trowawee

Wage theft comprises, by some estimates, about 75% of all theft in the United States each year[1]. A brief perusal of television news or newspapers in any city in this country will make it immediately apparent that the crime that corporate media likes to focus on is very much not wage theft.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

No one has “built wealth completely on their own”. Every rich person, in every country on earth, has in some way been assisted in building their wealth, whether that’s directly, like Bezos getting $250k from his parents (nearly half a million in 2020 dollars), or indirectly, like Buffet building a substantial amount of his holdings on monopolies in an era when the federal government was aggresively downsizing its anti-trust investigation and enforcement efforts, or the modern internet giants building fortunes on the bones of the federal and state research that created and maintain the physical infrastructre of the web.

This was not at all historically true. White business owners all over the South publically and vociferously supported segregation. The White Citizens Councils we're usually organized and led by wealthy white people in the community, frequently business owners, and wealthy white people contributed substantial support got the Klan.

I think requesting the most charitable reading of something that starts from a decidedly uncharitable position is an unfair request. If cscurmudgeon wanted to have a real conversation about it, they could do their own research; this information is pretty easy to find. In this thread, there's a link to a survey of Dalits and Shudras in the US where they report experiencing widespread discrimination. Instead, they came in throwing rhetorical bombs. That's not the behavior of someone who wants to have a reasonable discussion, it's the behavior of someone who wants to derail the conversation using the language of the culture war they're claiming to oppose.

Are you yourself higher caste? Being a member of the group that isn't discriminated against frequently makes it harder to see the discrimination. My wife is Indian-American, and her parents are a mixed-caste marriage; I've seen caste bias between her own relatives, even though they're all in the US and have been since the 1970s.

"post-Truth", "virtue signalling", and "accept the narrative unquestioningly" are all (barely) coded flags to say "This thing doesn't exist/isn't true." Following those up with "I'm not saying it doesn't exist" is just a rhetorical feint to seem reasonable.

I've been sorta keeping an eye on the space for a long time, because the dream for me would be to get the biggest iPad and have that be my full-time machine. Currently (well, pre-pandemic), my work laptop just moved from being docked on my desk at home to being docked on my desk at work. Sometimes I take it off the desk at home to watch Netflix or sit on the couch, but if you're doing anything memory-intensive, the battery dies pretty quickly. I'd much rather have the battery life and weight of an iPad, if I'm not losing too much functionality (obviously a huge caveat, and the reason why I haven't gone all-in on any of the cloud-based IDE options yet), and I'd also rather have most of my stuff in a cloud somewhere, so if I lose or break a computer, I don't lose all my stuff.

I mean, that's not a dick move tho? Going "on background" or "off the record" is not a one-way conversation. It's a negotiation with the journalist. It's not a magical invocation that binds the other party once they hear the words.

> I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish.

> Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it.

> Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years.

It's the Google problem. Once you have an automatic money printer, the only important job is making sure the automatic money printer still works. There's no incentive to improve it, because it's still printing money, and there's little incentive to make other products better, because whenever you look at the big revenue chart, the money printer in 90% of the pie chart, so who cares about the other parts.

Yeah, I think the complaint was that Valve is/was theoretically flat, in that people could self-manage, but in practice, it had an implicit hierarchy that was obscured by the officially "flat" structure (which, let's be honest, was always kind of a lie, because I guarantee you there's someone there who can fire other people, which means it's not actually flat). And an implicit hierarchy means that there's no way to say "I had these goals and objectively achieved them"; you aren't making your case to a defined supervisor, you're making a case to the informal supervisor. That'll almost always wind up with favoritism without any potential escape.

Some of these problems exist in any company, but at least in a standard hierarchy, if your boss is sabotaging you or ignoring you, there are routes you can take (go to their boss, go to HR) to (imperfectly) route around that. In a flat structure, you're grasping at ghosts - after all, no one's your manager, so it shouldn't matter if one person has it out for you, but of course, if they're politically entrenched, it absolutely does matter. And there's no one in the company to complain to, because the company's official position is "this is impossible, we're a flat company", and your complaints are minimized if you complain externally, through some combination of "sour grapes" + "but it's a flat system!".

Honestly, it's a great trick on management's part - everybody has the responsibilities of management, but no one is an official manager, and there's an easy playbook to run on anyone who complains.

