Calling Out GE's Misleading Data Visualizations 123
theodp writes "Stephen Few never did suffer data visualization fools gladly. After seeing an oil exec (mis)use data viz to put a positive spin on Gulf Oil Spill cleanup efforts, Few felt compelled to call out BP. And now it's General Electric that's got Few's dander up: 'The series of interactive data visualizations that have appeared on GE's website over the last two years,' writes Few, 'has provided a growing pool of silly examples. They attempt to give the superficial impression that GE cares about data while in fact providing almost useless content. They look fun, but communicate little. As such, they suggest that GE does not in fact care about the information and has little respect for the intelligence and interests of its audience. This is a shame, because the stories contained in these data sets are important.' Concerned about his strong reactions to poorly designed data visualizations, Few asked his neuropsychologist wife whether he might be overreacting. She, too, agrees that GE's natural gas visualizations are maddening, which one might be tempted to dismiss as predictable, although Eyeo Festival presenter Michal Migurski also declares GE's effort 'one terrible, terrible bit of nonsense.'"
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You have a point. Corporations are run by people. LLC stands for "Limited Liability Corporation." Corporations protect owners and employees from blame and lawsuits when something goes wrong. The corporation keeps owners from suffering the consequences when something goes wrong or even when someone does something wilfully negligent. This is why the modern corporation is a great enabler of evil... when something is done wrong, like the poisoning of a body of water or the financial ruining of thousands of
Re:Stupid we are (Score:5, Informative)
The most useful one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The most useful one (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the use of the Sierpinski triangle [wikipedia.org], Apollonian gasket [wikipedia.org], and Sierpinski carpet [wikipedia.org] style shapes for representing each fuel source. I haven't looked at much data visualization, but it doesn't seem the use of these doesn't add anything.
I don't know much about visualization either, but this one is really obvious. Empty spaces add perceived volume to the graph, so that it looks bigger (compared to the full square that show how much we use each year). Our brains don't know how to calculate the percentage of empty space into the perceived size.
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This is exactly why I ignore hand wavy comparisons and such. If the final answer is not deduced rigorously then it is worthless. Using valid mathematics to then display the information in a way that we must interpret without precision and without accuracy is a dead giveaway that the data is obscured.
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I don't think that one is useful, either. You have a slider at the bottom to adjust consumption rates, but there's two different scales (-2 to 5 and -1 to 4) AND a confusing note below that. Since the sliders are at 0%, is that assuming no increase, or should you adjust the slider to match the average increase listed? (which would make all 3 run out at roughly the same time)...who knows? There's no context to work with, just random sizes and shapes that pretend to be data.
Re:The most useful one (Score:5, Insightful)
Adjust the sliders to match the production increases over the last ten years, and you get 38 years left for oil, 42 years left for natural gas, and 44 years left for coal. Which makes the premise that "The World has Huge Natural Gas Reserves" totally false, unless you have no children and only expect to live for 40 years or less.
How many years of Sunlight Reserves do we have left?
Over 4,000,000,000 years.
Do you need a visualization to understand the difference between 40 years and 4,000,000,000 years?
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Adjust the sliders to match the production increases over the last ten years, and you get 38 years left for oil, 42 years left for natural gas, and 44 years left for coal. Which makes the premise that "The World has Huge Natural Gas Reserves" totally false, unless you have no children and only expect to live for 40 years or less.
How many years of Sunlight Reserves do we have left?
Over 4,000,000,000 years.
Do you need a visualization to understand the difference between 40 years and 4,000,000,000 years?
A visualization would not help to explain this ratio. People rarely understand numbers with more than a couple of digits, and would probably just classify it emotionally as "something bigger than 10".
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In that case, just use a log scale. ... and back in the realm of the understandable again.
You do realise this is supposed to be targeted at the lowest common denominator and not your typical slashdot readership right?
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Wind blows across land, sun shines on land, you can own land, and many of our largest corporations own big pieces of it because government handed it to them on a platter in exchange for their contributions. You can't build a solar plant on BLM land but you can drill for oil or mine coal.
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Anyone who takes such things seriously examining the raw data is a fool. Without the raw data it's as accurate as climate change priests excretions.
Yet the article whines about white space and shape and even color. The last bit about wikipee, creative commons, and the like appear to have been hacked on last as an after thought.
Summary v2 (Score:4, Informative)
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BP, on the other hand.. that was deliberate misleading..
