knucklesandwich's comments

If you think politics is not the realm of intellectual curiosity and that there's nothing political about this article you're a fucking sickening human being.

Wonder why a guy came in sick to the anti-labor publication that publishes vile bullshit like a Kevin Williamson piece shitting on the poor people he evicted from a home he inherited: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447292/underclass-char...

What a self-serving narrative that an employee must have come in when terminally ill because he "didn't want to die alone" instead of that he was falling in line with the calvinist dogshit work culture this publication helped to sustain. Fuck the national review, I hope Alex finally got some peace.

The idea of "tough on crime" was born from the political elites though. Read the Rick Perlstein trilogy, particularly the first two books "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland", which go into this depth. It was used to exploit racial resentment in the civil rights era as part of the "Southern Strategy" as Democrats began accepting civil rights into their political program (and eventually to blame the Civil Rights Act for crime). Racism is obviously a persistent problem here, as well as classism (which is often an unexamined cultural phenomenon in the US) and a culture of vengeance. Vengeance is a DISTINCTLY American idea that has been with us since our calvinist roots and is part of our cultural image in everything from our forever war of foreign intervention to our films (particularly Tarantino films exhibit this). It's a sick, contemptible cultural tenet.

We can begin to reverse this by electing DAs like Philly just has: Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who has made lowering sentences where he has prosecutorial discretion and refusing to try insufficient cases a part of his platform ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEFPHMrAKc ). It will also take citizen pressure to ensure these people follow through on their program as they join a thoroughly racist, punitive institution. Also, people must be willing to elect representatives that will cut criminal penalties across the board. Simply cutting them for nonviolent crimes will not solve the problem: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...

lol thanks for popping in. It sounded like he was being derisive, but not sarcastic. Sounded like he was legitemately trying to level a critique about Bezos not dogfooding, in other words (instead the fact that he's a garbage human being). Fair enough if I'm wrong, but the same kind of shit has and will continue to be said here in complete sincerity.

Looking at his comment history I'm started to think I misread irony for sincerity, but its still not clear to me where that's delimited.

The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You shouldn't have to "test" the ethicality of overworking your employees or paying yourself a huge amount of money while your worker' wages stagnate. Then again, I'm a socialist and find the entire idea of these companies to be ethically compromised because they aren't worker coops.

> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations.

> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.

Sometimes I just have to sit and marvel at how many layers of ideology some of you folks are on.

Planning is not the problem, and open borders is not a market solution. There's a fair point to be made that it's an overreach of the state, that it's unethical and pointlessly carceral and represents the kinds of things we shouldn't have government doing, but that has nothing to do with it being a failure of planning. And the soviet analogy is really going out of your way to score redbaiting ideological points when you can compare it to every other needlessly cruel and punitive policy that leads to social ills in our own legal system. At least that would be a comparison structured around the actual problem, which is one of morality and justice.

It's a failure of policy to be sure, but it's not as though planning is really at fault here, just as open borders isn't really a market solution (even though the implication that it is somehow worms its way into this argument). A market solution would be to use the government to perpetuate scarcity of visa slots and enforce property rights around a visa, and allow visa holders to sell or trade their visa rights. As a corollary, the problem with immigration is not inefficient allocation of slots caused by planning, its that we have immigration limits to begin with.

It's a neoliberal trope to try to work markets into every social problem, but this is really an issue concerning ethics and justice, not allocation.

It's incredibly weird when I find myself agreeing with someone on the right. This article is filled with lots of bullshit "its just econ 101" neoliberal cliches (and uses the beloved tactic of the right that "everything I dislike is soviet central planning and a perversion of this clearly natural and non-synthetic notion of a totally free market"). None of that is necessary to what is fundamentally an argument that should rest on moral principles. I prefer this version of the argument: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/03/the-case-for-open-borders...

Cool, seeing lots of garbage opinions in this thread. Either H1Bs are bad because they create greater competition with people who aren't American citizens, or if you got fired from a job that replaced you with someone on an H1B you must be a bad worker.

Haven't seen a single comment in here acknowledging that our immigration policy exists solely to benefit the wealthy (the wealthiest immigrants, or the ones with the most marketable skills and the wealthiest employers who often choose to exploit their immigrant employees via the precarity of immigration status created by an H1B). It would be great if people started having the conversation that we can have a mutually beneficial policy if we expedite citizenship for foreign born workers and actually work to build labor power in our industry instead of adopting nativist rhetoric or attempting to justify the various ways in which workers in tech are marginalized.

Love the wobblies, and from what I understand they've organized one of the few existing tech workers unions, the IWW 560. Definitely very interested in organizing with them.

