I'm sorry, but how is that different from 2006?

Yes. Oh, god, yes. That movie is simultaneously 50 times funnier and 100 times more depressing once you've actually worked in that environment.

From the fiction I've read, the average corp office worker is gonna be just as mundane and lazy and wrapped up in ridiculous office nonsense as his 2006 counterpart. (Cubicle decoration contest, anyone?) It's security (meatspace and cyber), middle to upper management, advertising/sales and R&D that's gonna be super-competitive and fast-paced. But, then, it'd really vary from corp to corp, I guess.

MOST corporations don't do that. There are a few *cough cough MICROSOFT* who have made it almost their exclusive business plan (except add intellectual theft to the list) since their inception. But most of the ones who do do that were around in 1989.

I'm sorry, i dont really agree with that, except that it's on a direct competition level. Take a look at Nestle for example. Not only are they the providers of tasty food for us, but they also supply man's best friend with HIS food (they also own Purina) I can't think of what else thay have their oven mits cooking, but atleast to some extent, the "our business is every business" model is already in place, to some degree.

Have things actually gotten better? I can't tell the difference. And why do they hire those average office workers if they don't actually do anything?

You have clearly never worked for a company with over 100 employees. Over time the Institutional Bureaucracy develops a dependence on these people, they don't do anything useful but in their mind they have the most important job in the company. Their supervisors back this up because that means they supervise the most important section, and it builds from there. Ultimately in a large company the people best at convincing their superiors that they fulfil an important function get promoted. Now what happens if all the truly important functions are already covered? You invent a new one, sell a few people on it and all of the sudden you're indispensible, even if what you do is something nebulous like tracks quality indicator reports. Some entities make a business out of this. ISO for example has a legion of consulting companies that make money simply off of helping other companies develop bureaucratic operating standards of their own and then auditing the companies to make sure they comply with their own procedures.

David E. Kelly may create amusing television programs, but it's about as far from realistic as you're ever going to get (the only thing close was the first season or two of The Practice). Law firms are cold, lifeless places. The largest (i.e., those with over 1,000 lawyers working for them) and those in major cities are soul-sucking vortexes of evil from which there is no escape. But, yeah, maybe two or three lawyers on that show would not have been disbarred for the shit they pull every week.

Seriously? Are you speaking from experience or from years spent watching Angel?

From what I've heard working for a law firm is like writing a research paper every 2-3 days only with a lot more copying and filing and a paycheck.

That depends on how you define "fun." Just because they have more money doesn't mean that they have more free time. As stakeholders, partners/shareholders have to produce and are expected to do more significant work.

They're expected to bring in new clients and entertain current ones for the firm so they're expected to go schmoozing with clients and such. If you enjoy that, then it can be 'fun'.

There are many firms (well, also if the clients are demanding it) that they keep track of their billable hours in 6 minute increments. Yes, it's that bad, other places might be in quarter hours, and maybe there's some that might be per hour instead, YMMV.

I watch Boston Legal once in a while to get a good laugh and I know they're not being serious. Plus, it's just hilarious seeing Capt Kirk, the shapeshifter from DS9, Murphy Brown, Keen Eddie, and for a short time Michael J. Fox all on the same show. The other shows that tries to be serious I avoid like the plague.

Hey SL, what do you really think about lawyers and law firms, be honest!

I know of folks at firms who put in 60 hours or so a week. Heaven help ya if you work in prosecution and it's deposition/trial time. You're lucky getting a couple hours of sleep during that time.

(My sister is a lawyer and I just finished law school, so yeah, I seen/heard stuff from the DC law firm scene )

Well (and this strangely enough, ties in with the "cyber-breast pump" thread), if you were wondering about corp practices in the here-and-now, Nestle sells, among other things, baby formula. They also have a long-standing program where they go to different third world countries, notably African nations, and hand out free formula samples to native mothers, along with pamphlets detailing how wonderful their formula is, and how all the sophisticated, cosmopolitan Western mothers feed their kids formula, blah blah blah. What a bunch of swell guys, right?

