[mattyb]

Well, in these times of financial / economic / banking crises, I am surely not alone in receiving the wise words from management.

Our latest rallying cry is : Better, Faster, Cheaper.

Then the guy left the meeting and got into his company car - a Merc E320.

If I could easily find another job, I'd be off after only 9 months in the job. Shower of twats.

[Sayf-Allah]

This is happening everywhere. The management is trying to keep its investors happy (keeping profits up) so they use the current situation as a way to lower costs.

Many companies around here are firing people but "offering" them a 10% reduction in salaries. The managers of these same companies still drive their Porches and Range Rovers though.

Nobody cares about the middle class anymore it seems. Probably because the middle class is too busy working their ass off providing for the household so they don't have time to protest against all this.

[ghporter]

Obviously, this particular "management" is part of the problem. "Attract talented managers with strong compensation packages" is only part of the way to go. You also have to "hold them strongly accountable for performance." That Merc should be the carrot dangling at the end of a very big stick. But boards of directors are often too clueless to think about that. So we wind up paying the price, and the mindless jerks that caused this world-wide debacle sip expensive wine and munch caviar. There's something anti-Darwinian at work here...

[lexapro]

Capitalism. Now you all understand why it is evil.

[The Godfather]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

Well, in these times of financial / economic / banking crises, I am surely not alone in receiving the wise words from management.

Our latest rallying cry is : Better, Faster, Cheaper.

Then the guy left the meeting and got into his company car - a Merc E320.

If I could easily find another job, I'd be off after only 9 months in the job. Shower of twats.

Have you tried complaining to your boss's boss?

[Railroader]

When I worked for GM, we had quarterly safety reviews and if there were no "recordable" injuries (no lost work days), then we had a small 2 hour party and received GM swag like coffee cups, t-shirts, or other trinkets. One year the management told us they were tightening the budget and had a one hour party with no gifts. Management's bonus from corporate went from $5k for front-line supervisors to $7.5k, and the plant manager went from $100k to $150k per quarter. Quarter.

Originally Posted by lexapro 

Capitalism. Now you all understand why it is evil.

It is the lesser of two weevils.

[Eug]

At my workplace, they kept the workers, and fired some of upper management.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Railroader 

and the plant manager went from $100k to $150k per quarter. Quarter.

WTF ?

No wonder GM is in financial trouble. That's just reckless.

-t

[Railroader]

I jumped ship at the right time. The workers were making sacrifices, but management wasn't.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Railroader 

I jumped ship at the right time. The workers were making sacrifices, but management wasn't.

Unfortunately, that seems to be rather universal.

-t

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by lexapro 

Capitalism. Now you all understand why it is evil.

That's wrong. Capitalism by itself is not evil. But people who call themselves capitalists but are actually "pillage then burn" idiots have given capitalism a very bad name. It's not intelligent to set up a business just to run it into the ground, and unless you have a board of directors with walnuts for brains you don't go very far with such an endeavor. Please note that recently there have been a LOT of directors with walnuts for brains, putting "investor return" before "maintaining our investments and turning out a good product that keeps us in business." THAT is what capitalism is, not "let's screw everything up and then bail just before the bottom drops out." That is the definition of "robber baron" in the 21st century. It took a lot of doing to fix the robber baron era at the turn of the 20th century, and I think we're in store for another round of "throw the idiots out".

[mattyb]

I agree with Glenn. Capitalism isn't the cause of the present situation. Greed, short term greed is. People and companies that think longer than three months or six months or even one year tend to be more successful than those that think in short term goals. Just look at Warren Buffett. Look at some of the companies that he owns. What seems to have been a trend over the past 10 years is that senior management have not suffered from their short term business plans : fire a CEO, COO etc and they walk away with millions. It happened during the dot-com folly as well.

I read some quotes from the head car honchos meeting the Senate asking for money, apparently they all went to DC in corporate jets. Its this sort of behaviour that shows that senior management don't have a f**king clue about the man in the street. That they don't want to 'eat their own dogfood' as it were. Politicians are the same.

I had the misfortune of working for a large Swedish company for over 6 years. I wanted two wall calenders one year - yes one was for home. Sorry, budget problems, only one calender per person. A few months later 14 DBAs from Sweden went to Oracle Open World, San Fran IIRC. They stayed for both of the weekends either side of Open World. I thought that working for a smaller company might be the ticket, but management are all the same : goto a decent school/university/college, straight into management, play some golf, make stupid proclamations using latest buzz-words, get company car, etc etc.

When the economy starts to look better (I'm hoping 18 to 24 months) then I'm going to do contract work, projects of a few months, maybe try and get some income coming in from other stuff as well. At least then I'll only have myself to blame for bad management decisions.

[lexapro]

No. This is real, actual capitalism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils capitalism creates.

[mattyb]

No. This is real, actual socialism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils socialism creates.
No. This is real, actual fascism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils fascism creates.
No. This is real, actual communism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils communism creates.

And on, and on, and on.

[lexapro]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

No. This is real, actual socialism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils socialism creates.
No. This is real, actual fascism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils fascism creates.
No. This is real, actual communism. It's evil, it's wrong. Look at the horrors and evils communism creates.

And on, and on, and on.

Please make sense.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by lexapro 

Please make sense.

None of the ideas you or mattyb mentioned are in and of themselves evil. Nor for that matter are they inherently good. It's what people do with them. Some people are good, others are evil. The vast majority seem to be "easily led," which is another problem. But in theory, any of the Utopian Movement ideas could have been wonderful, yet the only one anyone actually did anything with on a grand scale was Marxism, and by his death, Marx said that he
himself wasn't a "Marxist." Communism is the label the Bolsheviks used, but they didn't really use the ideas of Communism, and still they managed to enforce a truly evil and horrendous state upon what was in essence a peasant society. The Communist revolution in China did basically the same thing, replacing a dysfunctional imperial bureaucracy with a Maoist one, and again it was enforced evil.

Was Carnegie himself good or evil? He was one of the most successful capitalists ever, yet he decided that his meteoric rise was at the cost of human lives and dignity, and to repent he established a number of extremely good philanthropic organizations that are doing good to this day. It was NOT a government, not a set of rules, and not any other outside force that changed Carnegie. It was he himself.

Good and evil are properties of people, not economic systems.

Finally, if you can show me how to motivate people to do their very best, every day, year after year, out of pure altruism, I'd like you to try. This seems to be one of the major philosophical problems of all time. If you know that you'll be rewarded (however these rewards are given) exactly the same as someone else who does just enough gets you by, why try harder? In capitalism, you try harder because you can earn greater rewards if you produce something that people want more than what others produce. At its heart, that is what capitalism is really about. On the other hand, socialism depends on 100% altruism, from 100% of the populace, 100% of the time. This is, as if it weren't obvious, impossible. Humans are flawed, frail creatures who are as likely as not to take a self-serving path if it's available. If you eliminate that potential path, you have changed your socialist system into something that goes beyond what even Stalin could manage. Evil is in men's hearts, not in economic systems.

[mattyb]

Mr. Glenn Porter, there's a phone call from President Elect Obama for you.

Or at least there should be.