Although no immediate action was taken against Apple or Amazon— which both have been found to also listen in on their users — the commissioner’s report “invited” the companies “swiftly review” their policies and procedures.
Apple says,“all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements,” but we all know that people blab.
The Terms of Service (TOS) go beyond straight lies by being opaque and obfuscated. Their rules and meaning are a constantly moving target that even the NYT can’t figure out
The Times reported 46 of the accounts to Instagram, the site responded within 24 hours that none violated its rules, without explaining why.
The accounts were scams using scraped images of innocent US military personnel to get money from innocent US citizens.
While fraud has proliferated on Facebook for years, those running the military romance scams are taking on not only one of the world’s most influential companies, but also the most powerful military — and succeeding.
Apparently fraud doesn’t violate the TOS.
But why should it, since violence, hate speech and bullying don’t.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
It’s said that money is the root of all evil, but there are plenty of evil people with no money and lots of wealthy people who do enormous good. I think it’s more accurate to say that greed is the root, since people will do anything to satisfy it. And often, what they do is perfectly legal — but legal doesn’t mean either ethical or moral.
I’m no happier about the AIG and other bonuses paid to screwed up Wall Street banks, but I’m not sure why any of us are surprised.
“In the largest 25 corporate bankruptcies between 1999 and 2002, while hundreds of billions of dollars of investor wealth and over 100,000 jobs disappeared, the Financial Times found the “barons of bankruptcy” made off with $3.3 billion.”
Giant compensation packages, guaranteed bonuses and platinum parachutes are excused by Boards and executives as necessary to attract the “best and brightest,” but here’s what’s really going on.
The ‘names’ demand outsize compensation/stock options/guaranteed bonus/etc. in order to validate their ‘brand’.
Those responsible for hiring not only meet the demands, but even exceed them in an effort to attain or sustain the company’s reputation as a better home for ‘stars’ — the more stars you have the greater the bragging rights — mine’s bigger than yours in high school locker room talk.
Now let’s consider the folly of this attitude.
Those hiring often seek a name brand in the mistaken belief that the brand comes with a warranty that guarantees good results.
But no matter who you hire you’re actually paying for their past performance, which is always influenced by
circumstances—boss and company positioning in its market and industry
environment—culture and colleagues;
and let us not forget that minor factor
the economy.
The hiring mindset is that everything the brand accomplished was done in a total vacuum and dependent only on the brand’s own actions, therefore changing every single surrounding factor will have no impact on performance.
Put like that it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it.
This is one of the prime reasons that so many CEOs bring their ‘own team’ over when they move, as do managers all the way down the food chain—they know they didn’t do it alone.
CEOs aren’t like movie and rock stars whose very names draw consumers into spending money—nobody ever bought a product from GE because Jack Welch was CEO, nor do they carry Jobs iPods—so why pay them that way?
Moreover, assuming that performance occurring during an expansion is a valid yardstick for performance in general, let alone a downturn, is sheer idiocy.
You have only to remember the difficulties faced by people whose management skills were honed between 1991 and 2000, the longest expansion in our history. When the recession hit in March of 2001 they had no experience whatsoever of how to drive revenue or manage in a down economy.
That recession and the previous one in 1990 lasted only 8 months each. The longest recession we’ve had was 2 years, January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982, and that one had a 12 month break in it. This means there are a very small number of managers with any actual experience managing in anything even close to what’s happening now.
The current recession officially started in December 2007, so it’s already 15 months old and the end isn’t in sight.
What experience makes these folks the ‘best and brightest’ for today’s world?
Just why the hell are companies still guaranteeing oversized compensation and exorbitant exit packages when now is definitely the time to pay for future performance—no guarantees.
Did you know there are 35 million people like me in the US?
Not a giant market, but not one to completely ignore, especially when you add in all their relatives, friends, etc.
Yet that is what most advertisers do.
How do I know?
Because they don’t bother with captioning.
Congress requires video programming distributors (VPDs) – cable operators, broadcasters, satellite distributors and other multi-channel video programming distributors – to close caption their TV programs.
But not ads.
It’s not just that they don’t care about us (the hearing impaired), but it’s an active insult along the lines of hearing impaired = can’t/won’t purchase.
Think I’m exaggerating?
Women’s fashion couldn’t be bothered designing for curvy women, because if they cared how they looked they would lose weight/didn’t care about fashion/no money/ignorant/dumb, until it was the only market that offered growth — and the growth is enormous.
Even so, fashion doesn’t caption its ads, nor do automobiles, retail, financial, communications companies, sports equipment, food, the list is endless, although there are exceptions in every category.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Labor Day started as a sop to the working masses after a strike was broken using Federal troops. When I was young Labor Day was an actual holiday when businesses closed. Fast forward to today and for many it’s a workday like any other and a great reason for businesses to have sales.
