short stories about people dealing with life. John Irving, TC Boyle, John Barth, Jane Smiley, that kind of stuff: good, solid material that was sometimes creepy but usually worth reading. The two excellent writing teachers I had both primarily focussed on that sort of material, and wrote that way themselves.
I read an interesting article in the New Yorker about this whole fiasco. The underlying theme was that lots of people were responsible for the disaster, but none of them actually realized what was going on. Dunn and Hurd, in particular, repeatedly asked both legal counsel and the people doing the problematic projects whether it was legal. I believe TNY cited evidence of five separate written requests for assessment of legality from Dunn alone, and every one of them came back with repeated assurances that everything was legal, these were routine operations, and there was no problem. The other point of the article was that Dunn and Hurd both had access to the same material, both helped decide what needed to be done, and directed what was going on, but at the end of the day, Dunn lost her job and was charged with multiple felonies, while Hurd is now running the company.
>they can get a hundred miles per tank on tanks about the size of a scuba tank.
So can a moped. Which is to say: we need a better metric. I suggest what aircraft use: miles per gallon per passenger (assuming full occupancy, which means divide the number by four if it's being used in the US.) Unfortunately that doesn't include range, because there are lots of great transit options if you only need to go a couple of blocks. People expect a range of about 600 km or 6 hours, whichever comes first (except for pregnant people -- I didn't know there were so many bathrooms along stretches of road I drive all the time...) Usually, alternative energy vehicles have moderately or drastically reduced range, if they're not the Sunraycer on a nice day. I've been told the Honda Insight can do well over 1000 km on one fuel tank, though I don't know if that's true. It'd be cool for those of us with large bladders to have new vehicles go *further* than current ones do.
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I used to work in a used bookstore and people -- I'm not making any blanket statements about what sort of people -- would come in with 40 brand-new copies of "Dianetics" and just give them to us since we wouldn't buy them (since, y'know, we already had eleventy three zillion.) That happened at least once a week for a while.
In other news, my girlfriend got a job interview the other day. Phone interview, went in for an actual interview, all gussied up in her business suit, for a consultant job looking for people who had communications and management background. The interviewer handed her a paper to read and sign at the beginning of the interview, and one of the items on it was "I will read, learn, and obey the rules of L. Ron Hubbard." I'm not sure whether they were recruiting for the church or recruiting communications majors with psychology backgrounds to become recruiters for the church, but either way that's not how you want an interview to go. (She walked out.)
So get her to wear a cheerleader outfit instead of pajamas: problem solved.
What we NEED is the same thing pilots do: recurrent training and tests every other year to make sure you're still able to run a vehicle safely: medical, knowledge, and performance tests. You fail, you're out, until you've gotten your skills back into compliance.
It isn't the middle-aged who oppose this plan.
I'm not sure I agree. I've claimed in the past, and I continue to maintain, that roughly two songs from the 20th century will still be played in the 24th: "Yesterday" by the Beatles, and "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin.
From the 19th, probably only Scott Joplin.
See, I don't think it's hardwired, or at least not primarily hardwired, because (as I was on about in another post in the thread) the division point isn't the same between different people, or, more tellingly, different economic or societal groups. The idea of fairness might be innate/hardwired, but the implementation is much trickier. It requires an understanding of the future and a sense of expectation (or, as another poster put it, a sense of anticipation, that the money is already partly yours and an uneven division has stolen money from you, even if you never get the money.) But, as you say, it is a system for ensuring good behavior by others, at a cost to yourself.
By the way, there's extensive evidence animals *are* learning how to deal with humans, or human/animal interaction is selecting, on an evolutionary level, for animals that have more human-friendly behavior patterns. I've seen deer walk up to busy roads and look left/right before crossing. Likewise squirrels. There are lots of studies being done on coyote reintegration into suburban/urban environments, where the coyotes living/thriving in urban areas have markedly different behavior patterns than ones that haven't had any human contact. (I've had a lot of interactions with coyotes, including having interesting hunter/hunted transactions with wild ones and having an undomesticated/urban one living in my front yard and getting along peacably with me and my dog.)
I'd behave the same as you.
As I recall, the original research indicated that -- and here I have to resort to incredibly biased words because I don't remember how they categorized things -- the higher the economic stability of A and B, the closer the refused decision would get to 50%. In the US or northern Europe it was in the 55-60% range, whereas if you asked people from tribes in the Amazon B would be fine only getting 5% of the total. They seemed to show that the concept of fairness was a byproduct of civilization, for lack of a better word.
