A coworker had his work Macbook synced up to his iPhone messages app, and was getting blown up during a meeting by his friends in a group chat ranting about Trump.
It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.
Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons.
“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”
For those who aren't aware of Pinkerton's history, from wikipedia:
>One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant.
"My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists... Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique." [1, 2]
Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:
* Real-time location from your cell provider
* Real-time AirBnB booking
* Real-time purchases from credit card companies
* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks
* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy
Decades ago in University, I remember an Accounting professor talked about how Wal-Mart used their parking lot cameras to monitor where employees would congregate after work and would have special "employees" who would befriend these groups and make sure they weren't trying to organize unions, or discourage organization if they were.
Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them.
Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.
While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions.
It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]
+1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.
The US works hard to surpress labor history education. We even celebrate Labor Day in September, and as a result most Americans have never heard of the Haymarket Massacre, which is the whole reason it exists everywhere else in the world.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but might a union actually help in this case?
The 30 hour mandate is from the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act. If someone was moved from 40 hours to 29 hours because of this, that's bad, but they were likely not a union member, right? Unions would have a negotiated contract for however many hours they wanted (either more or less than the norm), and would have also already negotiated benefits on the side so the incentive for the employer to cut to 30 hours would be gone.
Regarding the fewer hours points - I wasn't advocating that shorter weeks are always better, but rather that unions are responsible for, or at least contributed to, many of the gains that workers got over the last 150 years, and that IMO have been eroding.
Pretending we lived in the early 20th century, isn't the benefit of 40 hours a week in a factory over >60 hours a week in a factory clear? In terms of health and safety, unions have also made sure that e.g. you were less likely to become trapped and burn alive during the workday [0].
This is an important argument that people miss. Cost increases in health care for government systems are managed at the government level, not at the level of individual companies. That's a pretty desirable situation for companies. Not only do companies make targets of themselves when they downgrade coverage, but the overall compensation is also less transparent to the worker when insurance is tied to the workplace. You get rid of all that stuff in a single payer system.
Withholding health insurance is also a powerful tool for breaking/preventing strikes. While it would save employers money, it would also reduce their leverage, and workers would be able to move on to other demands, or quit
i agree, although it's easy to withhold health insurance by maintaining a part-time, contractor, and gig workforce. That's a much stronger power-play. If anything, single payer alleviates some of their political exposure on gig workers. The pressure to classify gig workers as full employees is, in many corners, driven by the health insurance problem.
"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.
So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.
Whatever you do, do not only read the Manifesto. It was designed as an agitation pamphlet rather than an as a complete exposition of his thinking, and it is almost entirely devoid of his economic thought. As other commenters here have said, Wage Labour and Capital is a good read. You may also benefit from a companion guide if you want the full picture. Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique by Johan Fornas is a very high quality book, and relatively new; published by Routledge.
You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.
As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.
Like others have said, "The Communist Manifesto" is the easiest entry point. My copy also has "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" which some say is the work most descriptive of the US today. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin is a relatively easy and enlightening read as he talks about the nature of the capitalist state, the police, and other topics. "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg is also clarifying as it talks about why reformists have lost the thread. However, there are also many many many leftist podcasts you can listen to that can be easier to digest and will get you the basics, so that way when you read the original works later you have a baseline of understanding.
Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.
However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!
Not, OP, and not well read in Marxist literature either (life is too short), but I can recommend The Communist Manifesto, it's short, quite lucid and of enormous historical influence (and would be worth reading for that reason alone). As you say, the interesting part is the analysis, the proposed remedies do not just look bad in hindsight, after tens of millions of dead bodies.
I think anything before the communist manifest is worth it. But it should always be read in context of the time of the industrial revolution and before.
I don't think Marx always intended revolution and the term changed context later in his life, when reformation and revolution were distilled as two separate approaches. In my opinion this is still a fault line in modern leftist movements.
Capitalism rewards the vicious rentseeker and punishes the virtuous worker.
Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?
Capitalism rewards workers according to the utility of their contribution. Consider Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.
Rentseekers in the literal sense (landlords) are not that big of a function of the economy. Rentseekers in the figurative sense (companies that use regulatory capture to extract wealth from others) are not a feature of capitalism, they are a feature of a mixed economy.
