If you've for some reason been listening exclusively to the anti-BLM garbage being spewed by right wing media, sure, I guess that's a reasonable thing to believe.
But there's a massive difference in saying "Policing in this country is broken - cops kill too many people" versus "Cops and lot of white _and_ black people.. see? BLM is a pointless movement". Right wingers seem to love to pretend they're saying the former when they actually mean the latter.
I think there's actually a case to be made that there is widespread soft corporate censorship enforcing a new orthodoxy on race discourse (and other things), I'm just waiting on somebody to make it rather than just firing another blind volley in the culture war.
I would agree that there has been a lot of problematic race rhetoric posed by certain BLM aligned folks.. and would definitely posit that such soft censorship is a problem for the development of a mutually beneficial understanding of the racial problems plaguing this country between members of different races (there might be a more elegant way to state this).
An example of this aggressive, non-empathetic, censoring attitude that grinds my gears would be when that FB employee tried to publicly shame a colleague for opting not to put a BLM banner on the developer docs of RecoilJS. The whole mantra of "Silence is violence" can apparently now be used to accuse anyone of the terrible thoughtcrime of not talking about racism at all times.. even in places and situations where it doesn't make sense or wouldn't help the cause.
Extrapolate this out to how many people are unwilling to consider or merely listen to viewpoints that aren't in complete alignment (with whatever the accuser holds to be the absolute truth of non-racism).. yuck.
Projecting in the sense that.. my personal experience with this viewpoint has been exclusively made by friends, family, and randos on social media parroting this exact viewpoint for the exact reason I posited. Sure.
But yeah such political content is unfortunately bound to be flagged in HN unless it has some sort of explicit tech connection.
I feel similarly, but I think a big part of that is that my schooling was so bad. Ideally I'd have not had to work and actually been learning something (and that's the goal I have for everyone, as a collective political desire).
On the other hand, I notice people who didn't have to work as kids and went straight into college and respectable white collar jobs usually have absolutely no idea how the rest of their fellow citizens actually work and live, so I'm thankful for the perspective.
When an objectively flimsy discourse like that circulates widely you have to ask yourself what its actual function is. Its apparent function of describing the world accurately is not being fulfilled, but the discourse persists, so what is its less apparent function (and you got it: it's to naturalize exploitation)?
> Being an independent contractor does not mean being independent of rules
Surely it at least means being independent from some of the rules that you have to follow if you have a full time job, or why do it? If it doesn't at least mean setting your own price, then what in the world is the point?
Imagine you are freelancing on a software project but you can't ever make any good money because, strangely, the price you're allowed to charge is set by Stackoverflow and not you. Seems kind of presumptuous of them to decide that for me, no?
I don't understand why so many people in tech will bend over backwards to not notice the most obvious, basic nature of the economic arrangement between these firms and the people who do all the work. Just look at this stuff straight on. It's obvious what it is. Imagine yourself as a worker instead of a boss for once.
It's not an unmitigated good - unions are just as capable of becoming "another boss" as any other human institution. Simply supporting "unions" without asking "what kinds of unions" is opting people into being harmed coming and going.
Unions are good inasmuch they allow labor to bargain with capital by underwriting demands for better pay and conditions with the threat of work stoppage.
If unions aren't doing that because they are compromised or sclerotic or whatever, then they aren't much use. Who would argue.
A business that pays poverty wages is insufficiently socially useful imo. We do too much for it; it does too little for us.
> some government idea of enough pay
Misleading. There is an objective amount of pay that is or is not enough to live on in a given place. The government tries to guess at this sometimes, for the purpose of setting min wage, but that value is objective and exists independently. It's not some arbitrary bureaucratic thing.
Not everyone who works does it for the goal of "living on" that one job. Some people work for supplemental income. Some people (teens) work for spending money and to gain experience. Some people (retirees) work for something to do other than sit at home.
If all jobs had to pay enough to "live on" then most of the people above would be able to work at all, because the jobs simply would not exist.
I mean, me too, but it's insane that it's a binary where you either "are a contractor" or "are an employee". if you took this framework away and replaced it with a more flexible one (ideally decoupled from healthcare..) people would invent all kinds of other mutually beneficial relations.
Still, there is an extreme range within those parameters.
What is 'decent housing' for instance? An apartment in the affordable part of town, shared with 3 room-mates? Your own condo? Your own house in the suburbs? A home in a gated community?
Is 'decent food' the minimum amount of recommended nutrition as defined by the USDA? Or eating out 3 nights a week? Or enjoying prime rib whenever you feel like it?
Is "decent healthcare" a checkup every year? Or a Cadillac insurance plan?
Any combination of these could be called an acceptable standard of living depending on who you ask. It's totally subjective, but the difference between them is tens of thousands of dollars a year.
"Enough income to afford decent housing and food, healthcare, etc."
And how do you define those? I've heard people on here complain that $200k isn't enough for a good life with a family. Yet I make less than half that and pay all the bills for my family. Clearly standard of living and cost of living can have a huge fluctuations on location and what one thinks they are entitled to under a decent life.
For example, a studio apartment in a bad school district might be decent for a single person with no kids. Yet that likely would not meet the definition of decent for a family of 4. Unless, that was a step up from wherever you were living before (maybe on the street). Some people might say they have to eat out or have steaks to have decent food. But others might just want a discount grocery story with freash fruits and veggies with off-brand staples to meet their criteria of decent.
It all depends on people's expectations and needs.
I know multiple people who have never worked a day in their lives. They get food stamps, free health care and live in a $300/month apartment subsidized by the state (aka free).
