Yet by purchasing slaves you are increasing demand for slaves, which prompts the slave industry to acquire more. This doesn't strike me as morally pragmatic, it strikes me as wrong. The slaves did not volunteer for their duty, it was not their choice to leave their savagery, I see no way to argue that as being right. The best way to be the positive drop in the bucket is first and foremost to take the money out of the industry: don't buy slaves.

Moral pragmatism is coming in to possession of the slaves second hand (i.e. saving them from death), treating them well and releasing them and ideally giving them a paying job (given that released slaves in the US would likely have a rough go). Given the laws and social conditions, releasing them may actually have caused them greater harm, I can see having to make a less than ideal choice on this one for the greater good.

The harder choice is one more like what we face today (H1B) and more like what might be driving the cheating in India. These people choose their indentured servitude here, and you can't argue it's a step up, yet is entirely destructive and unfair. What we should be doing is giving them green cards. That will take the money out of the system and cut much of the cheating. The rest I would argue should be handled through testing that is more standardized and much harder to cheat on (with real legal penalties). Universities ultimately are not about qualifying people for a job, they're about education, it's on the student to use his time there productively. They should not also be the gatekeepers of qualification.

I actually found and still find people that think they should be forced to do it the right way even while complaining about the abuse.

I've found it's worse still, that in the corporate world if you CAN do it the wrong way, and the wrong way is profitable, you MUST do it the wrong way. I'm not even talking about the usual issues we moan about on /. (environmental abuse, consumer abuse, short-term thinking, etc). Even things as simple as reporting status and which emails you answer seem to be more subject to what you strictly have to do versus what the right thing is.

I agree with Gandhi, but I think a lot of good people would starve to death if they followed his example.

I think, particularly given the basis of memorial day, that the analogy is especially terrible.

Not if you have kids... time loses meaning, each day mostly an olympic dash to microobjectives and periodic unconsciousness. Some people choose to fight the inevitable, by estbalishing a date night, sort of like a repository tag, to put a stake in the in shifting sea of time. On this date, the children are given to a baby sitter of dubious repute (sometimes chosen intentionally so) and the adults are set loose on the world.

On this night there is a date. There is no date on the quicksand of parenthood, but this is a date.

this is actually a really bad one to select to celebrate rampant consumerism.

Unlike the yearly observance of the notional birth of the messiah, or the day after a day intended to be used to express gratitude for the sacrifice of the pilgrims, or hte day that bunnies lay chocolate eggs and you actually eat them...

Really I'm not sure I know of a holiday that we haven't turned in to some sort of circus. Even memorial day is mostly about cooking meat on a grill, and the families of the people being honored are still around.

Let's just ignore it because it's China and Alibaba and not look for some excuse.

The conclusion presented in the article however, is not that, I can agree with that (even if it's obvious). Their conclusion is that people stop believing in the problem. Probably not true, probably not even the right conclusion to draw from the data presented. If you present a "fact" and then *a* solution that may or may not address the problem, may or may not be optimal, and may reveal you as having a controversial political bias then you are basically asking for people to screw up your experiment.

First, upon deciding you have a political bias that opposes mine, I immediately doubt or question your "facts". I may think there's a problem, but I am going to assume you are lying or being intentionally deceptive. Rather than internalize your facts, I will replace them with my own (possibly wrong) facts.
Second, I assume that the purpose of the test is to lie/mislead/misrepresent truths for the purposes of accomplishing a goal I may not agree with.
Third, even if I believe your facts, even if I don't care about motives, if I believe the solution causes more problems than it solves, I will choose instead to let the problem continue. If I have chicken pox and the cure might cause cancer 10% of the time, but will definitely heal me, I would just suffer in silence. This is a no brainer, but the issues behind politics are far more complicated and have much more significant impacts and unintended consequences, not to mention that different people will weigh the solutions differently.

Maybe the paper was smarter than all that, I'm not going to pay good money to read soft science. I spent enough time with academics to distrust the paper factory even in hard sciences, in the soft sciences it's just utter bullshit to the core, and the article more or less confirms it.

If you give a survey like this, I will probably answer in a way intended to piss the person who wrote it off. If someone presents me with something I don't believe, and with narrow minded and/or politically charged options to solve it, I stop caring and start being angry.

If they really wanted to understand human behavior present facts that most people don't know, and solutions that we're not emotionally involved with. Attempt to do science while toying with people's emotions, they will toy back.

How do you know kuzb wasn't trying to spell "flamingo"?

Corporations avoid them because it is profitable to do so.

They're part of the EU, and no doubt the US and EU have some back scratching deals to ensure everyone pays taxes to some degree or another. While we can debate who gets the better end of the deal, it is a natural solution to multinats trying to be above the law.

... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime

I still can't even buy alcohol on Sunday mornings. Queue the Texas conservative jokes, however when I lived in the liberal northeast my town did not allow ANY alcohol sales.

Getting rid of these laws is going to take a long time.

tl; dr: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

I would pay $5k tomorrow for fiber provided that the fiber installed could be serviced by any number of providers that i can select at will, without contract or obligation.

If comcast or att want it, I will not line up at town hall with torches and pitchforks, I will ram them up the offending CEOs more intelligent end while slapping the other end across the face with my terms of service.

Like, how do you even reach this point of reasoning.

Hurrrr I ride a hoers!

Don't give up your fingerprint without having hired a lawyer to represent you. For the most part they can't just go looking for new crimes, although for sure they'll try particularly if no one is watching your back.