This is completely wrong. Marxism is presented as "scientific socialism" compared with former idealist versions that proliferated in the 1800s. While you can disagree with his conclusions, Marx presents a theory of class society, of the development of productive forces, and how these interact to advance the political forms of society which ends in revolution when the old structures and the new engines of society clash. He doesn't really go deeply into what "socialism" would look like, only that the clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, where the proletariat both massively outnumber the bourgeoisie and do all the work for survival wages presents a contradiction that will be resolved.
I think their point was that when you said “Marxism rewards the vicious and punishes the virtuous“, what you said could make sense when talking about Marx-inspired ideologies / movements (the USSR, etc), but not so much about the actual writings and thought of Karl Marx himself.
I.e. that Marxist scholarship / thought does not have a one to one correspondence with Marxist-inspired social or political movements, of which there are many different kinds.
But the real question is why am I wasting my time on the internet writing this when the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low?
Which isn’t so much a statement about you, dear debate-opponent, as it is about the internet itself.
Getting people to waste time online - the capitalists greatest tool in the repression of the masses! LOL ;)
Maybe we’ll get immortalized in the Internet Archive ;););)
I think my statement applies, or at least is likely to apply, under any implementation of Marx's ideas, and also has applied under every implementation that has been tried. If someone has a real counterpoint to that I'd be happy to hear it and engage with it.
I'm still kind of talking past the other person, and vice versa, but it's hard to have a good conversation about this, and I think it's important to say something to express my opposition to Marxism (though that's debatable---if nothing good/useful can be said, it's very debatable).
I would not have said anything on most discussion forums, but if there ever was a place where it's appropriate to speak up against Marxism when it rears its head, YC News is it. I think I can voice my pro-capitalist position politely and it's OK here, even if there is no traction in the conversation. I wouldn't do that on, say, reddit; I think it would be rude in that context, unless I can actually foster a meaningful conversation.
> the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low
Valid statement about the Internet in general, but culture can change, and we should strive to be better than that. In my own commenting history there are certainly bright and dark spots. I try to do the best I can.
In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.
Pre-COVID it was very interesting sitting in a bar in downtown SF and listening to all the drunk tech workers mouthing off. You could hear a lot of illegal activites, particularly racist or poor hiring practices, boasted of or complained about very regularly.
I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(
I keep trying to get the message out. When your employer sends out these surveys, rate everything at the highest level possible. Nothing good can possibly come from giving bad ratings. If your boss/employer can't figure out how to improve things outside of those surveys, they won't figure it out from the survey. All you are doing is creating a bureaucratic headache for your boss which is going to trickle down to you.
Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably.
All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.
What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?
Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way.
At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.)
I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.
>At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists
Were subjected to police brutality while largely peacefully picketing. Meanwhile the army was called in to do their jobs...
Apparently there was evidence of "excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers."
According to the independent police complaints commission, anyway.
Note the similarities to current protests in the US and similar attempts to depict police as simply reacting to "violent blacks".
If you want to see the full gamut of vicious state inflicted violence you can either be the wrong race, or you can form a powerful enough union and go on strike.
And why are police never punished, because police unions. Unions in their modern form are granted special privileges by the government and use those privileges to extort society. There is nothing wrong with people joining groups, collective bargaining, etc -- the problem is that they are given special privileges by the state.
I don't even understand what you're arguing. Aren't corporations given special privileges by the state? Are you against that well? Can you clarify what you're arguing here?
If any group is being given special privileges by the state, it's the police...
Normally, a union is formed to balance the power of capitalists with the laborers they employ. In the case of law enforcement, there is no capital, nor is their labor being used to produce something of value. If anything, law enforcement defends the interests of capitalists, rather than being subject to abuse by capitalists.
Police unions have no solidarity with workers. They're groups that exist only to protect themselves, and they're happy to suppress strikes when it serves them. It's facile to consider them as part of labour unions.
Well, they did intend to drop the concrete block on his car, the block wasn't dropped by accident or through their gross negligence (in which case it would be manslaughter).
Murder does require intent, but it does not necessarily require an intent to kill that person; if you intend to "just" assault a person but they die, that's murder; if you intend to kill someone but kill someone else whom you did not intend to kill, that's murder.
"extreme indifference to human life" (again, intentional) is generally considered murder - e.g. if you'd intentionally burn down your neighbour's house without knowing or caring if anyone's inside, then if someone dies, it's considered murder. And UK, where the incident happened, has the concept of felony-murder where any death (even if accidental) that happens in the process of felony can be considered murder, because the felony that endangered people's lives was intentional.
