winston_smith

1daysooner.org lists almost 40,000

1daysooner.org lists almost 40,000 volunteers, and that's without anyone official even asking for them. And you need far fewer subjects in a challenge trial than a normal trial.

It's great that you care about poor people, but it's also elitist to treat them like they're too poor to afford free will.

Unless we decide to consciously work against that tendency, which it's nice to see people doing in this thread.

You're using the passive voice, "people must be protected", which calls for action without considering whether the cure might be worse than the disease.

If your assumption is that people are helpless to resist persuasion, then who is this incorruptible entity who will protect us from having to make our own choices?

Feeding lies to vulnerable people sounds exactly like what our authority figures do. Who did you have in mind to enforce those limits?

This Johns Hopkins doc claims they took off four days for Thanksgiving: https://thedispatch.com/p/fda-career-staff-are-delaying-the

We are indeed far from the original argument that billionaires and creating value are bad. But I respect your right to petition the government to bring back housing projects and welfare cheese.

OP's argument was that capturing value itself is bad. But I suspect you don't check to see if your apple sellers have plenty of other potential buyers before buying apples. If nobody else is buying, then the seller lowers the price until the market clears, and you get a bargain. Lucky you.

> you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what you pay them to do it

This is the textbook definition for how wealth is created, and it's exactly what's supposed to happen in every transaction in the marketplace.

You buy an apple for $1 and it brings you $1.10 in value. You have captured the difference between its value to you and its value to the seller, and the ten cents is wealth that didn't exist before.

This also works for the seller, who sold her apple for $1 even though it only cost her $0.95. She captures five cents of the wealth created by the transaction.

Wealth is created because things have contextual value. It's the same when we exchange our labor for money. They wanted our labor more than the money. We wanted the money more than the time. Win/win for both of us.

> If someone challenges a status quo that you like ("makes something political" in your parlance), then actually defend that status quo

Incidentally, that right there is a good illustration of how being apolitical is different from supporting the status quo.

Going to a protest to defend the status quo from change is defending the status quo. Not having an opinion about some particular detail of how society operates is being apolitical.

> can't build an organization without making decisions some people will call political. What's the issue?

The issue is that when someone says "let's stay away from politics", it's pedantic and obtuse to start listing things that in some way involve politics.

It's clear what they meant: the more something is related to politics and unrelated to work, the more we should try to avoid it.

Your response does the exact opposite of that, bringing up a bunch of hot-button political issues tenuously related to work, which is a great way to bring more conflict about politics into the workplace.

Nonsense, most things are apolitical. The people who deny that are trying to produce political action on their pet issues and think we can be coerced into supporting it if they claim, as George W. Bush did, that "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists." It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

Fair enough, but beside the point, which is that "businesses ... are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith". Hobby Lobby had to wage a very public lawsuit all the way to the supreme court over a single element of their healthcare package, because our country doesn't like companies forcing religious beliefs on us. As it turns out, many of us feel the same way about companies forcing their politics on us.

Absolutely, because politics is what government is specifically for, unlike, say, toy stores and individual people doing their non-government jobs.

(edit: not endorsing either the government's position, just saying that yes, government is exactly where we see politics being forced on things)

And yet we do because it's a real and useful concept, just like "apolitical".

The smartass kid would agree with you. Is your claim that some things used to not be political but now literally everything is?

> can legally affect politics via lobbies, so it is hard for large American companies to stay apolitical

I think they could manage it by, stick with me here, not lobbying. Especially on issues unrelated to their core business.

> Being apolitical is no longer an option.

My purchasing power says otherwise. I'll take my business to the company that sticks to its job and doesn't preach at me.

If everything is political and there's no such thing as neutral, then neither of those words would exist.

It's like the smartass kid who acts like he doesn't know what "clean" means because there might be a molecule of dirt somewhere.

> having "no stance" means supporting the status quo

Voting "remain" in Brexit was supporting the status quo. Voting "leave" was opposing it. Having no stance on Brexit means having no stance on it.

We're allowed to not have opinions on everything.

If everything's political, then nothing is

> nothing is apolitical

If nothing was apolitical then we wouldn't have a word for it.

Nobody's claiming perfect political neutrality. The claim is that it's bad for companies to get political in unnecessary ways. Inasmuch as Hobby Lobby decided to push their politics and religion on their employees via their healthcare package, then we shouldn't be surprised at the result.

As much as political activists want to think the world revolves around them, it really doesn't.

Saying "but this other thing is vaguely political" (or religious) is no excuse to insist that your company get involved in your pet causes.

You heard of Hobby Lobby because they promptly got sued for it.

Nobody's claiming that work is completely unrelated to religion or politics. That's just the inverse of the stupid claim that because work sometimes involves those things, we might as well do them as much as we want.

They just listed off a standard set of "europe good, USA bad" talking points. The "everything is political" argument lets you tie any political issue you want to any company you want, so that you can pressure them into being more political about the issues you care about.

This is the same level of cleverness as saying "everything is made of atoms so everything is about physics".

This is a terrible argument. Replace politics with religion to see why.

You can try to be clever by listing ways religion might relate to business, but that doesn't change the fact that businesses generally, and in many ways are legally required to, let people do their jobs regardless of their faith. It works just fine.

Everyone knows it's possible to make things more political. Being apolitical means doing the opposite. It's a very simple concept from kindergarten, "more" and "less".

Drawing some strained connection to politics doesn't magically make it impossible for us to say "try to have less politics at work".

If I followed you around all day complaining that you're not vegan enough, you'd suddenly regain the ability to notice that some things are more political and more related to your job than others.