There seems to be an axiom that businesses ought to increase their profitability every year. Not just stay at a level profitability, but increase it. Obviously a business always has to stay sharp and on its toes, because the world is constantly changing out from under you, and you must be flexible and adaptive and so on. But that doesn't a priori have anything to do with increasing profitability versus maintaining profitability.

Obviously, stakeholders. My question is: is there any benefit to society or some scale larger than the company itself, of demanding that profitability be eternally ratcheted up?

Here's a post about university management.

Why Fahrenheit is superior to Celsius. The graph at the very bottom made me laugh even though it's seriously not that funny. But I'm convinced on the author's basic point!

--Olbermann's original tweets about PSU were way better than his bullshit apology. Also, ESPN is the very face of evil.

--Sadly, the explanation is 100% believable. Dude's facial expression is priceless.

Little Lending Libraries must be destroyed, presumably because they smack of sharing and caring.

Let's put 100 kindergartners in a single classroom and pretend it's disruptive innovation or something. At least it's disruptive.

This week is unusually stressful for assorted dumb work reasons. Sorry if I've been grouchy.

Is this common knowledge for everyone but me???

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

...

"It's sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place - if you can't find a client in the system, odds are they're there," said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

What. the. fuck.

Via delegar, elsewhere

February has got to be the coldest month. Every daycare closure that I can remember for the past five years seems to happen in February. Similarly, September seems to be the most miserably hot month, and I don't think that it's just summer fatigue. Why is it so delayed from the solstices? Is the planet really net-gaining heat or net-losing heat on a daily basis in a way that accumulates?No, as soon as I wrote that I realized it's nonsense, what with the opposite seasons per hemispheres. I suppose I could google but you could say that about every post I've ever written, and please don't.

I was going to write a post asking "what's it called when you assume a persona in order to mock it?"--you know, like Sean Penn was doing, and like Justine Sacco was doing--figuring there must be some obscure Greek term for this very complex satire that no one on Twitter seems to have ever encountered. Then I had what the Greeks called a "duh" moment: that's parody.

Now, parody is risky, and done poorly, it can veer into recapitulation (this was the problem with Colbert's "ching chong" joke) but it is a thing, and can be a very amusing and effective thing.

I'm old enough to remember when blogs were all about The Daily Outrage, and then most people seemed to realize that that was a boring and unproductive way to make a public space, and moved on to other things. Maybe the twitverseosphere will get there too.

I was looking at state-by-state driver's license policies for undocumented immigrants, and the big red Nebraska surprised me. Did you guys know the Cornhusker State denies the Dreamers access to licenses? Some details:

Circumventing the state's law for promulgating regulations, Governor Heineman announced in a 2013 press release that DACA recipients were ineligible for driver's licenses in Nebraska. [...]

In a majority of states, DACA recipients are able to obtain driver's licenses since, as was confirmed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in January 2013, they are considered lawfully present in the country. Nebraska is the only state in the nation that denies these young immigrants access to driver's licenses, thereby imposing enormous burdens on their educational and employment opportunities and their ability to assist their families.

That's a real jerk move, Nebraska.