You know what would have been neat? If you'd kept reading. If you'd kept reading, you would have gotten to the part where I explained the "give away the razors and sell the blades" business model.
I've never seen any system that the boss could keep running on his own
Then you must not be very experienced. You should try getting out more.
Any student of economics also knows that market forces drive prices down, but not to zero. Rather, to a point of balance between (hello) supply and demand. The price of a product typically starts high then falls steadily over time to a certain point which cannot be accurately predicted in advance, and which can best be described by the old adage "what the market will bear."
People are willing to pay for technology when the value they receive from buying the technology exceeds its cost.
Frankly, the value of Linux is so incredibly low that it has to be given away. If anybody tried to charge for it, they'd go out of business immediately.
Some have tried to apply the business model of giving away a poor product and then selling service contracts to support that contract. Not just companies, either; lots of IT pros have adopted this tactic. "Linux is free, so I'm saving you money, boss. Of course, you'll never, ever be able to keep it running on your own, so I've just guaranteed that you'll spend many more thousands of dollars paying me than you would have spent buying better computers in the first place." It's a valid business plan -- just ask Gillette -- but it's hardly a sure thing. It's predicated on convincing people that it's more desirable to accept an ongoing expense than a capital expense. That's an argument that only works sometimes.
And it's sure as hell not new, nor is it an industry-changing paradigm shift.
Any firm selling, for instance, an operating system, would feel threatened by what is becoming the standard OS
Um. Nooooo. If you want to talk about the standard, you're going to have to talk about Windows.
If every single person who's ever used Linux instantly divided into ten separate people, the total number of Linux users would still be a tiny fraction of the total number of Windows users.
Linux represents the brutal and unflinching march of technology towards the zero price point.
When I read this, I actually, no shit, yawned out loud. This sentiment is as old as the hills. The minute the first caveman chiseled the first wheel out of granite, another caveman standing behind him grunted, "Og think someday wheels be free."
To express this sentiment requires a deep and pervasive lack of understanding of economics. Things have monetary value associated with them not because of what they cost to produce, but because of what people are willing to pay for them.
How much did it cost Van Gogh to paint his picture of sunflowers? If you add up all the paint he used, all the brushes, all the canvas, and all the time he spent over the course of his life learning to paint, perfecting his craft and mastering his art, you might come up with a total cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
That painting sold at auction for nearly $50 million.
The cost of a thing isn't related to what it cost to produce. It's related to what the buyer perceives the value to be.
There is, in short, no "brutal and unflinching march of technology towards the zero price point." It simply doesn't exist. It's a myth, a concoction, a rumor, a big ol' lie.
Because as long as you offer your product for free, I'll be able to make a tidy profit by selling a better product.
Others' posts not withstanding, I don't care much about how easy or hard it is to install an operating system, as long as it's easy enough. Neither Windows nor Linux is easy enough.
But installing an operating system is something that most people will never do in their lives. It's something that even the most hard-core computer hobbyist might do once every year or two. It's just not important.
What's important is the ability to accomplish tasks with a computer. Have your students take three computers out of the boxes, one with Windows installed, one with Linux and one a Mac. Have them download some pictures from a digital camera and burn them to CD.
On the subject of FM radios and such, here's my two cents.
Think about mobile phones. Practically every mobile phone today has a camera in it. If you want a decent mobile phone, you have to buy one with a camera.
I don't want a camera. So when I buy a $120 phone with a camera, I feel ripped off. How much less could they have sold the phone for if they didn't put the stupid camera in it?
Apple knows that most people don't want a portable radio. They know that for two reasons. First, they know that historically portable FM radios have not sold like wildfire. Second, they know because they asked. Apple does tons of market research, which is one reason why they hardly ever ship products that flop. They have a good idea of what people want before they ship the first unit.
So if Apple added a radio just because they can, they know right up front that most people won't actually want it. Sure, it might only add a couple of bucks to the cost of the iPod, but the perception on the part of the customer is that he's being sold something he doesn't want. How much cheaper could the iPod have been if it didn't have that stupid radio in it?
Yes, he's a total sheep for trying something and discovering that he likes it. If he just did what you tell him and adopted a knee-jerk reaction to hate everything that everybody sells, then he could be a real independent thinker.
I absolutely agreed with you at first... but then I thought about it for a bit. I realized that nearly all of the time I spend listening to my iPod I spend listening to it on "shuffle."
See, Apple knew this already because they thought to ask. That's why they deserve credit. Did they make a product that everybody will love? No, of course not. But they made a product that most people will love by asking a lot of people how they use the products they already have and learning from the answers.
It's true that Sony understands style sometimes... and that time was 1985.
Back in 1985, when you bought a piece of high-end Sony stereo equipment, it looked slick. It was matte black with a glossy black front plate with a jillion buttons and little lights.
Thing is, though, one day somebody woke up and said, "Black boxes with buttons and lights are ugly and dumb."
Hence we have the iPod. It's white, and it has no buttons.
Sony understood style once, but the public's definition of "style" changed, and Sony failed to change with it.
I think at some point you just start deciding that you don't need some things.
I carry a phone with me wherever I go. I feel naked without it. It's always with me.
I also carry a driver's license, a bank card and a credit card, and a little bit of cash.
If I'm driving, I carry a car key.
That's it. That's the total contents of my pockets at any given time.
If I'm going someplace where I want to listen to music, I carry an iPod. If I'm on the train commuting, say, I like to have my iPod for listening to music or podcasts. Ditto if I'm driving in the car, although that doesn't really count because the iPod stays in the car when I park it.
I'm not interested in carrying a PDA. My phone has all my phone numbers in it, plus it acts as my alarm clock. A camera? No, thanks. I don't just spontaneously decide in the middle of the day that I'm going to take a picture. If I wanted to take pictures, I'd have brought my Nikon with me. I think my phone has a camera in it, but I've never actually used it, so I can't say for sure.
A radio? Not interested. If I'm listening to anything, I'm listening to my iPod, either in the car or on the train.
And as for a GPS device... is it really that important for you to know what your coordinates are at any given time?
I think there comes a point in every man's life when he realizes that gadgets qua gadgets just aren't very interesting, and that it's better to simplify.
So? I'm sick and tired of the "it's perfectly legal" defense. That ceases to matter to me the moment somebody raids MY pocketbook to pay for YOUR mistake. If smoking ceased to exist, the public health costs we, as a nation, have to pay would drop by A THIRD. Instantly.
Of course, it can't just cease to exist. But we can still work to marginalize it, with the long-term (like decades long) goal of wiping out the practice.
If you prefer, here's a counter-proposal: Smokers are ineligible for employer-provide health insurance. It's an unfair burden on non-smokers to subsidize health care for smokers. Better?
For example, motorcycle riding is WAY too dangerous...
You seem to have missed reading the actuarial tables. The odds of getting into a motorcycle accident, a mountain-climbing accident, a rock-climbing accident or a car accident as the result of speeding are tiny, and the odds of health problems related to being overweight are also pretty small (Despite all the hype and what intuition would tell us, the incidence of heart disease and other maladies in people who are merely overweight, as opposed to clinically obese, is not significantly higher.)
The odds of getting sick and dying from smoking are 75%. Three out of four smokers will die as a direct result of his habit. Those aren't even odds. That's a death sentence.
As for people who are morbidly obese, and therefore at significantly increased risk for a heart attack, vascular problems and type II diabetes, those people need to be in a hospital anyway, not working in your office. Non-issue.
It can really start to snowball on you....legal activities you do outside the workplace shouldn't affect your employment
You argued that if a policy were expanded unreasonably, it would be bad, therefore the reasonable implementation of that policy is bad. That's a dumb argument.
Since any appropriation of federal funds is done via an act of Congress, anyone who accepts federal funds also has to accept the strings that are attached.
That's an assertion that has gone both ways in the courts. It's not something you can really state authoritatively.
I realize these are all inherent qualities that nobody gets to choose
That's got precisely nothing to do with it. The fact is that we have laws prohibiting employers from firing you based on those factors. Everything that's not expressly forbidden is legal.
Wow. You don't have the slightest understanding of anything going on in your life. Reducing two totally different ways of looking at the role of government down to glib and dismissive sound bites is the stupidest thing I've heard all day. And that is saying something.