The only kink in this is, you can get their free formula while you're in the hospital, after which you're on their own. They will often get a sample can or two, which will last just about long enough for the moms to stop lactating on their own! What a coincidence!

Of course, at that point they're pretty much committed to the formula thing, except that these are still women living in third world countries. Which, as you may have heard, are abominably poor, and not especially well educated. Since they can't afford enough baby formula to feed an infant, they end up cutting formula with water. Water is not terribly full of nutrients. Babies like nutrients. Or, barring that, they like to die of malnutrition. Rinse and repeat.


Nestle has been boycotted for this several times - and successfully! (When did you ever hear of that actually working?) Only thing is, after the attention dies down they always quietly start doing it again. UNICEF places the damage at about 1.5 million dead babies a year. Nice guys.

Last answered Feb. 3, 2006 in a thread still active today.

It takes six weeks, yup. Also, the drinking water in these countries tends to be extremely contaminated, which leads to diarrhea, which can kill by dehydration. And a child that isn't breastfed isn't getting a lot of the natural immune system boosters that they would be otherwise, which is bad enough if they're in a nice, clean, industrialized nation. But when you're drinking watered down formula that a yak bathed in...

The Fluke that lives in the Volta in Target Smuggler's Havens apparently isn't completely made up.

Yes, the baby formula issue is actually a major issue in the field of humanitarian work and public health. Because of nutritive, marketing, and sanitation issues (loss of antibodies from the mother plus drinking unsafe water and using dirty drinking vessels), Nestle in particular is credited with being responsible for many needless deaths of infants.

Possibly, but it may have been competition that drove them to try in the first place too. It's a cost value determination between the cost of negative publicity and the value of opening up a new market. Of course in this particular situation it doesn't make a lot of sense because there just isn't much money to be made in the African Market right now.

It doesn't always increase costs. It increases payroll, yes but that may cost less than say being fined repeatedly or being sued once. Also some of the bureaucracy does actually reduce losses in other areas or produces information that can be used to increase efficiency. Sometimes just the promise of increased efficiency, reduced liability, or a potential breakthrough is reason enough to keep doing something. Also there is a lot of of institutional inertia, it's easier to just keep doing something the way it's always been done than to change it. Making changes costs money too, some companies would rather bleed money slowly than take a big hit all at once to make a change for greater efficiency. Also be careful with the use of evil in regards to corporations, while it applies to some SR Corps in the real world it usually doesn't. Tobacco companies who knowingly produce and sell a dangerous product, and then try to cover up how dangerous it is, might fit the bill. But rarely do companies go out of their way to do something nasty just to squeeze out a bit more profit. Thats not to say that they won't do all sorts of unethical things or cut lots of corners, but they usually do it to protect their share holders or believe that they have to do it that way to keep from being driven under by the competition who is doing the same thing. Also in the insular bureaucratic world of a corporate HQ lots of employees completely lose sight of the fact that their product or service involves real people, they merely track numbers and statistics.

Keen Eddie! Dammit, I knew I had seen him before somewhere. That was a great show.

My opinion of the law is , well, complicated. And, yeah, billing 60 hours a week is pretty commonplace. I knew law students who were racking up 60-80 billable hours (measured in 6 min increments) a week in their clinical programs, so go figure what the firms expect. If the clinic was a real firm that actually billed for those hours, it would make more per year than the entire budget of their law school.

http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1745,157186...-244192,00.html

Now just grind and form in to a ball

Oh that is priceless, and Corp espionage is just as strong today as ti will be in the future, you just never ever hear about it, well you do but not often.

That explaineth nothing!

Corporations who voluntarily decide to not perform evil acts and thereby lose profits can have their board of directors sued successfully by the shareholders. If the estimated losses due to bad public image and wrongful death lawsuits are less than the estimated profits of a course of action, the corporation is obligated by law to perform those evil acts.

Companies will rarely do something nasty for no reason (though even then, sometimes they just feel like doing some evil on the side), but if there is a bit more profit to be gained through senseless villainy, a corporation must take it.

-Frank