You seem pretty reasonable and I think we agree on many points, but I have to call you on claiming a moral high ground.
In your reply to someone who advocated simply ignoring unjust laws you said
Congratulations, you are what is wrong with America.
You then proceed to compare these ideas to a child molesters.
Whatever you do, DO NOT make a habit of spreading the cancerous idea that anyone can ignore any law at any time as it suits them.
This certainly seems like you are placing yourself on a pedestal and judging his opinion.
I'm a big fan of advocating change and I do so about things that I feel strongly about. However, our political system and climate are imperfect and we all must live in the present. I think principled disobedience of laws is a valid form of protest, and is perhaps even beneficial to the larger cause. If everyone obeyed media companies every whim things would be much worse for us now.
The only reason we have things like iTunes and DRM-free legal downloads is because piracy is so rampant. The media companies did not want to give us these things and would not have done so of their own free will. I suspect the MPAA learned from the RIAA's experience with piracy and has done a much better job. Within a few years of computer/bandwidth becoming cheap to distribute movies we already have numerous legal (and some free) sources of downloadable video. Without the threat of cheap and ubiquitous piracy the MPAA would certainly have preferred to keep to their comfortable and profitable theatrical release/dvd/broadcast only arrangement.
We should all thank pirates for giving us these things. Without these noble creatures we would have no legal downloads, no price constraints, no motivation for developing new distribution models. They are truly advancing the ideal of a more just copyright climate by risking financial ruin for demonstrable gains, while more timid souls impotently write letters and vote libertarian.
I don't think that a mindless devotion to the letter of the law is helpful. I've performed acts of sodomy in states with sodomy laws, I have gone over the speed limit, I have broken drug possession laws. Yet I have harmed nobody and done nothing unethical.
In fact our society is becoming more and more fascist. Everybody breaks laws all the time, it simply cannot be avoided. Having citizens always subject to arrest for some reason or other is one of the tools of a fascist regime.
This country would be a much sadder place if everybody who found laws offensive just sucked it up. From the founding fathers to slavery, prohibition, equal rights - I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to countless people courageous enough to break unfair laws.
I don't mean to glamorize copyright battles by comparing them to obviously greater things, but I guess now that our basic rights have been established (not that we can be complacent, fascism is not far away) we can shift our fights to luxuries.
You can obey our media overlords and bought-and-sold legislature all you want, but please don't claim a moral high ground over someone who does not.
Expensive food could be a boon to poor countries. Currently many poor farmers are unable to compete with cheap subsidized food exports and this would make their farms more profitable.
There is a lot of unused capacity right now and if we saw $3/lb sugar you can bet that a lot of poor people would grow sugar-generating crops.
Not to mention that objects also cast shadows in a vacuum - such as when the shuttlecraft crossed in front of the Enterprise.
I don't see the problem with shadows in a vacuum. You wouldn't have shadows in deep space since light is coming from all directions pretty much equally, but in the vicinity of a star you would have very dark shadows. Much more distinct than on a planet with an atmosphere to diffract light.
One of the first things astronauts said about the moon landing was how dark shadows were.
When I have found foreign-language-only documents that I wanted to read I was able to understand nearly all of the document. Whether I was trying to read software manuals from german, troubleshooting tips from Italian, or something from many other languages I have always been impressed with babelfish. Sometimes I get a laugh at stilted phrasing or unfortunate word choice, but it is an amazingly useful tool.
It doesn't really matter who needs who. There is a contract that doesn't expire until next year. There have been rumors that NBC may try to hire Jon Stewart to do late night, and an alleged dinner with the head of NBC, Jon, and his agent.
Given how popular his show is, I would be surprised if there wasn't a bidding war for him once his contract is up.
How about we create a "retarded non-religion" list going from peaceful, mostly harmless atheists and agnostics all the way up to "kill others" atheists like Stalin and Mao (and fake Christians like Hitler - he considered himself Christian but his actions speak louder than his words {and he shouted a lot})?
Sounds good. I'm way ahead of you. I have a list of non-religious wackos sitting on my desk, ready. So far it is blank. As soon as some non-religious wackos start trying to bother me or kill people I will fill it in.
