susanasj

supporters of Israel's conduct love talking about anything except the thing that is happening right in front of our eyes: mass deprivation and slaughter of Gazan civilians. The reason that you want to talk about something else, like how many Jews live in Arab states, is because Israel's conduct is indefensible and we all know it, including you.

CEOs will literally waste millions of dollars by losing half their staff rather than recognize a union.

Let's not pretend this is some smart stealth merit-based layoff play by the CEO: the people leaving are likely the ones with options, and many of them have been working remote for years now. They are unwilling to relocate their entire lives for Grindr. The RTO announcement came out soon after announcement of the union drive.

it is 100% a union busting move. RTO was announced almost immediately after announcement of the union drive

oh ya I'm saying we need to achieve net zero plus have carbon removal. We need to be net negative, we are already in catastrophe territory as far as much carbon is in the atmosphere (I am not a scientist to be clear).

I think, as with any politically charged topic, journalists are going to have biases. I don't think there is any particular solution to this except being conscious of those biases, particularly as they relate to career advancement and money. Money explains nearly everything about the issues in the American media ecosystem for me, not cultural factors like "some journalists are more open about being on the left".

One writer that I followed nearly every day for the first 18 months of the pandemic was Derek Lowe at Science.org who runs a fantastic blog about drug discovery, and he has given his assessment of the origins debate a few times. The short answer is he doesn't know either unfortunately https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic--...

yeah I think it's becoming clear that stopping emissions isn't enough and we will have to do carbon capture but Iceland has a functional carbon removal plant up and running and Exxon apparently sees it as part of their economic future. Lots of bad news out there and we need to accelerate the pace but optimism gives us energy for pushing the political front.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

ah I think even that is a bit pessimistic. I'm optimistic that we can figure out carbon sequestration and transition to renewables in the next few decades and prevent any catastrophic sea level rise. I fully admit that the global North will not give a shit if some peripheral nations are destroyed by climate change, but I think this summer is starting to show people living in Vegas and Phoenix that their days there are numbered if we don't do something. Maybe I'm being optimistic though.

one underdiscussed aspect of America's car oriented transportation system is that car accidents are a major reason that American life expectancy lags behind other developed countries[0] (along with gun violence). I have family that drive on highways in Texas daily and it's probably the most dangerous thing they do, but they have no choice. The cities are built to force you into owning a car and risking your life to accomplish basic tasks.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

you're describing the exact chicken and egg problem that we need to take the first steps on with "people still need a car in Seattle". That's only true because Seattle forced buildings and roads to be car oriented for decades, reforms like this are meant to reverse that because the environmental costs are catastrophic.

People don't necessarily need cars in NYC, Chicago, DC, SF, etc because a majority of the housing in those places was built before car oriented zoning became the norm in basically every major city. We have to start rolling that back, it's insane policy.

Shopify shares up 25% today, which explains most of what's happening here.

I agree with all the other comments criticizing the CEO's leadership of furiously hiring and now making massive cuts, but I think that is missing the context that the CEO does not answer to you or me, or to business professors, or to his employees. He answers to the board, which typically care about stock price and not much else. Today is a massive success in that regard.

obviously AI is moving quickly, but every mainstream news article about AI is incredibly gullible. Good time to be the Simpsons monorail salesman but for AI.

yeah they get paid a decent middle class salary. Can they afford a nice apartment in the West Village? No. Can they afford a nice 3BR/2BA in a decent neighborhood in Brooklyn/Queens/Bronx/Staten Island if their partner is also a civil servant like a teacher? I think so yes.

(not that teachers shouldn't get paid more, they should)

I understand the objections to "abolish the police" sloganeering because I think the alternatives of "restorative justice" and all that are pretty poorly defined (I say this as someone pretty involved in left wing politics).

However, it's increasingly clear that city police departments in many cities basically operate as unaccountable gangs that extort city government. LA Sheriff's Department has quite a few actual, traditional gangs operating within it. The NYPD routinely breaks the law when they feel like it. In Austin, the Police Academy training was found to be discriminatory and militaristic so the City Council created an oversight board, and the Police Department just doesn't let the board view trainings that they are supposed to.

Not to mention the constant police violence that they are rarely held accountable for, including the stuff from 2020 where we watched NYPD officers running their vehicles into protestors.

I don't know what the solution is but the status quo feels unsustainable.

"cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer." that's just this stage of capitalism unfortunately. Take an airplane trip and you will experience similar effects.

this is close to just straight up misinformation, but I'll point out the fundamental difference that you are ignoring in your analogy. You pay your union rep (via dues). It's not that you work for your union rep, it's that they work for you, just like you work for your company.

