Bee news.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

Dead bees make me sad.

I love their sweet sticky sticky delicious spit.

There's also the whole part where if the bees die we won't get to eat anymore.

Yeah, I just didn't want to mention that part.
I'm just gonna blame corn. Yeah. Fuck you, corn. This is all your fault...

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'm picturing a CEO and some intern is waving a stack of reports and saying "If we don't fix this we're all going to die!" and the exec is all like "Yes, fine but how will it affect our bottom line? Unless there's at least a two point drop I'm never going to be able to sell this to the board"

Speaking as one who has dealt with the board of a gigantic corporation, this is a true story.

I don't doubt it for a second. The notion of corporations being an entity unlike humans is only half the picture. The people involved in corporations become unlike humans as they are subsumed. I'm sure a lot of the planet destroying CEO's started life as perfectly nice human beings. The company corrupts them, much like the 3rd reich took a bunch of innocent kids and turned them into monsters. Human minds are generally pretty piss-weak and malleable. Corporate culture is not a good influence.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm picturing a CEO and some intern is waving a stack of reports and saying "If we don't fix this we're all going to die!" and the exec is all like "Yes, fine but how will it affect our bottom line? Unless there's at least a two point drop I'm never going to be able to sell this to the board"

Speaking as one who has dealt with the board of a gigantic corporation, this is a true story.

I don't doubt it for a second. The notion of corporations being an entity unlike humans is only half the picture. The people involved in corporations become unlike humans as they are subsumed. I'm sure a lot of the planet destroying CEO's started life as perfectly nice human beings. The company corrupts them, much like the 3rd reich took a bunch of innocent kids and turned them into monsters. Human minds are generally pretty piss-weak and malleable. Corporate culture is not a good influence.

No, it's not that.  It's that the machine takes on a life of its own.

Everyone's in the club car, nobody's driving the train.   

AND YA DON'T STOP!
\

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm picturing a CEO and some intern is waving a stack of reports and saying "If we don't fix this we're all going to die!" and the exec is all like "Yes, fine but how will it affect our bottom line? Unless there's at least a two point drop I'm never going to be able to sell this to the board"

Speaking as one who has dealt with the board of a gigantic corporation, this is a true story.

I don't doubt it for a second. The notion of corporations being an entity unlike humans is only half the picture. The people involved in corporations become unlike humans as they are subsumed. I'm sure a lot of the planet destroying CEO's started life as perfectly nice human beings. The company corrupts them, much like the 3rd reich took a bunch of innocent kids and turned them into monsters. Human minds are generally pretty piss-weak and malleable. Corporate culture is not a good influence.

No, it's not that.  It's that the machine takes on a life of its own.

Everyone's in the club car, nobody's driving the train.   

AND YA DON'T STOP!
\

YEP

Short time horizons are drilled into everyone, and everything is defined by money. People turn off completely, sold into the Cult of Financial Growth.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm picturing a CEO and some intern is waving a stack of reports and saying "If we don't fix this we're all going to die!" and the exec is all like "Yes, fine but how will it affect our bottom line? Unless there's at least a two point drop I'm never going to be able to sell this to the board"

Speaking as one who has dealt with the board of a gigantic corporation, this is a true story.

I don't doubt it for a second. The notion of corporations being an entity unlike humans is only half the picture. The people involved in corporations become unlike humans as they are subsumed. I'm sure a lot of the planet destroying CEO's started life as perfectly nice human beings. The company corrupts them, much like the 3rd reich took a bunch of innocent kids and turned them into monsters. Human minds are generally pretty piss-weak and malleable. Corporate culture is not a good influence.

No, it's not that.  It's that the machine takes on a life of its own.

Everyone's in the club car, nobody's driving the train.   

AND YA DON'T STOP!
\

YEP

Short time horizons are drilled into everyone, and everything is defined by money. People turn off completely, sold into the Cult of Financial Growth.

