It's subtle what's been "ditched" in later case law. And it's not what you're assuming.

I have to wonder why. That's the environment that fosters the maximum in human diversity, where everyone is the most free to find and do what is their own thing.

So you like an existence of more uniformity and degree of being controlled. I don't. I think even HOA's are frickin' nazis. As if the squeezing every last dollar of resale value is The One True Goal that everyone should have. Fuck that, I bought a home as a place to live, not something to flip, I want to customize it. If someone wants to paint their place Pepto Bismol pink, they ought to be able to.

My problem is I'm a city boy (or rather a suburbs boy) so I wouldn't be content to go live in some remote place just to be let be. That's why I wish the U.S. was split up geographically, for the two political sides.

I would never even give away a program binary, let alone source, because even patents and copyrights aside, someone could use your code in their business and if something goes wrong, they could claim it's your fault and you cost them x thousands of dollars and then try to recover it from you in a lawsuit. I don't need patent reform, I need legal immunity; something like a good samaritan law for software.

.NET is dominant on the Windows platform. After over a decade doing C/C++ on Win32, I finally had to switch to it several years back. Except for specialized stuff where the extra speed actually matters, no one is developing applications on Windows at this low level anymore.

Yes there is; case law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

The courts have only wavered in willingness to second-guess corporate officers' judgment in executing this primary pursuit.

People shouldn't have to do the right thing. Life is for each person to decide how to live. There should be just enough laws to keep society from totally breaking down, and no more.

As a (Googling) service to anyone else reading this, what smitty's references are getting at is that the CEO's and board members are on a binge to enrich themselves during this time of artificially-induced plenty, because they'll have moved on by the time the government begins to force their organizations out of the market.

Incidently, this is why laissez-faire capitalism is bad (and crony capitalism is worse). Because business owners are not purists about capitalism and fair play. Capitalism is about competing, and like in sports, there needs to be *some* rules, within which the players do their competing, otherwise it's not really basketball or capitalism.

Public corporations (vice private ones) in America are not about right and wrong, but legally about maximizing shareholder value. (And that's why I think we've allowed (way) too many of them.) And it's cheaper and easier just to try to avoid hiring those in trouble-maker demographics. Much more so than continuing to hire them and fund additional bureacracy for doing anal exams on the organization's pay and promotion statistics and buy insurance for lawsuits.

They don't have to; just the slapping of a company with lawsuits, even if they don't pan out, is still costly and is a nuisance that distracts from doing business/competing with competitors.

Your "we" has fixed nothing. Irrational fears/hatred of other people's differences die out naturally over generations. I'm (believe it or not!) much less bigoted than my parents, and they were much less than their parents. But what has your welfare state and Affirmative Action done for the Black community in America? Jack shit. Besides making things worse. WWII put America on the path of women sharing the workforce, that wasn't going to be stopped. Especially when salaries vs. costs of living began shifting negatively for the family, and men need their wives to go off to work to pay the bills. Or at least pay the household's taxes.

The best approach for helping these kinds of things along is to abandon the Leftist approach of trying to force things, and instead to encourage the more libertarian mindset of respect one another's right to live and work and play. Don't treat someone with respect because you have to, but because it's the right thing to do. The whole "it's the right thing to do, so you have to" is not the same thing. That's like forced charity. And to assume you need laws for this is also defeatist, assuming that most people are extremists.

Of course there is; business will try to pay as little as they can, and some people (like me) will accept less than others for equal or greater performance, so strong authority would be needed to make business do what you want, and it needs to be a centralized authority so that it's uniform.

I can fully appreciate why the Left is enamored with dictatorship and other totalitarian forms of govenment; because it's the only way to ensure equality is imposed on an innately unequal reality.

Absolutely. It's our frickin' freedom of association. If I want to get together with some others and pursue shared interests in bowling, it's my right. And if I want to get together with some others and pursue shared interests in our workplace, it's my right as well. If the bowling alley down the street doesn't like us, they can kick us out. Same with a shared employer. Because it's also their right to rent shoes and lanes and have whoever working there they want.

The idea of unions are as American as apple pie, independent of the major ones having been taking over by communists, back when the Left in America was still pursuing the remaking of America by way of getting the workers to revolt (having switched some time ago to pursuing the same by way of deception instead of honest argumentation).

