i agree. people constantly underestimate how powerful the brain really is. think about all the stuff it does simultaneously. like when you sit down to eat...you could be getting the food to your mouth, listening to the person across from you blab, checking out the girl sitting across the way, and on, and on and on... and we aren't even talking about feelings yet. or health related things like fighting off diseases.
and think about something like giving birth...the female egg gets a sperm and, nine months later, poof! a completely new and original life is popped out, with no input from the mom except food! i mean, the brain adjusts to supporting another living creature with very few side effects. and once the baby is out, the brain is able to recover and basically resume its normal functioning...to accomplish something like that seems to be a little harder than figuring out the root of an equation, at least to me.
i know people will say "oh, the brain only operates at blah blah blah gigahertz (go ahead, point out my lack of research), computers are already faster and smarter at math,"...
but if you think about it, they aren't even smarter at math anymore than an abacus is smarter than a human. all they do is count, and even that's just smoke and mirrors using the "AND" and "XOR" operations to simulate addition.
"I think creating something with recognizable intelligence (not just programming) will be much more difficult -- and have much more profound implications -- than "merely" creating life."
"Of course not. Because you, quite simply, are easily replaceable. There are, quite literally, millions of people ready, willing, and ABLE to do what you do. "
HOOOOORRRRSSSSEEEE shit.
there's no talented, out of work actors in los angeles, ready, willing and able to put in a 20 hour day for a million bucks is there?
i would further suggest that a valuable programmer is more rare than a good actor. think about all of the small theater productions with people that get paid nothing, not all of those people suck at acting, they just haven't caught their "big break". which is the reason why they're living in one room apartment in utica and not a mansion.
acting isn't even really that hard. everybody is good at it, only they call it lying instead of acting.
and sure, 20 hours seems like a long time, but when you get a bowl the size of a car tire full of nothing but green skittles at your request, it's not exactly work. the guy who gets that bowl full of skittles, he's working, not the actor.
and they don't make millions because it's "hard". being a cop is hard, being a doctor in the er is hard, being a soldier on the frontlines is hard. they make millions because they can. sure there's nothing wrong with that, but you have to wonder how good all that money really is when you look at how many of them end up with drug/alcohol problems.
"The problem with patent-law violation reasoning is that it seems to be without regard to the future. It's the same logic that leads to other poor policies (who cares about the environment! It's not messed up today). "
if the people over there are dead, they won't have a tommorrow.
wouldn't it be more fun not to be at the top... think about how exciting everyday would be if, the second you went outside, there was a chance that you could be eaten by a flying shark.... would anybody ever have another case of the mondays?
"Regardless, I think there's value in knowing *how* technology works independent of why you use it. The more convenient things become for you, the more is going on behind the scenes that can potentially screw you."
i agree. i think people should learn (early) how computers actually work at the hardware level so they know that the computer is NOT magic, it's just a bunch of switches. it's no different than a door or a tv or a car, just a controlled accident.
this is because, as people become more and more reliant on computers, they tend to trust what they see more. and, when you're dealing with things like bank accounts and personal information, sometimes the computer gives the wrong information. many people seem to think that computers are "smart" and don't realize that everything to do with the computer was made by people, and, well, people are stupid. even the smart ones.
well, in your fathers life time, assuming (and you know what happens when you assume...you make an ASS out of U and ME...) he was around in the 1960's/1950's/1940's, didn't he see much worse curtailing of freedom in that society?
things like putting thousands of japanese in interment camps during WWII and not even giving them back their houses or jobs when the war was over, black people not being able to vote/sit where they want to on the bus and being sprayed by fire hoses and bitten by dogs, people being drafted to go off and die for a theory in vietnam (that is what i assume the war was about, although i could be wrong).
and his father's (or maybe his grandfather's) society, man, those were the good days...if your skin has just the wrong pigmentation, well, you were property and 3/5th's of a human being.
i'm not saying you're wrong in your saying that passing the buck is a big problem, i'm just saying that always has been and most likely always will be. and that, since you seemed to be complimenting the values of a prior generation, that generation had way more problems in terms of values, in my mind, than this one.