And don't start with that "not a real christian" baloney. My mother would justify any bad behavior by christians by saying "Oh well so-and-so isn't a real christian." That's a small part of why I gave the whole thing up in disgust. If you judge a tree by its fruit, then it doesn't matter if anyone considers theirself a christian. I'm better than most christians if you want to use that criteria and the whole monkeybusiness falls apart.
I have had about 10 negative experiences with police and about 2 that seemed positive simply because nothing terrible happened. My experiences are hardly atypical.
I'll start being grateful when there is something to be grateful for. If police focused on solving crimes and helping people instead of giving out speeding tickets and harassing nonviolent drug users I'd be real grateful.
I had a family friend die because the police blew off her frantic calls about her abusive husband. I had an acquaintance die in a no-knock drug bust. To the wrong address. I had a cop laugh at me when my house was burglarized. Even though my stuff was found, I never forgave that cop for being so unsympathetic. I also never forgave him for obviously scrutinizing my house for drug paraphernalia after seeing my hand-rolled cigarette butts in an ashtray. What an asshole.
A bunch of hostile unhelpful pricks on a power trip, hassling people and very nonchalant about actual crimes. That's what police are actually doing.
Religions are all the same?! Here's my quick guide to how retarded religions are:
5. peaceful, mostly harmless: buddhism, pagans, some mainline churches. 4. wtf!? At least they keep to theirselves. Amish, Quakers, Mennonites 3. Stop messing with others. Please. Fundies of many stripes that seek to impose their beliefs on others. 2. Kill theirselves. Heaven's gate. Jonestown. Yikes. 1. Kills others. Antiabortionists, religious warriors, fag draggers, black killers, al quaida, etc. If only they realized that god kills those who kill theirselves. Or something.
I think they are all full of god-droppings, but I see a huge and amazing spectrum of lunacy.
Personally, I place Scientology around 1.05, Jehovah's Witnesses around 2.25 and Mormons around 2.5 - well along the way to being highly toxic dangerous menaces to society.
You should check out Galactic Rapture a funny and insightful scifi book about different religions.
If you are ever buying newspaper, why don't you complain to the newspaper company that you can read the same news on Google News or online free. They should have made the newspapers free than.
No. A newspaper costs money to print, and you have a tangible object. Bits are "free." A better analogy is this: It's like complaining about a pay site that displays the exact same news as Google News. And the paysite tries to prevent you from accessing Google News.
Would you support pizza copyright? Each kind of pizza would be copyrighted and cost $100. Even though someone else could make an identical pizza for $10 it would be illegal for them to duplicate the original pizza. You want mushroom & onion? One supplier, take it or leave it. It probably won't even be very good, and the original creator of this pizza is dead or won't see a penny from your purchase. How is this an improvement? Besides for the pizza monopoly holders?
I'd sure like to get paid every time a line of code I wrote was executed, but I don't. Why is music treated so differently from my work? Both require training, skill, practice, creativity, and talent.
We could save way more lives by giving out free annual checkups or something. Try losing your insurance and needing $2m worth of health care and see how much your life is worth. Hell, try needing $20k worth. You'll find your life is worth very little. We constantly place a value on human life, and the value is extremely low. Life is full of cost/benefit tradeoffs and I truly don't understand why some of these are so insanely tilted. We're prepared to throw away trillions in certain areas for little to no benefit while adamantly refusing to spend enough on the huge bang-for-your-buck things.
That 16k/year statistic is bogus. Most of those accidents would have happened anyway. Obviously alcohol is not necessary for an accident, and nobody has proved that further lowering the BAC saves lives. Besides, most of the drunk driver related deaths were already against the law. Lowering the BAC further won't stop any of those deaths. Those drivers were already willing to break the law. Tweaking the law won't make them more responsible.
I really don't get your attitude. You act as if it is wrong to place a dollar amount on human life. Well it is done all the time. The dollar amount is quite low, too. When designing roads, cars, traffic rules, etc. a tradeoff must be made.