That's not an example of wrongful termination, not by a mile. Generally speaking, wrongful termination claims can only stand in cases of discrimination or retaliation. There are so other even narrower exceptions, but that's it.
See, the problem here is that you're forgetting that legal terms have very specific meanings. You can't just say, "I don't think he should have been fired. I think firing him was wrong. Therefore, I'm going to sue for wrongful termination!" That's not what the term means. "Wrongful termination" means that an employer violated a specific law in firing you. We have laws protecting you against discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, disability, age, or a few other criteria. We don't have any laws protecting you from discrimination based on whether or not you smoke.
Frankly, I think firing smokers is a fantastic idea. You wouldn't believe how much you can save on your company insurance plan if you can guarantee the insurer that your employees are all non-smokers. That saves money both for you and your employees, because premiums are lower, or coverage is better for the same premiums. I think it's a fabulous idea, and I'd love to see it duplicated elsewhere.
It's already been drawn. It's illegal to fire somebody (or to refuse to hire somebody) based solely on race, national origin, gender, religion, or age. (I think that's all of them.) Firing or refusing to hire on these grounds is discriminatory, and unlawful. The law spells these exceptions out very clearly and explicitly.
Everything else is permitted.
Is posting "I think George W. Bush is a douche bag" a good enough reason to fire someone?
It begs the question. Because no reason is required to fire somebody. To ask, "Is X sufficient reason?" misses the point, because no reason is required at all. So the question of whether X is sufficient never even comes up.
Is it allowable to have a Republican-only shop?
Yes. It's also "allowable" (I think you mean lawful) to have a communists-only shop, or an English-speakers-only shop, or a Star-Trek-fans-only shop. It's not lawful to have a men-only shop or a white-people-only shop or a Christians-only shop, because those are deemed discriminatory and are prohibited by law.
Using your definition, it would be damn hard to fire someone.
I don't see where you get that at all. All you have to do to fire someone is say, "You don't work here any more." It doesn't even have to be written. It can be done at any time with no paperwork or bureaucracy at all. It's incredibly easy to fire someone.
That's not going to help you when the "problem" is something like, "How do I burn a DVD?" or "How do I sync my iPod?" or "Why doesn't this work like the Mac I used to have?"
Yes. Your employer should be allowed to fire you for whatever reason he wants, up to a legally defined line that protects workers from discrimination or unfair practices.
Employers have rights too. The rights of employees do not trump the rights of employers.
Nobody is perfect. Everybody has flaws. Everybody has bad days. I'm more interested in working with people who are up-front and honest about their flaws and their bad days. People who try to be perfect in the misguided hope that I might believe them do not impress me.
Bloggers, as a rule, are pretty self-aware people. They do their share of navel-gazing. This is a good thing. Being self-aware is an advantage in the workplace. It would be a mistake to hide that.
If people looked at the intentions, as written, of the founding fathers, they would see that neither party is actually good for this country.
No offense, but that sounds like pretty typical college-student blah-blah. I say that as somebody who, when I was 20, spouted exactly the same kind of nonsense.
Clue #1: You are not the first person to read our nation's heritage documents. We've all read them. We all know that the founding fathers envisioned a much different country from the one we live in. But we also know that the founding fathers recognized, above all else, the limits of their vision. The Constitution isn't inscribed in stone. It's a living, changing document. The process for amending it is strict, but straightforward. It was intended from the start to be a document that could adapt to changing times and changing situations, not one that would be so rigid that it might someday have to be thrown out.
The Constitution, in other words, was meant to last forever. And so far, it's done very well.
Clue #2: We no longer live in an agrarian nation of a few hundred thousand people scattered from Georgia to New York. Our situation is neither better nor worse, objectively, though different people have different opinions. But our situation has changed, drastically. Merely looking at documents written in the 18th century and concluding that things are different today is not insight, and it's not wisdom.
Clue #3: What you euphemistically refer to as "citizenship classes" went by some different names in older days. We called it "slavery" and we called it "male suffrage." Blacks weren't allowed to vote because they were considered property. Women weren't allowed to vote for basically the same reason. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who would say with a straight face that it's a great idea to go back to the days before universal suffrage.
