alvinrod opined:

Neither my wife nor I are religious in any way. We were married in the back yard of my parents' house - by the mayor of West Carrollton, Ohio.

A marriage ceremony may or may not be religious in nature, just as there may or may not be strictures of a religious nature on marriages of which one or both parties to which are adherents of a faith that routinely imposes those conditions. But the legal nature of the bond itself is a matter of civil law. That's why a cleric, for instance, can marry you, but it takes a judge to un-marry you.

I'm surprised I have to explain any of this to you ...

... strikes again!

Then this study is designed to make Belgian beers - not beers in general - taste "better" ...

madbrain snorted:

It's a tiny ISP in a small town, not Comcast or AT&T. I have little doubt that $10K will pack a non-trivial sting ...

Class. Action.

guruevi blathered:

It's "whalers," idiot. Not "sailors." "Whalers."

The tip-off is the next line: "We carry a harpoon."

Y'know, if you lift your arms just the tiniest bit, your knuckles won't get all red and swollen like that ...

McMann piped up:

The ONLY reason you "immediately knew" his name is Mark Steyn's baseless accusation of scientific fraud against him, which was amplified by oil industry trolls to the point where he became a public figure. He wasn't one until Steyn and his fellow anthropogenicly-mediated climate change deniers MADE him one by loudly and publicly attacking his professional integrity. Prior to that, he was just a professional climate researcher, toiling away in obscurity.

Steyn et al's attacks on him turned him into an unwilling public figure, and it is richly hypocritical of them to claim he must now surmount that higher bar for defamation of character.

With or without salt ... ?

In response to my observation:

Yeah. I actually did that before I posted my complaint. As you know, TFS is, like, 3/5 of the PC Magazine article - and all the stuff about Viasat trying to persuade the FCC to deny the private individual's petition is in the part msmash left out.

Not that there's a lot of detail in TFA itself, but still ...

TFS is about the petition, not Viasat's attempt to stop the FCC from considering it. WTF ... ?

RitchCraft sneered:

This space regrets the misattribution of tonality - you sensitive clod.

;)

RitchCraft sneered:

Consumer electronics have a typical lifespan of ~2 years because their solder joints grow metal whiskers. They grow metal whiskers because, after California adopted the EU's 5% maximum lead content for solder, manufacturers opted to eliminate lead from their solder altogether.

The 5% lead standard was developed by NASA's Materials Research Lab based on Apollo-era experiments with lead-free solder joints in booster rockets (because lead is heavy, and there's a LOT of solder joints in a gigantic booster rocket). Short version: lead-free solder was a disaster, because the high current levels in many of the boosters' subsystems (especially LOX pumps) caused the nearly-instantaneous growth of tin whiskers that shorted out the rockets' electrical systems, causing blowy-uppy events.

NASA eventually determined that 5% was the minimum necessary proportion of lead in solder to prevent the development of tin whiskers in solder joints. The EU adopted that as its standard for consumer electronics, in an effort to reduce the amount of lead entering the waste stream. California - the seventh-largest economy on Earth - did likewise. CE manufacturers, on advice of their lawyers, decided that, if 5% was the maximum allowed for products sold in Cali, 0% would be even better from a liability standpoint. When their engineers pointed out that lead-free solder causes even moderate-current consumer electronics to grow device-killing tin whiskers after 2 years or so, their C suites promptly had orgasms over the prospect of the profits to be reaped from the infinite stream of replacement device sales, and lead-free solder as the CE default was born.

FWIW, also courtesy of NASA, we know that a 2-mil coating of polyurethane laquer is sufficient to contain more than 90% of tin and other metallic whisker growth. It also makes CE devices a lot less of a target-rich environment for metal-whisker-induced short circuits. Manufacturers know this, of course (again, courtesy of NASA), so they go to great pains not to employ polyurethane protective coating in CE devices.

Because profits ...

