zeroname

Do you have a source for that?

Just dump all the sorted garbage in sorted landfills. Recycling may become economical again at some point. In any event, future technology will deal with it better.

Put the technologies you used next to the projects you worked on. Just listing "Python" or "SQL" without context isn't meaningful.

Similarly, it's not clear what you actually did in the projects. Write it more like: "Implemented X for Y using Z" and add in some benchmarks such as "reduced overhead by 12%" or "scaled to 100,000 clients", if possible.

If the US had mandatory six to eight weeks paid leave, that would come out of the employee's paycheck.

I don't see what's good or civilized about being forced to take a vacation. A lot of people are underemployed as-is, because of all the regulations that make it less attractive to hire people fulltime.

Occassion and modus operandi are two entirely different precepts but you know this, yeah, and your trying ever-so hard to be pedantic.

It is you who is being pedantic. My point is that working from home, as a developer, because of some special case is generally possible, just like in your case.

Now what about all the other professions in your country? Do they all get their little "stay at home" days? No? Then what's your point?

How can you rub in that which you assume to be true but have no evidence for or against? The arrogance is astounding, to say the least.

Why, I thought it was common knowledge.

Finland, as compared to the US:

Higher cost of living with less disposable income:

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Finland/Un...

Developer salaries half as high:

https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-sof...

Unemployment rate 50% higher:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

And obviously, the weather in Northern Europe sucks. Priceless!

I'm assuming you're speaking of purely fiscal wealth, which is a pretty myopic perspective to have.

No, I'm talking about the standard of living. Of course somebody with a lower standard of living will have to find some other reason to make themselves look superior.

Do you not do this with the current Social Security system?

You can look up the difference yourself.

The irony is palpable... Do you have anything of consequence to proffer or is it going to continually be this mundane level of effort, deriving from your bravado? If the latter of the two, then, you're bringing a knife to a gun show and it wouldn't be fair to keep being you with your own phantom limbs, so I'm dipping out.

I don't know about your native language, but if you write like this in English, it makes you sound like a clown.

Believe it or not, an American parent can take a vacation day as well. The difference is, you're not forced to have vacation days and suffer lower pay for it.

In any event, why have only five days? If five days is good, why aren't two weeks even better? How could five days be enough to care for your family? Why not a whole month, that's even better than two weeks! I'll tell you why: Because it's not a free lunch. These laws are made so that politicians can sell them to clueless voters, not because they make sense.

Just because I'm "out of touch" with ordinary, less privileged workers doesn't equate to my experience and observations in the sector as being invalidated, yeah?

It means your experience doesn't scale to broader society, but you were making a point about broader society. If the ordinary secretary or the shift worker or the policeman don't get their "work from home days" there's essentially no difference in your example to what's going on in the US.

That might be true for you but is it true for developers in the overall society?

Working from home on occasion certainly isn't unusual.

Let's take this to an extreme example: A coworker missed over two months, last year, for 'x' medical reasons. What would've surely driven him to the poor house in the states was paid through those taxes you later commented on and there was no threat to his job because of it.

"Surely" you have no idea about the US system. Paid sick days is something your insurance may or may not cover. You get the choice of whether you want to pay for that or not. States laws also may protect workers from getting fired during longer illness.

What does that have to do with anything related to kids...

Nothing, just rubbing it in. If you're successful in Finland (or some other little Euro country), you're going to be far less wealthy than in the US. You'll be paying for everyone else to live. If that makes you happy, go for it. Pat yourself on the back.

The cost isn't paid elsewhere. It's essentially going straight out of their own paycheck. Not immediately and in equal measure, but over time and on the average. It's effectively vacation days.

Remember, everyone gets those five days. Big earners, small earners. It evens out to nothing. Everyone can't live at the expense of everyone else.

(specifically speaking of the technology sector, as that's what I have first-hand experience with)

In other words, you're out of touch with ordinary, less privileged workers.

It really is a different world, over here. The antithesis to the apathetical, if I may be so bold...

Oh, come on. If you're a developer you can have a "work from home" day in the US as well. Plus, you can earn far more and you pay less in taxes.

Who is paying for those five extra days? Is it the health insurance? Your cost of health care will go up or service will get worse.

Is it taxes? Your taxes will go up or money will be missing in the budget (or you will need to get more debt).

Is it the employer? Wage suppression.

You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.

I will make an exception though: If you make people stay home when they are sick, you may reduce sickness overall. However, if people spend their entire "Family Care Leave" on rugby matches and then illness strikes, it's not going to work.

Your own source:

"Researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School who followed 122 men and women who had been released from the state prison in Massachusetts found that six months to a year after their release, just over half of the group had found a job."

That means he's actually right by a narrow margin. Most ("just over half") former inmates did find a job.

This source reports an unemployment rate of only 25%:

http://www.esrcheck.com/wordpress/2018/07/16/report-finds-on...

I appreciate the author making such clear and well-stated points, that makes it easy to use to simple facts to refute his/her argument.

You didn't refute anything. Of course a conviction is career poison and one can write long-winded articles on the injustice of it. Still, the statistics say: Most ex-convicts can find a job.

Does this bet mean anything if the only employment you can get is 10 hours a week at minimum wage?

Yes, because it's about relative rates. Unless you believe the EU is more "honest" about reporting unemployment numbers, the US numbers are just as meaningful.

"And psychology aside, remember that the welfare state forces active workers to support the idle. So when regulation forces wages up, even the lucky workers who keep their jobs ultimately forfeit much of what they gain."

Even a doubling in unemployment claims would be drop in the bucket compared to pension liabilities.

I've come to recognize you're conflating multiple related 'responsibility' concepts, swapping into the different modes when it's convenient. It's very similar to how you treated the term 'fair' earlier on.

Can you accept that words don't all have one meaning? Maybe you willfully misunderstand what people are saying so that you can win a debate that you started, on your terms? I don't care about "winning" a debate with you. Nobody else is reading this, it's just you and me.

Your statements regarding legal responsibility...

See, I never made a statement about legal responsibility. You want to talk about legality and law and power and justice and morality. I'm talking about fair market prices.

Of course "fair market prices" aren't going to be "fair" at every possible level of analysis, under every moral framework, in every single instance in the history of mankind.

For you, it's all power games and injustice and exploitation. For me, it's people cooperating voluntarily without centralized control. In my eyes, it all works pretty well. In your eyes, it doesn't and it all needs regulation and intervention. We're not convincing each other otherwise.

It's "fair (market) price", not "fair market".

And the market, and economy, should serve the people. Not the people the market.

This is a meaningless slogan. The market is the people. Demand reflects what people need. Supply reflects what people have to offer. Prices reflect their agreement.

But all too often the resources to pay a living wage exist but the market has been manipulated such that the labourer won't be able to claim that.

These are orthogonal. A fair market price simply isn't equal to the price that is required to sustain someone's living. A fair market price also is not equal to the price that could be paid (i.e. the "resources available").

The laborer whose price is raised to some arbitrary limit that is above the market rate will find demand for their labor disappear in equal measure.

And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee.

First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court.

Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. In this case, the woman (not "a woman") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert.

Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous.

I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job

What's impossible about watching the street and hitting the breaks if necessary, while testing a prototype self-driving car? I would say if you can't even do that, you shouldn't be in that seat.

This isn't the case where just one person is responsible. The system shouldn't have been configured that way. The driver should've been alert. The woman shouldn't have crossed the road like that. Everyone was negligent.

However, this is a societal issue and there needs to be some sort of referendum on this.

Why? Where's the referendum on allowing people to drive vehicles? People cause 99% of accidents in the streets, as of today.

Look, this just doesn't disagree with what a "fair price" is. If "a man must live by his work" but the market doesn't afford it to him, then indeed "the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation". That means this kind of worker goes extinct, as many professions have in the past.

I'm well aware that Smith on occasion argues for protectionism to "smooth out" that extinction process. That's welfare. It has no bearing on fair prices in free trade.

radical unfettered libertarianism doesn't work

I agree.

No it isn't, because absent laws people tend to do things like break your knees with a lead pipe if you're a union organizer.

You keep dragging things out further and further. Am I led to believe that without laws supporting unions, breaking knees suddenly becomes legal?

So you agree there's an informational asymmetry, but you put the burden on the weaker party in the transaction to be responsible for the calculation of the costs and effects of it (despite agreeing they don't know as much about it)

I'm not putting the burden on them. The burden is on them, as a pure matter of fact. Every worker is ultimately responsible for the risk they put upon themselves. If they get injured or killed, they are the ones harmed. They're the ones who have to make the call.

Of course an employer that hides information on safety hazards or is otherwise negligent is liable for endangering others.

None of this is specific to trade. You're talking about fraud, coercion and extortion and all kinds of things. It's going nowhere. Of course nobody willfully "consents" to being endangered, defrauded or extorted.

Again, no thank you. I'd rather have society put together so that people don't need to be an expert in every safety critical expertise in order to avoid harm from others.

You arguing against straw man libertarian, not me.

No difference.

A fair price doesn't imply "good" or "enough to live off". Ultimately, only so many people can live off a finite amount of land. The amount of labor regulates itself as well (i.e. less children are born).

an unsophisticated economically distressed person is forced into taking a poisoned deal

Forced by what? By their personal situation? Even in this case, both sides stand to benefit. Any better hypothetical deal simply isn't on the table. That person still has the choice not to take the deal or to try and find another deal.

