- you are welcome, but you may want to reconsider running your web server on your vanilla 68 Katy, I suggest adding a turbo mode for that :)

Wrong. Apple is not hurting anybody and this is a power grub by government. AFAIC the only people that actually hurt consumers reside in government and the central banks. By the way, governments like to tout inflation as the means to a good economy, for them destruction of money value is never enough, they 'care' about your prices? No, this is socialism/fascism out of control and in a decent society such governments that usurped power to meddle in markets would be summarily dismissed. The fact that it is not happening shows complete disregard to individual rights by the society that is not actually decent.

I don't own a single Apple product could not care less. There is no such thing as being 'guilty' of something that is an illegal and an immoral power grab by the government.

AFAIC this is no different than government throwing people to jail for drug use or sale, prohibition, concentration and labour camps and any other violence governments perpetrate upon people.

Total unadulterated nonsense. Apple comes to an agreement with some publishers to prevent Amazon from lowering prices, (or so the case says and I do not have a tendency to trust anything I hear, but lets assume that is thecase here). People still were buying through Apple but there is no monopoly on books, books can be bought in many formats. Apparently the market gave Apple enough profits as a reward for what they do to allow Apple to play hard, you know what? Amazon could easily raise enough money to fight this in the same market. They can find a publisher to work with them, nobody repealed the natural laws of competition yet. And maybe Apple has it right - people that buy their phones can buy books from them at Apple prices and also without having all the facts I am not at all convinced that Amazon was 'in the right' and Apple 'in the wrong', but what I do know is that the governments and the courts usurped this illegal authority with socialist / fascist nonsense like the Sherman act.

A fascist? Since you don't know the meaning of the word, maybe you should learn it before trying to apply. Fascism is a socialist system of government allows some operation of private property but introduces huge controls over it in order to gain most of the reward from that operation. Fascism requires business and government to work together.

What happened with the individuals taking over land they saw as unclaimed had nothing to do with governments and companies working together, so your ad hominem fallacy noted.

You are not the only person around and not the only person who helped other and no, we should not have 'support systems' if they are based on initiating of violence by government against an individual. It is immoral because it relies on violence against people and bad economic policy as well, because it leads to growth of government power and of the welfare state that eats itself to death.

There is no such thing as 'regulated free market'. Regulated means not a free market and what we have today across the globe is failure socialist/fascist policies that presents itself in the increasing economic downturn, reduction of standard of living for all people, you are pulling everybody down with your edge case based policies. Somalia has nothing to do with free market capitalism, it is a country that had to fight one war after another against the occupying forces.

There can be no compromise, income taxation, business regulation and money printing (inflation) are immoral and are leading towards economic disaster in countries that practice it, while those who are reducing the government pressure are building up their capital and wealth as a result (China as an example).

History has shown us exactly what happens when role of government is reduced - people become free and build the strongest economies in the world. We also know what happens when governments grow in power regardless of the reasons (and they always promise a free lunch for the majority), everybody becomes a slave and a poor slave at that.

You are not talking about a free market capitalist economy, you are talking about a monarchy with the aristocrats ruling not based on their utility to the market (profit motive, the most moral way to run an economy) but on their ability to put together enough military to subjugate the population.

So you helped somebody when they were down, you provided charity. Most people are not born into a vast empty space, they have a family or somebody taking care of them until they are of such age that they can take care of themselves. Parents / relatives / charity / adopted parents.

Again, using edge case scenarios to create policy that destroys freedoms of individuals is setting the society on the path to destruction, to welfare, to fiat currency, to government largess and government pyramid schemes, which are unsustainable by definition. In the long run you end up hurting everybody while pretending that you are moral by using government initiation of violence against individuals and destroying individual freedoms, destroying free market capitalism.

The solutions for edge case scenarios do not need to be provided, they emerge and if they do not it is too bad for a very tiny number of people. Your ideas lead to destruction for vast majority of people and thus they are immoral and dangerous but the mob cannot see beyond its nose, so it loves them.

In Seattle the average work day for a man is also 13% longer, much fewer men take maternity leave and many more men actually do work long hours at the day's end.

A woman with the same dedication to work as a man in the same exact position with the same experience will make same or more money, since apparently women have more education then men do.

Yahoo! CEOs:
Scott Thompson

Marissa Mayers

I run a business, if I could get work done for 10-30% less by hiring only women, you bet I would only hire women.

The entire 'article' reeks of class envy and jealousy nothing more than that. It's sounds like a socialist cry to arms more than anything else.

Women are not paid less if they are doing the same jobs and spending the same time doing them as men do, otherwise businesses would only hire women if they could actually pay them less to do the same exact shit.

Amazon is a company, it's not its job 'to create diversity' in any way, it already does more than any socialist ever could to grow the economy by hiring people, by paying them wages, by offering cheap products to everybody, including those very women and minorities that this garbage 'article' is yapping about.