Many more photos, a rollout video, and an animated "concept" video of the aircraft in flight here

RitchCraft demanded:

Harry Stonecipher happened. He was a disciple of "CEO of the Century" Jack Welch, who oversaw General Electric's transformation from one of the leading technology companies of the 20th century to a teetering pile of overvalued shit by slashing headcount and spending on R&D in favor of growth by constant acquisition, playing shell games with offshore banking havens, and bribing congresscreatures to tack GE-specific tax exemptions onto general spending bills at a cost of billions of dollars to American taxpayers. Stonecipher learned everything Welch could teach him about the art of MBA/CEO mismanagement, then resigned from GE when it became clear that he would not be named Welch's successor.

He took over as CEO of McDonnell-Douglas (where he regularly and bitterly criticized the "arrogance" of MD's aircraft engineers' quality- and safety-driven culture impeding his drive to cut costs at all costs), until it was acquired by Boeing (in a coup Wall Street wags referred to as "buying Boeing with Boeing's own money). Elevated to CEO of Boeing, he oversaw the exit of Boeing's Board and C-suite members, filling their positions with MBAs and accountants - and laying off thousands of Boeing's best-paid (i.e. - "most experienced") engineers, and moving the combined company's HQ to suburban Virginia, in order to be closer to the Washington, DC money spigot.

That's what happened to Boeing.

AnOnyxMouseCoward responded:

You are correct that virtually every publicly-traded corporation in the developed world is managed to maximize short-term shareholder return. That's because the curriculum of pretty much every MBA school is predicated on the Chicago School's economic philosophy - which is to say, "on Milton Friedman's philosophy." So their graduates are basically trained to be sociopaths. And they enter a business culture that has spent more than 40 years marinating in that stuff.

That's why virtually all of them believe the myth that they're legally obligated to transfer the maximum possible amount of corporate profits directly into shareholders' pockets, rather than spend any appreciable portion of it on things like research and development, computer security, employee benefits, and the like. MBA schools teach them that those things are "cost centers," so the amount of short-term shareholder return that's diverted to pay for them must be ruthlessly minimized. And the fact that C-suite performance bonuses almost exclusively take the form of massive blocks of discounted stock options means that executives personally profit from focusing on quarter-over-quarter increases in shareholder return.

So, of course, that's exactly what they do.

I strongly agree with your contention that that pervasive managment culture needs to change. But I see little chance that a sufficient number of activist shareholders can be convinced to fight for that - especially given that the legislatures and attorneys general of oil states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have already come out swinging against the emergence of interest on the part of some of the largest wealth management firms in incorporating ESG principles into their investment strategies.

The only long-term solution, however, is for MBA schools - especially the big guys like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford - to stop teaching the sharholder primacy myth to their students, and to turn to a more balanced philosophy of business management.

Sadly, I'm not exactly holding my breath for that to occur ...

AnOnyxMouseCoward misstated:

That is simply not the case.

Milton Friedman and his wife Rose proposed that principle in their book Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, published in 1980. Their book, and the 10-part PBS documentary based on it, were enormously influential in the corporate management sector. Enough so, in fact, that it became the bible of the so-called Chicago School of economics (Friedman was an economics professor at the University of Chicago at the time), and its ideas have so permeated the curricula of business schools ever since, that their graduates have come to believe that the Friedmans' opinion is somehow a legal requirement.

It is not, and it never has been, as courts in the USA, Canada, and the UK have repeatedly ruled over the past 100 years. Unless that obligation is imposed upon the Board of Directors of a particular company by specific language in the corporate charter's mission statement, shareholder primacy is a business school philosophy, not a legal obligation.

Please stop repeating this myth, as if it were gospel. The Michigan State Supreme Court's dicta in Dodge v Ford is not legally-binding precedent, as courts (including SCOTUS) have repeatedly held ever since.

In the end, it's just Milton and Rose Friedman's opinion - and opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes: everybody has one ... and most of them stink.