i think it's good to keep in mind that the government is only made up of people, and people make lots of mistakes and don't know what they are doing most of the time (myself included). i think the government gets in trouble when the people in it forget that the whole system is only a group of people, and start thinking of it as having some kind of authority and some kind of innate wisdom. i am not sure what the role of government should be, i only know (selfishly) that i don't want it to make me do things i don't want to do.
how is this post only "2, Informative", but the one it's replying to is "5, Insightful"?
intelligence doesn't have anything to do with wealth. if everybody had an IQ of 200, guess what, there would still be poor people! and, if everybody had an IQ of 65, there would still be rich people!
society wouldn't improve if everybody was smarter, didn't you people see this...
"The second law of thermodynamics (which we obey in this house!) dictates that it will always take more energy to get the free hydrogen that you can ever get back in a fuel cell."
for crying out loud, everytime a story about a new energy source/storage thing comes out why do people always say "well, it'll never work, you have to put more energy in than you can get out."? i mean, with that train of thought, why not just give up and quit trying to improve anything right now? after all, according to the 2nd law, the universe will eventually become a giant soup of particles of the same temperature so that no work will be able to be done. so, fuck it, let's all just quit now.
i can't convice you that oil companies are collaborating because it is only in their best interest and there is nothing to stop them. oh well. guess i'll just give up....
all hail the oil industry, a model of efficiency proficiency, and incorruptability that will never be topped in the history of the world...
well, i don't think you'll be convinced. so i can't change your mind, you can't change mind. and we both wasted time typing meaningless shit on some nerd website. good debate, but not a big fuckin' deal.
"Such blatantly anti-competitive conduct by the oil cartel violates the most basic principles of fair competition and free markets and should not be tolerated."
i am not a conspiracy theorist. i just think that corporations have too much power nowadays and that they have no conscience that tells them what is right and what is wrong. and that the government is not doing its job of protecting the rights of the citizens, and instead has found a higher paying job of doing what corporations want and lying to the public. an example... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7804770/
it is only logical for corporations to try to fix prices! they are going to do whatever they can to do what they are designed to do...generate more and more profit. getting rid of competition or collaborating with competition will do that for them. that is my reason for thinking there is price/supply fixing. you can say "well, i've seen the inside of government and corporations, and, believe me, there isn't". and, even if you really believe that, i simply will still believe what i believe.
"And then all end up jail. Yeah, right."
okay, i think you're missing one of my points all along. my point, that i'm sure you know, is that things don't work like they do in theory. in theory, those fines from the crimes exxon committed would stop them from doing crimes in the future, but those fines won't. those fines are only another part of the cost/benefit analysis that a company does when it decides to do something. and even fines like $500 million are not enough of a disincentive to deter a company as big as exxon. i think the fines that these companies face should absolutely cripple them. that is the only way that corporate power can be checked, because that is the ONLY thing that it understands, money.
and, if amazon cooked the books, i don't think they would most likely end up in jail...
the majority of those on that page are NOT in jail, years after their crimes were committed. i understand that justice is slow and these cases are complicated, but still. now, compare the page of corporate scandals' status with this one about mandatory drug dealing sentences... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snit ch/primer/ (scroll down to the mandatory sentences table)
now, who did more damage? the guy coming out of the ghetto, with no father, no education, a lifetime of dissapointment and discrimination, who has drugs in his pocket because that is what everyone else does and that's the only way he sees to make money or the corporate criminal destroyed the financial savings and jobs of thousands of people because he was greedy?
now do you see why i think there some type of fishy business going on? i mean look at the penalties. they fined samuel waskal $4 million dollars and sent him to jail for 7 years. but he got $73 million in compensation in ONE year! plus he'll most likely get out early. so, when he gets out he'll have millions of dollars in the bank
"If Amazon.com says "we're going to have a great next quarter! Two quarters from now, though, we're going to be out of business", people would sell Amazon stock like hotcakes."
yes, but Amazon wouldn't say that. if they were about to go out of business, i would guess that, given what previous companies have done, they would most likely try to cook the books.
