The Epstein thing is the true bait, which I feel Americans are swallowing hook line and sinker.
The real meat of the issue is nationalization of companies, militarization and trying to take over the Federal Reserve.
Honestly, every president of the US has semi-directly killed thousands of people. I feel that whatever exposure he had to Epstein's island pales in comparison to, you know, operating the military industrial complex.
Many people are also surprised that politicians lie and that the ultra rich do abhorrent stuff above the law. Seems like a new trend /s
It's like picking a bestest friend :) maybe he figuratively has many "best friends"? Saying this as a moderate conservative before I get called a liberal
> Yet we never 'see' this in the article. It just restates it a few times without providing any proof.
I'm honestly shocked by the number of upvotes this article has on Hacker News. It's extremely low quality. It's obviously written with ChatGPT. The tells are:
(1) Incorrect technology "hype cycle". It shows "Trigger, Disillusionment, Englightnment Productivity". It's missing the very important "Inflated Expectations".
(2) Too many pauses that disrupt the flow of ideas:
- Lots of em-dashes. ChatGPT loves to break up sentences with em-dashes.
- Lots of short sentences to sound pithy and profound. Example: "The executives get excited. The consultants circle like sharks. PowerPoint decks multiply. Budgets shift."
(3) "It isn't just X, it's X+1", where X is a normal descriptor, where X+1 is a more emphatic rephrasing of X. ChatGPT uses this construct a lot. Here are some from the article:
SCOTUS ruled in Mathews v. United States (1998) and in Jacobson v. United States (1992) that the government cannot induce a person to commit a crime, then arrest that individual for that crime.
Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
The FBI has been doing a lot of prodding people to say they hate the country, and then telling them to do a bombing, and then providing them with a (fake) bomb, and then telling the public "We caught another terrorist!":
https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human...
I like to call this the “dissident loophole”. What they really want to do is round up dissidents to protect the status quo, but punishing thought crime directly is just the right combination of unconstitutional and a bad look (though McCarthyism showed us we’re not always above that). So instead they will use social engineering to drag people over the line into minor acts of terrorism so they can be arrested, thus snuffing out future seeds of dissent.
You see this a lot in policing as well. Where people that seem “demographically criminal” to law enforcement are funneled into drug violations as an excuse to round up people they want to round up anyway.
>Well, that or the feds got them on something else and promised leniency if they become an "informant" and goading you into some bigger bust is part of the deal
Fixed to reflect typical federal government procedure.
I have to say that if someone is far enough gone that they can trivially be convinced to bomb innocent people then I'm fine with this type of entrapment. Great work, go ahead and lock them up for life.
The civil right not to be led by the nose by a government agent to commit a crime. They are relying on people doing exactly what you're doing here - convincing themselves that if it was possible to lead them into it then they deserved it so the ends justify the means.
Yeah I get your point, and I generally agree for minor offenses like buying drugs or prostitution or whatever. But if someone can trivially be convinced to murder a bunch of people then the world is better off with them locked away.
I do see what you're saying. However this debate isn't unique to this specific scenario. The exact same reasoning can be applied to other violations of due process. Historically that was viewed as a particularly dangerous slippery slope and thus we have the concept of fruit of the poisonous tree, despite that this can easily result in (for example) a mob boss walking free. Perhaps caution is warranted when considering abandoning well established principles?
Yes, this is why I get frustrated when people eyeroll about the severity of norm violations in our authority figures. Much of the law-in-practice is not the ink on the page, but the cultural norms around enforcement. By the time you get your vindication in court (assuming the court is acting in good faith), your life has already been turned upside down. The corrupt enforcer gets a slap on the wrist, and goes on to continue violating the law as written, knowing full well that they can basically just practice the law that exists in their head and let the court sort out anyone with the resources to fight for their rights.
It does, as much as always. A different thing is that elected politicians think that does not matter and stop enforcing the law.
But it will have consequences. Because just laws that apply to everybody create a very different society with very different capabilities than one that is just a feudal system.
The middle ages were not shitty because we forgot how to innovate but they were bad because feudal system kill innovation and creativity at the same time that increase suffering.
The U.S. is currently disappearing people to foreign prisons, openly and in flagrant defiance of the courts. Trump has signalled he intends to expand this practice to include U.S. citizens (Just the worst convicted criminals currently in prison, of course.). If this administration can get away with all that, disappearing students who were entrapped by police will probably follow. Foreign students first, then Americans.
