As someone who consumed organic food for several years I can attest that none of the organic food I ate tasted better than its conventional counterpart.
I suspect that most people who espouse this view have been convinced it tastes better because of the price.
So what was the point in spinning off a foundry into a separate company?
(Same reason any company ever spawns other companies: To create positions for more CXOs and fuck around with the accounting books. AMD isn't doing well, even though I wish it were.)
I know being cynical sounds good "Just more fat cats lining their own pockets, heh", but there are legitimate reasons to restructure companies.
In this case, foundries keep getting more expensive and AMD won't be able to compete with Intel if it keeps manufacturing in house. If it spins them off (while still retaining ~ 30% of the stock in the new company) they can achieve economies of scale by fabbing chips for other companies. This means that AMD will have a better shot at competing since they will no longer be hobbled by archaic process technology.
Series four gave us The Farnsworth Parabox, The Sting, 300 Big Boys and The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings, all of which were awesome.
Also, more importantly, which writers dropped off the show in seasons three and four that you think were funny and sharp? Given the writers credits in Wikipedia suggest that almost all contributors in the first two seasons wrote episodes in three and four I'm not really sure who you're referring to:
Yeah, a truly evil character would have armed the bomb in Megaton, shot Burke, taken the detonation controls and spent the rest of the game shaking residents of the town down for caps.
It's not an attractive way to raise the issue, but it's true: artists should be rewarded for their work. Look at how the studios screwed the Gilligan's Island people, who languished in poverty after the networks ran episodes for decades.
No, they shouldn't. In case you haven't noticed, we have a vast oversupply of artists even at their current low levels of remuneration.
On the other hand, we have a shortage of capital available to produce/support the production of art.
Looking further at your example of the Gilligan's island actors - they didn't finance the show, they didn't screen it, they provided none of the infrastructure. If they'd told the networks to fuck off and tried to make something in their basement they'd have failed utterly. The networks could have found other people to star easily. I have no idea why we should care that readily replaceable actors languish in poverty after they've finished doing the work they were paid for.
Finally, paying artists for work they've long since finished provides little encouragement for them to produce new work (and in fact may discourage them since they can keep food on the table without producing anything new).
These kind of comments always crop up in Yahoo! articles and they're depressingly stupid.
The correct way to stop the "dirty business practices" that you describe is through government regulation. The notion that companies will police themselves for the greater good makes as much sense as securing your home through the honor system.
Please answer this for me:
If a company isn't there to serve its owners, then what exactly is the point of owning a portion of that company?
If you wind up anywhere in management of a company I own stock in I'm selling up ASAP.
Support Mental Health. Or I'll kill you.
