The Off Topic Topic

[Admiral Yi]

No Raz, not all things that make a company uncompetitive are bad things.  I thought I had already made that clear when I said that torturing people who don't buy your products and murdering your competition are not good things.

[Razgovory]

Okay, then I don't understand.  Stop me when I go off the tracks. You say a union is bad because it makes a business uncompetitive.  The unstated assumption is that making a business uncompetitive is a bad thing.  Therefore other things that make a business uncompetitive should also be bad, correct?  Yet they are not.  Why is a Union singled out for this?

[Admiral Yi]

Employees presumably have a vested interest in the continued existence of their employer, and hence their jobs.  When they ruin a company through exorbitant demands, they harm themselves.

A customer being tortured, a competitor being murdered, or a slave chained to his work station have no vested interest in continuing their condition.  They lose nothing by escaping that condition.

[PDH]

See, I got lost when you said a customer being tortured is bad.

[Razgovory]

Employees presumably have a vested interest in the continued existence of their employer, and hence their jobs.  When they ruin a company through exorbitant demands, they harm themselves.

A customer being tortured, a competitor being murdered, or a slave chained to his work station have no vested interest in continuing their condition.  They lose nothing by escaping that condition.

What if the employees feel that the Union protects their interests?  For instance job security or better wages.  Certainly an employee has a vested interest in being payed more or prevented from being fired.  There many unions that haven't ruined their companies, presumably they aren't bad?  What if the Union destroys the company for interest of it's members?  Let's say the Union somehow gets the power to destroy the company and sell off the assets.  In doing so it will pay each of its member 10 million dollar, which is more then they can hope to make with a life time of work at the company and the retirement.  Plus they can go off and get another job.  Is that good or bad?

[Admiral Yi]

Yeah, or if the union used the company to build life like sex robots, that would be cool too.

[Josquius]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1416262/Court-refuses-trial-by-combat.html

A court has rejected a 60-year-old man's attempt to invoke the ancient right to trial by combat, rather than pay a £25 fine for a minor motoring offence.

Leon Humphreys remained adamant yesterday that his right to fight a champion nominated by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) was still valid under European human rights legislation. He said it would have been a "reasonable" way to settle the matter.

Magistrates sitting at Bury St Edmunds on Friday had disagreed and instead of accepting his offer to take on a clerk from Swansea with "samurai swords, Ghurka knives or heavy hammers", fined him £200 with £100 costs.

Humphreys, an unemployed mechanic, was taken to court after refusing to pay the original £25 fixed penalty for failing to notify the DVLA that his Suzuki motorcycle was off the road.

After entering a not guilty plea, he threw down his unconventional challenge. Humphreys, from Bury St Edmunds, said: "I was willing to fight a champion put up by the DVLA, but it would have been a fight to the death."

Old but the internet has recently took notice

[garbon]

Govts sure can be annoying. A fine for failure to register a motor vehicle? Sure. A fine for failure to inform the authorities that you won't be using your vehicle? Ugh.

[CountDeMoney]

Employees presumably have a vested interest in the continued existence of their employer, and hence their jobs.  When they ruin a company through exorbitant demands, they harm themselves.

LOL, "exorbitant demands".  When you swallow your own bullshit, do you use a hose directly or is it more of a scoop-as-you-go thing?

[garbon]

I wonder if I could get a pharmaceutical market research union going. There aren't really that many of us, so we'd probably be able to corner the market.

[Razgovory]

Yeah, or if the union used the company to build life like sex robots, that would be cool too.

You act as if this unrealistic.  As far as a know, there are many Unions that benefit their employees and haven't "ruined" their employer.  Do you believe these Unions are bad?

You seem to have shifted slightly from the pure competitiveness of the company to the welfare of it's employees.  This strikes me as bit odd.  Surely an employee would want a slightly less competitive company if it means more pay.

[Razgovory]

Employees presumably have a vested interest in the continued existence of their employer, and hence their jobs.  When they ruin a company through exorbitant demands, they harm themselves.

LOL, "exorbitant demands".  When you swallow your own bullshit, do you use a hose directly or is it more of a scoop-as-you-go thing?

Presumably a Union can make non-exorbitant demands.  If a Union was to get greedy and eventually destroy itself, I would agree that would not be a bad thing.  But then I would say "Greed", is the problem not the Union.  After all many, many companies have been destroyed by the greed of their owners or upper management.  Almost certainly more then ones that have been destroyed by a greedy union.  I can agree that "Greed" is a bad thing.

[DGuller]

I would also quibble with Yi's conclusion that unions destroyed the companies I'm sure he's thinking off (automakers, airlines, etc.)  What he's not mentioning is that a lot of American giants that had unions went down because they lost their protected oligopoly status.  All those companies had decades of protections that shielded them from full-bore competition, and getting into inflexible unions contracts was just one of many bad decisions they made when the going was good, and the effects of which they couldn't undo when anti-competitive regulation went away.

He does have a point that American labor relations tend to be more extreme and less collaborative.  However, I would think that the optimal solution is to not swing to the other extreme, but rather to find a middle ground with the regulation of unions.  After all, most people spend most of their waking hours working, and if that's an unpleasant and stressful experience over which they have no control over, that's a huge qualify of life issue.

[MadImmortalMan]

A fine for failure to inform the authorities that you won't be using your vehicle? Ugh.

That is pretty stupid.

[Syt]

My new apartment has a neighbor who is a chain smoker. You can smell the stale smoke already in the hallway. His door has brown stains on the outside where the door connects to the frame. I have a colleague who, funnily enough, used to live above him years ago. She said in summer she couldn't open her windows, because he had his open and the smoke would drift into her apartment.

It seems that there's a connection through the ventilation between his and my apartment through the bathroom. My jackets in the little anteroom  and the towels in the bathroom are already starting to smell like smoke. My landlady thought that the guy living in the apartment was a smoker, despite his protestations to the contrary. I will contact her today and let her know what the situation is, and I'll also get some air fresheners for all rooms.