I mean, the conclusion that things are better than people think is based entirely on measurements that the authors of the study decide represent "progress". It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. The authors are right that some health indicators like teen pregnancy for Americans have improved, but overall life expectancy for Americans has fallen for several years in a row now. The authors are right that incarceration rates have fallen slightly, but America still has by far the largest prison system in the world.

I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights.

The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no.

That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible.

EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.

I'm sorry but ban this technology now. The nefarious uses are easy to see and are already happening apparently. If we find good uses later for the public good (I really do struggle to think of these), we can figure out how to use it responsibly. This seems way more threatening to me than AI at the moment.

I forgot I posted this comment so just seeing this but as an upper middle class lefty tech worker I'll offer an answer.

I think your question is a bit too focused on the individual and not the system. I think it's actually difficult for founders to share the upside "equitably", whatever that means. Like, are there any examples of it actually happening? I suspect that the acquiring company frequently dictates terms that won't allow you to make every employee a millionaire because then what incentive do they have to work anymore. I think once you get to the multi billion dollar level of wealth it's difficult to get objective advice - many of the people surrounding you are just trying to please you to continue getting their slice of the vast wealth that you control. So just as a human it's hard to navigate that I think (this is me being sympathetic to billionaires, which I'm generally not).

The much easier answer to me is just much higher taxes on wealth. Capitalism is not a system built to share resources equitably, but inequality can be tamed through taxes. If you as a founder see most of the upside, fine, but a lot of it will get redistributed to society through taxes, and theoretically your workers benefit from that. It also means it's not up to the whims of the individual people or companies involved in something like an acquisition to try to make it equitable.

(another way inequality in capitalism can be tamed is through unions, but I don't know if there are any examples of unions being involved in something like an acquisition or IPO in tech)

I think this is a good article for tech workers to read to provide perspective on our place in the tech economy (particularly Americans): https://organizing.work/2020/12/there-is-something-missing-f...

particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.

it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.

ah fair enough, I wondered if I should phrase my comment as a global phenomenon.

I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?

I understand feeling psychologically hurt by this as a young ambitious person but as someone that has 10+ years of tech experience my ego wouldn't be hurt by this and I would gladly take a role where I send a few emails a day and keep my salary. I would be killing it with my hobbies during the day.

you are 100% correct about retraining. Flying Blind is a great book about the MAX failures at both Boeing and the FAA that I just finished a few weeks ago, highly recommend.

The FAA being archaic was absolutely not the cause of the MAX incidents. Boeing released a plane with a single point of failure that failed, and they also neglected to tell pilots and FAA about this single point of failure because pilots unions would have insisted on training in a simulator (which costs Boeing money) and the FAA may have insisted on a redesign or also simulator training.

Your comment is a complete mischaracterization of the MAX incidents beyond what even Boeing public relations was willing to do.

I think the answer here is not that Google makes bad product design decisions it's that we shouldn't live in a society of incredible wealth but some people still don't have homes and have to sleep in places where they are constantly the victims of property crime.

missed this comment earlier, but I'm curious if you're in the US?

shameless plug: https://internetforall.nyc/

There is a coalition of organizations trying to get NYC to start its own public broadband provider. If you live in NY, talk to your friends and reps about it, if you don't, get your city to start one. NYC had to sue Verizon because they didn't fulfill their contracts to provide broadband to low income parts of the city (just like Charter and LTD haven't), but there really is no choice except to keep subsidizing these godawful companies unless we have a publicly owned alternative.

I agree with complaints about the taxi industry in many cities. However this article is about the workers at these companies, not the consumer experience.

locals have been making fun of this article for the past day as tremendously out of touch, and it is: https://twitter.com/megankimble/status/1540041020192292865

I'll bite on this: we absolutely would be better off with state provided internet infrastructure. I don't care nearly as much about the levels above that, but the fiber in the ground should be a publicly owned utility.

there's lots of info here on a campaign that I am involved in NYC: internetforall.nyc

But the short version is: internet access is crucial to modern life (jobs, housing, civic participation), and access to it is very unequally distributed because we are beholden to a few monopolies. I live in a nice building in gentrified Brooklyn and I have exactly one choice of internet provider. That has been true of every building I have lived in in Brooklyn. Poor neighborhoods and public housing may not even have access to broadband at all. NYC has been sued by homeless advocates because many shelters have no access at all, but when NYC has spent money to try to subsidize internet through private providers they are so immune to competition that they just don't fulfill their contracts, and the city has no choice to but to continue contracting with them: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/report-verizon-nyc-set....

The reality is that providing the infrastructure to poor neighborhoods is not profitable and never will be, and the nature of the physical infrastructure leads to monopoly and corruption. Are some of the problems because of incompetence and corruption in local government? Yes, of course. But if more cities have publicly owned and publicly run networks then at least someone has to answer for the embarrassing state of internet access in the US.