There was this one time I was watched a whole bunch of old media agitprop reciting various tropes on how things should be and when I did what TV told me to do, people responded negatively! It doesn't matter if those people were also exposed to the same trope and became skeptical of it based on their own experience... or if my imitation of the trope was ham fisted... I'M THE SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE HERE. How dare others have opinions of how my favorite trope should work!
Competition heats up as programming languages get easier... and people obsess over being accepted by their peers? We learned from punch cards, through flame wars, and when being a nerd was actually a bad thing to your social status.
Sigh. Sigh.
Programming is no longer a science, it is a liberal art. You're just plumbers now.
Can HackerNews please stop sympathizing with nationalist unions? The perpetual civil war that was the 20th century ended quite some time ago. You can stop fighting those battles now. The losers of that fight have been preordained and now everything just has to play out How do I know this? Simple.
When automated cars happen, services like Uber win and antique systems of unions will run to pedantic legal protectionism. When did HackerNews become the hub of pro-nationalist union propaganda anyways?
"Can HackerNews please stop sympathizing with nationalist unions?"
Nationalist? There's nothing nationalistic about taxi driver unions. In my experience taxi drivers are usually foreign.
Not to mention that you've attributed all of hacker news to one hive mind that should agree with whatever you think. I would imagine most people here are rather insulted by that notion
You've also presented no real facts or arguments for why Stallman's article is pro-union propaganda. On the other hand, he's presented many compelling arguments for why Uber is an invasion of privacy when compared to a normal taxi service.
I agree unions are not helpful: what we should really have is a sound set of labor laws that oblige companies to treat workers fairly instead of leaving them to bargain for it.
So taxi drivers are going back to their native countries at the end of every shift?
Unions, especially service unions revolving around local physical transportation, depend entirely on nationalism. Without a sympathetic federal entity that can supersede local definitions of what work is, you're just a ragtag pack of misfits.
And owning a cellphone in general is an invasion of privacy. To single out Uber and ignore the NSA entirely is the hallmark of a hit piece's attempt at deflection.
You can't force anyone to treat anyone fairly. All negotiations between two people are exactly that: Between two people. Adding an arbiter only centralizes corruption and makes it easier for the already powerful to get even cheaper labor. Cubans get paid $30 a week while the arbiter mechanism takes the rest.
I think the problem is HackerNews is full of people who grew up in free market capitalism and are now fantasizing about what life would be like under mythical unicorn unionism. It's like some kind of forbidden fruit around here.
>Unions, especially service unions revolving around local physical transportation, depend entirely on nationalism. Without a sympathetic federal entity that can supersede local definitions of what work is, you're just a ragtag pack of misfits.
I'm not so sure that's the case ultimately. If all of Uber's drivers banded together and simply decided not to drive until their terms were met, they'd likely have a good deal of leverage over Uber without any government intervention required. That is the basic concept of unions. Of course, companies have historically tried to circumvent or supress unionized labor in the past, to varying degrees of success.
> If all of Uber's drivers banded together and simply decided not to drive until their terms were met, they'd likely have a good deal of leverage over Uber without any government intervention required
I have experience with unions and I can tell you that if every Uber driver on earth were to protest right here, right now.. and all you will be doing is creating job openings for other people who will happily get paid less to get the job done.
Driving people to and fro isn't exactly a highly skilled job and there is no shortage of people who are made poor because of a car payment.
Comments like this are just more proof of HackerNew's magical thinking regarding unions.
>> I have experience with unions and I can tell you that if every Uber driver on earth were to protest right here, right now.. and all you will be doing is creating job openings for other people who will happily get paid less to get the job done.
It depends on how many within the pool of potential Uber drivers join the union, and consequently how great the impact on supply is. If the majority of current Uber drivers agree to representation by a union, I'm not sure they will be so easily replaceable.
>> Driving people to and fro isn't exactly a highly skilled job and there is no shortage of people who are made poor because of a car payment.
User's brand and pricing relies on skilled drivers, since the driver has to be efficient, knowledgable, and courteous enough to warrant high ratings (Uber drops drivers with low ratings). It also requires drivers who have access to a vehicle that meets Uber's standards.
I'm not sure the job is as low skill as you characterize.
It's low enough that robots will do it in 5 years. No amount of down votes is going to stop that. Lol @ hacker news burying this obvious technical advancement in the name of mythical unicorn unionism.
>>> You can't force anyone to treat anyone fairly. All negotiations between two people are exactly that: Between two people.
Are you sure that wage agreements between a corporate entity like Uber and individual drivers can really be described as "negotiations between two people"? Are you sure that individual drivers are more likely to see their interests represented when they negotiate as individuals vs. when they negotiate as a collective?
>>> Adding an arbiter only centralizes corruption and makes it easier for the already powerful to get even cheaper labor.
I'm not sure this really aligns with the history of labor unions, at least not in the US. The "already powerful" as you describe them have often gone to great links to suppress unionization.
So you believe that corporations are people and that individuals with low skill sets and spare time even know how to represent, let alone index, what their best interests actually area?
And if you think mythical unicorn unison is the anti-corporate underdog, you should really come live in a highly pro-union state sometime outside of the SanFran bubble and watch your job opportunities vanish to seniority and petty local politics.
>> So you believe that corporations are people and that individuals with low skill sets and spare time even know how to represent, let alone index, what their best interests actually area?
No and probably not, which is why your assertion that "negotiations should be between two people" doesn't really apply in this scenario
I never said negotiations SHOULD be between two people. I said that they are.
Tell me, when is the last time you engaged in a negotiation with more than one person at the same time? And if you did, why are you intentionally crushing your odds like that? Have you ever conducted a negotiation in your life?
What's even more problematic is that you have been downvoted on a community that was founded by people who participated in building the tech responsible for forging history's first self-sustaining post-nationalist identity (the internet) in history.
The nation-state must be the enemy, which can only be defeated by a nation-state... because the concept of a nation-state is dying and is engaging in full blown Hegelian dialectics to keep itself afloat. Unions, nationalists, and identity zealots have been having a field day with HackerNews as of late.
This is technically correct in concept, but not in practice, as organized religion existed long before the formalization of the nation-state. In fact, one can even argue that nationalism is an agnostic subdivision of organized theology since it utilizes identical symbol worship mechanisms.
It means the internet allows people to communicate, share ideas, and form cultural bonds and identities outside of the highly-restricted context of national frameworks.
Half-hearted attempt by the collapsing mass media machine to conflate shitty attempts at DNS filtering as the next SOPA in the hopes the "angry poli-tech" types will run with it to drown out the fact that a darling entertainment exec and devote Democrat is actually racist.
"until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed."
Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work.
Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement.
Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors:
1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?)
2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials.
The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!")
TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it.
Very cool vision of the future. I'm trying to imagine more consequences of the price of human labor going negative.
After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services.
Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services.
We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion.
It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.
IPhones are affordable because of wealth inequality.
Oil is cheap because of wealth inequality.
Organic food is purchasable because of wealth inequality.
Hipster clothes can be owned because of wealth inequality.
And yet, none of these goods are targeted because those who use them are susceptible to pro-union shilling.
Stop the painfully forced guilt complex from this out-of-touch middle class white perspective. I wish I could have easily sold my spare time for more money when I first moved here with P2P labor systems like Uber... but I had to wait for a central bank's liquidity push to eventually intice small business hiring, some union to not bump a new guy for someone's seniority, or some corporation wonk to figure out a new growth market. Oh, yes, I just felt so equal in that system of waiting for people "smarter" than me to justify needing me.
People should have access to the means to sell their time and labor where ever and when ever they want. Period.
I don't know how you missed the recurring outrage about the wages and conditions of iPhone workers. And the article isn't against your last point. In fact the article isn't even blaming Uber for the problems. It's just pointing out that Uber (and other services like it) only work where inequality is pervasive.
Globalism works due to inequality. Nationalism works due to inequality. Tribalism works due to inequality. The dirty secret of civilization is that someone has to dig the graves. Why pretend it's an evil from your middle class morally righteous soap box instead of allowing people the means to participate as simply as possible?
So, I'm kind of ambivalent about this thread so far, but it sounds like you have thought about this a bit. What sort of moral framework do you find preferable over the 'out-of-touch white middle class' one?
Agreed. I don't see why that comment, in particular, got killed. I think some groupthink was at work, in that case. This is an unfortunate trend on HN.
Notice a pro-union/pro-mercantilist/pro-nationalist comment is at the top, while this comment was flagkilled. It is very possible some entity outside of the community hivemind is intentionally crafting a narrative... and this isn't the only thread they are targeting. Why? Because this post isn't even on the front page anymore.
In my experience (on HN and other places) economics orthodoxy is always unpopular. People like to believe "if only if weren't for X assholes, the world would be much better". Economics teaches that the assholes are us: the primary thing preventing the world from being much better is the political and economic barriers to redistributing wealth.
Redistributing wealth is hard. Much easier is to invent schemes like unions which enrich certain lower class people, while (silently) making other lower class people poorer.
As you point out, globalization and outsourcing has made Chinese and Indians much richer. But they are not very visible, so who cares about them? They should have waited their turn, and eventually Western unions would have granted them jobs with "fair" wages ;-)
I don't know why this keeps being brought up. Do China and India cheer when the economy picks up in the U.S., for reasons other than the increased demand they'll experience? Does GE include Microsoft's performance in its reports to shareholders?
I mean, fewer people starving is always awesome. But it is not the question being asked.
If JavaScript was so simple that we could force it into a singular model of ontology and be done with it once and for all, we would be so simple we could not.
Simply put, prototypical methodology reflects the mutability of reality. Object-oriented methodology reflects a visualization of reality.
