... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Exactly.

It's like they think people smart enough to work at google are dumb enough to believe that line.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

The main problem of receiving compensation commensurate to the "value" your profession is that you're at the mercy of the other people who share your profession.

People who become lawyers tend to be good negotiators. People who become accountants tend to be risk-averse. You could argue that the baseline value of these two should be similar, but it isn't because there are far more unemployed and underemployed lawyers in the market than accountants. Yet the average salary of lawyers is far higher than accountants. Why? Because accountants as a whole aren't as opportunistic, don't tolerate as much risk, and nobody is sticking their neck out to raise the bar.

If fast food work could attract the same kind of people that lawyering does, fast food workers would be some of the highest paid workers in the country. But it doesn't, that work attracts disengaged or otherwise engaged people who just need some job for the moment. People like that tend to negotiate towards a minimum of commitment and responsibility so they can focus on other things rather than towards a higher paycheck.

I don't disagree that blocking was the right choice. What I question was whether Comcast's current monopoly practices in the face of pressure across all business sectors (some more than others) are enough to make this merger make sense as a strategic business decision.

2-3 years ago where I live, you had a "choice" of high speed Internet -- DSL from CenturyLink, permanently stuck in the sub-2 Mbit/sec range or Comcast at 10+. A local Internet provider has been wiring part of the city for fiber -- it's a pretty small area now, but they just announced an expansion and are even offer 10 gig. CenturyLink has been running fiber in residential neighborhoods over the past month.

So by the end of the year, it's possible that there will be far better choices than Comcast for high speed Internet. Obviously this isn't enough, only one place, limited availability, etc, but it shows that other providers "get it" and see that Comcast is ripe for the picking.

I think the pressures on Comcast's cable TV service are even greater from Netflix, Amazon, HBO's new streaming option, selective download services like iTunes, Roku "channels" and so on. You can get most content now without cable.

I'd be most worried if I was Comcast about the original content. Most of what underpins cable is having content, and it may not be unlikely that in the near future the content people want isn't even available on Comcast or any other cable service at all.

My sense is that it maybe wasn't good business.

The sectors represented by Comcast (content, cable, internet) all face a ton of pressure from various competition. Amazon and Netflix are actively creating content and building alliances with production companies. Cable is being decimated by streaming and downloadable content (accelerated by excessive cable pricing and poor customer service). Even Internet is showing signs of competition from municipal broadband and other providers -- CenturyLink, who is just about as awful as Comcast from a customer service perspective, just ran fiber optic cable down the poles behind my residential address. The utility guy I quizzed said it was for residential high speed internet.

The only way this deal made any sense was as a holding action -- give Comcast a bigger local monopoly slice and hope that they can milk the customer base and Netflix, et al, for enough cash that they can keep the wheel turning. Regulatory pressure, net neutrality, etc may even have limited that strategy, at least on the milk-the-content-providers department.

Mergers are expensive, from the deal costs to the business integration side and I really question whether at the speed their markets are changing that they can maintain customers and margins long enough to profit from the merger.

It also makes the business a lot bigger, which makes it slower to adapt and innovate, especially when it represents a sector that has traditionally relied on monopoly power and not innovation. Being a bigger dinosaur didn't help the dinosaurs.

I think your reasoning makes sense from a team productivity perspective, but I agree with the other poster that such practices when they involve cultural behavior and can be (even remotely) attributed to race, age, etc would be considered illegal and discriminatory. And you might even argue if your team is so easily disrupted by "differences" like this that they may not be the greatest overall employees (naive, narrow-minded, unworldly, inexperienced...), either.

The funny thing is I have heard many complaints from people I know about business not caring at all about the productivity friction caused by hires -- not just "hey, learn to get along with someone different" but actively ignoring/denying that the conflicts even exist.

I had a friend who worked at a local hospital system's IT department. About 3/4 of the workforce was native born Americans of various ages and genders and about 1/4 were south Asians. More than a few of the south asians had simply awful personal hygiene -- they smelled like bathing was only an occasional afterthought.

Numerous employees complained to line management and then HR. Line management ignored it because the employees were OK producers and apparently inexpensive. HR tried to gloss it over until one of the employees brought in some kind of note from a doctor who said that she was extra sensitive to odors. HR finally came up with a list of the worst offenders hygiene wise and told them there had been complaints and that "as a hospital system, we have a vested interest in cleanliness and hygiene and expect employees to respect the standards of cleanliness."

I think about half "cleaned up" their act and the rest just got moved to some corner of the office.

I've also seen kind of the reverse, at a college I did some consulting at there was a "clique" of Vietnamese employees there with long tenure but awful skills. They often spoke to each other in Vietnamese and seemed to use their tenure/culture as a way to edge out other employees despite the total lack of skills and abilities. The result was the other employees (mostly white, but one hispanic) ALSO cliqued up and these two groups did not cooperate well at all -- there was often real hostility between the two. When one of the Vietnamese fucked up a wireless config and blackholed half the wireless traffic, one of the non-Vietnamese taunted her verbally about fixing the problem "So are you buying us all lunch if you can't fix this in an hour?" The manager seemed to ignore it all.

And there's the problem.

Who fits best with a team of 25 year olds?

It leads to a recursive situation where candidates with less experience or other negatives are chosen because they are young and not ugly.

And yet, right here on slashdot, I've had google employees swear in other discussions that google maintains a 45 hour work week when I said a friend declined due to work/life balance issues around her child.

I'm kind of surprised that this deal had investor support. The larger business model is under attack on many fronts, content delivery by streaming video, Internet by municipal-backed and private fiber vendors who are seeing opportunity -- CenturyLink, one of the few companies who compete with Comcast for poor service, just strung fiber optic cabling on the poles behind my house which is supposed to support gigabit residential Internet speeds. And even NBCUniversal's strength in content creation is under assault by Netflix and Amazon original productions.

Even if you assume greater profits from increased monopoly abuse by a combined Comcast/TWC, huge mergers face big costs internally and I'd question whether they will have time enough even as a monopoly to recoup those costs and the investment expenses of the merger deal itself.

Plus, the larger the entity, the less it is able to adapt to the huge changes sweeping the video content and Internet markets. Cable is already a dinosaur, being a bigger dinosaur has never proven helpful.

I can't speak for why your area has only one DSL choice, but in my small town we have eight DSL providers, only one of which is the telco. "Used to be" is "is" for a very large number of people.

The crazy prior owner put in over 2' of blown in flock fill insulation in the attic. It will probably never pay for itself but holy crap I have low utility bills.

In another 10 years, those will be actual renewable system batteries. A lot of money is going into batteries now-- prices are dropping at microprocessor like rates. And they recently found a new technology around non-rare, non-explosive elements.

I greatly prefer conservation up front over power generation on the back end however.

But batteries are improving rapidly at this point while at the same time prices are dropping rapidly.

There you go, we'll probably see more "oops the drones messed up" because it looks like this worked out well...no morality involved, oops shot the hostages, no meaningful PR backlash, hostage takers lose their leverage, win-win!

I don't know, the experience with company towns makes me think big business can do erosion of liberty on par with the government and with greater efficiency.