dls2016

> Welcome to the terrible world of tipping.

While I agree, I remember bartenders making $10/hr + tips when I worked in a restaurant... in 1998. I could make $10/hr washing dishes (always the most hard-to-staff position) but wouldn't do so until after the restaurant died down because I made more busing tables with tips.

Let's just call this type of employment what it is: wage slavery. People are used to there being a class of people willing to take these jobs.

I have just the slogan for you: "No Political Slogans!"

> Sorry to say but who ever decided that the phrase "defund the police" is good or smart made a huge mistake.

Yet we're here talking about it, repeating the phrase. So I disagree.

The original articles on this are already very sympathetic to capital, and so that’s the direction of my criticism. The story suggests we should feel bad for the railroad companies without any investigating whether the company itself could share some of the blame. Today there’s a story about how UP cut many of their security employees.

The original articles and discussion here on HN is surprisingly one-sided.

Obviously I don’t like railroad theft but let’s not send in the army to protect a supply chain which has perhaps been made too efficient.

I was downvoted in other threads for suggesting (perhaps in a ham handed fashion) that we shouldn’t rush to trust these one-sided articles about the rail theft in LA and shoplifting in SF. People are surprisingly quick to suggest we throw more tax dollars at these “problems” without questioning that perhaps an alternate explanation for the increased theft is due to years and years exploiting every efficiency possible in the supply and retail chains.

A store containing tens of millions of dollars of merchandise and “guarded” by a fewer and fewer underpaid employees eventually becomes a sitting duck.

It’s the same explanation for why our supply chains were so brittle in the face of the pandemic: years and years of streamlining.

Could there be societal or enforcement issues? Sure! But let’s be at least slightly skeptical when images of a few hundred yards of junk-strewn railway are plastered across every headline and trending list out there. The reality is often much more complicated.

> I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented.

A lot has been written about the decline of antitrust enforcement in the US since 1970.

https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...

Government or police? Government enforces pollution laws and will step in over wage theft. But you can't call 911 and say "my boss stole from my paycheck!" whereas that happens all the time with shoplifting.

Why must the government step in when these skeleton-crewed retail stores and supply chains have inevitable, predictable loss issues? The article itself makes this point.

Railroads already have police, armored cars are allowed armed guards (as do other high-value shipments, I'm sure), retail stores have security (however neutered they may be).

I don't see why shoplifters are thrown in jail and wage thieves are not. Why do cops gun down shoplifters but won't lift a finger for wage thieves? Why don't cops bust down the doors of polluters? It's the selective enforcement of property rights I have a problem with. The enforcers already side with capital 9 times out of 10.

Yes, my argument is a little muddled by grouping retail and supply chain theft together. I definitely think supply chain theft is somehow more serious.

But grouping the two together is a result of the recent San Francisco story being mentioned in this thread. People here on HN are usually so critical of the media, but this LA train story and the San Fran shoplifting story were both treated as a symptom of some larger societal problem. And maybe they are! But that is not at all evident from the stories.

In my opinion, both symptoms are the result of a decades long brutal drive for absolute efficiency in both supply chains and retail stores. And of course organized criminals are going to take advantage of the fact that perhaps that "efficiency" went too far in cutting security.

Yes, and mom-and-pops commit wage theft, too. Shoplifting should be a civil matter.

> Those packages on the trains belonged to individuals btw.

And?

Shoplifting is the act of stealing from a retailer, not an individual. Yes, I make a very big distinction between the two. I just don’t see why corporations in the US can get away with so much (shoplifting and wage theft are both estimated to cost the economy $40bln per year) and I’m supposed to feel bad someone is stealing from Amazon or Louis Vuitton? Doesn’t mean I’m “ok” with shoplifting, I simply feel it should be a civil matter like wage theft.

Railroads have always had their own police, so I’m not sure the reluctance. Retail/supply chain theft is a cat-and-mouse game… always had been, always will be. Step up enforcement, improve the locks, house the homeless and move on.

Retail and supply chain theft will always be a cat and mouse game.

