Business
Office Depot made a big mistake. The best policy for a business is: You don't need to know what your customers are doing with what they buy. If you sell bathtubs, you are not responsible for proactively making sure that you never sell a bathtub to somebody who intends to drown someone in it. If you sell clothing, you are not responsible for proactively making sure that nobody ever uses a garment to strangle somebody. If you sell printed material, you might be responsible for sending copies to the police if you're asked to print things that are clearly criminal, but you are not responsible for sabotaging political or advertising campaigns for a party or product your employees may not support.
At the age where people normally work for Office Depot, everyone should be challenged to think about the fact that it's possible to be too idealistic to live and the probability that they do not, in fact, know what other people are or should be doing. People may be enlightened but it's more likely that they are being insufferably selfrighteous. "I want to do, sell, make, only things I personally believe in," has actually been the cry of people whose fall down from an entry-level job was precipitous. Perhaps more schools should require students to read the stories of such people. "I was offered a full-time job in a law firm, but I didn't want to defend Jehovah's Witnesses' right not to have vaccinations. Then I was offered a job in a property management firm, but I didn't want to mail out the letters to retired people when the boss wanted to raise their rent. Then I was offered a job selling office supplies, but I couldn't keep telling people I was offering them the lowest prices when in some places someone else's prices were lower. Then there was the job raising money for the recycling campaign, but I found out that the organization that was supporting recycling was also supporting a politician I didn't respect. Then I was offered a part-time job in an insurance company, but, well, insurance. Then I was offered a weekly job stuffing ad circulars into newspapers, but the garbage they were advertising...[etc., etc.] Finally I woke up to the fact that worrying too much about these things was making me a burden to my family. I got a job wiring lamps and I don't let myself think about whether it would be ethically better to repair existing lamps. I am just learning all I can about lamps while I save up money to start my own recycled lamp business."
We might even benefit from having a recovery group for selfrighteous nannyism. "I saw someone buying candy for a child in the store, and I shut my mouth right up tight," someone might say, and be commended. "I...just couldn't keep from posting on social media what I felt when I learned that Barack Obama is a smoker," someone might say, and be commiserated with. "Take it one day at a time, Brother. Social media are less intrusive than harassing people in the grocery store but we have to focus on...?" "On complaining only when what other people do harms us, and making sure that what we do is not harming others, the way our megalomania was harming others."
Now let's consider a business practice that is likely to do harm: Some stores are trying to avoid showing the price for their merchandise.
I was in a Dollar General Store last week. I was doing some yard work. What I needed was to launder and put on a pair of jeans; I still own several pairs. But which pair? Glyphosate/glufosinate reactions make it hard to know in advance which pair will fit. During reactions my waist may become convex; after reactions it's concave. Puffing up hurts, and shrinking down itches, too. A pair of jeans that fitted in the morning might become unbearably tight during the day, or might slide all the way down to my ankles. I tried wearing leggings as underwear under a sunsuit. The ones I had were the sturdy pure cotton kind that were occasionally sold as "not a pantsuit, more of a salwar-kamiz look" in the 1990s. As I stretched and bent, the thirty-year-old elastic lost all elasticity. By the end of the day the waist of the leggings was hanging down below the hems of the sunsuit. So I went into this store and saw a display rack of brand-new leggings. Hmm, the fabric was thinner, not likely to last thirty years, but thirty years from now either we'll have a ban on things that change my waist size by half during a single day, or I'll be dead, or maybe both. I decided it was time to replace the leggings I had on. But I didn't see a price tag anywhere on the display rack or the packages of leggings hanging there.
What do good Green people do when we don't see a price tag? We take the item to the checkout counter and check the price. If the price is unreasonable, we put a store employee to the trouble of replacing the item on the shelf.
Why do we do this? Because we want the store management to know that surprising us at the checkout counter DOES NOT PAY. Prices need to be plainly marked on the display. If they're not, we might pick up something for which we didn't agree on the price. The store can't save any money by not paying its employees to put price tags on shelves and packages. "But prices change," some unscrupulous merchants whine, "and we can't afford to keep people changing the price tags." No, but that's not necessary; you can afford to sell things for the original price that was based on what you paid for them, changing the price only as you change the actual merchandise.
Also: because we don't want to allow room for unfair pricing ploys. If small town storekeepers want to have a regular price that is displayed to everybody, and ask for a much lower price from a small select group of people--relatives, or members of their tribe, or local police officers, or people they consider to be the deserving poor, or people they owe favors, whatever--that's their business. We don't want to bring this practice into big chain businesses and institutionalize it. We want the same store to sell the same item for the same price whether the purchaser is rich or poor, young or old, D or R or Independent. We show support for this idea by not carrying a spyphone and insisting on a fixed, regular price that is the same for everybody.
Earlier this summer, US Representative Rashida Tlaib proposed a bill criminalizing the unequal pricing scams that are made possible when people "scan the code." Other US Representatives apparently ignored that bill in the belief that failing to display one price for all customers on the shelf was so obviously such a bad idea that it couldn't possibly spread. They don't realize how eager "multinational" merchants are to introduce the unethical business practices of unchristian cultures into a Christian nation that has condemned these practices for hundreds of years.
Some are now saying that Tlaib, who has admitted some division of loyalty between nations, should step down from Congress. Some are saying she should be deported. I think anyone serving in the US Congress should have undivided loyalty to the United States. That means Tlaib's constituents need a different representative. But I would like to see Tlaib remembered for the good she did. I want single prices displayed for the convenience of cash customers to be the law of the land; since it seems we need a federal law to preserve what used to be common sense, I would like to see that bill preserve Tlaib's name.
Cowardice, Latest Excuses for
"Conservatives" make the case that more concealed firearms might have deterred the murder of Iryna Zarutska. I'm not sure that the murderer's brain was capable of thinking about that, nor am I sure that a shot at him might not have killed Zarutska; I support the right to bear firearms but I think that right is for responsible adults who don't fire them on a crowded train. I am sure that legislation clearly exempting people from any liability for, e.g., creeping up behind the murderer, each one seizing an arm or a leg until all his limbs were accounted for and he was face down on the floor, could have helped--assuming the individuals on that train were fully human beings.
Etiquette, Rs Showing Better than Ds
The second paragraph says it all.
Singapore
This man's views are his own but I think our Singaporean readers, the few legitimate ones that remain since the bots have been shut down, will appreciate his impression...
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