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

[Bill Stewart]

>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!

... and Tim goes on to attribute this to lawsuits of types 
that he asserts wouldn't happen in a free society.
It's not that cut and dried - in a free society, 
solid contributors are often fired for non-economic reasons,
and one reason such people are _not_ fired is also fear of lawsuits.
Stupidity may be stupid, but it's not rare, and there are 
lots more opportunities for random decisions to get made.

One friend of mine was having lunch with her boss and a male 
coworker that she got along well with, (back in the 70s) and the boss 
asked if they were going out.  "No, Bob, Charlie and I are both gay";
she and her coworker were both fired that week.
It wouldn't happen today, at least here in San Francisco,
partly because of changing attitudes in society (or at least
because people got used to it), and partly because the boss
would worry about losing other productive workers or customers,
but also because the boss would get sued or harassed by _some_
city or state agency whose job is harassing businesses.
But there's much of the country where it could happen.

An employer might also be concerned about the effects of a 
hostile atmosphere on the productivity of other employees,
not just the lawsuitishness of those employees - 
in a free society you have more flexibility to make decisions
about how to handle situations.  Sometimes companies don't deal
with personnel-relationships problems until hit on the head
with a two-by-four made of compressed lawyers.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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