If you're working for a Fortune 500 company there likely will be some form of internal integrity hotline. I know my own corporation has one. Document your concerns and contact them. I recently had to report a concern raised about one of the major offshore contractors we use to our integrity hotline and it was actually a very good experience from my side. After submitting the issue it took a few days but an investigator from our legal department contacted me and we had a phone conversation, and then I forwarded him some additional details I had held back from the initial correspondence. I did that mostly to protect an individual from the contractor who brought the concerns to my attention.

I would make sure that the correspondence you send to your legal department includes copies of some of the email chains you have with your managers, peers, etc... raising the concerns. Be sure to specify any regulations you suspect are being violated. If the legal team determines there is concern you can bet that change will happen. If they determine otherwise, then you've done your due diligence and reported it within the means your company gives for you to report it.

You don't face criminal charges for not testifying. You are held in contempt of court. Contempt of court does not require the state to press charges against you and an independent trial.

Pretty sure these were features of VB6. I remember hacking out code, using the immediate window to trace values, setting break points, stepping through the code, modifying in the middle of execution, and then resuming execution. The language itself may have had a lot of issues and performance issues, but the IDE and development environment had some very nice features.

We are definitely enriched by the arts. However there is a surplus of people going into these areas and a deficit of jobs. I see this quite frequently since one of my hobbies is working with community theatre groups. I see a lot of folks who got theatre, music, or other arts related majors in college (quite frequently at private colleges...) and then complain that they can't find a job. Note, I live in the Minneapolis area and we have a very large theatre community here, even with all the professional theatres we have here we cannot support the numbers of people who graduate every year looking to make theatre their career.

I would argue that most of these individuals would've been better off having obtained a major in some other field and done theatre as a minor or second major. Personally I majored in computer science. I have a stable profitable career, and I'm still able to partake in the arts and contribute to the arts.

The same can also be said for elementary education majors here in MN. We probably have per capita one of the highest rates of people with elementary education degrees. To the point where most of them are not working in education. Probably only half of the people I know who went to college for elementary education are actually working in that field. Did they learn something valuable? Sure. Could they have potentially learned something else and had an easier time getting a career in another field? Definitely.

I think the original commenter was simply trying to point out this fact. We do a very poor job of guiding teenagers moving from high school to either the real world or college. And, there are some fields which are simply over-saturated and it'll be hard to get a job in.

I have to say I have severely mixed feelings on working from home. It's definitely nice on occasion, but as I see more and more of my coworkers working remotely and we're forced to use more workers in India it creates an environment where the entire feeling of teamwork is breaking down. Plus as an engineer I feel my single best tool for communicating many technical issues and designs is a marker board. Which cannot be used remotely. Even the engineers I have "locally" tend to be very green and need a lot of guidance, trying to lead them remotely just gives me a headache and things take far longer than they should.

Some of it might be attributable to the "participation award" mentality that has become quite pervasive over the past few decades. I can't recall where I read it, but sometime in the past few months there was an article which was pointing out that the kids currently in college were more likely to believe themselves to be exceptional at whatever they were doing. If they all believe themselves to be exceptional they have very little reason to try and do better. A lifetime of reinforcing that everyone is a winner, and everyone is exceptional can only result in bar being lowered.

There's definitely value in teaching kids that it's good to try, and it's ok to not succeed at some things. But, it may have been taken a bit too far. People need to fall down if only to learn how to stand. And, that's not really happening right now in our schools.

Oh, the banks definitely have skin in this game. And, many of the big banks have quite likely many reasons to dislike OWS. I personally was not trying to attribute any nobleness to the organizations as a whole. Legal compliance is rarely a noble quality in large organizations. It's usually enforced by internal legal departments who are paranoid about the potential of lawsuits or fines. I deal with such internal legal paranoia quite often in my role, it can be quite stifling and lead to actions that can seem quite irrational. It usually boils down to a company trying to do what they think their job is.