"You're telling the daughter of an oil pres/VP and niece of a former US congressman. That's bloody rich. Sorry to ruin your fantasy world, but we don't live in a batman comic."
oh, it's rich alright. so's this. http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/00/09/200 0921959.html wow. a "cost of living" increase. and they even set it up so that they don't have to vote for it! hey, would your uncle pass a law that would put your dad's company in peril? oh, wait, this isn't batman is it?
"It's called economics."
my point exactly. if you notice in my previous post, i said that the reason why we still have the same design... "it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are."
i was simply trying to say that there are plenty of smart people out there and that we could do a lot better than the internal combustion engine. if you sit there and say, "well, we've made a lot of improvments," i would respond, is that good enough? why should we settle for 30% efficiency?
and now, i hope can restrain myself as i respond to this... "How on earth are these applicable to the oil industry? Heck, you could at least have cited things that were illegal - there's certainly enough of them out there. Oh wait, though, if you had cited companies doing illegal things, you'd then have to cite their punishments, and that would ruin your argument."
are you a moron ? in case you are, here are some more links... (warning, some may involve oil companies...)
to showcase monopolies, you pick out: microsoft, mpaa, riaa, phone companies, clear channel.
all good choices, and none of them depend on an exhaustable resource in the ground. so the fact that monopolies exist in places where things like raw materials aren't much of a problem means that there are most likely more in industries where raw materials play a key role. this is becuase the barrier to entry into a raw material base industry is much higher, this gives less competition, more consolidation, bigger companies, more monopolies.
"That's why the current price spike worries the heck out of them. While it's great for them in the short term, its consequences are disturbing to them in the long term. If energy prices stay high, it leads to worldwide recession which dramatically cuts into their profit margin..."
you might think so, but i doubt it. as you said, "Stock price is everything to a major company."
the fact that stock price dominates companies decision making is big part of the problem. the people in the "finance" industry seem to live and die on quarter to quarter profits , and this puts pressure on the companies to perform now. you might have noticed this pressure in the form of enron, worldcom, healthsouth, adelphia, and some that have not been discovered yet. so when a stockholder looks up an oil stock and sees that they've been having record profits, the stockholder will buy. this tells the company that they are doing something right. so the company is forced to think in the short term if it wants to continue to "grow" by getting more investment from outside.
"Both of these things are highly illegal, and mergers between large oil companies are subject to antitrust approval in most of the nations (including ours) that they operate in."
yeah, but if they buy the congressmen (you can tell me they don't, but i am certain that they do), then the laws don't mean squat. and, as for companies doing something illegal, it should be noted that this is simply a financial decision, not a "moral" one. if the benefits, in terms of profits, of doing something illegal outweigh the potential consequences, like a fine, then the company will do it. there is no doubt in my mind about that.
or how about what walmart and many other compaies are doing by paying chinese workers like 10 cents an hour.
"But you try to hide a conspiracy in an industry that consumes a major portion of the entire world's economy and employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide."
just because there are many people involved doesn't mean that there isn't a conspiracy. just look at the auto industry... over 100 years and we still have an engine that works on the same design. does that mean that, out of all of the smart engineers, no one has come up with a better idea? or that the internal combustion engine is the be all end all of inventions? no. it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are.
and just because there are many people involved doesn't mean anything. world war II showed us that. people say "how could the germans be so blind as to not see the execution of MILLIONS of people?" i mean, millions of people simply gone, how did someeone not notice, how did WE not notice?
i have a question for you (oneiros27)... do you think any car companies will ever make production versions of solar cars?
personally i think that, if they really set their minds to it, we could have one in like 5 years, but because the car and oil monopolies are still making plenty of money, they have no incentive to.
"Price fixing for OPEC involved setting production limits; there's an oil production shortage compared to current demand, and OPEC has the taps wide open."
maybe i'm stupid, but they control how wide the taps are, don't they? If they set the production limits, and then there is a shortage on the production side, how are they not responsible?