Perhaps you don't believe labour standards, collective bargaining rules, minimum wage, and other pro-worker laws exist, but they do.

Indeed, there is always and at any time a great deal of lawmaking and lobbying underway to regulate things that presumably need regulation. This in itself is not proof that the market mechanism needs such regulation.

I already dealt with minimum wage, it's price fixing and it doesn't work.

Collective bargaining (like any bargaining) requires no laws, it is a natural right. You are right insofar as that there are some anti-discrimination laws in place presumably protecting union workers.

Safety standards are an interesting topic. Last I heard, there's no law forcing employers to publish statistics on accidents, to properly inform the laborer on the risk they are taking. They're expected to trust "safety standards" set by the government and (presumably) checked by the government. Yet they fully bear the risk of their job. They are responsible for themselves. They can and must refuse to perform an action that they deem is endangering themselves unduly.

In any event, you are dragging in a lot of stuff that goes beyond "a trade" and into labor law. Labor isn't "one transaction" that could be deemed fair or unfair. The terms are re-evaluated constantly and if there is a disagreement, either parties can terminate.

Take a look at the SEC, then. They perform the exact same function, but for wealthy investors. Do you hate them too?

You can drop your "hate" allegations, please. Insofar as we are talking about regulating fraud, it is fine. Insofar as we are talking about being the nanny for foolish investors to not make foolish investments, it is unwarranted.

You just grab a random yo-yo with a vehicle and a clean driving record and they start making you cash.

Uber has been losing money ever since its inception, so it's clearly not making them so much cash.

For a Taxi there's a huge capital, personnel, and operational investment.

Maybe in the U.S. with all its regulation.

To become a NYC Taxi driver, you need...

Who cares? Taxis aren't all the same worldwide, they're still taxis. An unregulated/unlicensed taxi is still a taxi.

You have to already be investing tens of thousands of dollars in a vehicle, and also already have other income.

If it's really such a sucker's game, people can just stop doing it.

So what's new is the Uber driver herself. She only exists now because she was formerly lower-middle class, and now she needs 3 jobs to support herself.

If she needs three jobs to support herself maybe she'll prefer having the choice of working for Uber over not having it. Her situation is neither Uber's fault nor responsibility.

But then history gave us a ton of examples of contracts which are negotiated in the context of a power or informational asymmetry. Boo.

If there's a power difference to the point of coercion, it's coercion and one party is not consenting. Otherwise, it's still fair. Of course a company is "more powerful" than an individual. Still, a company cannot coerce you into working for them specifically.

As for informational asymmetry, that is part of trade. The time you spend on getting quotes is opportunity cost. It goes both ways, too. If you're selling labor, your employer has no way of knowing whether you're as competent or productive as you appear. There's nothing inherently unfair here.

Of course, there's a point at which informational asymmetry turns to outright fraud. Again, at that point there is no real consent.

Contracts for labour are predominantly contracts which are negotiated in the context of power and informational asymmetries, which is why developed nations have backstopping legislation to prevent wholesale abuse.

Such as? Last I checked, nothing stops me from offering cheap junk for a ridiculous sum of money, nor is there a law preventing me from attempting to hire workers well below market rate.

There are some political attempts at price fixing (such as minimum wage), but they generally don't work. They're either so loose as to have practically no effect or they cause shortages/unemployment.

Taxis aren't very different things at all. That's why in many countries, Uber has been banned. They're regarded as taxis circumventing taxi regulations.

It really is a job platform designed to take advantage of people who need multiple jobs, and surprise surprise, there's a slew of 'em here.

Any job offer is taking advantage of the fact that people aren't magical self-sufficient entities. There's nothing wrong with offering a job, nobody is forcing anyone to take it.

It simply wouldn't work in a country that did not have such huge wealth disparity.

Wealth disparity has nothing to do with it. Uber prices are set by supply and demand. In some countries, Uber may need to pay more to attract drivers - and raise prices as a result.

I'm talking about a fair price. Wages are prices. A fair price is one that both parties agree to. Curiously, many people work for free. Is that unfair?

I'm not talking about fairness in terms of equality. People are not equal in terms of economic value they never will be. Indeed, some people have no better choice than accept a job that pays less than a living wage. Would you deny them that possibility by mandating that every job needs to pay a living wage? Isn't that unfair?

There is no "servant economy" and these people are not servants. They're performing services that happen to not be well-paid, because virtually anyone can do them. You need virtually no education or skill. The "gig economy" didn't change that.

If you believe him, what does that mean for labor?

It means you are fairly compensated for your work and you pay fair prices for the product of other people's work.

These companies are literally small businesses. They're not about maximizing profit or utility, they're about blowing venture capital in the search of biggest fool to pay the highest price in an IPO or acquisition.

It's indicative of an era of cheap and dumb money, where FOMO is driving investment - just like before the dotcom bust.