Bottom line: You sound like a nice kid, but I think you've read Starship Troopers too many times. Recognize the limits of your understanding. Remember that the people around you, both your peers and those who were born before you, are not idiots, and that we do things for good reasons. And above all, try to be a little more humble. You don't know half of what you think you know, and you don't know a tenth of what you'll think you know at 30. You're just getting started. you've got a long way to go.
No, that's not even a problem. Using force to keep anybody from doing anything is generally a crime, assault, and as such we have laws to deal with that. (There are exceptions, of course, as when the heroic bystander tackles the bank robber.) Using force to prevent somebody from speaking would not be a first-amendment issue. It'd be an issue for the local criminal courts.
No, the only time the first amendment comes into play is when Congress is involved. The purpose of the amendment is to keep the government from abridging the freedom of speech, or the freedom of religion, or what have you. That's where it starts and stops. It has nothing to say about disputes between individual citizens or between citizens and their employers.
How are you protected if you can speak words that will change your status in the world in a negative way?
The purpose of the Constitution is to protect the people from our government, not from each other.
Fine, don't call it "protected" either. Call it whatever the hell you want. Call it totalitarianism, call it a police state, call it Nazi Germany. Whatever. It's not going to change the fact that we do enjoy the freedom of speech, and that the other side of the "freedom" coin is labeled "responsibility."
What about whistle-blowers?
We're not talking about whistle-blowers. That's a whole 'nother subject, one we could discuss for hours and hours. It's not relevant here, however.
Well if what you are saying is opinion -- everyone's entitled to their opinion.
That's the truth. But I don't think it's really what you meant to say. From reading the stuff you wrote in your first paragraph, it seems to me that what you meant to say is, "I'm entitled to my opinion, and everybody else should be required to accept it cheerfully."
That's not how it is. The fact is, you're entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled to mine. If my opinion of you, based on what you write on your blog, is that you suck as a human being and that I don't want to employ you any longer, them's the breaks.
What can you do against your company if they are doing wrong?
Again, not the subject here. We're talking about bloggers, not whistle-blowers. Different, unrelated topics.
My point is that people should be able to say whatever they want without any reprocussion by any entity.
It's mathematically impossible for that to be true of all citizens at the same time. Want proof? Here we go.
There are three people in a room. There's you, and me, and my friend Bob. Bob and I have known each other for years. Bob trusts me, and listens to my opinions.
You say, "I think oranges are nasty. Apples are way better."
I, hearing you say this, say, "I think people who think oranges are nasty are mentally ill."
My friend Bob hears both of these things. Because he trusts me and listens to my opinion, my statement influences him. He begins to suspect that you are mentally ill.
You subsequently go to Bob and ask for something. Help moving your couch, let's say. Bob, acting under the suspicion that you might be crazy as a loon, declines.
The net result? Because you expressed your opinion, and then I expressed my opinion, you got stuck having to schlep your own couch.
Now imagine that the order of the statements is reversed. Imagine that I start by saying that I think people who don't like oranges are crazy, to which you reply that you don't like oranges. The net result is exactly the same, even though the order is reversed.
Which one of us should have been suppressed by the government? You, for voicing your opinion in the first place? Or me, for voicing my opinion? It was my statement that influenced Bob, but in either example, if you hadn't made your own statement, you would have suffered no consequences. Which one of us should have been jailed for practicing illegal speech? Because obviously both of us can't be allowed to speak. If we both speak, you suffer consequences. So one of us has to be silenced. How do we decide which one it should be?
Or would you rather just circumvent the whole question and have the government require Bob, under penalty of law, to help you move your couch?
See what I mean? It's a contrived example, yes, but that's because it's meant to prove that your theory is mathematically impossible to implement. If you want to be completely free of consequence, then I'm going to have to be suppressed. But if I want to be free of consequence, then you're going to have to be suppressed. If either one of us is suppressed, obviously not everybody is free to say whatever he wants. See? There's just n
Slashdot Mirror
Care to explain RedHat?
You know what would have been neat? If you'd kept reading. If you'd kept reading, you would have gotten to the part where I explained the "give away the razors and sell the blades" business model.
I've never seen any system that the boss could keep running on his own
Then you must not be very experienced. You should try getting out more.
Any student of economics also knows that market forces drive prices down, but not to zero. Rather, to a point of balance between (hello) supply and demand. The price of a product typically starts high then falls steadily over time to a certain point which cannot be accurately predicted in advance, and which can best be described by the old adage "what the market will bear."
People are willing to pay for technology when the value they receive from buying the technology exceeds its cost.
Frankly, the value of Linux is so incredibly low that it has to be given away. If anybody tried to charge for it, they'd go out of business immediately.
Some have tried to apply the business model of giving away a poor product and then selling service contracts to support that contract. Not just companies, either; lots of IT pros have adopted this tactic. "Linux is free, so I'm saving you money, boss. Of course, you'll never, ever be able to keep it running on your own, so I've just guaranteed that you'll spend many more thousands of dollars paying me than you would have spent buying better computers in the first place." It's a valid business plan -- just ask Gillette -- but it's hardly a sure thing. It's predicated on convincing people that it's more desirable to accept an ongoing expense than a capital expense. That's an argument that only works sometimes.
And it's sure as hell not new, nor is it an industry-changing paradigm shift.
Any firm selling, for instance, an operating system, would feel threatened by what is becoming the standard OS
Um. Nooooo. If you want to talk about the standard, you're going to have to talk about Windows.
If every single person who's ever used Linux instantly divided into ten separate people, the total number of Linux users would still be a tiny fraction of the total number of Windows users.
Linux represents the brutal and unflinching march of technology towards the zero price point.
When I read this, I actually, no shit, yawned out loud. This sentiment is as old as the hills. The minute the first caveman chiseled the first wheel out of granite, another caveman standing behind him grunted, "Og think someday wheels be free."
To express this sentiment requires a deep and pervasive lack of understanding of economics. Things have monetary value associated with them not because of what they cost to produce, but because of what people are willing to pay for them.
How much did it cost Van Gogh to paint his picture of sunflowers? If you add up all the paint he used, all the brushes, all the canvas, and all the time he spent over the course of his life learning to paint, perfecting his craft and mastering his art, you might come up with a total cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.
That painting sold at auction for nearly $50 million.
The cost of a thing isn't related to what it cost to produce. It's related to what the buyer perceives the value to be.
There is, in short, no "brutal and unflinching march of technology towards the zero price point." It simply doesn't exist. It's a myth, a concoction, a rumor, a big ol' lie.
Because as long as you offer your product for free, I'll be able to make a tidy profit by selling a better product.
What they forget is 'Linux' isn't a tangible entity.
:)
While I'm sure some think that's an asset, it's also a liability. For reasons that I would hope are obvious.
He knows what £0:00 is, though.
I'm not from the UK, so you're gonna have to give me a hint here. Is that how you guys express "midnight" in terms of pounds sterling?
Others' posts not withstanding, I don't care much about how easy or hard it is to install an operating system, as long as it's easy enough. Neither Windows nor Linux is easy enough.
But installing an operating system is something that most people will never do in their lives. It's something that even the most hard-core computer hobbyist might do once every year or two. It's just not important.
What's important is the ability to accomplish tasks with a computer. Have your students take three computers out of the boxes, one with Windows installed, one with Linux and one a Mac. Have them download some pictures from a digital camera and burn them to CD.
There's your test.
Also, it wouldn't be slander, it would be libel ... only it's not libel, either.
On the subject of FM radios and such, here's my two cents.
Think about mobile phones. Practically every mobile phone today has a camera in it. If you want a decent mobile phone, you have to buy one with a camera.
I don't want a camera. So when I buy a $120 phone with a camera, I feel ripped off. How much less could they have sold the phone for if they didn't put the stupid camera in it?
Apple knows that most people don't want a portable radio. They know that for two reasons. First, they know that historically portable FM radios have not sold like wildfire. Second, they know because they asked. Apple does tons of market research, which is one reason why they hardly ever ship products that flop. They have a good idea of what people want before they ship the first unit.
So if Apple added a radio just because they can, they know right up front that most people won't actually want it. Sure, it might only add a couple of bucks to the cost of the iPod, but the perception on the part of the customer is that he's being sold something he doesn't want. How much cheaper could the iPod have been if it didn't have that stupid radio in it?
iTunes.