Hey, cool, that's precisely what I was looking for. Thank you.
You're using a different version of 'selfish', though. I agree with your reasoning (which is why I ended by saying that I think B is acting 'rationally' using different premises.) The point being, B's behavior doesn't make sense under a classic economist's view of behavior. No matter how much money B has, and no matter how much money B stands to get during this particular transaction, B will always get more money agreeing to the transaction than not agreeing. As such, for B to veto the transaction is against B's financial interest. Anyone who models the stock market, economy, or behavior in general as fundamentally about individuals maximizing their financial interest with little regard to anything else -- which many, many people do, and which is the behavior that the parent poster and I were/are on about -- doesn't acknowledge this behavior, and their model won't give correct answers.
People have also researched what I call reverse altruism, although unfortunately I can't find any good web cites. The experiment runs like this: you go somewhere and find two strangers, and sit them down, and say "I have (one year's wages) to give to you. Person A: you choose what percentage of it you want. Person B: you decide if you want to accept person A's division, in which case you both get your part of the money, or if you don't want to accept it, in which case neither of you gets any money."
If people were truly rational, if they were selfish actors, if they were motivated by self interest, *any* amount proposed by person A would immediately be agreed to by person B, because *any* money that person B gets, is greater than the amount person B gets if person B disagrees with the division.
In fact, the cutoff seems to be around 55-80%, depending on the society, but for any society, there is always a division point where person B would prefer to have no money at all, than to have a small amount of money where person A gets a large amount of money.
So much for selfish actors and 'rational' behavior. Their behavior is, indeed, rational, but with different premises than those of the free market advocates.
The person describing it as messy doesn't have access to the pointers, so doesn't see the organizational scheme.
However, a person's memory of pointers fades, and when NOBODY has access to the pointers, then it is, unequivocably, a mess. The task, then, is to organize marginally faster than your memory loss rate.
Okay, so you're saying the partial pressure is what makes us breathe, and I agree because it takes pressure to push oxygen across the lung membranes. Then you're saying that fire depends only on the percentage, not on the partial pressure. Why? I would think a molecule's willingness to react would be dependent on the concentration of the oxygen, and have little dependence on nitrogen at all since it doesn't enter into the reactants/products equation. More nitrogen will damp the start of a fire because there is more mass to heat up -- mass that doesn't give you anything back because it isn't involved in the reaction -- but I find it surprising it would actually stop a fire occurring at all, at such a small percentage change. It seems to me that at 20 atm, 5% oxygen would allow something to burn wildly. (In fact, wasn't this a plot point of Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"?)
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering why this would be the case. I think [reactants]/[products]. I know that at different pressures the thermodynamics will change, but this is the same pressure. The delta energy should be the same, so it seems like we'd see the delta-T be linearly dependent on the amount of nitrogen, since there's more mass per unit heat.
Your definition of 'value' is something lots of people can use. His definition is prefixed with a dollar sign. As such, you're both right.
but hey, this is /.
>Many of these were opposed by the President's Council on Bioethics.
Imagine the cognitive dissonance and heads exploding if someone managed to create mindless zombies that followed directions, didn't protest wiretapping or secret laws and secret courts, and voted Republican, but the creation used FETAL STEM CELLS?
owait that's already been done: the red states. Blast.
You're aiming a little low. It won't be the end of the USA, it'll be the end of civilization. Not humanity: some people will survive. But, imagine worldwide darkness for two years, while it's raining sulfuric acid. Two years' agricultural failure and the resultant unrest will probably do for any government (outside of North Korea, which seems to have figured out how to deal with that.) The weather would probably be okay five to eight years out, but it's unclear how many people would be there to enjoy it.
I hadn't thought about politicization per se, but that's a good point, and a very difficult one. There are sites like Wikipedia that try for NPOV, and on the opposite side of the fence there are people who listen to both fox and npr on the theory that they know the biases. It's harder for an individual running a company, where the experts' biases might not be worn on their sleeves.
The whole point of a board of directors is to be an independent guidance system for the CEO. One of the ideas HP was trying was to have the CEO independent of the BoD (which idea they discarded during this fiasco.) The problem is, of course, that all the BoD's of all the different companies are the same people, and they all use the same decision-making processes. Makes me wonder if a BoD shouldn't consist of people from outside the industry entirely -- but then they wouldn't make good business decisions. Or maybe it should have people from the company's rank-and-file, but that's not trouble-free either, because they have access to the business decisions and strategies, which is a company's true crown jewels.
