Here’s some more stuff that piqued my interest over the past week. While I find most comments on the internet to be extremely immature, the Slashdot moderation system really makes the good comments float to the top, producing a lot of good insight. I have to say that whoever came up with the Slashdot moderation system had a real stroke of genius.
Executive Compensation
Slashdot recently covered a story of a Sun employee commenting on the golden parachutes received by executives as their failing company was acquired by Oracle. Debates ensued in the story comments as to whether or not greed and apathy drives executives to place little effort into keeping their businesses afloat, completely disregarding the interests of employees and even shareholders. It reminds me of this Ambrose Bierce quote which I remember being narrated by Leonard Nimoy in Civilization IV:
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
One of the commenters of the story gave a blunt analogy:
To make it easier to understand and to make a more basic explanation, let’s replace “money” with “food”. Let’s say that the executive in charge of Sun has a machine that makes food for thousands of people. He runs the machine so poorly that it breaks down, and thousands of people no longer have access to the food it provides. In the process of breaking the machine, he manages to engineer it so that the very last time he runs the machine, it makes enough food to feed him, his family and his friends’ families for a couple hundred years if they manage the food he created properly.
It sure seems that executives certainly have the opportunity to obtain massive individual profit with little responsibility. Hopefully, for each story like this, there are hundreds of executives that run their companies well and think about their employees when making decisions.
Show me your papers…
In another Slashdot story, users commented on the heavy-handedness of Verizon blocking internet access to a popular website. Verizon alleged that a denial of service attack originated from the domain of the blocked site, which prompted comments that such attacks could be construed as terrorism and must be thwarted by corporations and governments. While I can’t really argue against the actions of Verizon or governmental involvement in stopping DDoS attacks, one commenter posted the following in response to increased governmental involvement on the internet:
When I was a kid it was popular to point to various things in the USSR like the inability to travel freely without “showing your papers” as evidence of totalitarian oppression. Here in 2010 “showing your papers” is as American as apple pie!
Oddly, I agree with the concept of this statement but not necessarily in the context of the internet. Air travel comes readily to mind. Nothing screams “show me your papers” more than flying. International travel is even worse, with arriving travelers powerless to stop searches of their computers and other electronic devices. What was once fun is now excruciating now that I’ve got to remove my shoes, take half of my stuff out of suitcases and into plastic bins, shuffle through metal detectors, and fumble for my ticket and ID. It really dampens my enthusiasm about going to Sweden in April.
Lowering the bar in Virginia schools
Virginia legislators have been desperate to get more Virginians into their public universities, even at the expense of revenue and quality of the student body. In the article, one legislator commented that he knew of several students with 4.0 GPAs that were denied entry to Virginia public universities. Well, when you loosen the grading scales in primary and secondary schools, there are going to be more students with higher GPAs.
I find it amusing that at one end, Virginia Beach students are whining that the grading scales are too strict and prevent them from gaining admittance to college. At the other end are complaints that too many 4.0 students are not admitted to Virginia colleges. Instead of high school students working harder to get into school or doing something that sets themselves apart from other 4.0 students, the prevailing wisdom is to just lower the bar. Fortunately, it appears as though the attempts to force 75 percent in-state enrollment is halted for now.
Those condescending liberals…
A piece written by a UVA politics professor argues that liberals are much more condescending than their conservative counterparts:
American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.
From postings on the internet, musings from friends, and from stuff I’ve heard around my college campus, I agree that liberals seem to be increasingly intolerant of any dissenting opinions. Everyone just drinks the Kool-Aid and can’t reason independently of news columnists or political party leaders. Nobody tries to understand all sides of an argument and understand the reasoning of the opposition.
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