This concept was foisted upon the world by former GE CEO Jack Welsh. It has ruined one company after another and is an example of the cure being worse than the disease. Watch out when your company hires in HR people from places like GE, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, AT&T, etc.. They will try to get a promotion by implementing a slightly different version of this which will have about the same results.

  Utilities don't have enough staff to handle severe-storm outages - the expense would send rates soaring - and so they rely on out-of-state utilities to send help ..."

So the CEO says it's a choice between soaring rates and prolonged outages. These outages cost something too. If your business depends on electrical power, you're shut down. We're liable to end up with backup generators everywhere.

They used to have adequate numbers of linemen. But ever since the waves of mergers and the CEOs began lining their pockets, they cut way back on the staff.

So now, widespread T storms knock out power for a week. I shudder to think of how long power would be out now after a cat 3 hurricane or a widespread ice storm. It could be weeks.

  Then they lost their way, management started all sorts of retarded internal competition games ...

Bad management is why most of the high paying jobs have disappeared over the last several decades, due either to incompetence, crookedness or a combination of the two. Nokia is just the latest in a long line of mismanaged companies going belly up.

Amen. It's either buy or do without.

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?
Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

He's just a sophisticated kleptomaniac.

There are probably a good number of plagiarized papers out there that have launched careers. No doubt some of their authors have a pucker factor worrying that somebody with too much time on their hands will examine their paper.

  I salute IBM in cutting jobs ...

I salute them too, but in a different way.

This is IBM's new business model. They make the books look good by laying people off. Go for it! At the rate IBM is shrinking, they'll be gone soon enough and the world will be shed of them.

Let's test that the way they did long ago. The ones who are reporting the seafood to be safe should be required to eat it.

We'll watch them for a few months to see whether they become ill.

what will they want later?

If they are acting like this now, what will they be like later?

The house doesn't like to lose.

This is yet another attempt to talk up engineering careers. There ain't many young people buying it because they see what it takes and what they will make. They've been watching large companies laying off engineers by the tens of thousands in mid-career. They know wages have been stagnant for the past 2 decades. They're doing a cost benefit analysis and concluding that there is too much stick and not enough carrot.

Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...

That's because most of the work is in other countries.

Ah, yes. Perhaps if we redesign landfills to harvest natural gas from then they'll be taken over by Exxon, BP, et al.

"When shit becomes gold, the poor will have no assholes."
  -- an unknown but astute source

"I used to be a heroin addict, Now I'm a methadone addict."

Yep. Methadone has all the addictive qualities without all the pleasing euphoria. A recent post on /. says it's killing people, both the use of methadone and withdrawal from it.

There's no telling what side effects this vaccine will have, assuming it works as intended.

There ain't very many pre-1983 pennies in circulation because collectors and metal investors cull them. Those are worth nearly 3 cents each. Some call copper the poor man's silver. It will be interesting to see whether the zinc pennies will be culled as zinc goes above $1/lb. What would they make the new ones out of? plastic?