I had a missive in agreement with you and a coupla fun links to go with it.

Sadly, I had a little attack on my comp and they were lost (ex GFs with Masters in CS can be unforgiving…).

Anywho, for the idealists among us I would offer this little bit-o-truth that you will learn once you reach the level of VP…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM

Well, if she does it again maybe she’ll have the decency to have a head on with a solid immovable object instead of some poor person (or family) riding along minding their own business. Sometimes that’s the closest an unapologetic drunk driver will ever come being rehabilitated.

Another article: http://www.autoblog.com/2011/02/24/fbi-being-sued-for-crashing-a-ferrari/

Here’s the story. He really cracked it up pretty good.

http://www.wreckedexotics.com/articles/027.shtml

If people want to join a union, fine. I’ll certainly disagree with using the strongarm tactics that the NLRB brings into play. And don’t think that that would have helped these folks who blogged for free. But they’ll also need to be prepared for the fact that there’s a limited amount of demand, and an awful lot of supply, and they’re not going to cartel up that supply, because there are too many smart people.

The laws of supply and demand cannot be wished away. There are too many writers. The market signals are very, very clear, “Get another job.” They choose not to.

That’s reality.

If they have not been defrauded, they do not deserve anything.

If you truly would like to hear that explanation — or read it — then why didn’t you visit the page linked by Radley? There you would have found said explanation, and it most decidedly does not involve defending some “patch” against “outsiders.”

Now, the argument there is certainly a lame argument. But it’s not the lame argument you’re ascribing. It’s a bunch of goofy class-consciousness idiocy, not a bunch of defend-my-turf idiocy. The boycotter is an attorney, not a journalist.

Incidentally, I’ve worked in a major metropolitan newsroom for more than two decades. I’ve never encountered a single journalist who thinks someone without a j-school degree isn’t a “real reporter.” Indeed, I’d venture that most of the reporters I’ve worked with didn’t go the j-school route.

I’ve also worked alongside many who don’t have any degree at all. They’re not only regarded as “real reporters,” they’re accorded a kind of nitty-gritty respect. They are admired for the very trait you claim is disdained — for having worked hard and made “their own way on their own merits.”

Of course, if the business owner happens to get her pants sued off due to the labor of unpaid workers, those workers have no obligation to chip in to help pay the judgement, I’m sure.

Writing that, it occurred to me that libertarians have a lot more in common than they think with college-educated leftist arts and humanities majors. Kind of a scary thought, eh? But they both seem to lead sheltered existences at opposite ends of the White Reservation, untroubled by the thought of bad people in the world who might try to fleece them. They either insist that bad things only happen to less charmed people or that there is some structural panacea that will make everything better. Rand/Marx published blueprints for the Comintern/free market utopia, so if only society could follow through with their plans, human sin would no longer exist. In any event, family money will tide Whitey over in the meantime.

And we wonder why the US has such extremes of wealth and intractable debt servitude. No kidding, it’s because we insist on applying otherworldly solutions to a world that exists only in our imaginations. It’s perception over reality yet again.

Just some food for thought.

When a link is posted with text along the lines of “so this is (insert vague term here)” and nothing else to describe what the article is about, and hovering over the link reveals a url with a numeric id instead of a slug, I don’t click on it. I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I am however noting that this is a thing, and while I can not vouch for others, I’m sure I’m not alone. Might be the most interesting thing I read all day, but I’ll never know because I’m only going to click if the subject appears to be of interest.

Just my .02.

Well said in #12 and #28. That’s exactly why libertarians take caveat emptor and laissez-faire orthodoxy too far: the orthodoxies are great cover for hustlers, con artists and other shysters.

When a business owner realizes a windfall from the labor of unpaid workers, the workers deserve back pay or royalties. If the owner continues to be stingy and hide behind sleazy legal covers, they should sue her if they have any legitimate cause and standing. Even a standard shakedown for a settlement is not entirely inappropriate, since hustlers can’t complain about getting hustled.

Sure, the plaintiffs may be whiny White People (in the sense of Stuff White People Like) and overeducated bullshit artists, but that is no excuse for their employers to engage in wage arbitrage until they have volunteer labor forces for profitable enterprises. And as I’ve written before, Arianna Huffington is well connected and would have had no problem raising capital to make a full payroll, so she had no excuse for mooching off of an unpaid labor force.

Another thing: comments and letters to the editor are a different beast from original, standalone articles. Conflating the two is a reductio ad absurdum too far.

We keep seeing these naive arguments that professional writers don’t need unions, pay, benefits or basic protections of their workplace rights because they’re creative types who stand a good chance of striking it big someday. Employers take advantage of this aspirational irrationality to abuse the hell out of their creative staff. At some point, it’s no longer fucking “Wheel of Fortune,” it’s a job, and it’s time for the help to grow a pair. It’s time to join the real world, which is an adversarial one, especially in the United States. An adversarial system doesn’t work if one side doesn’t have the balls to be adversarial.

That’s why commercial pilots don’t get screwed over as easily as writers. It’s not a matter of agreeing to little or no compensation because they’re doing what they love; it’s a matter of recognizing that they have to look out for their own financial interests because management won’t. So, no matter how much they love to fly, if management asks them to fly for free, they don’t say, “oh, sure, it is an honor and a privilege to be able to fly such beautiful aircraft in such a great country!” They say, “ask that again and half your fleet will be grounded tomorrow.”

Yeah, that’s how Jimmy McNulty ended up on the boat!

Obligatory disclosure: I work for Huffington Post. I am not working for free.

Out of curiousity, is your writing for them work for hire, or do you maintain the copyrights? If the latter, is their license to the material transferable?

Samuel L. Jackson narrates “Go The Fuck To Sleep”. It’s a 5min. long .mp3 and if you have kids it will get at least one good laugh out of you: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/193540/GoTheF–kToSleep.mp3

Make sure and tell them you want to work in the harbor patrol.

Buwahahaha, and here I was afraid I would be the only one to make that connection.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your modification of the analogy, but I would add that implicitly, if not explicitly, the volunteers were told the restaurant had to make some money to pay the rent and utilities, but basically existed as a forum for the cooks to put out interesting food.

Not to help build a franchise and sell it out to McDonalds.

I’m not proffering who is technically right or wrong. The observation is just that they got hustled on some level, they’ve figured it out, and now they are pissed. I agree 100% Bernie Madoff’s victims should have known better. Anybody who did a bevnap analysis of Madoff’s fund knew that it couldn’t do what Bernie said it did.

I’m not judging whether the fact they should have known better excuses the fraud. Life is full of hard lessons. I just get frustrated that it gets distilled down to ‘they volunteered so they should suck it up’ when there is more to the story. That’s all.

*crickets chirping*

thought so.

That’s shitty luck. Unfortunately, it’s neither a crime nor a civil tort. If we tried to rectify everything that was shitty, unlucky and/or unfair via the court system, bloggers wouldn’t exist because we would all be lawyers (except for the bailiffs).