> Subject to three exceptions (see Voluntary Manslaughter below) the crime of murder is committed, where a person:
> Of sound mind and discretion (i.e. sane);
> unlawfully kills (i.e. not self-defence or other justified killing);
> any reasonable creature (human being);
> in being (born alive and breathing through its own lungs - Rance v Mid-Downs Health Authority (1991) 1 All ER 801 and AG Ref No 3 of 1994 (1997) 3 All ER 936;
> under the Queen's Peace (not in war-time);
> with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (GBH).
> Well, they did intend to drop the concrete block on his car, the block wasn't dropped by accident or through their gross negligence (in which case it would be manslaughter).
I'm comfortable assuming intent when someone discharges a kinetic weapon at a occupied vehicle. If the car was parked and they assumed it was unoccupied you might have a point.
I wouldn't have any trouble believing there were more attempted murders on the part of the anti-union side, or that this example happened differently than described, but what was described was clearly a (successful) attempt to kill someone.
For sure :). I understand that. I was gently teasing and pointing out that the language you used obscured (as there were no trebuchets, de orbiting asteroids, etc, involved) rather than clarifies.
“Shooting a gun”, or “shooting guns or beanbag rounds, etc”, or whatever is specific and relevant to the topic clarifies thought and improves our thought. The opposite approach occluded and damages our thought.
And since language is how we discuss politics, we need clear language in order to truthfully and honestly discuss politics.
:-)
To quote Orwell from Politics and the English Language:
“ Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
“ Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining).”
>I was gently teasing and pointing out that the language you used obscured
I'd gently suggest it was quite the opposite; used to call attention.
"Understatement often leads to ... rhetorical constructs in which understatement is used to emphasize a point. It is a staple of humour in English-speaking cultures."
“Understatement is a form of speech or disclosure which contains an expression of lesser strength than what would be expected. It is the opposite of an embellishment.”
What’s the “expression of lesser strength” in this case? Confused.
Also, the bit you quoted continues with this as an example of the sort of rhetorical construct used in understatement:
“ For example, in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an Army officer has just lost his leg. When asked how he feels, he looks down at his bloody stump and responds, "Stings a bit."”
That’s a quite different style from the “discharged a kinetic energy weapon” phrase which we are analyzing.
If the Army officer in the Monty Python skit had said, “hmm, there seems to have been an incision made through my epidermis, muscle, and bone, resulting in a reduction of my ambulatory capacity”, that might have been funny in other ways but I don’t think it would have been understatement.
Similarly, while I have no idea of the intent of the author of “kinetic energy weapon” phrase, I argue the language in question is not understatement.
>What’s the “expression of lesser strength” in this case? Confused
Well, that particular Wikipedia article is not a complete guide to the English language or the topic of understatement. Taken in isolation, it doesn't prove the existence of the sort of phrase in question.
I guess if this were in court, I'd lose my case because I didn't spend enough time researching.
> pointing out that the language you used obscured (as there were no trebuchets, de orbiting asteroids, etc, involved) rather than clarifies.
And I was pointing that dropping a large rock on someone is a attempt to kill them. I don't particularly care about it happening to be politically motivated.
[EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EF-IT: The other guy was technically correct. And there are lots of edits here. It’s the “Pale Fire” of HN comments.]
[EDIT: All this because I lost the thread that we were talking about when striking miners in the UK dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto David Wilkies taxi whilst he was driving a strike-breaking miner to work, killing David. Hopefully future HN readers will find some value and pleasure in this thread, however.]
Ah. I didn’t realize a naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals was involved.
:):):)
And with regards to politics, part of Orwell’s point was that our language - how we choose to express things - is political, too. Regardless of our intent.
I wasn’t saying anything about the politics of anyone throwing a rock. And I’m not saying anything about your political beliefs.
I’m saying there’s a political power in how language is used, even if the subject under discussion isn’t expressly “political”.
Finally, to be a complete pedant, although “discharge” is often used as a synonym for “shoot”, I’ve never heard it used as a synonym for “throw” before.
So the correct way to use overly complex language to say “throwing a rock” would be “launching a kinetic energy weapon”. Or “releasing”.
Because unlike a gun, or bow, or whatever, in this case the “weapons system”, if it wouldn’t be a dehumanizing offense to call it such, is a persons arm.
Not a gun or bow or phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range or whatever.
And when we throw things we don’t “discharge” them.
Which is actually a perfect example of Orwell’s point.
To try to call someone throwing something a “discharge” is to dehumanize them, because humans do not discharge things from their arms when they throw them.
