This story is missing the best part, which is where the compliance officer bluescreens after being asked about whether the sex tape would be owned by Sony.
The Sex Tape Litmus Test
61–70 of 138 posts
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Collective bargaining rights was developed to counter exactly this power imbalance with minimum government involvement. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any programmer unions.
What's odd to me is that in many cases people who purport to be "pro free market" are also anti-union. As far as I can see, unions are the free market.
Unions in the US always have specific views that employees often don't share. Everything is about retirement, preservation of existing employees, and supporting other unions.
The problem is that most tech workers want incompetent workers fired, since they make other workers lives more difficult. The field also moves fast enough that credentialization is not particularly helpful. In fact, it can be harmful.
Unions would call for rules like "10% of new projects must be in COBOL" to help older workers that don't want to re-train.
German style unions aren't as opposed to guaranteeing worker performance, I'm not really sure why. That might fly, but keeping it German style would be difficult.
The other option is something along the lines of the WGA/SAG. But individual developers are treated well enough that that isn't seen as worthwhile.
Also there are the problems unions have with corrupt elections and organized crime.
My point is that unions are a mixed bag, and for many tech workers they're a bad deal.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's odd for you to point out one of the legal protections unions have without also pointing out the things they are prohibited from doing, such as sympathy strikes, mass picketing, and (in some states) the ability to require a union shop. And the law gives company owners protection against personal liability, and taxes companies different from personal income, while it also prohibits employers from having an unsafe…
A union: some sellers of labor merge into a single legal entity, and it becomes illegal for some purchasers of labor to buy from alternate suppliers. To translate to another field: Apple and MS merge, and now consumers can't use Linux. Laws enforcing a requirement to purchase from a cartel are about as far from a free market as you can get. Saying free market supporters should favor unionization is like saying free m…
This is a dishonest characterization of the law in most states re: unions.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#64California has a nice law that says that the employee owns IP created on his own time, unrelated to work, etc. This is a reason I moved to CA: the state I was in lacked such a law, and all the tech companies had contracts that failed the sex tape test. I suspect that for a place to flourish like Silicon Valley, it needs a law that protects self bootstrapping startups.
I keep hearing this, and have taken it as gospel (I am in CA), but can someone point me to some citations? You know, just in case.... ;-)
Your employer should have supplied you with the necessary paperwork to sign (this part is also stipulated in California, AFAIK, that you be made aware of that right)
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's odd to me is that in many cases people who purport to be "pro free market" are also anti-union. As far as I can see, unions are the free market.
Unions in the US always have specific views that employees often don't share. Everything is about retirement, preservation of existing employees, and supporting other unions. The problem is that most tech workers want incompetent workers fired, since they make other workers lives more difficult. The field also moves fast enough that credentialization is not particularly helpful. In fact, it can be harmful. Unions wou…
Meeeehhhhh... I'd join a tech union that allowed me to participate in bargaining over working conditions and benefits. I've seen a surprising number of companies (coughAmazoncough) that pay very high base salaries and nice bonuses but completely crap out on health insurance, pension/retirement account, vacation time, work hours, etc.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#66I think that any funny clauses in the contracts should be abolished and the worker/employer relations should only be regulated by law. This makes me pro-regulation and anti-market, but unfortunately I see exactly zero ways in which market can make contracts better. What are you expected to do in this situation - quit?
It's only "anti-market" if you fall into the common fallacy of conflating ideas of individual and economic freedom with the functioning of the markets. It's not at all the case that increasing say contractual freedom is always coincident with the improved functioning of the markets. The classic example is anti-trust law. Laws banning producers from forming cartels to fix prices is a restriction on contractual freedom, but they're a restriction that produces better, more competitive markets.
