Comment Re:convergence of wealth, lawyers, and arrogance (Score 1) 440
Corporations are people, my friend.
Corporations are people, my friend.
If I work 9-5, and at 5:01 start telling customers that my CEO should be fired because he's a pinko commie, I would expect to be told to find a new job
I also feel management should be fired if they attempt to fire employees for political activities during their off hours.
Telling people that your CEO should be fired because he's a pink commie after 5:01 is political activities during their off hours.
It's also a political activity, yes, but I think it goes well beyond that. I can't find the right words at the moment, but I'm sure you can see the difference. If the CEO was also the mayor, an employee running a campaign to defeat him in the election would be fine. The employee running a campaign to turn public support against the CEO in an effort to get him fired/pressured to step down? Not okay.
My boss? A mere difference of opinion is fine as long as we can be adult about it. If he has publicly called for me and people like me to be stripped of rights and made second class citizens AND put his personal money into helping to make that happen, anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out that there's a high potential for a problem there.
Maybe I'm missing something, but my understanding is that he did not publicly call for anything. He privately donated money to campaigns (which I despise), but TFA and this thread make no mention of any other activity.
I have worked for extremely conservative organizations while donating to the ACLU, FSF, Planned Parenthood, Courage Campaign, and many others. Should they have had the right to fire me if those donations became public knowledge?
Only with the fact that he was objecting -- publicly -- ABOUT his boss's politics, whatever they happen to be.
You seem to think you are the feudal lord rather than one signatory to a contract. Does the contract you signed with your employee say that he doesn't have the right to discuss your politics?
Really? I think you're misrepresenting the GP.
And yes, if an employee of mine made public comments about not wanting me as CEO because of my politics, I would show him the door in an instant.
While I wouldn't agree with instant/automatic firing, this is about bringing politics to your workplace. And that's fair. If I work 9-5, and at 5:01 start telling customers that my CEO should be fired because he's a pinko commie, I would expect to be told to find a new job. Employees publicly calling for their CEO's resignation because of their [legal] political activities are childish at best.
For the record, I also feel management should be fired if they attempt to fire employees for political activities during their off hours.
The consequence of this is that everyone who derives their income from labor rather than return on capital is screwed. There are only two choices: invest enough to become financially independent (and hope that you can do it before you lose your career to automation), or hope that society sees fit to redistribute wealth so that those without control of capital don't starve.
The catch-22 is that the people whose occupations are most in danger from automation are also those with the lowest capacity for investing...
I've reached the same conclusions, but it is worth noting a few points that should alter the outcome:
I find it extremely likely that those in power will ultimately realize that they are better off when the needs of all are met, enabling a compromise wherein some form of minimum income/welfare ensures comfort for all. The transition could be smooth, or it could be bloody, but I don't see how it's avoidable in the long-run.
Historically, this is the progression we have observed in the welfare state.
Given the current state of the world, can you really foresee no possible scenarios where dogfighting might be necessary?
So the military is to not just face any likely threat, but every possible threat, no matter how unlikely. The military is already about the same as the rest of the world combined. How much more do you think we need?
I can't tell if you're trolling or just... nevermind.
Clearly that is not what I believe. And I am quite sure you know that.
Obama has cancelled the superior, completed, and operational F-22 and directed some of the funds toward the incomplete, problem plagued F-35.
I was a huge critic of that move, and said this would happen. But let's be honest here:
Obama was among those leading the charge to kill the program, but:
- Congress killed the F-22's funding
- Senate votes had more to do with where production was located than political affiliation
- SecDef Gates wanted the F-22 dead
- The JCS and many others in the Pentagon supported him
- John McCain co-sponsored the amendment that killed funding
Moral of the story, though... the people who mocked the F22 as the boondoggle to the F35 should have been fired from the DoD and run out of Congress. The F22 ended up being cheaper and still better (IIRC). There's no excuse for being naive enough to believe "oh yeah, we'll be much cheaper" when building something like the F35.
Hey, thanks for the recognition! I was predicting precisely this on Slashdot at the time, and the consensus here was that I am an idiot... but it's all good. I'm sure those who advocated replacing F-22s with F-35s will happily volunteer to pay the difference.
We kill them on the ground and with ground to air weapons before we take to the air.
That's not even close to true. Aircraft are in the air in the earliest stages: infiltrating special ops; conducting reconnaissance, targeting, and BDAs; escorting unarmed platforms.
We never went to war without overpowering air superiority since, so there were almost no US dogfights since.
Does it follow that the US will never go to war without air superiority again? Given the current state of the world, can you really foresee no possible scenarios where dogfighting might be necessary?
I would agree that Afghanistan and Iraq did not have particularly threatening aircraft. Do you really think Russia, China, or some future rising power will be the same scenario? American soldiers have been safe from enemy air attack since Korea. I am willing to pay a little more to ensure it stays that way.
Scenario 1: Governments tax the hell out of fossil fuels in order to prevent more global warming from happening.
