What's more, even corporations who think that employee happiness doesn't matter because they can just hire someone else are just hurting themselves. Conservatively, it costs about 100k in upfront cost to hire someone. That can quickly balloon to one million if we're talking about skilled workers with specialized in-house knowledge. Heck, even a burger flipper or a maid costs money to hire - all that HR paperwork for terminating people and hiring people doesn't happen on its own.
All I can see when people are arguing that it's ok for companies to do this is people who don't know how to run efficient operations. Quite frankly, if the company has that attitude, please do fire me, because the company is one disaster or efficient competitor away from oblivion..
Why is this not at +5, Insightful? This is exactly where the future lies. The incumbent telcos are realizing that they have one thing that no one has (full control over the hardlines) and another thing that means that no one needs to go anywhere else: walled garden apps.
This is the future, folks. Give it ten years, and only the hardest of the hardcore geeks will even know how to get to the Internet. The rest of the US will be happy forever sitting on ATT's or Comcast's network, never leaving it, and never knowing how much the offerings suck they're consuming.
I'm wondering if Apple or Google will buy one of the smaller telcos to combat this. If they don't - they'll be toast.
Kinda funny that AOL's business model is making a comeback, killing off the very thing that killed off AOL.
You're right that companies are built from individuals, and that they have their own, valid opinions. However, that's not the problem here. If an MS employee wants to post their opinion under a pseudonym, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with someone liking MS products, and posting that. But that's not what's going on here: someone is paid to take a position and defend it at all cost. There is no debate going on here, merely advertisement.
I object to being advertised to by someone pretending to not be advertising, in an environment that I specifically selected because it is not filled with advertisement. Dupes, hot grits and GNAA won't get me to leave Slashdot. Astroturfers will.
It's the new Anti-Google astroturfer. The last one got killed because it he admitted he was a paid astroturfer for MS. This one isn't going to last very long either. Note for anyone who is wondering why I know (with >95% certainty) that DCTech is a paid astroturfer: * brand new handle * posts random Google is evil posts in the most unrelated topics * does so within seconds of the article being up * does little other than post Google is evil
I think foreign policy and economics are far more important than SOPA and patent law.
What makes you think that SOPA and patent law has no impact on economics? As far as I can tell, SOPA will be the death of a good chunk of the New Economy 3.0 companies....
I don't know what any of that has to do with a mathematical background in economics. If anything, what you mentioned has more to do with being a groupie than having an understanding of the mathematics behind economics.
I'm the first one on board the "Because it's there!" trip, but in this case, I'm less impressed. What's next - first trip to the South Pole in a Unicycle? Walking backwards? While doing a three-legged race?
Do it because you want to, not because you want to get your name in a record book by altering some small part of the original record.
What's even more of a problem: a lot of the business leaders are looking at the mess and thinking "Well, at least I have the money to make sure that I don't go down the drain like the rest of the people."
We can do better, but a lot of people disagree on what the better is and how to achieve it. The drawbacks of a democracy: if the majority thinks that a certain set of goals is the way to go, we will slowly move towards it.
This is exactly right. I used to ask all the standard questions, then threw in a puzzle to see how sharp they were. I stopped doing that once I realized that pretty much all the logical puzzles can either be memorized, or aren't as clear-cut as I would think they are. Instead, I use puzzles where I explicitly state that there is no right answer. They set up a completely unwinnable situation, so that it is obvious that I'm not asking a logic question. Then I ask the people to step me through how they would approach the problem. My goal is to figure out how they operate, not what kind of technical detail they have memorized. The other key part I'm looking for is consistency: is how they approached the problem similar to how they said they would approach the problem? I yes, great, if not, I know they memorized interview answers but don't actually work that way.
Then again, I also interview for people in a support role, rather than in a technical role, so communication is a lot more important than how much they have memorized of the product. But even then, I only ever have one question like that, and the rest are pretty standard. Including the one about where you see yourself in 5 years, and why you are applying for the job. Note to the asshole programmers above: cultural fit is important. I want to believe that I can work with you. If I start to think that you're a self-centered asshole, I'll start to look for reasons why I should continue the interview, rather than if you're a good candidate for the job.
1. I'm sure you can understand the difference between being bombed back to the stone age (say, like Dresden was), and the bombing of military installations and C&C centers. 2. I still can't find it. I'm gonna call shenanigans on this.