We do, however, discharge snot from our noses when we sneeze ;)
We are talking about throwing a rock at a truck, right?
[EDIT EDIT: We are not. We are talking about pushing a concrete block off a bridge onto a car below. Which I suppose, pedantically, is to “discharge” since the stored potential kinetic energy of the block is what makes it a weapon, although “pushing” is still a human thing, but it doesn’t feel as dehumanizing as the “throwing” case for some reason. You were, technically, correct, which is the best kind of correct. Ah well, at least we got a lesson in the relationship between language and politics out of the whole thing.]
I didn’t just write a pedantic magnum opus on the wrong subject because I didn’t realize the other person was still discussing hypothetical asteroids being de-orbited to destroy planets, or hypothetical kinetical bombardment weapons aka “rods from god”, did I?
;)
[EDIT EDIT EDIT: You did not, but what you did is almost as embarrassing.]
Lord, I hope I’m not arguing with a 16-year old on the Internet. It’d be like arguing with my younger self :/
Love the way you've got to reach back literally 36 years to find one example of union violence. The reputation that British unions actually have is for getting shat on by bullying employers.
I think it was a pretty watershed moment in union relations in the UK. It's what a lot of people think of when they think of unions in the UK. They're pretty unpopular here. I was explaining why a British person might call them goons.
The Labour party have been ineffective for a decade and haven't been less popular since 1935. They're at their least popular when their leadership is more aligned to the unions. They were at the most recent popularity when they were furthest from the unions. They have just one representative now in Scotland, once a key area for unions.
OK. At a keyboard now so I'll flesh this out a bit.
In my experience people have a fairly balanced view of unions. There's pretty broad membership. In most places I've worked people join the union if there is one. Some unions where regarded negatively at some points in time but there's also general sympathy for some industrial action. It varies - blue collar workers tend to be more positive and white collar workers (especially in non-unionized fields) tend to be less.
But this guy seems to be implying that that's wide-ranging hostility to unions in the UK - which I've never been aware of. There's a plurality of views as you would expect. I've known plenty of tory-voting union members so it's not even a strict right/left split.
Condemning all unions because some stupid idiots dropped a concrete block one someone? Are you a Pinkerton?
As for the union "goons" well it's safe to assume that the people doorknocking are going to be the ones who haven't been driven away by random verbal and physical attacks.
Also at the time that the leader of the NUM, the striking union, was a self-avowed Stalinist.[1]
It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members.
The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members.
this is part of history and one of the many reasons unions have failed in the UK. and they're still failing having lower number of members every single year.
Probably because of the same sentiment towards rewriting history that's going around now. Rather then learn and move forward lots of people seem to prefer going back in time and judging history through today's lens.
I used quotes because I was quoting my flatmate. She said their demeanor was not welcoming at all, and it felt very aggressive. I kind of wish I was there just so I could have told them what I thought, but spilled milk and what not.
Not saying this is the case, but it occurs to me... that would be a good way to sabotage the start of an union. Just send some aggressive people posing like members of the union.
It is, and there's evidence that has happened in the US.
The Pinkertons have been busting unions for over a century - they have pretty much explored the full range of options for worker suppression available to capital.
False flags can be a powerful tool (but becoming less so, as surveillance makes deniability harder).
Each location should have its own union, grouping them all up allows the needs of the few to get drowned out by the wants of the many, and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps have easier access to spread their messaging to employees across locations while normal employees can only organize within their location.
It also significantly decreases negotiating power. The point of unions is that someone small (an individual) has a hard time fairly negotiating with an organization (a company). Multiple small single-site unions would be just as ineffective negotiating with one large multi-site company.
>>> corpitized unions (anything union organisation bigger then 1 location of 1 employer) are goons.
> Each location should have its own union
You might as well go all the way, and condemn any union with more than one member.
The whole point of a union is to have an organization representing the workers that has enough power to negotiate with the employer as a relative equal. Your "single site" unions would be pointless in many cases. They'd have no power, because the employer's power to close and transfer work between sites would completely undermine the union with little disruption to the employer. Just look at how Walmart handled it's only successful unionization effort:
> The United Food and Commercial Workers is seeking an injunction against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to prevent the giant retailer from eliminating meat cutting departments at 180 stores with prepackaged meat....
> The decision to eliminate the meat cutters came just weeks after the butchers at the Jacksonville, Texas, Wal-Mart voted 7-3 to join the UFCW, the first successful union vote in the country at a Wal-Mart, a company well known for its opposition to organized labor.