Yes, he's a total sheep for trying something and discovering that he likes it. If he just did what you tell him and adopted a knee-jerk reaction to hate everything that everybody sells, then he could be a real independent thinker.
I absolutely agreed with you at first ... but then I thought about it for a bit. I realized that nearly all of the time I spend listening to my iPod I spend listening to it on "shuffle."
See, Apple knew this already because they thought to ask. That's why they deserve credit. Did they make a product that everybody will love? No, of course not. But they made a product that most people will love by asking a lot of people how they use the products they already have and learning from the answers.
It's true that Sony understands style sometimes ... and that time was 1985.
Back in 1985, when you bought a piece of high-end Sony stereo equipment, it looked slick. It was matte black with a glossy black front plate with a jillion buttons and little lights.
Thing is, though, one day somebody woke up and said, "Black boxes with buttons and lights are ugly and dumb."
Hence we have the iPod. It's white, and it has no buttons.
Sony understood style once, but the public's definition of "style" changed, and Sony failed to change with it.
I think at some point you just start deciding that you don't need some things.
... is it really that important for you to know what your coordinates are at any given time?
I carry a phone with me wherever I go. I feel naked without it. It's always with me.
I also carry a driver's license, a bank card and a credit card, and a little bit of cash.
If I'm driving, I carry a car key.
That's it. That's the total contents of my pockets at any given time.
If I'm going someplace where I want to listen to music, I carry an iPod. If I'm on the train commuting, say, I like to have my iPod for listening to music or podcasts. Ditto if I'm driving in the car, although that doesn't really count because the iPod stays in the car when I park it.
I'm not interested in carrying a PDA. My phone has all my phone numbers in it, plus it acts as my alarm clock. A camera? No, thanks. I don't just spontaneously decide in the middle of the day that I'm going to take a picture. If I wanted to take pictures, I'd have brought my Nikon with me. I think my phone has a camera in it, but I've never actually used it, so I can't say for sure.
A radio? Not interested. If I'm listening to anything, I'm listening to my iPod, either in the car or on the train.
And as for a GPS device
I think there comes a point in every man's life when he realizes that gadgets qua gadgets just aren't very interesting, and that it's better to simplify.
We can only pray that it goes as well as it did the last time Sony took on an iPod.
Smoking is a perfectly legal activity.
So? I'm sick and tired of the "it's perfectly legal" defense. That ceases to matter to me the moment somebody raids MY pocketbook to pay for YOUR mistake. If smoking ceased to exist, the public health costs we, as a nation, have to pay would drop by A THIRD. Instantly.
Of course, it can't just cease to exist. But we can still work to marginalize it, with the long-term (like decades long) goal of wiping out the practice.
If you prefer, here's a counter-proposal: Smokers are ineligible for employer-provide health insurance. It's an unfair burden on non-smokers to subsidize health care for smokers. Better?
For example, motorcycle riding is WAY too dangerous...
You seem to have missed reading the actuarial tables. The odds of getting into a motorcycle accident, a mountain-climbing accident, a rock-climbing accident or a car accident as the result of speeding are tiny, and the odds of health problems related to being overweight are also pretty small (Despite all the hype and what intuition would tell us, the incidence of heart disease and other maladies in people who are merely overweight, as opposed to clinically obese, is not significantly higher.)
The odds of getting sick and dying from smoking are 75%. Three out of four smokers will die as a direct result of his habit. Those aren't even odds. That's a death sentence.
As for people who are morbidly obese, and therefore at significantly increased risk for a heart attack, vascular problems and type II diabetes, those people need to be in a hospital anyway, not working in your office. Non-issue.
It can really start to snowball on you....legal activities you do outside the workplace shouldn't affect your employment
You argued that if a policy were expanded unreasonably, it would be bad, therefore the reasonable implementation of that policy is bad. That's a dumb argument.
Since any appropriation of federal funds is done via an act of Congress, anyone who accepts federal funds also has to accept the strings that are attached.
That's an assertion that has gone both ways in the courts. It's not something you can really state authoritatively.
I realize these are all inherent qualities that nobody gets to choose
That's got precisely nothing to do with it. The fact is that we have laws prohibiting employers from firing you based on those factors. Everything that's not expressly forbidden is legal.
