341–350 of 476 posts
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> If you have a senator or representative Most of us don't, but I've been looking at the lobbying numbers and they don't seem that expensive. I think with crowd funding and smart targeting of the money it might not be that difficult to buy change.
Are you suggesting we should crowd fund to get the money for politicians elected by the people to actually for the people?
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Massive salaries for programmers won’t last forever. Most people here on HN are self-taught; it’s a skill a large number of motivated people can pick up. Eventually, large corporations will feel comfortable lowering wages once they have a secure grip on the market, and the tools programmers today made will be used against the next generation. It’s no different from millennials resenting boomers for burning economic b…
Unpopular opinion but you need a certain IQ in order to be able to program effectively. A large portion of the population is not capable of reasoning at the level required to develop. I've organised bootcamps and learning spaces for wannabe developers and there are tons of people which can't get their head around programming. I'm not talking about being able to do algorithms challenge. I'm talking about simple functi…
It's deeper than that: there are a large percentage of people that do not want to code. It would be as artless and soulless to them as perhaps we think pounding nails into boards all day would be. But to plenty of people "an honest day's work" consists of doing with your muscles, your labor — having accomplished something "physical" at the end of the day.
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> I cannot imagine anyone here seriously defending this unless you’re just looking to be a contrarian. HN has a large libertarian base who are against regulated unions. They are seen as bad government interference in the free enterprise system. I don't want to start an argument but there's a lot of economics science that supports that belief.
You still have to get from "unions are bad" to "union discussion should be censored".
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The scariest thing isn't that Amazon is a company worth nearly trillions and using that money to oppress workers to maintain their lead. It's that tech workers are happily applying to get a decent paycheck and crushing people under them, just to protect the company's billions. Then they'll post online about how happy they are to have been smart enough to save up to buy a lakefront home and retire at 45, and say peopl…
I wouldn't say that coders as an industry are destroying the road behind us, since there isn't really a road between "warehouse worker" and "software engineer", unless someone has the knack for coding (in which case there's a very clear and well-paved road within the company between those roles) I think the best solution is to empower workers via unions or whatever else. It should be impossible for workers to get gro…
Pretty shameful for the programmers who implemented this.
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"How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation." Machievelli Most people are selfish and act in their own self interest despite what virtue signaling on social media they may do. You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse wo…
Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.
Or consider your own personal experience with people you have worked with. You may have had colleagues who were incompetent, unintelligent or annoying, but how many of them would you describe as evil? Over twenty years of working in the industry I have only ever encountered one person who I would genuinely describe, not as “evil” per se, but as lacking in certain moral qualities that we tend to take for granted among the people we know (and we take them for granted because most people are good). And he wasn’t a developer!
I believe it is much more likely that people work for Amazon because they either genuinely believe it is a good company (after all, it is lauded by many) and/or because they are ignorant of the nature of what people in socioeconomic classes far below their own are experiencing in Amazon facilities. Just how aware are each of us of the reality on the ground at companies we support? Do you know what it is like to be a worker at every company whose stock you own? What about the companies who make the clothing you wear or the device you’re using to read this?
If not, does that you make evil? Or are you a participant in a system that hides this reality from you?
I’m not saying that owning stock or wearing apparel is the same thing as joining a company, by the way. People should be very discerning about who they work for. But I think there are more plausible and positive reasons for human behaviour than Machiavelli proposed.
Let’s not view each other as evil and thus write off each other and in doing so, our future. Let’s work to change the system instead.
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This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]: > Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a…
I think it's a compelling critique of Arendt that she basically just bought this characterisation wholesale - the Nazis had every reason to present their actions as 'banal' both in limiting the damages selfishly at an individual level and also limiting the damage to their ideology ('anyone could do it'). Eichmann was probably not the nazi-punchcard, mindlessly executing horrible plans, that she states.
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This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]: > Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a…
Sometimes it feels like people are confused about the nature of themselves. We have this idealized version of ethics and rationality that maps poorly onto reality. Yet everybody (especially on social media) talks as if this idealized version is the obvious natural state of all humans. Our intellect as a species is a blessing and a curse. We are self aware, but only to a certain extent. The blanks are filled in by wis…
So i'm not sure how much of it is "natural" or "cultural", but as others have pointed out the vast majority of people are happy to cooperate and help one another... it's not an abstract ideal.
On the other hand, since we were kids starting at school, and across the media spectrum, we've been taught to crush others to move forward. That part is definitely not natural but cultural. If that's the "reality" you're talking about, we can do a great deal about it!
> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are…
If this upsets you, then you probably shouldn't use the "it's a private company" defense when people are upset by other instances of Big Tech being guilty of censorship.
Suffice to say, there's a significant difference, and trying to conflate the two implies either innocent ignorance or deliberate dishonesty.
I'm going to assume it's the former, because I've always taken Napoleon's alleged aphorism to heart - the one about "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance".