Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home

And amusingly enough, using cheap hardware to mess with RF devices around you reminds of Steve Lord's hilarious/informative/vicious "Cider Kill-chain" talk.[0] Since attacks only improve over time, the code golf to make the devices more effective could prove quite entertaining to watch - from a safe distance.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIRlFSIngfE

In fact, I'd argue they outweigh the younger audience by a far margin, are supported by media organisations and have done far more damage to our society and world.

Almost every young person I know wants one thing. A fairer, safer, more equal world. I can't say the same for most older people I know. If that makes them the extremists, then we are lost.

I think the best attitude is one which presumes that corruption is an inevitable and endemic feature of all human societies and that while we can deal with some or much of it in small ways as these things occur, there is no solution. The belief in a solution ultimately leads to far worse things. Don’t immanentize the eschaton.

The reason money buys power is because the people are divided or don't care. Money only wins when all else is equal.

To say the government serves capital, even in the US, is laughably wrong. Look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it’s literally designed for maximum employment.

The government serves those in power, many of whom are rich. Being rich is not enough to have the government serve you though.

> Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.

This is incorrect. They would only lose if they were part of the effected labor pool.

Break up the California teachers union and pretty much everyone in California except for the teachers will benefit. Tax revenue shortfalls mean worse services and/or higher taxes for everyone else to pay for fat retirements for incompetent teachers.

Securitas is known for having their people wearing uniforms that are designed to be confused with local law enforcement and for heavy lobbying for privatisation of the prison industry in the Nordics.

A great fit for Pinkerton.

I can recommend watching The Molly Maguires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Molly_Maguires_(film)

(That said, both public schools and the post office have meaningful private-sector competitors, in the sense that the government can decide that they just don't need to fund so many teachers or postal workers anymore, and systems like vouchers for private schools make it look even more like a private-sector market.)

They have given the non-landed class of people a life that even a century ago was unheard of.

Countries that have decent levels of union involvement have much better working conditions and standard of living than countries that don't.

Blaming unions for failed companies is incredibly flimsy argument against unions as a whole.

Sure there are unions that contributed to the collapse of some companies, people make mistakes.

Bad management is a far more leading cause of business collapse than unions.

I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").

The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.

There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.

Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.

> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.

Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?

And an explicitly partisan union would be a shot in the foot of the organizers. That's not exactly how you build solidarity.

The whole idea of employment (as opposed to being a founder) is that you take a job that is lower risk and lower reward. Instead of taking home every penny (minus taxes) that your software sells for, you take home some fixed number in your employment agreement, and management (or shareholders) take the rest. If it doesn't sell, management's still on the hook for paying you until they lay you off, but if you work hard and do a fantastic job and write the world's most intuitive and reliable and high-fidelity software for camera boxes on power poles and you make them tens of thousands of dollars a year in sales, they keep the profits. Maybe they'll give you a small bonus.

Now, what do they do with the profits that you made them? Several things, but donating to politicians is probably one of them. Go look up your own CEO's donations and tell me if you mind.

Your assertion that this is likely a skycop seems to however not based on any evidence.