Hytosys

The manager-gone-founder has sympathies and apologies for the destructive ideology of his capitalist master. Of course. The majority of managers have this same character -- it's their class nature. Be wary of trusting these people ;)

Yep, you're right. There's a belligerent, Randian dream behind that 1000% nonsense that always seems to be accompanied by some far-fetched narrative of climbing the ladder.

You sound like an employee who thinks they're an employer.

Awesome!

I used the Intensity Shuttle for USB 3.0 on a Macbook (OS X) to develop the plugin. It costs $190 and works pretty well, but can't capture 1080p @ 60fps (only 720p/1080i). I only got it because I couldn't install a PCI-e card on my laptop ;)

If you need 1080p @ 60fps, the Intensity Pro 4K is also $190 and is a PCI-e card. Otherwise, the Mini Recorder should work just fine.

I coded the Blackmagic support for OBS Studio. It was only slightly nightmarish.

https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio/tree/master/plugins/dec...

There is no voluntarism in slavery, even if it's of the wage variety.

But yes, sure! The employers are the oppressed class. All of us plebeians are so ungrateful of their estate inheritance -- er, brave risks. But don't worry for them! They can hire "domestic workers" to dry their tears with million dollar banknotes.

The means of production that you use are privately owned by your employer, that's all they provide. Maybe they also do some managerial/clerical labor to lubricate the interaction of the commodity with the market, but this is really only the case for small businesses.

Imagine a shirt that sells for $20 on the market. The shirt is composed of $5 from raw materials and depreciated tools and $15 from your transformative labor. The boss pays you $5 for your work and makes off with $10. The boss steals way more than their investment. They'll tell you (e.g. Paul Pester from the article) that they have more responsibility: this is a bold-faced lie. Corporations are never held responsible for the havoc they wreak on society and the Earth.

The result of this arrangement is the obvious wealth inequality graphs that we've all seen. This is the true injustice. The CRUD worker making $150k and the food laborer making $40k are fighting for scraps. We should focus our fighting upwards.

I wasn't being reductionist, that is not my world view; I recognize many different hierarchies. But wealth is an extremely important dimension and the one under examination here. Simple example: people with higher income hire literal wage slaves to do their gardening and cleaning. Low income people don't have nearly such authority.

I think this is tangential, but you're very correct! This alone makes you question the morality of capitalism. Your employer necessarily steals some of the value that you create, otherwise you would have no worth to the employer and you would either be fired or the employer would close up shop.

Wages are absolutely hierarchical. The people who have higher wages have higher rank/status/authority.

You just pushed the blame off to the market, which needs the exact same moral justification.

Hierarchy requires justification, and inequality requires justification, since always and forever.

You should be required to try to convince someone working three manual labor jobs and making $40k a year that your $150k salary for making CRUD apps in your underwear is morally justifiable.

Of course, you're right.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." —Guess Who

Employers are necessarily oppressive and may fire employees over this sort of notification if the listed project or the AngelList profile in general is against business interests.

If it wasn't clear already, this sort of move shows exactly who AngelList is serving. After all, as you said, how will the employer, in their contractual fantasies, ever be able to confirm that a potential interviewee is telling the truth?

I blame the stock market pressure towards growth.

Every capitalist mechanism insists on growth. That's literally what capital is.

Reporting for roll call. Once you get cope with abandoning all of the metaprogramming-heavy APIs a la ActiveRecord that have been front and center in pop web dev, it's quite lovely. The only thing that seems to slow down my work is the lack of a developed web ecosystem for Rust.

My hypothesis was that the type system is be able to benefit practically all domains. Personally, so far, I've become a cautious believer.

I loved GameMaker so much as a kid. I was sad to see it get taken over by money. :( Are there any modern free & open source alternatives?

Correction: I remember the underlying scripting language being GML (GameMaker Language). Maybe Delphi was embeddable into early versions of GameMaker? I also know that you could link plugins as DLLs...

a) To this end I agree that my simplification is too emotional.

b) I typically regard such actions as means to sustain profit, but I won't deny the exceptions to this rule.

c) I scrutinize the definition of profit here, but I won't disagree with what I believe to be your sentiment.

You go on to describe the feudal and individual capitalist (I think?) modes of production, which helps to define profit, but this is otherwise divergent from (c). In the communist mode of production, "profit" serves the community (ideally global), not the individual. I'm wondering what your profit analysis of the communist mode of production is.

I haven't yet read the last volume of Capital, so I am unprepared to take on the line of discussion in regards to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

Nonetheless, I fail to see how the simple arguments I initially made are affected by this diversion, and I fail to see how your analysis of price-setting mechanisms refutes the profit motive.

I'm not sure how factors of production (including durable capital goods) can possibly be an "enemy" of anything.