Scenario 2: Governments lower taxes on fossil fuels in order to help the economy grow, which will help people adapt to global warming. The warming will of course be much worse than in scenario 1.
Scenario 3: Business as usual.
Has this been done and what have the results been?
Not this precisely, but close enough. Plenty of cost-benefit analyses have been done. The results are exactly what one would expect: adapting to significant global climate change is at least one order of magnitude more expensive than reducing CO2 output. And that's if you ignore the anticipated increase in wars/conflicts.
Geo-engineering to prevent/mitigate climate change may be less expensive than adapting to change, depending both on the methods of calculation and the viability of untested/unknown techniques. No technique has been shown to be anywhere near as safe or inexpensive/non-disruptive as Scenario 1.
Scenario 2 is not viable and has not (to my knowledge) been proposed/studied. It should really be dismissed. Decreased costs will further skew the economy towards fossil fuels, making the ultimate shift away from fossil fuels more expensive. Plus all of the costs of Scenario 3 (and then some). Plus the cost of additional subsidies for fossil fuels (both direct, indirect, and towards infrastructure).
Any resident game theorist can correct me, but from the numbers I have seen, you would need greater than 90% confidence that IPCC is completely wrong to choose anything but reducing GHG emissions.
It doesn't matter if it is MS, MS Research, MS Marketing, or even a third party. What I said applies to anyone with an MS bent in their view. That is why what I said was modded up.
And my point is that MS Research is to Microsoft as Stanford University is to railroad tycoons. Danah Boyd doesn't work for "Microsoft", she does academic research for an organization funded by Microsoft. It's technically a division of MS, but it's really not the same thing.
Many of us not only remember the past, but lived through the whole MS "evolution" and can recall many dozens and dozens of examples of MS ruining compatibility, stifling innovation, corrupting standards, destroying competition, lying about FOSS, tampering with regulations, punishing vendors who try to give customers non-MS choices, locking down platforms, buying competing products that were multiplatform and ruining them or simply dropping them, creating unfair licensing agreements, etc, etc, etc.
Indeed. Nobody is arguing any of those points. Not me, not Danah Boyd. Given her focus on social media, I suspect she's in favor of open standards, but that's not really relevant. You're attacking her for working for a largely independent organization that is funded by Microsoft, but her work/career have nothing to do with your complaints.
AT&T sucked. They still do. But the researchers at Bell Labs made incredible contributions to society. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others are funding raw research in the hopes of doing the same. What's next, criticizing a gerontologist for taking grants from the same government that invaded Iraq?
And no, I don't have a horse in the game. I despise nearly everything MS has done. But I do respect the notion that real researchers need benefactors, and large corporations should sponsor raw science.
No, he's not right. The income inequality problem is not between engineers and common workers, it's between CEOs and common workers.
Not really. Instead, look at the gap between shareholders and common workers. The gap between CEOs and workers has been widening, but it pales in comparison.
The overwhelming majority of CEOs still have to work to maintain their lifestyles (ignoring the what, top 1000 CEOs in the world?). Among those who are independently wealthy, few would continue to passively increase their wealth. At this point, a near majority of the wealth is owned by those whose wealth generates enough passive income to be ensure ever-increasing wealth, as long as they hire a competent team to manage it.
CEOs may be the top 1%, but the real dangerous gap is with the top
But I guess the question is, why isn't American management better? The US has the reputation of the best business schools in the world, why can't they do a better job?
I would argue that American managers are, by far, the global leaders in extracting wealth, be it from natural resources, human capital, or corporations.
Of course, being able to extract wealth from a company should not make one a good executive, but... perhaps this is what happens when there is no moral hazard for management?
I've been saying this for a long time, so it's great to hear someone else propose it independently. I would love a return to the fairness doctrine, but I've lost hope on that... either have strict guidelines for what can be called "News", or put a "For entertainment only" marquee on all the crap.
Prevailing theory on first strike is that you fire everything you can, targeting not only cities and military installations, but also the nuclear fields of the enemy to try to knock out as much of their ability to strike back as you can.
References? Who is seriously proposing this as the best option?
It's been a few years since I did any research on the subject, but last I saw the prevailing (strategic choice) theory was that you always leave the other side incentives to acquiesce. E.g. target select military installations on the first strike, but leave population centers intact... "this was justified, if you don't escalate things we won't nuke your cities" might just work.
The reasoning for this is that neither the US nor Russia is believed to have an effective first strike capability. The US's strategic triad makes this virtually impossible, and Russia's got a hell of a lot of SLBMs as well.
Ignoring all that: Have you looked at a map recently? The US is big. To have the effect you are talking about a strike that would require hundreds of warheads. That would be more than enough according to Sagan et al.
You would need to boil the oceans and destroy all the submarines at the same time. Failure to get even a single submarine means absolute devastation. Nobody serious believes any country has an effective first strike against the US or Russia.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
