As someone who consumed organic food for several years I can attest that none of the organic food I ate tasted better than its conventional counterpart.
I suspect that most people who espouse this view have been convinced it tastes better because of the price.
So what was the point in spinning off a foundry into a separate company?
(Same reason any company ever spawns other companies: To create positions for more CXOs and fuck around with the accounting books. AMD isn't doing well, even though I wish it were.)
I know being cynical sounds good "Just more fat cats lining their own pockets, heh", but there are legitimate reasons to restructure companies.
In this case, foundries keep getting more expensive and AMD won't be able to compete with Intel if it keeps manufacturing in house. If it spins them off (while still retaining ~ 30% of the stock in the new company) they can achieve economies of scale by fabbing chips for other companies. This means that AMD will have a better shot at competing since they will no longer be hobbled by archaic process technology.
This is a bad idea not only because trialing things on death row inmates seems to be a cruel and unusual punishment but also because it creates a perverse incentive. Specifically, suppose that testing on prisoners provides a noteworthy improvement in development speed for this vaccine. There will then be the motivation to use this model again in the future (surely we should use these death row inmates to speed the development of a malaria vaccine, etc). If this keeps providing benefits there will then be a demand for death row inmates to provide a source of test candidates.
If this seems far fetched, consider the example of China which (at least until recently) has likely been selling the organs of prisoners http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5386720.stm and has an unusually broad number of crimes for which the death sentence applies.
Series four gave us The Farnsworth Parabox, The Sting, 300 Big Boys and The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings, all of which were awesome.
Also, more importantly, which writers dropped off the show in seasons three and four that you think were funny and sharp? Given the writers credits in Wikipedia suggest that almost all contributors in the first two seasons wrote episodes in three and four I'm not really sure who you're referring to:
Yeah, a truly evil character would have armed the bomb in Megaton, shot Burke, taken the detonation controls and spent the rest of the game shaking residents of the town down for caps.
It's not an attractive way to raise the issue, but it's true: artists should be rewarded for their work. Look at how the studios screwed the Gilligan's Island people, who languished in poverty after the networks ran episodes for decades.
No, they shouldn't. In case you haven't noticed, we have a vast oversupply of artists even at their current low levels of remuneration.
On the other hand, we have a shortage of capital available to produce/support the production of art.
Looking further at your example of the Gilligan's island actors - they didn't finance the show, they didn't screen it, they provided none of the infrastructure. If they'd told the networks to fuck off and tried to make something in their basement they'd have failed utterly. The networks could have found other people to star easily. I have no idea why we should care that readily replaceable actors languish in poverty after they've finished doing the work they were paid for.
Finally, paying artists for work they've long since finished provides little encouragement for them to produce new work (and in fact may discourage them since they can keep food on the table without producing anything new).
Defending this trademark is important. Without profit, the incentive for companies to develop new giant fire-breathing dinosaurs would diminish and society would fall apart.
These kind of comments always crop up in Yahoo! articles and they're depressingly stupid.
The correct way to stop the "dirty business practices" that you describe is through government regulation. The notion that companies will police themselves for the greater good makes as much sense as securing your home through the honor system.
Please answer this for me:
If a company isn't there to serve its owners, then what exactly is the point of owning a portion of that company?
If you wind up anywhere in management of a company I own stock in I'm selling up ASAP.
It was highly obvious at the time:
1) Yahoo! stock had been in decline for some time.
2) Google was kicking the shit out of it.
3) The offer from Microsoft was substantially above the market price.
You have to have really, really good reasons to ignore a large, certain profit. Yang didn't have any.
As one of the few foreigners who is still positive about the US as the sole superpower, let me point out that going it alone went really well for you in the past eight years.
You are facing challenges to your position far greater than you have in the past (ie China). Pissing goodwill up against the wall isn't going to help you maintain preeminence.
Feb 8th 2007 | TOKYO From The Economist print edition Almost everyone accused of a crime in Japan signs a confession, guilty or not
A TAXI driver in Toyama prefecture is arrested for rape and attempted rape, confesses to both crimes, is convicted after a brief trial and serves his three years in prison. Meanwhile, another man, arrested on rape charges, also confesses to the two crimes the first man was convicted for. He, too, goes to jail and serves his time. Is this a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a case of trumped-up charges from the annals of Stalinist Russia, a trick question in a Cambridge tripos? None of the above. It is a recent instance, and not an uncommon one, of the Japanese judicial system at work.