We could save 50k lives/year if we banned cars, but we as a society have decided that a human life isn't worth that much. We could probably save 40k lives/year is the speed limit was 25. Society has decided that that much lost time isn't worth a human life. We could give everyone a free safety upgrade to their car complete with 5-point restraint, interior crash protection cage, and so forth and probably save 30k lives/year but it just isn't worth it.
People get stupid about certain risks. They are prepared to spend unlimited amounts of money and lost time for zero demonstrable gain if it is about terrorists, child molesters, drunk drivers, violent video games, many other things. Yet many other greater risks are ignored or given low priority.
So many times I hear "You can't place a value on human life" or "If it saves even one life." That is so untrue and dishonest it makes my teeth hurt.
So let's say the cost is $20 and 1 hour for the drinker. Multiply that by a hundred million drinkers and multiply that by 20 times a year and what do you get?
$40 billion dollars and 2 billion hours.
Now how many lives does that save? It might be negative, might be zero, might be positive. Lets say it is positive. Lets say 1000 lives are saved every year, which I find highly doubtful. Remember that most traffic accidents are caused by sober drivers crashing into other sober drivers, and that drunk drivers are already breaking the law.
You're willing to spend 40 million dollars and 2 million hours to save a single life.
That's idiotic.
If you want to spend money and time to save lives, you can save a lot more while spending a lot less in a myriad of ways.
I am in full agreement. I think the MPAA has declared war on their customers much like the RIAA has. They have crossed many lines over the years, too. It makes me sad because I like film, but I cannot ignore being treated like the enemy. Between forbidden user actions and warnings against paying customers and searching patrons I don't have any pity and cheer the bootleggers on.
I've seen these many times, usually Asian produced. Many of them are so good I wonder how they did it. It almost seems like they had a high-quality scanner and access to the print. Some were obviously recorded from a projected image (vignetting, pincushioning) Some were awful hand-held crowded theatre bullshit.
The most impressive thing about them is the timing, often beating the theatrical release by a few days or weeks.
The obvious way to beat the bootleggers, who definitely exist and are prolific, is to release DVDs sooner, say when the film is released. Release worldwide at the same time to prevent region bootleggers.
Diesel engines are a lot more efficient than gasoline otto cycle engines. Their efficiency advantage is greatest at idle and is smallest at full throttle. Most passenger vehicle usage is nowhere near full throttle, so a diesel engine can enjoy a huge advantage over an otto cycle engine. In stop and go traffic the advantage can easily be several hundred percent.
To state it more simply, in a typical commute, which is largely low throttle and idle, a diesel engine will get 2-4 times the fuel of a similar power gasoline engine. Only 10-15% of this massive difference is due to the greater energy density of diesel fuel.
They do make diesel race cars, and they are competitive with gasoline engines. Here is Audi's most recent one, which placed 1st at Sebring. In a race with significant portions of the track at partial throttle a diesel engine will vastly outperform a gasoline engine. It would be an unfair race.
Be careful of term limits. We have them in my state and it has turned out to be a curse. I was a big supporter of term limits but have changed my mind.
Now we have an endlessly changing roster of new reps that are utterly in the pocket of lobbyists. Lobbyists now outnumber reps by an unthinkable margin and always get their way. In their first term the rep doesn't know anything about issues and tends to listen to the loudest lobbyists. In their second and last term they are looking for a job and really listen to lobbyists. In their third infinite term they are lobbyists, controlling legislature with no way to vote them out.
Would the casino be as blithe about your notepad and pen at a card table? You could count cards and give yourself an advantage.
Of course, casinos will eject and lifeban and share this info with other casinos at their whim.
I had a friend who was a math whiz who could count cards in his head. He got blacklisted from one casino and found that all other major casinos would intercept him within minutes.
I just bought a pay-as-you-go no contract no expire phone from virgin mobile for US$20. It came with a US$20 minute card so it is a free, no contract phone. Kyocera Oystr, which I actually like.
You have to add at least $20 every 3 months but the minutes don't expire, so it turns out to be perfect for someone like me who uses a cellphone rarely. I can store up minutes and use them up when I travel or go through a bad part of life where I need to talk on a mobile phone lots.
I used to think in black and white when I was younger. Now I truly think it rarely is simple.