Hm. I'm glad I'm just a small frog in a big pond some days, although I wouldn't mind the paychecks...
If I didn't live a stone's throw away from Yellowstone (by which I mean how far Yellowstone is going to throw stones when it goes) I'd be kind of cheering it on in that way I watch hurricanes or tidal waves and think "whoah, that's amazing."
If Yellowstone went, we might expect "some 2,000 million tons of sulphuric acid were ejected into the atmosphere to block out sunlight over much of the planet causing global temperatures to plummet by between 10C and 20C." from here.
WMD's in Jackson's Hole: who would ever have thought? (Cue the Taco Bell jokes...)
>I'm also skeptical of the usual "but they told me it was OK" finger-pointing merry-go-round that seems to indicate that merely asking someone else's opinion of the ethics of an action clears you of responsibility. We get that from every corporate scandal, when in reality its always a situation of them getting the answer they were looking for in the first place or yet another culture of don't-ask-don't-tell where results matter only slightly less than not getting caught.
Not just corporate: look at the Iraq/WMD issue. People tell you what you want to hear (especially if they're you're employees) and when people talk you hear what you want them to say. That doesn't clear the decider of responsibility. But it raises a question, which I've been on about at length in this thread: how do you verify? You do the research, but if it's not your area of expertise, you ask experts. If they tell you what you want to hear, how do you know? What's a good mechanism to ensure data validity? Consider (as a few nutjobs have proposed) that you want to discredit the President so you place a bunch of moles in various positions and have them all feed false information about WMD's upwards, so that analysis of multiple sources of data returns similar summaries, all false. I'm quite sure that didn't happen, but if it did, could we blame the person who got stuck with all the false data and made a bad decision based on it? Now consider the more gray case where several people who are apparently experts all think something's legal, either because they've done it in the past or because they know other people who are doing it, so they all reply to inquiries about legality by saying it's legal, and they're the experts. Someone who is trying to find an answer gets the same tainted reply from several expert sources. How much can we blame the person for believing them?
Many people pooh-pooh the distinction, but I think this is a perfect case. He has no *guilt* for what he's done: he doesn't feel badly about any of it because he thinks everything he did was justified. He has tremendous *shame* being heaped on him because everyone else can see that he's a bottom-feeding hypocrite. He is embarrassed because he's ashamed.
I think they knew very well that they were walking a dangerous line, but they had a hard problem: to stop a leak. (They did need to stop the leak, I would argue, based on other stuff I've read, to ensure that their high-level planning wasn't also getting out. Carly Fiorino seems to have indicated that part of her departure was because of infighting because of leak issues.)
What they were doing, discussing leaks and what problems they caused, with the other board members as a group and individually, wasn't working. So they resorted to using outside investigators and authorizing their illegal activities.
So the question (which is unanswerable if you're not one of the involved board members) becomes: were they repeatedly trying to get assurance of the legality of their actions because they wanted to know, or because they wanted to appear concerned as a CYA?
In any case, leaving extensive paper trail documenting your concern about the legality of behavior clearly indicates they knew what they were doing was borderline. Their problem was: the perceived reward (stopping the leak) was great compared to their perceived risk (lots of other people/companies/governments were pretexting, so why shouldn't they?)
The government has guns, and apparently sufficient approval that they can seemingly get away with anything they want (which is a damn shame.) I have to wonder if perceived governmental laxity was part of what made people think it was okay to do something similar on a corporate realm.
Part of this -- I was thinking about this on the way home from work -- is also that justice isn't smooth. When people do something borderline and get away with it, other people see that and do something just a little worse that stands to line their pockets or fix problems. At some point, justice suddenly lurches in, tromples on someone, and makes a statement to everyone else that the line has been crossed. Lay and Skilling got massacred for their completely awful behavior, and maybe the HP thing is Justice redrawing the lines, and Dunn was just unlucky enough to be the one in the hot seat.
People in higher positions have (and should be held accountable for) much higher responsibility, as a result of their high pay and power. As you say, they should be shrewd and experienced. I think this situation was somewhat unusual in that board members don't leak stuff on an ongoing basis. That was one of the recurring points of the New Yorker article: that's a serious betrayal of trust and isn't something that boards of directors have to deal with. I don't think they DID have much experience with this situation, so they looked for a way to fix the leak (for good reason) and after a year of discussing it with other board members as a group and in private they started using other, lower methods.
