That the rich digerati have taken up the cause of the ongoing Palestinian man-made famine and genocide diverges from actions of similar demographics in the past. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia received little notice in the global press and received little global action. This is positive progress. Even if the effect of an individual protest causes no direct change, it is important voices are heard and directed toward the political class and the owners of capital who buy influence over the political class. Unfortunately though, far-right Christian fundamentalists hold too much clout in America for mystical theological reasons and will never chide Israel for any behavior, no matter how abhorrent.
Not to agree or disagree with what you are saying here, unlike Rwanda and Bosnia, which were horrible enough, every single day of the apartheid and genocide operations are funded and aided by US. And in this instance the Nimbus program is actively complicit in it. If I were to use the trolley thing here, Rwanda and Bosnia were inaction, but this is fueling and arming the trolley to be a killing machine.
It's a new Christian fundamentalism-backed ideological McCarthyism to erase the entire left with a new loyalist pledge... sort of like what totalitarian and communism regimes have required. "Separation of church and state be damned, you must believe X or you are un-American and forbidden to hold a job" is their modus operandi.
Are you living in America? If so, how did you miss the 50% of the population that is the exact opposite of "new Christian fundamentalism-backed ideological McCarthyism"????
So the Egghead store in San Jose on Blossom Hill Road had 2 interesting employee perks:
0. Vendor reps, including those from Microsoft, were happy to see you cheap NFR copies ($10-25 USD mostly, with some expensive packages going for $50-150) of almost their entire catalog of retail and semi-retail channel software.
1. Here's the shady one: since 99.9% of software was only "sealed" by shrink wrap and having a shrink wrap machine in the store to fix damaged or packages missing sealing altogether, it was essentially impossible to tell, as an end purchaser, if a particular item had been used and resealed. This was by design to avoid throwing away returned product or sending it back to the manufacturer as a loss. An unofficial benefit was created to deter shrinkage (employee theft) at this store in particular, had an unwritten policy established by the manager that permitted employees to temporarily "borrow" software that wasn't sealed or was already unsealed such as being returned.
I helped closed the store in 1997 after the CompUSA tech hypermart format ate tiny stores like ES that would eventually also meet its own demise.
We were also allowed to borrow and re-shrinkwrap games at the Game store I worked in, in the UK, in 2000. Seemed like official company policy to give us better product knowledge!
For that type of employee, it would all fly under the standard deduction anyway, so the IRS would not care. (Unless you had a side-business making $$ on this.) This is the first Raymond Chen post I've read which seems kinda dumb and pointless. Oh yeah I need to deduct my copy of random DOS app DBPieGraphicsPro-VII, which was left on a table at work.
It sounded to me that he's just responding to a frequently asked readers question. And I'd guess it's more likely for people to ask such question if they're not familiar with US taxation.