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Maybe I'm too naive, but I suspect it's not even that malicious. I think it's merely that marketing folk got a hold of some numbers that the company wanted to put a positive spin on, and thought they (the marketing folk) were statisticians. About the only thing I learned from my Engineering Statistics course was that statistics looks obvious, but is far more complicated than it looks (at least, if you want to approach accuracy and such). I highly doubt that your average marketing drone has taken that muc
Re:Summary v2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing folk are malicious.
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I stand corrected.
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Yeah, my experience in the corporate world has been that almost nobody knows anything about data visualization. It's a rare person who even goes beyond the default Excel graphs. Most people don't read books, either, so getting them to read something called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a non-starter.
The GE guy seems like an artist who thinks graphics have to be exciting instead of informative. The BP guy doesn't seem dishonest at all -- he gives a rough daily average right on his graph
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Which is a shame, because poor visualization takes up even more time. A lot of it is just basic stuff like labeling your data and thinking about what you're doing. Get that wrong and you have a dozen people in a meeting trying to guess at what a graph is telling them. That adds up pretty quick -- 12 people * 5 minutes = 1 man-hour. Tufte has a one-day training class, and the books themselves are pretty short (and mostly pictures). There are lots of web sites, too. Communications skills are a career booster,
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"without realizing that a simple bar graph would have done a much better job than that crap they have up there now."
You can't use graphs from the eighties nowadays, it's uncool.
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BP, on the other hand.. that was deliberate misleading..
Of course it was. A cleanup per day figure rather than a total volume would look bad not because BP wasn't doing a good job, but because the natural progression of the graph is to follow a downward trend after an initial spike. Big blotches are easy to clean, when you exhaust your low-hanging fruit for the same effort you get lower results when you have to start climbing the tree. No company would present a graph that looks like that when you can trend it up in total oil collected.
Mind you this graph which
Not to go too far off topic... (Score:1)
but GE is Evil.
Jeff Immelt is Satan.
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My how the fallen have fallen.
What about the fonts? (Score:5, Funny)
At first I was thinking that this story was about GE trying to push its agenda or doing something evil. But I RTFA and this is actually about this guy complaining that people are using the wrong type of chart and making poor design decisions. The big punch is that his wife agrees with him.
I am so shaken up by this story, I know I will get all nervous the next time I insert SmartArt charts in Powerpoint - I would be so ashamed to end up publicly flogged on this guy's strongly-worded blog...
Reminds me of a former coworker who is spending his evenings writing blog entries about companies that dare use Arial instead of Helvetica on their websites.
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I am so shaken up by this story, I know I will get all nervous the next time I insert SmartArt charts in Powerpoint - I would be so ashamed to end up publicly flogged on this guy's strongly-worded blog...
"This guy" is one of the most well known authors of the visualization community.
Check out his website [perceptualedge.com]. How many people have a wikipedia page of one of their inventions [wikipedia.org]?
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I think I now use Arial because most computers come with a zillion fonts and Arial is at the top and Helvetica is lost somewhere in the middle.
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I never understood the difference, either...until I got into publishing (on a small scale). I had a brief but torrid affair with Verdana as a body text (always use serif fonts for body text, shows you how much I knew at the time).
I will never forget the moment that it dawned on me that Arial is just a cheap whore compared to Verdana's classy lady. I understood. OMFG.
Why did Microsoft "innovate" Arial? Because they didn't want to pay license fees. What, like Micro$oft doesn't have enough folding cas
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Arial is radically different than Verdana in the horizontal space it consumes. And since they have shipped both fonts since forever (but not Helvetica), I think you have something confused.
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The problem is, the font snobs don't design fonts to handle Unicode (or hide the ones that they've done that on behind paywalls). Those of us who work with things other than western european languages (e.g., russian, japanese, even math!) like to use Arial as it has much better coverage of the glyph-space. As a bonus, it's widely deployed too. Such practical considerations trump the font snobs regard in my eyes, and in those of many other people too.
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This is a lot more than "fonts", and a bit closer to deception than you're making it out to be. Visualizations are supposed to convey information quickly. When they don't it just becomes a series of pretty pictures people look at that give the reader the impression that they've learned something. That's a form of deception. It's not outright lying, but it's also certainly not aesthetics like font type.
It's too bad you expected the wrong thing going into the article. But it sounds like you're letting yo
Well if you think the visualisation is poor... (Score:3)
...then perhaps we'd better not even get started on the quality of the underlying data.
The sole purpose of corporations providing information is to convince the public of something that will benefit the company. From inception to design through data collection, analysis and reporting there is a defined marketing objective and it never involved "let's find out". Yet we treat with less scepticism than reports from an independent academic that at least in theory has survived a thorough peer review - though even that tends to assumes the technical parameters operated were correct. How often do you see reference to, say, questionnaires in the methodology which then goes on to even let you see a copy of the questionnaire?
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Wow.. and YOU have no political bias at all, do you? Go away.
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somewhere between the computer lab (funded by HP), the new classroom (funded by BP), the endowed professor chair (funded by Motorola) and the John Witherspoon Sciences Annex (heir of an oil fortune), i managed to see one little girl on a hunger strike about some nigerian dictator killing his people so that he could steal their land for an oil pipeline.
i told her to stop this silliness, and think about all the 'free enterprise' this nigerian fellow (im sure that 'dictator' is a stretch. he only killed a few
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Yes, it would be nice to believe that "one little girl" would be so self-sacrificing, if not terribly astute, as to stand on the side of some street somewhere in the US starving herself to death, thinking she'll be noticed and that the wonderful people of that country would suddenly mend their ways and cease toiling to make things better for themselves as well as others, thus bringing about th
truth is stranger than fiction (Score:2)
which is why nobody believes it.
there were a couple of protests about 10 years ago about an oil company dealing with some dictators in the western pacific, cant even remember the names.
one of the local 'professional student protestor' groups had this girl who went on a hunger strike over it.
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While you are right about the marketing end, you are incorrect in extending the marketing objective's influence into the inception, design, and data collection phase. Sure, they display simplified graphs to the general public in order to sway opinion. Why do they do it? Because the underlying data suggests that there is money to be made. You can bet that there is a lot of underlying data, which was obtained, analyzed, and reported internally at no small cost. GE needs to convince itself first before it trie
Typical liberal butthurt (Score:1)
I love how the submitter tries to validate his submission with a paper that has "social justice" in the first paragraph. What a load of crap.
Off to slam Comic Sans, laters.
yup. a phrase that andrew carnegie (Score:2)
..
ok actually andrew carnegie used this phrase, and so did some other industrialists in the early 1900s, when they did things like Henry Ford raising the wages of all of his workers something like five fold.
the book (Score:2)
is called 'our times' (part of a series) from the early 1900s by some guy whose name i cant remember.
Yeah, and? (Score:1)
When someone refers to 'social justice' (Score:2)
.. I reach for my revolver, because it means that they want to impose their view on me and consider themselves justified in doing so.
Justice equals law equals the desire to use force. Otherwise they would talk about 'social suggestions' instead.
I palindrome I (Score:2)
When I hear the phrase "When I hear the phrase $x, I reach for my $y", I reach for my Quine.
Fault McCandless, not GE (Score:5, Informative)
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures. (Here's his website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ [informatio...utiful.net] )
The problem is not that the data presented are not useful, or that they're deliberately intended to deceive, which we could fault GE for. As I see it, the problem is that the graphs themselves are crap. They hide useful information, and they use shape and color in ways that seem to provide information but don't, and in general they focus on the aesthetic appeal of the charts at the expense of the data.
When I first encountered McCandless's site a few years ago, I really loved it, but as time goes on it's begun to piss me off. For example, his chart on relative radiation risks:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/ [informatio...utiful.net]
Logarithmic charts are always difficult to explain to the public, but the triangular shape of his graph makes it even worse, suggesting a linear increase in dose. He compares it to XKCD's chart [xkcd.com], but his version is inferior in every way. XKCD uses color and shape to provide information; in McCandless's version color and shape have negative information content.
Another example: a graph of time travel plots in film and TV (minus Dr. Who):
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/ [informatio...utiful.net]
The curvy lines look nice, but all anyone can make out of this is a confusing snarl of lines too tangled to parse. Once again, shape has negative information content in this image.
But the king of the bad visualizations is probably another graph McCandless did for GE:
http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/co2/#/flights_London_Tokyo [geblogs.com]
Here, there's no way to intercompare various quantities, and figure out which of two choices is bigger. Shape, color and position are once again meaningless or misleading (things are shown the same size even when they're 8x different), quantities are in incompatible units, and worst of all some of the numbers are flat-out wrong (for instance, fuel usage of aircraft).
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
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I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures.
Yes, the latter was hired to produce the misleading figures, and the former selected, hired and paid for that work. Why exactly does this exonerate GE of responsibility for the images it commissioned and hosts on its site?
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Sounds like modern art syndrome to me. I'm sure if you go to a GE office building, you will find ugly pieces of modern art. It does not mean GE is trying to subvert the human ideals of beauty or that they are the cause of bad art, it means they bought into the same crap so many others do. Buy it because it's famous and respected, not because you like it yourself.
GE didn't hire the guy to produce misleading figures, they hired him because he's a well-respected data visualization expert (even in many comments
facts versus message (Score:2)
Informative post, except for this:
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
Megacorporations are presenting a message alright, but it's not one of information. Rather it's delivering messages that make them either look good or confuse the issue, or both. Ever read How to Lie with Statistics? Megacorporations are not filled with dumb marketing people, they are almost certainly acquainted with such techniques. Are they lying to themselves as well as us? I don't know and I don't care. Fry's visualizations, and now McCandless's artsy ones, were chosen
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When I first encountered McCandless's site a few years ago, I really loved it
Can you explain why? I would have thought that anyone who has ever considered data and the visualization of it would see his site and pretty much instantly realise it was pile of useless drek.
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Because he actually gave a damn. Information presentation has recently come into vogue, but a couple years ago, it was tough to find people who recognized the value of a good chart. Also, many of the things he links to which are done by other people (example 1 [informatio...utiful.net] example 2 [informatio...utiful.net]) are quite good.
Other GE Visualizations: Rank-And-Yank Curves (Score:4)
Didn't stop them from losing tens of billions of dollars [forbes.com] in the financial meltdown, but GE is a big fan of Forced Ranking [rightattitudes.com]: "Jack Welch, General Electric's former CEO, is often associated with a 20-70-10 distribution: the top 20 percent is rewarded for best performance, the middle 70 percent is rated 'average' and the bottom 10 percent is coached for improvement. The 'rank-and-yank' system, also associated with Jack Welch, automatically terminates employees in the bottom category, allowing organizations to purge the worst performers."
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You would think so, but an automated culling system actually has very negative impact on fostering teamwork (critical in a company that relies on innovation). After all who wants to share information when someone else could use it to edge above you in the performance review. It also doesn't take into account the quality of your staff. If you have the best people and you still need to fire the bottom 10% what message does that send?
Other GE Visualizations: GE/McKinsey Matrix (Score:2)
Pac-Man meets Tic-Tac-Toe [uottawa.ca]: "Though the GE/McKinsey Matrix is more sophisticated than the BCG matrix and can provide higher value information for the executive management, it has several flaws and limitations..."
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I call Inky, Blinky and Clyde in the corner pocket. Cherries are trumps.
Not only that (Score:1)
, Few asked his neuropsychologist wife whether he might be overreacting. She, too, agrees
Few then asked his mom about GE's data visualization who replied "Yes it's just horrible. Not as good as my pretty little boy could do."
Does anyone EVER believe corporate data? (Score:2)
Seriously, corporate data is always compromised and is the worst sort of misleading propaganda. It doesn't matter if it's a drug company, a software company,. a hardware company, an oil company, an airline, whatever. The corporate citizen has no character, integrity, principles, or purpose other than advancing the goals of the corporation...and whatever data it puts out reflects that. The only corporate data that is ever even remotely honest is the financial data and that's only because it is audited by
A frighteningly short time (Score:1)
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Normally, I'd agree with you. However, as a New Yorker, I can tell you that these phrases are used (or at least known) in the coastal Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, MD). I can't say one way or the other how a New Englander might react, because I've never been out that way (except for a brief foray into Boston once). It's not something that we commonly use, but we understand the idiom. Whether that's from linguistic evolution or global telecommunications, I don't know. I didn't have any trouble understanding th
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As a New Englander (a Rhode Islander, even) yes, we do use these idioms.
They are more picturesque than boring "standard" English.
--
BMO
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I've lived and traveled throughout the United States of America, and I'm pretty sure that no American would write that way. You wouldn't hear such phrases used in places like California, New York, Colorado, Washington, Maine, or in the mid-western states.
I find it interesting that I could read that summary with no problems even when I'm not a native English speaker. Perhaps you should read a bit more, because I have read people from those "places" use those phrases. By the way, an interesting link about getting your dander up [phrases.org.uk].
Re:Can somebody translate the summary into English (Score:4, Informative)
"got Few's dander up" == "Few lost patience."
Recommendation: steer clear of the writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. There is a difference between business English and literary English.
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[I don't] suffer fools gladly is a crude way of pointing out that you're an arrogant douchebag.
Probably why St. Paul used it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffer_fools_gladly [wikipedia.org]
dander is redneck slang for anger.