"What do you mean "there's only a few companies" when you just linked to a page showing over a dozen of them, and that's hardly all of them. Huge numbers of oil companies exist, from monstrous giants like Exxon-Mobil to tiny wildcatter firms and oil services providers. Even among the giants, there are several dozen "giants" worldwide, and multiple in the United States."
what i mean is to look at the market capitalization numbers on the right. after the top nine companies there is a 30x drop in capitalization.
and i believe they have no incentive to compete in terms of aggresively lowering their prices so that people will buy from them and not somebody else. think about it like this...they all have a guaranteed revenue stream coming in because people need gas, so it is to all of their advantage to keep things predictable in order to maintain that guaranteed revenue stream. if they competed by lowering prices, they would make less money, some companies would be eliminated or changed. but, if they ALL raised prices, people have no where to go and so they would be forced to pay higher prices, generating more revenue for everybody with the added plus that the companies get to stay the same. now, the government is supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening, but i don't see ol' GW getting in the way of his buddies and their profits. as a matter of fact, he seems to be putting the middle class over the barrel in order to give the oil companies things like subsidies. check out this link... http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=XOM (click on the quarterly part) they have made PROFITS of $5.6 billion, $8.4 billion, $7.8 billion, and $7.6 billion in the last 4 quarters! there is no other business this successful in any industry! look at their competitors income statements too, and you'll see huge profits, year after year, quarter after quarter. does that look like competition to you?
i think of their business model more like getting a tax on driving instead of a selling product like a watch.
and finally, i don't trust a word these companies say. i think they are cooking the books in the opposite direction by hiding profits so that it does not appear that they are making as much money as they are.
...hey, there's a car on the tracks! quick, start the breaks...
"It's worse than many industries, because they're all selling essentially the same thing. They'll push particular blends and additives, but it really comes down to the same product, so it's really down to whoever can sell it the cheapest."
i think that you're missing something. it is not in these companies best interest to compete. there are only a few major oil companies (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ll/120mkt.html) that control basically all of the market. what is the incentive to compete? you assume that these companies are operating on some kind of free market model, but OIL'S NOT A FREE MARKET! their entire INDUSTRY is based on price fixing! (http://www.opec.org/home/). why compete when you can price fix? if businesses can price fix, they do. who is going to stop all of them from colluding and artificially raising prices? the market? the market doesn't have a choice. the government? no, they bought it a few decades back.
no, i think the real irony is that it doesn't matter if google talks to company X, because company X can just use google to find what google said and reprint it.
i think your "sig" says it best... "Few of history's great minds would have made it past the personel department."
things like this inevitably lead to a class system, like in "a brave new world".
the people who think that, based on "genetic information", they can give reliable predictions of what will happen to people in the future are COMPLETE IDIOTS!!!!!
for those people, i have just one question... if it was of financial benefit to the company to fire you because of health care costs, rather than pay your salary, would you still support genetic discrimination?
or, how about this, what if you worked at a company for like 20-30 years, and you've done great work, but they've instituted this new "genetic testing" policy, and you're tested. if it is found that you're very likely to develop some kind of cancer as you get older, is it right if they fire you?
that kind of logic is why i absolutely hate business, and i REFUSE to allow a company to get anything from me other than what they are paying me to do. companies are only out for one thing...profit, and if you're in the way, screw you... so, i say, i'm only out for one thing...freedom, and if your company is in the way, i quit.
Slashdot Mirror
i agree. people constantly underestimate how powerful the brain really is. think about all the stuff it does simultaneously. like when you sit down to eat...you could be getting the food to your mouth, listening to the person across from you blab, checking out the girl sitting across the way, and on, and on and on...
and we aren't even talking about feelings yet. or health related things like fighting off diseases.
and think about something like giving birth...the female egg gets a sperm and, nine months later, poof! a completely new and original life is popped out, with no input from the mom except food! i mean, the brain adjusts to supporting another living creature with very few side effects.
and once the baby is out, the brain is able to recover and basically resume its normal functioning...to accomplish something like that seems to be a little harder than figuring out the root of an equation, at least to me.
i know people will say "oh, the brain only operates at blah blah blah gigahertz (go ahead, point out my lack of research), computers are already faster and smarter at math,"...
but if you think about it, they aren't even smarter at math anymore than an abacus is smarter than a human. all they do is count, and even that's just smoke and mirrors using the "AND" and "XOR" operations to simulate addition.
"I think creating something with recognizable intelligence (not just programming) will be much more difficult -- and have much more profound implications -- than "merely" creating life."
sex.
it's not only difficult, but fun!
