If MBAs really aren't taught "bad management skills," what is it that corrupts them and causes the disastrous short term thinking epidemic in companies these days?

It's not that the MBA training is negative, it's just not enough to be useful on day 1. So the process goes like this:

The guy who hires him is looking to fill a role, and he knows it's not going to happen without a learning curve, so he can never find an exact match to the job.

So you can hire someone who wants twice what you want to pay and doesn't have the exact skillset you need, or you can hire someone out of college who wants 60% of what you're willing to pay and, after some on-the-job training will have the skillset you need. So you take the cheaper one.

And it turns out he's an idiot. But by the time you find that out he's been working there for a year, and he's not so bad that you need him fired right now, and bringing someone else up to speed is going to take a year, so you make do. And 10 years later you realize you're still just "making do", so you put out an ad and replace him.

Rinse / repeat.

There wasn't a single person in Congress, Democrat or Republican, who actually attempted to avert the shutdown.

That's because it's gotten too easy, with color coded, keyed cables of with widely varying connector shapes.

I remember when everything was unkeyed, unmarked ribbon cables, both inside and out, as far as the eye could see. And you had to plug unkeyed ICs by hand into their sockets.

Yes it does. There is far more access to dangerous materials and dangerous people online than there is in person. While there's a slight advantage in a greater pool of potential victims to hide in the crowd of, the danger in the ability of predators of any stripe (not just sexual) to reach your kids from anywhere in the country or even the world. There's not as much ability for kids to tell what a "bad neighborhood" is online as in real life.

There's also less public shame for bad behavior and a greater tendency for people to act in herds of like-minded individuals. (See, e.g. the resurgence of white supremacist groups in the modern day or "thinspiration" sites.) You don't have to encounter people who disagree with you, unless you want to -- even if just to troll them. Witness comments section of any news or politics site.

The harassment would have been completely different in tone and scale. Hiding behind a computer is quite different from doing something where witnesses who might disapprove would be present to act as a check or the much simpler one of being within arms reach. Witness Xbox Live, the domain of bullies who would be the bullied anywhere else.

Tools matter. There's a difference between two hotheaded boys getting in a fist fight and two armed hotheaded boys getting into a fight. The same is true of cyberbullying v. in-person bullying. People act differently in different environments, and online is more (and less) dangerous for certain types of behavior.

Same applies for the highways you drive on, but people get upset at toll booths for some reason.

Can't you just pick another doctor, or do you live in a small town or have a restrictive policy?

GP never said anything about a hospital. He said he went to a doctor, and he was dissatisfied with being prescribed useless antibiotics. He did not say that that was his end goal.

Did you even read the post your replied to?

Define recent years, for one thing.

Pretty much everything internet has been pioneered in America: ecommerce, social media, search engines, online maps, instant messaging, web video, blogs, BitTorrent and most other P2P services, Tor, etc. There may be a few earlier versions of these ideas that you can point to (e.g. Minitel), but the versions the world uses today are all defined by American companies.

There's a lot of other computer innovation in America too. The top CPU & GPU makers are all American companies. So are the top OS manufacturers. So are the top database vendors, the most of top networking hardware companies, and all the top cloud computing services. Behind the scenes, we have many companies that are world leaders in supply-chain automation like Amazon and Wall-mart.

Those are just my areas of knowledge. We also have a successful aerospace and pharmaceutical sector, so I suspect a lot of innovation there too. We've had a lot of innovation in energy too, but that technology is pretty much global at this point.

Ah, it's a speech from him. No, I'll trust a transcript. Or just a date & location, and I can look it up myself.

(Not that I'd be all that surprised if Obama broke yet another campaign promise, but I just don't think that one jived with the others I remembered on the issue of taxes.)

You're partially right. The jobs will happen somewhere, which is why the notion that tax avoidance "creates jobs" is utter BS. All it does is rob the American people of the revenue to pay for the services that Apple benefits from as an American company. That's the broken window -- higher debt and costs eventually shifted from the investor class to the working class and a more lawless market.

That's not a cost the Irish are paying. In fact, they're reaping the benefits of putting the stick to America, but that cost is being paid somewhere, and rent-seeking behavior weakens the ability of nations to address important causes like labor conditions, a clean environment, and trust in the financial sector by allowing the worst actors to simply demand lower and lower standards in exchange for putting the jobs that are going to happen anyway right there. The end result is a harsher, more dangerous world with greater class divisions, more unrest, and less trustworthy markets.

Arresting? Putting a 12 year old in FUCKING PRISON? Have you all lost your goddamned minds??? You have, haven't you?

You just listed two technologies that used to do this exact thing before people got tired of them and moved onto the next big thing. Someday, Facebook will be the same for all of you.

I don't watch videos at work nor read Slashdot at home (most of the time). Got a text link for whatever point you were making?

Plus I'm not fond of waiting around and listening for minutes until someone gets to an important point that I could have reached in mere seconds of reading.

You know, if you want to just automatically churn out metal gun parts, you could do it with a CNC mill for a fraction of the cost. It's not like automated metalworking is a new thing. The plastic gun was mostly a stunt -- a dangerous one at that.

Or if you were willing to put in the time and elbow grease yourself, you could mill your own parts by hand for a fraction of that with power tools bought from Home Depot. It's not like there isn't a wealth of material at your fingertips on the internet from a devoted community of paranoid "gotta be able to make this myself once the gubbermint takes mah gun away" people to get you started. As a bonus, many of these people are smart and meticulous (despite my teasing), and it's all legal with the right licenses, so the material's more trustworthy than your average Anarchists's Cookbook nonsense.

And if you really don't care about having a polished, reusable model to show off, zip guns can be made with entirely off the shelf parts found in your local tool store too.

And then once they move to the next lowest rung on the race to the bottom, what -- are they gonna set up robots there or something?

I tend to find that if the only thing someone can offer in defense of a policy is that it's "job creating," then they damn it with faint praise. Many extremely negative behaviors "create jobs." Pimps create jobs. Drug lords create jobs. People who dump toxic waste create all kinds of jobs in the cleanup. Heck, bureaucratic redtape creates jobs to deal with it all!

Saying something "creates jobs" is nothing more than a prettier version of the broken window fallacy.