Let me give you an example. When I was down on my luck and working for Echostar doing tech support for fricking satellite TV I was presented with numerous ethical situations. A common one was a customer who had been having ongoing problems and had reached the point where they wanted to cancel their service. Company policy was to attempt to keep the customer, even if they resisted. It felt wrong to me to attempt to convince an angry person to stay a customer. However, sometimes (according to my numbers a record-setting sometimes) the person would be mollified to be speaking with a literate, intelligent, and caring person and wound up happy to stay a customer once I diagnosed and fixed their problem. Countless times I heard "I would have never considered canceling my service if they had more people like you." Because I "saved" so many customers I was given leeway to wordlessly cancel a truly irate unsalvageable customer quickly and efficiently, thereby minimizing needless suffering.
Even though I am embarrassed to have done such low-grade work being a college graduate and all, I look back on those 6 months somewhat fondly. I made a lot of people happy. I brought my house out of foreclosure. I was able to afford my heating bill and groceries again, although I still had to go to the food bank regularly.
It is somewhat odd to philosophize about the ethical concerns surrounding a needless luxury like pay television, something that I have never felt necessary myself. I often felt reduced sympathy for the customers since they were upset about what to me is a needless luxury. In any case, I gave every caller the best help that I could despite their rudeness, the company's ruthless policies, and the constraints inherent in troubleshooting over the phone with a nontechnical user.
I really don't know whether working there was good or evil. It was a mixture of both. I was doing good on behalf of an evil corporation, but I didn't maximize their revenue at the expense of customers. I erred towards making customers happy at the expense of revenue, although apparently I was good enough at the job that it ended up being profitable anyway. I happen to think that more enlightened policies would be more profitable, in addition to being more pleasant for customers and employees, but that is a whole nother rant.
I think you are out of line to judge me. You have no idea what was an ethical problem for me. I have never robbed anyone or harmed them against their will on behalf of an employer. I had trouble at my first official job because I thought upselling a fast food customer was irritating and unnecessary. It isn't as if I was living a life of luxury while taking food away from orphans. I was in bankruptcy, my condo was in foreclosure, and I had stripped expenses to a mere $1000/month, $800 of which was housing. My choice was to become a homeless burden on society or to take a job that gave me a bit of guilt. I am the only person qualified to make that choice, and I think I made the most ethically defensible one.
You are a judgemental shortsighted simplistic asshole. Oh well, so was I at one time, and I was able to develop a more comprehensive outlook. That is why I am attempting to explain my thinking further, in the hope that you will expand your narrow view.
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In your reply to someone who advocated simply ignoring unjust laws you saidYou then proceed to compare these ideas to a child molesters.This certainly seems like you are placing yourself on a pedestal and judging his opinion.
I'm a big fan of advocating change and I do so about things that I feel strongly about. However, our political system and climate are imperfect and we all must live in the present. I think principled disobedience of laws is a valid form of protest, and is perhaps even beneficial to the larger cause. If everyone obeyed media companies every whim things would be much worse for us now.
The only reason we have things like iTunes and DRM-free legal downloads is because piracy is so rampant. The media companies did not want to give us these things and would not have done so of their own free will. I suspect the MPAA learned from the RIAA's experience with piracy and has done a much better job. Within a few years of computer/bandwidth becoming cheap to distribute movies we already have numerous legal (and some free) sources of downloadable video. Without the threat of cheap and ubiquitous piracy the MPAA would certainly have preferred to keep to their comfortable and profitable theatrical release/dvd
We should all thank pirates for giving us these things. Without these noble creatures we would have no legal downloads, no price constraints, no motivation for developing new distribution models. They are truly advancing the ideal of a more just copyright climate by risking financial ruin for demonstrable gains, while more timid souls impotently write letters and vote libertarian.
I don't think that a mindless devotion to the letter of the law is helpful. I've performed acts of sodomy in states with sodomy laws, I have gone over the speed limit, I have broken drug possession laws. Yet I have harmed nobody and done nothing unethical.
In fact our society is becoming more and more fascist. Everybody breaks laws all the time, it simply cannot be avoided. Having citizens always subject to arrest for some reason or other is one of the tools of a fascist regime.
This country would be a much sadder place if everybody who found laws offensive just sucked it up. From the founding fathers to slavery, prohibition, equal rights - I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to countless people courageous enough to break unfair laws.
I don't mean to glamorize copyright battles by comparing them to obviously greater things, but I guess now that our basic rights have been established (not that we can be complacent, fascism is not far away) we can shift our fights to luxuries.
You can obey our media overlords and bought-and-sold legislature all you want, but please don't claim a moral high ground over someone who does not.
Expensive food could be a boon to poor countries. Currently many poor farmers are unable to compete with cheap subsidized food exports and this would make their farms more profitable.
There is a lot of unused capacity right now and if we saw $3/lb sugar you can bet that a lot of poor people would grow sugar-generating crops.
Flew to the heavens, huh? That means Jesus is an alien! And he still threatens this planet!
eBay isn't going to make jack.
Purchase price: $0.01
Shipping: $4,899,999,999.99
I find it humorous when babelfish comes up with awkward phrasing that I have actually heard a foreigner use.
One of the first things astronauts said about the moon landing was how dark shadows were.
When I have found foreign-language-only documents that I wanted to read I was able to understand nearly all of the document. Whether I was trying to read software manuals from german, troubleshooting tips from Italian, or something from many other languages I have always been impressed with babelfish. Sometimes I get a laugh at stilted phrasing or unfortunate word choice, but it is an amazingly useful tool.
It doesn't really matter who needs who. There is a contract that doesn't expire until next year. There have been rumors that NBC may try to hire Jon Stewart to do late night, and an alleged dinner with the head of NBC, Jon, and his agent.
Given how popular his show is, I would be surprised if there wasn't a bidding war for him once his contract is up.
Thank you for enlightening me. I was using the stereotype I learned in school which appears to be out of date.
And don't start with that "not a real christian" baloney. My mother would justify any bad behavior by christians by saying "Oh well so-and-so isn't a real christian." That's a small part of why I gave the whole thing up in disgust. If you judge a tree by its fruit, then it doesn't matter if anyone considers theirself a christian. I'm better than most christians if you want to use that criteria and the whole monkeybusiness falls apart.
Grateful!? WTF!?
I have had about 10 negative experiences with police and about 2 that seemed positive simply because nothing terrible happened. My experiences are hardly atypical.
I'll start being grateful when there is something to be grateful for. If police focused on solving crimes and helping people instead of giving out speeding tickets and harassing nonviolent drug users I'd be real grateful.
I had a family friend die because the police blew off her frantic calls about her abusive husband. I had an acquaintance die in a no-knock drug bust. To the wrong address. I had a cop laugh at me when my house was burglarized. Even though my stuff was found, I never forgave that cop for being so unsympathetic. I also never forgave him for obviously scrutinizing my house for drug paraphernalia after seeing my hand-rolled cigarette butts in an ashtray. What an asshole.
A bunch of hostile unhelpful pricks on a power trip, hassling people and very nonchalant about actual crimes. That's what police are actually doing.
Religions are all the same?! Here's my quick guide to how retarded religions are:
5. peaceful, mostly harmless: buddhism, pagans, some mainline churches.
4. wtf!? At least they keep to theirselves. Amish, Quakers, Mennonites
3. Stop messing with others. Please. Fundies of many stripes that seek to impose their beliefs on others.
2. Kill theirselves. Heaven's gate. Jonestown. Yikes.
1. Kills others. Antiabortionists, religious warriors, fag draggers, black killers, al quaida, etc. If only they realized that god kills those who kill theirselves. Or something.
I think they are all full of god-droppings, but I see a huge and amazing spectrum of lunacy.
Personally, I place Scientology around 1.05, Jehovah's Witnesses around 2.25 and Mormons around 2.5 - well along the way to being highly toxic dangerous menaces to society.
You should check out Galactic Rapture a funny and insightful scifi book about different religions.