"Of course not. Because you, quite simply, are easily replaceable. There are, quite literally, millions of people ready, willing, and ABLE to do what you do. "
HOOOOORRRRSSSSEEEE shit.
there's no talented, out of work actors in los angeles, ready, willing and able to put in a 20 hour day for a million bucks is there?
i would further suggest that a valuable programmer is more rare than a good actor. think about all of the small theater productions with people that get paid nothing, not all of those people suck at acting, they just haven't caught their "big break". which is the reason why they're living in one room apartment in utica and not a mansion.
acting isn't even really that hard.
everybody is good at it, only they call it lying instead of acting.
and sure, 20 hours seems like a long time, but when you get a bowl the size of a car tire full of nothing but green skittles at your request, it's not exactly work. the guy who gets that bowl full of skittles, he's working, not the actor.
and they don't make millions because it's "hard". being a cop is hard, being a doctor in the er is hard, being a soldier on the frontlines is hard. they make millions because they can. sure there's nothing wrong with that, but you have to wonder how good all that money really is when you look at how many of them end up with drug/alcohol problems.
"The problem with patent-law violation reasoning is that it seems to be without regard to the future. It's the same logic that leads to other poor policies (who cares about the environment! It's not messed up today). "
if the people over there are dead, they won't have a tommorrow.
apparently bitching on slashdot isn't a luxury, so they're entitled.
instead of having the same argument that is repeated at least three times a week, how about people post suggestions of what the ip laws should be.
to me having ip laws with software doesn't make much sense.
isn't it kind of like trying to patent a math formula?
with music and movies, the companies should have protection for at most 5 years, after that, it's fair game.
wouldn't it be more fun not to be at the top...
think about how exciting everyday would be if, the second you went outside, there was a chance that you could be eaten by a flying shark....
would anybody ever have another case of the mondays?
International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
http://icann.org/faq/#WhatisICANN
not uscann
not uncann
even if they got control, they couldn't control shit.
if they sucked, another icann would be started.
greatest...
post...
ever
"Regardless, I think there's value in knowing *how* technology works independent of why you use it. The more convenient things become for you, the more is going on behind the scenes that can potentially screw you."
i agree. i think people should learn (early) how computers actually work at the hardware level so they know that the computer is NOT magic, it's just a bunch of switches. it's no different than a door or a tv or a car, just a controlled accident.
this is because, as people become more and more reliant on computers, they tend to trust what they see more. and, when you're dealing with things like bank accounts and personal information, sometimes the computer gives the wrong information. many people seem to think that computers are "smart" and don't realize that everything to do with the computer was made by people, and, well, people are stupid. even the smart ones.
hahahahaha
that was hilarious.
well, in your fathers life time, assuming (and you know what happens when you assume...you make an ASS out of U and ME...) he was around in the 1960's/1950's/1940's, didn't he see much worse curtailing of freedom in that society?
things like putting thousands of japanese in interment camps during WWII and not even giving them back their houses or jobs when the war was over, black people not being able to vote/sit where they want to on the bus and being sprayed by fire hoses and bitten by dogs, people being drafted to go off and die for a theory in vietnam (that is what i assume the war was about, although i could be wrong).
and his father's (or maybe his grandfather's) society, man, those were the good days...if your skin has just the wrong pigmentation, well, you were property and 3/5th's of a human being.
i'm not saying you're wrong in your saying that passing the buck is a big problem, i'm just saying that always has been and most likely always will be. and that, since you seemed to be complimenting the values of a prior generation, that generation had way more problems in terms of values, in my mind, than this one.
i think it's good to keep in mind that the government is only made up of people, and people make lots of mistakes and don't know what they are doing most of the time (myself included). i think the government gets in trouble when the people in it forget that the whole system is only a group of people, and start thinking of it as having some kind of authority and some kind of innate wisdom. i am not sure what the role of government should be, i only know (selfishly) that i don't want it to make me do things i don't want to do.
and end the discussion.
how is this post only "2, Informative", but the one it's replying to is "5, Insightful"?
intelligence doesn't have anything to do with wealth. if everybody had an IQ of 200, guess what, there would still be poor people!
