Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Infosys founder Narayama Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake.
Speaking on Indian TV channel CNBC-TV18 at the Global Leadership Summit in Mumbai last week Murthy once again declared he did not “believe in work-life balance.”
“I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave,” he asserted .
The argument from Murthy, and like-minded colleagues he quotes, is that India is a poor country that has work to do improving itself. Work-life balance can wait.
The Infosys founder held prime minister Narendra Modi and his cabinet up as an example of proper workaholics, claiming the PM toils for 100 hours a week, and suggested that not following suit demonstrates a lack of appreciation.
“Frankly I was a little bit disappointed in 1986 when we moved from a six-day week to a five-day week,” he added.
[...] In response to his Murthy’s comments, some have suggested that long working hours are acceptable when you own your own company, but perhaps not ideal as an employee.
“This man has been given too much of an importance by asking his opinion about everything under the sun. His words remind me of those exploitative barons of medieval ages from whom the 8 hours work day rights had to be snatched,” quipped a commenter who claims to be a former Infosys employee.
[...] Despite its founder’s firm stance that India’s workforce be fully engaged, Infosys has recently received attention for promising 2,000 graduates a job and them making them wait up to two years to start work.
The engineers-in-waiting were allegedly kept busy with occasional training and promises after being selected for employment during Infosys’ 2022/23 recruitment drive.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday November 21, @05:06AM (5 children)
dude who got rich exploiting people has developed an ethos that justifies exploiting people.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Thursday November 21, @07:54AM
He just wants slavery to be legal again. Then he can exploit all he wants.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @09:32AM
I read your comment, and your username certainly checks out. :-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday November 21, @02:34PM
You can not have fun on the weak days; but you can on the weakened.
The age of men is over. The time of the Orc has come.
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday November 21, @10:09PM (1 child)
FTW, nailed it.
This story seems like a bit of a troll story? Of course everyone's going to roll their eyes and think this. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @10:17PM
You haven't followed the history of this guy then, especially the part where he hires firms to clean up
the PR wreckage his statements result in.
(Score: 3, Touché) by gawdonblue on Thursday November 21, @06:55AM (9 children)
Really? 100 hour working weeks?
I suppose it takes time to come up with racist dogma-whistling [cnn.com]. (Wearing a rainbow turbin does not make you inclusive.)
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday November 21, @01:27PM (8 children)
To a capitalist, any worker who spends a single second existing and not working for the company is wasting resources. They look at Chinese factories with people working 16 hours a day 365 days a year making iPhones with armed guards that make it basically impossible to leave and anti-suicide measures so they can't take that way out, and think either "How can I make my production lines more like that?", or if they already are like that "How can we get even more out of those workers?"
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Thursday November 21, @02:50PM (1 child)
The irony is outside of bulk manual labor, productivity after 30 to 40 hours per week is negative, so they'd run a net positive by pretending to work fewer hours.
The article does explain a lot about the quality of product out of India.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @07:26PM
That is yet more weakness to be beaten out of the lazy bums.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @02:54PM (4 children)
>How can we get even more out of those workers?
Automate your processes, train the workers to design, build, program and maintain robots that do the jobs for them.
Over-educate your populace, train so many robot techs that there's only 5 hours per week of work for each of them to do.
That's how you get George Jetson jobs at Spacely Sprockets. Bonus: since your employees have 6 days a week of free time instead of two, they can consume 3x as many consumer products - you just have to pay them like Ford did: enough to afford the products they are making. Extra bonus: parents have time to help their kids with their education to get those coveted 5 hours per week jobs...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 21, @05:55PM (3 children)
Now that's where your plan goes dreadfully wrong. The plan each management team is ruthlessly intending to implement is that their workers get paid peanuts, while the market for the goods is made up by other company's workers. This is very smart if one management team does this. It is, however, not going to work if everybody does it at the same time.
And the politicians could fix this with higher minimum wages, lower full-time work weeks, and increasing overtime benefits, but they don't because their campaigns and parties are funded by the same people who are trying to implement the plan described above.
Which is exactly what has been happening for the last 45 years or so.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @06:48PM (2 children)
2024-45 = 1979...
Things were going pretty well for my dual income family in 1979 - new 6 cylinder BMW in the 2 car garage of our newly constructed (1650sq ft) concrete block house in the 'burbs. Private school for the kids, and this on two teachers' salaries.
