Young, College-Educated, and Desperate - F*** The Poor!

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I've been skimming through the last page of giant posts and would like to comment on this. One of my friends works for a major oil company whose corporate logo resembles a certain mollusk. She did the usual drudge work stuff for the first few years but eventually got promoted to a senior position where she can run whatever research projects she wants as long as she stays within the budget and the resources needed aren't tied up in more urgent projects.

It's probably not very common but it does exist.

Is she an engineer? Do you honestly think they would really be allowed to do anything she wants that doesn't have any beneficial use to the company?

[Alyrium Denryle]

As a follow-up to the prior post:

Back in the 1980s, the court ruled it legal to patent living things. This serves as an excellent case study in why proprietary knowledge is horrendous. Take a look at the practices of Monsanto. They sue seed cleaners for "inducing people to break patent law" when they dont even deal with people breaking the patent law. They send private investigators out and sue people who have seeds from neighboring farms blow into their crops. It used to be that seed stock was bred, produced, and stored at land grant university ag departments, and were cheap and publicly available. This was good for everyone. When the courts ruled that living things could be patented, Monsanto managed to leverage their crops to obtain 90% of the market share, using techniques which are public property, they have patented virtually every soybean in the US.

Imagine this with knowledge itself. Imagine having a PI combing the scientific literature and investigating someone for using knowledge about genetics they dont have a license for. Not a world I want to live in.

Is she an engineer? Do you honestly think they would really be allowed to do anything she wants that doesn't have any beneficial use to the company?

Or which may run counter to their interests.

What happens if she does research and finds out how much oil from shell operations off the coast of nigeria is linking to cancer or something?

Or perhaps she is a sociologist, and tries to publish her work on how they have influenced the government of nigeria to murder entire villages engaged in property disputes with them.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Argument from incredulity.

Though, a lot of random free stuff actually does the benefit the company:

a) Free workers are happy workers. Happy workers are productive, loyal workers.

b) Random whim research or projects sometimes does bring benefits. I've had many times where a weekend project either ends up being useful directly or something developed for it can be applied to a work project, thus enabling new products in less time.

Feel free to address my argument that this work is heavily constrained by a variety of limitations including time and infrastructure, and that it does not and will not get true academic freedom or IP rights to the one performing said research.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Feel free to shut the fuck up and stop spamming. Some of us actually have lives and obligations outside of wanking to college.

Long posts take a while to write. It can wait.

Just reminding you. I cant wait to read more of your narcissistic short-sighted bullshit.

[Zaune]

Argument from incredulity.

Though, a lot of random free stuff actually does the benefit the company:

a) Free workers are happy workers. Happy workers are productive, loyal workers.

b) Random whim research or projects sometimes does bring benefits. I've had many times where a weekend project either ends up being useful directly or something developed for it can be applied to a work project, thus enabling new products in less time.

Don't forget the good publicity, especially if it's something with benefits in another sector or that clears up some minor mystery that geologists or geophysicists have been pondering for a while. The oil companies are at least guilty by association in screwing over the planet's climate (whether that's entirely fair is a different debate) and cock-ups like Depwater Horizon certainly aren't helping, so they need all the public goodwill they can get right now.

[Anguirus]

Observation: when I don't have time to write an "SD.net essay," I don't make a brief inflammatory post just to keep my opponent nice and riled, and THEN plead lack of time. I don't think there is a rule against that per se, but it certainly is read by me as bad form.