Comments on: Hey look – it’s the Goodyear blimp!

By: perianwyr

perianwyr — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:31:02 +0000

Gold is, after all, the metal with the broadest shoulders.

By: DirkVA

DirkVA — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:03:39 +0000

‘Overcome by rage, the neighbor could only manage to growl, “Roosevelt!”’

You call this ‘craziness.’

Some of my elderly relatives used to do exactly the same thing. But it was not their basements that had been flooded. It was solidly Republican East-Tennessee towns that Roosevelt eliminated via the water caused by dams for his TVA project. Some died, literally, of broken hearts. Some merely found a new curse word.

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:37:51 +0000

pietr: I say old bean, when was the last time a corporation mugged you? Hah, you are a Canadian! No USian who has ever dealt with one of our for-profit hospitals or HMOs could ask a crazy question like that.

By: pietr

pietr — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:49:36 +0000

I say old bean, when was the last time a corporation mugged you?
Okay, so I would agree the laws are insane when they allow a corporatoin to usurp someone elses property, such as when exploring for oil, but did anybody really force you to go into QuickyMart and then force you to buy things?
As for saying ‘we’, why allow yourself to be stereotyped so easily?
What an admission.

By: Bruce Baugh

Bruce Baugh — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:42:34 +0000

Or perhaps we don’t hate corporations as such at all, but regard them as enjoying inappropriate privileges under the law and framed by social and legal expectations that make it too easy to do stupidly harmful stuff and insufficiently reward either competence or excellence. Tell me, do you question whether the victims of muggings and assaults might really just be jealous of their assailants’ superior wealth and strength?

By: pietr

pietr — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:57:17 +0000

Actually everything I said about corporations applies equally well to the left/’liberal’ establishment, or wanna-be establishment.
Perhaps they hate the corporations so much because they see in them political organs with a greater degree of legitimacy than they can lay claim to themselves.

By: Crooked Timber » » The Drop of A Hat

Crooked Timber » » The Drop of A Hat — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:01:50 +0000

[...] Yousefzadeh isn’t taking the internet mockery of his anti-FDR agitation [...]

By: Alan Bostick

Alan Bostick — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:39:46 +0000

Redstate is off his rocker. Were I to choose Powerball tickets, in the uncommon event that the Powerball lottery was offering an overlay, I would carefully choose my numbers to all be greater than 12, so as to significantly reduce the likelihood that I would be sharing the prize with someone else. Since each number combination is equally likely, but more people pick number combinations that include dates (like birthdates and anniversaries), number combinations that don’t include dates result in a higher expectation value (EV) per ticket than those that do include dates.

By: pietr

pietr — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:33:32 +0000

Corporate cultures are inherited from those who dominate the corporation at any one time; as people leave, the culture can change, but only assuming that the incumbents are of sufficient stature that they can wilfully diverge from the established practises without losing their jobs.

They usually can’t.
So they become contractors.

It takes an emergency, such as impending bankruptcy, to demolish the monolithic bigotry which can be entrenched; and even then, in some big, old corporations, such as Ford, the warnings are ignored once the initial crisis has been reached.

By: abb1

abb1 — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:57:16 +0000

…radically different internal cultures…

Sure, but Google and Halliburton live in different environments. Like cockroach and shrimp. They are different in that sense. But I’m sure Google is not that different from, say, Adobe or Microsoft circa 1980s.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:30:07 +0000

There’s no such thing as ‘corporate culture’

Balls. They can have radically different internal cultures. (Bell Labs vs Provident Financial? Google and Halliburton?)

By: mds

mds — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:56:05 +0000

I didn’t think that there were any Gold Bugs outside the editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal.

Returning to the gold standard is actually part of the official platform of the Texas Republican Party. Not that this should be particularly surprising. In fact, it’s one of the sanest parts of the document.

By: abb1

abb1 — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:55:17 +0000

Libertarian economics might work if you had a basically sane corporate culture, with a lot of decision-making power in the hands of people who understood that their social position can become fragile…

There’s no such thing as ‘corporate culture’, corporations are primitive organisms. To them it’s a simple ‘survival of the fittest’ game. If a corporation isn’t optimizing its short-term profits, then in a short time it will be killed and devoured by those who are optimizing their short-term profits.

What you could do is to change, optimize (and enforce) the rules of the game the corporations are playing, until you’re satisfied with typical corporate behavior induced by these rules.

Unfortunately it’s too late now: corporations already control those who make and enforce the rules.

By: Bruce Baugh

Bruce Baugh — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:23:12 +0000

It’s this kind of historical obsession that played a key part in my giving up on libertarianism, actually, along with facing up to the realities of health care. Libertarian economics might work if you had a basically sane corporate culture, with a lot of decision-making power in the hands of people who understood that their social position can become fragile, that optimizing short-term and local profits isn’t an unlimited good, that cooperation with the rest of the society helps promote long-term opportunity for business too, that gratuitous social stratification feeds into unrest that ends up hurting the business environment, and so on. Say, business as conducted by people like Jim Henley and Neel Krishnaswami. :)

Unfortunately, far too much corporate power is in the hands of people who genuinely do feel personal hurt and anger over things that FDR and Theodore Roosevelt did, and who really have been planning their political and social strategy to roll back the New Deal and the Square Deal for decades. These are the people who subsidize the individuals and groups like Frum who will tell them that a scared and helpless public is good for liberty and morality. The lesson they’ve taken away from a century of public response to the excesses of their class is that they need slicker PR and more jackboots. The lesson for the rest of us has to be not so much “oh no, not again” as “always and ever”.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:44:17 +0000

Apparently price control “has never worked”, so forget all you ever read about the second world war.