The cost of automobiles has outpaced inflation by some ludicrous multiple since then. Highway fatalities are down, but how much of that is attributable to safer highways and not the cars themselves? Nearly impossible to say, the people with the data to tease that out aren't sharing (like: fatalities per mile driven of antiques on the road today vs modern? Even then: how well maintained were the antiques? Even then: who drives antiques and do they drive them the same way as 60 month leased new commuters? Spoiler: not the same at all...)
Houses around here have gone disposable, built to fail within 40-60 years (needing major rework/repair as the roofs leak down into the wood frame walls putting mold behind the drywall, etc.), and more than doubled in size. We're also building more multi-family in the mix than we used to, as those single family homes spiral up out of reach for most workers.
Minimum wage shouldn't be the benchmark, but with our "smart" business owners each individually working to enrich themselves at the expense of society at large, it surely has become the benchmark, and unlike the hyper-inflating cost of cars and houses (and food, lately), minimum wage has been hypo-inflating for those 45 years.
Things weren't ideal in 1979, many things have improved since then, distribution of wealth isn't one of them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Saturday November 23, @10:10PM (1 child)
Wasn't that always the case? I haven't noticed much quality changes in average house in last 50 years.
But it is. What multiple of minimum wage is your current salary? How was it in 1980? That's the measure of how well you are compared to rest of society. If minimum wage is catching up to the median salary, you should know what it means.
Voting has consequences. Taxes is how you redistribute wealth. If you keep lowering the taxes, what do you think happens to this income/wealth redistribution dream? Yeah, it's simply doesn't happen and the rich accumulate a lot more money much quicker.
I'm not against someone getting rich. But it's up to the government to keep the FREE in the Free Market. Natural state of any capitalistic society is monopoly and total wealth inequality. Government's job is to force the Free Market rules and redistribute the wealth. That's their basic economic job. That's how you keep the ephemeral hamster going in its economic wheel. But it looks like in America the rich have tricked the poor into voting against themselves and you get what you vote for.
Anyway, taxes were much higher in 1979, yet you are saying your standard of living you remember as better? Higher taxes == more money for teachers and other public servants. Yeah, that's how gov't "redistributes" money -- though services.
The antiques are death traps. Few fatalities because few drive them. And they are only driven in perfect conditions anyway. But like a motorcycle rider will tell you, it's not always up to you if you will get hit by another.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 24, @12:29AM
>>Houses around here have gone disposable, built to fail within 40-60 years
>Wasn't that always the case? I haven't noticed much quality changes in average house in last 50 years.
In Florida there has been a big move (encouraged by the building codes, which in turn are mostly written for the construction industry - giving them continued employment) away from concrete in construction. With our wind loads concrete can be very viable economically, but the codes are heavily slanted against it and the few contractors that have continued to try to build in concrete are facing major economy of scale issues.
Florida concrete homes built in the 50s through the early 70s are in very much better condition today than similar homes built from wood frame in the late 70s onward. They're unfashionably small, but structurally quite sound.
>>Minimum wage shouldn't be the benchmark
>But it is. What multiple of minimum wage is your current salary? How was it in 1980?
I wasn't working in 1980, but my father was working in 1973 for $10K per year, against a minimum wage of $1.60 per hour - or $3200 per year, so he was at 3.125x
When I started with a "real job" in 1991, I was making $30K per year against a minimum wage of $4.25 per hour - $8500 per year, 3.53x
>That's the measure of how well you are compared to rest of society.
I don't think that's a valid measure at all. As an example: Manhattan real estate in the late 1980s, a 300 square foot studio apartment would run $1000 per month, but for $2800 per month you could have a nice 1500 square foot three bedroom apartment... the thing was: lots of people could get $1000 per month together, but very few could manage $2800 per month. For less than 3x the money, you get three actual bedrooms, two bathrooms, a real kitchen and living room area, all because you've got what most of the other people don't...
Just because the lowest paid working people in the country are making more per hour doesn't mean your money is worth less... and vice versa. The price of Florida waterfront real-estate is mostly disconnected from "real" houses inland because the people who trade in those properties are simply different pools of buyers. The waterfront property rises and falls in price with the stock market, and spirals up at higher rates of inflation as the people who trade in it accelerate their income growth faster than the "little people" inland. The price of the "regular" homes is much more tied to mortgage interest rates...
>If minimum wage is catching up to the median salary, you should know what it means.
It means that nearly 50% of salary workers are being paid at minimum wage. That's neither good, nor bad, it's a statistic describing a flat bottomed income pool. If families supported by those minimum wage earners can afford basic healthcare, food, shelter, education, transportation and a bit of recreation / entertainment, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. If families supported by minimum wage earners are spending all kinds of time and effort qualifying for and receiving government assistance for food, shelter, healthcare, etc... I'd say that's the "free market" freeloading on the taxpayers, and I'd call that a bad situation.
