My employees are holding a strike, yay!

Today almost 80% of my employees are holding a strike. The cause was pretty simple, one old employee who had a pretty bad track record was.. verbally disciplined. For whatever reason, he couldn't accept that reprimand so he told his work friends. Now, some of those friends were talented provocators (really. they were pretty good..) . I had awared of them since years ago but they behave well enough so... They coordinate a strike bringing almost 80% of them.

The detail is rather sketchy since I wasn't present when the incidence happen. I'll update later. But one thing for sure, I now have a reasonable basis to fire those provocators. Yay! But now I must deal with some future consequences... *sigh*

The boiling frog: Internet censorship (Fitna) in Indonesia.

Have you heard the story of boiling frog? Taken from wikipedia: "The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out."

This blog told me about a decision of a major ISP in Indonesia to censor the controversial fitna film. Regardless of whether that movie deserved to be ban or not, I fear that this censorship is the beginning of boiling frog phenomenon. The justification for the next censorships will be more and more ridiculous that it won't take too long for Indonesia returning to a police state again..

And I do think that the censorship decision is ridiculous. Yes it is probably important to ban this movie in Europe where a majority or people in power are not moslem, because the hatred towards moslem induced by that film put many minority moslems in trouble. But in Indonesia, where the majority are moslems, banning that movie is not only unnecessary, but has the potential to make religious conflict sharper due to the discriminative privilege to censor for moslem majority.

Edit: Now that I am calmer, I can emphatize how in collectivistic culture, insult to a group will be considered very personal attack to individual. But I'm getting more and more concerned with the humanity if collectivistic culture dominates the earth.. One concern is how internal conflicts are more likely to occur the bigger a group is, compared to individualistic culture. *sigh*, oh well.

And yeah, I'm still very concern with the eventual state of freedom of expression.

How guilty is he?

Consider a ..hypothetical case.

Due to a certain fuck up, a large national corporation used to pay P's electricity bill. Being a good honest individual he reported their mistake to their office, and offered them a payment equal to the amount they paid. They said they would contact him again.

The following month they paid his electricity bill again. He reported this incident again to them, while checking whether the person he talked to have the authority to act on the corporation behalf. This time, they did send someone to him. He paid them although he only received their proof of payment as receipt, which wasn't enough evidence that the money would be properly received by the corporation.

..as you can guess, they paid his bill again on the following month. He called them again. They say they would get to him again. He waited and waited for months but no one ever come anymore. Meanwhile, he was getting so busy he totally forgot. When he finally remembered again, he didn't bother to contact that corporation anymore.

Interestingly, he later noticed that whenever he paid the bill earlier, they won't double pay for that month. That means they had a mechanism to check that a bill they were suppose to pay, was paid. That should raise a red flag on their system. He guess someone probably took advantage of that..

How guilty do you think is he?