And their role. Sadly, many think it's their job to tell people how to do their job. A former boss of mine, who I owe a lot of my knowledge on management, put it best: When you're coaching an NFL team, you needn't tell them how to play football. They know that. You have to make sure they can do it.

Management is not about breathing down your people's back and crack the whip. That's not going to accomplish jack. Maybe it feeds your ego. Ok. But I don't care about your ego, I care about results. And results, you won't get that way. You will get workers that spend more time pondering how to find a new job without a gap in their resume rather than doing any meaningful work. Which will only tell those idiots that they didn't crack that whip hard enough.

Good management is not about squeezing your people dry and getting the last bit out of them. Good management means that this isn't even necessary to get peak performance. Of course, that means that the manager has to actually work rather than just sit or stand there and yell at people.

My job as a manager is to "pave the way". To clear out obstacles for the people working for me to make sure that they can do their job without interruption, distraction or stumbling blocks. I have to make sure they have the resources they need, timely and completely.

Yes, correct. I am working for them. That's the whole point. That's why I have the clout and the "power" that my position carries. They can't go and stand against a department head who doesn't want to cooperate. I can. I can make decisions and I can back them up. And I can get a decision from other departments and I can ensure that they will deliver. I can do that. They cannot.

Of course, cracking the whip and burning your staff is easier, and it sure will not make you appear "difficult" to your peers in management who have to deal with you instead of someone they can brush aside. But that is your damn job as someone who should manage his team. You're the manager not because you're the best in whatever your team is doing. You're their manager because you can get them what they need to do their job!

So do your damn job, manager!

I think it's some manager term. Must be one of their buzzwords they use to feel like they're important or something.

So instead of climbing the ranks 'til they are useless, the go right from MBA degree to useless?

Seriously, the unrest is brewing in our towns. The powder keg is filled to the brim, all it takes is a spark, and any kind will do, to blow it up. You're getting close to a critical mass of people who are severely unhappy with how things are going, the only thing missing is a focal point for this anger. As soon as a justification is found to vent that anger, you have a riot.

Sure worked great for Mubarak et al.

Funny how quickly we forget how we berated those middle east regent when they tried to prop up their failed regime by banning social medias, then promptly turn around and want to squelch dissent at home by monitoring and controlling them when it threatens our own regime.

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

- wrong. Every time humanity actually did get to experience freedom (free economy means economy not centrally planned, economy built by people without government meddling with it) the people built the biggest economies, which later were crashed by the mob, which set up government to steal from the fruits of labour of people who built the economy.

As for 1000 years of feudalism - the feudalist system is a system of government that destroys freedom. Free market requires that people are free from regulations and from government, you can't be born into slavery and call that a free market.

- wrong, freedom is the exact opposite of coercion, which is what communism entails, given that no free person would stay in a communist system on his or her own volition unless they were ruling it somehow.

When you're done playing, kindly place it next to the Kinect, will ya?

Worldcom and Enron were simply not big enough not to fail. They should've gone into banking. Or car manufacturing.

Name one. In recent history, please. I'm aware that the American dream once existed (and it could actually work out).

Politically they don't differ too much, that's true. All of them have pretty much the full range from left to right, liberal to conservative and free to controlled market, with proponents for pretty much any kind of political ideal you could hold dear.

I think that is the first sensible AC comment I read here. Maybe it was the right decision not to surf at +2 after all...

I'm still not convinced they're different enough for me. I'm used to a political spectrum that reaches from the far right (think Rep, but more Ayn Rand and less compassionate conservativism) to infra-red leftism that makes anarchy look like a fascist ideal.

But yes, I can see the difference between your two parties now.

No, it does not matter much to me. And while it may affect you personally, on a very high level of your comfort necessities, not being able to marry your husband is probably more of a firstworldproblem than you may want to admit.

