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Apartment In US Asks Tenants To 'Like' Facebook Page Or Face Action (business-standard.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Business Standard: An apartment building in Salt Lake City has told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease. Tenants of the City Park Apartments said they found a "Facebook addendum" taped to their doors last weekend, asking them to "like" the City Park Apartments Facebook page. The contract says that if tenants do not specifically "friend" City Park Apartments on Facebook within five days, they will be found in breach of the rental agreement. In addition, the contract includes a release allowing the business to post pictures of tenants and their visitors on the Facebook page. Currently, the apartment building has a 1.1 star rating on its Facebook page.
IIRC, that's a violation of Facebook's Terms of Service. Please report it to Facebook, and if enough people corroborate the report, the business in question won't have a page anymore.
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You know, you didn't even have to read the article. You only had to make it to the second sentence of the summary to learn the name. In fact, it's mentioned three times in the summary alone.
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-- "Oh. This guy again."
Sort of like illegal drug dealing, prostitution and assassination? Granted they exist because they provide a service people are willing to pay for. However, they're limited in number and difficult to do due to the nature of governmental opposition.
Many potentially profitable businesses don't exist because society doesn't give permission for them. It sure seems like they do need "society's permission" since laws are created by society to prevent actions and businesses the society doesn't approve of. Many times, this is actually a good thing.
Consider net neutrality. Most posters here seem to be in favor legislation forcing companies to act against their own profit interests in favor of something benefiting the greater good of the society that creates the rules.
This coming from an avowed libertarian.
>Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state, over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote, to plutocratic jungle where my landlord/employer/whatever does shit like this. But perhaps you fancy being one of the overlords.
We used to have that system. It was called feudalism. It's what libertarianism (or indeed any other brand of unregulated capitalism) must inevitably devolve into. We got rid of that system for very, very good reasons.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>If a business is messed up enough, people will eventually vote with their feet.
Maybe this theory actually could work in practice, but the reality is society has generally found that it's better to get rid of the butcher selling the dodgy meat BEFORE half the town is dead. And generally businesses tend to have no such thing as a conscience. It takes a very evil person to poison a town's drinking water - it merely takes a typical company to do the same. If we don't prohibit this behavior explicitly - not only can we not even try to prevent it, we can't punish them if they do it either (something we mostly do in the hope of preventing all the other companies from also doing it).
Libertarians always claim their theories cannot be disproven by empirical facts. The claim is two-fold, firstly they mostly subscribe to Austrian economics - a cult that rejects the very concept of empiricism and so can conveniently ignore when all their economic predictions invariably fail to occur (for example). Secondly they claim that their ideas in terms of government has never been truly tested - so it can't be refuted until it is. Except... it has, repeatedly, they just disavow every occurrence there-off because they all went very bad, very quickly. Tortuga, Somalia - all places of small and limited government with no real regulation. One historical, one current.
In both cases the 'government' was quickly a non-entity and actual rule devolved into powerful warlords (seeing as there was no powerful government to prevent this) who are much, much worse than any democratic government. Liberty was soon replaced with slavery and forced labour - since the government was too weak to prevent this (by means of things like labor laws to define what is or isn't free labor and punish those who violate that). And in both cases death, famine and disease were soon rampant.
Productivity rapidly broke down and very soon the main industry was piracy - that is, taking the productivity of people in other (functional) countries to supply the needs of your own non-functional one by force.
This is what *always* happens (indeed it's the only thing that CAN happen) when folks like you get their way. Another version of that ruled Europe for centuries, it's mature form is called 'aristocracy' (an aristocrat is just what warlords become after a generations when their position gains political cement) - and the economic system was called feudalism. Feudalism wasn't REPLACED by capitalism it replaced it. It's what capitalism without adequate regulation must ultimately become. We returned to a functional market economy only when we added regulations - by taking away the 'rights' that the feudal warlords had claimed for centuries. Reducing the liberty of the few, to give liberty to the many - it's the only way that liberty ever has been or ever can be increased.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *