As is what you say. We choose to do that because we live in a society that pressures people to value having jobs over having rights. And there aren't enough jobs to go around because technology has made production so efficient.
Checkbox seems unlikely, but this would be a reasonable way to distinguish between the "home" version of the OS for normies and the "premium" version for power users.
Many shareholders (of medium to large-cap, publicly traded companies) seem to only be interested in short-term gains, not longer term. Some claim to be interested in longer-term profits and business sustainability, but they don't seem to act like it.
The market does not seem to be good at optimizing for long-term outcomes, bluntly.
Could you actually give an example of the short term mentality? I keep hearing it repeated over and over and over but nobody actually points to an example or study or anything.
At the last large corporation I worked at, they got rid of most of the inside embedded device engineers and outsourced design to India and Japan. The reasoning was probably something like we spend $X on engineering staff here, whereas we could spend $Y to outsource development of the same products, where $Y < $X. Whoever made that decision made a fat bonus and left. The time necessary to determine the real value of that decision takes a few years, after that guy was gone. Anyway, most of the outsourcing ended up being a huge waste of money and put one of our flagship products a year behind schedule. The company has since moved embedded development back inside.
Toys 'R' Us was doing fine and making stable profits but the company was run to the ground in an attempt to push online sales for a chance of massive growth.
It's not so much that the market favors "short term" growth. The market favors high-risk high-growth (which usually only works short term and requires an exit) over low-risk low-growth (which is usually fairly stable in the long run).
Part of the problem I think is that big investment companies and institutions (pension funds and asset managers) rebalance their portfolios in ever shorter intervals. The game has sped up dramatically. This means that big investors reevaluate their portfolio composition ever more frequently and thus companies have a shrinking leeway in sacrificing short term gains for long term prospects. A company whose stock is ouperformed by a competitor purely because of short term tricks runs the risk that their company will be downweighted at the next rebalancing time. This then results in further selling pressure on the stock. It's all a feedback loop really. This is further exacerbated by using the same quantitative models across many investment companies, resulting in herd behavior and clustering. There are other considerations for sure, but I see the above as at least part of the problem.
Profits today can be easily invested in another short term profit project tomorrow. Therefore, I say long term should be done by a foundation that has the explicit goal to achieve, rather than a corp whose sole purpose is to make profit.
> rather than a corp whose sole purpose is to make profit
So we've all now universally accepted the Friedman doctrine?
You're aware that the Friedman doctrine isn't held as an inherent truth everywhere and by everyone, right? Not every culture sees corporations as having the sole moral duty of maximising shareholder value with no regard for societal wellbeing.
Actually neither! There is one level more pessimistic than Friedman, which is Greenspan's parting realization. [1] So it's three layers of theft now. Public corps ...
Society's wellbeing < shareholder's value < executive's value
So you get these axemen who show up, extract whatever they can from the corporation, and then walk away from the ruins for the next thief, if anything is left. They're TWO layers removed from society.
Corporations are essentially feudal, and one of the biggest unstated goals is to maintain and signal class power differentials.
You don't do that by including social inferiors in board-level deliberations - no matter how inane, misguided, and ultimately self-destructive those deliberations turn out to be.
Here is one example of a board-level decision that a majority of workers would have said was a very bad idea, but which executives decided to complete anyway.
It's really ridiculously easy to list other examples from corporate history:
If it were actually more valuable then someone would buy the company, fire the noblesse oblige and hire new management.
The reality is that there’s a point of decreasing returns for productivity. If the “happy workers make more money for the company” truly had a positive ROI, then the market would pay it. There’s plenty of capital willing to make long term investments that would take companies private to jack up wages.
> If it were actually more valuable then someone would buy the company, fire the noblesse oblige and hire new management.
Comical. "The Market" is far from perfect - especially in more monopolized industries. Consider the 2008 housing crash for a recent[1] example where "the market" did not behave rationally across a wide swath of professional investors. Add to that the fact that the "someone" in your example is most likely part of the noblesse oblige themselves and will default to respecting the opinion of the board (no matter how wrong) and not the workers.
