Comment Re:Do We Want Our Gov't to regulate the drones? (Score 2) 94
http://www.modelaircraft.org/a...
ROFL.
Obama's out to stop the drone entrepenaurs!
ITS ALL A CONSPIRACY!!
It's not a conspiracy, coward. It's published policy. Your decision to trot out ad hominem in place of addressing the basic facts of the matter shows you know I'm right. That you're posting as a coward makes it even more clear. But keep propping up your pet administration, man. The documents they publish - you know, the ones that have been amply covered in both aviation news and general media of all sorts - make this all very clear. The agency has just been sued by multiple parties over the 'interpretation' document and policy position in question. But please, don't trouble yourself to keep up with the news - that would take the fun out of your shrill, drooling Obama fanboyism.
This is that anti-job anti-business Obama's fault!
To which I respond: [citation needed].
You actually need a citation to believe that the director of the FAA is a political appointee? You are that unaware of how federal agencies are run by the executive branch of the government? You don't need a citation, you need a remedial course in basic civics. Please return to the conversation when you understand the basic structure of the government.
I enquired about when subscription renewal would be available again and the reply I got was that the subscription process will not be coming back. Must not make enough income to make it worthwhile. I liked seeing stories a little early and would try to quickly email and warn of dupes when I could. But it is a business. So it goes.
In the future, when the world is more enlightened, freedom to trade will be as much a basic right as speech is today.
No. The same collectivist and PC-style urges that currently act to prevent free expression will continue to further intercede when you seek to trade with someone. Why? Because there will always be people who think it's unfair that you and someone else have found a mutually beneficial reason to interact, and they will use the force of government to take a piece of that benefit, pay career middlemen in the government to handle it, and hand some of that benefit over to other people who didn't manage to make that transaction happen for themselves. That trend has been increasing, not decreasing. Places like academia and mass media are now LESS free places, for expression, and the market is an increasingly less free place in which to transact business between any two given parties. The "in the future" you envision is a fantasy. That horse has left the barn, and the nanny staters have won.
The housing thing is an entitlement not a right. What I said was that if you qualify for the entitlement the dignity right prevents government from giving you a new cardboard box and calling it "housing assistance".
OK, so indeed, if you pass a certain test, you have the power to make the government take something from other people, and give it to you. And your constitution guarantees that only can that happen, but it has to happen with a certain amount of style. Not enough style, and it's undignified, right? So: who decides how many square feet of entitlement home is constitutionally dignified? How does the constitution lay out the definition of dignified where the rubber meets the road and you have to decide how much of someone else's work day should be spent building a kitchen for somebody else? Specifically.
Why would you assume my question meant that there should be no CEO at all?
Because when someone trots out any eye-rolling reference to how many burgers, or airline seats, or theater tickets have to be sold to pay the chief executive a company's board of directors deliberately hired to do a specific job, it usually means that someone disapproves of the kind of money that changed hands to make that happen. That complaint is usually made in the context of a larger, rambling complaint about any or all of for-profit entities in the first place, or a company's liberty to hire who they want at whatever price they see fit to pay for executives, or the very existence of incorporated businesses, etc.
Complaining about how many widget sales are required to pay for a CEO or CTO or CFO has become shorthand for complaining that they exist at all, and how it would be better if the company was managed by somebody that's a peer of the entry-level employees, or maybe their immediate management. That fantasy and variations on it is pure nonsense.
The minute that someone cites the CEO's pay when complaining about the nature or price of a delivered retail product or service is the moment that you can be sure they don't know what's involved in keeping a gigantic company funded and running. That complaint needs its own equivalent of Godwin's law, because it's always apparent where the sentiment originates - and it's usually based on the premise that people who own companies (whether privately held or publicly traded and thus owned by investors) shouldn't be allowed to decide what they are willing to pay for the things they need to buy as they run their business. They pay vendors for products and supplies, they pay contractors to maintain facilities, they pay workers at every level to do a whole spectrum of things, and they seek out and hire officer-level people to deal with big-issue stuff. They choose those people from a limited range of choices, and stake enormous parts of the company's future on how those choices will turn out. And they throw money at the problem to open up more options and, with much of that pay being tied to performance, to make sure the executives have a vested interest in meeting the owners goals.
Dismissing what that costs as being too much misses the larger picture.
Why is an enterprise that is losing 440 million dollars every 3 months paying the top person 7 million dollars compensation? It appears to be unsustainable.
They pay that money to retain the services of someone that they judge will help make sure that those losses aren't ever bigger, and that they'll be reversed, at least in part due to that person's efforts - whether it's in overseeing M&A or more investment, or branding exercises, or housecleaning that can impact the long term viability of the business. It can take years to make that work. If the company's owners want to gamble the current $7m against a future they expect will turn around in the hundreds of millions, why isn't that their decision to make?
They don't perceive things like terrorist attacks against Saudi Arabia as attacks on themselves even when Saudi Arabia was the largest non-domestic source of US oil.
Sure they do. I do.
That's why dealing with people who use terrorist bombings and similar tactics against civilian and commercial targets in order to boost their global profile and recruit fellow idiots to their cause ARE considered a global problem, even if all they're doing is deliberately slaughtering innocent women and children at a vegetable market in Afghanistan. Because allowing people who embrace and spread that way of interacting with the world to continue unchecked just makes the problem grow. Legitimizes it, for some, as a way to communicate their twisted world view in a global media/economy era. That stuff is toxic to civilization, period. So those of us who appreciate civilization do feel assaulted when those who want to tear it down decide they can and should get away with it unmolested.
How many tickets must be sold to satisfy the CEO's paycheck alone? Much less the other executives...
You're right! There should be no CEO. The company doesn't need a chief executive. In fact, all airlines should be run by the government so that the company no longer needs to figure out how to attract investment, make marketing deals, strategize about how to pay for fuel a year from now, or negotiate over routes and hub services. There's no reason that any of that can't be done by a typical bureaucrat who has no personal vested interest in making such decisions as financially efficient as possible. Also, people who've spent money to buy shares in airlines should have to give that up, and taxpayers should be stuck with all of that as the decisions made by a randomly chosen mid-level federal employee begin to immediately lose billions more dollars. It's OK, we'll just borrow it from our grandchildren!
Many people are unenthusiastic about their work.