> The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Walmart's (WMT) recent closing of five stores was done in retaliation for a history of labor activism at one of the locations, rather than because of the plumbing problems the retailer cited, The New York Times reports. The union is asking the government agency for an injunction that would require Walmart to rehire the 2,200 workers who were temporarily laid off or affected by the closings.
Your "single site" unions would be anything less than a sham to neuter unions was that if businesses were also forbidden from expanding beyond a single site, so each location would have to be a totally independent business. So instead of the Walmart corporation, you'd have 11,496 independent retail businesses with no common ownership or management structure.
> (...) and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps
I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation?
I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?
My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist.
The primary positive effect of a union is its appeals process that keep employers from firing you on a whim.
Nothing about that positive effect requires the union be forced upon you, and if unions had to earn their dues they wouldn't act in bad faith as often.
> My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist.
Who said anything about forced unions? We're talking about allowing unions to exist so that workers are free to join them if that happens to be their wish.
I mean, we're having a discussion on how corporations use their coercive power and influence over workers lives to degrade their lives to serve the interests of a few, and somehow you're expecting to shift the conversation to how bad unions are if we don't get a say whether we join one or not?
Unions can (and, if they're strong and it's not prohibited, often do) make collective agreements with the employer that mandate that the employer will not be permitted to employ non-union workers for these jobs. In a "closed union shop" you'd be required to join the union when you're hired, and if you would not join or if you would get kicked out of the union, the employer would have to fire you. This is pretty much 'forced unionisation'.
Another possible part of such collective agreements is that the employer will withhold union dues and hand them to the union no matter if the employee wants to join or not; to prevent the 'free rider' effect where some employees get the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for the representation (the appropriateness of this argument can be debated, but that's at least the stated intent).
In about half of USA ("right to work" states) such agreements are illegal, and in about half of USA unions can have such practices.
Yeah, stupid laws then. Considering whether someone is in a union or not before hiring them is discriminating and ought to be illegal. Thanks for the background.
How it works in my state is every grocery chain (except walmart) joined an employer union, called allied employers inc, and they negotiated a union contract with UFCW21. (yes, the employer's answer to unions, was to start their own union)
The effect is every grocery chain in the area has the same price-fixed wage they offer, price-fixed benefits, and etcra.
Don't like your wage at Fred Meyers? too bad, the safeway down the road is in the same union contract and thus the same wage.
Get kicked out because an unexpected financial/medical expense killed your ability to pay dues? too bad, none of the other chains in the area can hire you until you pay off the back dues, that you can't pay because you can't get a job.
Union is holding a vote to strike and pushing out misleading information when really the only provision the employer is objecting too is a new one that requires the employer pay the union dues for any unfilled position because the union just wants to make more money so they can vote themselves into a raise? too bad, you can only communicate with people on your shift at your location in your section of the store, the union however has mandated access to break rooms, as well a mailing and email broadcasts.
What people don't seem to get, is that sometimes, the power unions get from getting so large, can be used against the employees, not just the employer.
But you can't even bring that up without getting strawmanned as a republican union hater.
I haven't even gotten into programmer unions, with high dues and 9k initiation fees that get voted for because nobody who votes it will have to pay it as they are already in.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union.
They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization.
A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
> Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.
<sarcasm>Well, then that would be the first and only time that jackass did something skeezy and illegal</sarcasm>
Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.
In my mind they are all the same. I honestly paid so little attention, I didn't even do the research. Everyone just kept referring to the local, but I don't remember what number. This was 2010 time frame. I've slept (a lot) since then.
HN is not the best platform to from anti-capitalism sentiments. There's a lot of privilege here and it makes people pretty blind to how awful capitalism is (and the things it creates, like anti-union sentiment).
Unions aren't anti-capitalist, they explicitly work within a capitalist framework to ensure better pay and working conditions for their workers.
Unions deal in money and don't seek to change that, unions recognize and don't challenge ownership of the business.
What about them makes them anti-capitalist, except that they seek to shift the balance of "who, of all the people working on a business, gets paid what for the operation of a business"?
I'd like to see where they're ensuring long term viability - every group they work with in the US is either facing a pension crisis or is not thriving.
That is simply not true and a common anti-union trope. Unions should have mandatory representation on corporate boards. Broadcom would be my first choice.