Maybe this'll taint the entire idea of deceptive methods of getting information... but I doubt it.
>This isn't about micromanaging. These were executive level decisions.
But it *is*. Managing: "make this happen." Micromanaging: "do it this way."
You'd have to be dumb to not consider that things might go awry, and have a contingency plan in case they DO go wrong. They're not dumb. I'm sure they had a backup plan, and it's very possible what we're seeing is exactly that. But at some point, second-guessing becomes tautologic: if a person is guilty because there's clear evidence, but also guilty because evidence sufficient to exonerate the person is itself evidence that the person guiltily manufactured exonerating evidence -- then what evidence is sufficient to exonerate the person?
Don't get me wrong: I think they did ordered something illegal and there should be repercussions. But I think those repercussions should be shared among a lot more people.
>There's a difference between "I don't remember what happened" and "I don't know what happened." They darn sure as heck knew what was going on.
Obviously I don't *know* what was actually happening, but the writer's claim was that, yes, they knew exactly what was going on, were sufficiently worried about its legality to spend time researching it, and in the end, were repeatedly reassured by people who were more expert than they, that it was legal.
>There's something wrong if people in Dunn and Hurd's positions aren't able to identify a yes-man or an outright liar. How much were they being paid? The more likely explanation is that they asked only for the purpose of creating an auditable paper trail to try and cover their behinds if the scam was every exposed.
That's a real possibility, and I can't tell one way or the other.
But, in essence, a manager *must* rely on the manager's employees. A manager who goes and verifies every little decision, does all the research on everything being done... doesn't need employees because that manager's just done all the work. The employee is the expert on the job in question, and the manager is the expert in how that job fits into the grand scheme of the corporation. When a manager doubts a particular employee's answer, and goes and asks another employee, who is likewise more of an expert in the field than the manager, and gets the same answer, then what? If my manager refused to take both my and my coworker's assurances that what we were doing was the right thing, I'd consider my manager a micromanaging PHB.
To paraphrase King Henry V: every man's duty is to his king, but every man's soul is his own. The people who broke the law are responsible for breaking the law. A person who orders illegal actions, without knowing that those actions are illegal and having gone to some lengths to investigate whether they were actually illegal -- and having been told by corporate lawyers that the behavior is fine -- is much harder to find guilty.
That makes sense. I took three years' english comp/writing in college, and was thoroughly immersed in this at one point, but it was pretty much from the vantage you describe.
MR is fundamentally fantasy: positing something that doesn't/can't happen and exploring how people deal with that. Postmodern is more like performance art: writing to play with the medium and make statements using style. Both are innately limited in what part of the human condition they can address.
There are a lot of people writing what I call New Yorker fiction, though: short stories about people dealing with life. John Irving, TC Boyle, John Barth, Jane Smiley, that kind of stuff: good, solid material that was sometimes creepy but usually worth reading. The two excellent writing teachers I had both primarily focussed on that sort of material, and wrote that way themselves.
I read an interesting article in the New Yorker about this whole fiasco. The underlying theme was that lots of people were responsible for the disaster, but none of them actually realized what was going on. Dunn and Hurd, in particular, repeatedly asked both legal counsel and the people doing the problematic projects whether it was legal. I believe TNY cited evidence of five separate written requests for assessment of legality from Dunn alone, and every one of them came back with repeated assurances that everything was legal, these were routine operations, and there was no problem.
The other point of the article was that Dunn and Hurd both had access to the same material, both helped decide what needed to be done, and directed what was going on, but at the end of the day, Dunn lost her job and was charged with multiple felonies, while Hurd is now running the company.
>they can get a hundred miles per tank on tanks about the size of a scuba tank.
So can a moped.
Which is to say: we need a better metric.
I suggest what aircraft use: miles per gallon per passenger (assuming full occupancy, which means divide the number by four if it's being used in the US.) Unfortunately that doesn't include range, because there are lots of great transit options if you only need to go a couple of blocks.
People expect a range of about 600 km or 6 hours, whichever comes first (except for pregnant people -- I didn't know there were so many bathrooms along stretches of road I drive all the time...) Usually, alternative energy vehicles have moderately or drastically reduced range, if they're not the Sunraycer on a nice day. I've been told the Honda Insight can do well over 1000 km on one fuel tank, though I don't know if that's true. It'd be cool for those of us with large bladders to have new vehicles go *further* than current ones do.