The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”
If an “industry’s labour [is] supplied only by those inherently passionate about it” the post says it would “crush wages and working conditions”.
That runs completely counter to the basics of supply and demand in a perfect competition market. It would be market with far fewer (labor) suppliers, who could therefore command a higher wage, not lower.
You are only looking at supply. Neither supply nor demand by themselves adequately describe prices (even in supply-demand 101 theory; in practice of course it gets significantly more complicated than just supply and demand). There are fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely cheap and fields with few suppliers where supply is extremely expensive.
Is the number of suppliers low because demand is also low or is the number of suppliers low because demand is high but supply is constrained?
A field that previously had a supply of labor in it "for the money" who all leave is indicative of the former scenario not the latter.
That does not lead to higher wages. That leads to low wages.
(There are a variety of reasons why this story is too simple and why I remain uncertain about developer salaries in the short term)
There is a broader question of whether having people who are in it for the money leave independently "causes" wages to go down (e.g. if you were to replace all such people with people "purely in it for the passion"). My suspicion is yes. Mainly because wage markets are somewhat inefficient, there are always mild cartel-like/cooperative effects in any market, people in it for passion tend to undersell labor and the people in it for the money are much less likely to undersell their labor and this spills over beneficially to the former.
Note that this broader question is simply unanswerable assuming perfect competition, i.e. a supply-demand 101 perspective (which is why it doesn't make sense to posit "perfect competition" for this question).
It posits durable behavioral differences among suppliers that are not determined purely by supply and demand which do not update reliably in the face of pricing. This is equivalent to market friction and hence fundamentally contradicts an assumption of perfect competition.
The only way the people who are only in it for the money leave the industry is if the money gets worse. If the money stays the same why would they leave
To use your example of someone working on the plumbing of an accounts payable system, who is passionate about that? The supply is near zero. That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Your example runs counter to the laws of supply and demand too. You understand that wages will rise when supply is restricted, but you don't want to accept that supply will respond to the price signal in the form of more people entering that job market.
> That, like most jobs, is going to need to be done entirely by people who are just doing it for the money
why then do they all have those interview rounds where you have to talk about what really attracted you to work at this boring company and how you would love to do that kind of work? They evidently haven't gotten the memo.
I have never once pretended to be “passionate” about working. Never wrote a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since I graduated from college 30 years ago. I was a hobbyist before college for 6 years.
I’ve gone through the BigTech guantlet successfully. Even then I showed I cared about doing my job well and competently.
I have purposefully thrown nuggets out during interviews letting companies know that I had a life outside of work, I’m not going to work crazy hours and in the latter half of my career, I don’t do on call.
We've banned this account. We can't have vile comments like some of the ones your account has posted in recent days, without taking any action, if we're to have any standards at all here.
> by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict — in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society."
> "history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion."
The propaganda in the New York times is especially precious because of how highly respected it is, there never was a war or other elite interest they didn't push along.
They have a very long track record of pretending to be independent but actually toeing the government's line at key pivotal moments in history when an independent newspaper is needed the most. Everybody here knows how they helped start the second Iraq war I hope, but that wasn't a one-off fluke. Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these. World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin. WWI, frequent editorializing of Germans being wild Asiatic savages while the Anglos were good and noble people that Americans owed something to for some reason nobody could explain. Vietnam, they uncritically accepted government reports on the second Gulf of Tonkin incident which never happened and broadly accepted the governments own reports about how the war was going, at least in the early years when it still might have been possible to avoid further engagement. Korean war, they supported the government narrative of communist containment. First Iraq War, they uncritically reported very dubious atrocity propaganda, like the fraudulent "Nayirah testimony" given by the teenage daughter of a diplomat pretending to be a politically uninvolved hospital worker.
The pattern here is deference to official narratives at precisely the times when criticism is needed the most.
> World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin.
Duranty's New York Times articles were written in 1931, a decade before America entered World War II. They not only predate an American alliance with the Soviet Union, but they also predate the United States having any diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union whatsoever.
> Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these.
Are there other major American newspapers who have a history of dissenting against war? Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
> Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
Dear god, what? I love the unintentional satire its so funny. "Its fine if the media lies to the people if the people believe the lies." That's low even for this stemlord dumpsterfire of a platform
> "Its fine if the media lies to the people if the people believe the lies."
That is low, but that's neither a direct quote or not an accurate paraphrase of my comment. While I realize that the comment I replied was edited after my response to talk about lying in more recent conflicts (which might be causing your confusion), I don't think you (like OP) are trying to make the argument that the New York Times is bad because of their reporting in the 1930s.
The American political apparatus was already normalizing relations with the Soviet Union due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931, which is when WW2 truly started), due to the great depression in America making alliance with the Soviets look economically advantageous for America, and due to political instability in Germany and Italy. There was a strong sense of shit hitting the fan soon and that America would be with the Soviet Union through it. FDR officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, during the peak of Stalin's famine in Ukraine, which the New York Times was actively denying.
As for other newspapers, the Times isn't worse but bears the brunt of the criticism because they are after all America's foremost, most influential newspaper.
Your comment is full of historical revisionism. The Second World War has little or nothing to do with the Holodomor. The Times' lack of reporting on it has nothing to do with American foreign policy (both Duranty and Gareth Jones were British) and everything to do with credulous reporters. The idea that America and the Soviet Union would be natural allies was not the majority viewpoint in the 1930s (outside of American communist propaganda) and is clearly disproved by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
They have done more targeted layoffs as well like the FAIR layoffs in 2025 and the RL layoffs in January 2026, as well as the 5% performance cut in February 2025.
It's around the same time they announced their Applied AI org under Boz, which is responsible for data for Avocado/Mango/Watermelon training now. The timing certainly doesn't help.
With declining birth rates in the west, wouldn't it also make sense that Big Diaper is increasing prices and expanding into luxury products while unit sales go down? Expanding into products for the elderly, like incontinence, would also make sense, or perhaps expanding products into more countries (I don't know the global reach of say Pampers).
I know it's not the same thing as enshitification, and I don't know if the diaper industry is even vulnerable to enshitification, but it would be such a nice play on words if the diaper industry had enshitification.
People do this to meet minimum requirements for mileage tiers, e.g. I know someone who was close to Diamond status on Delta and went to Miami and back without leaving the airport area just for the miles.
Palantir is a glorified data aggregation/data visualization platform. Hooking up Claude to different data systems, with safeguards turned on in Claude Gov, is different than what the government is asking from them now. Similar to if the government had Claude hooked up to Tableau/some salesforce derivative and then asked it to be autonomous in the kill loop/spy on US citizens.
"Glorified" is underselling it. Thier ability to microtarget anyone based on any trait is basically the death of democratic discourse. Now, if you're saying the data is just there for anyone to do this, you're correct, and society needs to understand that and what it means.
That is not how Gotham works. The data you're talking about is most definitely not "just there" for anyone to have. The data is provided by the military and IC, Gotham is the data viz layer to make sense of it all. It does nothing on its own.
There's also the option of choosing to not commit to either action. One stays in the status quo without choosing it, but since agency is negatively correlated with regret and no agency was used, the 'choosing not to do something' option probably has a higher chance of being regretted.
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