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Comment Been around that block... (Score 4, Insightful) 73

...both for myself, and advising others. The first level manager is told "We're not giving out any raises, but don't admit that. Tell your direct reports that they're not getting the money they expected is all about their performance. I've even been able to make some of the better first line managers admit this is what's going on privately.

Regardless, this never, ever, ever, works out well for the company. It doesn't increase productivity, just discontent. Add insult to injury for your top performers? Buh bye.

The converse often works a little better, especially if the business is a small one hitting choppy waters: "We love you and what you're doing. We literally can't afford to pay you as much as we value you. But we've got plans to fix that." You get a lot more positive response from that - assuming that the budget problems are actually real.

But often they're not. In big companies like Microsoft, "Corporate Culture" is often a synonym for "making excuses for incompetent and/or greedy, short-sighted, executive leadership". It has nothing to do with actual positive corporate culture or long term shareholder value.

Comment Re:Not what I wanted. (Score 4, Informative) 135

Another article preaching a green agenda word soup without any interesting tech info.

That's a fancy way of saying "I can't read"

Let me break it down for you in simple terms: the technological idea is to create a "heat battery" consisting of several tons of sand, which is heated to 1000 degrees in the summer, and then keeps a building (commercial or residential) warm all throughout winter. Technically, the heat could be used to drive steam turbines as well, but the direct heat use is 95% efficient.

This is important because just heating and lighting buildings account for 27% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. It's not all cars.

Comment Re:Bidenomics & "Inflation Reduction Act" (Score 3, Informative) 125

This story is about the UK, dumbass. "Bidenomics" (which, BTW judging by its US results, looks like it works amazingly) has nothing to do with it. The "Green New Deal" isn't law. At all.

"Politics" hasn't screwed everything up. Idiots who think their stupidity and petulance trumps facts have.

Comment People, not things, commit crimes. (Score 1) 46

A "corporation" in legal code, is approximately equivalent to a Virtual Interface in programming. It is only a "person" for the sake of torts (lawsuits, contracts, and the like), not criminal law. And despite the rhetoric you hear from the idiot left (admittedly not quite so numerous as the idiot right), this is a very good thing.

Just for example, say you're trying to build a high rise. If you know anything about buildings, you know this involves all sorts of people, firms, specialists, and groups. You've got architects, plumbers, finance guys, brick layers, HVAC people, painters, crane operators, cement trucks, etc. Now imagine (as often can happen), someone gets hurt on site and sues. Without a corporation, they have no one to sue. The courts would have to try to figure out who was responsible for exactly what, try to invent implicit agreements, etc. The HVAC guy says he has nothing to do with someone getting hit by a falling brick, etc.

Enter the "corporation" which is created solely for the purpose of building the high rise. Because it's a "virtual person", it has income, expenses, can own property (including bank accounts), can be forced to pay taxes (other types of property - like the chair you're sitting on right now - don't typically owe taxes), and can be sued in civil court. If the people controlling it want to, it can sue others, most typically other corporations. In the end, everything is wrapped up, and handled much more efficiently than it would be if it were hundreds of squabbling individuals (each with their own lawers) before the courts.

But ultimately, corporations are still legal fictions of virtual people, despite what Mitt Romney says, they are not real people themselves. And as such are not capable of committing crimes.Only real people can be charged with crimes.

Most of the whining about "corporations being people" is really anger that people get hurt in accidents, and no one is thrown in jail over it. Except that accidents happen every day in this country.- even fatal ones - and still, no one is thrown in jail. It could also be argued that prosecutors tend to shy away from prosecuting outright crimes when they're committed by rich executives, even when malfeasance is obvious. But even then, there are plenty of CEOs who actually have gone to jail.

But that valid critique of legal double-standards, has nothing to with the whole tort concept of corporations being "virtual" people". And it's silly to harp on it.

Comment Yeah, but what was the alternative... (Score 1, Troll) 179

An uppity woman? Who'd served under an even more uppity black man?

And don't forget, that uppity woman had reached an age where she was now considered unfuckable by thirty year old white men. I mean, how could anyone vote for someone like that to become President?

