This is a military high command that not only re-floated their sunken fleet, but which told Von Rippers subordinates to ignore his orders and to do it "their way" - and those subordinates did just that. Von Ripper quit for that reason.

If anyone studied the results, I'm very sure they got the lesson and kept their mouths shut.

After the Revolutionary War we were left with the constitution of the First United States Republic, the Articles of Confederation. It wasn't much of a constitution for the simple reason that it wasn't much of a government. There was no president except for the ceremonial office of President of the Congress. There was no federal court let alone a Supreme Court.

The states were mostly independent - of the federal government and of each other. The confederation was more of an organized rabble except that each state ran it's own affairs in about the same way that the British government had run things. The federal government such as it was had no power to do more than beg the states for revenue.

It was a living enactment of "that government is best that governs least".

There was a problem with the common people. The pre-revolutionary smugglers were now "legitimate" merchants and they were busy foreclosing on the people who actually fought in the revolution. See Daniel Shays for the details. The US aristocracy was scared silly that the common man might actually gain some control over his own government (As they did in Rhode Island, by voting not revolution.)

The common people staged a revolution called Shays' Rebellion. The merchants and bankers hired mercenaries. The rebels were beaten down but eventually pardoned after swearing never to do it again.

This was a problem in the minds of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and to some degree in the mind of John Adams. They didn't want a government that governs least, they wanted a government that could get things done - an imperial government. The French and the British had empires, and Alexander Hamilton wanted one for himself. They also had navies - and Alexander Hamilton wanted to be an Admiral.

But you can't run an empire with a rag-tag collection of states that weren't too sure about a federal government in the first place.

Washington, Adams and Hamilton (with the help of a front group called the Society of the Cincinati) tried to put together a constitution that George Bush would have loved.

The leftovers in Massachusetts refused to ratify the new constitution without "reservattions" which turned out to be the Bill of Rights. A number of othe states did the same.

Washington and Hamilton had to settle for something less than the Roman Republic they seemed to want. And when they got their new constitution, they proceeded to ignore the Bill of Rights as in the Alien and Sedition Acts.

So what was our country meant to be - the free country desired by Shays' Rebels - or the Empire desired by Washington and Hamilton?

How would you feel if you discovered that the company that provides and maintains the cameras had modified the timing of the lights to increase the number of people photographed as red-light runners. Some of them were a little sloppy in their cheating, got caught and were run out of town. There are probably a few companies that were a little more careful in their cheating and haven't been caught yet.

We live in a world where "shareholder value" is more important than honesty.

Regulation fails largely because we do not know when or how to regulate.

Before everything went to hell, the mortgage industry regulated itself very nicely for one simple real-world reason - the investors did not trust the originating bankers any further than they could throw them. (This is semi-historical so don't confuse the way it was with the way it has become.)

Bankers used to write loans out of their own (depositors) funds. They knew their customers and they knew who was good and who was no so good)

Investors knew this and if a bank wanted to sell a bunch of loans, they wanted enough documentation to make sure that the bank wasn't going to sell them the junk and keep the good stuff for their own portfolio. When they bought a loan, they also had buy-back provisions. The originating banker had to keep a reserve fund, and if a loan was bad from the start, the originator had to buy it back - and the reserve fund meant that they had to put up enough cash to show they were able to buy it back.

Fannie May and Freddie Mac insured loans. They charged a fee and they had their own set of rules. They didn't trust the originating bankers or the investors either. At his time, Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac were still private companies even though they were sponsored by the federal government.

Notice the there is no government regulation anywhere here - just independent businesses who know how crooked the people they are dealing with can be.

But regulation costs money. These guys were making their own regulations and making just enough regulations to cover their own butts. If they got skinned anyway, they added a few new rules - just enough to fix the problem.

This is business taking care of themselves. This doesn't protect the public. So you still need some regulation, but not the kind of clusterfuck that the regulatory agencies usually create.

Since the government isn't paying for regulation out of it's own pocket, there is no limit to the number of really stupid regulations they are likely to pass. And because they don't really know what they are doing, business is usually able to turn that stupidity to their own advantage.

The one thing I have not been able to find out here is whether the high salaries are an actual salary, or the billed costs of a consulting firm. If these are billed costs, divide by three (or more) to find out what the programmers were actually paid. And then consider that this is New York - where a parking space costs more than an apartment in most other cities.

The rest of the comments seem pretty accurate.

Maybe I missed it and someone already said this, but the way warranties work is defined by the Uniform Commercial Code - and not necessarily to our benefit.

If a software developer were to provide a printed warranty - sort of like: "If it doesn't work correctly we will fix the problem and give you a free copy of the revised version", the developer has just printed his own suicide note.

You can't write a simple commonsense warranty because of a legal doctrine called strict liability. If you give any warranty at all, you have automatically imported an entire body of law that governs warranties.

That is why most software products refuse to even guarantee that the CD will fit in the drive or that the computer will not catch fire during installation.

I really wish I knew the entire story about Dell, but this simplified version has a certain amount of truth. It goes like this:

Dell was a pretty well run company over it's 20 or so year life span. They made a respectable profit.

Then the Wall Street analysts decided that per-share earnings should be about 50 percent higher. When Wall Street demands more money on the bottom line, smart managers either pay attention or dust off their resumes.

There are only a few ways to increase those earnings:

1) Cheapen the product
2) Screw over the employees - fire some, overwork others, steal the pension plan - all the traditional ways.
3) Reduce customer support to almost nothing.

This isn't done in one step. You can generally go though 3 or 4 rounds of each of these before it becomes obvious that you have screwed the pooch.

In one of these iterations, Dell exported customer support and order handling to India - and apparently not to the best firm they could have picked..

When too many of their newly cheapened machines showed up DOA, all of the people who knew how to fix the problems were gone. A customer service department that took 20 years to build was now toast. If you were one of the customers with a dead machine, the chance of getting the problem solved was close to zero.

This of course mean that marketing stopped working as the word got out.

Then they cut a marketing deal with Wal-Mart. It took them a while to figure out that when you make a marketing deal With Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is the only one who makes any money.

Selling off their manufacturing will put a one-time addition to "earnings", and with any luck, all of the smart guys in management will have bailed out.

This one sort of relates to step 4: After you have totally trashed the company, lie on your financial statements while looking carefully for the Exit sign.

And in the mean time, the Wall St guys and the portfolio managers cashed their bonus checks and are now saying: "tsk, tsk - isn't it a shame".