The lack of due process is a big problem, but what if the court in question issues an order that is impossible to legally comply with?
The United States has no jurisdiction over citizens of El Salvador in El Salvador. What is Trump supposed to do in this case, call up Pete Hegseth and order a commando style raid on the prison he’s being held in?
If it's impossible to legally comply with orders to bring US residents back from El Salvadoran prisons (which I'm skeptical of, but let's grant that it is truly impossible), then that's probably a sign we should stop sending people there, since it'd be impossible to comply with future orders as well.
He wasn't a citizen, he was granted a work permit and it was directed that he should not be deported to El Salvador back in 2019. That arguably makes him a US resident, legally able to reside and work here.
Also I originally said "resident" and not "legal resident" because I think it's blatantly insane that anyone in the US, with legal recourse to be here or otherwise, is being captured and sent to a prison in a country they may or may not have ever been to, and in a country over which the US claims to have no authority to bring them back when ordered to do so. Kicking someone out of the US is one thing, but sending them to a shitbox supermax prison abroad is another entirely.
That said, it's also true that many of these people are LEGAL residents, which makes matters that much worse.
Absolutely, I was agreeing with you even though my wording was a bit strange.I wanted to try and engage in good faith forum responding to the other commenter but see that might not be productive. There are so many issues with this case and the many others that are popping up and I don't imagine they are going to get better.
Oh yeah, I figured you and I were in agreement! I meant that as an addition aimed at anyone reading this thread, not in a combative shot at you, so apologies if it came off as such :P
What is needed is an expedited means of both providing due process and efficient deportation of gang members and other violent criminals that are in this country illegally.
That’s the best way to honor the senseless tragedies of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and several others, and to prevent them from happening in the future.
The US has been kidnapping and putting people in torture centres willy-nilly for decades. That this would somehow get better under an openly fascist or fascism-adjacent regime is not a sound expectation.
One might suspect that a reason for the acceptance of takfiri thugs coming to power in Syria has to do with their disinterest in the rule of law and the low likelihood that they will do robust investigations of Sednaya and other prisons.
Where I get a bit confused is the part where the US supposedly has no ability to retrieve him yet he's also supposedly being held on our behalf. If it isn't on our behalf then why are they keeping him there? Did he commit a crime according to them?
You are ignoring the part where we are paying el Salvador to keep them there. If it's a contract we enacted and pet for then yes we have leverage unlike what the government suggests
You’re ignoring the part where he’s not actually a “Maryland man” but instead a citizen of El Salvador that was in this country illegally. Now that he’s back in El Salvador the United States government has no jurisdiction over him. It’s entirely up to El Salvador. Just because a judge issued this order doesn’t make it a lawful order.
That’s like saying it’s entirely up to the restaurant to give you your food, so you have no control over what the kitchen does. The United States is paying them money for a service and has many other levers of considerable power, so it would be easy for an administration acting in good-faith to show that they made a request at a certain time and will cancel payment or escalate if it’s not honored.
I’m sorry but you can’t convince me that people in this country illegally shouldn’t be deported back to their country of origin. Particularly when they are affiliated with violent gangs like MS-13 and commit acts of domestic violence that cause their wife to get a restraining order against them.
I can empathize with why people would want to immigrate to this country, but they need to do so legally.
I'm not trying to convince you that illegal immigrants shouldn't be deported. What I would like to convince you is that any time the government takes action against a person, the government should have to prove their case in open court, and the person should have a fair chance to defend themselves.
Is this particular person MS-13? Did he have a legal right to be here? You don't know. None of us do, not for sure.
10 years ago, the idea that the government could sweep people off the streets and deliver them to a foreign prison with no trial or recourse would have been seen as absurd by every part of the political spectrum.
I think it's also absurd that the media is painting this guy as some innocent victim. He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking. Citizens have rights to trial. Those who have entered the country illegally do not have the same legal rights that citizens do.
That's a terrible idea. Everyone needs trials or the government can make up a quick lie about anyone (or make a mistake about anyone) and then their rights disappear.
And in general, bad people still deserve trials. There is no crime you can point to someone doing that changes that.
I'm not saying they don't deserve some form of due process, but they are not entitled to full on trials that citizens get.
Due process could be as simple as can you prove that you have a legal right to be in this country? If yes, you can stay, if no, then you get deported. He absolutely should have had due process prior to being deported. I am not arguing against that.
