minimuffins

As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute

Sickening pro robo war jingoism!

Going to the wreckage is a reasonable idea. There will be an ELT in there which is what a rescue crew will come looking for. Plus it's easier to spot from the air than a lone person. And maybe something useful survived the crash.

That said, it's an incredibly fake stunt video.

Eh yeah, you're right. I was really thinking about white collar vs blue collar unions.

Yes! I keep seeing these idealistic responses about negotiation.

When you negotiate a higher salary, you are saying to your boss, look, I know I am creating more value for you than I'm getting as a wage, and I know you can't just swap me out with somebody else. You're actually making a demand that needs to be underwritten with a credible threat, no matter how politely you communicate that. You demand that the company realign your wage with your value (actually, you demand that they get closer, they of course never pay you your full value, or they don't make any money).

It's really that simple. You get what you have the power to get. It's not magic, and it's not all about the attitude or w/e.

Of course we are all still constrained by material reality! If you can't make the credible threat, you can't "just" negotiate. (Duh)

I think you'll have a hard time sourcing that claim.

The games industry is notorious for crunch hiring and firing, low wages and exhausting work regimes. When work conditions like that prevail, people unionize (good for them imo). If there's anything surprising about it, it's that people put up with it for this long.

Yeah, it's a good idea to learn how to negotiate and good advice to leave a failing company if you can.

But "just learn to negotiate" is really a non-solution if the goal is to transform unacceptable industry wide labor practices.

You think that's enough? I guess we'll find out.

increasing reliability and resilience

I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the impression that renewables really suffer in this department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20 years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function of weather, etc. What am I missing?

and we do need to fix that

I can't see any way of fixing it that doesn't entail interfering with the (supposedly) natural operations of profit seeking in the market.

At some point we need a state (or somebody or something that is in charge and able to reconfigure and manage economic processes "from above"), some agent or authority to be able to say, "Build this. Don't build that. Do it even if it doesn't make any money." Or we'll eventually experience our own very profitable self negation.

No HR person would allow unpaid intern positions in 2021. It's very clearly illegal in the United States.

Unless this claim is scoped to the tech industry, it's absolutely wrong. Frankly I don't know the actual legal status but it's standard practice in a lot of industries, esp. things like publishing.

We = everyone who has to work to earn a living. And as I say, most especially people who can afford to take a pass on bullshit no-pay work and try to establish a culture where such exploitation is impermissible (like it used to be).

you think this free market thing means get the government involved to prevent some kind of exploitation?

Can't parse that.

We ought to establish norms that discredit this kind of nonsense. Those of us who could afford to take on this kind of unpaid work for exposure ought to object sternly and without any particular regard for professional decorum (just like the author) when these sort of offers come by, because the other side has already thrown all of that out.

Always treat an "offer" for work without pay like the insult it is.

Just-in-time works really well when it works really well. But the ripple effect of a global pandemic upon every sector of the globe...causes a lot of companies to feel the immobilizing weight of the ball attached to the supply chain.

We are now feeling the problems that come with the limits of this kind of global supply chain (which is the outcome of a political-economic project which has been underway, outside the spotlight of mainstream media coverage, for about three decades). The problem and possible solutions are inevitably more political than technical (who gets to decide where things are made, how, and how much is not something the average citizen who has to bear the brunt of the effects has any control over--a political problem).

I also recently learned about how single-use production techniques exacerbated the supply chain fragility, esp. as regards the US covid response. Interesting stuff. Big, long-term problems.

https://exhaust.fireside.fm/18

I honestly thought this was going to be about alternatives to less and more.

I think there's actually a case to be made that there is widespread soft corporate censorship enforcing a new orthodoxy on race discourse (and other things), I'm just waiting on somebody to make it rather than just firing another blind volley in the culture war.

Maybe so but could you say why?

I feel similarly, but I think a big part of that is that my schooling was so bad. Ideally I'd have not had to work and actually been learning something (and that's the goal I have for everyone, as a collective political desire).

On the other hand, I notice people who didn't have to work as kids and went straight into college and respectable white collar jobs usually have absolutely no idea how the rest of their fellow citizens actually work and live, so I'm thankful for the perspective.