> If the “happy workers make more money for the company” truly had a positive ROI, then the market would pay it.
Most often, the market behaves like a gradient descent algorithm - seeking slightly more optimal operating conditions without rocking the boat too much. This normally leads to finding local minima, not global ones. The most notable exception is "startups", where the initial conditions of the search may be radically different than a typical big-co - sometimes leading to better results.
Now consider that most medium-to-large companies have been operating for years (maybe decades) on the assumption that cutting costs - including wages - is the best way incrementally optimize profit. Reversing direction would mean going back uphill for a while as the culture, employee attitudes, and recruitment pipeline slowly change in response. How many boards do you think would put up with years of declining profits during the attempt to find the better way?
This doesn't mean that there aren't examples of companies that take this approach even for low-skilled labor[2][3]. Just that it's rare because of conventional wisdom and the corporate politics involved in making it happen.
[1] An even more recent example is Theranos - where companies that should have known better bet big on partnerships with a vaporware medical company against the explicit advice of consultants they had hired to advise them on these matters.
Shareholders don't always act in a rational way, plenty of companies and trillions in shareholder value have been destroyed by stupid short sighted shareholder demands.
> Shareholders don’t act rationally, but the market eventually does.
Citation needed. I hate to bring up 2008 again, but the market first acted irrationally by over-investing in garbage CDOs and then "corrected" in a way that would have tanked the economy without massive public intervention. If that's rational behavior than perhaps we should nominate the next person drunkenly weaving between two lanes for Driver of the Year.
"Rational" does not mean "maximizing profit". Sometimes rational mean throwing a failed experiment in the trash, after a past irrational or poor decision.
Facebook forbids them to learn something about Facebook. It was the phone's fault when they didn't limit what data Facebook pulled from it. Modern ones do just that.
Why not? You just need to have a cursory knowledge of how little elections and security actually matter. We already use computers to manage our finances, social lives, and health. If they get hacked they get hacked. Life goes on.
Fake cakes provide themed decoration, just like the fancy lace curtains or floral centerpieces that are also common at weddings. It's basically the exact same reasoning you gave for knockoff clothes.
I don't see how it makes sense to copy a strategy that loses money when someone else is already following that strategy and going broke due to all the money they're paying you.
The strategy only loses money because they are paying full-retail price for movie tickets.
AMC's A-List (costs $19.99) does not pay $9-$13 per showing a la MoviePass. They pay the same space/personnel costs per seat they always have. Tickets have never been a theater's largest or most desirable source of revenue.
It was my understanding the ticket price basically covered the film licensing cost, the movie theater made basically zero profit of that. They make their profits off concessions. I don’t know if that’s true still or not, but used to be the case.
Any sources for me to read up on? Googling just gave me the BattleChess duck story, some unrelated UX examples using ducks, and info about how the duck hunt "gun" worked.
I've never heard the term before, but I do recall plenty of people playing duck hunt shooting at the dog when the game said they failed. Although, he kinda earned a laser zapping by laughing at your failures, right?
"An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. "
Congress can vote to get rid of the CIA, or stop them from spying. The CIA exists because of an act of Congress and at the pleasure of Congress, which consists of elected representatives .
You just gave a non-answer to try to avoid answering it. Public agencies such as the CIA are politically armoured against any attempt to get rid of it. These organizations aren't accountable nor are they at the service of the US congress.
The CIA was created by an act of congress, and can be disbanded by an act of congress. That is ultimate accountability. Any other level of accountability is at the will of congress. These are basic facts of how the government works.
Maybe we'll know 50 years after everyone involved is dead. As your own article points out, the senators certainly had the power to hold the CIA accountable. The fact that they did not do so despite making angry noises in public can only be properly responded to with the thinking face emoji.
Exactly. Sure you don't directly elect them but they still face public scrutiny because nobody wants to be the swamp that some senator makes campaign promises to drain. Every few years (not nearly often enough IMO) an agency learns that lesson the hard way.
