This is why a free society is evil. [Re: This is why HTML email is evil.]

[Tim May]

At 9:40 AM -0500 12/15/00, auto58194 at hushmail.com wrote:
>Tim May wrote:
>>
>>  In a free society, free economy, then employers and employees are
>>  much more flexible. A solid contributor would not be fired for
>>  something so trivial as having a porn picture embedded in some minor
>>  way. Hell, a solid contributor probably wouldn't be fired even for
>>  sending MPEG porn movies to his buddies!
>>
>
>Depends on your definition of a free society, free economy.  In my definition,
>  free society, free economy property holders are free to use the power derived
>from their property in order to protect their property and also to advance
>their own agenda.
>
>I don't know if your example involved a claim the Personnel Dept. bimbo
>was acting as an agent of the company's property holders or not, but that's
>just the advancing agenda situation.

The reason the company now prohibits all sorts of activities, and the 
reason the Personnel Commissar is inspecting offices, is because of 
_externalities_ like lawsuits, harassment charges, etc. In a free 
society, these externalities would vanish.


>I suspect you'd be happier if property
>holders didn't hire people prone to making decisions advancing their own
>individual agendas.  Unfortunately, it's hard to find perfect people and
>it's still the decision of the property holder to hire them and allow them
>to make decisions without supervision.

You seem to fundammentally misunderstand the situation. The reason 
the Personnel Commissar is ordering sensitivity training, workshops, 
and is requiring that posters of Brittny Spears be removed from 
office walls is because government and lawyers have made companies 
liable in various ways for "discriminatory" or "sexist" or suchlike 
behaviors.

One of my fellow engineers at Intel had a large poster of the famous 
early 80s porn star, "Seka," on his walls--she was, in this poster, 
clothed, albeit skimpily.  Some of the secretaries clucked, and 
retaliated by putting up Chippendales calendars, including full 
frontal nudity.

Would such things be tolerated today? Nope. And not because of the 
personal choices of a particluarl Personnel bimbo.

Nope, the fear is of lawsuits.

This was my point about a free society.


>
>Even so, a property holder is equally free to protect their property by
>deciding that firing an individual accused of an action is less of a cost
>than the legal actions and/or bad press that might otherwise result.  Firing
>actions don't have to be rational and property owners are free to be gutless.

You're really missing the point, aren't you? Go back and think about 
the issues more deeply.

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: 1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns