questions which they'll preface with ominous portents if you answer affirmatively, so the examiner assumes you're going to lie about them
This is the thing that scares me most about having to take a lie-detector test (which I thankfully have not had to do, though not having a security clearance no doubt hurts my employability somewhat). What if you don't lie to the control questions?
Suppose you actually haven't cheated on a girlfriend or used marijuana, to use the above example. Suppose they ask about fetishes and you say "Yep, I enjoy watching scantily clad Asian grandmothers drive heavy construction equimpent", or whatever happens to be true in your case. Then, their controls are messed up.
Hopefully the results in such cases would be reported as "inconclusive" rather than interpreting essentially random fluctuations.
Not very many people know quite what the BBB's powers are:
Stats collection, as others have noticed. Anyone can get a report on a company and find out how many complaints (and, more importantly, unresolved complaints) have been filed.
If the company is a BBB member, then all complaints must get resolved (note that this doesn't mean resolved in the customer's favor), or the company's membership gets dropped. BBB provides arbitration to facilitate this.
That's pretty much it.
A selection of things they can't do:
Force any company to do anything. They can terminate a member's membership (and keep them from using the BBB logo, etc.) but that's it. They have no authority at all over non-members.
Know about every company. (E.g. I can go into business without notifying anybody except licensing boards and taxing authorities; I certainly don't need the BBB's permission).
Tell you some company is legit, non-legit, a scam or not, etc. You have to make up your own mind after reading the report. (Think of the slander lawsuits, even from scamsters!) There are exceptions for blantantly illegal things like foreign lotteries, fake cashier's check scams, etc.
Give customers legal advice (the legal industry would rather they didn't, and BBB CSR's would rather not be liable for practicing law without a license). They'll certainly refer you to the AG, postal inspectors, etc. if you want help putting the legal smackdown on a scamster. If you just want to know whether something a company did was legal, gotta ask a real lawyer.
no organization is any more evil than the people in it
What about corporations? Most people in a corporation (yes, even CEO's) are decent. There are very few people who are as sociopathic as the typical corporation. Do you know anybody who's willing to run society into the ground for a small amount of short-term personal gain? Do you know any corporations that are not?
This sort of advice is only useful if you think that the whole of civilisation is going to collapse.
Many geeks actually think collapse of civilization, or events of a similar catastrophic scale, are likely. For people who a bit cynical and can see patterns (both traits of most any professional programmer), it's easy to see current trends leading to a Great Depression II, the U.S. becoming a third-world country because of racing to the bottom, the U.S. middle class becoming extinct (and since few of us are already wealthy, we'd be consigned to poverty), or other Bad Stuff.
I deal with this partially through spiffy meds, and partially though denial. Simply assuming a relatively static future (e.g. no hyper-inflation) works well for day-to-day planning and living. Also, many of the patterns we see (e.g. political corruption up, corporate control up, income stratification up) have happened before, and either ended up swinging the other way, or have failed to destroy society so far.
Besides, there's no good way to prepare for economic/societal collapse, other than those that involve a compound and a heavily-armed like-minded population, so you can keep your hoarded goods / farm from being taken over by local warlords. If society then fails to collapse, at best you look pretty silly and waste a ton of money, at worst you get into a fight with the still-powerful government and get squashed like a bug.
[8] If big companies don't want to wait for the government to take action, there is a way to fight back [against patent trolls] themselves. For a long time I thought there wasn't, because there was nothing to grab onto. But there is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. Big technology companies between them generate a lot of legal business. If they agreed among themselves never to do business with any firm employing anyone who had worked for a patent troll, either as an employee or as outside counsel, they could probably starve the trolls of the lawyers they need.
The best idea I had was running for office (state House at the time), but I can't afford it, and most likely wouldn't win anyway. Anyway, we ended up with a pretty good guy running the next time (Grier Martin, in Raleigh, NC) and won, so it worked out.
The electoral system is pretty useless given the Demopublicans' stranglehold over ballot access, but it's not dead yet. Encourage good people to run, support them, vote (even for the lesser evil), etc.
Maybe the best bet is to get some like-minded people together and form a political party. (Common Sense Party? Consumer Rights Party?) It sure seems like there's enough outrage out there to pull something together. It would have to start with state and local offices, working their way up to federal-office candidates, though.
Be cautious about "business" deductions
on
Is a Weblog a Business?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You will have to report the income, as "self-employment" income. That's not any more difficult than anything else relating to individual taxes.
If you want to consider this a "business" and write off the expenses related to it, the IRS says it's got to be an activity carried on for the purpose of making a profit, not just a hobby that happens to generate income (even if it's a net profit). They have some nice, vague criteria on their website. Being considered a hobby doesn't free you from paying taxes on the income, but it does prevent you from deducting the expenses.
As for needing licenses, that's highly dependent upon your state, county and city (any of them might require licenses). I live in Raleigh; North Carolina has a "Business License Information Office" you can call, and they will tell you what licenses you need. Hopefully your state / locality has something similar.
My guess would be that nobody will care about licenses since you're not "engaging in a trade". However, only your state / local government knows for sure.
There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques. Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item. Anyone who sent a legitimate payment will understand this, and it only takes 3-5 days.
Not necessarily. There is only one way to be sure about the goodness of a check, no matter how long you wait. That is to cash it at the issuing bank (who will know for sure). Especially if the check is from overseas, it could be weeks later that it comes back to your bank with a "this is fake" or "we have no such account" or "that account is closed". Then, your bank cheerfully deducts the money from your account, and you're screwed. (A domestic fake / closed-account check can be caught somewhat sooner, but it could still take quite a while after your bank releases the hold on the funds).
(I went through this when my wife had a job that was bouncing paychecks - luckily they were drawn on a local bank, so we were able to compensate by going to their bank to cash the paycheck, then going to my bank to deposit the cash).
That said, there's probably little point in not accepting such payment, except in these cases:
You're selling an expensive, easy-to-fence item, like a laptop.
The person wants you pay with a larger check and have you refund the difference, as the grandparent says (this is a common scam, and there's no convincing legitimate reason to be doing it, though the scammers often make up plausible-sounding ones)
There's a problem with this - since companies can get this work done anywhere in the world, if you want to unionize (or improve working conditions in any way) then you have to get the whole world on board at the same time. Good luck.
You have a good point; the same sort of trends-last-forever thinking caused the dotcom bubble.
However, my depressive side wonders if there haven't been fundamental changes (which, of course, is what the irrationally-exuberant in the dotcom bubble thought as well). Communications are certainly not going to get more expensive. U.S. corporations are certainly not going to get less power (and there are many factors pushing them towards greater power). International borders are certainly not going to become more restrictive to labor (classical economics says that would be economic suicide; besides, it's always in the best interests of the rich to be able to pick and choose the poorest labor pool).
So what factors are going to puch the pendulum back the other way? (Everyone says "customers demanding better quality", but I've never once seen a customer that demanded better quality and was willing to pay more).
The worst-case scenario, of course, is that no countries make the transition from third-world. Instead, every country makes the transition to third-world, and stays there forever, because otherwise their citizenry have no jobs.
Certainly, this makes total global output (GDP of the world) continually rise, according to established economic theory. However, that theory is strangely silent on how the increases will be distributed.
Currently, trends are moving towards a very small, very rich elite, exploiting the labor of an entire world of serfs living at base-subsistence conditions. There are many forces pushing things this way, as well (a system that forces corporations to continually increase profits or die, economies of scale leading to small numbers of huge corps, basic human greed, governments subservient to the corps,...)
Historically, the only force counteracting this was revolution (through peaceful, legal means or otherwise). Opposition of this trend through legal means in the U.S. is essentially impossible, because of the government's beholden-ness to the corporations. Opposition through violent revolution can't happen until conditions get bad enough so that people prefer risking near-certain death to living as they do. Either way things look pretty bleak.
If it were in the U.S., the banks would just buy some legislation to make offshoring their development legal, once it would save more money than the legislation costs. Simple economics.
Is it actually profitable for companies to outsource their calls?
Good question.
At my employer, we have most (embedded software development) work going on at our India location. It's hiring people all the time; essentially no hires in the U.S. (even to replace attrition).
The interesting part is: we bring people from India here for weeks / months at a time to train. This means they're living at the U.S. standard of living, or even slightly higher; we have to pay for hotels, restaurant meals, etc.
I think this flies because of a standard big-company (though we're not actually big) tactic: separate budgets. When presenting to the board, they probably say "Look how little we're spending on headcount! (Don't look at that travel budget)".
The real answer, of course, is that it's always cheaper in the short term, and U.S. companies (especially publically-traded ones, but also VC-owned ones like ours) are legally prohibited from thinking makeing short-term sacrifices for long-term benefit.
I'd love to see this kind of punishment generalized to other companies. AOL is by far not the only company whose business model includes auto-recurring billing and difficult cancellation.
My optimist side hopes that this lawsuit will be seen as a deterrent by other companies, and the practice will wither away. Alternatively, maybe some other AGs will jump on the bandwagon, and enough companies will get publically smacked for this behavior to form a deterrent.
Ameritrade also works just fine for me in Firefox on Linux.
However, I'm not doing anything fancy, just buying, selling, looking at account history, and such. I tend to do research on Yahoo Finance, and have no need of Level II stuff, so I've no idea how well Ameritrade's site works in those areas.
Funny you should ask; I've expounded on this before.
A corporation must become psychopathic once it reaches a certain size (defined by number of investors, and not the same for every company). Look at it this way: A sole proprietorship is answerable to only one person, so it will act according to that person's ethics. A publically-traded company has a practically infinite number of investors, and is answerable to them all. The only common factor amongst them will be a desire to make money.
Compensation and employment practices also contribute. Because executives are compensated largely in stock options, their personal interest lies in keeping the stock price increasing, which (because of the way stocks are priced) means keeping the profit growthrate increasing constantly. Also, since executives are "disposable" employees like you and me, they have no incentive for the company to be healthy in the long term (as they would if, say, they were going to retire and draw a pension).
This short-term thinking leads to companies putting next quarter's profit numbers above all else (including the long-term survival of the company). It's obviously not good for a company to destroy the society of which it is a part (and which supplies it with customers), but they are trying, because it's good in the short term.
Many think this is a Good Thing, because free-market capitalism has been shown to lead to good GDP growth (leading to more wealth available to all), and any profits the company is making get put back into the economy in the form of returns to shareholders (which theoretically anyone can be). I don't personally buy it, because it also leads to concentration of wealth, and "tragedy of the commons" damage to society due to externalities.
A reductio in absurdum example:
Suppose through (bought) legislation, or some other means, a company found a way to charge everybody in the country a recurring charge every month, while providing no service at all. This is the Holy Grail of corporate America; every company that could do this would be required to, in orcer to keep the stock price up. This would lead to the company essentially being a parasite on the economy; a large enough parasite could bleed the economy dry.
The people who support this are thinking about the economics, without thinking about the social consequences.
Free-market capitalism requires sociopathic behavior of companies; they must act without a conscience to increase profits. In return, this keeps the size of the economy (GDP) growing.
Whether you believe that GDP growth at the expense of all else is a good thing or not is a matter of personal politics / "religion". Some think that keeping GDP growing is all that matters, because that increases the size of the "pie", making better standards of living available for everyone. Some (such as myself) think there need to be other factors optimized for in our economy (Percentage of poor people? Population-weighted average standard of living? Not sure) because our current system of simply optimizing for GDP growth can lead to massive concentration of wealth / power, and other social ills.
Which is right? Unfortunately, the only way to know is to wait and see, since we can't really run full-scale controlled experiments to find out for sure. Also, those who are already wealthy / powerful, and sociopathic (including all corporations, of course), will support laissez-faire capitalism because it gives them the freedom to amass more wealth without interference. Fighting the wealthy / powerful is always difficult (see any story on opposing software patents, for example).
One of our guys (an H1B, I believe), left here (our U.S. location) to go back, taking a job at about 40K USD / year for some other company in India.
This is certainly not as much as a programmer with equivalent experience might make in the U.S., but it's not so much cheaper as to make offshoring work to him a "no brainer".
My company was using TCS for a while, then opened their own office in Hyderabad to cut down on the middleman-costs.
According to several reports from Indians here and dealings with some of the managers there, Hyderabad is getting like Silicon Valley in the late '90s. People can simply walk out whenever they want, they'll find a new job the next day. There's a lot of turnover because of that.
Also, wages are going up. A couple of our test guys (who are dealing with hordes of Indian colleagues, of course) have noted that the wages are coming up to where it's not that much less expensive to hire in India. (It's still cheaper than the U.S. of course).
I had always predicted / feared that once this wage parity started happening, companies would start offshoring all their jobs to other places (China? Romania? the Congo?) but that does not seem to be happening, probably because few other countries are teeming with English-speaking programmers as India is.
This means that there's some hope for the trade equilibrium predicted by classical economics / big-business apologists, rather than the "race to the bottom" where every country becomes Third World, predicted by me and some fellow paranoids.
I'm most certainly not saying employers should run secret genetic tests without employee consent
Neither is anybody else as far as I know.
The problem is that "consent" from employees doesn't mean much, morally (I'm certain it carries plenty of legal weight). When presented with the choice "take and pass this test, or you're fired", when one has to buy food and shelter, does the employee have a realistic option to refuse? What about when most / all employers across the industry do so? "Sorry, looks like you got the wrong degree. Better go back to school and retrain"?
My point is that practices that are evil enough, and not illegal, tend to become industry standard, and so voting with your feet is not an option. Trying to get legal protection against it is tough (maybe impossible now?) in our era of corporate-owned government.
Employers aren't always bad; aren't always in the wrong.
Quite true. However, corporations (there's a difference; many are employed by sole proprietorships or other small businesses) are usually in the wrong - it's a good way to bet. Any explicitly-amoral entity whose sole purpose is to continually increase profit growth rate is certainly going to trample people along the way. By corporate logic, weeding out genetically "undesirable" employees is not only a Good Thing, but required.
An example I like to use is pre-employment credit checks. There are some employers who will do credit checks upon candidates. I can see this for money-handling and similar jobs (where bad credit or financial troubles might make you a theft risk). However, there are employers who will do this for ordinary office jobs, using the logic that someone with bad credit is probably "irresponsible" and therefore will not be a good employee.
I think that's Evil(tm) because it easily leads to a downwards spiral if widely deployed; you fall on hard times, credit gets bad, you can't get a job because of bad credit, credit gets worse,...
I've been using MailHop Outbound from dyndns.org for this... my mail server sends to them, they relay it onwards... something like $30 / year for 300 messages / day, and no problems (that I've noticed) in a couple of years.
This way, for a lot less than buying "business class" service, I don't have to worry about dynamic-IP blocklists. If Roadrunner decides to block outbound port 25 MailHop can accept mail on other ports. It requires SMTP AUTH so I'm accountable for the messages.
I want information to be free when that helps me get things done: keeping the details of the SMB/CIFS protocol secret hinders my ability to keep my systems functioning smoothly, for example.
I want information to be kept secret when disclosure can hurt me. For example: some aggregator finds out I buy environmentally-conscious products, own a small house upon which most work is done myself, and generally live (slightly) below my means. Prospective employers get access to this data and refuse to hire me, because I'm not living so close to the edge of bankruptcy that I'm easy to control by the threat of firing.
See, it's all just enlightened self-interest (the very engine that drives capitalism).
Slashdot Mirror
This is the thing that scares me most about having to take a lie-detector test (which I thankfully have not had to do, though not having a security clearance no doubt hurts my employability somewhat). What if you don't lie to the control questions?
Suppose you actually haven't cheated on a girlfriend or used marijuana, to use the above example. Suppose they ask about fetishes and you say "Yep, I enjoy watching scantily clad Asian grandmothers drive heavy construction equimpent", or whatever happens to be true in your case. Then, their controls are messed up.
Hopefully the results in such cases would be reported as "inconclusive" rather than interpreting essentially random fluctuations.
- Stats collection, as others have noticed. Anyone can get a report on a company and find out how many complaints (and, more importantly, unresolved complaints) have been filed.
- If the company is a BBB member, then all complaints must get resolved (note that this doesn't mean resolved in the customer's favor), or the company's membership gets dropped. BBB provides arbitration to facilitate this.
That's pretty much it.A selection of things they can't do:
I deal with this partially through spiffy meds, and partially though denial. Simply assuming a relatively static future (e.g. no hyper-inflation) works well for day-to-day planning and living. Also, many of the patterns we see (e.g. political corruption up, corporate control up, income stratification up) have happened before, and either ended up swinging the other way, or have failed to destroy society so far.
Besides, there's no good way to prepare for economic/societal collapse, other than those that involve a compound and a heavily-armed like-minded population, so you can keep your hoarded goods / farm from being taken over by local warlords. If society then fails to collapse, at best you look pretty silly and waste a ton of money, at worst you get into a fight with the still-powerful government and get squashed like a bug.
If promoting a dispirited or negative view of life is illegal there, I guess Slashdotters aren't welcome.
Occasionally, they let listeners know that, for every $75K raised before the spring pledge drive, they'll shorten the spring pledge drive by a day.
The best idea I had was running for office (state House at the time), but I can't afford it, and most likely wouldn't win anyway. Anyway, we ended up with a pretty good guy running the next time (Grier Martin, in Raleigh, NC) and won, so it worked out.
The electoral system is pretty useless given the Demopublicans' stranglehold over ballot access, but it's not dead yet. Encourage good people to run, support them, vote (even for the lesser evil), etc.
Maybe the best bet is to get some like-minded people together and form a political party. (Common Sense Party? Consumer Rights Party?) It sure seems like there's enough outrage out there to pull something together. It would have to start with state and local offices, working their way up to federal-office candidates, though.
If you want to consider this a "business" and write off the expenses related to it, the IRS says it's got to be an activity carried on for the purpose of making a profit, not just a hobby that happens to generate income (even if it's a net profit). They have some nice, vague criteria on their website. Being considered a hobby doesn't free you from paying taxes on the income, but it does prevent you from deducting the expenses.
As for needing licenses, that's highly dependent upon your state, county and city (any of them might require licenses). I live in Raleigh; North Carolina has a "Business License Information Office" you can call, and they will tell you what licenses you need. Hopefully your state / locality has something similar.
My guess would be that nobody will care about licenses since you're not "engaging in a trade". However, only your state / local government knows for sure.
(I went through this when my wife had a job that was bouncing paychecks - luckily they were drawn on a local bank, so we were able to compensate by going to their bank to cash the paycheck, then going to my bank to deposit the cash).
That said, there's probably little point in not accepting such payment, except in these cases:
Before Operation Desert Storm, the Iraqi Army was the fifth largest army in the world.
Afterwards, it was the second largest army in Iraq.
There's a problem with this - since companies can get this work done anywhere in the world, if you want to unionize (or improve working conditions in any way) then you have to get the whole world on board at the same time. Good luck.
However, my depressive side wonders if there haven't been fundamental changes (which, of course, is what the irrationally-exuberant in the dotcom bubble thought as well). Communications are certainly not going to get more expensive. U.S. corporations are certainly not going to get less power (and there are many factors pushing them towards greater power). International borders are certainly not going to become more restrictive to labor (classical economics says that would be economic suicide; besides, it's always in the best interests of the rich to be able to pick and choose the poorest labor pool).
