Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions. Why is that if you know? What's the alternative for a UPS worker to get fair pay and fair working conditions?
> Taking your word for it regarding HN not liking unions
Don't. HN is far from a monolith on this issue.
To the degree I've seen even a semblance of consensus, it's in animosity towards public-sector unions and gentle support for blue-collar private-sector unions. Where it turns to total anarchy is when we debate unionizing tech workers. (They tend to be fun reads.)
* In the US there's a narrative that unions add layers to bureaucracy to a process that should (from an IMO limited "pro free market" position) efficiently settle on an optimal solution all by itself. Many people just by default accept this argument, and to be entirely fair US unions definitely got complacent in the last few decades.
* Many HN commenters are affluent tech workers or entrepeneurs, and some are bosses or capital owners themselves. People in this first group kind of "won" the economy, and in the second group actively benefit from workers negotiating 1-on-1. Group (1) has a tendency to not relate well or understand the position of the typical union constituency, Group (2) has financial motivation to push back against it.
HN has a mix of opinions but there are a lot of "temporarily embarrassed ~~millionaire~~ billionaire" wannabe entrepreneurs. People that think of themselves as employers not employees, etc.
Maybe you should actually read and understand the anti-union comments on this site rather than using a memetic caricature from reddit or whatever. Of the anti-union comment I've seen, none were justified on the basis that the commenter was a '"temporarily embarrassed ~~millionaire~~ billionaire" wannabe entrepreneurs'. The closest I've seen are people who think they're above average performers, and think that contracts that typically result from union negotiated contracts (eg. seniority based or credential based) would negatively impact their compensation. Regardless of whether you think arguments like these hold any water, it's a massive disservice to portray them as them being anti-union because they "think of themselves as employers not employees".
That is indeed close: Why do we always hear from people who think they are well above average contributors, and not the ones that don't?
I've read the other comments too. The most interesting ones were the people who previously had "conventional, blue collar" union jobs and didn't like their union. There are certainly real problems, but thankfully there are a number of "reform caucuses" right now winning elections that can start to fix them.
I don't think that's it. It's just that some people see the world of business, particularly in the West, as the main mechanism for pay rises.
If there's a relatively open market, non-onerous regulation, and some money to be made, then businesses will spring up and the best engine of salary-raising, other employers, will work without intervention.
It's not a perfect solution, but it also requires paying close to zero taxes to work. Every regulation is more cost paid in tax by employers to central and regional government, and also within every business as they have to employ more people to ensure they stay compliant. This is all money that could go to salaries / lower prices / higher quality elsewhere / dividend payments. It's not free.
And so you don't need to be a Fountainhead-quoting 17 year old to question this stuff. It's a fundamental lever on how economies and productivity work.
I am not sure what you are arguing. What is the mechanism you are proposing?
It sounds like "overhead depresses wages", but outside of a few special cases like Academia, I don't really see much evidence of that. Until recently we had chronically loose labor markets. There is simply no reason to presume employers are handing out all they can in that case. And the ones that are and not paying above-market wages are, by definition, low-productivity businesses that do not deserve to exist.
That's the great thing about high employment: as the "floor" of acceptable comp/working conditions goes up, we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it. Those shitty businesses do fine in the Obama years when everyone is desperate for work, but they can't cut it now. They go under when they can't hire, and average productivity rises accordingly.
> There is simply no reason to presume employers are handing out all they can in that case
I didn't say that there was.
> That's the great thing about high employment
Not if it's coming from the public sector. Then it's government taking taxes from businesses and using it to pay people more than said business can. Saying that means the businesses shouldn't exist feels like a statement of faith.
> we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it
We also find good small businesses that can't, and bad public sector ones. We just call the public sector ones "underfunded" when that happens.
"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire" is one of the most ridiculous bits of motivated reasoning to ever come out of the left. There's little to no evidence for it but gives the one who states it the ability to hold anyone who disagrees with them both in contempt and inferiority at the same time. It is quite clever, if your goal is to protect many of the inherent contradictions on the neoliberal worldview but is terrible if your goal is to ever understand those who frustratingly refuse to hold views you paternally believe are what's best for them.
It's true it's not a monolith, but the loudest voices here have been against all union,s not just public sector ones. But do you hear that today? Silence. It's the sound of former well-paid engineers and other tech workers of the techbro-libertarian bent realizing that the worker rights they've spent years decrying actually matter. Could this be because they finally realize that despite their notion that they are in the ownership class with their options and investments, their jobs have more in common with a UPS driver than with management and the superrich who own the companies where they work?
What about this post makes such people identify more with UPS than they previously would? And what about this post makes them suddenly care about the workers rights that they previously didnt think mattered?
You can have both ways which I'm shocked isn't more common. Everyone in the same position gets paid the same, if anyone negotiates higher for themselves everyone gets a pay bump to match. Now you get paid max(individual rate, group rate).
Bad negotiator? Anxious? A woman? Congratulations! You're probably doing better than you could on your own.
Amazing negotiator? Could sell ACs in Alaska? Congratulations! You get all the fruits of your labor and your new coworkers immediately love you.
I think what messes people up isn't that they think their temporarily embarrassed millionaires, but that their temporarily undiscovered principal engineers who deserve more money for pulling the same cards as everyone else on the team.
> You can have both ways which I'm shocked isn't more common. Everyone in the same position gets paid the same, if anyone negotiates higher for themselves everyone gets a pay bump to match. Now you get paid max(individual rate, group rate).
Except this misses the fact that negotiating for your own pay raise is now suddenly harder. Suppose there's a company with 100 non-supervisory employees, each of which $200k worth of value for the company, gets paid $100k. Under a regime where everyone's pay is automatically bumped up to the highest rate, if you're trying to negotiate a $10k raise for yourself, you're actually negotiating for the company to part with $1M ($10k * 1000 employees). Without such a regime, a negotiated $10k raise for yourself only costs the company $10k. Obviously negotiating in the latter situation would be easier to pull off.
Of course, the real world is more complicated than this, because the union can hire trained negotiators or whatever, but your simplistic model of "max(individual rate, group rate) so everyone wins" makes no sense.
That can only be true if labor budgets are limitless.
Even a business like Apple has some number that is the most it can pay to all of its employees. And if there is a maximum, then that means it can be divided any number of ways.
I don't think Apple (or any company) are paying "the most it can pay to all of its employees". Labor is a market, and in a market, buyers don't pay any more than they can get away with. All companies are paying the least they can get away with while still retaining the people they want to retain.
There isn't some fixed bag of money $X that gets distributed to employees, where X is uninfluenced by the market. If the labor market happened to change such that X must be more, companies would have to pay X or do without some employees.
EDIT: I think we actually agree. Roundabout way of saying the same thing.
Yes but that gets factored into the hiring because this salary scheme is for retention. If someone negotiates a higher salary it's taken as the market price for the position increasing and the company not wanting to lose their employees who will eventually or immediately realize they could be making more somewhere else.
I do not understand what salary scheme for retention means. There exists $x to pay everyone in the company. You can start from dividing it equally amongst all employees. As you pay some employees more, you have to pay others less.
Keep going along this track and “max(individual rate, group rate)” will break down as you winnow down the definition of group.
If an object is callable you can use it in places that might conventionally expect functions. The utility of that is very situational, though. I've only used it a handful of times myself over the years I've known and used Python.
It may also give you a "clearer" (in quotes because subjective) presentation for something you're trying to do.
I see it a lot in HuggingFace, and use it myself for classes that are used like a function, especially when the obvious method name is the verb form of the class name
processor = SomeProcessor.load("path/to/config")
# with __call__
processed_inputs = processor(inputs)
# less awkward than
processes_inputs = processor.process(inputs)
The only benefit is to the human, same as @property or even @dataclass.
Thanks for writing that up! I disagree though, I prefer the processor.process for clarity, and for not adding another way of doing things that regular methods already do.
I feel like you're giving away your stance here with the "weird home lives" comment in relation to being openly gay. And I don't mean that I want even more personal stories to LinkedIn, but posting vacation pictures is hardly equatable with posting a hardship story about being gay in the workplace.
Being heterosexual is a privilege since it's the norm, so you don't have to worry about it. Being gay on the other hand can be dangerous, even life threatening depending on the country.
What? Weird home lives are LinkedinLunatics posting themselves working from pools and their backyard writing pseudo motivational blogspam. And countless other acts of WTF.
You specifically said this which I maybe latched on to a bit hard.
> The idea of me declaring my heterosexuality while postering my CV...
But based on your answer you are also making a delineation between "blogspam" and for example someone posting a story about discrimination for being gay (for example).
That also comes with a lot of downside though. Their overconfidence means that they wade in to topics they have no actual expertise on and force things that are unviable.