No comrades of mine would see guest workers or immigrants as a threat. I wouldn't join a union that didn't stick up for all workers, regardless of their citizenship status.

Maybe we have different perspectives on how popular the anti-immigrant position is in tech (and how many neo-reactionary/dark enlightenment dipshits there are), I guess I'd just ask that you keep an open mind about this and make a decision if and when workers approach you to join a union. I certainly wouldn't knock you for opposing a group that doesn't have your interests at heart, but the union I want to form would take solidarity seriously and would explicitly go to bat for women, people of color, lgbtqia people, disabled people, and immigrants.

Actually I'd prefer if my country would just naturalize you instead of running you through an exploitative guest worker program that hedges your visa status on continued employment. I have absolutely no desire to prevent you from getting a job (and I'd like the union to have a spot for you and ensure you share in the benefits we create by collectively bargaining).

Agreed, I think relatively high compensation is something engineers can get caught up on when discussing the idea of unionizing (though its worth noting that we're paid salaries closer to electricians and plumbers than we are to specialist doctors, not that this is really apples to apples in terms of education required).

Even though we earn good wages, its relatively easy to see that workers are not often reaping the benefits of surplus value and have no ability to weigh in on determinations of how that value is allocated. More importantly, the advantages of a union are not limited to being able to negotiate a better salary, there are lots of workplace conditions that can be pretty oppressive in the tech industry, and unions offer the ability to improve all of them.

The AMA _did_ lobby (I should have clarified that they no longer do this) to restrict medicare funding for residency: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/us/doctors-assert-there-ar...

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/29/business/curbing-the-suppl...

At one point the AMA had about 75% of American doctors as members but has declined for various reasons (growth of specialty professional associations, change of employment in which many doctors have gone from private practices to hospitals which has accompanied a change in political objectives, etc.). The AMA probably does still serve as a professional association in the interest of some segment of doctors, but I take your point that it definitely don't work for doctors writ large. This is actually a good example of why professional associations can be inadequate, because they fundamentally are limited to advocacy for a profession instead of working for gains for a workplace.

Not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with the person above, but just to clarify: the FLSA doesn't prevent tech workers from collectively bargaining to gain paid overtime as a condition of employment, it just determines the highest wage at which salaried workers are required by law to be paid overtime (which I agree is stupid, and should be a benefit all workers receive).

Guest workers aren't a reason not to organize though, they're just a reason it might be more difficult to organize certain shops (though not impossible, take a look at the FLOC who has been able to organize thousands of guest workers).

> Who decides what is fair? You? Tech workers? Speaking about fairness as though it's objective or straight-forward isn't doing anyone any favors.

The beauty of a union is there doesn't have to be an objective definition. A union gives you a democratic voice to advocate for what you think is fair. Without organized labor power, your voice is completely ignorable.

> Speaking generally, if employees aren't getting a fair deal, they should look for better jobs. If they can't find better jobs, they're getting a fair deal. There are certainly anti-competitive exceptions, but nothing posted so far suggests we're in such exceptional territory.

This is a completely naive understanding of what finding a job is like. Leaving a job can be a strike against a person in the hiring process, not to mention it consumes a lot of time, leaves someone uncompensated and without benefits during the process, etc. This also assumes engineer competency is something we can effectively gauge in the hiring process or otherwise (just search "hiring" on hacker news to get the general sentiment among engineers about how good we are at this).

Imagine if this was the suggestion given to factory workers and coal miners and the early 20th century (not that I think the worker conditions are comparable, but its illustrative of how naive it is to believe that market forces are sufficient for providing fair compensation). This is a marginalist's definition of "fair" that doesn't jive with any real human person's.

The real question is why you are so fervantly against having a democratic voice in the workplace.

Listen I think the meritocracy fetishization of SV is dumb and unjustifiable (again, if you really think this, propose a measurement or set of measurements that adequately explains salary and can be justified as representing "skill"), but standardizing pay is ultimately not a major interest of mine in forming a union.

You seem to believe there are separate stratifications of tech workers that do not have shared interests. Even though I pretty strongly disagree, you're in luck, a union is still what you want. You want a craft union that recognizes something like "senior engineers" as a collective bargaining unit. As long as you can justify that you constitute a real unit with a shared "community of interest" to the NLRB, you can still collectively bargain only with other senior engineers.

Sure, this will often happen if litigation can set some precedent that benefits the profession as a whole. For example the AMA will take up cases that can challenge legal precedent on malpractice damages limits. Sometimes these disputes can be with management, but generally these kind of interventions are done as part of professional advocacy.

However a professional association is effectively limited in what it can do in a labor dispute because management has no obligation to collectively bargain with them, hence this is not really the purpose of professional associations.