From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If the accusation is as simple as "you don't have a right to be in the country" what makes proving it different from a real trial?
> From everything I've been able to gather on this story, the issue isn't really whether he should have been deported, it's that there was a legal order preventing him from being deported to the country of El Salvador specifically because a rival gang in the country would kill him for being a member of MS-13.
If there's only one place you could reasonably be deported to, and there's an order saying you can't be deported there, then you can't be deported and you effectively have legal residency.
>He is an MS-13 gang member. He beat his wife, to the point that she filed a restraining order against him. There is evidence that he was engaging in human trafficking.
Again, these are EXACTLY the sorts of allegations that should be adjudicated in court. Citizens and non-citizens all have the right to a fair trial before imprisonment.
If all this is true, why couldn't the government try and convict him of a crime?
Because they couldn't, of course. The evidence is made up and parroted by useful idiots to justify the end of the rule of law.
I’m not trying to convince you that they shouldn’t deport anyone. I’m saying that the government should always follow the law when doing so. For example, if we’re being told that someone is a violent terrorist they should easily be able to prove that in court.
I imagine asking would likely do the trick. As an escalation, considering we're paying them to hold these people, we could threaten to stop paying them. They're not locking up our detainees out of the goodness of their heart.
None of the things you are talking so confidently about are factual. A police officer filled out a form saying he believed he was in a gang but that was never tested in court and there’s a long history of that sort of assertion turning out not to be true, which seems plausible in this case because the officer was suspended for professional misconduct on a different case a few months later.
Similarly, you’re claiming that he’s a wife beater but she’s advocating for his return:
> “After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.
> “No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added.
Again, nobody is saying he can’t ever be deported. All we’re saying is that he deserves the due process of law the constitution guarantees for everyone - not just citizens - and humane treatment, as the heavily Republican Supreme Court just affirmed is a legal requirement. If he is as bad as you claim, that can be established in court just as we’ve done for millions of criminals over hundreds of years.
For El Salvadorian citizens I think you make a good point. But for non-citizens (e.g. Venezuelans)that the US has sent to El Salvadoranean prisons presumably via diplomatic means, it seems reasonable that they could be returned via diplomatic means. [edit] Courts should be able to order a good faith effort to implement those means, but they certainly don’t have any way to guarantee a result.
This is the most ridiculous argument. Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. He wants to take Greenland by force if necessary. He's going to start trade wars until foreign leaders come and beg him for relief.
BUT he's going to cower before the sovereign might of El Salvador.
>Now the government is rolling out fully-automated entrapment bots.
Are we reading the same article? Hand wringing about slippery slopes aside, I skimmed the article and the actual messages that the AI sent are pretty benign. For instance, the "jason" persona seems to be only asking/answering biographical questions. The messages sent by the pimp persona encourages the sex worker to collect what her clients owe her. None of the messages show the AI radicalizing a college student activist into burning down a storefront or whatever.
I don't disagree with the claim that brainrot literally rots brains. But, I strongly oppose laws that ban social media on the grounds of "protecting children."
Parents are fully capable of monitoring and regulating their children's internet usage without Daddy Government getting involved.
this is a bad argument in the abstract. "drivers are fully capable of navigating intersections without Daddy Goverment getting involved" so we shouldn't have traffic laws and stop lights
the evidence says otherwise. I agree an outright ban probably isn't the best solution
I would argue that traffic laws and signage is more about efficiency than capability. Not every country has a culture of following traffic laws and people still manage to navigate motor vehicles around somehow.
My personal experience with this is from Mexico where, in heavy traffic, lanes are not really a "thing" and people will pack their vehicles in wherever possible. This leads to much more chaotic traffic flow and more unexpected stops though.
Except parents can't control what their children's peer's internet usage is. A common argument to let kids use social media is that their friends use it and they would be left out. This problem can't be solved by individuals, it needs collective action.
And some kids feel left out because their parents won't buy them a Stanley water bottle that their peers have. Guess we need to ban Stanely water bottles so those kids don't feel left out. Won't someone think of the children?!
I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks).
I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year.
We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor.
I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
I'm sure many of us have figured this out, it's just that there's no alternative for most.
I live in Europe and we are all unionized and I hate to break it to you but we're still creating much more value than we earn for someone else. Our work conditions may be significantly better - I work 40h/week with unlimited vacation (within reason ofc) and sick days - yet still burnout happens frequently and necessitates costly rehabilitation trajectories.