and, if everybody had an IQ of 65, there would still be rich people!
society wouldn't improve if everybody was smarter, didn't you people see this...
http://www.thesimpsons.com/episode_guide/1022.htm
"The second law of thermodynamics (which we obey in this house!) dictates that it will always take more energy to get the free hydrogen that you can ever get back in a fuel cell."
for crying out loud, everytime a story about a new energy source/storage thing comes out why do people always say "well, it'll never work, you have to put more energy in than you can get out."?
i mean, with that train of thought, why not just give up and quit trying to improve anything right now? after all, according to the 2nd law, the universe will eventually become a giant soup of particles of the same temperature so that no work will be able to be done. so, fuck it, let's all just quit now.
great post,
i wish i had mod points.
okay, this is my last post.
/ 596718/fromItemId/2332
/ oil_2-17.html
2 2.RFS:
y _id=1602123
I D=/20050804/EDIT/508040321/1003
i Science/mechanic/HowstuffWorksHowGasPricesWork.htm
i can't convice you that oil companies are collaborating because it is only in their best interest and there is nothing to stop them. oh well. guess i'll just give up....
all hail the oil industry, a model of efficiency proficiency, and incorruptability that will never be topped in the history of the world...
pysche.
http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/jan-june00
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c106:H.R.38
http://economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?stor
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A
oh, and those links work.
unlike this one...
http://articles.roshd.ir/articles_folder/mohandes
and they're legit, whats roshd.ir? (i can't read arabic.)
and, this final link...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2908133.stm
you wanted evidence?
well, i don't think you'll be convinced. so i can't change your mind, you can't change mind. and we both wasted time typing meaningless shit on some nerd website. good debate, but not a big fuckin' deal.
uhhh...
http://www.senate.gov/~kohl/press/statements/20053 09430.html
that ain't an idiot like me talking, that's one of your father's former colleagues who said...
"Such blatantly anti-competitive conduct by the oil cartel violates the most basic principles of fair competition and free markets and should not be tolerated."
another opinion on price fixing...
http://slate.msn.com/id/77957/
i am not a conspiracy theorist. i just think that corporations have too much power nowadays and that they have no conscience that tells them what is right and what is wrong. and that the government is not doing its job of protecting the rights of the citizens, and instead has found a higher paying job of doing what corporations want and lying to the public.
an example...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7804770/
it is only logical for corporations to try to fix prices! they are going to do whatever they can to do what they are designed to do...generate more and more profit. getting rid of competition or collaborating with competition will do that for them. that is my reason for thinking there is price/supply fixing. you can say "well, i've seen the inside of government and corporations, and, believe me, there isn't". and, even if you really believe that, i simply will still believe what i believe.
"And then all end up jail. Yeah, right."
okay, i think you're missing one of my points all along. my point, that i'm sure you know, is that things don't work like they do in theory. in theory, those fines from the crimes exxon committed would stop them from doing crimes in the future, but those fines won't. those fines are only another part of the cost/benefit analysis that a company does when it decides to do something. and even fines like $500 million are not enough of a disincentive to deter a company as big as exxon. i think the fines that these companies face should absolutely cripple them. that is the only way that corporate power can be checked, because that is the ONLY thing that it understands, money.
and, if amazon cooked the books, i don't think they would most likely end up in jail...
they might be found not guilty...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8293846/
they might not ever go to trial (5 years and waiting...)
kenneth "kenny boy" lay
or they might get a "harsh" penalty...
bernie ebbers
just look at this page...
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/features/scandal_s heet.asp?cbsReferrer=www.google.com
the majority of those on that page are NOT in jail, years after their crimes were committed. i understand that justice is slow and these cases are complicated, but still.
now, compare the page of corporate scandals' status with this one about mandatory drug dealing sentences...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snit ch/primer/
(scroll down to the mandatory sentences table)
now, who did more damage? the guy coming out of the ghetto, with no father, no education, a lifetime of dissapointment and discrimination, who has drugs in his pocket because that is what everyone else does and that's the only way he sees to make money or the corporate criminal destroyed the financial savings and jobs of thousands of people because he was greedy?
now do you see why i think there some type of fishy business going on? i mean look at the penalties. they fined samuel waskal $4 million dollars and sent him to jail for 7 years. but he got $73 million in compensation in ONE year! plus he'll most likely get out early. so, when he gets out he'll have millions of dollars in the bank
"If Amazon.com says "we're going to have a great next quarter! Two quarters from now, though, we're going to be out of business", people would sell Amazon stock like hotcakes."
