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

[Tim May]

At 6:26 PM -0800 12/15/00, Bill Stewart 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!
>
>... 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,

I didn't say that contributors are not fired for non-economic 
reasons. Maybe they're not putting out for the boss, maybe he doesn't 
like people who supported Gore. Whatever. Not for anyone but the 
property owners to deal with.

>and one reason such people are _not_ fired is also fear of lawsuits.

Depending on the terms of an employment contract (most have none), 
employees are employed at will. In a free society, that is.


>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.

In a free society, so what?


>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,

Which is as it should be....


>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.

Because we don't live in a free society. Which was my point.



--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