memmcgee

What? How are you arriving at that conclusion?

Executive salaries aren't the same thing as the surplus value extracted from your labor. If that was spread equally, each employee would make considerably more.

Why would it though? In every other industry, union workers make much more than non-union workers. And unions don't seem to drag the salaries of other high earners (actors, screenwriters) down.

It seems no one has yet mentioned the potential illegality of this policy. The rights of employees to discuss their working conditions at work, a largely political discussion, is protected by the NLRA. Google got whacked by the NLRB for their ban on political discussion as well.

I wonder if this has a lot to do with the economic system we live under. Marx wrote a lot about the alienation of labor, and one form of alienation was alienation from fellow workers. I wonder if we surveyed company executives or small business owners whether you'd find a different breakdown.

they might make it economically rational for Amazon to automate the jobs away

Any jobs that can be automated will be regardless.

People seem to think this is going to hurt workers, but it was gig economy workers who pushed for this law. Workers know their own conditions better than you do.

I'm autistic myself. Damore trying to deflect criticism by saying he's autistic is insulting.

This is true, but zoning laws are ultimately determined by who owns land. Landlords and landowners are incentivized to increase the value of their property at the expense of everyone else. They use zoning laws to do this, which they indirectly control by being active in political lobbying.

If Amazon the marketplace was solely responsible for the upkeep of the marketplace, they'd be more inclined to actually maintain it in a working manner. Not to mention it'd be easier for publishers to sue them to compel compliance.

Property crime is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. Consider this: wage theft results in over double the losses of all other property crimes COMBINED, yet we don't throw bosses who rob their workers of earned pay in jail.

But anecdotes can be misleading too. The only thing left then is ideology.

That's not the same thing as coming down on landlords. We could criminalize slumlording and use civil forfeiture to turn slumlord's properties into public housing. We could put a hefty property tax on all rental properties. We could create a vacancy tax on all unoccupied units that would force prices down. The problem is landlords and land owners and their rent-seeking and speculative behavior. The solution is to stop enabling them by protecting their property rights over the well-being of the population.

Except the supply here is necessarily constrained by the amount of land available to build on. You're treating this like microeconomics 101, which is a fundamentally flawed way to look at the problem.

I disagree that slavery isn't something this generation can't make amends for. As the 1619 project has shown, the legacy of slavery on capitalism in America is broad and extreme.

Amazing how a site that started by selling books now does an awful job doing just that. Another reason Amazon et al should be broken up.

The 1619 Project is some of the finest reporting I've seen in a long time. It's surprising to me it came from the NYT, as they typically avoid speaking truth to power.

Genuinely don't know if HN is as reactionary as this comment sections makes it seem or if we're just getting astroturfed by the usual suspects.

I can't be the only one who sees this as a significant crackdown on employee freedoms and an attempt to silence dissent.

Yep. I don't know how someone can read him as "naive". He immediately went to new sources like Breitbart and PV.

Oftentimes the people they say are "executives" are just rank and file employees. I have a friend who is not an executive who got tricked into meeting with a Project Veritas scumbag. Thankfully they realized something was up and left the meeting.

I think part of this is many of the "experts" people see on TV are not experts at all, they're ideolouges or idiots (and sometimes both).

I'm surprised how low the buyout price was. Like Verizon basically killed Tumblr with the adult content ban but only $3million? I'm sure the net worth of Tumblr's employees is worth more than that. They should've sold Tumblr to the employees and then turned it into a co-op if they were going to sell it for that little.

Except there is an objective reality that LGBT people don't choose their sexuality.

Except YouTube hasn't even banned overt racism and calls to violence. You can still find plenty of it on the platform. Once a channel is large enough, there's effectively nothing you can do short of copyright infringement to get banned.

You know Project Veritas is a load of shit right?

Neither of those include massive mental trauma.

The population at large is heavily affected by Facebook as well.

It affects a company's ability to raise future money. In the case of Tesla, Musk and his other projects are heavily leveraged on his $TSLA shares. There's a very real house of cards that could come falling down in Musk-land if TSLA drops too much.

Yes, the idea that campaign donations = speech is a new one as well. Tbh I think we need a constitutional convention to really solve all the problems with the American political system.

I'm not persuaded by some of the ideas they have (like adding diversity to their governing board, seems designed to be exclusive to tech-startups that already have a bias toward that "value").

What on Earth does this mean?