On January 26th Jinen Nagase, Japan's justice minister, apologised for the wrongful arrest of the taxi driver and declared that an investigation would take place. After all, the suspect had an alibi, evidence that he could not have committed the crime and had denied vociferously having done so. But after the third day in detention without access to the outside world, he was persuaded to sign a confession.
With too many instances of wrongful arrest and conviction, few expect anything to come from the justice ministry's investigation. But the spotlight has begun to shine on the practices of police interrogation as well as on the court's presumption of guilt. More and more innocent victims of Japan's judicial zeal are going public with grim accounts of their experiences at the hands of the police and the court system.
Now a new film about wrongful arrest by one of Japan's most respected directors, Masayuki Suo, has just opened to critical acclaim. The movie, entitled "I Just Didn't Do It", is based on a true story about a young man who was accused of molesting a schoolgirl on a crowded train--and refused adamantly to sign a confession. Thanks to support from friends and family, the real-life victim finally won a retrial after two years of protesting his innocence, and is today a free man.
The film, which was premièred in America and Britain before opening in Japan, depicts how suspects, whether guilty or innocent, are brutalised by the Japanese police, and how the judges side with the prosecutors. Mr Suo argues that suspects are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that the odds are stacked massively against them being so proven.
The statistics would seem to bear him out. Japan is unique among democratic countries in that confessions are obtained from 95% of all people arrested, and that its courts convict 99.9% of all the suspects brought before them. Prosecutors are ashamed of being involved in an acquittal and fear that losing a case will destroy their careers. Judges get promotion for the speed with which they process their case-loads. And juries do not exist, though there is talk of introducing a watered-down system called saiban-in for open-and-shut cases. Apparently, members of the public are not to be trusted with cases that might involve special knowledge. Those will still be heard and ruled on--as are all cases in Japan today--by judges alone.
Despite Article 38 of the Japanese constitution, which guarantees an accused person's right to remain silent, the police and the prosecutors put maximum emphasis on obtaining a confession rather than building a case based on evidence. The official view is that confession is an essential first step in rehabilitating offenders. Japanese judges tend to hand down lighter sentences when confessions are accompanied by demonstrations of remorse. Even more important, prosecutors have the right to ask for lenient sentences when the accused has been especially co-operative.
It is how the police obtain these confessions that troubles human-rights activists. A suspect can be held for 48 hours without legal counsel or contact with the outside world. After that, he or she is turned over to the public prosecutor for another 24 hours of grilling.
First up, great post. I like a lot of your ideas.
I'd like to respond to the trial-by-boredom thing in MMORPGs though:
There is a reason why these games are like that - investment. If you've spent 12 hours crafting the Mace of Exsanguination, no matter how boring it was, you feel invested in the game because you've made a sacrifice. The more time you invest, the more reason you have to keep playing because otherwise it would all be in vain.
If that doesn't work, then ask them for a signed document stating categorically that nothing is wrong.
If they are unwilling to provide it (thanks to the state of medical liability many will be), explain to them that you'd like to investigate it further and that you'd like a referral.
The idea is to trap them between the two choices.
When you're comparing the super rich vs the poor, there is a far greater pool of poor people to draw from.
Furthermore, the acts of the rich stand out far more than the acts of the poor thanks to the scope of their influence. Case in point would be Bill Gates. On the one hand there's his huge philanthropic donations, on the other there is MS. MS isn't really that evil (compare it with SCO) but it stands out due to its size and market dominance.
I think that you can find good and bad in everyone, it's just that you're focussing on the virtues of the poor, and the evils of the rich.
For example, Einstein was an awful husband. But you don't mention that. Gates donated billions to wipe out childhood diseases. But, no, he's from MS he's eeeevilll. In fact he's had a social conscience pretty much all the way along (most of his early political donations were to left leaning causes).
Anyway, back to your post:
"And a lot more who were perfectly content with enough to get by on, and not much more."
What's so great about being content with enough to get by on? Why is this an admirable trait? How do you know these people actually were content and weren't just failures?
Your post seems to imply there's something virtuous about being poor. I have no idea why anyone could accept that. At the least, having money gives you the resources to do something about what you care about. How many people can fund research like Bill Gates?
"And I'd like to see it, name some really rich dudes (we'll class really rich as billionaires in todays dollars, adjusted for time) who weren't or aren't more or less jerk offs."