Would you support pizza copyright? Each kind of pizza would be copyrighted and cost $100. Even though someone else could make an identical pizza for $10 it would be illegal for them to duplicate the original pizza. You want mushroom & onion? One supplier, take it or leave it. It probably won't even be very good, and the original creator of this pizza is dead or won't see a penny from your purchase. How is this an improvement? Besides for the pizza monopoly holders?
I'd sure like to get paid every time a line of code I wrote was executed, but I don't. Why is music treated so differently from my work? Both require training, skill, practice, creativity, and talent.
I'm not trolling. Our priorities are weird.
We could save way more lives by giving out free annual checkups or something. Try losing your insurance and needing $2m worth of health care and see how much your life is worth. Hell, try needing $20k worth. You'll find your life is worth very little. We constantly place a value on human life, and the value is extremely low. Life is full of cost/benefit tradeoffs and I truly don't understand why some of these are so insanely tilted. We're prepared to throw away trillions in certain areas for little to no benefit while adamantly refusing to spend enough on the huge bang-for-your-buck things.
That 16k/year statistic is bogus. Most of those accidents would have happened anyway. Obviously alcohol is not necessary for an accident, and nobody has proved that further lowering the BAC saves lives. Besides, most of the drunk driver related deaths were already against the law. Lowering the BAC further won't stop any of those deaths. Those drivers were already willing to break the law. Tweaking the law won't make them more responsible.
I really don't get your attitude. You act as if it is wrong to place a dollar amount on human life. Well it is done all the time. The dollar amount is quite low, too. When designing roads, cars, traffic rules, etc. a tradeoff must be made.
We could save 50k lives/year if we banned cars, but we as a society have decided that a human life isn't worth that much. We could probably save 40k lives/year is the speed limit was 25. Society has decided that that much lost time isn't worth a human life. We could give everyone a free safety upgrade to their car complete with 5-point restraint, interior crash protection cage, and so forth and probably save 30k lives/year but it just isn't worth it.
People get stupid about certain risks. They are prepared to spend unlimited amounts of money and lost time for zero demonstrable gain if it is about terrorists, child molesters, drunk drivers, violent video games, many other things. Yet many other greater risks are ignored or given low priority.
So many times I hear "You can't place a value on human life" or "If it saves even one life." That is so untrue and dishonest it makes my teeth hurt.
So let's say the cost is $20 and 1 hour for the drinker. Multiply that by a hundred million drinkers and multiply that by 20 times a year and what do you get? $40 billion dollars and 2 billion hours. Now how many lives does that save? It might be negative, might be zero, might be positive. Lets say it is positive. Lets say 1000 lives are saved every year, which I find highly doubtful. Remember that most traffic accidents are caused by sober drivers crashing into other sober drivers, and that drunk drivers are already breaking the law. You're willing to spend 40 million dollars and 2 million hours to save a single life. That's idiotic. If you want to spend money and time to save lives, you can save a lot more while spending a lot less in a myriad of ways.
I am in full agreement. I think the MPAA has declared war on their customers much like the RIAA has. They have crossed many lines over the years, too. It makes me sad because I like film, but I cannot ignore being treated like the enemy. Between forbidden user actions and warnings against paying customers and searching patrons I don't have any pity and cheer the bootleggers on.
I've seen these many times, usually Asian produced. Many of them are so good I wonder how they did it. It almost seems like they had a high-quality scanner and access to the print. Some were obviously recorded from a projected image (vignetting, pincushioning) Some were awful hand-held crowded theatre bullshit.
The most impressive thing about them is the timing, often beating the theatrical release by a few days or weeks.
The obvious way to beat the bootleggers, who definitely exist and are prolific, is to release DVDs sooner, say when the film is released. Release worldwide at the same time to prevent region bootleggers.
Diesel engines are a lot more efficient than gasoline otto cycle engines. Their efficiency advantage is greatest at idle and is smallest at full throttle. Most passenger vehicle usage is nowhere near full throttle, so a diesel engine can enjoy a huge advantage over an otto cycle engine. In stop and go traffic the advantage can easily be several hundred percent.
To state it more simply, in a typical commute, which is largely low throttle and idle, a diesel engine will get 2-4 times the fuel of a similar power gasoline engine. Only 10-15% of this massive difference is due to the greater energy density of diesel fuel.
