garry’s posthaven

In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple:  no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company.  That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business.

Examples of internships that have been legal are where the job is a “dummy” job.  For example, there was a case of an internship for working on a train.  The company had the interns driving trains from one end of their yard to the other under close supervision.  The moving of the trains was completely unnecessary and was just being done to train the potential employees. As such, no “work” was being performed, so the internship was legal.  On the other hand, if the workers were moving the trains as part of the regular re-positioning of the trains, but were still performing it under close supervision, they would be required to be paid for the work.

Mark Cuban is pretty angry about this. He says unpaid internships should be 100% legal, and the government is being short sighted.

I could see where this law can be useful though -- in cases where workers start getting abused in various situations. It can be used as a way for companies to skirt minimum wages.

When running a business, you typically try to think about the value-accretive things in life, e.g. letting an unpaid inexperienced person get valuable experience... but when making laws, policy wonks must think about the base realities of how humans will exploit the laws and each other.

NY Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan on Nov 10. Knowing the Taliban check Wikipedia to find out who they nabbed, friends of Rohde updated his wiki entry to show Rohde had written sympathetic articles in the past to help Muslims in their struggles in Bosnia and Guantanamo.

But then it turned into a cat-and-mouse game to keep the lid on the story. The Times feared that broad knowledge about this information could cause Rohde to become a bargaining chip and reduce his chances of surviving the kidnapping.

Two days later, with no major press on the issue, an anonymous user updated Rohde's wiki page to mention the kidnapping. While the article refuses to speculate -- one can't help but connect the dots.

Remarkable. We know that the Internet is widely used, now even by Taliban kidnappers. And not just to do research, but *possibly* to release information and gain advantage in an ongoing armed conflict.

Who was the Florida-based wiki editor who kept trying to update the page? Was it a well-meaning friend of the family that wasn't in on the secrecy? Or was it the Taliban themselves?

You can take your firm handshakes and your courage and your lifelong calling to save the day using your fists. We're no longer charmed by the smug romancer who never second-guesses himself. Bush Jr. killed any remaining interest we might've had in a James Bond or a Han Solo or a Crash Davis.

This is the age of Obama. Give us your lanky thinkers, your flawed do-gooders, your hunchy neurotics yearning to breathe free. What we long for these days is a man of ideas, a man of compassion leavened by pragmatism, a well-intentioned fly swatter. We'll happily swap smooth-talking bravery for the worried, thoughtful ramblings of an honest chickenshit.

Maybe it's time for a change. I for one, welcome it.

Update: Foreign Policy Magazine is declaring the death of macho

Following the crowd is best strategy for an individual until too many people follow the crowd, and then it’s a terrible strategy.  The irony.

In his blog post today, "Are social networks destroying knowledge?" Mike Speiser explores whether our new online medium is actually leading us astray in some way.

I'd go further and wonder -- do we become more disconnected in that we have greater variety and choice in media? American political discourse has become more rabidly partisan than ever. Farhad Manjoo of Salon posits we are in a post-fact society where it's difficult to know what is true and not.

I'd argue that social networks don't really make this post-fact society any better or worse. It's nothing new compared to the initial shock of the new that was Web 1.0. The only difference is now we can be misled a lot faster.

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

I was just thinking this recently. I think PG was prompted to write this quick essay due to a recent poll on Hacker News regarding whether people were theists, deists or atheists. I think it was 3 to 1 atheists to theists.

When I was a teenager, I liked to watch documentaries about the New Left of the 60's. I considered myself liberal by all accounts. These days, I feel less like ascribing to a single worldview than ever before. It doesn't make sense to call yourself a liberal when all it means is rubber-stamping ideas on a panoply of vaguely related issues in current times.

Of course these days the proper word for liberal is progressive. But I'm not a progressive, nor am I conservative. I'm just me, and I'd like to think I can try to read and understand any given issue and not be clouded by a particular lens. PG is right. Labels are dumb. Think for yourself.

I'm not saying I don't see the world through a particular lens. But it's a fool who always uses a lens pre-crafted for them by talk radio (of either wing) or what it means to be conservative or liberal or theist or atheist. At least try to craft your own. Somehow, I think we'll be all better off.