The context of the discussion is that humans evolved in tribal/family groups that needed to be coordinated and organized for survival. So they naturally fell into a hierarchal structure where decisions get made quickly by one leader and everybody gets coordinated. In that sense, any randomly chosen leader is better than none, and in fact most people *want* a leader and really don't want to be one. It would be difficult to settle on a chief if everybody wanted to be the chief, so we evolved into, mostly, a race of hero worshippers and order takers.
But there has to be a mechanism for picking a leader. People tend to pick tall, big-headed, well-spoken, charismatic people (like Phil) to lead them, whereas it's obvious that short, cute, round-faced people (like me) would be the superior choice.
I figured all that out on my second glass of Ron Zacapa 23. Or maybe the third.
I was just about to say that. The biggest retailer on the planet, Wal-Mart, is non-union. The steel plants are mostly gone.
Small businesses are usually run by real people who know and care about the people they work with. Big companies can be run by bean counters who may decide on any Tuesday near the end of the quarter to can 4000 employees because the books will look better.
So another choice the individual worker can make is to work for a small company or a monster one. Lots of people deliberately pick the big one... and they had better not expect a lot of touchy-feeley individual caring if they do.
Yeah, I figured someone like James Arthur would have called me on it if I hadn't mentioned it. :-)
I think that with small businesses there's far greater deviation in what you get (in terms of how much the people running the joint really care about the employees) than in big businesses, but the average is probably a bit higher. I.e., while a big business just can't be as magnanimous as some little guys -- particularly in publicly held companies --, you also don't find the worst of the worst scumbags in big business either.
Or at least I didn't used to think so... with some of the big banking/investment firm scandals, you really have to wonder sometimes.
Hey, since you're a small business, perhaps you'd consider just giving the company to your employees when you're ready to retire? A guy here in Oregon just did that:
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Agreed. For years now I've been a bit incredulous at just how attractive big business is to would-be employees... it's certainly not my first choice.
krw > I was just talking to Phil Hobbs about that krw > recently. He pointed out that bad krw > management is better than no management. krw > At least it gets everybody pulling in the krw > same direction.
JL > Opposite management? =A0It's not good going JL > in the opposite direction as the guy JL > with the purse, either.
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being or acting in accordance with the principles of government analyzed in Machiavelli's The Prince, in which political expediency is placed above morality and the use of craft and deceit to maintain the authority and carry out the policies of a ruler is described.
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I always focused on the part about how a bad ruler who maintains control is better than a weak ruler who subjects his people to the costly horrors of revolution.
All the little companies I worked for went out of business, and once I had to go to State labor board to get my paycheck. Big corporations are more dependable and usually make the payroll. Most small businesses fail.
Do you think that any self respecting mange would get close to Sloman, or his wife? The only thing willing to do that is the Black Plague, which was carried by infected rats. :(
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Anyone wanting to run for any political office in the US should have to
have a DD214, and a honorable discharge.
Hell, I can imagine retiring *well* on 25% consulting workload. In fact if I thought it would last I'd still be "retired", contracting as I was doing two years back. That would be my ideal retirement, AAMOF.
In UK law you can (at least in theory) if it is written in the contact. Or alternatively if they refuse then sue for breach of contract. Usually a bit of horse trading goes on to try and get projects handed over reasonably cleanly to other workers.
The employment contract is open to negotiation on both sides. I have refused some employment contract terms in the past and had alterations accepted by the employer (although that is unusual). I wanted to exclude specific unrelated IP rights. In the UK the employer by default owns the IP rights of everything invented whilst you are employed.
Contract law is dynamite stuff it allowed the guy who wrecked Royal Bank of Scotland (Fred the Shred) to obtain a £650k per year pension for totally destroying a once proud financial institution.
Therein lies the problem. And as I said it was standard practice if someone was going to a competitor that their pass revoked, desk emptied that day and they were escorted off the premises by security.
Anyone worth their salt would have grabbed whatever information they wanted long before announcing their intention to leave. These days with tiny multi-GB memory sticks it is impossible to stop data leakage without locking down PCs to an unacceptable level in most organisations.