There's a good explanation of its origins here: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/5/messages/289.html [phrases.org.uk]
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>"never did suffer data visualization fools gladly"
suffer: verb - to put up with, to endure, to tolerate
data visualization fools - collective noun - idiots that don't know how to draw a graph.
gladly: adverb - enjoy with a smile. this word modifies the verb "suffer"
To rewrite the sentence fragment:
"never did gladly tolerate idiots that can't draw a good graph"
I like the original better.
> and "got Few's dander up"
If you've ever angered an animal enough to provoke a fight or flight response, its fur sta
Re:Pathetic. (Score:5, Funny)
What's good for GE shows up as legislation in America.
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ala wind subsidies
With as much wind as we have, one would think that it needed no subsidies, but it is somehow believable that it is.
--
When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, and scream and shout.
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It's almost impossible to compete with the vast fossil fuel subsidies. People who mock the costs of alternative energy sources seem to forget that one of the chief reasons they aren't competitive is that any subsidies they may get are dwarfed by what is handed over to oil companies.
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the chief reasons they aren't competitive is that any subsidies they may get are dwarfed by what is handed over to oil companies.
Did you consider reliability and cost in your market analysis?
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It's almost impossible to compete with the vast fossil fuel subsidies. People who mock the costs of alternative energy sources seem to forget that one of the chief reasons they aren't competitive is that any subsidies they may get are dwarfed by what is handed over to oil companies.
Someone trying to site a wind turbine will be met with a suit by environmentalists or nimbys. Economics is not what stops wind energy.
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Do you come on every thread with a vaguely green theme and spew horseshit? In case you hadn't noticed, the US gov't has funded and fought wars to maintain stability of oil and other fossil fuel supplies. These wars cost a material percentage of the US's wealth, which is certainly not true for renewables. And of course, this type of subsidy is only one small part of how petrocompanies are subsidised.
Additionally, your point about tax cuts not being subsidies is fundamentally flawed. The issue is not what tax
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It's a shame your logic doesn't match your vocabulary. Why the fuck would you think that I think that *every* argument contrary to mine is horseshit? Do you not see the logical fallacy and essential narcissim (to use your oh-so-clever phrasing) in imagining that because I disparage your argument in this way, I do the same with everyone else? I disparage your argument as horseshit because it is internally inconsistent, is contrary to the evidence available to us, and is clearly driven by your ideological mot
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What's good for GE certainly doesn't help the IRS. Biggest company in the world, and paying practically no taxes.
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What's good for GE is good for India
FTFY [truthdig.com]
Tell that to the residents of Bhopal.
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Uh, that was Union Carbide, which is now owned by Dow Chemical, which has nothing to do with GE, other than that they're both industrial companies.
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Uh, that was Union Carbide, which is now owned by Dow Chemical, which has nothing to do with GE, other than that they're both industrial companies.
Except that they use the same bought dog politicians.
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So this has NOTHING to do with abusing third world countries except that being able to poison the land and treat workers like dogs is considered a nice bonus to these bastards, no what we are talking about here is companies taking hand outs to then fuck us over with the money which is why we should demand payback at 75% interest RIGHT NOW and if they don't? They are banned. No GE products, no GE businesses, not even the CEO will be allowed to set foot on American soil and any assets they have here seized.
But of course that will never happen because our congress critters and dear leader are too busy cashing their bribery checks thanks to Citizens United to give a fuck. Hell the CEO that pulled this shit? Got to enjoy having GE PAY NO TAXES for most of this past decade!
The reason companies outsource to foreign nations is due to being able to reap the rewards of the American tax system.
I have no problem with companies sending jobs to other countries, as long as those same companies take their administration, secretaries, CPA's, their board of directors with them. The American tax system should be for American companies hiring American workers.
As for the abuses of the foreign workforce, soon enough they will wise up and start demanding higher wages, it's already happening i
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Well, take the visual out of data VISUALIZATION, what is left?
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What's good for GE is good for GE share holders. If the the board of GE is not acting in this way they are not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility. GE does not care about America anymore than it cares about any other country. Go away shill.
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I have absolutely no idea what the summary is about - it makes no sense and there is no context...
Um, did you finish High School? Or are you just being deliberately obtuse?
Re:WTF does the summary mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the summary could actually try to summarize what is going on. For example it could let us know:
* Who is Stephen Few? Is he an expert in this filed or some random blogger?
* What data on the GE website are they talking about? If there are many different sets of data give an example of one.
* What is 'Eyeo Festival'?
Providing some basic context lets us know whether TFA is worth reading - as is stands it just bunch of meaningless drivel.