The "core values" are for the drones, specifically to keep them in line and not cause any issues. The board members can keep doing what the $%%$ they want as the only values they have are economic, the generation of profit for the company.
Just remember that corporationa are not "ethical" so having "core values" is an oxymoron. The only thing a corporation exists for is profit, so "core values" is the clown face painted on a psychopath. A corporation will lie, rape and destroy to make a profit.
Human beings have values. Human beings can be ethical. But most corporate leaders leave their humanity at the door when running a corporation. It is just business.
"Core values" are a delusion for the masses, a stupid form of mind control to keep the losers in thrall [1].
Many more people realize that than you realize, but I think you're misunderstanding the Gervais Principle link. "Losers" in the Gervais model are completely aware that their company is getting a much better economic deal than they are. They just don't think that's a big deal, because, after all, human beings have values but corporations are basically amoral. So a corporation is just a tool for a Gervais Loser to feed, clothe, and shelter himself; he directs his emotional energy toward his personal relationships.
Core values are useful for attracting and keeping the Clueless in the Gervais model. But in doing so, they make the company more than just a purely amoral economic engine. In order to sustain the delusions of the Clueless, the Sociopaths at the top need to pay at least lip service to preserving their illusions, else they leave in a huff and start acting like a wrecking ball, as a certain other prominent HN poster who likes to throw around Gervais Principle links has done. That lip service is pretty much the entire social purpose of the corporation.
One often-unstated corollary of the Gervais Principle is that the whole idea of "money" and "profit" is a social construction developed by Clueless and Losers to rein in the will-to-power Sociopaths. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte went on killing sprees to satisfy their need for power. Steve Jobs and Richard Branson go on building sprees. That's entirely because the Clueless and Losers have created a society where the only way to the top is to take a bunch of people with you.
Happy for the guys who got acquired....BUT thinking as a consumer, this type of thing makes me very nervous about relying on teeny tiny SAAS businesses for anything long term.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with Self identification with Steve Jobs and people like him, so an attack on Jobs is an indirect attack on them.
Personally I think Jobs was an over hyped marketing manager (with perhaps a true gift for getting talented people to do the work).
There are dozens of people in the computer industry that I respect far more who will never get 1/100th of the adulation (and I'm not sure most of them would want it).
Look at the contributions of people like John Backus, Edgar Codd or Maurice Wilkes and of course Kernighan and Ritchie, those people (to me) are worth far more respect.
I did some research on CPAN - comparing it to Ruby gems and Python's various packaging solutions...
CPAN is the defacto Perl standard, mirroring and testing built in. With perlbrew, localLib and cpanm, the tooling for Perl is world class. I think Ruby and Python are still catching up here. No doubt they will, but CPAN is an amazing feat of engineering.
Smalltalk - the most perfectly made jacket in the entire world but when you put it on, all your other clothes disappear.
Javascript - A jacket with legholes where the armhole should be, but you wear it because everyone else is wearing one.
Visual Basic - A jacket made out of bits of old carpet.
Haskell - A highly technically advanced jacket made out of nano particles that configure themselves to the wearer, but nobody wears them as the instruction manual is written in Sanskrit.
I disagree with your Perl jacket... a Modern Perl jacket would come with a magic incantation that when said over the jacket, it turns it into a bad-ass leather jacket that comes with a free Harley Davidson.
JavaScript - more like a jacket with thousands of pockets. Some contain useful tools, usable by anyone with some experience of DIY.
Others, extremely dangerous tools, many with their safety features disabled, usable only by qualified builders.
There is no manual as to which is which.
CoffeeScript - A T-shirt and tie combo. You started with the intention to look smart, but got distracted by all the other cool looks you could potentially carry.
Sorry, I have to disagree. I have run a small software consulting business in Dublin for nearly ten years. The one thing we get right in this country is our pro business climate. It is easy to set up a company, there is a lot of support and advice available. I think we do this well...
Two caveats though:
- You DO need to get a good accountant to get advice on international VAT charges as they are complex (I suggest bypassing them by using a company like FastSpring that manages them on your behalf).
- Small business owners should have the same social welfare security net as everyone else (I think this might be changing).
I agree with you on the inbred gombeens and cute hoors, but thankfully there seems to be less of them in the tech sector :)
"You have the option to pay either 8.9% flat or 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction. "
Wowza, thats steep!
edit: Sorry but experience has been different here in west, in another lifetime I worked on an "innovation partnership" with EI, it was nothing more than a way to funnel state money to politically connected "friends", the business idea was crippled from day 1 but that didnt matter the objective was transfer money, which as as a taxpayer was sickening.
Sorry for being cynical but I have many years of experience in business here, and seen it all in my interactions with state bodies. Maybe in Dublin they manage to put on a better show or things changed in last few years.
> "You have the option to pay either 8.9% flat or 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction. "
> Wowza, thats steep!
FastSpring customer here.
First, they handle lots of boring and complicated stuff for you, not just taxes. How much would it cost you to accept all major credit cards, PayPal, checks and (international) wire transfers, and provide customer service for all of those transaction types?
Second, if you sell the more expensive B2B stuff like we do, and/or sell lots of your stuff through them, you can ask for a custom rate.
> I see, still thats quite a bit especially when need to hand over a large chunk on any sale from Irish/EU28 customers in tax!
I am not sure I understand what you are talking about. If we set the price at $1K, we get from FastSpring $1K minus their commission, whether the customer has paid the EU VAT or some sales tax on top of that $1K or not. And it is FastSpring that does EU VAT remittance.
I wish Netflix would just give me a list of genres I could browse through and stop with the oh-my-so-clever recommendation engine. Maybe I want to stretch my viewing habits... how am I going to see what is on offer if it is always filtered through what I chosen before?
I have made more than one good decision choosing from the Random Picks list. For all I know they're not random and very calculated, but they seem to 'stretch' my taste.
I don't know exactly where you are, but back home lawyers with pretty good chances of winning a case like this would be jumping at this with a no-win no fee.
The "core values" are for the drones, specifically to keep them in line and not cause any issues. The board members can keep doing what the $%%$ they want as the only values they have are economic, the generation of profit for the company.
Just remember that corporationa are not "ethical" so having "core values" is an oxymoron. The only thing a corporation exists for is profit, so "core values" is the clown face painted on a psychopath. A corporation will lie, rape and destroy to make a profit.
Human beings have values. Human beings can be ethical. But most corporate leaders leave their humanity at the door when running a corporation. It is just business.
"Core values" are a delusion for the masses, a stupid form of mind control to keep the losers in thrall [1].
[1] See the definition of loser here: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...