If I recall correctly, in Kodak's case it was not that they became bloated and could not sustain themselves from profits, but that their new CEO kept doing a stock pump by selling off profitable divisions in order to make good quarterly numbers at the expense of recurring profits. So they had the classic 80s/90s 'short term profits give everyone huge bonuses, 5 years down the road does not matter' behavior.
Ah Ron Paul.. giving us solutions that didn't work before, but somehow because they failed during mythical better times (better for a few, crummy for many) people forget how badly they worked and assume that if they were implemented again it would be all gold and ice cream.
Unlikely. The private sector tends to do pretty badly with anything that requires sustained long term research before having a return. The first commercial application was communication satellites, but it took decades of research (and failures) before it was possible at a reasonable success rate for private companies to get interested.
I always wonder if the people who put forward that idea have actually worked in research before. I have been on both sides (public and private) and have generally found that they dovetail and the economy moves forward best when they are both doing what they do well.
I could see that working for some but not others, I guess it depends on how interconnected your industry is and how social everyone is. Personally, when I have done hiring, I have not recognized a single reference on someone's list.
Though the mirrorless cameras are quickly catching up in flexiblity, so this is likely to not be true much longer and might not even be now (esp at the entry level).
Something to keep in mind, 'Sony', in many ways, is not a single company. Each division acts almost independently... in fact there was an amusing case years ago where two divisions of Sony ended up on opposite sides of a law suit. So individual divisions can be crummy, but others can be pretty good.
The problem with brain teasers is they do not test if someone is smart or if they will be able to hack a situation.. they test how well the subject metathinks the test creator. They are artificial situations where the test creator has thought of both a problem and solution, and really only tests if the subject is good at figuring out how the test writer's mind works. It is kinda like reading a mystery novel... you are not solving a mystery, you are solving a writer's thought pattern.
Actually, I would wager they are giving brain teasers as an amusing way to cut down the number of applicants. I think programmers and hiring managers tend to like the questions because they are fun to give, but they are also a quick way to sort through people who look pretty similar on paper. When you have that kind of application volume, figuring out how to reduce it becomes pretty important for one's sanity, but like any other HR technique, it is designed to reduce the pile, not find the best applicants.
I guess it is less a 'buyer is always right' and more 'we give our reps poor training, vuage guidelines, but stand behind whatever they do'.. so you get lazy reps which might just push things through without verification or sit on things making it difficult to do anything about.
True, and eBay still has many scammer sellers on it (though often the scamming has moved up and is sellers scamming resellers)... but I think the big thing here is they do not even seem to have a resolution process... PayPal is infamous for 'we internally decided X, you have no recourse, we legally own your money, you are not getting it back'. Their whole model is crummy.
As a seller, not accepting PayPal significantly decreases the amount of business you will get, and as a buyer one's options for sources is dramatically reduced if you do not want your money going through PayPal. They have the chicken and the egg, and figuring out how to get rid of either is non trivial.
They used to, but that required more work on their part.. this was requires much less effort for their customer service people. Just receive a photo and hit a few buttons transferring the money.
Pity the buyer was in Canada, otherwise the seller could take them to small claims court. Taking PayPal probably will not work since they have their ToS written in such a way that they own both the item and the money till they say otherwise, so they are free to do whatever they want with them. Challenging THAT in court is no small deal and will take millions to fight.
Perhaps, but they can fall. They are huge because for a long time they were really the only option and they had lock-in with eBay. Now though other options are starting to gain traction, and sooner or later the DoJ is going to stop overlooking PayPay (who exist mostly through a legal loophole combined with doing favors for the DoJ that would be illegal to require) and start regulating (or even arresting) them. There have been too many cases of 'we will just keep your money with no resolution' over the years. Instances like this where they give someone's money to someone else without resolution also stand a chance of getting them in legal trouble eventually, even if their ToS says they can do it.
Apparently years ago they used to do just that.. but now that they have a stranglehold on eBay they have dropped such complexity for a simpler system that screws merchants over pretty badly.
From listening to other merchants, turns out this is a known scam. Buyers take advantage of PayPal's policy of 'buyer is always right' and end up with both the money and the item, which they often turn around and resell. There have also been cases of people buying stuff, returning for a refund, and shipping back something else of much less value... with again PayPal supporting the buyer.
And this cuts to the heart of the problem with these attempts, they require extensive amounts of metadata to be exposed by applications. Not only does this require overcoming a significant amount of vender inertia (including the problem of legacy apps) but it would represent an ongoing struggle to keep vendors including all the hooks needed for such systems to work. This is why they tend to have nice 'OS + a few hand picked trivial apps' demos when people show off such interfaces.
This idea comes up every few years and it always suffers from the same basic problems.. it gets attention because of elegant examples and use cases that the designers come up with, but tends to fall apart when dealing with the flexibility users actually need.. I have yet to see an implementation that handles the command space well. instead they have to restrict it to the point all you end up with is something that is less flexible then both GUIs and CLIs while not really adding anything useful... so it really only ever allows for 'more complex applications' if by 'more complex' you mean 'a few complex use cases are more automated, but don't try to do anything else.'.
Well, lobbyists and other such groups do not really have a reputation or revenue stream that can be impacted by anonymous, so they would not make sense as targets.
Ahm... actually part of the strategic reasoning behind sanctions is that they hurt the population. The idea is that if you make the lower population suffer enough that they will pressure their government to change behavior OR overthrow it. So when people rant about sanctions killing people, they are not just bleeding hearts.. the result is by design.
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If I recall correctly, in Kodak's case it was not that they became bloated and could not sustain themselves from profits, but that their new CEO kept doing a stock pump by selling off profitable divisions in order to make good quarterly numbers at the expense of recurring profits. So they had the classic 80s/90s 'short term profits give everyone huge bonuses, 5 years down the road does not matter' behavior.