The women who use Amazon likely already save more than 25% on their purchases compared to what they would have to pay if there was no Amazon at all. If 'investing in public transit' made Amazon money and was actually fucking legal in the fucking socialist/fascist ran cities, Amazon could certainly get into that business, but it's not clear that it could profit a retailer to get into transportation business. Should a chip manufacturer get into sewer business? Should a pastry chef get into electronics repair business?

Just because more white qualified males apply to Amazon than minorities or women do doesn't mean that this somehow is Amazon's problem to fix and that it is even a problem in the first place. I am sure there are jobs that minorities and women apply for in overwhelming numbers compared to white males.

If Amazon is not retaining people at the same rate as Microsoft for example (mentioned in this garbage 'article'), it doesn't mean Amazon is mistreating anybody, it means that Amazon gives people an opportunity to find a low level job that others wouldn't provide to those very people. Can the people that are hired by Amazon be hired by Microsoft? I doubt it very much. However once they worked for Amazon maybe their chances of being hired by other companies increase quite a bit, after all, if a year later people quit it means they can now find better jobs that they couldn't a year before, so Amazon is doing a fine job training people, giving them the lower run of the ladder to step on.

If it was up to the author of this garbage 'article', Amazon maybe would have the same hiring practices as Microsoft, but then where would all the people that Amazon hires right now find their first jobs?

Philanthropy has nothing on running a successful business and providing products/services that people are willing to pay for. It's easy to give away money to people, it's hard making money. Making money requires providing enough customer satisfaction to offset your costs, giving money away requires nothing of the sort. Everybody likes getting free lunch, but paying for lunch means that the people paying value it enough to give their money in exchange for that lunch and it's much harder to provide that type of satisfaction than to provide free money. Philanthropy destroys capital that otherwise can be used to increase real customer satisfaction and that's a crime as far as I am concerned. Africa will not get better with hand outs, it will get better with real business growth and opportunities provided by business growth.

As to the fucking ridiculous advices from this garbage 'article', they stink socialism so high, it's should be embarrassing even to most socialists. 'Advocate for an appropriate tax system in Seattle and Washington state'. WTF is an 'appropriate tax system'? AFAIC the only appropriate tax system is 0 tax, all other tax systems are inappropriate. I hope Amazon advocates for that. 'Lead in diversity both in Seattle and worldwide'? What? How about lead in customer satisfaction. 'Lead on supporting economic programs that make it easier for lower income, lower skilled Seattleites to stay in the city'? Fucking hell, how about save more money and build more business so that all the lower income folks can save even more by buying at Amazon and some of them work there anyway.

This 'article' is what is wrong with America and the Western world today, total, uninhibited socialist crapola that needs to die in fire, but instead it's spreading like worst type of cancer.

No, slavery is your main point. As to 'westward expansion' - what is the problem again? People with guns killed off people without guns as to be expected. The market rewarded those who had higher levels of technology and who utilised the resources more efficiently to provide more people with more goods than the native population ever could.

There is no need for any centralised government to enforce contracts, a system of private competing courts and private competing security forces does that just fine. As to you 'rubbing one while watching teenage girls if you keep your distance' - where is the problem? You are correct, it is not hurting anybody. If you are doing it in a way that everybody has to observe you do it, then there may be a problem with the rules set up within the private property boundaries you are in (and no, there shouldn't be any 'public property', all property has to be private, even if it means that property is owned by a corporation that runs the city for example, and yes, most if not all cities are corporations).

I was born in the USSR and worked my way out of poverty in the last couple of decades. Edge cases are exactly that: a low percentage of people that fall behind regardless what. The entire population shouldn't be punished unfairly by having policy that is aimed to steal to provide something for those edge cases.

As to your last statement: you are against people having power if you are against the freedom of an individual from the oppression of the collective. If you stand on the side of a government being able to initiate violence against an individual to steal from the individual, to enslave him, then you are not for people having power, you are for a system that breeds powerless slaves.

I am obviously talking about the free market capitalism, which excludes the slavery, I am talking about free trade and the industrial revolution. In USA the industrial revolution happened in the North, so you may want to refresh your history books, factories weren't built or operated by slaves. Sure, people were poor, but that's the normal state of affairs where farmers were offered jobs in factories, they had no experience or knowledge, so their market value to the production lines was low, but it increased with time, as capital was accrued and experience was built up. It was the industrial revolution that showed that slavery was not an efficient way to run a business, free people work better, have real incentives to do a better job because it means better pay. Industrial revolution within the free market capitalist economy settings built the economy that USA became (and that it destroyed), not slavery. Slavery barely registered on the wealth generation. As an example Standard Oil production was done with only free people working for a wage, not slaves.