American taxpayers contributed at least $70m to the development of this drug[0] and our reward is to be gouged by Gilead. It's the exact same shit they've pulled with Truvada[1] and it's grotesque.

[0]: https://www.citizen.org/article/the-real-story-of-remdesivir... [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/opinion/prep-hiv-aids-dru...

I'm interested when I see this critique, because I definitely agree with you, but I also see a strong bias against new pedagogical approaches like Common Core math that focus more on teaching concepts like numerical composability and less on memorization and recitation. Personally, as someone whose mental map of how math works lines up much more with the CC standards, I wish I had been taught that way; the memorization & recitation approach fell apart for me when I reached higher level math classes.

For starters, I'm a little disappointed that that's the only thing you decided to engage with. That said: this isn't actually terribly complicated. This isn't medical malpractice, where some degree of risk is an inevitable side effect of any medical intervention. Police in the United Kingdom shot one (1) person to death in 2018. He was carrying an airsoft rifle that looked like a real gun. I still think that's terrible! He should be alive. But still: one person, in the whole year. There are countries where the police don't kill anyone. This is the healthcare conversation all over again; Americans insisting that some goals are impossible while other countries that have already achieved those "impossible" goals look at us with a mix of pity and disdain.

It's honestly even worse than that in some ways, because we were still pretty actively adding to/changing the rules as recently as the late 1960s, and then we just kinda...stopped.

To address your first point, there're a constellation of relevant answers.

1. Most people who dislike or distrust the police don't actually trust those numbers. There are decades worth of documented evidence of police lying about people carrying weapons, and sometimes even carrying weapons to plant on people they kill. So from the start, a lot of us think that number is an undercount, possibly by a dramatic degree.

2. Even among the people who are armed who are shot by police, there are people who weren't doing anything wrong who were still shot. The most recent high profile version of this was Philando Castile. Technically, he was armed when he was shot, but when he was killed, he had already informed the police about his licensed, legal firearm and was moving slowly towards the glove compartment, as instructed by an officer, to retrieve his registration. So it's not just shootings of unarmed people.

3. Police don't just shoot people to death. George Floyd was not shot; Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for just under nine minutes. Eric Garner was not shot; Daniel Panteleo choked him to death with an illegal chokehold. Adam Trammell was not shot; he was hit with a Taser, 18 times, while in the shower and experiencing mental issues, and it caused his heart to stop. Sandra Bland was not shot; she supposedly hung herself with a plastic grocery bag in her cell after being arrested as a result of a pretextual traffic stop. This list could go much, much longer. Only looking at shooting deaths artificially constrains the number of people police kill in a very deceptive way.

4. There are so very many other ways that police can make your life absolutely miserable without shooting or killing you. I am not Black, and so I have been spared many of these experiences, but of my Black friends and family, I can tell you this: every single one of them has had police harass them for absurdly minor issues, or sometimes no issue at all. A number of them have had a police officer point a gun at them. Almost all of them have been at some point unofficially detained for some length of time. Some of them have been arrested and then eventually released without charges. All of them who drive get pulled over at least a few times per year, without fail. These are mostly middle- or upper-middle-class professionals. They live all over the United States, in cities and towns, in places with large Black populations and small Black populations, and yet their experiences all share a commonality that is terrifying when you pull back even a little bit and look at them as a pattern.

5. But maybe this should have been #1...what do you think is a reasonable number of shootings of unarmed people? Personally, I think that number is zero, so even "just 14" is absolutely grounds for extreme anger, even if you want to ignore my first four points. I don't think the police, people who are given special dispensation and training to use violence in the name of the state, should ever shoot and kill an unarmed person. I actually think any number of deaths caused by police is too many deaths. In every situation, they are the people with the most training. They are (ultimately) the best-armed. I recognize that, in a country with as many guns as the US, maybe the police will have to kill some small number of people per year, but I think every time they do, that shooting should be heavily scrutinized. We give them these weapons and powers so they can protect people, even people who commit crimes, and if they have to kill someone, they have failed to protect that person.

I hope those points answer your first question, and start to explain the answer to your second question. In response to that, though, I would first ask what you've read about police abolition so far.

True. And looking at their comment history, this "What about black-on-black crime?!" seems to be a recurring bit over the last few weeks whenever people here talk about police brutality. Still, I think it's worthwhile to name and push back on this tactic when we see it, because it's pretty commonly used when people want to minimize or ignore police violence.

