9thdoctor

Off topic observation: Tucker Carlson repeatedly refers to Amy Peikoff as a libertarian, and not only does she not bristle at it, she nods in agreement. What a change from even, say, 10 years ago. I've seen the same with Yaron Brook, during his appearances on Dave Rubin's show.

In short:

Recall that the corollary of "Check your premises" was "Watch your implications". If I'm ascribing to you views you don't hold, consider whether they are implied by the views you have stated. I've already pointed out that Amazon (as well as Walmart and McDonalds) are legally forbidden to ask the questions (in the hiring process) that would make it possible for them to not employ people receiving government assistance. So they're between a rock and hard place already. And I wouldn't favor it if they did put such a policy in place anyway. It would require the kind of system that led to the tragedy of Fantine in Les Miserables. Entry level pay for entry level work is the merit system. Honest work, honest pay, as you say. If that's not enough for a given employee's needs, it's not the employer's fault. And if an employer adds a "social worker" function to its HR department, I don't see that changing the fundamental moral positive that they've provided a job.

Sleaze? What's sleazy about providing entry level pay for entry level work? And what if, instead of providing info about government programs they only provided info about private charities? Churches and such? Would that still point to some nefarious motive? That they're trying to hold people down, pay them subsistence at a subsistence rate, to keep them in wage slavery? There's nothing Amazon-specific about any of this. It's standard Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren material. And Marx before them.

Where do I get the conclusion that having your employer counsel you on how to get government assistance will lead to employees being more productive and loyal? If these things (food stamps, subsidized housing) make the employee's life more stable, they'll be able to concentrate on work better. Single mothers worried about being evicted aren't reliable, good chance they'll miss their next shift.

He's got a new one upcoming: https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-America-History-Alan-Greenspan-ebook/dp/B079WKXYYR/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536618931&sr=8-1&keywords=alan+greenspan I wonder how it'll be made to relate to Trump. No doubt he'll be making the rounds of the talking heads shows, and they'll all be prompting him to speak ill of the current prez.

I don't say it's a good thing. But HR departments aren't run by Objectivists. They probably put this in the same moral category as smoking cessation programs.

They provide counseling for their lower-income employees so they learn how to take advantage of things like subsidized housing, food stamps, etc.? And this (presumably) makes them more productive and even loyal? If so, Amazon didn't invent this. It's one of the reasons to value a job with a big company like Amazon over waiting tables at a mom and pop diner.

Meanwhile, we managed to dodge an ice age. http://reason.com/blog/2018/09/10/thank-a-farmer-if-you-hate-ice-ages

You believe they seek out employees who receive government assistance? I don't see how one could prove that true or false. If it were true it would get leaked out eventually (via some internal policy manual becoming public). If not true, there would never be confirmation of the fact. As to postage, at least where I live, Amazon does its own deliveries. Which tells me that bringing that part of the business in-house is cheaper and/or more reliable than using USPS.

Responsible to the employee and to "society". Which is not necessarily altruism, though invariably it gets packaged that way. This ("responsibility to stakeholders" in modern parlance), as opposed to the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith. Alright, let's move on. Allow me to assert, without proof, something I believe is most likely true: Amazon receives a sufficient number of job applicants for its entry-level positions that it could fill them all without hiring a single beneficiary of government assistance. So why don't they? Could it be because they are forbidden to ask? There are a whole host of questions you're not allowed to ask nowadays, like marital status...I'm not even going to start compiling a list here. Actually, I don't think Amazon seeks to exclude struggling single mothers, but note that they couldn't even if they wanted to. Ultimately what this comes down to is whether Amazon may pay market rates for labor. Since they're so successful are they to be held to a different standard than McDonalds? And they have some number of government contracts (which they're dependent on? What percentage of their revenue comes from the government? Is it a no-bid deal? Did they get an affirmative action preference?).

I'm going to have to insist you answer my first question: Is it the responsibility of an employer to ensure the economic stability/status of its employees? Yes, no, maybe, sometimes?