Wow. You don't have the slightest understanding of anything going on in your life. Reducing two totally different ways of looking at the role of government down to glib and dismissive sound bites is the stupidest thing I've heard all day. And that is saying something.
You're a fucking idiot, man.
That's not an example of wrongful termination, not by a mile. Generally speaking, wrongful termination claims can only stand in cases of discrimination or retaliation. There are so other even narrower exceptions, but that's it.
See, the problem here is that you're forgetting that legal terms have very specific meanings. You can't just say, "I don't think he should have been fired. I think firing him was wrong. Therefore, I'm going to sue for wrongful termination!" That's not what the term means. "Wrongful termination" means that an employer violated a specific law in firing you. We have laws protecting you against discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, disability, age, or a few other criteria. We don't have any laws protecting you from discrimination based on whether or not you smoke.
Frankly, I think firing smokers is a fantastic idea. You wouldn't believe how much you can save on your company insurance plan if you can guarantee the insurer that your employees are all non-smokers. That saves money both for you and your employees, because premiums are lower, or coverage is better for the same premiums. I think it's a fabulous idea, and I'd love to see it duplicated elsewhere.
Where should the line be drawn?
It's already been drawn. It's illegal to fire somebody (or to refuse to hire somebody) based solely on race, national origin, gender, religion, or age. (I think that's all of them.) Firing or refusing to hire on these grounds is discriminatory, and unlawful. The law spells these exceptions out very clearly and explicitly.
Everything else is permitted.
Is posting "I think George W. Bush is a douche bag" a good enough reason to fire someone?
It begs the question. Because no reason is required to fire somebody. To ask, "Is X sufficient reason?" misses the point, because no reason is required at all. So the question of whether X is sufficient never even comes up.
Is it allowable to have a Republican-only shop?
Yes. It's also "allowable" (I think you mean lawful) to have a communists-only shop, or an English-speakers-only shop, or a Star-Trek-fans-only shop. It's not lawful to have a men-only shop or a white-people-only shop or a Christians-only shop, because those are deemed discriminatory and are prohibited by law.
Using your definition, it would be damn hard to fire someone.
I don't see where you get that at all. All you have to do to fire someone is say, "You don't work here any more." It doesn't even have to be written. It can be done at any time with no paperwork or bureaucracy at all. It's incredibly easy to fire someone.
Just like it's incredibly easy to hire someone.
That's not going to help you when the "problem" is something like, "How do I burn a DVD?" or "How do I sync my iPod?" or "Why doesn't this work like the Mac I used to have?"
Yes. Your employer should be allowed to fire you for whatever reason he wants, up to a legally defined line that protects workers from discrimination or unfair practices.
Employers have rights too. The rights of employees do not trump the rights of employers.
I would interview those people first.
Nobody is perfect. Everybody has flaws. Everybody has bad days. I'm more interested in working with people who are up-front and honest about their flaws and their bad days. People who try to be perfect in the misguided hope that I might believe them do not impress me.
Bloggers, as a rule, are pretty self-aware people. They do their share of navel-gazing. This is a good thing. Being self-aware is an advantage in the workplace. It would be a mistake to hide that.
If people looked at the intentions, as written, of the founding fathers, they would see that neither party is actually good for this country.
No offense, but that sounds like pretty typical college-student blah-blah. I say that as somebody who, when I was 20, spouted exactly the same kind of nonsense.
Clue #1: You are not the first person to read our nation's heritage documents. We've all read them. We all know that the founding fathers envisioned a much different country from the one we live in. But we also know that the founding fathers recognized, above all else, the limits of their vision. The Constitution isn't inscribed in stone. It's a living, changing document. The process for amending it is strict, but straightforward. It was intended from the start to be a document that could adapt to changing times and changing situations, not one that would be so rigid that it might someday have to be thrown out.
The Constitution, in other words, was meant to last forever. And so far, it's done very well.
Clue #2: We no longer live in an agrarian nation of a few hundred thousand people scattered from Georgia to New York. Our situation is neither better nor worse, objectively, though different people have different opinions. But our situation has changed, drastically. Merely looking at documents written in the 18th century and concluding that things are different today is not insight, and it's not wisdom.