We deal with the consequences better, and I'm grateful for the conditions here, they may well be much worse elsewhere, but the core issues remain. Humans aren't built to work mentally straining jobs for 8 or more hours per day, and the fruit baskets and vacations only do so much. I believe a four day work week would help some of it.
Burnout is caused by your body running on adrenaline and cortisol for too long as you’re pushing past what is sustainable. Eventually your body says - enough! And it forces you to stop.
The _symptom_ of burnout are as you describe: essentially you no long see the point of what you’re doing.
Speculatively, I believe the drop in motivation is your body’s way of stopping you pushing it any further. It’s a defence mechanism.
Hm I see. You have a point that the causality is not necessarily how I described. But I am not convinced it is the opposite.
What causes the workplace to make you have high adrenaline and cortisol for too long? Stress is perceived by the body as a threat and it subsidizes when the body perceives that the threat is overcome. If we exert ourselves for a while but then we have a good outcome and we celebrate with our colleagues, we will have dopamine and oxytocin levels rise and adrenaline and cortisol subsidize. Something one might say makes the exertion meaningful.
So I hear what you're saying but I think we're both describing the same thing from two perspectives and not actually different causality directions. I described the subjective interpretation and you described the biochemical process underlying it.
There's no need to be snarky. The values of things can most definitely be objectively measured, otherwise there would be no transactions. Objective is not absolute, the objective evaluation might change when the agents involved have new information.
I also don't thing it contentious that the stockholders pocket some of the results of the workers labor. That is the whole point of employing people isn't it?
Though you'll need to deduct a lot of SG&A, etc. overheads from that as well, and it often looks far worse.
Big Tech companies (ie ones close to monopolies) still extract a ton of net cash flow that ends up going to investors and top management, though you could then ask why those monopolies extract cash from their customers as well, etc.
My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. I get why bus drivers, etc. in stable systems should organize and could do so without adversely affecting system performance, but in tech/startups, I don't think those companies would exist in unionized form for very long before being put out of business.
Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
> My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change.
Do you have examples?
> Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
Yea, it's more complicated than that, but in the US context unionization (like in the automotive and steel industries) was shown to slow innovation. [1]
The counter to this is that Europe actually has better outcomes because it takes a more collaborative approach vs. the adversarial approach in the US, and this better approach has shown to improve some outcomes.
The linked paper is strongly biased towards the ownership class--and the think tank is labeled "libertarian-conservative" on wikipedia, so I'm skeptical of the conclusions.
Yea, almost anyone in the US asking about the productivity implications of unionization will be coming from the ownership class, as US unions don't see that as their problem vs. building worker power.
I couldn't find a paper about US unions increasing productivity. Can you?
Fair. And I didn't look for other papers. If the discussion is simply "unions decrease productivity" however that's defined, that may be true. But by how much? Is that a problem? To whom?
I suspect unionization is better for more people overall.
Interesting approach. Did you ever try to include other factors into the model ? Such as :
* cost of sales (and crm, and billing)
* cost of infra
* taxes (on income and profits)
* taxes (on salary)
* cost per employee (office, PC, software licenses)
* cost of loans needed for the investment
Would be curious to see how big the ratio remains.
The alternative is to start your own company or start consulting. I've been doing this for over a decade and make great money compared to a salaried employee.
Doing this has also made me realize that development is only a small part of the overall process.
This is overly simplistic. I don’t fault you for it, but it shows a lack of understanding how a business functions.
There is a lot of overhead that goes into running a business, as others have mentioned. Taxes. Rent. Utilities. Licenses. Certifications. HR, testers, project managers, product managers, people managers, directors, marketing, customer service, sales, C suite, and on and on.
I know right now you might be saying “those people don’t even do anything! Developers are the only people making the damn product!”. Again, a business is kind of like a product of its own. It takes many moving parts to take a usable product and get it to market, fight off competition, work with government for regulations (or keep from getting regulated), find and get customers, etc.
Once you try and “go it alone” you will realize that creating the product is only one small part of making a functional and profitable business.
I run a small business. I don’t use half of those roles I mentioned and there is still a lot of overhead. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of extra work involved.
And yet you still turn a profit at the end of the day, i.e., money that's not going to 'overhead'. Let's not kid ourselves. Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Business owners are also responsible for ensuring their employees (and payroll taxes) are paid whenever revenue dips into the "L" part of "P&L".