They only exist because without them, capitalism and its advocates brutally oppress the workers, keeping them in a perpetual state of poverty. The fact that they are not literally trying to overthrow the regime doesn't mean they aren't anti-capitalist.
Unions are extortion rackets and price fixing cartels. As such, they are not only unethical in themselves and should be illegal, they constitute an attempt to obstruct capitalism.
Amusingly, this hypocrisy is literally embedded in US antitrust law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/17
Literally "price fixing cartels are bad, except when they aren't".
And keep in mind, we don't have a "pure" capitalism like the insane libertarian types would. (Remember how Ron Paul said Civil Rights legislation was unnecessary because the market would have taken care of it?
It took years of fixing the system with child labour laws, union laws, anti-discrimination laws, factory strikes, workers riots, civil rights laws, minimum wage, etc.
Capitalism works in the Nations where it does because of years of regulation to make it more fair and to weed out exploitation.
People wanting to dismantle the state right now (and make no mistake, many of these riots have a lot of anarco-anti-cap/antifa people in them causing the violence) do not understand they will not get a better State. They'll be lucky to get some stable regions, but when a State falls there's a power vacuum. Then you have to start over .. and there will be a ton of corruption until you get everything "right" again.
> Remember how Ron Paul said Civil Rights legislation was unnecessary because the market would have taken care of it?
I wonder how people could make such an argument if they have historical records of business owners rejecting more paying customers and spending more to put together duplicate infrastructure just because they felt that some paying customers had to be subjected to degraded levels of service just because.
> because of years of regulation to make it more fair and to weed out exploitation
Actually it's because of years of union-organising, putting pressure on companies and governments to implement these measures. Without unions, we would have none of these improved work conditions and protections.
Please, go on and continue the propaganda about how socialism and communism doesn't work. Please point to failed nations/states that had communism and explain how they failed due to communism and that it definitely wasn't anything else.
Becoming a communist state is impossible. The leader of the socialist state won't let it happen. Power corrupts, why should we be putting more power in the hands of the state in hopes that one day it will relinquish it?
History isn’t over. If you think capitalism isn’t tending the same way (with the example of China showing how successfully it can work), you haven’t been paying attention.
> My company is generally behind the curve so now people have been bitten by the REST, JSON, Microservice bug. They don’t know why or what it really is but things have to be done that way.
This resonates with me. My first job out of college was with a big, very old insurance company. My team lead became obsessed with using microservices for some reason, even though we were only building internal web apps that would have about 1,000 users on a busy day. There would be no performance concerns whatsoever that would warrant "breaking up a monolith" to make it more scalable. But microservices were a great way for the team to feel like we were using trendy tech despite not having any idea how to really go about doing it or any particular reason for doing so.
> At the end of the day Uber/Lyft will be just another taxi company, albeit with a less professional set of drivers.
What city do you ride taxis in? Because the taxis I've ridden have spanned a range of tolerably annoying to downright abysmal experiences. Uber/Lyft drivers have unequivocally been more friendly, punctual, and professional. No taxi company I've seen can manage to make a halfway decent app or even guarantee that a driver will show up within an hour of me needing one.
Even if Uber/Lyft become the same price as taxis, I'll take Uber/Lyft any day over a traditional cab company.
I've taken taxis in many European cities. It's universally a miserable, sketchy experience.
European taxis are the absolute worst for trying to wiggle out of accepting your credit card. Ever time I get in a European taxi I know I have a fight on my hands.
It depends on the country and city - here in Ireland the taxis are almost always a class act. My local taxi company allows payment via smartphone and even sends you the invoice via SMS or email if you need it as a business expense. I've even had a driver turn off the metre and show me around once he realised I was new to the city.
And tipping, although appreciated, is not at all mandatory like in the states.
The most universal issue with taxis around the world is safety. How do I know whether a taxi driver is going to take me to my destination, or drive me to an alley and mug me?
Apps like Uber are a major safety improvement over taxis. If I get out of an airport and need a ride, I can either hop in a taxi and pray I get to my destination safely, or I can take an Uber and have a paper trail of who picked me up and where I went.
I think the point of the person you're replying to is that there are other methods of assessment which would render plagiarism ineffective - such as in-person presentations and conversations. But, teachers don't have the time and resources to do that with all of their students.
Effective writing is an important skill, so I don't think in-person conversations would replace papers, but from a conversation with a student who plagiarized their paper you could probably tell that they didn't really understand what they "wrote."
I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks".