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yes, but Amazon wouldn't say that. if they were about to go out of business, i would guess that, given what previous companies have done, they would most likely try to cook the books.
"You're telling the daughter of an oil pres/VP and niece of a former US congressman. That's bloody rich. Sorry to ruin your fantasy world, but we don't live in a batman comic."
oh, it's rich alright. so's this.
http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/00/09/20
wow. a "cost of living" increase. and they even set it up so that they don't have to vote for it!
hey, would your uncle pass a law that would put your dad's company in peril? oh, wait, this isn't batman is it?
"It's called economics."
my point exactly. if you notice in my previous post, i said that the reason why we still have the same design...
"it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are."
i was simply trying to say that there are plenty of smart people out there and that we could do a lot better than the internal combustion engine. if you sit there and say, "well, we've made a lot of improvments," i would respond, is that good enough? why should we settle for 30% efficiency?
and now, i hope can restrain myself as i respond to this...
"How on earth are these applicable to the oil industry? Heck, you could at least have cited things that were illegal - there's certainly enough of them out there. Oh wait, though, if you had cited companies doing illegal things, you'd then have to cite their punishments, and that would ruin your argument."
are you a moron ?
in case you are, here are some more links...
(warning, some may involve oil companies...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon-Mobil
(scroll down to allegations)
http://www.law.washington.edu/pacrim/abstract/12.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F5
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1313246.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1180985.stm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F0
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB
oh, i got more...
and if you keep responding, you get a lot more.
that was a real good post.
to showcase monopolies, you pick out: microsoft, mpaa, riaa, phone companies, clear channel.
l
T he_reporter_Detroit_.shtml
all good choices, and none of them depend on an exhaustable resource in the ground. so the fact that monopolies exist in places where things like raw materials aren't much of a problem means that there are most likely more in industries where raw materials play a key role.
this is becuase the barrier to entry into a raw material base industry is much higher, this gives less competition, more consolidation, bigger companies, more monopolies.
"That's why the current price spike worries the heck out of them. While it's great for them in the short term, its consequences are disturbing to them in the long term. If energy prices stay high, it leads to worldwide recession which dramatically cuts into their profit margin..."
you might think so, but i doubt it. as you said,
"Stock price is everything to a major company."
the fact that stock price dominates companies decision making is big part of the problem. the people in the "finance" industry seem to live and die on quarter to quarter profits , and this puts pressure on the companies to perform now. you might have noticed this pressure in the form of enron, worldcom, healthsouth, adelphia, and some that have not been discovered yet. so when a stockholder looks up an oil stock and sees that they've been having record profits, the stockholder will buy. this tells the company that they are doing something right. so the company is forced to think in the short term if it wants to continue to "grow" by getting more investment from outside.
"Both of these things are highly illegal, and mergers between large oil companies are subject to antitrust approval in most of the nations (including ours) that they operate in."
yeah, but if they buy the congressmen (you can tell me they don't, but i am certain that they do), then the laws don't mean squat.
and, as for companies doing something illegal, it should be noted that this is simply a financial decision, not a "moral" one. if the benefits, in terms of profits, of doing something illegal outweigh the potential consequences, like a fine, then the company will do it. there is no doubt in my mind about that.
just look at what bechtel did...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.htm
or maybe monsanto...
http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/24/Worldandnation/
or how about what walmart and many other compaies are doing by paying chinese workers like 10 cents an hour.