They do make diesel race cars, and they are competitive with gasoline engines. Here is Audi's most recent one, which placed 1st at Sebring. In a race with significant portions of the track at partial throttle a diesel engine will vastly outperform a gasoline engine. It would be an unfair race.
Be careful of term limits. We have them in my state and it has turned out to be a curse. I was a big supporter of term limits but have changed my mind. Now we have an endlessly changing roster of new reps that are utterly in the pocket of lobbyists. Lobbyists now outnumber reps by an unthinkable margin and always get their way. In their first term the rep doesn't know anything about issues and tends to listen to the loudest lobbyists. In their second and last term they are looking for a job and really listen to lobbyists. In their third infinite term they are lobbyists, controlling legislature with no way to vote them out.
Would the casino be as blithe about your notepad and pen at a card table? You could count cards and give yourself an advantage. Of course, casinos will eject and lifeban and share this info with other casinos at their whim. I had a friend who was a math whiz who could count cards in his head. He got blacklisted from one casino and found that all other major casinos would intercept him within minutes.
I just bought a pay-as-you-go no contract no expire phone from virgin mobile for US$20. It came with a US$20 minute card so it is a free, no contract phone. Kyocera Oystr, which I actually like. You have to add at least $20 every 3 months but the minutes don't expire, so it turns out to be perfect for someone like me who uses a cellphone rarely. I can store up minutes and use them up when I travel or go through a bad part of life where I need to talk on a mobile phone lots.
I used to think in black and white when I was younger. Now I truly think it rarely is simple.
Let me give you an example. When I was down on my luck and working for Echostar doing tech support for fricking satellite TV I was presented with numerous ethical situations. A common one was a customer who had been having ongoing problems and had reached the point where they wanted to cancel their service. Company policy was to attempt to keep the customer, even if they resisted. It felt wrong to me to attempt to convince an angry person to stay a customer. However, sometimes (according to my numbers a record-setting sometimes) the person would be mollified to be speaking with a literate, intelligent, and caring person and wound up happy to stay a customer once I diagnosed and fixed their problem. Countless times I heard "I would have never considered canceling my service if they had more people like you." Because I "saved" so many customers I was given leeway to wordlessly cancel a truly irate unsalvageable customer quickly and efficiently, thereby minimizing needless suffering.
Even though I am embarrassed to have done such low-grade work being a college graduate and all, I look back on those 6 months somewhat fondly. I made a lot of people happy. I brought my house out of foreclosure. I was able to afford my heating bill and groceries again, although I still had to go to the food bank regularly.
It is somewhat odd to philosophize about the ethical concerns surrounding a needless luxury like pay television, something that I have never felt necessary myself. I often felt reduced sympathy for the customers since they were upset about what to me is a needless luxury. In any case, I gave every caller the best help that I could despite their rudeness, the company's ruthless policies, and the constraints inherent in troubleshooting over the phone with a nontechnical user.
I really don't know whether working there was good or evil. It was a mixture of both. I was doing good on behalf of an evil corporation, but I didn't maximize their revenue at the expense of customers. I erred towards making customers happy at the expense of revenue, although apparently I was good enough at the job that it ended up being profitable anyway. I happen to think that more enlightened policies would be more profitable, in addition to being more pleasant for customers and employees, but that is a whole nother rant.
I think you are out of line to judge me. You have no idea what was an ethical problem for me. I have never robbed anyone or harmed them against their will on behalf of an employer. I had trouble at my first official job because I thought upselling a fast food customer was irritating and unnecessary. It isn't as if I was living a life of luxury while taking food away from orphans. I was in bankruptcy, my condo was in foreclosure, and I had stripped expenses to a mere $1000/month, $800 of which was housing. My choice was to become a homeless burden on society or to take a job that gave me a bit of guilt. I am the only person qualified to make that choice, and I think I made the most ethically defensible one.
You are a judgemental shortsighted simplistic asshole. Oh well, so was I at one time, and I was able to develop a more comprehensive outlook. That is why I am attempting to explain my thinking further, in the hope that you will expand your narrow view.