Warren Buffett - he's donated a few billion to charity, is one of the world's richest men, and still lives in the same, small house he's owned for years.
Banks give credit cards to unemployed college students. They loan money to people with no income. People have credit card debt because their paycheck is insufficient to afford things like the dentist and a new transmission for the car.
Not being too far out of college myself, I managed to survive without having all my money stolen by the evil banks. I've noticed that a lot of students who run up large debts manage to do so because they spend money on nonessentials as soon as they get it, rather than paying off their loans and credit cards. I have an ex who, up to her eyeballs in debt would get more cash from her family and buy new clothes and toys and stuff.
Plus, if you're going to sign up for a credit card or something, you should be smart enough to read the fine print. If you don't do that you're going to get thoroughly screwed throughout life. These are college kids we're talking about.
By contrast, my parents were gainfully employed perpetually (with full benefits) from the moment they graduated college, and were never laid off. Not even once.
I'm not sure why I'd want permanent full time employment without being laid off. I was out of work for seven months at one point, which, after I stopped slacking around, caused me to go out and get a new job where I'm making three times as much. Now, the process of finding that job made my life pretty hellish, and went through probably fifty interviews, but it paid off in the end. There are opportunities out there if you're willing to consistently push yourself towards them.
Remember everyone, if you're not successful, it's not your fault! It's the system! The man is keeping you down!
It's funny how many people talk about life being stacked against them. These are the same people who are fat because it's the food companies fault, or are smoking because they're addicted, or have huge credit card debts because the banks make it too easy to get credit.
It's really easy to come up with these sort of excuses. I even came up with one of my own - "I'm really smart, therefore I'm disadvantaged, because I've never learnt how to work hard". But the problem is, they guarantee you'll be stuck at the bottom.
In the end, I'd rather believe that I am 100% responsible, however false this may be. At least it'll encourage me to do my best, rather than complain that everyone else is unfairly rewarded.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who consumed organic food for several years I can attest that none of the organic food I ate tasted better than its conventional counterpart.
I suspect that most people who espouse this view have been convinced it tastes better because of the price.
So what was the point in spinning off a foundry into a separate company?
(Same reason any company ever spawns other companies: To create positions for more CXOs and fuck around with the accounting books. AMD isn't doing well, even though I wish it were.)
I know being cynical sounds good "Just more fat cats lining their own pockets, heh", but there are legitimate reasons to restructure companies.
In this case, foundries keep getting more expensive and AMD won't be able to compete with Intel if it keeps manufacturing in house. If it spins them off (while still retaining ~ 30% of the stock in the new company) they can achieve economies of scale by fabbing chips for other companies. This means that AMD will have a better shot at competing since they will no longer be hobbled by archaic process technology.
This is a bad idea not only because trialing things on death row inmates seems to be a cruel and unusual punishment but also because it creates a perverse incentive. Specifically, suppose that testing on prisoners provides a noteworthy improvement in development speed for this vaccine. There will then be the motivation to use this model again in the future (surely we should use these death row inmates to speed the development of a malaria vaccine, etc). If this keeps providing benefits there will then be a demand for death row inmates to provide a source of test candidates. If this seems far fetched, consider the example of China which (at least until recently) has likely been selling the organs of prisoners http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5386720.stm and has an unusually broad number of crimes for which the death sentence applies.
Series four gave us The Farnsworth Parabox, The Sting, 300 Big Boys and The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings, all of which were awesome.
Also, more importantly, which writers dropped off the show in seasons three and four that you think were funny and sharp? Given the writers credits in Wikipedia suggest that almost all contributors in the first two seasons wrote episodes in three and four I'm not really sure who you're referring to:
List of Futurama episodes with writers
Yeah, a truly evil character would have armed the bomb in Megaton, shot Burke, taken the detonation controls and spent the rest of the game shaking residents of the town down for caps.
It's not an attractive way to raise the issue, but it's true: artists should be rewarded for their work. Look at how the studios screwed the Gilligan's Island people, who languished in poverty after the networks ran episodes for decades.
No, they shouldn't. In case you haven't noticed, we have a vast oversupply of artists even at their current low levels of remuneration.
On the other hand, we have a shortage of capital available to produce/support the production of art.
Looking further at your example of the Gilligan's island actors - they didn't finance the show, they didn't screen it, they provided none of the infrastructure. If they'd told the networks to fuck off and tried to make something in their basement they'd have failed utterly. The networks could have found other people to star easily. I have no idea why we should care that readily replaceable actors languish in poverty after they've finished doing the work they were paid for.
Finally, paying artists for work they've long since finished provides little encouragement for them to produce new work (and in fact may discourage them since they can keep food on the table without producing anything new).
Defending this trademark is important. Without profit, the incentive for companies to develop new giant fire-breathing dinosaurs would diminish and society would fall apart.
Given YHOO pays no dividend, where exactly did you get this $10 a year for 10 years idea?
These kind of comments always crop up in Yahoo! articles and they're depressingly stupid.
The correct way to stop the "dirty business practices" that you describe is through government regulation. The notion that companies will police themselves for the greater good makes as much sense as securing your home through the honor system.
Please answer this for me:
If a company isn't there to serve its owners, then what exactly is the point of owning a portion of that company?
If you wind up anywhere in management of a company I own stock in I'm selling up ASAP.
It was highly obvious at the time: 1) Yahoo! stock had been in decline for some time. 2) Google was kicking the shit out of it. 3) The offer from Microsoft was substantially above the market price. You have to have really, really good reasons to ignore a large, certain profit. Yang didn't have any.
As one of the few foreigners who is still positive about the US as the sole superpower, let me point out that going it alone went really well for you in the past eight years. You are facing challenges to your position far greater than you have in the past (ie China). Pissing goodwill up against the wall isn't going to help you maintain preeminence.
How much tuna were you eating last week? What are the symptoms of your mercury poisoning? How were you tested for it?
It all happens in something like 24 hours, and with the world travel, it's conceivable that you could be spending the entire time in darkness.
Plus the cyberpunk genre doesn't work if you're trudging through verdant sunny meadows.
True - from the Economist:
Confess and be done with it
Feb 8th 2007 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition
Almost everyone accused of a crime in Japan signs a confession, guilty or not
A TAXI driver in Toyama prefecture is arrested for rape and attempted rape, confesses to both crimes, is convicted after a brief trial and serves his three years in prison. Meanwhile, another man, arrested on rape charges, also confesses to the two crimes the first man was convicted for. He, too, goes to jail and serves his time. Is this a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a case of trumped-up charges from the annals of Stalinist Russia, a trick question in a Cambridge tripos? None of the above. It is a recent instance, and not an uncommon one, of the Japanese judicial system at work.
On January 26th Jinen Nagase, Japan's justice minister, apologised for the wrongful arrest of the taxi driver and declared that an investigation would take place. After all, the suspect had an alibi, evidence that he could not have committed the crime and had denied vociferously having done so. But after the third day in detention without access to the outside world, he was persuaded to sign a confession.
With too many instances of wrongful arrest and conviction, few expect anything to come from the justice ministry's investigation. But the spotlight has begun to shine on the practices of police interrogation as well as on the court's presumption of guilt. More and more innocent victims of Japan's judicial zeal are going public with grim accounts of their experiences at the hands of the police and the court system.
Now a new film about wrongful arrest by one of Japan's most respected directors, Masayuki Suo, has just opened to critical acclaim. The movie, entitled "I Just Didn't Do It", is based on a true story about a young man who was accused of molesting a schoolgirl on a crowded train--and refused adamantly to sign a confession. Thanks to support from friends and family, the real-life victim finally won a retrial after two years of protesting his innocence, and is today a free man.
The film, which was premièred in America and Britain before opening in Japan, depicts how suspects, whether guilty or innocent, are brutalised by the Japanese police, and how the judges side with the prosecutors. Mr Suo argues that suspects are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that the odds are stacked massively against them being so proven.
The statistics would seem to bear him out. Japan is unique among democratic countries in that confessions are obtained from 95% of all people arrested, and that its courts convict 99.9% of all the suspects brought before them. Prosecutors are ashamed of being involved in an acquittal and fear that losing a case will destroy their careers. Judges get promotion for the speed with which they process their case-loads. And juries do not exist, though there is talk of introducing a watered-down system called saiban-in for open-and-shut cases. Apparently, members of the public are not to be trusted with cases that might involve special knowledge. Those will still be heard and ruled on--as are all cases in Japan today--by judges alone.