You get to sue for breach of contract (and vice versa if fired without notice). My boss didn't work anything like as hard after he handed in his notice, but he still worked better at it than his successor ;-)
It is actually pretty rare to have problems. Most decent professionals continue to work professionally though perhaps not quite so hard after handing in their notice to quit. YMMV
What a strange world you live in. Most people in the UK - except those working for cowboy outfits have a written contract of employment.
I don't understand what I have said here to get a vitriolic personal attack from that senile old duffer with the anal fetish Thompson.
Nobody has ever complained about my documentation - except perhaps to complain that I've given more detail than was absolutely necessary, which I justify by pointing out that keeping documents intelligible after ten or twenty years does require making explicit the thinking behind some of the choices. I can't say I particularly enjoy writing up stuff, but it's part of the job, and I've done more than enough of it know that I'm good at it.
The sort of "attention span" that you might be seen as lacking isn't so much temporal as spatial. You don't seem to have the inclination to get your head around all the aspects of a complex system - either elaborate scientific instruments or complex social questions.
Joerg wants to be able to identify a big single contributor to a countries GDP before he can believe that that country is viable, when
- in fact - countries that depend on a single industry are exceedingly vulnerable to changes in the business or technical environment. Most countries get their income from a wide range of activities, so a 5% contribution to GDP is big, for a single industry .
The fact that Jeorg can't be bothered working out how Greece - almost
- supports itself doesn't make them the hopeless basket case that he claims.
So the owners of the Greek shipping fleet had enough money to bribe a few legislators - US residents shouldn't find that surprising.
Jim - even as an ignorant American - should know better. Jack Kennedy's widow married a large chunk of the Greek shipping industry, and - despite its parochialism - the American press went to the trouble of informing the American public about it at the time. Jim may not have read those newspapers, or he may have forgotten what he was told since then, but he really should know better.
Marx was a non-producer who lived off Engels, and managed to produce a large volume of useful critical work. There are other examples who make it equally clear that your point is entirely fatuous.
What else would I mean?
Most people don't share either your stupidity or your bizarre preconceptions.
Do pay attention - I don't think much of the political thoughts of Marx, and wouldn't recommend them to anybody (except perhaps as a bad example). Marx's thoughts about economics were revolutionary, and still deserve some attention, though I'd no more recommend reading his output as economic textbooks than I'd recommend Darwin's output as biological textbooks.
Not really. Americans ignore the way the rest of the world does things, despite the fact that some ways of running a country are better managed outside the USA. Health care is the the classic example
- US health care cost half as much again per head as the best foreign systems (in France and Germany) while providing no better health care for prosperous employed Americans than the French and German systems provide for everybody, while providng much worse health care for the less well-off part of the US population.
Obama's rather timid attempt to inprove the US health care system is widely objected to as "socialist" as if this was valid objection in itself, which is remarkably stupid, reflecting many years of irrational anti-socialist propaganda in the US media, which does seem to have taken root in the kind of brains that can't do critical thinking (such as yours).
You're being an idiot, as usual. When we design electronics, we first learn the user's technology. Jet engines, eximer lasers, tomographic atom probes, electrical power systems, NMR/MRI, FTMS, ICCD cameras, NIF fusion lasers, particle accelerators, gas pipelines, product weighing machines [1]. It's a load of fun, and it impresses the hell out of a customer when we understand his system at least as well as he does. In a sense, the electronics is the easy part. We also have to understand the customer's business and cultural needs to get and keep the business; that can be a lot of fun too.
Your experience seems to be very narrow, and pretty much powerless, and mostly failures, so you make up things as you'd like them to be. Sorry, Charlie. There's nothing wrong with that, except you get pompous about stuff you know esentially nothing about.
John
[1] Try this: get a good gram scale and buy 50 small bags of potato chips. Note the specified net weight; say 3.5 grams. Weigh the contents. You'll find weights like 3.52, 3.56, 3.54, rarely as much as
3.6. Weigh one chip; it might average, say, 0.2 grams. So how do they manage to come so close when the quantization is so large?
This is the Wild West, kemosabe. Go live in Switzerland and be an accountant if you want an orderly life.
Being senile is like being young or being drunk. It's disinhibiting. Without social constraints or manners, one's fundamental personality emerges. He dislikes me, goodness knows why, and will do anything, including insulting my wife, to offend me, even when it makes no sense. He's a lot like Sloman, who at least doesn't insult my wife.
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