When an objectively flimsy discourse like that circulates widely you have to ask yourself what its actual function is. Its apparent function of describing the world accurately is not being fulfilled, but the discourse persists, so what is its less apparent function (and you got it: it's to naturalize exploitation)?

This is a discussion about whether gig economy workers ought to be classed as employees by the government. The reason that is a salient question is because a lot of these workers can't make ends meet under the current structure.

The current structure treats them as serfs and says what really matters is the efficiency of the overall system, or its ability to generate a profit for its shareholders, or whatever. In short, the problem is these guys work too much in exchange for too little. Whatever theories anybody might have about the market, the role of the state in the market, etc, those are the basic facts on the ground: over-exploited workers seeking dignity where they currently lack it. The idea that they are "contractors," in the way that you or I might be contractors sometimes (I assume you are a tech worker), as experts in a technical field, is a sick joke. They don't have any power to get what they need, in that market, as individuals (they aren't even allowed to set their own prices!). If they could bargain collectively, they might. That's the context here.

When somebody enters the discussion and says, "Well, yeah, but what IS dignity, anyway, when you really think about it, man???" you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe they're doing it out of a devotion to clarifying terms but because they just want to take Uber's side in the fight. Yes, it's obscurantism.

You are setting up a scenario where we have to choose between:

A) teens and retirees having access to low paying scut work jobs

B) eradicating wage slavery for non-teen, non-retirees by making it illegal for employers to pay poverty wages

I don't know if it's really such a simple binary opposition, but if it is, B for me.

Unions are good inasmuch they allow labor to bargain with capital by underwriting demands for better pay and conditions with the threat of work stoppage.

If unions aren't doing that because they are compromised or sclerotic or whatever, then they aren't much use. Who would argue.

Yes or no. Take your pick. It's not such a hard question that there's no answer. You can make a policy on this stuff. We solve harder problems all the time.

even people spending their own money on their own housing often can't define their own parameters

I can't believe I'm spelling this out. A person picking out their ideal home has trouble figuring out exactly what they want. Ok. We all don't ever know exactly what we want. It's the human condition. But I don't want to live in grinding poverty. I don't need to look within to figure that one out.

I don't want my home to be dilapidated, overcrowded, full of pests and toxins, or to not exist.

If you're still pretending to have a hard time with the definition of "decent," consult a dictionary.

This line of argument is absurd word chopping. "Oh my, I could never in good conscience try to lock down a subtle word like 'decent' into a singular meaning, guess drivers will have to stay earning a sub-living wage forever. Sorry! Definitions are hard!"

No.

Being an independent contractor does not mean being independent of rules

Surely it at least means being independent from some of the rules that you have to follow if you have a full time job, or why do it? If it doesn't at least mean setting your own price, then what in the world is the point?

Imagine you are freelancing on a software project but you can't ever make any good money because, strangely, the price you're allowed to charge is set by Stackoverflow and not you. Seems kind of presumptuous of them to decide that for me, no?

I don't understand why so many people in tech will bend over backwards to not notice the most obvious, basic nature of the economic arrangement between these firms and the people who do all the work. Just look at this stuff straight on. It's obvious what it is. Imagine yourself as a worker instead of a boss for once.

There is an Upton Sinclair quotation that fits.

US Labor Secretary is a product of union politics

The man heading state labor policy is a "product" of the labor movement. Is that supposed to be a scandal?

easier for the AFL/CIO and Teamsters to unionize them

Good.

Yeah, any of those would be acceptable. What would be unacceptable is when somebody has none of them.

There is enough space to move around in the dwelling. It is not falling apart. It is not infested with rats. There is clean running water. Come on. Stop pretending this is a hard question.

A business that pays poverty wages is insufficiently socially useful imo. We do too much for it; it does too little for us.

some government idea of enough pay

Misleading. There is an objective amount of pay that is or is not enough to live on in a given place. The government tries to guess at this sometimes, for the purpose of setting min wage, but that value is objective and exists independently. It's not some arbitrary bureaucratic thing.

Since I'm in the employee class and not the employing class, I would like to see the opposite.

There are certain things that aren't in question about this. Enough income to afford decent housing and food, healthcare, etc. It's not so mysterious.