What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
Business guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much.
And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it.
The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on
This happens way too often. They often read a blog that talks about how X was implemented at company Y and mindlessly cite the blog for their own related-but-different-in-important-ways ideas and it’s upto the engineers to fact check the wackiness. It’s not pleasant.
This happened to me recently where a PM shared a blog about someone who had built an “all encompassing multi cloud cost calculator” for their org and had blogged about it. The PM was naturally extremely excited but I asked him to find more details about the tool and if/how that can be used. Turns out even though it was supposedly open sourced it wasn’t really available to just anyone but the author promised he would release it in a month. That was over 6 months ago, no word from the author or PM.
These blog fueled hype trains are extremely destructive. It makes engineering appear trivial. Building useful tool might be easier now but it’s not trivial. And if a tool sounds too good to be true it probably is.
This makes more sense when you remember that being "concerned with reality" for a salesperson mostly means "Getting the commission paid and moving to a different role before everything blows up too badly", rather than "delivering software that meets the sales deal's contractual requirements".
Salespeople are too rarely judged/punished for the disastrus messes they leave behind, and all too quickly judged/rewarded for being able to convince a customer to sign off on a big number without any care for long term implications of that deal...
A few years ago at a small company after a round of golf with some other shmuck, our CEO told us we needed SSO via OAuth, because that's how we can convince people we're secure. How soon could we get it developed? Spare no expense!
We had a single website with an already written to OWASP standards login, no external API or plans for any.
What always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on.
This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher management positions. I have yet to figure this one out. Which drives me crazy sometimes, because my gut tells me that as soon as I did most "problems" I have regarding managment would be solvable instantly.
I think a big worry for any C-levels is "what if my employees are wrong". And there is good reason to hedge against this, because insiders have clear interests in defending past mistakes.
And if you hired your people yourself, you probably know you skipped over some qualified people who were to expensive, and weeded out some overconfident people who turned out not to be all that. In the end, you wonder what those expensive smart people would have said, and you wonder if your confident sounding employees are just overconfident incapables that you failed to weed out.
Hence, getting an outside perspective from someone you trust has a lot of attraction. However, getting that outsider person to be knowledgeable enough, and getting them the right information, is a tough task.
When I was 17 I worked [production] in a sofa factory that made huge profit. They hired every highly specialized consultant available. I asked one of the consultants and some office folk for an explanation (I was paid 3 guilders or so per hours ($1.5)) To my surprise both the consultant and the office folk thought it was a fascinating question and explained elaborately how [to them] it was worth every penny to have written proof for every business process. Investors could point at anything and get a pile of reports explaining exactly why the chosen method was the right one.
(When I left they continued to pay me for months. It struck me just now that cheap employees probably looked great on paper.)
Why they paid me roughly 1.5 USD and the consultants several thousands per hour.
My bad, I originally wrote " They hired every highly specialized consultant available for .... guilders each" but I only hear the price of one and I failed to remember if it was 5000 or 20 000 for a 2 hour chat.
At my last job, about a month or six weeks after starting, the CTO would meet with new devs and ask them if they thought we were doing anything wrong. He was clear “I have to ask you now because in a month it’s gonna seem perfectly normal to you.”
I recall telling him they were doing builds like no one I had ever seen (“Yes we have a plan to change it.”) and and asking why do you use R as the main language for the ETL pipeline (“It makes it easier for data science and we can run it in Spark.”)
In my case, the business guy stubborn and think he know best, many times.
Every times, I told him it wasn’t what he think. For a few times, I let it go, part to let he learn about the reality. I thought he would change the evaluation process. But no, he still stubborn.
I remember at Microsoft, people would need to win an argument with Bill Gate to get their idea approved. Sometimes, it was a really hear arguments. Maybe some people get inspired by this story too much.
I know a guy that works at a company where the CEO will sell something to customers not knowing anything about the technical details, and then come back to the business and "make them do it".
I previously worked for a Dutch fintech company that operated in the same way, but from my understanding they were (probably still are) really quite effective, profits hugely increasing year-on-year.
But this Dutch company also makes use of some kinds of SWAT dev teams that help customers on the spot with issues, making sure the product lives up to the clients’ expectations, even if this means modifying a product delivered by the core dev teams. I.e.: if some feature was promised, but not yet part of the current release, the SWAT team might hack something quickly, often on the spot in the clients offices. Later on, such a hack might be replaced with a proper solution.
