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The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

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Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#151

Post by cynicalkane »

barrkel wrote: post #57
tokenadult wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the submitted article may have more sense of history than most Americans. It is a historical fact that Adam Smith first wrote a book The Theory of Moral Sentiments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments in 1759, pondering the issue of why people behave morally when they could simply guard their own self-interest. As Smith pondered the issue more, he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature…

You have completely missed the point. Contrasting economic systems is completely irrelevant . The choice here is not between different economic systems, but between different moral systems. You cannot make a free market your moral system because markets are amoral . That is, it is not that they are not immoral and so should be replaced with something else; rather, they have no moral content - morality comes from some…

False distinction. The GP is saying that economic systems are moral systems. He even says why, and cites examples.

He didn't miss your point. He saw your point, and thinks it's wrong.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#152

Post by Hoff »

edster wrote: post #61

Here is my best story about business consultants... I was contracting at a big three automaker and they had retained just such a firm, possibly even BCG, to "restructure" the IT department. So they had a team of overpaid consultants come and perform an analysis. I won't even get into the pointlessness of all that. However, the leader of the pack, the alpha male of the consulting team, would physically walk his laptop…

Well, if you're looking for fodder for future fun and games, remind your mark that all sorts of interesting stuff can be recovered from the disks that are often resident inside mid- and upper-end printers. And remind your mark that printers actually can be infested with stuff; it's a good spot for malware to operate on a LAN, too.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#153

Post by Retric »

wisty wrote: post #55
gvb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They think they will retire in their thirties, but they never have enough. "At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, "Yes, but I have something he will never have... Enough." http://ww…

Their fixed costs keep rising. When you are 22, you think that $100,000 a year (rising with inflation) is heaps. But by 30, you buy your first yacht, and it takes $50,000 a year just to keep it in the dock.

While that's true, the cause of this is a salary that compounds faster than inflation. If you make 10% more each year it's almost impossible to retire anywhere near the salary you had 5 years ago without saving a huge percentage of your income.

EX: Ignoring inflation, if you get a 10% rase a year and get a 10%ROI on your investments every year then you need to save 40% of your income to for 35 years to retire on what you made 5 years before you retired. (Assuming you can live safely on 4.5% of your capital / year)

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#154

Post by Gobiner »

abalashov wrote: post #36

"I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man…

I found that quote particularly hilarious given the article in which it is embedded. The article would make a good reference for the wikipedia article on cognitive dissonance.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#155

Post by gjm11 »

jacquesm wrote: post #135
gjm11 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he stay a long time? It doesn't look that way to me from the article, but maybe I just missed something. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-... seems to imply that he started there in June 2009. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-impe... seems to imply he was still there in October. ... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are together i…

However long he worked there, he didn't bite the hand that was feeding him, but when the party was over he did turn around to bite the hand that fed him. Being moral about the NDA does not weigh up against working there in the first place, and I don't know what $16 K means to a high profile Dubai consultant, it may have been substantially less than the severance pay he was entitled to anyway.

I don't think anyone was claiming that being moral about the NDA does "weigh up" against working there in the first place. If he were trying to paint a glowing picture of his own morals, he wouldn't have written the article in the first place.

(Since he appears to have been there for something like 6 months before getting fired, I'll hazard a guess that his severance pay wasn't all that spectacular.)

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#156

Post by thwarted »

jacquesm wrote: post #128
thwarted wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what that has to do with anything, "You're my best friend" was released 21 years before Deacon retired.

It contradicts that he didn't have a say in the creative direction. That may not have been true at the time the gp indicates though.

It doesn't contridict that Deacon didn't have a say in the creative direction: having written one song that was popular is not the same as having influence on much of the band's output. I don't know enough about Queen's history to say that Deacon did or did not have creative influence, but citing one song isn't support.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#157

Post by albertsun »

gjm11 wrote: post #112
jackowayed wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he was taking a double course-load and working, so that may count as being buried in sand. But still, even if he didn't know beforehand, he figured it out very quickly upon arrival and then stayed for a long time for the money, so I agree with most of your point.

Did he stay a long time? It doesn't look that way to me from the article, but maybe I just missed something. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/06/third-day-... seems to imply that he started there in June 2009. http://thesensibletechnocrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/moral-impe... seems to imply he was still there in October. ... Ooh, and all four parts of the story of which the OP here is part 3 are together i…

Comparing the writing there against the versions published in The Tech is a good case for the importance of editing.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#158

Post by arvinjoar »

jacquesm wrote: post #128
thwarted wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what that has to do with anything, "You're my best friend" was released 21 years before Deacon retired.

It contradicts that he didn't have a say in the creative direction. That may not have been true at the time the gp indicates though.

John Deacon did write songs, so he was not completely out of the loop. But just look at their discography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_discography

John Deacon had a very small part in their total creative output, and so, his contributions to their creative development wasn't comparable to that of the other members.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#159

Post by F_J_H »

holdenc wrote: post #46

This story is written with a wonderful naivete. Consultants like BCG exist only to lend credentials and competent temporary labor. The companies who hire these consultants are looking for affirmation and peace of mind -- most of them too mired in bureaucracy or incompetence to draw even the most basic conclusions by themselves.

"This story is written with a wonderful naivete."

Exactly. Another case of idealism colliding with reality. It's refreshing and makes me sigh at the same time.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#160

Post by billybob »

tokenadult wrote: post #26

"I wasn’t sure at the time, but having had enough free time of late to ponder such questions, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that having a father who can pay for a top-notch education outweighs the disadvantage of being raised by a hypocrite. Sticking with the job for the sake of a paycheck passes the children test." I wonder how many children get sent to college by dads like that.

I don't know, but I think it's a horrible conclusion. He hated his job and felt he was making the world a worse place. If that's what his top-notch education got him, why did he want the same for his children?
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