Those are corporation assets and are being taken in lieu of a punitive fine. If they didn't turn them over then the corporation would have been fined, gone into bankruptcy, and those assets would have been sold off to pay the debt by the bankruptcy trustee anyway.

It's not clear why they wouldn't have just gone bankrupt, but there's probably terms in there that would be better than they would get if they had gone down kicking and screaming. Well, more kicking and screaming than they did before the case went against them, anyway.

It is tragic in a manner of speaking, when you see the death of an idea that the company wanted to bring to the table. If Grooveshark would have succeeded, it would have been... interesting. It was never going to happen, it was just too explicitly illegal, but they held out awhile.

It is also tragic in that real people lose their jobs, possibly suddenly.

Corporations aren't just CEOs and shareholders. I can feel bad for one going under, even if I don't necessarily consider them to be people. Corporations don't exist without individuals within them, those people can represent something you can feel for, even if the tendency is for them to be faceless. So it is a case-by-case proposition.

Can't really do that or they legitimize this model and Spotify and all the rest start jumping on the bandwagon and the publishers start losing their juicy cuts of those services.

It was probably in the terms of the settlement. When they ask for an apology in a settlement, you can't half-ass it or make it a smirking "apology". That doesn't mean they believe it personally.

No, it is not. It gives the sort of people who want to hide their money under their bed a warm fuzzy, but it's basically condemning the economy to stagnation at best.

Yes, inflation does have a dark side of printing more money to pay for things that you can't afford, but the positive side of it is that it encourages people to provide cash to economic engines to maintain value. Companies need to be able to borrow against future revenues to grow their capacity, and the only way to do that is for people to invest money in them. So inflation provides growth because it demands growth.

People who have a simpler view of the "value" of their money will believe that they should be able to not lose value by holding on to it. The reality is that money has never been actually "valuable" by itself. You can't eat it and it doesn't make for a very good roofing material. It is there to spend, and if it isn't being spent, then you have potential which is not being realized.

Actually, they got in trouble by *not* printing money, but instead by borrowing. They were working hard to keep inflation down for awhile in the 1990's and that meant that they borrowed to cover their work on building infrastructure. This actually worked fairly well... for awhile.

When the global financial crisis hit in the early 2000's it left Argentina unable to service debts. Argentina had to deal with huge unemployment and political instability. That resulted in the largest default on sovereign debt ever. No bueno.

Argentina is still a "pariah" but was doing a little better until recently. Some people are blaming new populist policies for having put Argentina back in trouble with a shrinking economy again.

Argentina is just chock full of corruption, as well. That means that unless things are peachy keen and there's enough money for everyone, like in the 1990s, people don't want to touch Argentina with a 10 foot pole. That hurts their ability to recover where less corrupt countries might bounce back faster.

Whipsawing around is a shitty reason to throw investment money into a currency like Bitcoin, no matter how high it goes.

Hopefully, they are buying because they expect it to stabilize in a good place or the utility of it will make it ubiquitous, but if its value doesn't stabilize, then you're not investing, you're speculating. Full-on gambling.

I've seen the lottery hit 500 million dollars. That doesn't make a lottery ticket a good investment.

If you have pesos, sure. If you have dollars? Then bitcoin is a speculative currency. It's just that Argentina has such a bad situation that even a gamble is better than the sure loss of trying to hold their currency for any period of time.

We have the type of managers you are talking about, we call them project managers. Although, there are some very skilled PMs out there, many are there to call meetings and manage spreadsheets, MS Project, or JIRA. Very useful tasks, that don't require them to know how to do the actual work.

The problem becomes supervision of those skilled employees. You need someone who has authority and skills who can call bullshit and call on their knowledge of how things actually work when they do that.

In reality, you're skilled manager is a good technician and also understands business requirements, as well as how to manage a team of skilled workers. You can see why this is a tough job to fill.

Sometimes they force you to accept a higher position, but in most cases, a key ingredient is that the person in question allows themselves to be moved into that position. There have been plenty of people who I have reviewed who are very good at their jobs and I will neither promote them, nor do they wish to be promoted. We all know that the person in question is not going to do a good job at it.

The reason for the Peter Principle is that *somebody* has to do the job. There are a lot of bad managers, but there is always the potential for a *worse* manager. You have to promote somebody for *something*, and so they pick someone who is good at their current job because you can't very well promote the people who are terrible at their current tasks, even if they suspect that the non-performer might actually have management skills. That's actually an argument for having people trained as managers as a career, but we all know the problems with that as well.

As long as you promote from your current staff, you have to accept that your pool is made up of people who you originally interviewed for their (for instance) coding skills, as opposed to for their management skills.

In tech, they usually can.

You don't need an MBA to make management even today. You really don't need it if you're a middle manager. Executive? Maybe.

An MBA is buying yourself an opportunity with a piece of paper. That opportunity can be worth it, if you know how to exploit it, but there are other opportunities to be had.

There is no guarantee that we'll nuke Iran just because they nuked Israel. In fact, it's very likely that we wouldn't do so. Iran's government knows that as well as anyone.

Besides, their "defensive" capability is merely cover for them to increase their regional presence in terms of more overt support of groups in other countries. They don't really want to nuke Israel. They just want to increase their influence in Iraq or Syria or Lebanon. If Israel is likely to have a problem, that will come about due to more overt activities to support proxies like Hamas.

The real threat of Iran with nukes isn't nuclear war, per se. It's that they get a free hand to increase their interference in the region and that's very dangerous. Say what you will about US invasions, but no one seriously believed that we were there to stay. Iran is right next door to a lot of countries that don't want to have to deal with a nuclear Iran which would be able to hold off the US, because the US is what is guaranteeing the balance in the region between Muslim states that hate each other's guts. A nuclear Iran could cause a country like Saudi Arabia to obtain its own nuclear weapons because the threat of a US invasion in support of the status quo is lessened.

The reality is that we're not just trying to keep nukes out of the hands of the Iranians, we're trying to make sure that the rest of the ME doesn't enter an arms race which puts nukes in the hands of other countries.

Although there is a very substantial distance between the sun and Pluto, I'd imagine that the radiation from the Sun still causes the ices (in this case any sort of ice, not just water) to sublimate from the areas more exposed to solar radiation year-round. You'd get a cap in places where that radiation does not regularly reach, such as at the poles.

I think you actually need specific conditions of atmosphere, or at least gravity, to actually maintain a snowball planet, as opposed to a very cold, but otherwise barren rock.

Agile doesn't make up for poor coordination above the product level. It can help in the sense that you have business involvement, but if the product owners don't talk to each other, then you have a bunch of completely uncoordinated products all being developed under Agile, and very efficiently tripping all over one another.