It's not even that, at least in my experience.  It's classic disinformation theory.  Nobody knows what the hell is going on, because everyone's afraid to tell their immediate supervisor the unvarnished truth.  This goes through dozens of itterations, until the decision makers hear a story that has NOTHING to do with the actual situation.

Then they make a decision based on what they've been told.  This creates confusion in the ranks, and WORSE information travels upward.

Rinse, repeat, kaboom.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Interesting crossover with psychopath-thread. I remember hearing a while back some (possibly sensationalist) statistic about such and such a percentage of top ceo's being psychopaths. Wonder if they started off as a psycho in the mailroom or was it part of their orientation/career ladder?

[Doktor Howl]

Interesting crossover with psychopath-thread. I remember hearing a while back some (possibly sensationalist) statistic about such and such a percentage of top ceo's being psychopaths. Wonder if they started off as a psycho in the mailroom or was it part of their orientation/career ladder?

Um.

Never mind.

[Doktor Howl]

http://www.today.com/money/sometimes-boss-really-psycho-6C10732488

The boss IS a psycho apparently about 20% of the time.  Clearly, though, the problem is greater than 20% of the CEOs. 

But rather than identify the problem, let's just call them ALL psychopaths and stop thinking about it.  Much easier that way.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Not my point. Is corporate culture responsible for turning Richie Cunningham and turning him into Hannibal Lecter? ie. we're blaming the CEO's but maybe they're just a symptom.

[Doktor Howl]

Not my point. Is corporate culture responsible for turning Richie Cunningham and turning him into Hannibal Lecter? ie. we're blaming the CEO's but maybe they're just a symptom.

But that doesn't happen, most of the time.  That's not the problem.

[Pergamos]

Not my point. Is corporate culture responsible for turning Richie Cunningham and turning him into Hannibal Lecter? ie. we're blaming the CEO's but maybe they're just a symptom.

That was my point as well.  If cultural norms tend toward sociopathy then even non sociopathic people are going to act more sociopathic.

Although I think there might also be a transfer of empathy, instead of empathizing with other humans CEO's are empathizing with the corporation.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm done.  Carry on.

[Pergamos]

I'm done.  Carry on.

Clearly you have something to say about it, probably something important, but you seem fed up with our apparent blindness and/or preconceptions. 

Figuring out what is wrong is the first step to actually doing something about the problem and the possible solutions I see so far are

(a) CEO's tend to be psychopaths, so we should string them up

(b) Corporate culture tends to create psychopaths, so the culture needs to be changed

or (c) both of those ideas are wrong and we need to figure out what is wrong with corporations and bosses and what can be done about it.

It seemed like you were suggesting something along the lines of the burden of omniscience before, and the only suggested solution I have seen to that is Anarchy, which doesn't seem like a very workable solution.

[Doktor Howl]

I said anarchy?  Where the fuck did I say anarchy?  There is actually a very real and viable method of dealing with disinformation theory, though it takes a long time to get results.

But that's too much like saying that they aren't The Other, and therefore the REAL problem in this conversation is my lack of commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Here:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,35058.0.html

Take this as my repentance for failing to properly knee-jerk my way to a Better Tomorrow™.

[Pergamos]

I said anarchy?  Where the fuck did I say anarchy?  There is actually a very real and viable method of dealing with disinformation theory, though it takes a long time to get results.

But that's too much like saying that they aren't The Other, and therefore the REAL problem in this conversation is my lack of commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Here:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php/topic,35058.0.html

Take this as my repentance for failing to properly knee-jerk my way to a Better Tomorrow™.

I didn't say that you suggested Anarchy,  I only said that you seem to be suggesting the problem is the burden of Omniscience, we don't tell our superiors the truth, we tell them what we think they want to hear, so they get false signal and it gets worse as it goes up the chain.  The only other time I have seen that addressed was by Robert Anton Wilson and his suggested solution was eliminating authority.