>Anyway, taxes were much higher in 1979, yet you are saying your standard of living you remember as better?
I didn't say the standard of living was better. To repeat what I said in more detail: our family of four, supported by two schoolteachers, seemed to be living a bit more comfortably and securely in 1975 than similar families are living today.
>Higher taxes == more money for teachers and other public servants.
Yet, today's starting teacher salaries in Florida are at $40K, roughly - and by the CPI: $40,000 in 2024 is worth $6,247.15 in 1974, so... a 37% decrease vs where my parents were at back then. Florida sales tax in 1974 was 4%, today it's 6% and locally boosted to 7% in most jurisdictions, up more than 50%... property taxes (where school funding comes from) are trickier to track, but inflating home values have resulted in greatly increased property tax collection in the last 50 years, while teacher salaries decreased by 37% in real terms...
>The antiques are death traps. Few fatalities because few drive them. And they are only driven in perfect conditions anyway.
I agree, in some ways. Prior to 1970 most of what was on US highways was horridly unsafe. Drum brakes, rigid steering columns, no seat belts, no headrests... However, my 1977 GMC Sierra collected two solid impacts within about 16 hours back in 1995, SUV ran a red light into it at 40+mph on my way home from work, totalled himself on the left rear quarter panel - which sustained minor wrinkles to the sheet metal and sprung the diamondplate bumper out a bit - then on the way to work the next morning a neighbor rear-ended me, totalling her SUV and mostly pushing the bumper back to its original shape. A little spray paint to cover up the exposed sheet metal and the 1977 truck was basically as good as ever except for some cosmetic "character marks." By 1972, most of what was being sold new by the US automakers had progressed tremendously in safety terms, since then I am much less impressed with the plasticization of everything, the rarely necessary but always easy to destroy "crumple zones", vast arrays of airbags, etc. etc. Side impact protection bars: good ROI in my book. Explosives 12" from my face ready to trigger in any given millisecond? I'm not sure I trust the muddied statistics on how much those may or may not be helping overall.
>But like a motorcycle rider will tell you, it's not always up to you if you will get hit by another.
Not always, but frequently it very much is. I absolutely refuse to drive around without headrests - I likely would have been paralyzed by that rear-ending if my head had been allowed to flop back like the cars of the 60s and prior would have allowed... being rear ended is one of the most unavoidable situations out there, even when you see it coming it's often hard or impossible to do anything about it. As for things that air-bags can help with... I'd say the majority (at least 51%) of accidents where air bags have made a positive difference for the occupants, the driver could made bigger positive differences with proper handling of the situation leading up to the deployment.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24, @03:20AM
Where's the evidence for that? Thexalon says so? Why don't you go to Apple and/or the media with your "evidence"? https://www.apple.com/supply-chain/pdf/How-we-prevent-forced-labor-in-our-supply-chain.pdf [apple.com]
FWIW it's illegal in China. Maybe it's a communist thing but "China's labour law bars employees from working more than eight hours a day and 44 hours a week".
I'm sure not everyone follows the laws, but that's true in other countries like the USA and India too.
But, China has reduced its poverty levels more and faster than India has.
(Score: 5, Touché) by RedGreen on Thursday November 21, @09:28AM
Good to read hopefully nice and soon.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @09:46AM (4 children)
How about this: If Murthy wants India to improve, wouldn't human rights and better working conditions be good places to start?
Yet we hear the same type fallacious arguments on this site, where a certain American user claims that limiting the work week to 40 hours is really a tool for exploitation. Their argument is that it makes working longer hours a privilege of the wealthy, where they can earn more money, while many laborers are limited to the wages paid for 40 hours. This, of course, is absolute rubbish. There's nothing about a 40 hour work week that stops a person from starting a side hustle to earn some extra money, and putting some extra time into that. Of course, the wealthy don't actually like this idea because it might encourage more people to escape from working for their corporate overlords. In fact, if we limited the work week to 32 hours, it would actually free up more time for people to invest in a hobby or a side hustle, increase their earning power, and escape from corporate America. But our corporate overlords and their shills don't want us to ponder such wrongthink.
Just because someone's not working 70 hours for you doesn't mean they're not working at all. They might be using some of their extra time to become educated about new topics, develop new skills, or start their own business. The usual suspects don't want the working class to ponder such dangerous ideas like labor rights and upward mobility.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday November 21, @01:18PM
You don't get rich by working for someone else: you get rich by having others work for you.