And independent of some of them being so stupid as to drive their reason for being out of business! And independent of, what for lack of a better term I'll call cronyist labor; the corruption that is government involvement like denial of right-to-work and denial of the secret ballot.

In short, unions are like journalism, education, government, etc.; they're all fine and important in principal, it's just that ours have all been corrupted by the Left (who've turned them all from their actual roles into primarily about advancing Leftism). Otherwise I'm not anti- any of those things.

It doesn't need to; just a few and society shifts to avoid the risk, and however is cheapest and easiest at that.

1) You ought to know better by now that I don't just troll people. (When I do use sarcasm, I try real hard to make sure it's absolutely, obviously dripping with it.) My thinking is way outside the mainstream, but that's just genuinely where I'm at (/where I've evolved/devolved to).

2) Where the false dichotomy is is in saying that we can only address a few of types of discrimination (the ones the Left pushes, (not so) coincidently) at a time. We could pass an omnibus anti-discrimination act that makes all the kinds of discrimination we can think of illegal in one fell swoop, each with outlined detections and remedies. Hell, our Affordable Care Act was around 11,000 pages.

3) Yes my position is defeatist. I don't like unfairness. I don't even like that some people pay full price for cars, because they're unwilling or aren't fully aware of dickering. Should government mandate automobile pricing? It just never ends. I'm just not naive enough to think that "inequity" is a problem that can really be fixed.

I don't like it, but wisdom tells me to let it go. Controlling people is worse, and that's what it takes to try to fix everything. The moral thing is to just live and let live, and encourage good treatment in others by setting the example. For example, I could make more money in the workplace, but I don't screw people over. It's unfair, but I'd rather make less.

No they should not. I'm sorry but you're a communist on this, and I deeply despise you for it. What you're talking about is centralized authoritarian control over how people conduct their lives, and that's probably the largest evil in this world. People are individuals and should get paid whatever they can get. Because that pay is coming from other individuals, who deserve their right to conduct themselves as they see fit respected as well. If I opposed people deciding how they were going to live their lives, I'd oppose that in you.

Just because something's part of reality, doesn't make it automatically actionable. (Especially it even being moral to try to act on a thing.) The commie dream of chasing equality is a fool's errand, and just makes things overall worse. We're always going to be unequal, across the multitude of dimensions of possible comparison.

Remember, no Republicans voted for it, and there was trouble wrangling enough Democrats to go along with it. Obviously for-profit/private-sector insurers is nowhere near the desired end-goal of the Left, but the idea was(/is) so unpopular that it magnified the influence of major lobbying groups (when it's down to a handful of votes).

So the Left had the choice of (highly likely irrevocably) putting us on the path to single-payer*, or get nothing. I.e. it was a *huge* win for the Left. The interesting question to me is what the insurance companies are thinking. They know their days are numbered. (By design/according to plan. The government can just mandate more coverage, at less reimbursement levels. Keep squeezing profitability/operability until they get out of that market, and then government can claim that they have to do the insuring because the free market failed.) I guess the insurance companies know, and just figure to make as much money as they can, while they can.

*If it really was about getting the uninsured covered, it wouldn't have involved the already insured. (That is, a few new regs pertaining to pre-existing conditions and what-not could've been imposed on the insurance industry, without creating an over-arching behemoth set of legislation that imposes control over everyone. (Notice who the real target was in this pursuit.))

*Once*? By *some*? *Pretty much*? This is like how advertisers will say something to make you think they've made a claim about what they're selling when they really haven't.

So our next Republican president (if we ever have one again, that is) could then use an executive order to outright repeal Obamacare and then just say "Progressivism was once opposed by some Democrats [Remember that long-lost species Democratis Conservatus?]. So I don't know what you're complaining about, Democrats, because anti-Progressivism was pretty much your plan before I adopted it."

On a serious note, Hillary would at least be more mature than this guy. We at least need to go back to having grownups in the WH; even people like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, despite being doofuses, were at least adults. BHO hornswoggled his one crowning achievement through, and everything else has been either to agitate the country (racially), or nothing more than simply towards irritating the other side (hence the delivery always with his trademarked self-amused smirk).

I mean, thank goodness he's not accomplished (because he's not tried to/couldn't be bothered to) anything else of substance. Just like I'm thankful WJC had only partying in mind when he ran for prez. But really we need to have *adult* supervision. (Because Americans are so infantile(ized).)