If you have strong soft skills this isn’t so much of an issue, and I highly recommend that. AI can do such a good job in so many avenues, but being able to show up with confidence and understand and present materials to leadership is a very important skillset to possess. In addition, having the ability to solve problems on the fly is also a large asset from my perspective.

I need not demonstrate any such thing. There’s a difference between subjective and objective morality. We live in a world where we humans have self-awareness, and with that self awareness comes concepts of logic, reason, and justice. Unfortunately for us, human conflict arises and it isn’t always clear which side of said conflicts are good or bad.

For example, maybe you don’t like the existance of these lightning cables. OK, great. And you may have a lot of reasons for not liking them, but those are all subjective. Value itself, is subjective. Someone else might love the lightning cable. So who is correct?

Even if you can come up with 30 ways why you think the lightning cable is bad that doesn’t make your stance objective. You could say for example that the cable makes more waste. OK, but I don’t have to value waste creation the same way you do. Maybe I don’t care at all about waste.

You could say that the cable is too expensive and there aren’t enough alternatives. Great, I would agree with you on all of these fronts (remember, I don’t buy Apple products. None) but that STILL doesn’t mean they’re not just opinions.

Objectively, lightning cables aren’t bad. If you don’t want a lightning cable, don’t buy one, and don’t buy Apple products. I should be allowed to have them if I want them. It isn’t for you or anyone else to tell me I can’t, and it doesn’t matter what justifiers you have for it.

The only time when the lightning cable would become objectively “bad” is if there is something to do with the cable that violates the will of another in the same logical way that manifests concepts such as murder, assault, theft, or fraud. For example, if the waste is being dumped on your property and you don’t want it there.

But then the “problem” isn’t the lightning cable at all, it’s that Apple is dumping trash on your property without your consent. Again, the lighting cable isn’t the issue, the act of violating property rights is the issue.

Does this make sense? I want to make sure I am explaining these concepts in a way that make sense.

How do you define a free market? The only laws you need - fundamentally - are those in which aren’t victimless crime laws. A free market is predicated on ownership, and the fundamental essence of ownership requires two cardinal premises:

1. You desire exclusive will over something.
2. You obtain exclusive will over that something without violating the preexisting will of another to hold exclusive authority over it. I.E: You didn’t steal someone to get it.

If a third party (the government) can tell you what you can do with your property then it is violating your exclusive will over it. In short, the government is robbing you. Theft doesn’t - and in fact cannot - simply mean I take a something from you. I could take your wallet off my counter because you left it in my home with the intent of bringing it back to you. You could borrow me your car with an understanding that I will give it back to you the moment you request it.

But if I take your car without you knowing and without your consent, EVEN if I brought it back later that day and filled up the tank, I have robbed you. It doesn’t matter that I brought the car back. Theft has very little to do with the location of property and certainly rarely ever to do with having property on ones person. The moment I leave my house almost everything I own is no longer on my person, but I expect it to be where I left it when I get home.

The moment another entity can dictate what you can do with your property you no longer have freedom, because freedom requires your will remain unviolated (in a logical order of operations across time.) So I would argue that if your consent is being violated, you are no longer existing within the confines of a free market.

Now if your argument is that an employer could ask you to work 24 hours in a day or terminate employment - there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. If YOU consent to it, then it’s OK. What on earth makes you think that a third party has any right to come in between two consenting adults? Is that third party the wise and affluent intellectual, and the employee the simpleton barbarian?

The mere fact that freedom requires violence utilized to protect from things like murder, rape, assault, theft, and fraud means that you do not need to really worry about things like labor laws. So long as an employer cannot force you to do something at gun point means you get to consent. In addition, so does everyone else.

I’m not working for a business that forces employees to work 24 hour working days. I’m also not BUYING anything from those businesses, would you?

And remember that if a business hides these facets from the market that fundamentally is what fraud is. Fraud, I would argue, is at its core about trying to get someone to consent to something by purposely (or by way of negligence) misleading them. I KNOW a lot of people wouldn’t work for me or buy from my business if they knew I employed children, so I will hide that fact - that’s fraud.

