They sold them off partly because they had been poorly built and maintained. They were essentially outsourcing the maintenance costs to the residents and making them pay for the privelege. The units are mostly valued well below the surrounding stock, so unless they pay exhorbitant rents or move to the country they were no better off.
And for every person who made a bit of money from it, there was another who ended up having to sell back to the council for a reduced amount when they started knocking these things down in the 2000's.
Hackers (by my own definition) make this thing here work now.
A master of his art has the time to design not just his solution, but the task itself, and the experience to understand all the implications of a given solution.
This idea cuts straight to the heart of the argument.
If you view your employer as a master who gets to tell you how and where and when to work, for the pittance he affords you so you can live to work another day, and so he can take all your extra productivity and initiative and IP and profit from it as he wishes, then I guess you are right.
If you view your contract with your employer as a mutual agreement where you provide a set amount of work for a set amount of money, then your productivity is your own. You can use it for a better life or more money.
I guess this is why I contract. I happen to think my pay should be directly linked to the value I create, rather than an arbitrary amount based on how much it costs me to live, and how long it takes me to find work.
Agreed. I usually use the version of Hanlon's Razor that substitutes "incompetence" for "stupidity." Not that they didn't understand what was at stake, but made a series of bad decisions.
I understand. I am guilty of only reading the comments when I feel an article is meant to address a single very interesting question, and then fails to go anywhere near it in the first two paragraphs.
LLC is limits liability doesn't it? Its not no liability. Surely a more effective and wide ranging measure would be to enforce limits on the limitations. If no one wants to take some small amount of responsibility for a company, that company has no business existing.
They're not really shells. They're very small companies created to limit the exposure of the owners to liability. This is not weird or abnormal in business. Real estate guys use separate entities for their projects all the time. If one gets in trouble, it leaves the others intact. That is the whole point of limited liability.
A coworker had his house destroyed by errors on an adjacent building site, and he faces the real risk of the real estate guys declaring a loss on this one and moving on to the next "shell company".
Thnk about that for a moment, because it's not even possible. How are you going to finance a second building when the first one has the ability to suck up all the cash flow? No bank would do it. No equity partners would do it. Throwing out limited liability is a huge deal.
Courts should have the option of making directors or whatever personally liable in the case of gross negligence (like cratering an adjacent building).
Either that, or mandatory insurance for these cases.
It's just unfair that someone is made homeless and faces the threat of being left out in the cold while the persons responsible are raking massive profits elsewhere. It's not a faceless meteorite crash, it was gross negligence.
In the case of patent trolls, "piercing the veil" is also complicated.
There's also the common practice of naming a figurehead as the person responsible for a company, while the real owners don't figure in the legal documents (we call them "testaferros" over here). I don't know what the solution is (I wish I did), but the current system doesn't seem to be working out well.
I have always understood the "limited" liability means that the company is liable, but the shareholders are not.
In the case of the shell companies the owner is the parent company, not the shareholders. Thus the shell companies limit the liability to the parent company. This allows the parent company to sue people without the risk of an adverse ruling.
Productivity is usually a relative measure to gauge the profit margin of a nation / company ie. hours worked against earnings. But as you say, a relative measure will not catch any across the board increase.
The corollary of this is that almost the entirety of the worth is ascribed to the comparatively minor differences which produce relative gains. Anything which does not produce relative gains, but which 'simply' helps the human race at large is ignored or disparaged by the market. ie. if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.
While I can kind of see the thinking behind your argument about the rise of the financial sector being driven by demands of growth from politics and policies.. i think this is very much the wrong way of looking at it. The rise of the financial sector was a power grab.. a con, pure and simple. They bought up all our debt, devalued it and then sold us more. That is to say, they bought all our shares in the future and with a bit of hocus-pocus, pulled a bunch more out of thin air and diluted our stake.
It is not disingenuous, it is feigned. A subtle but important difference. She points out in the first 30 seconds of that clip why it is important that they SHOULD occasionally sue - leverage.
You can't just count the cost of one suit against one settlement and call it economically rational.
"If bias is wrong, being biased in favour of a minority group is still wrong, in this view."
Another way to look at this is that the exception proves the rule. These sorts of deliberately perverse inversions of discrimination really offend. Perhaps they may also serve spur the male colleagues to clean their own house. Sometimes people can become aware of their own biases when they see their actions mirrored in front of them.
As an aside, I will believe the people arguing for deontological ethics just as soon as they give up the lifetime of power, privilege and status afforded them due to their sex (or race).
Privilege seems to be a common theme today, based on the very worrisome line of thinking that averaging over 150 million people spanning 100+ years tells you anything meaningful.
And for every person who made a bit of money from it, there was another who ended up having to sell back to the council for a reduced amount when they started knocking these things down in the 2000's.