1. Of course infrastructure is bombed. You defeat someone by destroying their ability to coordinate. Not sure why this is news. 2. You're gonna need some proof for that. I looked for your quote, and couldn't find anything. And yes, I was looking for the original French.
Most people inside the EU understand what Americans don't: that the EU sucks, but that this is their best shot at not returning to about 3000 years of constant war. Besides, the EU doesn't have a monopoly on stupid ideas. Do you think the individual countries fare better? Heck, show me a single country that hasn't made a similar amount of stupid decisions, and I'll move there immediately.
Strange, considering that when Libyan oil started to go into Chinese direction, both EU and US got scared shitless and bombed the country into stone age.
Is this what passes for intelligent commentary these days?
1) Libya was not bombed into the stone age. The Ghaddafi regime lost some tanks, artillery, choppers and a few buildings were hit in the process as well. 2) Libya was free to sell its oil to whomever it wanted before the Ghaddafi regime change, and it is so now.
It's trivial to point out why something has bad side effects. Yes, China gets its oil a bit cheaper. Besides the fact that you still haven't demonstrated how that is in and of itself a bad thing (look - cheaper plastic toys at Walmart) outside of some basic fear of the China man, the key part is whether the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. And in this case, they don't.
I love this phrase. It sounds meaningful, but it really isn't. It comes from people who figured out that democracy isn't all roses and rainbows, but have never experienced what life in a true tyranny is like.
I know you're aiming for sarcasm, but you're actually right. After a certain level of income, a few percentage points of taxes do not change your lifestyle. Instead, the question then becomes, what kind of government do these taxes buy me? What kind of society do I want to be a part of?
I guess I should have been more specific. Specifically, I was referring to the ideas he laid out with Engels in the Communist Manifesto. There, unfortunately, his "direction of history" goes off the deep end and into some really far out stuff. Heck, even hippies had a hard time getting those ideas to work.
Of COURSE they don't exist yet. People haven't reached the enlightened state yet through which they will be able to fully take advantage of the conditions presented by such an economic and governmental system. In the meantime, we'll progress in small steps by progressively removing government workers from the public sphere and increasing the freedom of the Marxists... I mean, Markets.
Wait, I think I heard that story before.... it didn't work out so well then either.
If you think that the Justices in SCOTUS see the Constitution as anything more than a tool to advance the agenda of the party whose President appointed them, then you are truly naive.
I would suggest at looking at some data about who appointed whom, and how their decisions panned out. You might be surprised. Justice Souter, for example, was so famously a thorn in the side of the Republican Party that he was probably single-handedly responsible for the march toward nominating more politically known entities to the SCOTUS. Furthermore, one of the dissenting justices in the United Citizens case, Justice Stevens, was appointed by a Republican President.
Finally, you're conflating two things: political party and philosophical framework. While one can lead to another, it is dangerous to assume that they are always 1:1 relationships.
All in all, I find your position the most naive - that you can predict the decision of a member of the SCOTUS merely by looking at who nominated them.
Not sure what you're referring to, but I suspect it is my quip about Somalia. That's not a binary view of society, that's merely pointing out that reducing government past a certain point leads to the situation that is present in Somalia. I haven't seen anyone propose a solution that would gut the government to Somali levels, while preserving even a 2nd-world level lifestyle. Well, at least a solution that doesn't involve the free market just magically solving everything according to: 1) Free Market 2) ??? 3) Profit
Well, that's because a number of the views that are qualified as libertarian here are indeed nothing but anarcho-capitalism. They're not even true anarchy, they actually manage to be worse than that.
The main problem with those views is that they start with the premise that government is bad by definition. It isn't - it's a tool we invented to organize our social tendencies. As a result, libertarians who claim that the government is bad by definition fall into the trap that there is never a level where there is too little government. You could always cut back more. Furthermore, they vastly underestimate how much even the basic services they are ok with would cost: DoD, DoJ and State Department.
I'd love to get on board the Libertarian bandwagon - in theory, it should be the ideal place for me: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand and her followers have managed to corrupt that term to a degree that it has nothing to do with its classical definition. The reason I bring up Somalia is because it is one of the few places that truly has a weak central government. Even Afghanistan has a stronger central government than they do.
Slashdot Mirror
What's more, even corporations who think that employee happiness doesn't matter because they can just hire someone else are just hurting themselves. Conservatively, it costs about 100k in upfront cost to hire someone. That can quickly balloon to one million if we're talking about skilled workers with specialized in-house knowledge. Heck, even a burger flipper or a maid costs money to hire - all that HR paperwork for terminating people and hiring people doesn't happen on its own.
