What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[The Brain]

Without a contract how do you determine which people are employees (and presumably are affected by policies)?

There are contracts, they just aren't in writing.  Oral contracts are valid in Anglo-American law subject to certain exceptions.  In small organizations everyone knows who everyone is.  Large organizations have HR departments.

Sure (it's the same in Sweden except when buying real estate and some other cases), but it seems a total hassle for big organizations to keep track of oral contracts, especially when there are disagreements regarding them. I don't see how it's better to do without written contracts.

How is it a hassle?  With written contracts, they don't have to keep track of the individual contract signed by each employee, just the policies that apply to different classes of employees.  In fact, even in unionized jobs, that's how it works--the individual employees don't have individual contracts, but are covered by the contract the union agrees to.

And which individuals are employees is known only through oral contracts, which opens up for all kinds of uncertainties. I think signing a half-page standard contract and filing it is time well spent.

Nah, there's a ton of paperwork that gets filled out, just none of it is a contract.  Though technically I guess a lot of it isn't paperwork anymore, since most of it is done electronically nowadays.

I don't see how documents that aren't contracts solve the contract issue, but I don't think we'll get further here (and it's not really related to Trump).

[garbon]

On a different note:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/gofundme-border-wall-refund-brian-kolfage

GoFundMe Is Refunding All $20 Million In Donations To Build Trump's Wall After The Plans Changed

GoFundMe will refund more than $20 million in donations made by hundreds of thousands of people to an online effort to build President Trump's border wall with Mexico, after the Iraq War veteran behind the crowdsourcing effort suddenly changed his plans Friday on what to do with the funds.

In an update to the "We the People Will Build the Wall" campaign, Brian Kolfage wrote that rather than donating the money raised to the federal government, it would instead be handed over to a private nonprofit he said he had established in order to construct a wall himself.

"The federal government won't be able to accept our donations anytime soon," he wrote. "We are better equipped than our own government to use the donated funds to build an actual wall on the southern border."

When he first created the campaign in mid-December, Kolfage had set an ambitious $1 billion goal for the crowdsourcing effort and pledged to refund all the money himself if the target was not met, according to an internet archive. "100% of your donations will go to the Trump Wall," Kolfage wrote. "If for ANY reason we don't reach our goal we will refund your donation." The language was later removed from the fundraiser page.

"However, that did not happen," GoFundMe spokesperson Bobby Whithorne told BuzzFeed News in an email after Kolfage changed the campaign's original promise. "This means all donors will receive a refund."

"If a donor does not want a refund," Whithorne continued, "and they want their donation to go to the new organization, they must proactively elect to redirect their donation to that organization. If they do not take that step, they will automatically receive a full refund."

Kolfage didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday, but Jennifer Lawrence, a spokesperson for the new campaign, disputed the characterization that donors were being refunded.

However, Whithorne told BuzzFeed News that donors will be automatically refunded unless they choose otherwise.

Kolfage said the nonprofit's advisory board included, among others, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, controversial former Wisconsin sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., and Fox News contributor Sara A. Carter. Kobach confirmed his involvement in the project in a tweet.

Kolfage is a recipient of the Purple Heart medal (his legs and right arm were amputated as a result of a rocket attack during his second Iraq tour), but has a history of creating and profiting from fake, inflammatory news and right-wing conspiracy theories, and has been permanently suspended from Facebook.

Some of the stories on his now-defunct web pages falsely accused Democratic megadonor George Soros of funding domestic terrorists and former president Barack Obama of being a pedophile.

The veteran has also spearheaded other crowdfunding ventures over the years, raising thousands of dollars on GoFundMe with the promise of helping mentor fellow vets at military hospitals, but spokespersons for the medical centers told BuzzFeed News they have no record of Kolfage working at their facilities or donating any money.

Kolfage has repeatedly said he would not take any money from the wall donations. He has started another GoFundMe campaign with a $100,000 goal that he says will be used to help him "Fight 4 Free Speech" and take action against Facebook, which deleted several of his pages in October during a major purge of inauthentic accounts.

Shortly after he established the wall fundraiser last month, Kolfage updated the webpage to include a separate website that included a Colorado P.O. box, where he said donors could mail personal checks to support the cause.

The amount raised with personal checks was not known, but Kolfage said Friday on Twitter it was enough to put the campaign "over the record." A GoFundMe spokesperson said those funds could not be guaranteed.

The federal government isn't presently able to accept financial donations with strings attached, but last month Republicans introduced legislation that would allow Treasury officials to do so for the border wall.

[Caliga]

What a shock... he's a con man.

[The Brain]

Welcome to Con Man.

[alfred russel]

What the hell, no written employment contracts? How are disputes settled?