Wise owners ensure some portion of profit is retained such that temporary market adversity does not immediately result in terminating their employees.
People who have never had these concerns make sweeping statements such as the one quoted.
As it should be. I am not begrudging anyone of that. As a matter of fact, I often mentor employees on treating their career as a business, and build it accordingly. Just like a strong business, you should be selling your services for as much as reasonable, and if your employer is not paying the appropriate price then find another “buyer”.
To maximize the price you can sell your ‘product’ (you), you should be making career decisions that strengthen your offering. This can be taken too far (those that only look for promotions at the expense of real work), but it can be done ethically very easily.
No, this is just the (insane) status quo. Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money). Part of this mission is supporting the livelihoods of employees; part of it is giving a return to investors; part of should be some social net good (maybe within a larger societal context, if not unilaterally). Much as "maximizing" the price at which you sell yourself (ick) often ends in workaholism, broken personal relationships, unhealthy relationships to material goods, and a generally deleterious existence as the opposite of a happy, upstanding, and well-loved member of society, "maximizing shareholder value" usually ends in a business that is either a hated monopoly or a bankrupt shell (often both, in that order). In both cases, hyperfocus has lead to the loss of the entire reason for pursuing the venture in the first place.
Profit is just a KPI for something else that you're supposed to be doing (and often a bad one, depending on what that something else is).
> Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money).
I mean, sure, but the defining difference between a business and a nonprofit is making money.
It's important for companies to provide value to society but the way we measure that is by how much they earn. Despite several hundred years of people trying to come up with better ways to do this, this is the only one that seems to work.
Non-profit organizations are often colloquially called "non-profit businesses" in recognition of the fact that they are organized and operate as any other business would - in developing business plans, filing with the IRS, hiring employees, minding balance sheets, etc - except in ways related to their purposely not seeking a profit (though revenue is another matter).
>but the way we measure that is by how much they earn
Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
>this is the only one that seems to work.
Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
> Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
It's not questionable at all but if you don't already see that I'm not interested in arguing it with you.
> Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community. The Nordic countries all have very high per-capita GDP.
If you wanna call my claim a myth, citing a few metrics which correlate really well with GDP is not very convincing.
Militaries exist expressly to destroy (enemy) societies. Even if you agree with the reason for a war, that fact doesn't change. So "preservation" of one society (if becoming beholden to a MIC doesn't change that society) versus the destruction of another. Questionable value.
>GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community.
The commencement of measuring GNH coincided with marked increases in Bhutanese living standards by traditional measures. Nordic countries have roughly the same GDP per capita as the US. Countries like Japan and France feature lower GDP per capita and, while not traditionally considered social democracies, feature comparable approaches to social welfare, income equality, etc.
Free-Market Capitalism as the only way, or even best way, to prosperity is indeed a myth. Even at its best or most successful, it has to be tempered with robust social policy and economic controls, lest people fall to excess and the economy itself burn out. That's called, "Late-Stage Capitalism", and you'd best start believing, because we're in it.
That's the standard conversation line that sounds oh-so optimistic but it's not actually true, is it?
As soon as you need to raise money, or as soon as you need to compete, the system will either beat you into submission or you'll get out-competed by companies that don't concern themselves with any missions other than making the maximum amount of money possible.
The most ruthless, dirtiest, immoral players can cut the most corners, grease the most political wheels and offer products and services at the lowest prices.
This is true, and what Machiavelli was talking about in his book The Prince. He is not talking about HOW to be an asshole ruler, he was talking about what other asshole rulers WILL DO, and how you will need to deal with that (as a ruler that does not wish to be a tyrant).
While it certainly reads satirical, in the sense that someone writing a book like this now would come off comically evil, there is nothing to suggest it was a satire. That's just a reddit thing that's been trending, and largely put forward by one historian a long time ago.
There's plenty of reason to think he wrote this book earnestly to boost his own political standing with the Medici family. It was not written for the common man, it was written as a resumé for political leaders to peruse. However, he distanced himself from the book in his later work.
I appreciate your frankness, and I am not an idealist who is proposing that the market 'should' be this way or that way for purely moral reasons. But the topic at hand is unionization. An aspect you neglect in this post is that another way to raise wages (or 'total compensation') is via collective bargaining. If tech workers really do care, and have a collective interest, and are able to overcome countervailing forces, this is an inevitability. No longer will the ball be purely in your court as an employer to solely determine the value of labor.
I don't agree that the worker's interest is or should be in minimizing company profit - this is a very zero sum approach that doesn't really cover companies that aren't stagnant or dying.
I agree with your general point that a business CAN increase profit by reducing costs, including by reducing employee compensation (and there are lots of shortsighted, greedy people out there) but increasing revenue instead is often much more significant and, in theory, can increase both employee take home and company profit.
A business is a mechanism to turn labor and other resources into revenue and often aligns with paying for more expensive talent in order to provide more valuable revenue. Businesses that are failing or stagnant can't grow revenue anymore and have to cut costs instead.
I don't think the imbalance between workers and companies is in a zero sum, adversarial relationship. I think the imbalance is in who gets to decide what to grow and what to cut (which is one place where collective bargaining helps a great deal).
The aim of the worker is not usually to kill the firm, I assumed that went without saying, as that would ultimately 'minimize' their wages. But the reason to work in a society where one needs money is to receive a wage, as maximal as possible. These incentives will always contradict whatever real but necessary need there is for 'genuine interest' or 'social tendencies'. Constantly businesses attempt to harness this value, (which is the source of revolutions in productivity beyond the daily rote labor) through trying to present the relationship as anything but transactional. But as their interest in this value is ultimately a monetary interest, what the worker returns to them will be done on a transactional basis. An inhuman force rules over all.
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Is it? I know a handful of small business owners, and generally their interest is running their business well and keeping their customers happy. Sure, they want to be profitable, but profit isn't their primary motivator.
They may have a moral sentiment and so too do employees - but the market is the ultimate condition for any moral sentiment to survive. You have no company, you no longer 'satisfy' customers. I am not referring to a moral idea, but a cold reality of business.
Before maximizing wages and minimizing profit, your interest as workers is to assure that the owner is provided with enough financial motivation to both stay in business and not find substitute employees or solutions for the work that you do.
It varies greatly per company and industry. You are talking about Net Margin and it can vary a lot.
A company like google has a 28% net margin. That means that after paying all expenses for employees and rent and everything, they have 28% left over from revenue as profit. This is very good.
Amazon (being a hybrid retailer/tech company) has 9.29% net margin.
Target has a net margin of 3.84%.
Believe it or not, many public companies have a negative net margin, meaning they spend more than they bring in. Lyft had a negative net margin until just this year. A few years ago, they had a negative net margin of -70%! That means if someone didn’t keep putting money into the company they would have “ceased as a going concern”, as they say. Their most recent year they had a 0.39% net margin. Go Lyft!
Okay, that seems easy enough and affordable with most tech salaries.
> hire the developers for $200,000
And you've just applied an unspoken filter. What founder can afford paying someone $200k a year, let alone multiple people? So that means you need to either be filthy rich already or to get investors - who will likely have very strong opinions about whether you should be paying devs double their market rate even if you still make a profit.
Not to mention that this assumes "your own company" can earn $1,000,000 for every developer it employs. Because "your own company" likely has a completely different value proposition, different customers and different tech.
The profit (read: surplus value not paid out to employees) of a company doesn't directly translate to market success or competiveness, but it can affect factors that do (e.g. availability of investments, bank loans, etc). It's not necessary to exploit your workers to operate a sustainable business, it's just very difficult to compete with companies that do because they can tap into those profits to cut you off (e.g. by cutting prices below cost) or leapfrog you (e.g. by acquisitions or hiring more people).
The existence of a company willing to pay its employees 2x the market rate doesn't impact the ability of other companies to hire enough sufficiently talented people at or below market rate to squash that company if it is small enough. "We live in a society" - or in a market in this case. The market wasn't created yesterday so if you join it today, you're starting at a disadvantage, not an equal level playing field.
It is funny when middle class salaried employees notice the same thing that every minimum wage worker knows intuitively, but that’s part of how this system remains stable is a lack of awareness.
This is how the monetary system works. While your math is inaccurate in terms of the spirit of what it is attempting to show, correcting for that, its still the way of the world until money is no longer a thing.
No. Respectfully, you don't understand how money works and the proposal of vaguely applied ten cent terms can't make up for that. Ironically, this means that you also don't understand socialism.
Capitalism is simply the innate nature and structure of the monetary system. The maintenance of the properties of money require capitalism. Otherwise, you will begin to not have money. No matter what word that you use for it. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. It's just a concrete thing.
The more socialism that you apply, especially in terms of shelf goods, the less actual money that you have. Due to how prices will react, what you begin to have is something akin to allotted credits or even just de facto allotted goods. The former which necessarily implies price controls. The only question then is how much food each person will be allotted.
Tell me which companies, ahem, I mean "socialist countries" aim to maximize free GDP allotment (in this case for food) to each individual citizen instead of minimize it to the lowest possible level? Consider a hypothetical wherein this socialist country has 300 million people.
The negatives of capitalism are not because of capitalism. They are because of the structural nature of money, which only maintains value roughly relative to the degree to which a large amount of people don't have it.
Smart countries attempt to maximize socialist benefits without affecting their currency value, in order to control and promote social stability to the best of their ability. But this generally excludes socialism for common goods, or else the characteristics of money begin to change.
If every single person paid to work on AWS leaves the company overnight, what happens to the value of AWS? Sure, Amazon could eventually hire enough people to replace those who left and maybe even keep AWS running and develop new features but it would be a catrastrophic loss of value and take a long time (and a huge investment) to recover.
You don't create value by having capital either. Labor converts capital into value. Labor can also transform capital (e.g. produce code which can then be used to provide a service for money). Plenty of people have "ideas" but ideas are worthless in a vacuum. If you pay someone to turn your ideas into capital you can use to generate value with cheap labor, your idea didn't become valuable by itself, you literally paid for labor to refine your capital to become better at generating value - you may legally own that refined capital the same way you owned the initial capital but the transformation had nothing to do with you other than your means to pay someone to perform it for you. Your money didn't create value, it merely facilitated the transformation of your capital and the creation of value. Your individual ownership of that capital is entirely unnecessary in this.
The tech, knowledge, software, etc of a company is a multiplier for the value labor can produce. It still requires labor to produce that value. It also requires labor to maintain that multiplier, much like literal machines require maintenance. The industrial era analogy still holds true (and arguably even more so given how specialized individual jobs can become).
The total cost of employment is generally not an order of magnitude more than salaries. Wages are the biggest cost factor in most companies, especially in companies built on knowledge work (e.g. software). The biggest employee expenses (though usually defined in terms of easily obtainable bonuses and often with severance packages other employees don't have access to) are CEO and other CxO-level positions. This isn't because of a natural value of these positions to the company, this is almost entirely the result of years of advocacy to investors and boards promoting the idea that these positions should be paid several orders of magnitude more than everyone else with very little factual evidence to support that idea - it's pure ideology and it's fairly recent.
The overheads are irrelevant for the general point, too. Corporations need to make a profit to function. Corporations don't need to siphon that profit almost exclusively into CxO-level benefits and shareholder dividends. You're right to argue that if a company makes $1,000,000 per $100,000 employee, that doesn't mean it makes $900,000 in profit per employee. But even if the operating costs are so high it only makes $100,000 profit per employee - that's still money left on the table (which the individual employee has no leverage to demand a fair share of).
Well if it's that simple go ahead and start a company, generate $1M per employee and pay everybody their fair share.
If you're right you'll get the top 0.1% talent in that market, no question.
There's a collective action problem here, though. Some parents are willing to do the hard thing and tell their kid no over and over and over. Most aren't. The result is that kids don't hang out in person any more and so the only social outlet left is digital, which makes the decision to ban it at the family level even harder because you may actually do more harm than good by forcing your child to not participate with his friends.
If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?
Kids will quickly learn that if their parents say "yes", they can get on social media, and so parents will still have to say "no" over and over again. The only difference is now we need to make sure our government papers are in order before we participate in the most important communication forum of our time.
We can apply this to everything. No one is trying to raise the age of candy and soda purchase to 16. Although we know that having access to these things drastically impacts children's health. Fast food too.
Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.
Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.
You don't have to do something all the way, for it to be that thing. A hop still qualifies as a jump. Demanding adults ID-verify their age is still fascism.
Restricting access to devices is the easy part (although keeping ahead of kids breaking in is not). Exposing your kids to enormous peer pressure and social isolation is the hard part.
My daughter broke or worked around three different parental control systems, including Google's own Family Link. There is always some webview in some settings page that will not be regulated and can be used to browse the Internet or some crap like this. These systems are either all poor or this game of whack a mole is unwinnable in principle.
We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.
There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”
I have wondered about that, but we didn’t keep them strictly from it. They had Instagram and a couple other things—with screen time limits and we knew their account handles. That was apparently enough friction for them to find a workaround. “Went wild” in this context means they signed up for dozens of accounts on dozens of different services—SnapChat, Discord, Instagram, and others I’d never heard of at all.
I strongly agree, but it needs to be balanced against being 14 on the open internet.
And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet". My goal has always been to support their growth and development by giving them progressively more responsibility and autonomy as they grow up.
> And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet".
Well I don't think I said otherwise, but not only is this rather absolute, it's not true. I don't see how limiting screen time, for example, precludes respecting their privacy.
May I ask: Why is it important to know their account handles?
Might as well put porn on TV and billboards and tell parents to cover their kids eyes and change the channel. It's about time government did something useful for once.
The Capitol riots killed 6 people, including two police officers. The crowd was armed to the teeth with guns, pipebombs, and ziptie handcuffs. They constructed a gallows. They coordinated with police sympathizers to gain access to the building, while one GOP congresswoman live-tweeted the known whereabouts of Nancy Pelosi.
They were planning to murder political opposition and violently overthrow a fair democratic election to appoint their leader instead.
If not for the plan devolving into a disorganized mob, and a quick thinking capitol officer who lead rioters away from the chamber where House Reps had been evacuated, rioters may have claimed many more lives.
Kudos for Amazon, Apple, Google, and all other tech companies for deplatforming violent neo-fascists and their enablers.
Twitter hosts the KSA and leaders of other terroristic regimes. Should Twitter unreservedly be banned?
Reddit has been implicated in murdering an innocent thinking they were the Boston Bomber. Should Reddit be unreservedly banned?
Suicides and murders have been live-streamed on Facebook. Should Facebook be unreservedly banned?
Each of those platforms host countless instances of violence, are platforms on which abuse of all kinds can grow and thrive - should they all be unreservedly banned?
Sure, some of Parler’s users were violent in the protests. A vanishingly small minority of their user base, at that. But to single out Parler and not any of the other platforms is no different than singling out a political viewpoint that you find disagreeable, and for all that you wax poetic about neo-fascism, nothing is more fascist than saying that a viewpoint you don’t like shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook ban people all the time for calls to violence. Reddit made the national news last year because moderators of r/The_Donald failed to police the numerous posts of users who plotted to murder the governor of Michigan.
Parler, by contrast, did not moderate calls to violence. It quickly became a safe space for neo-fascists to plan, coordinate, and execute plots against the US government.
Parler was playing a completely different game to Twitter, Reddit, and FB. Parler was deservedly ejected from the stadium.
I've known a handful of pathological liars, one of whom is my nephew. My nephew's caregivers are not model parents. They are extremely hot and cold: either ignoring the kids for hours at a time, or screaming at the kids over every trivial accident and annoyance. Example: nephew was pouring a glass of water, knocked the cup on the floor, and his parents screamed at him and hit him until he was broken down in tears.
Newphew's day-to-day routine is an exercise in walking on eggshells to avoid triggering mom and dad's short temper. Anytime his parent's said a word to him, nephew assumed he'd done something bad again. He began lying at a very young age as a defense mechanism to avoid punishment.
He became very distrustful of adults. We had a family get-together once where my nephew was playing with toy dinosaurs. I walk up behind him and say "hey buddy what are doing over there" and he immediately startles and says "I didn't do anything!"
I noticed that he started lying habitually. And even lying about things that didn't even matter. If he had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, he'd tell everyone he had a bagel. If he got up early, he said he'd slept in late. If he watched Finding Nemo, he'd say he watched Spongebob.
I started challenging him on these things: "why did you just tell me ate a bagel? I was right here fixing the computer when you rolled out of bed at 10am to eat a bowl of cereal this morning." He'd double down, "well actually I got up early and ate a bagel when you didn't see me. And then I had cereal afterward." I'd say "why are you lying to me about something so stupid? I'm not mad, I just don't see why you'd lie about it. What's the point?" "I'm not lying, I swear!"
He's 11 years old and his lies are getting bigger, more absurd. He told me his friend's dad is the president of the Pokemon factory and he can get any rare Pokemon card he wants for free, and that he gets to ride around in his friends Lamborghini.
I literally think he's lying for sport now, like a game to see what he can get away with. He's going to have a hard time making and keeping friends if he doesn't break the habit soon.
I think all of this started from bad parenting. The kid didn't feel safe in his own home, and his defense mechanism became habit, which then became a pathological obsession.