They basically make money buying and selling items occasionally, when they see a deal. That's enough for them to buy all the "luxuries" they want ($5k car, $2k laptop) every couple years.
I think there's a big difference between peoples desires/definition of acceptable and what they put in to obtain them.
Yes or no. Take your pick. It's not such a hard question that there's no answer. You can make a policy on this stuff. We solve harder problems all the time.
There is enough space to move around in the dwelling. It is not falling apart. It is not infested with rats. There is clean running water. Come on. Stop pretending this is a hard question.
It is bad faith or sheer ignorance to think this isn't a hard question. Consider that even people spending their own money on their own housing often can't define their own parameters, which is why touring houses is a thing. Now scale this out to the population of a country and creating a single bar of "decent housing" is incredibly hard.
And then that's just talking about the structure. What about the location - if a person's entire support system is in one location but the available free housing is 75 miles away and they don't have a car, that isn't decent. This comes up all the time re the affordability of the Bay Area where locals get priced out, someone says "just move to stockton" and the resident feels it's not fair (or "decent") to have to leave where they were born and raised.
You could link location to workplace I suppose but then that would create massive downward pressure on wages since people would be willing to sacrifice pay in order to live where they prefer. This sounds like a net negative.
This question is only hard if you haven't thought about it for more than like 2 seconds.
> even people spending their own money on their own housing often can't define their own parameters
I can't believe I'm spelling this out. A person picking out their ideal home has trouble figuring out exactly what they want. Ok. We all don't ever know exactly what we want. It's the human condition. But I don't want to live in grinding poverty. I don't need to look within to figure that one out.
I don't want my home to be dilapidated, overcrowded, full of pests and toxins, or to not exist.
If you're still pretending to have a hard time with the definition of "decent," consult a dictionary.
This line of argument is absurd word chopping. "Oh my, I could never in good conscience try to lock down a subtle word like 'decent' into a singular meaning, guess drivers will have to stay earning a sub-living wage forever. Sorry! Definitions are hard!"
I didn't say (and nobody in this thread except for your straw man said) that the definition is too hard to create and therefore we should just throw our hands up and walk away. Literally nobody is saying that.
What I am arguing against is your baseless assertion that defining "decent housing" is easy, and that everyone who thinks it's hard is simply being obstructionist/anti-poor/whatever.
The closest thing we might have today to an across-the-board definition of "decent housing" might be HUD's FHA standards which -- to your shock and amazement, I assume -- is much more complex than "must be decent"
This is a discussion about whether gig economy workers ought to be classed as employees by the government. The reason that is a salient question is because a lot of these workers can't make ends meet under the current structure.
The current structure treats them as serfs and says what really matters is the efficiency of the overall system, or its ability to generate a profit for its shareholders, or whatever. In short, the problem is these guys work too much in exchange for too little. Whatever theories anybody might have about the market, the role of the state in the market, etc, those are the basic facts on the ground: over-exploited workers seeking dignity where they currently lack it. The idea that they are "contractors," in the way that you or I might be contractors sometimes (I assume you are a tech worker), as experts in a technical field, is a sick joke. They don't have any power to get what they need, in that market, as individuals (they aren't even allowed to set their own prices!). If they could bargain collectively, they might. That's the context here.
When somebody enters the discussion and says, "Well, yeah, but what IS dignity, anyway, when you really think about it, man???" you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe they're doing it out of a devotion to clarifying terms but because they just want to take Uber's side in the fight. Yes, it's obscurantism.
This is a weird phenomenon that I see across discussion platforms - it's like reverse sealioning, where legitimate good-faith questions are taken as evidence of supporting the other position.
In deeply complex and high-stakes systems, the details matter a lot; I haven't thought about it too deeply but my intuition says that they're the only thing that matters. Unintended consequences (like my salary depression example above) need to be carefully considered. There is inherent inequality built into a naive system like you suggest: an apartment in SF is worth multiples of an apartment in OK, are we alright with that? (don't answer, just an example). The details and their impact are important.
These discussions often miss the point and get bogged down in trying to prove or disprove individual instances of bias or censorship.
The problem for me is prior to all of that.
If the New York Times (say) lacks financial independence, then it will always be structurally indebted to whoever foots the bill. It's just a matter of fact built into the nature of the relationship between the two entities.
Facebook executives may not have established the relationship simply to "buy off" the Times. I imagine most of them have a real commitment to "fixing the news" in their hearts. But it doesn't matter.
If news agencies depend on organizations outside of themselves for the basic necessities of their existence and reproduction, then they aren't independent. They are dependent on those organizations, by definition. What they can report on now has conditions and limits. I want to emphasize that this is a restriction on what it is *possible* to report on. It might not ever produce a distinction that you could easily measure. This is a different, and worse, problem than Facebook purchasing some flattering reporting. Facebook now (obscurely, tacitly) sets the structural conditions (without having to explicitly state any rules or appear to be a bad guy in any way).
It's not hard to think of an example of reporting which could become impossible under these conditions. Imagine if the Times, due to some public outcry, or for whatever reason, took a major rhetorical turn toward combating digital surveillance, just like they did in the last year with racism and issues of cultural morality. A sudden "moral clarity" emerged around topics that the paper used to try to be neutral about.
Whether you like those developments or not, I imagine most people will agree that the employees of the New York Times, not executives at Facebook, or anybody else, should decide the course of the Times' reporting. An existential financial dependence will of course condition all reporting on the maintenance of that dependence.
