This article says that since 1965 the return on assets for US corporations has dropped by 75% while the biggest additions to the asset base over the same period have been hardware and software. The first question this seems to raise is what are we actually measuring when we look at return on assets - does it take into account the fact that your customers view your brand more positively because your IT has made your company more responsive to the customer? Because that change could actually reduce your advertising costs and not end up in any metric. And the second question is whether most companies are just investing in technology to automate existing processes or are really reorganizing the way they do business around their IT so that they can fully leverage all of the potential benefits of their IT. Of course that takes a degree of understanding of IT that many older executives simply do not have.
-> "A good developer would never put the end of the digestive system right next to the start of the reproduction system - not even if that would require fewer lines of code (which it undoubtedly did)."
Whatever point he's trying to make in this post - and I'm not going to take the time to try to figure it out - I'm sure there's a simpler way of saying it.
Basically, "biological" describes a system that works decently, and which has grown through incremental changes, and yet is a poorly architected mess inside. It describes something that appears to be great from the way it works and the way it looks on the outside, even if the internals are a mess that require 10 years of schooling and residency to fully understand and maintain ;)
Not even that! 10 years and continual refresher courses and on-the-job training for a lifetime -- just to have an inkling and at best a hazy but uncanny knack for fixing. But even this is not even enough in all cases.
That must take some getting used to. I use a similar feature in Netbeans for Ruby programming but didn't know there was a feature like that for regular English words. Pogue has said previously that he has suffered severely from RSI so it must be related to that. He has advocated Dragon Naturally Speaking so much that I assumed he didn't type at all.
I really like Derek Sivers' blog but I have an issue about affiliate linking. Maybe it's just my issue but when I see Amazon affiliate links for all of the books on this list, it makes me hesitant to click them. Call me crazy perhaps.
My old version of that page had a blurb about how I've included the ISBN number for every book there, so you can use your local library, bookmooch.com, or any book-lookup service you want.
I took away the blurb because it felt like a lot of "blah blah blah" and giving the ISBN was self-explanatory. But the old blurb is back now.
No need to click the Amazon links. That was definitely not the point of the page.
Fully agree - a one liner at the top of the page saying 'you can help support this blog by buying from this link' or so takes only a moment and fully informs the visitor.
I did think the list of books would be better described as 'how-to' rather than educational. There are some great choices (and I own a few of them) but educational suggests something a little more intellectual and less of the moment.
Re: 'The Obsolete Employee'
Very instructive, but also good perspective like how until the industrial revolution, there were no employees: everyone was freelance.
Really! Who knew feudal Europe was such an entrepreneurial paradise :)
You'd have to look at the URL to know. It doesn't affect your experience in any way if there's an affiliate link -- unless you choose to look for one, and choose to care.
In fact, an affiliate link should make you feel good! At least you know that the link was posted for money, rather than for some base motive like attention or conformism.
It doesn't affect your experience in any way if there's an affiliate link
Perhaps it is not meant to, but when a scientist has affiliation with say the tobacco industry, I would take his research about the effect of smoking on health with a very suspicious hat on. In fact, I would dismiss it completely.
I think the same logic applies here, it may seem like the list is made for the bucks hence eroding goodwill and by buying a book in such a way you might feel cheated at worst or perhaps simply do not want to encourage such conflict of interest at best.
But books aren't commodity goods, like tobacco. When a blogger recommends a book (or a list of them) he's recommending specific books to read, usually on a narrow topic that his audience is interested. His interest lies in recommending books that his audience will enjoy (or learn from, in this case), so that they trust his recommendations in the future.
Doesn't the company have a contractual obligation to pay you your wages even if it has to go into debt to do so? I don't see how they could get away with that.
Owed wages have very high precedence when all creditors line up for whatever's left... but if there's no cash and no one to loan/invest more money, employees may not be made whole.
My understanding is that the choice is completely optional.
While Vidoop is legally responsible for paying them, I can see how some employees would rather have valuable merchandise now than wait what could potentially be a very long time for their wages in cash.
A program where where the state pays before collecting from the company would be pretty amazing, so I read your link and the related form.