As for cracking down on the protests can you really blame anyone working in management at these banks for wanting to? You have an angry group of people who will not so much as give a cohesive list of demands that could sensibly bring an end to the protest. All you have is a large group of people with no defined leadership, which makes them impossible to even negotiate with, and a list of ideas/concepts/whatever that they are protesting for or against that's so general and broad that there is literally no way possible that any of the targets of their protest could reasonably assuage them.

Peaceful protests? Sure, parts of the protests have been peaceful. Parts have been less so. Blocking traffic, causing such a disruption that small employers like the local restaurants and coffee shops were unable to do business, beating drums at all hours of the night so the local residents cannot sleep in their own homes. (Yes, there are people living in those neighborhoods too.) These don't strike me as particularly peaceful. The folks living there can in no way effect the operations of the businesses so beating drums in the middle of the night when there aren't any office workers there is pretty much just a nuisance activity. Destroying the business of the folks who may very well have their entire livelihoods tied up in those local businesses that were unable to operate because of the disruption is also not in line with peaceful protests. Based on the tenor of your comment I'm going to guess that you'll probably justify all those actions in some manner though.

As for your question I'm not going to answer it. You define only two possible answers and assume that my reasoning must fall into one those and therefore try to constrain me to fit within the categories which you define. If I answer in any way other than you would accept you're just going to assume that I ultimately fall back into one of those two categories. By defining naivete and dishonesty as the only two possible answers you show that your mind is already closed.

In my opinion that's too many things to try and effect change on at one time. People who are not directly invested into those causes are for the most part very easily distracted and if you bombard them with too many inputs at once they naturally start to drown out some or all of those inputs. Have you ever been in a meeting where you had a dozen things on the agenda and everyone wanted to talk about their own particular agenda item and were unwilling to yield to other other agenda items? I have. Nothing got done. In those circumstances someone has to clearly steer the conversation to give time to each point and address them. By directing the conversation the meeting suddenly becomes more effective, and while they end result is that some things get deferred you will stand a much better chance of accomplishing something.

I've also been in situations where people simply complained about something and said "fix it." My question to them always is "how do you want it fixed?" If there is no direct answer then I can't fix it. OWS suffers from this same exact problem. Simply complaining about something is not enough. Giving a stated list of suggestions on how to fix something is effective. You may not get your ideal solution, but you may get something instead of just getting ignored.

Because OWS eschews formal organizational structures and leadership and tries to lead everything by committee their message is lost, diffuse, and ultimately ignored.

Some corporations definitely do hold too much sway in politics. As I would argue many special interest groups and even unions do. I would love to see all these groups have their influence dialed back. But, I would argue without term limits and campaign finance reform you won't see any of them lose their sway. Politicians who "serve" indefinitely are in my opinion the real problem. It invites a class of individuals whose only true goal is to continue to be re-elected. They then cater to some mix of these groups and accept their money happily to fund their campaigns. If politicians were limited in the length of time they could serve in federal elected offices and prohibited from then moving into appointed positions you would likely see a return of the citizen legislator that once (very early in our republic) dominated. And, perhaps a bit of a return to sanity and common sense. Or at least so I hope.

Thank you for your comments. You hit the point exactly.

Most "loose protest" groups have not tried to utilize banking the way that I have heard OWS did. I recall a number of stories talking about how committees had been formed to handle their cash flow. Some of the groups had a bit more formalized arrangement than others. But, with the amount of money they had coming and going to pay for food, kitchens, fuel for generators, generators, etc... there was probably a higher amount of cash moving through OWS than most "loose protest" groups. And, the fact that the news had also reported on several occasions that OWS had set up bank accounts that also puts them into a different category.

I know the majority of the articles I read about Tea Party groups and how they were organized they had done so as non-profits. In fact there was some hullabaloo this past year where some federal agency was going back and requesting more documentation from various Tea Party groups and questioning their incorporation. So, yes, the government has been giving them grief too. The main difference from what I can see though is that they followed the process of incorporating themselves and appointing leaders who were specifically responsible for accounting and tax filings whereas OWS never has.

Those are really the only two protest groups that I know enough about how they are structured to comment on. There may very well be others that you could cite that either have gone through the process of incorporating themselves and others that haven't. But, I would guess that most other groups if they have tried to set up a bank account have filed some modicum of paperwork.