It is completely irrelevant. It's like responding to "It's raining today" with "It was sunny last week". At best, it's a non-sequitur, at worst it's an active attempt to distract from the conversation at hand. And it ignores the facts that A) black-on-black crime does not happen at a substantially higher rate than white-on-white crime, B) the explanation for why most crime is intra-racial in a segregated country is pretty straightforwardly obvious, and C) Black people actually are attacked and killed by police at wildly disproportionate rates, which is why the subject of police violence against Black people is a valid topic of conversation, whereas "black-on-black crime" is a pointless or hostile digression.

> "[...] justifiably or not [...] extrajudicial and unjust tactics are used"

...how could this be justifiable?

Bringing up "black-on-black crime" is a common disingenuous tactic to distract from conversations about police brutality. Most violence is committed by people you're around, and in an intensely segregated country, that will usually be people that are the same race as you. It's a complete digression from the actual conversation here, which is about agents of the state, entrusted to act as enforcers of the state's monopoly on violence, abusing that trust and meting out violence to people who have done nothing wrong.

Well, you choosing to donate your time and effort to an open source project is really not analogous to a union's work improving workplaces, but! As it so happens I do believe that having huge swathes of the tech industry built on unpaid labor is also a pretty bad thing, that the political stance taken by large parts of the FOSS community that "free means no restrictions, EVER!" is foolish, and that companies should have to pay for their use of FOSS. It enables exploitation of individual maintainers by massive corporations.

And to loop back around to the topic most of us are discussing, if there were some type of SWE Guild, standardizing rules around FOSS usage and remuneration for FOSS creators and maintainers should be high on that guild's list of priorities. There're thousands of people in the entertainment industry making comfortable livings off a combination of some work and residuals; why can't that be us? Why shouldn't people who've created, maintained, and improved projects that companies have leveraged for billions of dollars of profit see some of that money?

Yeah, this is a complaint that a contract they signed had a clause they didn't like. Which...tough? You always have the option to not attend the trade show, or try to negotiate the contract. Sounds like they publicized the rules well in advance; I'm not sure what the point of the whinge is here.

You have your causation backwards there. If you look at virtually every metro area in the US, the history goes: dense core -> policy decisions to favor cars above everything else, usually with a healthy dose of racism tossed in -> suburban sprawl.

If you benefit from the union's work, you should absolutely have to pay for that work.

Chicagoan here; we also don't need a tank or a humvee and probably don't need a chopper.

I was curious what the City Journal was, so I looked it and the Manhattan Institute up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy.... Worthwhile reading for anyone wondering where the original piece is coming from.

Personally, looking over their history, I think their interest in publishing a piece like this is likely rooted in ideological issues rather than actually looking at anything meaningful. (I also think they've been wrong about...very nearly everything they've ever offered a position on, so I'm skeptical about this claim that SF is on the brink of tipping over into a Mad Max set.)

Well...yeah. That's the whole point of deniable operations: when they go to hell, you can pretend they were the work of some rogue operators. Every time one of these goes sideways, the US government tries to wash its hands of the instigators. Doesn't mean we need to be credulous enough to believe them, or the media outlets they use to launder those claims. It's absolutely legitimate to look at the CIA's body of work in South America and then roll your eyes and laugh when they try whistle innocently and stroll away from an attempted coup against a left-wing South American leader involving ex-special forces.

Some special forces guys believing they were sufficiently individually bad-ass enough to bluff their way into a country and overthrow a government, ignoring intelligence to the contrary, and then everything going to shit in an objectively hilarious way and the op getting blown up by menial laborers with outdated equipment actually tracks pretty well with most of the last, mmmmm, sixty years? of American special forces activity.

I actually turned the game on and parked my avatar in front of the anchovy tank for most of the morning every day this week while I worked from the couch. It's incredibly soothing.

I don't think people necessarily disagree, but I also think that the benefits of that are limited by human biases and tendencies toward clique-ish behaviors, and that hurts both the people who inevitably get left out of those events and the broader company, because the opportunities for unpredictable synergies are limited by those biases/cliques.

No you don't. No one is pushing to break up Basecamp, or LinkedIn, or even companies that have actual documented histories of anticompetitive practices, like Oracle. I haven't even heard much chatter about breaking up Apple, altho that might ramp up as they move farther away from hardware into services and other areas. The conversation centers around FB, Google, and Amazon, for reasons that are unique to each of them.