Clue #3: What you euphemistically refer to as "citizenship classes" went by some different names in older days. We called it "slavery" and we called it "male suffrage." Blacks weren't allowed to vote because they were considered property. Women weren't allowed to vote for basically the same reason. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who would say with a straight face that it's a great idea to go back to the days before universal suffrage.
Bottom line: You sound like a nice kid, but I think you've read Starship Troopers too many times. Recognize the limits of your understanding. Remember that the people around you, both your peers and those who were born before you, are not idiots, and that we do things for good reasons. And above all, try to be a little more humble. You don't know half of what you think you know, and you don't know a tenth of what you'll think you know at 30. You're just getting started. you've got a long way to go.
No, that's not even a problem. Using force to keep anybody from doing anything is generally a crime, assault, and as such we have laws to deal with that. (There are exceptions, of course, as when the heroic bystander tackles the bank robber.) Using force to prevent somebody from speaking would not be a first-amendment issue. It'd be an issue for the local criminal courts.
No, the only time the first amendment comes into play is when Congress is involved. The purpose of the amendment is to keep the government from abridging the freedom of speech, or the freedom of religion, or what have you. That's where it starts and stops. It has nothing to say about disputes between individual citizens or between citizens and their employers.
How are you protected if you can speak words that will change your status in the world in a negative way?
The purpose of the Constitution is to protect the people from our government, not from each other.
Fine, don't call it "protected" either. Call it whatever the hell you want. Call it totalitarianism, call it a police state, call it Nazi Germany. Whatever. It's not going to change the fact that we do enjoy the freedom of speech, and that the other side of the "freedom" coin is labeled "responsibility."
What about whistle-blowers?
We're not talking about whistle-blowers. That's a whole 'nother subject, one we could discuss for hours and hours. It's not relevant here, however.
Well if what you are saying is opinion -- everyone's entitled to their opinion.
That's the truth. But I don't think it's really what you meant to say. From reading the stuff you wrote in your first paragraph, it seems to me that what you meant to say is, "I'm entitled to my opinion, and everybody else should be required to accept it cheerfully."
That's not how it is. The fact is, you're entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled to mine. If my opinion of you, based on what you write on your blog, is that you suck as a human being and that I don't want to employ you any longer, them's the breaks.
What can you do against your company if they are doing wrong?
Again, not the subject here. We're talking about bloggers, not whistle-blowers. Different, unrelated topics.
My point is that people should be able to say whatever they want without any reprocussion by any entity.
It's mathematically impossible for that to be true of all citizens at the same time. Want proof? Here we go.
There are three people in a room. There's you, and me, and my friend Bob. Bob and I have known each other for years. Bob trusts me, and listens to my opinions.
You say, "I think oranges are nasty. Apples are way better."
I, hearing you say this, say, "I think people who think oranges are nasty are mentally ill."
My friend Bob hears both of these things. Because he trusts me and listens to my opinion, my statement influences him. He begins to suspect that you are mentally ill.
You subsequently go to Bob and ask for something. Help moving your couch, let's say. Bob, acting under the suspicion that you might be crazy as a loon, declines.
The net result? Because you expressed your opinion, and then I expressed my opinion, you got stuck having to schlep your own couch.
Now imagine that the order of the statements is reversed. Imagine that I start by saying that I think people who don't like oranges are crazy, to which you reply that you don't like oranges. The net result is exactly the same, even though the order is reversed.
Which one of us should have been suppressed by the government? You, for voicing your opinion in the first place? Or me, for voicing my opinion? It was my statement that influenced Bob, but in either example, if you hadn't made your own statement, you would have suffered no consequences. Which one of us should have been jailed for practicing illegal speech? Because obviously both of us can't be allowed to speak. If we both speak, you suffer consequences. So one of us has to be silenced. How do we decide which one it should be?
Or would you rather just circumvent the whole question and have the government require Bob, under penalty of law, to help you move your couch?
See what I mean? It's a contrived example, yes, but that's because it's meant to prove that your theory is mathematically impossible to implement. If you want to be completely free of consequence, then I'm going to have to be suppressed. But if I want to be free of consequence, then you're going to have to be suppressed. If either one of us is suppressed, obviously not everybody is free to say whatever he wants. See? There's just n