And since you cannot live in a free society where there’s rampant fraud, there would need to be individuals ready and willing to use violence against it. Frankly the proper answer to such a thing would be to just apprehend the owners of the business directly. The fact that we treat companies like individuals is nonsensical. If you want nefarious acts done via business to fade away, start imprisoning the owners/CEO’s for what their businesses do.

The good and just need not permit the machinations of the sinister. If someone shows up to your home to threaten you and your family, the just and proper answer is to end them. Violence is in no way intrinsically evil in its own right. The sword - it can be used in the defense of the innocent and goodly, or to enslave the masses.

I’ve been here for a week or so now and my experience here has quickly shown me that there are a lot of very shallow-minded leftists here (I’m not a Republican/conservative) and a lot of people really quick to just sling profanities and slurs around if they don’t agree with something you have to say.

In the US, phones in general are regulated by both federal agencies and the states. The FCC is a prime federal regulator, for example. The FCC auctions off radio bands to mobile carriers, it sets rules for signal power and compatibility as well. But I digress.

You pointed out the lightening cable. Why is the lightning cable a problem? Is it not for the consumer to decide what they want to buy? If the lightning cable produces waste, and you care about that, then is it not incumbent upon you to just not buy an iPhone?

Let me ask you a question here: Do you believe that if you and someone else had agreed to a trade of some sort, that your neighbor down the road would have any right to come along and mandate that this trade produces too much waste and therefore, threaten you with violence unless you change or nullify that trade?

What you’re referring to here actually isn’t even a problem. It’s just something people want. If you don’t want it, you don’t buy an iPhone. In fact, only 25% of active smartphones globally are iPhones. Android phones command 72.36% of the market. So 25% of the market clearly want the iPhone more than they care about any waste produced by an outdated charging cable.

I don’t buy Apple products, nor does any of my family. I don’t buy them because I actually don’t like how Apple does business. This is how it’s meant to work in a society predicated on CONSENT. The moment you don’t like something you don’t have the right to start threatening people unless they do as you say.

What does this have to do with what I’ve said?

I disagree with you completely.

I’m not talking about the federal government, I’m talking about government, period. Any government that exists (and by government, I simply mean that relative force monopoly) in the form in which all governments exist today are nefarious and should be out right abolished.

The ONLY thing that a force monopoly should be doing is enforcing just laws, and by just laws, I mean any laws that are not victimless crime laws. In other words, you protect people from things such as murder, theft, rape, assault, and fraud.

More or less, the non-aggression principle.

If you can give me any “problem” in the modern world today I can tell you explicitly how the government either creates the problem or exacerbates it.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing that any government can provide that cannot be provided without a government. The very notion that you must be coerced and robbed in order to have a good or service is so utterly insane a thing to even say.

I want less government, not more rules and laws.

The only laws that should exist are those protecting people from things like murder, rape, theft, assault, and fraud.

I’ve actually fought my entire life against the “game” of business. I don’t like the lingo, I don’t like the corporate nonsense, and I don’t like how business in general is conducted. I mostly work by myself. I’ve simply learned some skills that let me produce value for businesses so they want to give me a paycheck, but even then it’s always an ongoing challenge because anyone can be removed from a role at any time and for any reason.

I work high up in large business, so I know how it works.

Let’s say you’re correct, so what? Let’s say I have $10,000 to invest. I notice that the electronics sector is a good place to invest based upon recent trends, so I want to invest there. I do some research and conclude I will either invest in Apple, or Samsung.

If I choose Apple and they give me a 5% return on investment but Samsung gives me 8%, I will invest with Samsung. My money isn’t a charity, it’s an investment.

I am relying on the company to do the best job that they can to provide me with a return on my investment because I would actually LOSE money on my investment, and if I keep losing money, that would be quite irrational of me to keep investing, wouldn’t it?

And if Samsung ends up getting 70% of the investment and Apple only 30%, Apple is going to go out of business, and it should. This would fundamentally mean that Samsung is the superior business in that sector and Apple is doing so poorly that it should not exist.

