There are things Man was not meant to know. ( Long )
January 27th, 2004
...Pitt County schools have been closed for the last two days because of the icy roads. We got two inches of snow on Sunday then freezing rain over the top of it, and it hasn't thawed, so the roads are still sheets of ice.
This is a great time for our furnace to be malfunctioning. (I keep having to switch it to "cool", then back to "heat" again, to get it to start.)
This article on the Panopticon Singularity is relayed from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
janetmiles, who first brought it to my attention. It should be required reading both for those who Understand The Problem, to borrow a phrase from Col. Jeff Cooper, and for those who persist in the innocent belief that government exists for their benefit. (Word to the wise: In this age of information and technology, governments are frightened, and governments that are frightened but still have power to do something about it with are the greatest enemies of freedom that exist or ever have existed.)
(I also strongly recommend his articles on why no more Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors will ever be built, why DejaNews should be considered harmful, and censorship and the 'Net.)
The Register reports that HP has slipped completely off the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, on which it was in 10th place when Carly Fiorina took over in 1999 (and that was after her predecessor had already begun the task of destroying HP and its culture that Carly is so ably completing).
It's depressing to see a once-great company destroyed by naked greed and stupidity. Cthulhu in a merrywidow, people, Bill and Dave built HP from the ground up, kept it running for almost 60 years, and made a really great company out of it by using their heads and sweating the details, instead of blindly following the Wall Street flock. Weren't you people fucking paying attention?
Oh, sorry, I forgot, when you have a Harvard MBA, you don't need to know dick about the company you're running or the industry it operates in, as witnessed by Carly's non-memorable predecessor's brilliant idea of discarding HP's core business for 50 of its 60 years into a spinoff, under the woeful misapprehension that the metastatic PC division operating in a cut-throat market with razor-thin margins was HP's core business. (Yeah, the PC division that doesn't even manufacture any of its own products any more, just rebrands and resells.)
