So your assertion is that we should require "100+ years of study" before deploying any new technology? If not any new technology, how do you determine a priori which technologies should be subjected to that level of scrutiny?

By that logic we should not be using televisions, digital electronics, new cultivars developed after the 1920s (and most developed prior, as though they are over 100 years old, very few specific cultivars had been in production for 100+ years), any antibiotics, the polio vaccine, any of the procedures and drugs associated with modern medicine, etc.

You cannot prove a negative. What you can prove (and what already has been proven) is that all of the GMO crops are safer than peanuts, penicillin, and organic bean sprouts and spinach, and cell phones (GMOs 0 deaths with 100s of millions of exposures over nearly 20 years, the others many thousands of deaths between them due to anaphylactic shock, e. coli, driving-while-texting, etc) .

I am not arguing that there is no risk with GMO technology. What I am saying, however, that the rational approach is to formulate scientific hypotheses regarding risks such that those hypotheses can be tested via either examining existing data or conducting experiements that quantify the risk such that it is possible to determine whether those risks are acceptable based on our best current knowledge.

The "poison" genes you're referencing (e.g., Bt11) are currently based on proteins that are produced by soil bacteria, bacteria naturally found in milk, and other things that humans have been consuming for centuries and that are in many cases applied to organic crops as well. They have also been tested according to both USDA and EPA regulatory standards (in the US, pest control GM traits are regulated by both agencies whereas herbicide tolerance traits are only regulated by the USDA). At this point it is not a question of whether or not they have been tested, but whether they have been tested to a sufficient degree. My personal opinion is that given that they have been tested (both scientifically in controlled experiments and by default through market exposure) far more thoroughly than anything else I consume short of pharmaceuticals, I am OK with them. Beyond my personal comfort level I would challenge anyone to come up with a scientifically defendable justification to require greater testing that would not logically require much greater testing of non-GM foods as well.

The problem is not that there is a lack of "clear thinking" regarding GMOs. The problem is that the ratio of rational thought to irrational thought is unfortunately very small, and the ratio of rational communication vs. irrational communication regarding the issue is even worse. These difficulties are also compounded by the unfortunate fact that many people conflate GMOs with IP laws, religious beliefs, personal philosophy, etc.

It is the wholesale rejection of an entire body of science and technology on non-scientific bases that will affect both Europe's ability to contribute to scientific progress in those areas and its ability to produce its own food.

In other words you have confused the direction of the cause and effect relationship between scientific progress and food production in this case.

In this case, because it is entirely due to choice (partially by the youth, partially by the larger society), the difference is instructive rather than disingenuous.

No, though the lines can be blurred somewhat, there is a recognized and fundamental difference between what are termed 'knowledge workers' and laborers.

In the case of laborers, the value of the operation in which they participate lies primarily with the capital and resources of the operations. This is most readily apparent when the labor of any one individual is a commodity that is easily substituted with the labor of another while the capital and resources are relatively scarce. In this situation, the owner of the capital and resources has a huge advantage, as laborers essentially have to bid (via offering to work for less compensation or less favorable terms) for access to participate in the operation (i.e., have a job). A fast food restaurant whose facilities, location/real-estate and equipment are valuable and scarce relative to the availability of the labor required to operate the facility is a typical example of an operation largely reliant on low-skilled labor. A radiologist is an example of a highly skilled laborer (highly skilled laborers are often referred to as technicians to distinguish them from both low-skilled labor as well as knowledge workers).

In the case of knowledge workers, however, the knowledge and expertise that they possess is scarce relative to the capital and resources of the operation that are applicable to their roles. In fact, the total capital and resources of an organization based primarily on knowledge work may be negligible (i.e., consulting groups where individual members work from their home office). These situations are most readily recognized by the characteristic that the value the person is able to generate for the organization is a function of their knowledge and expertise moreso than the capital and resources allocated.

From a worker's perspective, the most important distinction between labor and knowledge work is that the ownership of the primary means of production is inherently owned by the worker in the latter case, while it is owned by the organization in the former.

Your statement is ambiguous, but I assume that you are implying that real-estate bubbles were bad for society, but that you believe that profitability as a measure would judge them to be good for society, therefore profitability is a poor measure of benefit to society.

If the above is an accurate representation of your argument, then my response would be that your argument is based on a misunderstanding of profitability.

The question you have to ask is whether the net effect of the bubble created by government policy was a profit or loss for society. If the net effect was negative (i.e., not profitable), as in the case of the most recent housing bubble in the US, then the actual effect of those policies that contributed to the bubble were bad as measured by profitability.

Any management decisions that sacrifice the overall or long-term viability of the business for short-term benefit do not, in fact, generate profit (or minimize losses) for shareholders with the exception of the case where management has determined that the business itself is no longer economically viable and winding it down is the only way to avoid throwing more good money after bad.