All I can see when people are arguing that it's ok for companies to do this is people who don't know how to run efficient operations. Quite frankly, if the company has that attitude, please do fire me, because the company is one disaster or efficient competitor away from oblivion..
Why is this not at +5, Insightful? This is exactly where the future lies. The incumbent telcos are realizing that they have one thing that no one has (full control over the hardlines) and another thing that means that no one needs to go anywhere else: walled garden apps.
This is the future, folks. Give it ten years, and only the hardest of the hardcore geeks will even know how to get to the Internet. The rest of the US will be happy forever sitting on ATT's or Comcast's network, never leaving it, and never knowing how much the offerings suck they're consuming.
I'm wondering if Apple or Google will buy one of the smaller telcos to combat this. If they don't - they'll be toast.
Kinda funny that AOL's business model is making a comeback, killing off the very thing that killed off AOL.
You're right that companies are built from individuals, and that they have their own, valid opinions. However, that's not the problem here. If an MS employee wants to post their opinion under a pseudonym, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with someone liking MS products, and posting that. But that's not what's going on here: someone is paid to take a position and defend it at all cost. There is no debate going on here, merely advertisement.
I object to being advertised to by someone pretending to not be advertising, in an environment that I specifically selected because it is not filled with advertisement. Dupes, hot grits and GNAA won't get me to leave Slashdot. Astroturfers will.
It's the new Anti-Google astroturfer. The last one got killed because it he admitted he was a paid astroturfer for MS. This one isn't going to last very long either. Note for anyone who is wondering why I know (with >95% certainty) that DCTech is a paid astroturfer:
* brand new handle
* posts random Google is evil posts in the most unrelated topics
* does so within seconds of the article being up
* does little other than post Google is evil
I think foreign policy and economics are far more important than SOPA and patent law.
What makes you think that SOPA and patent law has no impact on economics? As far as I can tell, SOPA will be the death of a good chunk of the New Economy 3.0 companies....
I don't know what any of that has to do with a mathematical background in economics. If anything, what you mentioned has more to do with being a groupie than having an understanding of the mathematics behind economics.
I'm the first one on board the "Because it's there!" trip, but in this case, I'm less impressed. What's next - first trip to the South Pole in a Unicycle? Walking backwards? While doing a three-legged race?
Do it because you want to, not because you want to get your name in a record book by altering some small part of the original record.
America died the 11th of september 2001.
Correction: America killed itself on 09/11/2001.
What's even more of a problem: a lot of the business leaders are looking at the mess and thinking "Well, at least I have the money to make sure that I don't go down the drain like the rest of the people."
We can do better, but a lot of people disagree on what the better is and how to achieve it. The drawbacks of a democracy: if the majority thinks that a certain set of goals is the way to go, we will slowly move towards it.
No, they have better things to do than stare at an empty space station - like the Middle East for example.
This is exactly right. I used to ask all the standard questions, then threw in a puzzle to see how sharp they were. I stopped doing that once I realized that pretty much all the logical puzzles can either be memorized, or aren't as clear-cut as I would think they are. Instead, I use puzzles where I explicitly state that there is no right answer. They set up a completely unwinnable situation, so that it is obvious that I'm not asking a logic question. Then I ask the people to step me through how they would approach the problem. My goal is to figure out how they operate, not what kind of technical detail they have memorized. The other key part I'm looking for is consistency: is how they approached the problem similar to how they said they would approach the problem? I yes, great, if not, I know they memorized interview answers but don't actually work that way.
Then again, I also interview for people in a support role, rather than in a technical role, so communication is a lot more important than how much they have memorized of the product. But even then, I only ever have one question like that, and the rest are pretty standard. Including the one about where you see yourself in 5 years, and why you are applying for the job. Note to the asshole programmers above: cultural fit is important. I want to believe that I can work with you. If I start to think that you're a self-centered asshole, I'll start to look for reasons why I should continue the interview, rather than if you're a good candidate for the job.
1. I'm sure you can understand the difference between being bombed back to the stone age (say, like Dresden was), and the bombing of military installations and C&C centers.
2. I still can't find it. I'm gonna call shenanigans on this.
1. Of course infrastructure is bombed. You defeat someone by destroying their ability to coordinate. Not sure why this is news.