It’s the result of an 1894 labor strike against the Pullman Company (think aspirational, luxury private railroad cars).
Engineer and industrialist George Pullman’s workers all lived in company-owned buildings. The town was highly stratified. Pullman himself lived in a mansion, managers resided in houses, skilled workers lived in small apartments, and laborers stayed in barracks-style dormitories. The housing conditions were cramped by modern standards, but the town was sanitary and safe, and even included paved streets and stores.
Then the disastrous economic depression of the 1890s struck. Pullman made a decision to cut costs — by lowering wages.
In a sense, workers throughout Chicago, and the country at large, were in the same boat as the Pullman employees. Wages dropped across the board, and prices fell. However, after cutting pay by nearly 30%, Pullman refused to lower the rent on the company-owned buildings and the prices in the company-owned stores accordingly.
Federal troops used extreme force to break the strike resulting in 30 deaths, while rioting and sabotage left 80 million dollars worth of damage in its wake.
Indiana state professor and labor historian Richard Schneirov said President Grover Cleveland’s decision to declare Labor Day as a holiday for workers was likely a move meant to please his constituents after the controversial handling of the strike. The president was a Democrat, and most urban laborers at the time were Catholic Democrats.
Congress approved (knowing their constituents would also be pleased).
Makes you wonder what the current president and congress would do.
Rather repeat the same stuff I’ve been saying for the last 11 years, consider what John Hall, co-founder and president of Calendar, says.
… workers aren’t liable to fall in love with a company over a handful of gimmicks and perks. … the things that really matter when it comes to sticking with an employer for a long time go deeper than decorations.
What are they?
Well, they aren’t rocket science — except to bosses whose heads are stuck in the past.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Why is happy so often equated with fun, as in “if you’re having fun you’re happy.” What makes you happy? A beautiful sunset? Your kids/grandkids? A quiet walk? Time with loved ones? For most people, It takes more substance than fluff to make them happy.
It’s well-proven that happy employees are more productive, but creating happy requires substance.
The components of long-term happiness are things such as challenging work, continued learning, opportunities to grow, clear communications, fair bosses, etc.
All of these require more thought, effort and skill from managers than installing a few foosball tables or gamifying the project.
Whether you’re talking invention or innovation, it’s important to remember that it’s often the simplicity of a solution, as opposed to complexity, that makes it truly elegant. Along with simplicity, practicality is important, as seen in the MYCOmmunity Toilet, and focusing on plain old common sense can create a viable business by addressing American bias against ugly produce.
Here are a few that actually have world-changing potential.
Following up on yesterday’s idea to re-freeze the Artic is best described as ‘back to the future’.
A California-based company called SkyCool Systems is in the early stages of manufacturing a coolingsystem that’s more energy efficient than anything humans have used for a century.It’s doing it using radiative cooling, a concept that was used in the Middle East and India hundreds of years ago.
Inventions like this are potential game-changers as the world stares down a growing climate crisis, spurred by emissions pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. Globally, about 12% of non-carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to refrigeration and air conditioners, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
There is a lot of the talk about “food disruption,” mostly focused on new ways to grow food, plant-based protein, etc. But ending food waste would go a long way to feeding the world’s population.
Europe is way ahead of us when it come to reducing food waste.
Nearly 2 million tonnes of food is wasted by the food industry every year in the U.K. alone. Of that waste, 250,000 tonnes is still edible, equating to roughly 650 million meals. When you consider the 8.4 million people in the U.K. struggling to afford to eat, there’s obviously a problem.
And that’s where the Danish-born Too Good To Go app comes in. The app, which is available in 11 countries in Europe, is simple: it connects users to stores, such as supermarkets, restaurants and bakeries, that have unsold, surplus food.
R3’s software assesses criminal records, as well as credit histories, employment experience and information self-reported by individuals, and produces a numeric indicator for each individual predicting future trends. Scores run from 300 to 850, to mimic the standard framework for conventional credit histories. The higher the number, the less risky the person.
Gina Périer and Alexander Egebjerg have designed an industrial-standard female toilet for festivals and outdoor events that allows people to pee sitting down quickly and safely.
Named Lapee, the pink plastic structure has three urinals arranged in a spiral, with curving back rests that provide privacy while allowing the user to remain aware of their surroundings.
All of these, even Lapee, have the potential to create major change in our world.
Ask any entrepreneur about their idea and at some point most will claim it will “change the world” in some way — such as making it easier to hook up.
But some truly want to change the world֫ — or at least help save it.
And not all are young, nor are they techies.
One of the most impressive I’ve heard about recently is Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an Indonesian designer, and his two colleagues, Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa.
Kotahatuhaha’s team set out to create a prototype for the “re-iceberg-isation” of parts of the Arctic by freezing seawater into hexagonal blocks of ice that nest together to form new ice floes.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