There are a lot of considerations on the elasticity of demand for labor, information asymmetries between employer and employee, relative bargaining leverage, etc, that weigh in favor of laws to regulate the labor market. I think a great example is bans on NDA's or non-competes. They help make the labor market more liquid and prevent anti-competitive labor practices, even though they are a restriction on contractual freedom.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, you can quit and work somewhere else. As if people always have that luxury. What if most companies in your field (e.g computer games) follow similar practices? "Go work at another field"? Why fell prey and bow down, looking for work elsewhere, and not try to change the system instead? If a company didn't allow black or gay employees would that be acceptable, and people be told to just "work somewhere else"? I…
I'm with you, though you're fighting a pointless battle on HN, a great bastion of the privileged who don't even know their own privilege. They are young, male, predominantly white with knowledge that is (almost always) accidentally gained in a field of absurdly high demand. 99.9% of the world doesn't have the leverage we do. The amount of clucking and tsk-tsk-ing HNers do at the rest of the world is sickening. This e…
It's not a pointless battle. There are two possible reactions to any such post: engagement, which provides the possibility of changing the other person's mind, or disengagement, which at minimum gave you a little practice at making your point. The cost is the time and energy expended to write the post in the first place; as long as that doesn't outweigh either possibility, it's not pointless.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's odd for you to point out one of the legal protections unions have without also pointing out the things they are prohibited from doing, such as sympathy strikes, mass picketing, and (in some states) the ability to require a union shop. And the law gives company owners protection against personal liability, and taxes companies different from personal income, while it also prohibits employers from having an unsafe…
A union: some sellers of labor merge into a single legal entity, and it becomes illegal for some purchasers of labor to buy from alternate suppliers. To translate to another field: Apple and MS merge, and now consumers can't use Linux. Laws enforcing a requirement to purchase from a cartel are about as far from a free market as you can get. Saying free market supporters should favor unionization is like saying free m…
Unions don't have a legally enforced monopoly on labor. They obtain a monopoly or oligopoly through market power.
The problem being that without unions, labor becomes subject to oligopsony buying power and Ricardo's Law of Rent kicks in.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's odd for you to point out one of the legal protections unions have without also pointing out the things they are prohibited from doing, such as sympathy strikes, mass picketing, and (in some states) the ability to require a union shop. And the law gives company owners protection against personal liability, and taxes companies different from personal income, while it also prohibits employers from having an unsafe…
A union: some sellers of labor merge into a single legal entity, and it becomes illegal for some purchasers of labor to buy from alternate suppliers. To translate to another field: Apple and MS merge, and now consumers can't use Linux. Laws enforcing a requirement to purchase from a cartel are about as far from a free market as you can get. Saying free market supporters should favor unionization is like saying free m…
At issue is the part "laws enforcing a requirement."
I'm hard pressed to think of any advocate of a free market who wants this law in place.
But a closed shop arose not from legal statute but by an agreement between the company and the union. There's no need for government involvement, except to settle contract disagreement.
In fact, it's quite the opposite! Closed shops are illegal in the US, under Taft-Hartley Act, though they are legal in some other countries. Union shops are legal, except where the states have prohibited that practice.
The question to the audience is, shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND those which take power away from unions?
If your concern is about monopoly powers, well, 1) that's a restriction of free trade, so our hypothetical free market advocate might not want those restrictions either, and 2) why aren't they regulated under anti-monopoly laws, rather than specific anti-union laws?
As to the net neutrality issue, well, that's a mixture of morality and an abuse of monopoly power. I believe you're only focusing on the latter issue for now. (And I think our government is and has been entirely too closely intertwined with business, and especially big business, for too long, which has allowed these abuses to grow.)
Is an employer a sort of monopolist? I believe they are. While there are exceptions (IT in the Bay Area during the dot-com era being an obvious one), for many people it is not easy to quit and easily find new employment. Otherwise Nevada wouldn't have a 10% unemployment rate. The problem with monopolies though isn't that they are monopolies, but that they can abuse their monopoly power.
You rightly pointed out that unions can abuse their monopoly power. But so too can companies.
So the modified question to the audience is: shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND which take power away from unions, so long as there is no abuse of the monopoly power?
Unfortunately, the easy answer by an anti-union person is that unions are, by definition, an abuse of monopoly power, so this question has no real utility. And I can't come up with a better phrasing.
Re: The Sex Tape Litmus Test
#70California has a nice law that says that the employee owns IP created on his own time, unrelated to work, etc. This is a reason I moved to CA: the state I was in lacked such a law, and all the tech companies had contracts that failed the sex tape test. I suspect that for a place to flourish like Silicon Valley, it needs a law that protects self bootstrapping startups.
There is such a law but you should not assume it means what you think it means. Talk to a legal professional if it's important to you. One IP lawyer I interacted with maintained that the rulings in actual court practice are very unfavorable to the moonlighting employees. To the point that CA labor code 2870 might as well not exist (although of course he didn't say that in so many words.) "Actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer" can be made to mean anything. I asked, "Say I worked for a company that makes software for medical devices, and I work on cell phone apps in my spare time, could they still claim that it's related to their research and development?" He said, "Yes."