Blowing Smoke

Monday, June 12, 2006

One of the blogs I read (Larry James' Urban Daily in the list on the right) is by the CEO of an inner-city Dallas nonprofit. He gets a lot of comments, mostly supportive, some with good questions and suggestions, and occasional attacks (this last category has a 99% Anonymous rate). What strikes me in the attacks is they assume automatically that the people at a food pantry made choices significantly worse than the normal person. A decent probability, but do we usually assume people who do better than us made significantly better decisions, or are they lucky, or started with more, or something else that erases the difference in decisions?

Also (and this is completely unrelated), I saw The Perfect Storm last night. It was a big Clooney-Wahlberg weekend as I also saw Three Kings - both of these movies for the first time. Anyway, when Donny's collecting his pay for the fishing trip, the owner explains the pay system - that the non-sailing, non-fishing owner takes half the net profit, and the rest is divided by the crew. I know capitalism is supposed to reward the risk of supplying raw materials, but does it make sense for one person to profit that much? The others don't own the boat, of course, but especially for a profession like that, their health and life are in danger on every trip. It doesn't seem fair to me, but I can't quite decide on it. Any thoughts?

posted by Unknown 4:51 PM | 2 comments

Comments:

I'm not sure what your getting at here. I spent last week with a friend. He was in litigation for the death of one of his employees children. The employee took his child to a job site and let his son climb up on the scaffolding and the boy (16) fell to his death. My friend paid for the funeral and then to the day the statue of limitations is to run out he is sued for wrongful death. Now how that works when the employee was breaking all the rules is beyond me. So to answer you question in regards to the owner taking half the net. He is probably being sued by the families of all his employees who died on that boat. Also state law requires that he be liable for ten years after the selling of his business meaning that after the destruction of his boat any fish that might be canned and eaten 9 years later and causes someone to die he becomes liable and thus can be sued. We always want to blame the owner of businesses but understandably they take a lot of the risk and usually are in the highest tax bracket.

Just some thoughts.

# posted by

happytheman : 10:38 AM

1) It's still money compared to risk of death. 2) I wouldn't support the "wrongful death" lawsuits, either, but two wrongs never made a right.

I'm not against profit, even what some might term excessive - I just don't see that risking property is the same as risking life and injury.

# posted by

Unknown : 10:47 AM