Is it the responsibility of an employer to ensure the economic stability/status of its employees? Especially of their entry-level ones? There will always be single mothers with limited work history and dead-beat dads. They have to start somewhere, and it’s going to be in jobs more ideally suited (compensation-wise) to college students who live with their parents. Amazon picker, for instance. If there wasn’t government assistance, they’d have to rely on private charity (before the “war on poverty”, that’s what they did), maybe from churches or battered women shelters, etc., to make ends meet. Then they get to climb the ladder. It sucks to be on the lowest rung, there's no disputing that. Is Amazon to deny employment to single mothers, to avoid the claim that they’re being subsidized? Imagine what that would look like. It calls to mind the story of Fantine in Les Miserables.

Yeah, that's over the line. But for some reason I feel it would be within bounds to use this picture: I'm not into football, and whole "taking a knee" thing has never struck me as important.

Can't resist. There's a non-trivial probability that this NYT thing is a complete fabrication. Like Dan Rather's GWB documents. Most likely it'll be years before we know.

Who is the one between Bin Laden and Franken? I don't recognize the face. The Weiner one is the best.

I'm wondering if it's cultural appropriation, or some kind of trans-species offense to post this: You'll let me know?

"Informed by", not "ruined". Alright, it's not really as bad as that. For an update you might check out the TV show Burn Notice, its plots were often McGee-esque. I used to see them filming it in my neighborhood. I wouldn't be surprised if I had a cameo walk-by role in some episode or other. Time will tell, my prediction is pretty premature. On the plus side, note that Gillum was polling lower going into election day than Gary Johnson is polling now. Yeah, 5 way race vs. 3 way race, I know.

He didn't win by much, and it was a five way race. I think he's going to lose, and he's going to take Bill Nelson (Senator) down with him. I got some lulz (and you may too) from this interview: Did he just call for a new Confederacy?

Yes, right out of the playbook, the non-sequitur segue. I believe the next step is dependent on whether I react with an apology or a double-down. In the case of apology: But I forget, what comes after a double-down?

Who, me? Man, you've got the repertoire of SJW knee-jerk reactions down cold. Look, no actual Mexicans were harmed in this scene: Hmm, so Gillum won the Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi's character) award for surviving. And we're told he's a socialist, therefore a pinko. Get it? Now, where's the child molestation angle?

The other candidates ran ads constantly...but I never saw a single one from or about Gillum. The ads were vicious, vying to establish their opponents were like Trump, had been friends of Trump, etc. A Mexican standoff. And the one left standing is the guy who never drew a gun. There was one, by Levine, which featured punching sounds (preceded by a bell, like the start of a boxing round) punctuating its bullet points of how the candidate had beaten Trump over this or that. It doesn't seem to have made it to YouTube. Oh well, take my word for it, it was so over-the-top it was funny.

He just picked up Rand Paul's endorsement. http://reason.com/blog/2018/08/28/huge-news-rand-paul-endorses-gary-johnso I'm feeling hopeful. Go ahead, call me crazy.

Amen to that. McCain-Feingold in particular, which led to the Citizens United case. As to the rest, all I wanted to establish was that he did "something more than getting captured and held prisoner of war for years", no matter how we project what his motives at the time were. He made a choice, and (hard to believe I'm about to type this) it was something comparable to John Galt advising his captors how to fix their torture machine.

While I was no fan of McCain qua politician, and regard his prisoner-of-war heroism as misdirected, the story bears reviewing. This comes from David Foster Wallace's piece on McCain from 2000. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/david-foster-wallace-on-john-mccain-the-weasel-twelve-monkeys-and-the-shrub-194272/ But there’s something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain’s military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It’s very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we’ve all heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off-the-charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s life. But it’s worth considering for a minute, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line easier to hear. You probably already know what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi, Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90-degrees to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison – a.k.a. the “Hanoi Hilton,” of much movie fame – where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant’s office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain’s father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true – both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused, The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? It so, would you have refused to go? You simply can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you’d react. But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he’s capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn’t just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: the guy does – did – want your vote, after all.