Investors by the way do not obtain a fixed percentage of profit from a company’s income statement. What they receive depends on a myriad of things like earnings through dividends, equity appreciation, interest rates, type of investments, etc.

Publicly traded companies have benefits over private. They for instance, can produce large amounts of money through selling stock or bond issuing, and shareholders being able to easily buy/sell shares gives good data on company value. Private businesses on the other hand often have more limit on raising funds, so it can make it very challenging, if not impossible, for private companies in some sectors to compete with publicly traded ones. Keep in mind it’s also more complicated than that.

I can give you an example from my business life as well. About 5 years ago a mid-market business (let’s just say around 5 billion in annual revenue) was bought by a private equity firm. The reason was the business was failing. If not for private equity, the business likely would have died.

Through private equity and their investor base, the business is still afloat and doing even better. Private equity was able to invest in the business to make it more profitable, but they don’t want to do that with nothing to gain. The goal in that investment is they make enough of a return in the future that they made a profit off the endeavor. It’s a risk - the firm could have invested billions only to see nothing but a loss. Do that too often and the entire firm would fail and thus, close.

A lot of terminations were done too, but new people were also brought in and a lot of changes were made.

But without giving to that investment, the business would have failed and 100% of its employees would have been without a job. This business currently employs over 10,000 people, mind you.

Freedom of association is both moral and good.

This isn’t quite how it works. Generally in medium to large businesses - meaning at least a billion a year in annual revenue - oftentimes how it works is a given business unit (BU) will be given a budget. This is usually based on analysis and projections based on the previous fiscal years as well as projections on growth goals.

The VP of that BU will need to spread that budget across their unit as best they can. This will include everything from promotions to new hires. Keep in mind that it could cost a business $160 an hour to hire one full time employee who only makes $50 an hour, all things depending. In many roles, it can take a year or more to get a new hire up to speed in their new role. At $160 an hour, that’s $332,800 against your budget and that first year will not recoup 100% of the potential output of that new hire who will likely not be putting out their fullest until around a year or more, so you’re looking at what more or less accounts to over a quarter of a million just to train a new employee for one year so they can start putting out the same level of work as someone of their level should be.

Then consider if you’re an international company. The business I work for for example is in 60 different countries. All of those countries have different regulatory practices that require a lot out of the HR business unit(s). Some countries have regulatory requirements that force the business to utilize software that can account for those regulations that cost millions annually and aren’t even very good, but there isn’t a good alternative, so it’s either pay that or fall out of compliance, which is not really a viable strategy.

If you have 100 employees in your unit and you want to give them all a 3% annual raise but you’re not given a larger budget unless you grow that side of the business (in other words, you self fund), then where are you getting that revenue stream from?

In many cases you have to set up projects yourself from the top-down, such as requesting from your directors that they begin brainstorming ways to generate revenue. This could be through efficiencies, for example. If you were a director in HR for example, maybe you want to take a look at your team’s processes and see what could be automated. That project alone requires expertise, and those kinds of analysts aren’t cheap. Then you need engineers to perform the automation, which are also not cheap, and you need a surefire return on investment there because the end goal might be to free up 25% of your team’s labor through automation of their current processes, but you may not see a return on investment for 2 years, then by the third year the return isn’t even enough to hire an additional 3 people, let alone give an entire team of 100 a 3% raise.

So you might argue then, “well why can’t the business just give that BU a larger budget?” And there are a few answers. I won’t list them all here, but some examples would be is there something your team could be doing to increase their value to warrant taking budget from elsewhere to funnel into your team? Or every year is it just expected that 3% of the budget go into the employees without an ounce of those employees providing any additional value? To seriously simplify, if the business makes $100 and they pay $50 to their employees and $30 to their shareholders and $20 is reinvested in the company, why should the business pay the employees 60%? HOW do they pay them 60%? They have to take it from the shareholders or the reinvestment, and take too much from the reinvestment and your competition will put you out of business, and take too much from the shareholders and they will invest with your competitors - see the problem?

Many employees don’t understand that they have to increase their perceived value to warrant more, and few do.