Even if management is able to pump the stock price temporarily, if that is done at the expense of the fundamentals of the core business then it actually destroys shareholder value and profitability. It is critical to remember that just because share price goes up, that does not mean profits for shareholders because that potential profit is not turned into actual profit unless they sell their shares at the higher price. For these schemes to work, however, the number of current shareholders who are aware of what is happening must be significantly smaller than the number of new investors/shareholders-to-be who are fooled, because otherwise the net sell-off of shares will crash the stock price before it can be inflated. The only shareholders who profit from these pump and dump type schemes are the ones who actually realize what is going on (due to either greater insight or insider information) and wisely decide that it is no longer worth being a shareholder and thus sell their shares at the temporarily inflated price before the reality of what has happened becomes apparent to the wider market.

In other words, for the kind of temporary 'milk the cash cow' type strategies implied earlier in the thread to work, they need to fool the majority of current and potential shareholders such that they do not realize that the value of the company is in fact being destroyed. The fact that this does not "generate profit for shareholders" overall is almost tautalogical.

They mean what they say, but the mistake you're making is the implicit assumption that all employees are equally valuable* (to the company in terms of economic value, not as human beings in general).

For technology companies in particular, the key employees with true, industry-leading expertise in their field comprise the crown jewels of the company's "assets". In these cases, while it is true to say "The most important assets we have are our employees", the truth is that those 5% of employees who are critical to the core business represent 95% of the company's economic valuation of human resources.

* A good way to figure out how valuable you are to the company is to ask the questions "How much would it cost to replace me?", "How does that cost compare to the cost of continuing to employ me?", "How significant is the impact of my departure for other reasons?". If you are the LeBron James the answers might be "at insanely prohibitive cost, and quite likely only with inferior substitutes", "Very high while we lose games and merchandising revenue", and "Massive downgrade of the brand". If you're the janitor, however, those answers would be "The time it takes to process any one of the 300 applications we have on file", "insignificant difference", and "nothing".

Wow. Apparently my brain simply does not function properly in the morning before I've had caffeine.

The second concept you listed--wealth given to shareholders--is return on investment, not profit. Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.

Also, you have to be careful to distinguish profits generated for some entity other than the business (e.g., shareholders, employees, customers, etc.) vs. the business itself being profitable. Put another way, managing a business to be profitable is an entirely different matter from managing the business to generate profits for certain stakeholders. The latter can happen even in the extreme case of stakeholders destroying a viable business at a loss if that results in a net gain for them because of other factors. E.g., a large organization purchasing a smaller competitor for more than the latter is worth and then winding it down might be ultimately profitable if the resulting increased control over the market is sufficiently valuable. An individual employee (including the CEO) may also profit greatly by compromising the profitability of the company via what amounts to sabotage in return for bribes (which may take the form of anything from cash to guarantees of future employment elsewhere) or insider trading opportunities.

You are not the GP, but you're making the same mistake. "Just for profit" != "profit NOW" Also, you are conflating the motivations of individuals within the company with the purpose management of a company in and of itself.

By your own words, that is not managing for profit, it's managing "to look better". Managing in a way that deliberately compromises or destroys an institution's ability to continue generating profit is by definition not managing "just for profit".

The reality is that many engineers do things that are nearly as bad as the caricature of a MBA you describe, and can be extremely ineffective at managing even if the company flourishes while they are at the helm. The reason is that they compromise the systemic health of the organization by effectively turning it into a mechanism to extend the reach and scope of their own creative abilities. This typically represents the best way they know how to "make a better product", but leads to a company that is absolutely reliant on that specific person remaining at the helm in order to function*. That is why so many once-great companies crap out once their founders leave. Driven by the sole purpose of creating great products, the founders inadvertently constructed a fundamentally unstable organization without systemic protections against being taken over by idiots and shysters (in the best case this happens organically after they retire, but can also happen even before they actually leave--or can even force them to leave against their will). This also destroys profitability and threatens the company's survival in the long term (though on a longer-term horizon than the kind of deliberate value destruction described in your post).

* This is not too dissimilar to the situation where a programmer creates a polyglot codebase that elegantly solves complex problems, but that only he or she can ever get to compile or run without crashing and leaving behind only inscrutable log files and core dumps.

Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival--all it means is that you manage the enterprise such that the value that it is able to generate and capture as a result of its operations exceeds its share of the cost burden of its operations. You're conflating sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains with management for profit, or perhaps confusing managing for what is profitable for specific individuals with what is profitable for the corporation.

That being said, there are several broad strategies for increasing profit:

1. 1) Increase total value generated. E.g., Facebook improving its service or expanding the scope of its service.
2. 2) Increase captured share of value generated. E.g., Facebook 'monetizing' the value generated by the social graph--people already use it to conduct trade, advertise, etc. Facebook just wants a bigger cut of the action.
3. 3) Reduce total cost burden of the operation. E.g., Facebook improving energy efficiency of its data centers.
4. 4) Reduce share of total cost burden borne by the operation. E.g., Facebook lobbying governments to subsidize its operations with various tax breaks etc.

Variations or specific implementations of the above strategies may be unethical, risky, etc. (e.g., strategy 2 can damage your reputation and actually result in reduced value generated overall, or strategy 4 might result in a backlash from the groups that had to absorb the externalized cost of your operation), but all are at least intended to improve the probability of survival of the corporation.