Besides, the guy before the black guy had screwed the economy so bad that it was in free-fall, which meant that the outgoing black President had instituted all sorts of reforms (rewarding the working class rather than billionaires) that pundits working for billionaires were absolutely certain would make the economy worse. Yet somehow (absolutely not to his credit) the economy inexplicably got better anyway. Which meant that voters who hate women and blacks having power, were no longer forced to choose between voting for the women or keeping their job. By making the economy magically somehow getting better under his watch, the black guy made the economy good enough so that lots of poor trash didn't think voting for an outright grifter would be an unsafe thing to do.

(They were wrong.)

Comment When the truth fits... (Score 1) 128

This is the most hilarious "no shit Sherlock" post I've read in a while:

  • Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate change accords.
  • Trump rolled back dozens of oil and gas regulations that combatted greenhouse gases
  • Trump torpedoed car gas milage standards
  • Trump campaigned on bringing coal back as a power generation source
  • Trump allowed oil drilling and mining in national parks and wildlife refugees
  • Trump limited bodies of water covered by the clean water act,

Trump clearly wants pollution, if money can be made from it.

Comment Re:Undo? (Score 1) 82

Maybe the EVE Online corporate universe should investigate the concept of a "quorum".

Worthless unless the developers have implemented the mechanic in-game. It kind of sounds like they didn't.

In the real world, such shenanigans would be instantly shot down in State or Federal court by a judge.

Comment Re:This means that the Fed (Score 1, Insightful) 93

Anyone who's been paying attention to the market knows we've been in a "recession" for 2+ years at this point. Nobody is hiring, everyone is cutting, and markets are flat - or worse.

Really? In March 2023, we found an aggregate of 238,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were added to the U.S. economy last month with an aggregate U6 of 3.6%. In February, it was +311,000 jobs. (Note: these figures include the layoffs in the tech-sector that got massive media coverage.) In January, prior to the Fed trying to put a damper on the markets, it was +517,000.

The only reason why unemployment is going up at all is because wages are getting so good, people are deciding to reenter the job market, adding to the job-seeker pool.

---

These are cold hard facts that all your whining about "woke" can't change. It's plainly obvious that you want the economy to be bad under a Democratic President. But, as has been shown for the past 50 years, Democrats simply know how to run economies well. While Republicans don't. The numbers don't lie.

Comment Re:Surprise! (Score 5, Insightful) 102

She couldn't get through a Democrat-controlled Senate. That's how bad she is.

Manchin is about as Democratic as John McCain was. He delights in voting to ratify Republican hyper-partisans while shooting down Democrats.

You can tell just how much the attacks against here are BS by noticing that literally none of them here say anything bad that she actually did. They're just all mischaracterizations.

Seriously. Go look at her wikipedia entry. "Since 2018, Sohn has been a member of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation." The horror!

Comment Re:Not an Actual Repeat Article, but Same Discussi (Score 1) 150

If you don't want your video accessed by law enforcement, obscure your cameras and store your video locally.

Storing things locally doesn't give you any special power to resist a subpoena. You can quash a subpoena only if you can show the courts (including appeals courts), that the subpoena violates someone's constitutional rights.

Same thing goes for banks, by the way. They may want to keep all their transactions private, but if there is reasonable suspicion to believe the money is dirty, they have to turn over the relevant records.

Comment Re:You're an idiot. (Score 1) 36

From the fucking summary "They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down..."

Except that they do: PFAS chemicals do not last forever. They also take an average of about four years for half of them to leave the body: Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) FACT SHEET

This would still be alarming if PFAS were positively associated with adverse health conditions, but even if they are, it's so minuscule that scientists can't measure it accurately: "some human epidemiological studies that suggest that a possible relationship between exposure to PFAS and health effects, but other studies do not show a correlation between exposure to PFAS and health effects." So rather than worry about microscopic amount of PFAS that is only detectable by exceedingly sensitive equipment, you might be better served worrying about the carcinogen that kills more humans than any other. It's known as alcohol.

He's not an idiot.

Comment Re: Ah yes (Score -1, Flamebait) 210

Between not being to watch porn without an ID and being told that any challenging of a doctrine is me being a racist who needs to be treated accordingly I'd pick the former anytime.

If the "doctrine" you are challenging is that "skin color has nothing to do with intelligence", then yes, by challenging that, you are being a racist.

The number of righties who whine and cry about supposed "Critical Race Theory" (getting all huffy because they incorrectly think it means "Being Critical of Racists"), absolutely dwarf the number of lefties who even knew about the obscure theory taught only in Law School, before all the right wing ("just because I think blacks are inferior doesn't make me racist") whining about it on FOX 24/7.

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