I read employers trend increasingly towards having employees agree that any disputes are settled in single arbitration, not a court of law, and that they won't join any class action suits.

I know there's a big cultural divide going on here between the US and the ROTW, but it won't cease to surprise me how helpless US employees seem to be.

At a very high level, workers in the US have had it very good for a long time (relative to the rest of the world) because we have had shortages of workers. There was more or less an empty continent (Indians didn't count) full of resources and rich farmland - there was enough to provide ample profits to owners and have plenty left over to pay workers (who needed to be paid well to keep them from leaving for other opportunities). Obviously for a while a part of the country overcame the worker shortage by importing slaves, but that is a different issue...Europe blowing itself up in the middle of the last century didn't help them, nor did adopting stupid ideas like totalitarian communism.

The point being workers didn't need the protections maintained in much of the rest of the world because they had a relatively strong market protection: an abusive employer could just be left and another job found.

As the economic reality of the US and Europe is converging, I think labor regulations are as well, but there is still a gap.

[crazy canuck]

What the hell, no written employment contracts? How are disputes settled?

I read employers trend increasingly towards having employees agree that any disputes are settled in single arbitration, not a court of law, and that they won't join any class action suits.

I know there's a big cultural divide going on here between the US and the ROTW, but it won't cease to surprise me how helpless US employees seem to be.

At a very high level, workers in the US have had it very good for a long time (relative to the rest of the world) because we have had shortages of workers. There was more or less an empty continent (Indians didn't count) full of resources and rich farmland - there was enough to provide ample profits to owners and have plenty left over to pay workers (who needed to be paid well to keep them from leaving for other opportunities). Obviously for a while a part of the country overcame the worker shortage by importing slaves, but that is a different issue...Europe blowing itself up in the middle of the last century didn't help them, nor did adopting stupid ideas like totalitarian communism.

The point being workers didn't need the protections maintained in much of the rest of the world because they had a relatively strong market protection: an abusive employer could just be left and another job found.

As the economic reality of the US and Europe is converging, I think labor regulations are as well, but there is still a gap.

Your narrative doesn't explain how Canada developed better worker protections and benefits.

[celedhring]

Guy I know had this theory that the US broke away too soon, while Canada was still Europe when the welfare state happened and thus imported it just in time.

I don't know if the theory holds up scrutiny, but it seemed interesting. His whole reasoning (he's an American national born in Europe) was that the Boston Tea Party was eventually a bad thing.

[Eddie Teach]

If we hadn't broken away, Europe would likely have stayed autocratic much longer.

[The Brain]

If we hadn't broken away, Europe would likely have stayed autocratic much longer.

lolwut

[PJL]

If we hadn't broken away, Europe would likely have stayed autocratic much longer.

lolwut

There's some reasoning to that statement. I believe that some of the leaders of the French Revolution were inspired by what happened in the USA, and wished to copy their system.

[The Larch]

Besides the political philosophy implications between the American revolution and the French revolution, there's also the fact that without an American War of Independence there's no massive French investment which causes the French financial crisis that triggers the revolution.

[The Brain]

If we hadn't broken away, Europe would likely have stayed autocratic much longer.

lolwut

There's some reasoning to that statement. I believe that some of the leaders of the French Revolution were inspired by what happened in the USA, and wished to copy their system.

France is not the same as Europe. And even in France they had something like 15 years (depending on how you count) until they were back to autocracy.

[Oexmelin]

The French fiscal problems were structural. The American War of Independence was one conflict - if not that one, there likely would have been others, as France had been preparing precisely to reduce British power.

The intellectual considerations are more complex, but certainly not that mechanistic. The American example in France is somewhat hard to trace, for while there were certainly people inspired by American independence, both the American and the French were drinking at very similar fountains. The idea of Constitutionalism existed in France (and in the UK) before the Insurgents set out to take it to one possible outcome (out of many). The main question was whether or not the American example was idiosyncratic, born of a  New World irreducibly different from the most ancient of European monarchies, or whether or not it was a great feel good story, with little French applicability.

The one part where the lineages are more evident is around the question of individual rights, bill of rights, and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Men. 

[celedhring]

If we hadn't broken away, Europe would likely have stayed autocratic much longer.

Europe stayed autocratic very long, though. Most of the continent was under autocratic regimes at the dawn of WWI.

[The Brain]

Sweden was autocratic 1680-1719 and again 1772-1809. I don't see either 1719 or 1809 as being caused by American or French revolutions, in both cases the most obvious cause was the regime having lost a major war. Autocratic regimes had risen and fallen across Europe for centuries before 1776/1789, and indeed have continued to do so since.