Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

The effect is every grocery chain in the area has the same price-fixed wage they offer, price-fixed benefits, and etcra.

Don't like your wage at Fred Meyers? too bad, the safeway down the road is in the same union contract and thus the same wage.

Get kicked out because an unexpected financial/medical expense killed your ability to pay dues? too bad, none of the other chains in the area can hire you until you pay off the back dues, that you can't pay because you can't get a job.

Union is holding a vote to strike and pushing out misleading information when really the only provision the employer is objecting too is a new one that requires the employer pay the union dues for any unfilled position because the union just wants to make more money so they can vote themselves into a raise? too bad, you can only communicate with people on your shift at your location in your section of the store, the union however has mandated access to break rooms, as well a mailing and email broadcasts.

What people don't seem to get, is that sometimes, the power unions get from getting so large, can be used against the employees, not just the employer.

But you can't even bring that up without getting strawmanned as a republican union hater.

I haven't even gotten into programmer unions, with high dues and 9k initiation fees that get voted for because nobody who votes it will have to pay it as they are already in.

I'd gently suggest it was quite the opposite; used to call attention.

"Understatement often leads to ... rhetorical constructs in which understatement is used to emphasize a point. It is a staple of humour in English-speaking cultures."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[EDIT: All this because I lost the thread that we were talking about when striking miners in the UK dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto David Wilkies taxi whilst he was driving a strike-breaking miner to work, killing David. Hopefully future HN readers will find some value and pleasure in this thread, however.]

Ah. I didn’t realize a naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals was involved.

:):):)

And with regards to politics, part of Orwell’s point was that our language - how we choose to express things - is political, too. Regardless of our intent.

I wasn’t saying anything about the politics of anyone throwing a rock. And I’m not saying anything about your political beliefs.

I’m saying there’s a political power in how language is used, even if the subject under discussion isn’t expressly “political”.

Finally, to be a complete pedant, although “discharge” is often used as a synonym for “shoot”, I’ve never heard it used as a synonym for “throw” before.

So the correct way to use overly complex language to say “throwing a rock” would be “launching a kinetic energy weapon”. Or “releasing”.

Because unlike a gun, or bow, or whatever, in this case the “weapons system”, if it wouldn’t be a dehumanizing offense to call it such, is a persons arm.

Not a gun or bow or phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range or whatever.

And when we throw things we don’t “discharge” them.

Which is actually a perfect example of Orwell’s point.

To try to call someone throwing something a “discharge” is to dehumanize them, because humans do not discharge things from their arms when they throw them.

We do, however, discharge snot from our noses when we sneeze ;)

We are talking about throwing a rock at a truck, right?

[EDIT EDIT: We are not. We are talking about pushing a concrete block off a bridge onto a car below. Which I suppose, pedantically, is to “discharge” since the stored potential kinetic energy of the block is what makes it a weapon, although “pushing” is still a human thing, but it doesn’t feel as dehumanizing as the “throwing” case for some reason. You were, technically, correct, which is the best kind of correct. Ah well, at least we got a lesson in the relationship between language and politics out of the whole thing.]

I didn’t just write a pedantic magnum opus on the wrong subject because I didn’t realize the other person was still discussing hypothetical asteroids being de-orbited to destroy planets, or hypothetical kinetical bombardment weapons aka “rods from god”, did I?

;)

[EDIT EDIT EDIT: You did not, but what you did is almost as embarrassing.]

Lord, I hope I’m not arguing with a 16-year old on the Internet. It’d be like arguing with my younger self :/

[EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT: If so, I think you lost.]

I.e. that Marxist scholarship / thought does not have a one to one correspondence with Marxist-inspired social or political movements, of which there are many different kinds.

But the real question is why am I wasting my time on the internet writing this when the odds of you yourself wishing to step back and hear with open ears what I’m suggesting is quite low?

Which isn’t so much a statement about you, dear debate-opponent, as it is about the internet itself.

Getting people to waste time online - the capitalists greatest tool in the repression of the masses! LOL ;)

Maybe we’ll get immortalized in the Internet Archive ;););)