In the area I'm most familiar with, the really successful ones,
e.g.Microsoft, Oracle, and Computer Associates.

On Nov 1, 10:41 am, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Really?  I've worked for one of them and they weren't all that
psychopathic when they laid me off.  In fact, they were rather nice
about it.

With all 3, I guess your definition of "psychopathic" has a
significantly lower threshold than mine ;-)

I was generally in favor of enforced divestment in the case of
Microsoft's monopoly investigation some years back.  But even that
would have been difficult to carry off because of the inherent network
effects in the Office/Windoze stacks.

On Nov 1, 10:11 am, David Johnston <da...@block.net> wrote:

My point exactly.  You need a triptych of powers.  The voters, the
companies, the government.  The voters' choices should not be hindered
by lobbyist influence and money.  And the government should have no
vested interests in any company, unions, and especially industry, that
would color their enforcement of regulations deemed to be of obvious
public interest.  The companies should be free to make money, as long
as they did not break the law, but they should not be allowed to
influence the government.

This, I think, is more of a call to governmental reform than removing
corporations.  In Canada, Stephen Harper originally wanted to disallow
political contributions by unions and corporations.  Sadly, that has
dropped out of the party platform.

Have you ever tried to compete with either of the first two or been
acquired by the third?

Still a far cry from the average malevolent company depicted in SF...

- W. Citoan
--
This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about
who killed who.
-- Monty Python

On Nov 1, 11:21 am, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Been acquired, and laid off later, by one of them, yes.

The first two compete against each other in certain markets so
presumably they are in a competitive market on those segments.

Psychopathic in my book means knowingly causing actual direct harm to
individuals.  Not "mere" commercial market dysfunction as in M$'s case
a few years back.  That is a cause for regulation because of market
failure, but it is not Union Carbide level behavior.

When I'll see an SF scenario attacking a company for causing market
failure, I'll read it with interest, regardless of which political
viewpoint it is written from.  But how often do you see that in SF?
Or any literature for that matter?  Boring it would be, tied as it
would be to the dismal science.

In article <e5552966-7714-4e15-b900-f017a2e5a...@e4g2000prn.googlegroups.com>,
DouhetSukd <douhets...@gmail.com> said:

Why do you believe that it is "especially" likely in those cases,
compared to non-government-run companies?  (See: every U.S.
government regulator who didn't do much of anything to regulate the
financial industry recently.)

I thought I subsumed that in "very laissez-faire governments."
What's written on paper is irrelevant if the government doesn't
feel like forcing the relevant regulators to enforce it (or, in
fact, actively discourage such enforcement because they hate hate
hate the whole idea of government interference in the Sacred Free
Market).

Ah, but would there have _been_ a scandal if they'd killed the right
people at the right time?

And we're back top the problem of having a government that has both
the strength and the desire to perform such enforcement.

In the U.S., there are usually better ways to make money; see "and
when there isn't a greater profit to be made by playing nice and
just renting government regulators and legislators."  (And also by
"Break the laws, pay piddling little fines when caught, repeat.")

[...]

That paragraph appears to start at "The U.S. has a strong regulatory
structure in place" but be at "The U.S. doesn't have a strong
regulatory structure in place" by the end.

-- wds

In article <713781c0-3300-44b9-9946-8a22a5eb0...@j9g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
DouhetSukd <douhets...@gmail.com> said:

You're complaining about what you find in fiction stories when your
entire philosophy on the subject is all built on "should" rather
than what is?

-- wds

In article <e5552966-7714-4e15-b900-f017a2e5a...@e4g2000prn.googlegroups.com>,
DouhetSukd <douhets...@gmail.com> said:

Wait a minute.  I said sociopathic, you said psychopathic.

My definitions:

Sociopathic: coldly and rationally does what one considers necessary
to one's own advancement and profit.

Psychopathic: like sociopathic but also at least ten percent
deranged.  Very poor impulse control, bad at thinking fully about
likely consequences of one's actions, also bad at understanding
people and interpreting their actions.  "I didn't like the way he
was looking at me, so I stuck him."

-- wds

In article <proto-6FDD39.11415601112...@news.panix.com>,
Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> said:

You mean "CSI Miami."  YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!

-- wds

        Horatio Caine is cool enough so that physics and logic will follow HIS
lead.

--
                      Sea Wasp
                        /^\
                        ;;;    
      Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com

On Nov 1, 3:48 pm, wdst...@panix.com (William December Starr) wrote:

(Sheepish)  You are entirely correct, sir.  Sloppy choice of words on
my part, I meant sociopathic.

Re. the rest.

I think we can safely agree to disagree.  I don't entirely disagree
with you either - effective regulation is one of the prime
justifications for governments.

But my point is mostly that, the stereotypical _sociopathic_
corporation behavior in SF might sell well to most of its audience.
It remains an entirely unsatisfactory set of cardboard characters for
me.

I will leave you with one thought re. regulations.  Be careful what
you wish for.  Ten years ago, most people would have agreed with the
statement that "it sucks that banks don't loan money to poor people".
Now all they can do is complain how banks should have been regulated
not to give mortgages to poor customers.

Bankers, borrowers and yes, bank shareholders have all had their part
to play in this charade.  The next crisis will be different and,
unless people understand that easy money is risky money no matter what
the spreadsheets say, they will get bitten again because we will be
regulating the last crisis.