"But you try to hide a conspiracy in an industry that consumes a major portion of the entire world's economy and employs hundreds of millions of people worldwide."
just because there are many people involved doesn't mean that there isn't a conspiracy. just look at the auto industry... over 100 years and we still have an engine that works on the same design. does that mean that, out of all of the smart engineers, no one has come up with a better idea? or that the internal combustion engine is the be all end all of inventions? no. it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are.
and just because there are many people involved doesn't mean anything. world war II showed us that. people say "how could the germans be so blind as to not see the execution of MILLIONS of people?" i mean, millions of people simply gone, how did someeone not notice, how did WE not notice?
i have a question for you (oneiros27)...
do you think any car companies will ever make production versions of solar cars?
personally i think that, if they really set their minds to it, we could have one in like 5 years, but because the car and oil monopolies are still making plenty of money, they have no incentive to.
"Price fixing for OPEC involved setting production limits; there's an oil production shortage compared to current demand, and OPEC has the taps wide open."
maybe i'm stupid, but they control how wide the taps are, don't they? If they set the production limits, and then there is a shortage on the production side, how are they not responsible?
"What do you mean "there's only a few companies" when you just linked to a page showing over a dozen of them, and that's hardly all of them. Huge numbers of oil companies exist, from monstrous giants like Exxon-Mobil to tiny wildcatter firms and oil services providers. Even among the giants, there are several dozen "giants" worldwide, and multiple in the United States."
what i mean is to look at the market capitalization numbers on the right. after the top nine companies there is a 30x drop in capitalization.
and i believe they have no incentive to compete in terms of aggresively lowering their prices so that people will buy from them and not somebody else. think about it like this...they all have a guaranteed revenue stream coming in because people need gas, so it is to all of their advantage to keep things predictable in order to maintain that guaranteed revenue stream. if they competed by lowering prices, they would make less money, some companies would be eliminated or changed. but, if they ALL raised prices, people have no where to go and so they would be forced to pay higher prices, generating more revenue for everybody with the added plus that the companies get to stay the same. now, the government is supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening, but i don't see ol' GW getting in the way of his buddies and their profits. as a matter of fact, he seems to be putting the middle class over the barrel in order to give the oil companies things like subsidies. check out this link...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=XOM
(click on the quarterly part) they have made PROFITS of $5.6 billion, $8.4 billion, $7.8 billion, and $7.6 billion in the last 4 quarters! there is no other business this successful in any industry! look at their competitors income statements too, and you'll see huge profits, year after year, quarter after quarter. does that look like competition to you?
i think of their business model more like getting a tax on driving instead of a selling product like a watch.
and finally, i don't trust a word these companies say. i think they are cooking the books in the opposite direction by hiding profits so that it does not appear that they are making as much money as they are.
...hey, there's a car on the tracks! quick, start the breaks...
"It's worse than many industries, because they're all selling essentially the same thing. They'll push particular blends and additives, but it really comes down to the same product, so it's really down to whoever can sell it the cheapest."
i think that you're missing something. it is not in these companies best interest to compete. there are only a few major oil companies (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ll/120mkt.html) that control basically all of the market. what is the incentive to compete? you assume that these companies are operating on some kind of free market model, but OIL'S NOT A FREE MARKET!
their entire INDUSTRY is based on price fixing! (http://www.opec.org/home/). why compete when you can price fix? if businesses can price fix, they do. who is going to stop all of them from colluding and artificially raising prices? the market? the market doesn't have a choice. the government? no, they bought it a few decades back.
no, i think the real irony is that it doesn't matter if google talks to company X, because company X can just use google to find what google said and reprint it.
i think your "sig" says it best...
"Few of history's great minds would have made it past the personel department."
things like this inevitably lead to a class system, like in "a brave new world".
the people who think that, based on "genetic information", they can give reliable predictions of what will happen to people in the future are COMPLETE IDIOTS!!!!!
for those people, i have just one question...
if it was of financial benefit to the company to fire you because of health care costs, rather than pay your salary, would you still support genetic discrimination?
or, how about this, what if you worked at a company for like 20-30 years, and you've done great work, but they've instituted this new "genetic testing" policy, and you're tested. if it is found that you're very likely to develop some kind of cancer as you get older, is it right if they fire you?
that kind of logic is why i absolutely hate business, and i REFUSE to allow a company to get anything from me other than what they are paying me to do.
companies are only out for one thing...profit, and if you're in the way, screw you...
so, i say, i'm only out for one thing...freedom, and if your company is in the way, i quit.