Yes, it would be great if self fulfillment was our current problem. It isn't. Our current problems are that people are losing their job, losing their homes, can't pay for medical necessities and so on. That is dangerous, yes, even to you, even if you have a job, a home and all your medical expenses covered. Because nothing is as dangerous as people who simply have lost everything so they got nothing to lose but everything to gain by revolting. You might have noticed that civil unrest is brewing, in the US as well as abroad, and all it takes is a spark to ignite that keg of powder. It already happens now and then, just watch what happens whenever some policeman shoots someone.

Sorry for being selfish, but you will not pick up some makeshift weapons and start a revolt just 'cause you can't marry your husband. People who have nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and know that they'll be dead anyway in a couple months have a MUCH higher incentive to do just that.

And NEITHER of those parties has any kind of plan or willingness to solve this.

Those inflation numbers are hogwash, do not buy into the agenda that government is pushing, the interest rates are at 0% and have been at 0 for 6 years. Never before has this actually happened, never before has anybody tied their economy to 0% interest rates for such a long time. It is not going to be possible to get off the 0% interest rates without an economic collapse (which is inevitable and actually required to fix the issues that have accumulated in the economy since the creation of the Federal reserve and switch to the paper money and paper debt).

As to prices, they are going up, not down. There are no prices that are going down, actually even oil had a steady growth this year, what prices are going down? The only thing that is going down is real employment and productivity.

Also the fake negative inflation rate was used to adjust the GDP in a way that makes it look bigger, all of this is complete propaganda.

AFAIC deflation is not a problem, inflation is. Inflation is what has been killing modern paper money based economies, deflation is a bogeyman that never materialised. The only reason the so called mainstream 'economists' are scaring people with deflation is because there was deflation during the Great Depression, which government fought with gigantic amount of money printing (and farming output purchases with printed money that was ploughed straight into the ground to try and keep prices up rather than allowing people to eat cheaper at lower prices during a depression). Depression was not caused by deflation, deflation was a natural consequence of a post-inflationary collapse and it was proper and necessary but it was fought against with fake money printing the same way they did with QE1, 2, 3 and the next one and the one that will come after, the QE infinity.

There will be no rising interest rates coming out of the Fed, they can't do it, not without crashing the economy and Fed will not be crashing the economy on purpose any time soon (especially not before the coming elections).

Again, the inflation is not negative, it is very much positive and way higher than 2% that the Fed says it wants. 2% inflation rate to be a target.... that's a joke. 2% interest rate target was introduced decades ago in New Zealand I think as a CEILING target, once they hit it, they were supposed to raise interest rates to fight inflation.

Anyway, if you truly believe the government nonsense after decades of lying they have perpetrated upon the people, the false pretences for wars, the false economy, the false money, then I don't think I'll be getting through to you in this comment, but I had to write this as a response at least for myself.

Ok, but look past the initial reaction, what are the next 20 years going to be like past the first shock of a crash? Let's say the dollar and the bond markets collapse, the stock and other asset markets go through the roof as people are fleeing the dollar, but housing market collapses anyway, because almost all of it is borrowed money and almost nobody has real savings to buy a house outright. So money generating ventures gain relative value while money pits (houses) lose value once fiat dies and is displaced by real market money (whatever that may be, but I set my bets in a particular way).

I don't think the next 20 years are going to be about rebuilding socialism, they are going to be rebuilding individual freedoms and thus opportunities, companies will spring out into existence, figuring out ways to help the people that ended up in these conditions, helping them to do something productive and get some payment doing some of those productive things.

I think the next 20 years after the crash are going to be about rebuilding the economy but the only way to do it would be by reducing the role of government to something entirely negligible.

There is no other way to survive when all of the assumptions and basic institutions fall on their face and disappear in the poof of actual logic (can't steal money forever, can't borrow forever, have to pay back at some point).

I think we are going to be moving away from collectivism of all forms (communism, socialism, fascism) and towards freedom again actually, maybe I am a bit premature on this but it is bound to happen in a global economy with at least some entrepreneurial people. The trick is to program the mistakes of the past into machines, who would remember the problems of the past and become certain rule-setters as to what direction any future attempt at setting up a government structure takes.

AFAIC governments should not exist at all, only individuals and their companies should exist and I think the future is going to move in that direction past the inevitable impending self-destruction of the current system.