I found no evidence the state pays before collection; in fact they warn that "collection depends upon your employer’s financial ability to
pay, business closure, bankruptcy filing or location of money and assets". It might still be a good program to help assert an employee's claim with the weight of the state agency, but there are other caveats which might make many Vidoop employees ineligible for even that sort of assistance, such as a total unpaid amount more than $10K or "having a direct financial interest" in the company, which many startup employees might have.
The officers of the company are astronomically unlikely to personally bear any contractual liability at all, that being the one of the points of incorporating in the first place.
No. Your article is from 2002 and, at the end, refers to a case then before the Colorado Supreme Court. Here's the outcome (2003):
"After finding a lack of precedent from the Colorado Supreme Court construing individual officer liability under the Wage Claim Act, we certified the following determinative questions...
1. Are officers of a now-bankrupt corporation individually liable for the wages of the corporation's former employees under the Colorado Wage Claim Act? ...
2. If so, are all officers individually liable due to mere status as officers or must the officers have been high ranking or active decision-makers? ...
The Colorado Supreme Court then answered the first reframed question, holding "under Colorado's Wage Claim Act, the officers and agents of a corporation are not jointly and severally liable for payment of employee wages and other compensation the corporation owes to its employees under the employment contract and the Colorado Wage Claim Act." Id. (emphasis added). This response clearly answers the first question certified by this court and moots our second question. We REVERSE the district court's summary judgment order..."
Citing general treatises and texts on corporate law, the majority sets out general precepts like “insulation from individual liability is an inherent purpose of incorporation; only extraordinary circumstances justify disregarding the corporate entity to impose personal liability . . . a corporate officer is not the employer responsible for creating the contractual employment relationship and is not personally responsible for a breach of that relationship . . .” Id. The court rejected the employees' argument, viewing it as making every corporate officer a surety (guarantor) for the corporate obligations. Thus, the court found, that under general principles of corporate law, the officers of Nations Way were insulated from liability by the general principles of corporate and agency law.
Thanks for the update. I lived in CO in the late 1990s and actually had an employer take a while to pay me, which is why I incorrectly assumed that the law was the same, when it has in fact changed.
It is actually more difficult than I thought it would be to locate an accurate list of which states have which positions in this matter.
It seems that courts in many states are starting to lean against officers being responsible for unpaid wages.
You are mis-interpreting my point: it is not officers being responsible for contractual obligations in general, it is (or at least was) an exception carved out for wages owed employees.
There seems to be a lot of debate over when/if an officer can become an "employer" as defined in the law.
Here are some URLs that cover what I am talking about:
Since the company that is not paying is often headed for bankruptcy, these situations often spill over to bankruptcy court, where the judge has a great amount of leeway to determine who gets paid and when.
In Reynolds v. Bement, 36 Cal. 4th 1075 (2005), the California Supreme Court
observed that, “[U]nder the common law, corporate agents acting within the scope of
their agency are not personally liable for the corporate employer‟s failure to pay its
employees‟ wages.” Id. at 1087.
Now I'm finished reading, and, hopefully, talking about this. Like I said, it's extremely unlikely that the owners, investors, or officers of a VC-funded company would be on the hook for salaries after the company went bankrupt. That's a good thing. Surprisingly few things need to go wrong for a company to BK. Who'd start a company if that event meant they'd lose their house?
If it was an LLC, any form of Corporation (like the C Corp it almost certainly is), or an LLP, there is no liability. The "LL" in "LLC" sets LLC's apart from Companies that are not formally Corporations.
I don't find it particularly uncool to convey your meaning as effectively as you can, especially when, in a corporate environment, there is so much other data competing for the attention of your reader. Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try to use this myself.
If this is a duplicate, it's one that a lot of people could benefit from.
Summary:
1. Delete redundancies.
2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives.
3. Add missing context.
4. Focus on the strongest argument.
5. Delete off-topic material.
6. Seek out equivocation and remove it.
7. Kill your favorites.
8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion.
9. Shorten.
10. Give it a day.
Summarising even further... note that most of those involve "delete"!
At least, that's what I usually end up doing. The more concise it is, the easier it is to absorb. It's quite sobering how long it can take to get something that concise though.
