A walmart, for the uninitiated, is a concrete structure with at least 15000 sqaure feet minimun floorspace, containing items consisting mainly of petroleum by-products, sugar, and working-class poor, the most highly decorated of which can be called manager/supervisor-While their job duties are only slightly different, the supervisors,checkers,and stockers all for the most part, have these things in common:

Poor health bennies
Paycheck-to-paycheck job security
Little or no company pride,enthusiasm,or loyalty

The kind of beast that Walmart is, dictates the overall vibe of the institution.
Little or no concern for the human factor, or their quality of life, and profit-driven above all else.

Quality is a thing of the distant past.
In the not to distant pass, it was the poorest with regard to monetary wealth, who were the artisans and producers of quality in this country.
Go to Turkey...they still make the finest tile and marble...
to Belgium for chocolate, to Trinidad for steel drums....

Come to America for worthless shit, imported from Taiwan...a city known for its endless miles of sweatshops and manufacturing compounds....toxic waste, ansd human wreckage....Exploitation is the walmart difference!!!!

I don't agree with penn and teller on everything aaaaand this is one of those things. The argument that "oh well you know, those kids would just be turned out by pimps anyway if they weren't working in a sweatshop" is just embarrasingly laughable. Penn LOVES the libertarianism and ADORES the cato institute. You can tell when he takes it too far....

I generally love the show and have seen most, if not all, of the episodes - but this one was ghastly.

I never thought of P&T as ideologues until this episode.

While I am certainly no Wal-Mart fan (I boycotted them 4 years ago and have never been back), there is some validity to the professor's point. In particular, I find it interesting the double standard that Western nations want to apply to developing countries.

Basically, today's richest countries became that way during a time when there were few regulations: there were 80 hour work weeks, child labor was ok, we could burn fossil fuels and coal in the dirtiest and cheapest ways known, etc. And since we have developed (using profits gained from those less than perfect institutions) society has decided that it is no longer desirable to live by those standards.

Unfortunately for developing nations which now want to follow a similar path to wealth, the western nations try to impose their new found moral restrictions. We protest their labor practices, we force them to use extremely expensive methods for producing energy, etc. I feel that we are putting the horse before the cart placing such restrictions before any value can be derived from the lack of regulation.

Do I think child labor is OK? No. Do I like the idea of burning massive amounts of fossil fuels in very dirty ways? No. Do I want an 80 hour work week? No. Am I a Westerner and therefore predisposed to object to these things? Yes.

If we want poor countries to develop without going through this unpalatable growing phase, then rich countries have to give them untold amounts of investment (technological, financial, and human). Otherwise we are telling them that they can't play by the same set of rules that we used because we are already so far ahead of them in the game.

Most episodes of bullshit i can agree with, mostly because they pick on the craziest people they can find, but a few made me want to punch pen in the face. I think that is the premise of the show, agreeing wholeheartedly with the man or wanting to kill him. This season has been taking on some topics that i think the pair have the wrong opinions about, namely this one and the obesity one.

yah, he says the bible is bullshit, sucks you all in, and then comes out with this crap and you're all shocked.

HELlo!

This is proof we don't really admire a spokesperson unless he tells us what you are already thinking. We don't watch clips on the internet to educate ourselves, we watch to find things that validate our prejudices.

Deal with it. The same guy that told you the Bible is bullshit also told you WalMart is great. Doesn't that make you reconsider your opinion of the Bible episode? How can you just pick and choose when to applaud this guy?

Penn, while very entertaining, seems to me to fall into the religiously libertarian camp like a lot of well to do white men who want to feel that their success has nothing to do with white mans affirmative action.

The premise that capitalism does not have an authoritarian bias, and that unrestircted markets solve real problems is an unquestionable artical of faith in that camp, and P&T do seem to suffer from it.

As for walmart, I think that alot of the pro-sweatshop set likes to point out europe did it(and it's in the US, so is slavery [check out florida]), but let's not forget that technology has advanced since the industrial revolution, and this is no longer neccesary. Add that to the fact that sweatshop investment shifts to the most oppresive regimes where the cost of keeping workers docile can be externalized. The old sweatshop-> labor union model does not work in a globalized ecconomy, the historical referance is whofully inaccurate.

I think P&T were blinded by their religious belifs concerning the invisible hand of the markets, and dropped the ball on spotting thier own bulls hit.

Uhm no mink, I already thought the bible was bullshit before seeing thier show and "just picking and choosing when to applaud this guy" is called having a mind of your own and using it to deduce whether the arguments a person is making are supported by reason and rationality. see, unlike yourself, some of us actually do watch videos on the internet to educate ourselves. As P&T themselves say, "everybody got a greegree" and for them its vehement libertarianism. Big deal, the show is still quite good overall. If you find yourself agreeing with someone absolutely 100% all the time no questions asked EVER well, that's about the same time you should be getting VERY suspicious of your own convictions.

I gotta disagree Mink.

I thought the Bible was Bullshit before P&T told me. I enjoyed the episode because it was eyecandy never had I seen anything like it on TV before.

But yeah, I will have to pick and choose when to applaud P&T because I simply don't agree with them 100% of the time. I never even watched their Environment Bullshit episode because I knew it would piss me off.

Expired in Queue - 4 day limit.