[PLUG-TALK] Insurance (was: Mad SCO Disease)

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, AthlonRob wrote:
> There's nothing like removing incentives from working harder than the
> guy next to you to bring society to its knees.  If I didn't have to work
> hard to provide some 'personal wealth' (albeit very little), I'd be
> perfectly content to fiddle around with my computer all day, every day,
> and not go and be productive for the rest of society.

You amaze me, Rob.  You toe this outrageous conservative party line even
when real life shows you the assumptions are just plain not true.

You insist we need punishment and threat in order to keep people from
doing bad things, but you admit that you wouldn't do bad things even if
there were no such punishment.

You further insist that profit-motive is the incentive for working hard,
but you participate in the Free Software community where people work very
hard for the benefit of all.

You write things that indicate that you really believe that people would
kill each other without the law and wouldn't work without pay, yet you are
somehow an exception to this rule.  Why is that?  Could it be that the
"rule" is all in your head and reality paints a very different picture?

Ando you really believe that fiddling around with your computer isn't
productive work?  You share your experience with others and it helps
enrich their lives.  If you were just some tinkerer at home who didn't
participate on these mailing lists and didn't keep any notes for
posterity, I'd probably agree that it's not productive, but that's not the
case.

And I think you'd be perfectly willing to ride the garbage truck once a
year and empty trash cans if it meant getting your trash handled by
someone else the other 364 days.  In urban areas, this would be
significantly cheaper and less demeaning than the current system of paying
people to dedicate their lives to cleaning up after others.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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