That's rather easy to explain. Businesses never really had ethics. They're out to make money, and these kinds of situations are simple risk vs. reward calculations. The activity brings in more money, and any laws to curtail corporate misbehavior have long since been rendered toothless. The only consideration is whether customers would leave en masse, but between the early termination fees and the fact that most costumers have some pathological fear of standing up for themselves when a corporation jerks them around, that's rather unlikely.

It largely depends on what you consider failure. WSJ cites that if you base success on breaking-even, 95% of start-ups fail, but if you base it on businesses failing so badly that investors are left with nothing at all, then it's closer to 30-40%.

Why limit it to one? At premium prices, customers demand premium quality. US history books will have all four.

Not all species, nay, not even all human cultures and periods of history follow this rule. If you look across the continuum of group sizes, that's not even true at all levels in even the most competitive society. It's rather unfortunate (and rather telling of how immature we as a culture are) that so many aspects of our lives are ruled by cutthroat competition, where 0.9 + 0.95 + 1 = ~1 rather than something closer to 2.85.

We've figured out that at the smaller sizes, cooperation is superior. After all, small teams of people get more done than a whole bunch of individuals who are each working towards their own ends, especially if you tell the individuals that they have to expend some of their effort to fend off attacks from others and attack in kind. We still struggle at the sizes involved at the corporate level, where some companies unify vision and goals rather than pit each department against one another.

When there's some external stimulus (usually some common threat), people figure out real quick that it's better to work together. Perhaps one day, we will evolve to the point where people don't need prodding to stop the bullshit and put their resources to work towards common ends, or at least not spend so much effort opposing one another.

That's precisely why it's a nice anecdote. Weeding and sweeping especially are shit jobs that people do because they have to. Finding a millionaire company owner who's still willing to get down-and-dirty is a good sign that he isn't full of himself. Buy the man a beer.

Nearly all the really creepy ones are, too.

That only makes sense when you take it for granted that it is normal to have a large prison population. The US is #1 in terms of prisoners per capita.

That is probably the most apt observation I have seen to explain why management is usually terrible.

That depends largely on what it is you need to learn. Most (all?) programming languages are free to learn, but many technical standards (e.g., ANSI, IEEE) are not.

We are merely mice voting for black or white cats.

Because now they're worried the guns will inadvertently kill the people who fire them.

I thought we learned from the warrant-less wiretapping of US citizens that most government employees don't give a damn about infringing rights and breaking the law and that Congress will fall all over itself to pass new laws to shield telecoms. Not that I believe this guy's story... I simply feel compelled to point out that the only thing preventing large-scale surveillance and storage of communications is the technical capability to do so.

The beauty of hiring people based upon a program is that it's not the hiring manager's fault when the new hires are terrible. It's the computer's fault.

Now think what happens when a stranger decides to follow you around all day, every day.

But alas, they failed to check for security holes in the design. Political parties and lobbyists have done an end-run around most of the checks built into the system.