rc_subreme's comments

Americans are living in a world with a land war in Europe with an old foe on one side, and the increasing pressure exerted on Asian trade and policy partners by a Pacific rim empire we've not seen eye to eye with in the past 100 years.

I'd like to see more effort expended on spying and undermining our rivals than ourselves. But such large diplomatic/economic/(hopefully cold)military projects require long term thinking we're poor at. Its so much easier to just fight the latest culture war against domestic weirdos and malcontents.

Every time we have one of these internal thought-purity checks, it sows discord in an already discordant country made of too many different races religions and regional cultures to ever work if we're going to try and weaponize our own governmental security apparatus against each other, vying for control on the airwaves and at the polls, just so we can stick it to our domestic rivals for a few years.

The cowboy and the indian are both Americans.

Rudolph the Red strikes again.

It looks like Europe has reached a far more sustainable labor market in general, with lower peaks and higher valleys. As well as much better time off, and benefits like health and pension secured by public institutions instead of employers. I'd be willing to give up my chance at more money through starting a contracting business or pivoting to webdev with some certs to know that workers are more secure in their future. Thanks for a view from somewhere far away.

Yes. I am paid time and a half past 40 hours as mandated by US law. At time and a half, I am still falling short of the salaried spreadsheet operators who are the lower tier of the non-labor workforce. If you take all the overtime, 12 hours every weekday and 8 hours on saturday, for an entire year, you can make 70K before taxes.

My issue is mostly wage stagnation and lesser benefits, as well as the lack of security, and the way the trend isn't showing any signs of reversing leaving me worried if gen Z is even going to bother and an entire way of life won't disappear along with 'Made in the U.S.A', as well as a warning that tech field might be next up for optimization of labor costs if VCs go off to chase the next thing and CRUD stops printing money.

>"Stretched thin" means there are few of you. Yes, there's less participation from young people in manufacturing. The pay doesn't go up, the plants go to Mexico or China. During covid when a bunch of old timers left my factory tore down a few machines and shipped them to Mexico because young people like myself aren't coming into the field fast enough to replace the boomers. As other countries catch up in tech skills you might find yourself in a similar position.

>If you can make similar money in easier work... Nerd sniping. Some people were just born with a wrench in their hand and need to be solving practical problems. I just can't work jobs like that without being bored out of my mind and miserable.

>I would imagine that what you do is in fact skilled labor it should pay more... Buddy I can MIG TIG and stick weld, I'm a mechanic, I've worked as a qualified person on 480V three phase, and low voltage controls, as well as hydraulics and pneumatics. I can drive 10 ton trucks stick, take apart and put a motor back together, and locate the clitoris with only a bubble level, ruler, protractor, line out chalk, twine, pocket calculator, and a stud finder. Imagine what you want. Macroeconomic principles are of little comfort in the real world, where social forces and political forces collide and such simple game theory doesn't hold up.

The company can pay less and ask more, paying less and asking more has become common and nobody wants to rock the boat and lose the immense power gap between labor and management by competing on the basis of wages to attract talent. Besides, a lack of manpower means you can just go somewhere else. The world supply chain, even during covid, is so robust at scale that physical location means little, but relative economic wealth and power means a lot.

I'm not bitching, I eat three meals a day and pay rent. But tech has it good and I see a lot of people not realize how much that can change overnight. I expect a great deal more people will work in tech in the west, and less at my kind of job, so I'd like to see workers realize that they have to entrench the current available quality of life, for the future generations. Because the people in manufacturing through the 50s-70s didn't entrench the quality of life in such a way it could survive financialization and lean strategies of the 80s.

The view from outside tech:

I'm an hourly laborer who thinks computers are fun and free software unixen are most fun, which is how I ended up finding HN. I've worked a number of manufacturing and agricultural jobs. Right now I make car parts.

I don't have a choice. I check the calendar on the wall and work the hours it says or I'm fired. I work 60-70 hours a week. This is normal. The workforce is stretched thin as you can make similar money fucking around with your phone on the clock at Walmart, and bargaining power of unskilled (nee essential) labor is at an all time low.

You tech types have the best bargaining power of anyone, crazy pay, nice working conditions out of the elements in hazard free offices, and you will lose it all if you don't stand in solidarity.

At manufacturings peak in America people like me had good middle class lives but as it waned and unions were busted and we suffered title deflation (opposite of entry level coder being an engineer, machinists became operators, foremen became team leaders) quality of life and ability to dictate terms of employment faded.

Someday tech will have it's 80s, vc will stop chasing the next apple or MS, engineers will become coders, sysadmins will become IT techs, wages will stagnate, and if you're all working till 8 it will go from extra to expected.

Draw lines, stand in solidarity, set expectations, have a talk with coworkers who are pussies doing extra for nothing that they're fucking up the solidarity thing.