- at least, that is the aphorism I was told.
The more you work for someone else, the happier they will be.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 21, @01:31PM
I think you're misunderstanding something: Murthy wants India to improve for himself and people like him. It's the old joke about the subordinate who admires his boss's new luxury car, and the boss says "Keep working hard and next year I'll be able to afford another one".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @02:57PM (1 child)
>If Murthy wants India to improve, wouldn't human rights and better working conditions be good places to start?
Not for Murthy. Murthy will be long dead in the ground before human rights and better working conditions make any improvements he could possibly appreciate.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Murthy is saying it himself: India is far from great.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @06:51PM
Of course, in a country with over a Billion people, some of them are great:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_root_bridge [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 21, @01:22PM (2 children)
In America, people think about all the time they lose sleeping, and try to do as little sleeping as possible! We still don't know why animals need sleep, all the more reason not to do it!
And you know, bathroom breaks are stretched out by those lazy slackers to dodge work! Employers shouldn't have to pay employees while they are in the bathroom, and now, technology makes it possible to automatically clock people out when they enter the bathroom. Could apply this automatic clocking in and out to the nooks where vending machines with highly overpriced snacks are, but that might hurt company store profits. Decisions, decisions, sigh. We successfully abolished paid lunch time, first cutting it from an hour to half an hour or just 15 minutes, then allowing it to lengthen again once everyone agreed you shouldn't get paid for time spent on a food break. That song "9 to 5", well, Dolly Parton should be shot for having put to music such Socialist ideas as paid lunch times!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @01:29PM (1 child)
Brain maintenance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @02:59PM
The people who don't know why animals need sleep have done so little brain maintenance for themselves that they'll never figure it out.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @01:23PM (1 child)
FYI
https://www.sri.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/A-heritage-of-innovation-International-and-Domestic-Economic-Development.pdf [sri.com]
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday November 21, @05:52PM
+Interesting link, thanks. Hadn't heard of SRI before, and look: they're (also [soylentnews.org]) working on a microreactor converting carbon dioxide into methanol [sri.com], which can be used [sciencedirect.com] in ICE engines, biodiesel production and methanol fuel cells. Thanks again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday November 21, @05:45PM (8 children)
We live in dangerous times. There's too much of this rhetoric about from wealthy "leaders." Many of us are lucky to live in countries where the progress of rights and conditions for workers, i.e. ordinary people, are still quite advanced following the painful struggles for improvement fought and won over the last couple of hundred years.
Those on the political right, in spite of it ultimately being in their own interest to have happy, healthy, educated, productive workers, want the short-term gains from cutting all the corners and throwing away all that progress.
I have yet to work for anyone, any company, perhaps with the exception of the nuclear industry, where the pressure to cut corners for short-term gain wasn't too great. They all ultimately fail in a smouldering pile of greed and hubris.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @07:38PM (1 child)
I have this model in my head of zero sum interactions being essentially linear in nature. If the whole pie is equal to 1, then for you to get "x" I must lose "x". However empathy and team spirit are a quadratic term. Basically, the loss of x can be compensated by gain of an x^2 from the satisfaction/enjoyment of not seeing others suffer. This term is dependent on the person. I'd say liberals have a larger 2nd order term while conservatives a smaller one. Psychopaths have a negative one (i.e. the cruelty is the point).
Zero sum is 1-x : x while second order is 1-x+alpha*x^2 : x. The variable alpha controls how much empathy one has towards reducing the suffering of others.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 22, @12:00AM
Most "conservatives" have a zero or negative one too, trust me.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @08:48PM
> in spite of it ultimately being in their own interest to have happy, healthy, educated, productive workers, want the short-term gains
Oldest president ever elected, short term is the only term.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @08:54PM (4 children)
>I have yet to work for anyone, any company, perhaps with the exception of the nuclear industry, where the pressure to cut corners for short-term gain wasn't too great.
I have worked at enough varied places to say: there's a definite (inverse) correlation between corners cut and time to implosion...
I am fortunate enough to work in a quiet (read: more profitable than most) corner of a large corporation where upper management has been leaving things more or less alone, because: why mess with success? We still cut corners, but not so much in the well staffed departments.
