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United Wizards of the Coast

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Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#211

Post by wredcoll »

scoofy wrote: post #205
bb88 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions. Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.

If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality. The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.

Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.

It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#212

Post by _DeadFred_ »

scoofy wrote: post #205
bb88 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions. Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.

If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality. The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

Also theft by corporations is one of the largest types of theft in the US.

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#213

Post by culi »

xienze wrote: post #133
culi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they are in much of Europe! Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, etc. Even France has over 80% coverage

And what has that really bought them? The wages are laughable compared to the US where you'd THINK us non-unionized tech workers would be paid minimum wage. And the famous European healthcare and long vacations are more a function of the government than anything the unions have explicitly bargained for.

You mean to tell me unions can make a government actually responsive to its people? Gee wouldn't that be nice to have here

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#214

Post by Timon3 »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #51
sabedevops wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stability of development, features etc is to the customer's benefit.

Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.

Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#215

Post by dash2 »

wredcoll wrote: post #211
scoofy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality. The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm. If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose. Corporations, in general , have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with th…

It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#216

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

Timon3 wrote: post #214
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have Magic customers been clamoring for Magic's employees to unionize for the past 30 years? This benefit you purport strikes me as purely hypothetical and possibly wrong: if they can't downsize when they need to, they could go out of business completely.

Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.

GM circa 2008 would like to have a word

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#217

Post by Timon3 »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #216
Timon3 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions don't prevent downsizing when it is actually necessary. What they do prevent is downsizing to goose the stock price, and that is good for the customer.

GM circa 2008 would like to have a word

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the specifics. Can you link clear proof that unions were preventing necessary downsizing, and that this downsizing would have saved the company?

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#218

Post by HanClinto »

nicolas-siplis wrote: post #81
Imnimo wrote: post #57

Back when Arena was first announced, there was an interesting line in their write-up: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee... >We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new me…

I'm actually working on this right now! https://chiplis.com/ironsmith It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :…

This is seriously impressive!!

What are you planning on doing with this? Where should I follow along?

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#219

Post by bwestergard »

scoofy wrote: post #192
northern-lights wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots. If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bo…

Unions are complicated. Generally speaking they are good for workers, but when they start focusing on job security over compensation and build in seniority-based advantages, the leverage unions have can be wielded against consumers and fellow workers, not just against employers. “Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes the…

Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?

There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).

For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.

For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).

https://koncontributes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#220

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

BizarroLand wrote: post #73
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likewise confusing when people think unions are always A Good Thing no matter what in all circumstances. I'm glad the employees are exercising their rights to organize. Whether this turns out to be good for the business and for customers remains to be seen over time.

Any time people want to unionize, it's good for the customers even if it means the business goes under. Sure, they won't get to be customers any longer if that happens, but at least it will increase the likelihood that the products they have available are not the cause of other people's suffering.

> it's good for the customers even if it means the business goes under

Ok then I'm just not flexible enough to do the mental gymnastics involved in understanding this statement.

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