Despite Article 38 of the Japanese constitution, which guarantees an accused person's right to remain silent, the police and the prosecutors put maximum emphasis on obtaining a confession rather than building a case based on evidence. The official view is that confession is an essential first step in rehabilitating offenders. Japanese judges tend to hand down lighter sentences when confessions are accompanied by demonstrations of remorse. Even more important, prosecutors have the right to ask for lenient sentences when the accused has been especially co-operative.
It is how the police obtain these confessions that troubles human-rights activists. A suspect can be held for 48 hours without legal counsel or contact with the outside world. After that, he or she is turned over to the public prosecutor for another 24 hours of grilling.
This problem can be solved by offering cash to Uncle Frank as well.
If I am in the decision making minority then yes.
The trick is to break the hard stuff up into lots of little tasks that collectively take care of the hard stuff.
First up, great post. I like a lot of your ideas. I'd like to respond to the trial-by-boredom thing in MMORPGs though: There is a reason why these games are like that - investment. If you've spent 12 hours crafting the Mace of Exsanguination, no matter how boring it was, you feel invested in the game because you've made a sacrifice. The more time you invest, the more reason you have to keep playing because otherwise it would all be in vain.
If that doesn't work, then ask them for a signed document stating categorically that nothing is wrong. If they are unwilling to provide it (thanks to the state of medical liability many will be), explain to them that you'd like to investigate it further and that you'd like a referral. The idea is to trap them between the two choices.
When you're comparing the super rich vs the poor, there is a far greater pool of poor people to draw from.
Furthermore, the acts of the rich stand out far more than the acts of the poor thanks to the scope of their influence. Case in point would be Bill Gates. On the one hand there's his huge philanthropic donations, on the other there is MS. MS isn't really that evil (compare it with SCO) but it stands out due to its size and market dominance.
I think that you can find good and bad in everyone, it's just that you're focussing on the virtues of the poor, and the evils of the rich.
For example, Einstein was an awful husband. But you don't mention that. Gates donated billions to wipe out childhood diseases. But, no, he's from MS he's eeeevilll. In fact he's had a social conscience pretty much all the way along (most of his early political donations were to left leaning causes).
Anyway, back to your post:
"And a lot more who were perfectly content with enough to get by on, and not much more."
What's so great about being content with enough to get by on? Why is this an admirable trait? How do you know these people actually were content and weren't just failures?
Your post seems to imply there's something virtuous about being poor. I have no idea why anyone could accept that. At the least, having money gives you the resources to do something about what you care about. How many people can fund research like Bill Gates?
"And I'd like to see it, name some really rich dudes (we'll class really rich as billionaires in todays dollars, adjusted for time) who weren't or aren't more or less jerk offs."
Warren Buffett - he's donated a few billion to charity, is one of the world's richest men, and still lives in the same, small house he's owned for years.
Banks give credit cards to unemployed college students. They loan money to people with no income. People have credit card debt because their paycheck is insufficient to afford things like the dentist and a new transmission for the car.
Not being too far out of college myself, I managed to survive without having all my money stolen by the evil banks. I've noticed that a lot of students who run up large debts manage to do so because they spend money on nonessentials as soon as they get it, rather than paying off their loans and credit cards. I have an ex who, up to her eyeballs in debt would get more cash from her family and buy new clothes and toys and stuff.
Plus, if you're going to sign up for a credit card or something, you should be smart enough to read the fine print. If you don't do that you're going to get thoroughly screwed throughout life. These are college kids we're talking about.
By contrast, my parents were gainfully employed perpetually (with full benefits) from the moment they graduated college, and were never laid off. Not even once.
I'm not sure why I'd want permanent full time employment without being laid off. I was out of work for seven months at one point, which, after I stopped slacking around, caused me to go out and get a new job where I'm making three times as much. Now, the process of finding that job made my life pretty hellish, and went through probably fifty interviews, but it paid off in the end. There are opportunities out there if you're willing to consistently push yourself towards them.
Remember everyone, if you're not successful, it's not your fault! It's the system! The man is keeping you down!
It's funny how many people talk about life being stacked against them. These are the same people who are fat because it's the food companies fault, or are smoking because they're addicted, or have huge credit card debts because the banks make it too easy to get credit.
It's really easy to come up with these sort of excuses. I even came up with one of my own - "I'm really smart, therefore I'm disadvantaged, because I've never learnt how to work hard". But the problem is, they guarantee you'll be stuck at the bottom.
In the end, I'd rather believe that I am 100% responsible, however false this may be. At least it'll encourage me to do my best, rather than complain that everyone else is unfairly rewarded.