Roles that are more fungible, train drivers, factory workers, I can see the case from the worker's perspective, even if I think there are externalities.
But I can't even see it from a worker's perspective in roles such as software or sales, why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected, compensation is more levelised etc?
I'm assuming this will boil down to some unspoken values differences but still thought I'd ask.
I guess you have no experience with assembly lines?
> (unions can sometimes push safety standards, but also comes from others who have the union take credit)
Btw, health and safety are what economists call a 'normal good'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_good
> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
That explains fairly well, why rich countries all have more-or-less similar health and safety standards despite very different histories and especially histories of labour activism, and why poor countries fare worse in this respect--even if some of them have laws on the books that are just as strict.
Just like a democracy does whatever its voters want it to do?..
Different people want different things.
> I'd argue that an environment where pay negotiation is a case of every person for themselves isn't actually good for anyone but if the majority of members disagree with me then the union won't get involved in pay.
Well, I feel for the minority that doesn't want the union to get involved in their affairs.
I don't know why one would want to maintain a system of 'look how high I can still jump after all these years, reward please'. Again, expectations: they rise faster than the rewards.
The adversarial framing with coworkers is confusing, discipline is a different matter from collective bargaining.
The "much worse workers" are the majority. That's why you see everyone complaining about technical interviews and such - those of us who crush the interviews and get the jobs don't mind.
However I do think it's a good way to filter candidates. I should clarify that what I'm talking about is fairly basic programming tasks, not very hard leet code style DSA type tasks. I've never been given an actually hard task in an interview, they've all been fairly simple tasks like write a bracket tax calculator, write a class that stores car objects and can get them by plate number and stuff like that. Helped a friend do a take-home one where we fetched some data from spacex's api and displayed it in a html table.
Every time I do these, people act like I'm Jesus for solving a relatively simple task. Meanwhile I'm just shocked that this is something my peers struggle with. I would have honestly expected any decent dev to be able to do these with roughly the same proficiency as myself, but it turns out almost nobody can.
That's why I think it's a good way to test candidates. If you're going to work as a programmer you should be able to solve these types of tasks. I don't care if you're frontend, backend, finance, healthcare, data science, whatever kind of programming you normally do, you should be able to do these kinds of things.
If someone can't then by my judgement they don't really know programming. They may have figured out some way to get things done anyway but I bet the quality of their work reflects their lack of understanding. I've seen a lot of code written by this kind of people, it's very clear that a lot of developers really don't understand the code they're writing. It's honestly shocking how bad most "professional software developers" are at writing simple code.
Of course keeping the union narrowly focused is an issue. Unions are a democracy after all
Yep, and I don't want my neighbours to vote on the colour of my underwear or what I have for breakfast either. They can mind their business, and I can mind mine.
If AI slop infiltrates projects enterprises are built upon, its likely companies and their customers are metaphorically hurt too, because of a spike in outages etc... (which already happens given AWS got like 7000 outage reports after getting rid of another 14000 employees).
Yes AI can be cool, but can we stop being this blind regarding its limitations, usecases, how its actually used, how it actually benefits humanity, and so on? Like give me a valid reason for Sora existing (except for monetizing attentionspans of humans, which I consider highly unethical).
You confuse intent with reality. The social software under discussion was abused immediately for the criminal purpose of spreading falsehoods about men, both with malicious intent and wilful negligence, which is particularly egregious because the victims were not made aware of the slander. Even if they wanted to defend themselves, they were prevented from doing so because of the institutionalised sexism, men are banned from participating on grounds of their sex alone. The proof for this is in the leaks. You failed to take this into account and hence got downvoted into oblivion, not for the reason you claim.
The other facts you write about are part of a different narrative, they are not directly relevant to kanwisher's proposition.
IMO, we should not have any tolerance for platforms that are designed for gossip because of the boy-cries-wolf effect in backlash because it means if a woman is a genuine victim, people will take the priors into account and most will assume she's a liar, too, and this lets the perpetrators off the hook. I do not want to live in such a society. The way out of this is holding women accountable, they should be punished for criminal behaviour with immediate and drastic consequences, and tenfold so for their enablers. The problem would stop overnight.
I can’t think of why the idea of unions is gaining popularity in some programmer circles, other than that its advocates simply don’t have economic common sense.
How?
