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.

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?

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.

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!

Because if you participate in the US economy (as someone who contributes to it, or someone who takes from it - either way), then a deliberate attack on it IS an attack on you. They "view" themselves as having a vested interest in the US economy because they actually do have such. There's really no room for confusion on that front.

But tribal behavior is pretty well baked into us, genetically, and certainly manifests itself in large groups whether they're fourth cousins twice removed or just plain people who were raised the same way or like the same things. Groupthink on Slashdot frequently looks that way, for example, where people reflexively root for or against some person, meme, or the like simply because that's what their tribe here does.

Tribal-style behavior can exist in groups much larger than kin without that group happening to be a nation-state.

Except, lots of Sunnis consider those asshats to be unspeakably un-Sunni-like, and a scourge. You're confusing religious affiliation with the foundation of nation building. That's not "important," it's exactly what's wrong with the entire Middle East.

Because it WAS an attack on themselves. It was intended to be damaging to everyone in the country or who has a vested interest in the health and well being of the US economy. The people who did the attack did so because there are hundreds of millions of people who don't want to live under a cruel religious authority, and have build nations where that medieval BS is appropriately pushed to the sidelines. It's not important that ISIS take the steps it's taking, it's important that they are prevented from taking a single new step at all, ever again.

Right, exactly. Another thing that most people in the world don't have.

Which would be an interesting observation if it wasn't pure nonsense. Flying anywhere, no matter how briefly uncomfortable, is a huge luxury. If you want to fly first class, put the money aside and do it. If you don't want to spend that much money, quit bitching at people who do. If you can buy any sort of airline ticket, you're the wealthy one by any measure that matters.

No. Representative government, not tribalism, IS the common interest. The long-term thing you're describing isn't an embrace of democracy., It's the retrenchment of tribal rivalry by people who think that there is only so much prosperity available, and that the best way to get more is to kill the other guy. The "other guy" in this case, is someone who doesn't share your relatively recent family tree. Combine those gang-war family turf politics with medieval-minded murderous theo-thugocracy in the form of groups like Isis and the Wahabism that fuels it, and you've got quite a mess. None of which has anything to do with Democracy.

No, not really. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis. Getting even more of his people killed while spending that last of force's energies to try to keep him in power was also his fault. Starving even more of them while stealing aid money to buy more weapons and prop up his regime by force was his fault.

We do indeed have to put up with lots of bad people in power. But holding our noses while contending with him ceased to be an option. He invaded Kuwait, and we allowed to stay in power as long as he agreed to stand down and abide by many specific requirements. He chose not to, at every turn. He never stopped trying to kill ethnic minorities (like the Kurds), never stopped shooting at allied forces enforcing the no-fly zone, never stopped importing weapons (including long-range SCUDs), never came clean about where he put all of his VX gas, and more. The larger conflict that finally took him down was the climax of an uninterrupted fight that he started when he tried to forcibly take over a neighboring country. He'd probably still be there, along with his incomprehensibly cruel and murderous sons, if he'd not invaded Kuwait - and possibly he'd still be there if he'd actually done what he promised when he was kicked back out.

No, Congress passed a law forbidding the FAA from messing with hobbyists. The FAA is even now trying to find a way around that statutory requirement, and has published an "interpretation" of that law (now being challenged in court) that shows the administration is actively trying to pretend the law means the exact opposite of what it plainly states.

You've got it backwards. The FAA would be banning ALL such activity if it could. But congress passed a low telling them it was hands off for the hobby crowd. The FAA is currently being taken to court over their recently published "interpretation" of that law, implying that a whole bunch of hobby RC activity (like, flying while using video linked goggles) is reasonably banned. If congress hadn't explicitly carved out a niche for hobbyists, it would already be all over.

The Obama administration has already come right out and said that they won't be complying with the law requiring the FAA to have, by next year, rules in place to integrate commercial UAS into use. They will eventually, but all signs right now are that their idea of making it allowable for people like small aerial photography operations is going to be so onerous and expensive as to completely shut down huge new areas of economic activity. Thanks, all of you hope-and-changers who put such idiots in charge of the executive branch of the government, and in charge of political appointees like the FAA's Huerta, who is the driving force behind crushing this technology at every opportunity.

No. You own the copyrights on content you create, by the very act of creating it. You take a photo, you are the copyright holder, right then and there.

No, not on the basis of your holding the copyright. Not unless you can show that you'd normally make millions off of the use of that image anyway. Because unless you REGISTER the copyright, federally, you can only sue to stop infringing use and claim - at most - the customary fee you'd normally have collected if the infringing person had agreed to license the image from you in the first place. There is no punitive damage $ possible unless you take the matter to federal court, and you can only do that if you've taken the additional step of registering the material with the copyright office. THEN you can hire a lawyer and go to town. Of course, you'd need to have the material registered BEFORE all of that happened. Otherwise, your main option is to simply use your copyright power to stop the infringing use.

Of course, that's all completely separate from suing someone for defaming you, or using your likeness commercially without your permission ... those aren't copyright matters, that's separate. You might indeed be able, as a celebrity with a valuable public face, to sue for a pile of money based on someone else's mis-use of your image without your permission. But the average basement-dwelling slashdot user? No.

You've obviously never dealt with the Maryland state government or any of its counties. The entire MO is to make interaction with the government absolutely as miserable as possible at every turn. Then, when you play the game right and donate to the right party (it's a political monoculture, really), you get relief from the imposed hell. "Everybody is always in trouble" should be the state motto. Sounds better in Latin...

Quisque Semper Est Mala

Words to rule by.

Well, you did say, "Montana, Wyoming and parts of Idaho and Utah" ... which is more than Wyoming. Lots of cattle throughout those four states. Lots of agriculture in Idaho, timber in Montana. Anyway, those states together produce just under 10% of the grain and ranch output we consume - many billions per year worth. Considering the just-in-time nature of the country's food supply, loss of it would be very non-trivial. We're also talking about herd destruction, which would have a lasting impact beyond the immediate absence of what would be going to market at any given time. That sort of destruction would quite suck, and we're not even talking about the industries that are present in places like Salt Lake City. Let's hope it just doesn't happen any time soon.

Not counting the huge amount of our food that comes from those places.