That is, not to write mortgages to people who won't be able to make
the payments on them, and then use accounting hocus-pocus to make the
resulting crap look valuable.  I don't think that ten years ago or at
any other time people were clamoring for more fraud.

On Sun, 1 Nov 2009 21:17:52 -0800 (PST), DouhetSukd

That's bunk.  What they should have been regulated not to do, was
offer floating mortgages.  They were a recipe for default.  

On the other hand, we are talking about leaving control with the company
directors who agreed to this - the same people who, after receiving huge
sums of taxpayers' money to bail them out, paid a large part of it to
themselves as bonuses, presumably for making such poor decisions.

--

Rob Bannister

They agreed to this under threat by regulators.

The regulators enabled badly run banks, in particular
Washington Mutual, to take over well run banks, thereby
punishing fiscally correct lending, rewarding
politically correct lending, and getting rid of
dangerously competent bankers.  Bankers lost their jobs
for their refusal to run their banks into the ground.

Further, who lost the most money?  Whose is the biggest
bailout:

Fannie and Freddy, government created corporations whose
executives are appointed by congress, were the biggest
losers, and the next in line is Washington Mutual, a
tiny bank swollen to gigantic size by the regulators
using it to mop up uncooperative bankers.

On Nov 1, 9:37 pm, David Johnston <da...@block.net> wrote:

Certainly a common opinion and quite true at that.

Consider this though:  Europe (except for Germany) and Canada both
have also had very large increases in the price of houses over the
last 8-9 years.  Much higher increases in fact than the US, at a
national level, in some countries (no, not just Ireland and Spain).
This happened despite the absence of the US exotic loan menagerie you
cite.

Take a look around - economics and civilization strangely enough do
not entirely end at the US borders .  I know, I know, the French
struggle with that concept as well, which is why you dislike each
other.

When something goes up that much in price, it looks mighty bubbly to
me.

Time will tell what buying what could turn out to be highly overpriced
houses will mean to the middle class families who have done so.

If it turns out to be millstones around their necks, there will again
be calls to regulate.  That and funneling prudent taxpayer money at
other imprudent taxpayers' debts.

But regulate what, exactly?

Excessive optimism by the buyers?  I don't mind regulation if there is
a compelling logic behind the regulation.  In the case of floating
loans, yes, I would agree to severely limiting them - they serve
little purpose and can be disastrous.

But they are only part of the picture - basically we went on a
planetary house buying binge after the dot com crash.  That's hard to
control.  Except that the interest rates were probably kept too low
too long in order to avoid any recessionary pain in 2000-2001.  Which
was excessive government intervention.

Oh, and I definitely would not mind regulating executive bonuses.
Giving the stockholders better rights to veto remuneration plans would
be a start, though stockholders typically don't do much in practice.
5-10 M$ per year ought to be enough for almost any _employee_, boss or
not.

Anyway, we are still NOT at SF-level evil corporations in all
this :-)  Chaotic Neutral, at best.

In article <1a1ef0c1-90ee-44de-9184-ba0f350ff...@j9g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
DouhetSukd <douhets...@gmail.com> said:

Not really.  That's _one_ component of the complaints of people who
(1) have followed the details of the current crisis and (2) aren't
liars trying to spread the lie that the whole thing was caused by
banks having to lend to poor people.

But mostly bankers.  That's why it makes so much sense for Barack
Obama to put bankers and bankers' servants in charge of trying to
get us out of the mess. </sarcasm>

_Which_ people, and risky to whom?  Very few of the people who
engineered the mess are in danger of starvation or homelessness
today.

-- wds

Many are far less rich than they once were, and seem to think that
they deserve sympathy for that.

On Nov 2, 9:03 pm, DouhetSukd <douhets...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just fix things so that people who have real jobs making real things
of value are not affected by the vagaries of the stock market. It
might crash, but the government will take action to ensure that a
stock market crash only affects people who play the stock market -
zero layoffs in the auto factories or the steel mills, zero reduction
in demand for the products of the nation's farms, and so on and so
forth.

Of course, there will be some transitions due to technical
advancement; that, unlike stock market speculation, is genuinely
beneficial, but in such cases, the government will attempt to smooth
the transition so that those affected aren't losing their union
seniority or working at lower pay.

John Savard

On 3 Nov 2009 03:35:46 -0500, wdst...@panix.com (William December

If the crisis was caused by something other than political lending,
how come the largest losses are in Fannie, Freddy, and the FHA - the
organizations whose lending was most directly regulatory and
political, and the biggest banking disaster after that lot was
Washington Mutual, the most politically correct and politically active
of the banks?

I'm sure you are correct with regard to what they do in "our" countries,
but every now and then word escapes about goings on in remote, poorer
regions.

There seems little doubt that people really are killed just to get them
out of a logging, mining or other lucrative site - whether it is done
directly by western corporations is another matter, of course; it may be
a question of overzealous underlings following the "Will no one rid me
of this troublesome priest?" syndrome. There are a lot of things that
happen in Papua-New Guinea or the Congo, for example, that never make
our headlines - yesterday, I heard of people being beaten to death in
the Amazon basin to make room for soy bean production.
--

Rob Bannister

I was reading an article in my local paper about yet another business
leader being paid a huge bonus, apparently for losing money. The article
suggested she deserved this because she was taking large risks - I
nearly fell on the floor laughing: people get paid enormous sums for
gambling with other people's money? If it were their own money, I might
be able to see the point.

--

Rob Bannister