2. You're gonna need some proof for that. I looked for your quote, and couldn't find anything. And yes, I was looking for the original French.
Most people inside the EU understand what Americans don't: that the EU sucks, but that this is their best shot at not returning to about 3000 years of constant war. Besides, the EU doesn't have a monopoly on stupid ideas. Do you think the individual countries fare better? Heck, show me a single country that hasn't made a similar amount of stupid decisions, and I'll move there immediately.
Strange, considering that when Libyan oil started to go into Chinese direction, both EU and US got scared shitless and bombed the country into stone age.
Is this what passes for intelligent commentary these days?
1) Libya was not bombed into the stone age. The Ghaddafi regime lost some tanks, artillery, choppers and a few buildings were hit in the process as well.
2) Libya was free to sell its oil to whomever it wanted before the Ghaddafi regime change, and it is so now.
Man, and you people vote. Scary.
It's trivial to point out why something has bad side effects. Yes, China gets its oil a bit cheaper. Besides the fact that you still haven't demonstrated how that is in and of itself a bad thing (look - cheaper plastic toys at Walmart) outside of some basic fear of the China man, the key part is whether the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. And in this case, they don't.
I love this phrase. It sounds meaningful, but it really isn't. It comes from people who figured out that democracy isn't all roses and rainbows, but have never experienced what life in a true tyranny is like.
I know you're aiming for sarcasm, but you're actually right. After a certain level of income, a few percentage points of taxes do not change your lifestyle. Instead, the question then becomes, what kind of government do these taxes buy me? What kind of society do I want to be a part of?
I guess I should have been more specific. Specifically, I was referring to the ideas he laid out with Engels in the Communist Manifesto. There, unfortunately, his "direction of history" goes off the deep end and into some really far out stuff. Heck, even hippies had a hard time getting those ideas to work.
Of COURSE they don't exist yet. People haven't reached the enlightened state yet through which they will be able to fully take advantage of the conditions presented by such an economic and governmental system. In the meantime, we'll progress in small steps by progressively removing government workers from the public sphere and increasing the freedom of the Marxists... I mean, Markets.
Wait, I think I heard that story before.... it didn't work out so well then either.
Aw, how cute. You broke down your statement into logical parts, and still can't figure out where it all falls apart. Ayn Rand would be proud.
If you think that the Justices in SCOTUS see the Constitution as anything more than a tool to advance the agenda of the party whose President appointed them, then you are truly naive.
I would suggest at looking at some data about who appointed whom, and how their decisions panned out. You might be surprised. Justice Souter, for example, was so famously a thorn in the side of the Republican Party that he was probably single-handedly responsible for the march toward nominating more politically known entities to the SCOTUS. Furthermore, one of the dissenting justices in the United Citizens case, Justice Stevens, was appointed by a Republican President.
Finally, you're conflating two things: political party and philosophical framework. While one can lead to another, it is dangerous to assume that they are always 1:1 relationships.
All in all, I find your position the most naive - that you can predict the decision of a member of the SCOTUS merely by looking at who nominated them.
Not sure what you're referring to, but I suspect it is my quip about Somalia. That's not a binary view of society, that's merely pointing out that reducing government past a certain point leads to the situation that is present in Somalia. I haven't seen anyone propose a solution that would gut the government to Somali levels, while preserving even a 2nd-world level lifestyle. Well, at least a solution that doesn't involve the free market just magically solving everything according to:
1) Free Market
2) ???
3) Profit
Well, that's because a number of the views that are qualified as libertarian here are indeed nothing but anarcho-capitalism. They're not even true anarchy, they actually manage to be worse than that.
The main problem with those views is that they start with the premise that government is bad by definition. It isn't - it's a tool we invented to organize our social tendencies. As a result, libertarians who claim that the government is bad by definition fall into the trap that there is never a level where there is too little government. You could always cut back more. Furthermore, they vastly underestimate how much even the basic services they are ok with would cost: DoD, DoJ and State Department.
I'd love to get on board the Libertarian bandwagon - in theory, it should be the ideal place for me: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand and her followers have managed to corrupt that term to a degree that it has nothing to do with its classical definition. The reason I bring up Somalia is because it is one of the few places that truly has a weak central government. Even Afghanistan has a stronger central government than they do.
I see that you still think that quoting yourself is somehow the sign of a well-supported position.