When those organizations officially form themselves I believe it is still called incorporation. There's just different levels of paperwork and tax reporting that have to occur. The verb to incorporate actually covers a great many types of entities.

Oh the FBI has definitely been misused in the past. Under J. Edgar Hoover he used the organization as his own personal tool to attack anyone or anything he didn't like. Like any organization it has people who are truly dedicated to doing a good and honest job, and it will also have people who actively try and use it for their own self centered goals. While I know the latter exist I choose to believe the vast majority of the people working at the FBI are there to try and do good.

To the best of my limited knowledge on the subject there are only two federal law enforcement agencies that are charged with enforcement of banking regulations. The Secret Service gets involved if there is suspected counterfeiting involved. And, I believe the majority of the other types of incidents fall under the purview of the FBI. Anything that crosses state lines falls under federal law whereas things that remain within a single state typically fall under state law enforcement's purview.

So by that reasoning the FBI would definitely become involved in any action that looks to be enforcing federal banking or money laundering laws.

Now, as to building dossiers on people within the organization and the organization as a whole. Well some of that is understandable and some is not. I'm not going to sit here and try and justify those actions because frankly I don't know enough to argue one way or another on the subject.

I would like to point out that the FBI does do a lot of good. Good that you may not typically think of. The FBI is primarily responsible for bringing down most of the major mafia families and their criminal enterprises. They are the ones who handle all child kidnappings in the US. They provide assistance to local law enforcement whenever there is a suspected serial murderer and take over the case when the crimes extend across state borders. You might want to consider that when you make your blanket assertion that you'll never cooperate with them.

Thank you for that laugh. No, I do not work for any government agency or shadowy secret organization. I'm simply a rational thinking cubicle dwelling software engineer. I just don't happen to see conspiracies everywhere I look, rather I look for the logical explanation behind things. More often than not I usually find a reasonable explanation.

Oh, I readily admit that I personally dislike OWS. However I am in no way bending reality to fit my dislike. Rather I'm trying to point out the reality of the situation and how OWS is simply running afoul of that reality. I think some of the folks who are in it have some very valid points that they are protesting. The overall problem with this group is that it is too loosely organized and completely lacking in any direction. When you look historically at groups that have successfully protested for change there is a pattern to their success. Women's suffrage had a very clear goal, gain the right to vote for women. The Civil Rights Movement wanted the abolition of various segregationist policies and discriminatory hiring practices. Their goals were clear, there was a defined end state to which they were working and therefore their success could be measured. OWS on the other hand has not stated end state to which they would like things moved. They simply protest everything, and therefore will never obtain concrete action on anything.

As for following banking regulations. Yes, I do truthfully believe it has everything to do with that. I have multiple friends who work in varying levels of several fairly large regional banks. Every single one of them has told me about the training they've had to go to regardless of how high or low their position is to learn about fraud, how to detect it, and what they have to report. It was pretty interesting to hear from them some of the things that they were instructed to be aware of. The laws are there to stop money laundering, trafficking money to terrorist or criminal organizations, tax evasion, ponzi schemes, etc... There are more ways than you can possibly imagine that people have used and abused financial systems. While we may not always appreciate why many of them exist, usually they were crafted to stop or control a certain practice. Some of them may definitely seem stupid to us as individuals. But, they do exist.

The Mall of America was designed with the foreknowledge that people moving through it would generate heat. When I was working a volunteer event there a number of years ago the community relations contact we had was cheerfully explaining that they typically don't heat the mall. She cited a figure of 100 people generates about the same thermal output as an average household furnace. Which puts into context why a party in a house gets so warm... Most office towers in northern latitudes tend to heat primarily around the edges of the building where heat bleeds out of the tower through the windows. Otherwise you may find that the interior of the build could actually be receiving cool air to dissipate the body heat of the office workers.

So, while I applaud the re-use of body heat for something useful, it's definitely not a new concept. Architects and engineers have been accounting for it and sometimes harnessing it for years.