I'm a Marxist. So in the aforementioned sense, capital is only wealth that grows over time through the process of exchange. I am referring to the process, not the assets.

As I mentioned before, I am not interested in analyzing the behaviors of individual employers. I am interested in analyzing the behaviors of the classes. You may call this oversimplification, but I call it cutting through the bullshit.

OP is looking at people who direct and sustain a capitalist enterprise's internal processes. These people (managers, HR) are hired by the capitalists to optimize internally for profit. The only warm & fuzzy side-effects that these positions provide are the ones that don't get in the way of capital increasing.

It's not even about these individuals being evil or not. I'm sure most of them are torn to pieces (before they become numb) when they make decisions against the wellbeing of the workforce. The point is that the managers would not be in these positions if they could not fulfill these roles — they would be replaced. These positions self-select for "evil."

The people who optimize externally for profit focus not on squeezing the workforce, they focus on squeezing the public. These are the lawyers, the salespeople, the accountants, the marketers, the compliance experts. There's no point debating the evilness of the individuals, but their roles are necessarily evil. These roles tend to grow more and more evil as the capitalist enterprise grows. The enemy here, then, is capital, not these poor workers who fill necessary capitalist roles.

Let's Encrypt has a public API for managing certificates. One use case where this is handy is for creating/modifying certificates for each customer-controlled domain/subdomain of your multi-tenant web service.

The capitalist would not be making any money off of the capitalist endeavor if their workers were not being paid less than 100% of their work's value. Incidentally, the economic system is set up in a way to obscure this basic fact. Example:

Say a TV is priced at $100, the raw materials to produce the TV costed $24, and all of the depreciated tools in building the TV costed $1 (the tools wear down, eventually requiring replacement). The labor performed by the worker produced $75 of market value.

If the capitalist pays the worker the fair $75, the capitalist makes nothing off of this whole coordination. Why in the world would the capitalist do that? Not only can the capitalist not take some of the money for themselves, they don't have any money to expand their business. A company that doesn't expand is a company that is eaten alive by companies that do expand. If the worker gets the $75, the capitalist isn't happy, and the capital isn't happy.

$30 goes to investment capital, $20 goes to the capitalist's wallet. The capitalist pays the worker $25.

Software is no exception to this reliable, yet simplified model.

You're right, I think I understand. OP is laying out the metrics dependent on social relations by which one may estimate a sort of "fair" wage.

My rant was tangential to that bullet point but relevant to the second bullet I quoted... so I probably should just remove the accusatory word "incorrect" from my post ;)

If I create $1M of value for the company, you can compare my price with $1M.

Incorrect. If your company were to pay you the same amount as they profit off of you, you wouldn't be sticking around for very long at that company. That's the basic requirement of your company's mode of production.

If the ranges of acceptable don’t overlap, it’s worth stepping back and clarifying what glasses people are using to look at the numbers.

Consider my previous assertion. You may come to this conclusion: "it is unacceptable that I don't make as much money as the money I produce for my company." You may realize that the entire economic system is structured that way. Then, you're right that it's worth stepping back and clarifying what glasses people are using.

If you interpret these results as the material conditions of a class instead of the material conditions of every individual of that class, the results are very easily digestible. Nothing personal.

...homelessness, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality

These are all directly caused by an economic system which optimizes for profits instead of people. I would also argue that the other problems you listed are perpetuated by said system. You are looking to solve a social problem using individual means. You cannot do that. Join local fights, help replace this broken system.

My experience here has reinforced the truth at the root of Groupon’s success: if you have a small business, it’s hard to reach customers.

I love this. You are the founder of a big company known for being predatory, and you're recognizing that big companies are predatory.

Why do you think that these financial institutions exist in the first place?

Another piece of the puzzle: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/16/stock-prices-of-weapons-...

The dangerous ideological heterogeneity I was referring to: see Ferguson, EU vs. Greece, US vs. immigrants... Regardless:

Someone hard-working with a 130 IQ versus someone depressed or maladjusted with a 90 IQ

Capitalism doesn't do a "decent job handling those extremes," it does a fantastic job creating those extremes. The latter person you mentioned is either highly exploited and/or rejected from society and given a tragic, humiliating life. Our capitalism is divisive, unjust, and destructive.

I would think most Marxists would agree that any society would be have a more prosperous working class with a basic income than it would without one. Because of the framework of class analysis Marx provides however, Marxists do not compromise on moving beyond capitalism. The problems of capitalism run much deeper than just poverty.

I don't think that you argued my point, though. Virtually every reform program in the history of capitalism has eroded over time, even the ones that probably sounded as impressive as UBI at the time (near 100% tax rates, social security, etc.).