So what factors are going to puch the pendulum back the other way? (Everyone says "customers demanding better quality", but I've never once seen a customer that demanded better quality and was willing to pay more).
Certainly, this makes total global output (GDP of the world) continually rise, according to established economic theory. However, that theory is strangely silent on how the increases will be distributed.
Currently, trends are moving towards a very small, very rich elite, exploiting the labor of an entire world of serfs living at base-subsistence conditions. There are many forces pushing things this way, as well (a system that forces corporations to continually increase profits or die, economies of scale leading to small numbers of huge corps, basic human greed, governments subservient to the corps, ...)
Historically, the only force counteracting this was revolution (through peaceful, legal means or otherwise). Opposition of this trend through legal means in the U.S. is essentially impossible, because of the government's beholden-ness to the corporations. Opposition through violent revolution can't happen until conditions get bad enough so that people prefer risking near-certain death to living as they do. Either way things look pretty bleak.
This may have already happened, I don't know.
At my employer, we have most (embedded software development) work going on at our India location. It's hiring people all the time; essentially no hires in the U.S. (even to replace attrition).
The interesting part is: we bring people from India here for weeks / months at a time to train. This means they're living at the U.S. standard of living, or even slightly higher; we have to pay for hotels, restaurant meals, etc.
I think this flies because of a standard big-company (though we're not actually big) tactic: separate budgets. When presenting to the board, they probably say "Look how little we're spending on headcount! (Don't look at that travel budget)".
The real answer, of course, is that it's always cheaper in the short term, and U.S. companies (especially publically-traded ones, but also VC-owned ones like ours) are legally prohibited from thinking makeing short-term sacrifices for long-term benefit.
My optimist side hopes that this lawsuit will be seen as a deterrent by other companies, and the practice will wither away. Alternatively, maybe some other AGs will jump on the bandwagon, and enough companies will get publically smacked for this behavior to form a deterrent.
However, I'm not doing anything fancy, just buying, selling, looking at account history, and such. I tend to do research on Yahoo Finance, and have no need of Level II stuff, so I've no idea how well Ameritrade's site works in those areas.
A corporation must become psychopathic once it reaches a certain size (defined by number of investors, and not the same for every company). Look at it this way: A sole proprietorship is answerable to only one person, so it will act according to that person's ethics. A publically-traded company has a practically infinite number of investors, and is answerable to them all. The only common factor amongst them will be a desire to make money.
Compensation and employment practices also contribute. Because executives are compensated largely in stock options, their personal interest lies in keeping the stock price increasing, which (because of the way stocks are priced) means keeping the profit growth rate increasing constantly. Also, since executives are "disposable" employees like you and me, they have no incentive for the company to be healthy in the long term (as they would if, say, they were going to retire and draw a pension).
This short-term thinking leads to companies putting next quarter's profit numbers above all else (including the long-term survival of the company). It's obviously not good for a company to destroy the society of which it is a part (and which supplies it with customers), but they are trying, because it's good in the short term.
Many think this is a Good Thing, because free-market capitalism has been shown to lead to good GDP growth (leading to more wealth available to all), and any profits the company is making get put back into the economy in the form of returns to shareholders (which theoretically anyone can be). I don't personally buy it, because it also leads to concentration of wealth, and "tragedy of the commons" damage to society due to externalities.
A reductio in absurdum example:
Suppose through (bought) legislation, or some other means, a company found a way to charge everybody in the country a recurring charge every month, while providing no service at all. This is the Holy Grail of corporate America; every company that could do this would be required to, in orcer to keep the stock price up. This would lead to the company essentially being a parasite on the economy; a large enough parasite could bleed the economy dry.
Free-market capitalism requires sociopathic behavior of companies; they must act without a conscience to increase profits. In return, this keeps the size of the economy (GDP) growing.