Isn’t this the norm? I complained that sales were “demoing new features” to customers before the back-end dev team had even heard of these features. I was basically told to stay in my lane. A property developer making design mockups of new highrises doesn’t run it past the bricklayers first, so why should product/sales talk to us digital bricklayers...
In one sense, great, I don’t want to bother about what a customer’s priorities are. But it turns out that only works if you TRUST the product team.
In my previous job in a consulting company one of the sales people mentioned how this is the first place where he has to sell the project twice: once for the customer, and one for the co-workers who'll work on it.
It was a nice company. Bosses had very limited direct power over the developers and designers, and rightfully so -- it's supposed to be a team of experts, after all.
I had a moment like that once where the product manager said something like "at this stage of the process the software will go off and find the documents specifically relevant to this stage" - and I was like pointing out we could do a search but that might bring back irrelevant stuff or fail to find relevant stuff - he insisted that it would automatically find just the exact documents people would need at that stage in the process.
It was an "AI complete" feature as up to that point it required someone who knew what they were doing to decide what documents were actually relevant - not "close enough".
The product was used for arranging formal approval processes for things like drugs and government contracts - the definition of what documents were relevant was often quite strictly defined in a practical sense but less so in sense that a bit of software could make sense of.
I've been kicked off a project because I couldn't stop talking about training data (they already had) and machine learning algorithms (NLP, text classification) that we could implement right now to start automating a couple of internal processes that are currently pointlessly manual. Think moving incoming e-mail to appropriate downstream support channels.
Not enough magical AI / AGI in there.
The countless PowerPoint presentations built after my departure described processes along the lines of "the AI will detect when you're about to miss your connecting flight and book you into your favourite hotel with your favourite dinner pre-ordered".
Surprisingly, the project survived and now they collect training data and use machine learning for text classification.
Solve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?
If someone offered me AI that drove me to work while I slept or watched movies, or AI that filled out my expense reports, I'd ask if the AI is able to scan the receipts by itself.
Just start a software consulting business. An outsourced programmer goes for $100+ per HOUR. No need to have the initial capital you need for market prediction.
Dude I see hilariously absurd ideas for AI implementation in both the film and podcast worlds. There is definitely potential - such as transcriptions - but people are way overselling the efficacy and trying to “disrupt” with AI in ways no industry professional is asking for.
Even transcription is hard when it's used in the way manual transcriptions are used. Whenever there is sufficient value in transcription to bring the manual process close to worthwhile the cost of mistakes will also be high. But lower value applications can have much lower quality requirements, e.g. imperfect transcription could still be used to generate a high level topic log of a conversation that might be useful e.g. for backtracking after a digression.
The pinnacle of the low failure cost principle must be ad targeting, it costs nothing besides opportunity to display the wrong ad. And the success metric can even be inverted if the mistake is sufficiently surprising: I'd probably be more likely to deliberately click an ad that is entirely off my beaten path, out of curiosity, than something that aligns with my actual interests. Who wouldn't click on an ad for e.g. curling brooms? Curlers.
It’s only disruptive when it actually disrupts something I guess is my point. I’m not so curmudgeonly as to think “this stuff will never work,” I just see so many folks selling it as if it already does.
I find that a C suite member talking about AI without a specific goal in mind (“we will use AI to automate X, which will help us do Y better”) is a huge red flag.
It also seems to be a main selling point of a lot of logistics and supply chain star-ups these days. I guess it sounds way sexier than "give us millions to build a new forwarder and our own tech because we don't want to use off-the-shelf software and we want to be acquired by DHL one day".
At least once a month I get contacted by some recruiter contracting with a company like this. They all seem to have a vauge screen reader -> OCR -> AI fill in the blanks, form submission charter. They claim to be profitable and have 10+ customers, but their examples of how their product is used sounds like they are automating Sally in Accounting's job, and she's 2 years away from retiring, so if they could get the software to interface with the 1990s software she's been using for the last 10 years, they won't have to retrain her replacement when she finally retires. I'm sure Boomer Replacement is a market, but does not seem like a 1000x unicorn growth market.
WorldMaker's answer to this comment is great. I would TL;DR it by saying that while there are always multiple phone companies to choose from, there is usually only one cable or fiber internet company, which is what matters.
In every state I've ever lived, for example, Comcast is the only company that provides acceptable internet speeds. DSL and satellite providers don't even come close enough to count as competition. So Comcast has the localized monopoly on the infrastructure necessary to actually provide a good product.
It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.