The ironic thing is: most places, most implosions have nothing whatsoever to do with cutting corners and everything to do with being ill prepared to handle unpredictable challenges from the market, economy, etc. I suppose if you're already cutting all the corners, then the unexpected challenge is always more than you can handle. Anyway, the cut corners never really came out as an identifiable root cause of implosion anywhere I worked - though there are plenty of case studies highlighted by the corner expansion and reinforcement regulatory agencies showing where they did cause serious trouble - kind of like those "death on the highway" movies they used to show in driver's ed. Sure, it happens... but other things happen much more often.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday November 21, @09:00PM (1 child)
It's about sustainable institutional knowledge, a sustainable work pace, cohesive and well-functioning teams and time to plan rather that a constant fire-fight. You can get away with the fire-fight mentality for a quarter or two but it soon all comes down in a heap.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 21, @09:33PM
>a sustainable work pace, cohesive and well-functioning teams and time to plan rather that a constant fire-fight.
It is, but during my current 12 year tenure, I have seen two division chief replacements and one CEO replacement. The "new guys" up top are always fired up to "change things for the better." The CEO seems to have simmered down in the past 7 years, but those division chiefs came in, stirred things up, then were shown the door.
>You can get away with the fire-fight mentality for a quarter or two but it soon all comes down in a heap.
I briefly (5 months) worked for a place that ran on the fire-fight mentality for nearly 15 years. COVID took them down - not directly, but the economic shifts were more than they could handle.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Friday November 22, @04:52AM (1 child)
Of course, cost cutting, especially reduced head count often leaves business and it's processes brittle. It's also worth considering that nobody wants to tell the people who cut costs that the ship may sink due to cost cutting, lest they become the next cost to be cut.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 22, @12:19PM
Thus: the golden parachute. CEOs aren't always the brightest bulbs, but many of them know enough to get advice and advice that tells them to write their own contracts such that they make piles of money whether they do well or poorly tends to be taken.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @07:31PM (5 children)
I'm not a communist; but I totally understand its appeal. I'd probably want to throttle this guy if I met him personally. That's not the way though. Cooler heads must prevail, and ignore such twats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @07:43PM
Exactly. The point isn't to reserve cruelty for those who "really deserve it". It's to stop being so cruel. To make people empathetic to the struggles of others, up and down.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @09:08PM
I worked for one of these companies once when my hitherto employer decided to save money by replacing us with cheaper "passionate" Indians and we all got transferred. They provide cheap, young, impressionable, enthusiastic and underpaid staff who have been fed propaganda about a bright future with no limits. It's all about the money. It's not about the engineering. It's about signed contracts, boxes ticked and money changing hands. Working products are irrelevant. Statements of Work fulfilled are what it's all about.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 22, @12:02AM (2 children)
I really wish Communism could work, but it can't. It can't because it doesn't scale, and it doesn't scale because most humans are simply not good enough people to make it work at scale...and my suspicion is that if we *were* good enough, Communism would never have even been thought of, because *any* economic system people that good came up with wouldn't be an engine of suffering. In other words, if humans on average were good enough for Communism to work, we'd be good enough for any economic system to work.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilcam on Friday November 22, @06:58AM (1 child)
Counterpoint: Capitalism doesn't really work either, except in theory. Like sure, capitalism has worked some of the time in that it has led to enormous prosperity for about 1% of the population, but there about 100M more people living on less than two dollars a day [imf.org] than two decades ago under that same system. Since the death of Karl Marx in the 1880's the Gini coefficient-the measure of global inequality-has worsened [wir2022.wid.world].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday November 23, @03:37PM
Oh, absolutely correct, and it comes down to the same reason capital-C Communism doesn't work either: people fucking suck. The main difference is that capitalism *could* work if it were to set its sights on sustainable, level production instead of growth at all costs. Of course, since the innate drive of capitalism *is* "growth at all costs" and "all costs" would include "buying the actual regulators and making sure they don't regulate," it's only a matter of time until capitalism explodes too.
I liken what's happening in late-stage capitalism to diseases of lifestyle and excess: countries like the US have removed basically all restraint (or are about to...fucking Zoomer men!), and it has about the same effect on the body politic as a human being who's deliberately abused his or her system with so much alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex, and unhealthy food in unhealthy amounts that the usual satiety signals don't fire any longer and all sorts of irreversible metabolic and neurological damage has been done.
Basically, late-stage capitalism is when your economy is built in the image of the love child of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Jabba the Hutt. And it shows.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday November 21, @09:09PM
There are a lot of companies I will not personally do business with on ethical grounds. Amazon.com is one. This is another. I'd have to be destitute and starving to work for them and I certainly will never employ their services if I have any say in the matter.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].