They're usually forced upon them by banks and Wall Street firms when they seek financing rounds to 'insure their investment' and end up destroying it instead because they know nothing about the investment they're trying to protect.

They sold out to Wall Street for mountains of cash and turned the company over to MBAs, like the rest of Wall Street's zombified corpses of corporations.

Simple. They invest in them when their valuations are going up and they recommend their clients invest in them when their valuations are going down. These investment firms have no legal fiduciary responsibility to their clients, so they can recommend bad stocks to them day in, day out and not get in trouble. So, they increase their portfolio values at their clients' expense.

The problem was, the U.S. federal government pushed the 'everyone has to go to college' at a time when youth unemployment was skyrocketing and there simply were no jobs available for young people, especially high school graduates. So, the government pushed this, with easy access to federal student loans, to hold back a large part of the youth labor force for 4-6 years while they went through school. But, it was a short-sighted solution to a bigger problem that caused other problems that have been pointed out in this thread. Now, we're upside down. We need the employees faster then they're entering the job market and the debt crisis cased by the earlier administrations (plural, not just one is guilty) has come home to roost, preventing home ownership at staggering levels and rents are skyrocketing due to price fixing by rent control software companies. It's just one giant mess. Gen Z has a reason to be pissed. They're being called lazy, unproductive, and unsuccessful, compared to their parents, when a large part is all this is stacked against them.

Probably because the original source code is unreadable. So much Windows code was made intentionally so during the Ballmer years so they could claim to US regulators (with some validity) that they couldn't separate feature X from interface Y. This came after the whole Netscape ruling. Of course, outsourcing coding work didn't help at all. Ironically, now that they want to make certain changes, they had to scrap large volumes of code and start over, hence why so Much of the Windows 11 user interface is just reinventing the wheel (poorly).

Yes. It's why the Supreme Court allowing the existence of a corporation was one of the biggest mistakes ever made by this country as a whole. Then the world followed us along in our fuck-up! A personal can only be reasonably expected to be lawful due to fear of prosecution. Corporate executives are all but immune to prosecution unless they steal from the company. So, what's their incentive to follow the law? (Hint: There isn't one.)

Only if you also hold the criminal cartels called the media companies and Hollywood accountable as well. Prosecuting one and not the other is two-tiered justice.

Didn't I say in my post that I wasn't suggesting upending our entire economy for this. just making an exception? Many other countries have direct state-ran defense programs. It wouldn't require killing the entire economy to set this up, though several defense contractors may lose out. This way, we wouldn't have to be paying a private company billions to sweep the floors of an idle factory. Because the free market would demand that they charge what they could make in profits if they made in something else, plus 20%, not the actual cost of keeping an idle factory, making it untenable for the US taxpayer.

And I'd hate to break it to you, but we have socialism programs peppered all through our economy. Perhaps you've heard of them? Social Security, Medicare, Medi-cal, and to a lesser extent, Obamacare and many corporate tax breaks. Wingnuts tend to foam at the mouth at the word socialism, not even realizing it's all around them and it's here to stay.

The US government, and the Republicans in particular, need to realize that the free market isn't the answer to everything. Emergency preparedness requires reserve capacity sitting idle. That's an anathema to the free market. And the Ukraine war has shown us that we need a mix of low-quantity high-tech weapons that can out-fight your enemy and high-quantity low-tech weapons that can be quickly and cheaply manufactured to out-last your enemy. And no free market solution is going to get us there. Now, I'm not saying upend out whole economy to deal with this, but this needs to be an exception to the rule. Same for P.P.E. and other emergency equipment.

Actually, they knew they couldn't realistically win that war before they even started it. The amount of troops and money needed to actually win the war was so untenable that it would have caused a political crisis in the US that made the actual anti-war protests look like a tea party! So they decided to cause trouble because they chose to partner with Russia (after we snubbed and humiliated Ho Chi Man) because that was a no no in our books. The hubris on display during that whole war was remarkable. We got to watch a relay of it during the Afghanistan war and the second Iraq war. The second one being entirely a war of choice because the US president wanted to show his daddy he was better than him and the US vice president wanted the oil producing country who was going to dare to create an oil exchanged pinned on something other than the US dollar under US control. Of course, we know how both wars turned out. The only thing they did accomplish was delaying the non US dollar oil exchange by over a decade.

Actually, there's a long history of senior management at Paramount doing everything in their power to drown Star Trek at every level since it's inception. First off, it was a modern TV drama when all they cared about was classic (and racist) Westerns and it was extremely progressive, starting out with a black woman and a Russian in the main cast with equal film time in the 1960's. (Note: Most of Nichelle Nichols's [Lt. Uhura] film was ordered to be cut out and incinerated by managers.) So they didn't just dislike this, they loathed it with every fiber of their being! And, until the most recent remake movies, which share more in common with Star Wars than Star Trek, these progressive themes kept being in the show. The fact it made money was the only reason they somewhat tolerated it. Which is why any free fan additions are beyond unacceptable. In their view, expanding such an IP without, at least, the benefit of lining their pocketbooks, is a sin of the highest order.

So, in short, Zoom needs to fire the CEO immediately and replace him with a better one, got it.

The problem is not so much that people who want to work in the office go work in the office, the WFH people are like 'if that works for you, great, send me a message if you need anything.' But, that's not good enough for them. In order to make them happy everybody must be in the office. They have to have their daily dose of dopamine walking around disrupting and bullying other people who aren't behaving exactly like they want (or just pick someone at random if they can't find anyone). Steve Jobs was legendary for this. Disclosure: I used to work for Apple. People would post lookouts at building for him. He literally fired someone for greeting him because 'it wasn't his job to greet him.' Now, he'd have a lot harder time doing this today, but stuff like this still goes on in offices around the world and workers quietly working from home doing their jobs out of the reach of these people drives managers and C-suitors like this up the wall as they can't have their little daily power trips.

It comes from municipalities threatening to remove tax breaks they offered companies or even impose new taxes upon them unless they force employees back to to the office and fix their ailing cities rather than address the problem that no one wants to enter their cities unless they have to for work.

Billionaires: "Challenge accepted."

Agreed, this is the Wall Street MBAs wanting the old guard out so they can 'maximize returns on their investment' which these people are stopping due to things like 'customer satisfaction' and 'ethics' (a truly hated word in MBA world). Certain people have stopped them up till now, but they are no longer a problem. So now, it's time to clean house and turn this company into the money-printing machine it was mean to be! (Complete fantasy they'll ride until they drive the company into the ground.)