Bay 12 Games Forum

So are corporations allowed to compile blacklists of individuals who espouse certain views ensuring that they are unemployable for all participating in that blacklist system

Last I checked that's legal so long as those views don't fall under one of the protected class umbrellas, yup. For better or worse, it's rule of law. Would mostly be stuff that's expertise specific that would be able to slip through on that front, though, so far as views folks would normally get blacklisted over. Except for parts of the LGBT community, anyway, among other things. Some of the states haven't made discriminating on that front entirely count legally.

And yeah, sorta' ang. It's called a discrimination lawsuit, providing the blacklist was actually filtering people based on protected views. If it wasn't things get a lot murkier.

... y'know, if in some strange world things had flipped, the GOP won the popular vote but lost the EC for the first time, the dems were running an equivalent candidate (Though I'm not even sure how that would work. Torture camps for small business owners, mass exile of rural WWC people, somehow going full command economy?), and some subset of the GOP base was getting riled up more than usual, I'm not entirely sure many people would even notice. Protests are almost always pretty local, and given where R trends ahead, there's just... not many people around there. And no one really cares much regardless, most days. Couple dozen (maybe) people yelling outside a town hall know one's heard of doesn't tend to get as much attention.

Any case, who knows how the response would go. No one said much about the agitating and protest conservatives've kept up pretty consistently for the last eight years or so, after all, and the police/gov't/etc. tend to handle right wing people making a racket considerably more leniently. Fairly likely we wouldn't be hearing about riots at all from most sources, just maybe some shit about protests or concerned citizens or some crap.

Still, if the media coverage/response stayed roughly the same, reaction'd probably be fairly similar, just without the GOP supporters also voicing a fair amount of condemnation. Probably more dead people, too. Might even get a few lynchings come back, who knows.

Maybe someone with better understanding than I can explain it... I just can't wrap my head around it.

Some of it's EC related. Most of it, from what I understand, is protesting who got elected and the platform they ran on. Not necessarily that it was an R candidate, but that it was this one, that accepted/chose the VP they did, is drawing in the advisors they are, and made the campaign promises they did. Pretty strong narrative about not being quiet and docile in the face of hatred, from what I've seen. Going ahead and letting folks know that if trump goes through with some of his more egregious shit or doesn't keep pence and co on a short leash, people aren't going to just roll over and take it.

And ninja'd pretty much dead on. Damn cript, warn a fellow if you're going to be deploying cross continental mind reading.

Foss is free, open source software. Should clear things up.

Uh, in other news, apparently a chunk of NC is on fire?

Oh hey. Carson's apparently recused himself from consideration for a cabinet position.

The reason he gave for it is a bucket of hilarity, though. Cited inexperience in government making him inappropriate for a cabinet position, apparently.

... things like that make me wonder just how badly our social studies education stuff is failing on the governmental organization front.

And yeah, trash and sewage is an issue, but it'd likely be an even bigger one if the places were dispersed. Spreadin' folks out doesn't exactly make them consume less, heh, and the trash and sewage issues still exist, they're just scattered around. More or less same impact, basically, just less overtly visible.

FRUMPLE, FOR THE NTH GODS DAMNED TIME, FARMING IS SKILLED LABOR!

No shit? I've acknowledged that more than once, if not the exact term. It's skilled labor that can be trained, and isn't somehow inextricably locked into an apprentice system that requires the current batch to do that training. Beyond that, while a lot of the work does require a bit of training, much of it is only a bit. Ag science and some of the overseeing/planning/etc. aspects can get complicated but the scutwork of running a farm is significantly less so. And even beyond that, it's not like there's not folks plenty capable of that stuff already in urban areas. Again, you're overestimating just how important that skilled labor is, and significantly.

Hey, we're more efficient than we used to be :V

Well, so far as getting the stuff off the ground. Less so the biological processing bit. Squishy things are pretty bad on that front in general, really.

and the reasons for said starving tactic?  Being told "You are few, your voice is meaningless! Obey the voice of the majority, or lose your lands!"  is somehow a better narrative?

Protip: replacing the farmers wont make that cause go away. You just victimize more people.

... if you want to ignore the fact that someone making themselves an existential threat is going to be treated like an existential threat, or that the ag sector doesn't have nearly as much negotiating power as some folks seem to be portraying, I'unno what else to say.

So a question I have is - if city dwellers could magically make this automatic equipment that can do all agriculture, why don't we have it today? Why isn't food "free"?

I wouldn't mind that actually.

Been ninja'd a bit since I started typing, but eh. Free isn't what happens, but what does happen and has happened is the amount of people needed to support a nation's agriculture needs have shrunk, and shrunk drastically. Used to be gigantic chunks of a country's population was needed to keep it fed -- can't recall the exact percentage and don't particularly feel like wrestling a search engine to check, but iirc was somewhere over half. Nowadays it's, what, <3% of the population? Ah, sorry, checked. Less than 2% of the workforce, for the US. To produce enough it's an export. Food is cheap. Food is plentiful. It's not magic, but it's close. And the point is, what's making it cheap and plentiful isn't really long earned experience or somethin', for all it helps to whatever degree in some areas. It's advances in ag science, in farming machinery, in crop genetics, and so on -- and none of that, as noted, is somehow magically the unassailable domain of the rural population. They don't have enough of a lock on the tools and expertise needed to really be able to leverage withholding that as a credible threat, for all it's generally far less trouble to not work around or over them.

Ultimate point being, rural communities've got room to push on some subjects, but not an infinite amount, and the rural ag sector doesn't have nearly enough power to make it approach -- and that's not even getting into what actually controls gigantic chunks of said sector (hint: it's not people interested in antagonizing urban centered anything). Stuff like actual starvation threats or some kind of agriculture revolution just in't on the table. Not in the US, not since a long, long time ago.

Well, I did say "free", not actually free... but food is actually pretty inexpensive as it is.

So it's not so much really about food production.  The bigger issue is really what do you do with all those people that are being marginalized? Even if - and especially - if you don't agree with the views of the marginalized group?

That, well. You talk to them, work out compromises, try to help deal with the marginalization. Sometimes pressure can be used, if it's not stupid pressure. Even if they're not an actual threat it's still generally better and more effective to be working together rather than working at odds. Which is why, y'know. Oodles of federal and state money have been pouring into rural communities all our lives, at least when the GOP isn't screwing things on that front for the Nth time. Why folks have been trying to work with these rural/ex-manufacturing communities for as long as we've been alive, and so on.

What the wikipedia article does not explain well, is that a major contributing factor of the holodomor was the forced eviction of Ukrainian farmers, with a land-grab by ethnic russians (from cities) who did not know how to properly work those farms, in addition to the state mandated crops.

Trick is, "Did not know how to properly work those farms" isn't really an issue at this point. Ag science isn't exactly some kind of mystical knowledge kept enshrined in the depths of the countryside only able to be interpreted by the great seed wizards, and the advances in machinery and methodology and all that we've made since that time (and especially in comparison to that area) gives a significantly different sort of scenario. Different times are different times.

Though it's silly as all hell to begin with. Rural frustration is there but it's not anywhere near the critical mass even attempts at crap like is being discussed needs to become even a remote chance, never mind likely one or likely success of the initial steps.