Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

Don't these yokels deserve the right of self determination?

Sure. Maybe they should pool all the ranching and land use subsidies they've been collecting for decades and buy an island where they can roam free, untrammeled by a burdensome government. That'd show us.

I'm in favor of just erecting a razor wire fence around where they are, letting them sit there with their military surplus rations and gold bars, and calling it a day. If anyone gets bored in there and wants a police escort out, one can be provided.

Or they could go to Puerto Rico and experience some real US oppression, all taxation and no representation.

A bunch of cows ******** all over everything would fit right in over there.

Um... I think it's you two who failed at reading comprehension. I got that entirely. The "you" in that statement was the "you" you were instructing to "do the bare minimum work necessary to fill a job slot, make no effort to increase your skills, and in fact actively work to avoid doing so...".

In case you're still confused my point was that you were giving absolutely terrible advice. While doing that extra work isn't a guarantee for success, not doing so is almost always a guarantee for failure. How the heck will you *ever* advance if you make no effort to improve your job skills and knowledge? You should be jumping at every opportunity to take on a new task. Period. Every, single, time. Even if it doesn't immediately result in any increase in wages, it doesn't matter. It's a skill you now have that you didn't have before. Even if it doesn't pay off at your Walmart position, it may pay off somewhere else.

And yes, Virginia, management does make note of who goes out of their way to be extra helpful and who does not. If this extra work didn't pay off for you, it's more likely something else about *you* that made that happen, and not the extra work. For most people taking on extra tasks pays off.



Seriously? You think the sons and daughters of the rich and entitled are sitting around using their connections to get sweet mid level management positions at Walmart? Really? You're way overplaying this narrative. You really need to step away from the "us vs them" mentality. I suspect that's what's hurt your advancement.



Wrong. Everything else staying the same, your outcomes will be better doing those things than not. Again, it's no guarantee of success, but your odds are better if you do work harder, and are optimistic, and do more to help than if you don't. Again, I'll suggest that this negative attitude that seems to be firmly entrenched in your mind may be your biggest hindrance to success.



Wrong. Dead and demonstrably wrong. How would these volunteers eat? You get that a starving workforce doesn't get much work done, right? You really have a bizarre infatuation with the idea that everyone that is part of "them" is just out to get you or something. You've read to many crappy distopian novels or something. In the real world, employers must pay their employees salaries sufficient for the jobs they are doing, or they wont do them. No one will work for $0.10/hour in an economy where a loaf of bread costs $3. Surely you can see this.

You keep tossing out extremes, but the reality is in the middle. And it's a middle you can work with, if you make good choices.




Then why were they chosen for the position? You get that Walmart is a business. It has to make money to survive. Which means that it's management levels have to be sufficiently competent to ensure that they continue to make a profit. I get that you have built up this assumption that they are all stupid and whatnot, but that simply cannot be the case. The incentive of each level of management is to put the best people in the key positions. Said positions tend to be the best paying positions. A business that doesn't do this will fail over time. Your personal assumptions about management is almost certainly ridiculously biased. I'm not going to assume no incompetents will exist in management, it's very likely that the measurement of competence that you are using isn't an accurate one in terms of what the business considers to be important.

And at the end of the day, that's what matters. When I spoke earlier about figuring out what those who have become successful have done, and attempting to do it yourself, this is why. It doesn't matter if you, the stock boy, think that the things your managers do are dumb, it's clear that whomever put them in their positions do *not* agree with you. Since they're the ones making the decisions, then it's their opinion that matters, not yours. The smart move is to figure out what they are looking for and work yourself to be that. The dumb move is declaring what they want "dumb", and refusing to do it, and thus ensuring that your odds of success are as low as possible.


Contrary to your assumptions, businesses aren't in the business of oppressing their workforce. They are in the business of making money. And most of the time, the best way to make the most money is to pay your workforce a sufficient wage to keep them employed. Which yes, means that low skilled people will tend to make very little money. But as you gain in skill, your value will increase, and your wages will increase as well. Your view of this seems to be solely from the "no skills that can't be replaced by the next warm body to walk along". Which is a very very narrow view of employment. The key is to fix that skills problem, not demand that such skills magically command a higher salary. Because the latter approach simply doesn't work on a macro-economic scale. Wages are always going to be relative to the value of the output of the labor. You can't get around this, no matter how many wage laws you attempt to pass.

This. IMO (and yes, I'm aware that the term gets grossly overused by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons) what makes an act "terrorism" is that it is designed not merely to harm the target of the act itself, but to invoke fear in the population so as to intimidate them into pressuring for or accepting a change that the terrorist wants. Setting off a bomb on a bus full of children, or in a sidewalk cafe, and following it up with a manifesto of things you want changed, and a warning of more to follow unless/until said changes are made is terrorism. Even the old NRA tactic of planting a bomb somewhere and then calling up the authorities and telling them where it is in plenty of time to be disarmed before someone gets hurt (but with the implicit threat that "we didn't have to tell you about the bomb") qualifies as terrorism. Because the population is aware that if they **** this group off enough, they might not warn the authorities in time.

There are lots of acts that are borderline, and could be interpreted either way. McVeigh blowing up a federal building, for example. If his goal was simply to destroy something he hated, then it's not terrorism. If the goal was to blow up the building, so that people would be afraid of the chance of being in a building that might blow up and thus pressure the federal government to make some kind of change, then it is. I'm not aware that McVeigh had any specific (or even semi-reasonable) demand for changes other than just a very strong and broad hatred for the federal government, so I actually tend towards his act *not* technically being terrorism and just being an act of great violence and hate. Similarly, most mass shootings aren't terrorism either. Even if the targets are random, "random targets" is the objective, not some broader thing. Even the ones with some manifesto attached are usually just nutty rationalizations from really sad pathetic people.

Occupying some land, even while armed, leans more towards "armed protest" than "act of terrorism". In this case, we can see that there's a larger agenda and associated demands, but the "semi-random violence designed to create fear in the population" isn't present. No one's threatened by this action except those who choose to interact with the group, so it's hard to see this as terrorism of any sort. Doesn't mean we can't condemn them for other reasons, but I would not label what they're doing terrorism.

Was there an article linked to? I must have missed it.

Honking my horn might cause "fear" in someone nearby, but that doesn't make my action terrorism. It's the intent that matters here. There's a segment of the population that is terrified of anything having to do with firearms (gee, I can't imagine why), but their irrational fears don't make someone's actions terrorism. Unless these people are actively threatening the populace in the area with violence and/or actually committing violence with the threat that more will occur if something doesn't change, then it's not terrorism.

Are they doing this? I'll admit to not having read anything about this other than what has been written on this forum. But from what I've read here, it appears as though these people are just sitting somewhere on federal land (a building?) and holding it. That's a far cry from going around killing people indiscriminately and then threatening more violence if their demands aren't met. You kinda have to have the whole "fear that someone just going about their day might die" bit for it to be terrorism. They aren't picking off people in a town square are they? Or walking to the bus? Or sitting down and having lunch? Cause that would be terrorism. A bunch of armed people sitting somewhere out of the way doesn't sound particularly scary to me.

I mean, there's armed people sitting in that military base just north of me. Yet, oddly, I'm not terrified that the USMC is going to kill me today. I'm just as unconcerned about these people killing me. So if they're trying to commit terrorism, they're doing a pretty crappy job. Get back to me when they send their kids to school with clocks that look suspiciously like bombs. Then, maybe we can talk.

I'm going to wait like six months before I read and reply to anything gbaji just said.

So then labor strikes are also terrorism, as was the civil rights movement (after a point), the Alamo, the Boston Tea Party, and The French resistance movement and miscellaneous riots all fall under that definition. There are words other than terrorism to describe things, and it devalues the meaning to paint with such a broad brush. It also, again, gives bestows legal powers to be used in the resolution of these events that I don't see as conducive to a democratic state.

Oh, if you are under the impression that the terrorism semantics argument is unrelated and pointless, tits not; the poacher who is being sentenced twice (or resentenced) for the same crime is being pursued by (you guessed it) the Anti-terrorism act of 1996.

The Hammonds disagree with and are distancing themselves from Ammon and his Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, and turned themselves in to serve their five years yesterday.

Edited, Jan 5th 2016 10:16am by lolgaxe