751–760 of 1001 posts
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That was discovered and busted by the government. It appears unions aren't necessary to end wage fixing cartels. And especially, note that unions are wage fixing cartels!
You should see how small my check was for restitution payments. I really don't think that the government fixed the problem effectively.
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Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make. Perks are t…
> Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't co…
You seem to be referring to large faceless corporations that are ordering in bulk that way.
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From what I have seen it’s mostly management that gets greedy first.
Who was first doesn't change the fact that unions are sometimes unreasonable. Though I have to say most companies I've seen with evil unions have management that deserves the worst a union can do. I've seen cases of good management with bad unions harming everybody (except the union leaders), but they are generally rare.
The truth is that ~7% of French workers were unionized last I checked — a dysmal failure for these associations, an all-time low that's been true for decades. And yet they take the right to block the whole country on issue X or Y because, well, they're official unions protected by the law. They are systemically funded by regulation, like social security or any other de facto 'tax'.
I would generally claim that in very different ways, the French and Americans are just as bad at unions — totally fails the point and disturbs (destroys, even) much more than it creates. I've heard great things about the German approach, but I can't substantiate first-hand. It's portrayed as a great synergy between management and unions to increase the value of the company as a whole while redistributing wealth (whether money, time, privileges...) in a fair manner.
It's no rocket science either to treat everyone well, which tells you how uncooperative human beings can become when circle-jerking too hard (we are biologically, socially very protective of "our own" and very hostile to "others", the question being where each of us puts the limit).
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Democracy is also a system that produces BETTER decisions. Sure tyranny can make decisions "efficiently" but that's not that great when those decisions are terrible. Democracy: Fewer macro, more micro, better decisions Command-Control: More macro, fewer micro, terrible decisions. EDIT: Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making" vs command-control which is "centralized decision making". When I…
Not necessarily. Democracy could only work effectively if most of the population is very well educated. Which is not the case, specially in under developed countries; Most of the time, the ignorance and lack of a more developed consciousness in a country citizens benefits those that are in power, as ignorant people are much easier to manipulate so that it stays that way;
I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.
Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.
The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.
So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.
Another way to look at "fitting in" is "wanting the right things." Get the elites to want what you want and the broader population will tend to follow. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desir...
The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.
Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.
The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)
The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.
Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bottom, is prone to envy.
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Why do you think that strong unions will fight for collective negotiation of wages? Sweden has one of the strongest union system in the world and at the same time is one of the most entrepreneurial nations with high wages and lots of billionaires, salaries are lower than the US but they are still negotiated and not fixed by the union. The minimum wage for a specific job might be but apart from that I'm free to negoti…
It's very difficult to actually grow a company in a country like Sweden because of the regulations and taxes you are required to pay after a certain amount of employees.
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They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
Yeah this discussion appears to have been hijacked by thinly veiled anti-union astroturfing. I would be highly skeptical of all posts in this thread. Many of the posts literally using the exact phrases commonly repeated by anti-union propagandists. This makes me wonder if Silicon Valley is starting to see the writing on the wall and pay for disinformation campaigns in places where engineers regularly read and post. I…
I would not be surprised if there is some low level effort amongst some of the larger companies in silicon valley.... especially after the whole issue of not bidding up talent or stealing talent from each other...
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Why do you think that strong unions will fight for collective negotiation of wages? Sweden has one of the strongest union system in the world and at the same time is one of the most entrepreneurial nations with high wages and lots of billionaires, salaries are lower than the US but they are still negotiated and not fixed by the union. The minimum wage for a specific job might be but apart from that I'm free to negoti…
It's very difficult to actually grow a company in a country like Sweden because of the regulations and taxes you are required to pay after a certain amount of employees.
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Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.