Ah Ron Paul.. giving us solutions that didn't work before, but somehow because they failed during mythical better times (better for a few, crummy for many) people forget how badly they worked and assume that if they were implemented again it would be all gold and ice cream.
Heh. Agreed. I had not heard of her before, she seems rather awesome. The TNG cameo is just icing on the cake.
Unlikely. The private sector tends to do pretty badly with anything that requires sustained long term research before having a return. The first commercial application was communication satellites, but it took decades of research (and failures) before it was possible at a reasonable success rate for private companies to get interested.
I always wonder if the people who put forward that idea have actually worked in research before. I have been on both sides (public and private) and have generally found that they dovetail and the economy moves forward best when they are both doing what they do well.
I could see that working for some but not others, I guess it depends on how interconnected your industry is and how social everyone is. Personally, when I have done hiring, I have not recognized a single reference on someone's list.
Yeah, but that one is hard to rationalize. Puzzels on the other hand they can tell themselves that they are testing for 'the best'.
8% might not be a majority, but it is still a huge amount.
Though the mirrorless cameras are quickly catching up in flexiblity, so this is likely to not be true much longer and might not even be now (esp at the entry level).
Something to keep in mind, 'Sony', in many ways, is not a single company. Each division acts almost independently... in fact there was an amusing case years ago where two divisions of Sony ended up on opposite sides of a law suit. So individual divisions can be crummy, but others can be pretty good.
The problem with brain teasers is they do not test if someone is smart or if they will be able to hack a situation.. they test how well the subject metathinks the test creator. They are artificial situations where the test creator has thought of both a problem and solution, and really only tests if the subject is good at figuring out how the test writer's mind works. It is kinda like reading a mystery novel... you are not solving a mystery, you are solving a writer's thought pattern.
Actually, I would wager they are giving brain teasers as an amusing way to cut down the number of applicants. I think programmers and hiring managers tend to like the questions because they are fun to give, but they are also a quick way to sort through people who look pretty similar on paper. When you have that kind of application volume, figuring out how to reduce it becomes pretty important for one's sanity, but like any other HR technique, it is designed to reduce the pile, not find the best applicants.
Good point.
I guess it is less a 'buyer is always right' and more 'we give our reps poor training, vuage guidelines, but stand behind whatever they do'.. so you get lazy reps which might just push things through without verification or sit on things making it difficult to do anything about.
True, and eBay still has many scammer sellers on it (though often the scamming has moved up and is sellers scamming resellers)... but I think the big thing here is they do not even seem to have a resolution process... PayPal is infamous for 'we internally decided X, you have no recourse, we legally own your money, you are not getting it back'. Their whole model is crummy.
Sadly, getting away from PayPal is not easy.
As a seller, not accepting PayPal significantly decreases the amount of business you will get, and as a buyer one's options for sources is dramatically reduced if you do not want your money going through PayPal. They have the chicken and the egg, and figuring out how to get rid of either is non trivial.
They used to, but that required more work on their part.. this was requires much less effort for their customer service people. Just receive a photo and hit a few buttons transferring the money.
Pity the buyer was in Canada, otherwise the seller could take them to small claims court. Taking PayPal probably will not work since they have their ToS written in such a way that they own both the item and the money till they say otherwise, so they are free to do whatever they want with them. Challenging THAT in court is no small deal and will take millions to fight.
Perhaps, but they can fall. They are huge because for a long time they were really the only option and they had lock-in with eBay. Now though other options are starting to gain traction, and sooner or later the DoJ is going to stop overlooking PayPay (who exist mostly through a legal loophole combined with doing favors for the DoJ that would be illegal to require) and start regulating (or even arresting) them. There have been too many cases of 'we will just keep your money with no resolution' over the years. Instances like this where they give someone's money to someone else without resolution also stand a chance of getting them in legal trouble eventually, even if their ToS says they can do it.
Apparently years ago they used to do just that.. but now that they have a stranglehold on eBay they have dropped such complexity for a simpler system that screws merchants over pretty badly.
From listening to other merchants, turns out this is a known scam. Buyers take advantage of PayPal's policy of 'buyer is always right' and end up with both the money and the item, which they often turn around and resell. There have also been cases of people buying stuff, returning for a refund, and shipping back something else of much less value... with again PayPal supporting the buyer.
And this cuts to the heart of the problem with these attempts, they require extensive amounts of metadata to be exposed by applications. Not only does this require overcoming a significant amount of vender inertia (including the problem of legacy apps) but it would represent an ongoing struggle to keep vendors including all the hooks needed for such systems to work. This is why they tend to have nice 'OS + a few hand picked trivial apps' demos when people show off such interfaces.
This idea comes up every few years and it always suffers from the same basic problems.. it gets attention because of elegant examples and use cases that the designers come up with, but tends to fall apart when dealing with the flexibility users actually need.. I have yet to see an implementation that handles the command space well. instead they have to restrict it to the point all you end up with is something that is less flexible then both GUIs and CLIs while not really adding anything useful... so it really only ever allows for 'more complex applications' if by 'more complex' you mean 'a few complex use cases are more automated, but don't try to do anything else.'.
Unlikely. Laws like this tend to have 'wink and nod' exceptions for big players.... any case that is 'obvious' will quietly get dropped.
Well, lobbyists and other such groups do not really have a reputation or revenue stream that can be impacted by anonymous, so they would not make sense as targets.
Ahm... actually part of the strategic reasoning behind sanctions is that they hurt the population. The idea is that if you make the lower population suffer enough that they will pressure their government to change behavior OR overthrow it. So when people rant about sanctions killing people, they are not just bleeding hearts.. the result is by design.
The FDA does what congress tells them to do, and getting (re)elected requires massive amounts of capital.