I mean, this is likely factually wrong even in a US context, because presumably the collective bargaining power of a union extends beyond salary to functioning as a buyers group things like health insurance, being loud enough to gain visibility, etc.
But it's a thought process that depends on the idea that you're always in control of staying on the better side of the average in whatever metric a company chooses to judge employees. Which is a bold position to stake out without the anti-discrimination and working time safety measures achieved by unions that are at obvious risk of falling away without them.
Many of the freedoms to individually negotiate with an employer about rights and payment are underwritten by safety nets that are negotiated by unions, and everyone thinks themselves better than average until they aren't.
I'm not sure how it can be "likely factually wrong" that you are better off without paying a third party who does very little for you as an individual who is above average in your field than you would be if you didn't have that money. Concessions in indirect benefits often come at the cost of higher wages and the portability of earnings, the latter being one of the major downsides for skilled professionals.
All above average employees I know don't need to worry about staying on the better of average for some arbitrary metric. If the company makes a mistake and fires them, they can quickly get a job elsewhere. It's the people who have no better alternative than their current job who need the protection provided by a union contract, and they have no better alternative because the company made a mistake in the other direction when agreeing to employ them, and the union's job is to bar the employer from correcting that mistake.
And yes, unions successfully fought for improved work conditions 100+ years ago. What have they done to earn their keep during the careers of anyone posting on this site? Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one? It's certainly not going to improve my total compensation, and the people who did the hard work you mentioned are long gone so it's no benefit to them for me to pay dues into an organization they were affiliated with at some point.
> I'm not sure how it can be "likely factually wrong" that you are better off without paying a third party who does very little for you as an individual who is above average in your field than you would be if you didn't have that money.
Do you not purchase insurance? Same principle. Collective bargaining and buying power unlocks things even you, a wealthy above average human, might wish to have affordable.
> Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one?
So they continue to exist and rules don't slide back further.
I mean if you are old and rich enough enough not to care about the next decade of working life then good for you, I guess. But society could very well be ripped apart by the very things that the tech industry is rolling out, and unions are one of the few things that stand in the way of absolutely massive regressions in the way humans who have the temerity to want to eat will have to tolerate being treated.
Personally I want to see them survive, and non-union workers joining them when they can is one of those ways that can happen.
(As an IT freelancer I cannot, meaningfully; I assure you that when my work pattern changes I will)
This comment is much more revealing about you than I think you realise, but it's good to know at least that there's no point in wasting time on arguing things on the merits.
> I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
Why is it that so many union supporters point to entities like SAG and professional athlete unions in the US when advocating for unions, when they are a massive exception to the norm?
I would join a union like SAG. I have zero interest in being forced to make contributions to a political organization who has a passing interest in my well-being at best and is structured to benefit below-average workers.
Have you filled out a federal income tax return in the US?
It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).
Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.
I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.
They can certainly enforce that you answer the survey. But it's very difficult to enforce a requirement that people answer questions accurately, particularly when they perceive that doing so will expose them to danger.
I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?
The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.
There's not many cases of enforcement. Non-response is taken about as seriously as the Robinson–Patman act. I think the Census Bureau is very reliant on people thinking there will be enforcement, however, which is why the materials they send all have a threatening aura. I don't know about the ACS, but for the decennial census I often felt like my job as an enumerator was just to bother people until they'd answer. The case would keep being recycled until we got at least (IIRC) a head count.
I'm just anticipating the next version of “Community-based EBITDA" that sama rolls out in the latest attempt to convince everyone that spending >$1 to earn $1 is a good idea.
It's far from a blindspot. People have been yelling about this from the rooftops for the last several years.
No one cares about security. People used to care for a fairly short period of time after something bad happened to them, but even that seems to have gone by the wayside as breaches, leaks, and use of exploited code has become normalized.
It's always been a discussion in packaging, around build/install/configure time, think like setup.py, Debian's postinst, etc.
The rise of editors that will own your system just by browsing to the wrong folder without opening or running anything is relatively speaking newer, but I think most people in HN audience should be able to intuit some of the risks, especially when untrusted PRs and semi-trusted LLM bots are in the mix with your "trusted" codebase.
>but I think most people in HN audience should be able to intuit some of the risks
Only a small subset of the worlds programmers are on HN, and one might assume they are more security aware then those that are not. Which means there's a shit load of people opening stuff they shouldn't be.
> The rise of editors that will own your system just by browsing to the wrong folder without opening or running anything is relatively speaking newer, but I think most people in HN audience should be able to intuit some of the risks, especially when untrusted PRs and semi-trusted LLM bots are in the mix with your "trusted" codebase.
This is kind of my point. People are doing things that are objectively stupid from a security perspective on a daily basis, and actively rejecting the idea of protecting themselves because they keep doing it after either identifying some risk themselves, being told about it directly, or being told about how others were negatively impacted by the same actions.
And in my opinion, the benefits they get from these changes to their dev environment are negligible, and that's not even getting into how every file is potentially executable code to an LLM.
What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
Use value and exchange value are highly correlated for basically all goods other than collectibles and luxury items, and even then their "use" often is providing an emotional boost to their owner.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
Demand for a magic box that solves your problems at a low cost will always remain extraordinarily high. Supply is the hard part, because it will never catch up.
Some people believed LLMs were that magic box for a time, and that time is coming to an end if the parent poster is correct.
Just had to deal with this with a company that had outsourced its support to "AI". Probably saved them a ton of money not having to employ those annoying humans. Problem is that for this particular company once you get to the point where you have to contact support you're almost certainly in a situation that no stochastic parrot has any hope of comprehending, let alone solving. I spend about an hour going round in circles with the parrot until I finally figured out what to tell it to get it to give up and connect me to a human, who fixed the problem in about five minutes.
The scary thing here is that I know how the parrots work, what they can't do, and how to get around them. The typical person calling will assume they've been helped by the parrot, which is just going through the motions without comprehending anything or fixing anything.
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