Whether you believe that GDP growth at the expense of all else is a good thing or not is a matter of personal politics / "religion". Some think that keeping GDP growing is all that matters, because that increases the size of the "pie", making better standards of living available for everyone. Some (such as myself) think there need to be other factors optimized for in our economy (Percentage of poor people? Population-weighted average standard of living? Not sure) because our current system of simply optimizing for GDP growth can lead to massive concentration of wealth / power, and other social ills.
Which is right? Unfortunately, the only way to know is to wait and see, since we can't really run full-scale controlled experiments to find out for sure. Also, those who are already wealthy / powerful, and sociopathic (including all corporations, of course), will support laissez-faire capitalism because it gives them the freedom to amass more wealth without interference. Fighting the wealthy / powerful is always difficult (see any story on opposing software patents, for example).
This is certainly not as much as a programmer with equivalent experience might make in the U.S., but it's not so much cheaper as to make offshoring work to him a "no brainer".
My company was using TCS for a while, then opened their own office in Hyderabad to cut down on the middleman-costs.
According to several reports from Indians here and dealings with some of the managers there, Hyderabad is getting like Silicon Valley in the late '90s. People can simply walk out whenever they want, they'll find a new job the next day. There's a lot of turnover because of that.
Also, wages are going up. A couple of our test guys (who are dealing with hordes of Indian colleagues, of course) have noted that the wages are coming up to where it's not that much less expensive to hire in India. (It's still cheaper than the U.S. of course).
I had always predicted / feared that once this wage parity started happening, companies would start offshoring all their jobs to other places (China? Romania? the Congo?) but that does not seem to be happening, probably because few other countries are teeming with English-speaking programmers as India is.
This means that there's some hope for the trade equilibrium predicted by classical economics / big-business apologists, rather than the "race to the bottom" where every country becomes Third World, predicted by me and some fellow paranoids.
The problem is that "consent" from employees doesn't mean much, morally (I'm certain it carries plenty of legal weight). When presented with the choice "take and pass this test, or you're fired", when one has to buy food and shelter, does the employee have a realistic option to refuse? What about when most / all employers across the industry do so? "Sorry, looks like you got the wrong degree. Better go back to school and retrain"?
My point is that practices that are evil enough, and not illegal, tend to become industry standard, and so voting with your feet is not an option. Trying to get legal protection against it is tough (maybe impossible now?) in our era of corporate-owned government.
Quite true. However, corporations (there's a difference; many are employed by sole proprietorships or other small businesses) are usually in the wrong - it's a good way to bet. Any explicitly-amoral entity whose sole purpose is to continually increase profit growth rate is certainly going to trample people along the way. By corporate logic, weeding out genetically "undesirable" employees is not only a Good Thing, but required.An example I like to use is pre-employment credit checks. There are some employers who will do credit checks upon candidates. I can see this for money-handling and similar jobs (where bad credit or financial troubles might make you a theft risk). However, there are employers who will do this for ordinary office jobs, using the logic that someone with bad credit is probably "irresponsible" and therefore will not be a good employee.
I think that's Evil(tm) because it easily leads to a downwards spiral if widely deployed; you fall on hard times, credit gets bad, you can't get a job because of bad credit, credit gets worse, ...
I've been using MailHop Outbound from dyndns.org for this... my mail server sends to them, they relay it onwards... something like $30 / year for 300 messages / day, and no problems (that I've noticed) in a couple of years. This way, for a lot less than buying "business class" service, I don't have to worry about dynamic-IP blocklists. If Roadrunner decides to block outbound port 25 MailHop can accept mail on other ports. It requires SMTP AUTH so I'm accountable for the messages.
I want information to be kept secret when disclosure can hurt me. For example: some aggregator finds out I buy environmentally-conscious products, own a small house upon which most work is done myself, and generally live (slightly) below my means. Prospective employers get access to this data and refuse to hire me, because I'm not living so close to the edge of bankruptcy that I'm easy to control by the threat of firing.
See, it's all just enlightened self-interest (the very engine that drives capitalism).