This is not an issue for which society/government should pay the cost to fix it (which you seem to imply by saying the markets have no options).

Uhm… so we ignore that rail yards in LA are super busy relative to those in “more respectable” towns?

This already happened in the US, too, regarding strike-breaking forces. See, for example, the official history of the Pennsylvania State Police.

But there are numerous solutions between the current situation and what you describe. Better locks, housing the homeless, reducing the amount of junk we import, etc.

I remember as a kid trains had cabooses (a sign of more employees). But of course that has all been optimized away. I’m guessing the skeleton crew is completely unable to secure the train if they wanted to.

Edit: downvotes for saying that the US has handled the identified problem in the past? (Which was a slippery-slope comment, anyway.)

> If criminals can get away with constant car break ins, burglaries, and daylight mass raids of stores, why stop there?

This is rich. The rich always get away with crimes: wage theft, labor violations, financial fraud, environmental destruction, opioid crisis... but some people shoplift and society is falling apart? Cry me a river.

Let the market fix their own broken supply chains.

People have been writing songs about retail theft for ages. Think about the term "riding shotgun"! This isn't a new problem.

> But Union Pacific is partly to blame for not deploying more security, said Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck Division.

Half-way through the article we get the point. This is just another example of how our retail supply lines are optimized at every turn to shovel maximum crap through the pipe... be it minimally-staffed stores or unsecured trains. It's all about cash flow, baby!

Let the market fix the problem.

A reminder that this isn’t the first time Google has been caught colluding with competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

My last job was a dead end: small software group which had survived many mergers and lived inside a mining/valve manufacturer. The only interest upper-level management had in our group was cutting costs. This caused a lot of dysfunction in our group, which lead to stagnation of the product and any learning/challenges. Plus I was underpaid.

A buddy had approached me a year or so prior to quitting with an idea and we developed and won an SBIR grant from NASA which ran the second half of 2021. The results weren't quite strong enough for commercialization, in my opinion. So I will be on the market in a month after more studying.

Penalize? So it’s ok for a group of people to enter a contract to form a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the profits of the corporation)… but it’s not ok for a group of people to enter a contract to collectively bargain with a corporation (“penalizing” non-signatories by preventing them from benefiting from the contract).

This is absurd.

You’re saying a corporation cannot enter into a contract to be the exclusive supplier of a widget to another corporation?

Partnership contracts bind non-signers from receiving benefits of a partnership. And with good reason: you wouldn't want any ole schmoe laying claim to the fruits of your labor.

Contracts deprive non-signers of things all the time. That's kind of the point.

Do you have a problem with corporations signing "exclusive" deals with other corporations?

Entering into a contract with multiple people to form a corporation = fine

Entering into a contract with multiple people to collectively bargain with a corporation = deprivation of human rights (according to some posts in this thread)

At least the GP admitted that their problem really is just "that kind of contract".

Doesn't corporate lobbying also lessen your wages?

If the parent comment to mine wanted to make a point, perhaps look toward movie stars. Although then I personally think the point falls apart.

Well, for a while they colluded with other tech giants to prevent this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

I don't know, how much would he make if the NBA wasn't a monopoly?

> In all cases, all relevant employees are "coerced" into the union contract.

It's funny because usually the libertarian response to a lot of problems is "put it in a contract". But not that kind of contract!

Which other human rights are violated by representation dues?

I can name dozens of corporations who have used their profits not to increase worker compensation, but instead to lobby directly against their workers. And the workers have no vote or voice in the matter. Google in the article, for instance. But think of all the other dubious lobbying corporations engage in. It's never discussed in this context because your pay check doesn't include a line item for "lobbying fees".

I second the grind. There's not really a shortcut... like lifting weights or practicing scales/rudiments.

I returned to grad school at 27 for math and had trouble passing qualifying exams. I ended up using spaced-repetition to memorize large sections of books and old questions. I had previously shunned memorization... but coupled with focused practice it is a powerful tool. Memorizing forces you to distill the material and patterns to their essence and allows you to recognize the patterns in new situations.

That lazy river is wild!

I think I saw a documentary about this.