I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions. I don't need someone to do it for me, and I certainly do not want to be forced into such an arrangement. Just because it's something you personally find advantageous doesn't mean others feel the same way, and no one should ever be forced into it.
>I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions.
You can, and the company can choose to not hire you. There is a huge power imbalance between employers and employees. Right now, this is muted because the job market is so tight. This will not be true forever.
> Just because it's something you personally find advantageous doesn't mean others feel the same way, and no one should ever be forced into it.
As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
I noticed you've emphasized this twice. You have to admit that this pro-active idea of "join a union before you _really_ need the union" is not that compelling of a sales pitch to a lot of developers who already have good paying jobs. It's human nature.
>I never understand employees who don't want to unionize.
Do you really want to understand? I think the reasons are obvious: most programmers don't see any economic benefits to paying ~$500 (or whatever amount) annual union dues for very little gain.
If you can prove to developers that paying $X would return tangible benefits in excess of those fees, there would be an unstoppable movement. The proof isn't there yet.
As many programmers have testified, they already get excellent pay, benefits, work hours, etc without union representation. Yes, of course some programmers are suffering in terrible jobs but not enough of them (yet) outnumber the people who don't want to pay for a union.
I can easily understand why some programmers want a union. But it's a mystery why union supporters also can't see why some don't want it.
Virtually every other high paying profession has unions by another name, namely professional organizations who often are responsible for things like licensing, ethics enforcement, ect.
Should Software Engineers want to remain a part of the professional class over the long term, it would be ignorant to not push for these things and introduce further supply restrictions around who can and cannot be a software engineer just as how accountants, lawyers, actuaries, ect have all done before them.
The NCEES does offer a software engineering PE exam. But, that's meaningless when anyone can be a dev because there are no limits to who can be hired for what purpose in software, really.
I'm someone is and has had very senior roles in software development without any formal education past high school, for the past 24 years. I'd rather not have a program that requires such in this area of work. There are already enough businesses that won't hire me for a give role because of their internal requirements for certain positions, I'd rather not.
I sympathize with that, and I was in no way advocating the PE exam for software development (although I could see it being of use in certain areas - it could be useful for roles involving risk similar to the risks that usually lead to other engineering disciplines having that requirement). But with how many CRUD apps are in existence, it's wholly unreasonable to expect all developers to get a 4 year degree and pass the PE exam.
When unions were first starting, people were literally putting their lives on the line to protest and strike. State troops (in various states) were called, protesters were killed. Frankly, today isn't that bad for most people. Personally, I don't have a problem with unions existing as a protected option. But insisting they exist is akin to Communism imho.
>But insisting they exist is akin to Communism imho.
This is funny for me to read, because you probably intended to imply that's a bad thing. I'd also question whether the forms of domination which the founders of the unions of old has decreased or just changed form - and even given that it has decreased, what is an acceptable level of exploitation? I would say none, and many union members would agree with that supposition.
Today not being that bad means that today is still bad.
It should stop where the liberty eroded for anyone is greater than the good provided to someone else. Also, where is the exploitation? Are people locked into contracts and cannot leave their job? Most of these jobs are in states where non-competes are not enforceable.
It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation. As I said, I'm not even anti union. I would rather see a guild around software development over a union though, based on reputation over protecting the bad performers. It could be considered A union, but wouldn't act like a typical union in practice.
If you are more senior, and submit that a junior is ready to move into a journeyman role, your reputation is also at least partially on the line if they cannot do the work, or put in the effort to get there.
No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
Some theorists define exploitation in capitalist society as unequal exchange of labour, see John Roemer for instance; other more traditional critiques see it similarly but it may apply individually (such as Marx's theory), and yet others see it as a class issue. Of these, they can be grouped into PECP (Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle) and CECP (Class-exploitation Correspondence Principle). There's a lot of talk and debate as to whether which of these, if any, is a viable or possible way to characterize modern relations of production.
>It's a trade, one person trades their time, knowledge effort and skill, the other trades money and other compensation.
In the employment relationship, this trade is assymetrical, hence the need for either strong labour laws, a rich union culture or both.
>No person's wants should ever infringe on another's rights.
The critique of capitalism begins with a critique of rights-based thinking. In short, some people don't believe that rights are a useful tool to characterise how society ought to look, since it is clear that despite universal rights, some are clearly more able to take advantage of them than others. The propertyless have right to property. So what? Where does that get them most of the time?
I believe that the existence of unions is necessary. Without any unions worker rights would degrade pretty significantly. I also strongly believe that unions aren't the right answer in most situations.
One example - teachers. In the public sector, teachers are unionized yet underpaid, and in general terms, have unfavorable work conditions.
In the private sector, teachers get paid much better and have the freedom to actually run their classroom in the way they see fit.
The union isn't the cause of this disparity, but it clearly doesn't overcome it.
>In the private sector, teachers get paid much better and have the freedom to actually run their classroom in the way they see fit.
While this might be true wherever you are from, it is definitely not universal. Every US state I have lived in has been the opposite.
At a private school, the advantages to teachers are the student base is self-selected and can be expelled, and the school can teach things a public school cannot (often religious).
At a public school, pay, benefits, and job protections are much better.
Being able to "run your classroom the way they see fit" is a school-by-school work culture thing, but a teacher with more job protections would always have more leeway in how they ran their classroom. A teacher working at-will could never truly run their classroom the way they saw fit, because "do X or you're fired" is always a possible ultimatum.
Honestly I think unions are redundant when you have properly functioning governments.
Ideally the government should have worker protections in place that do exactly what a union does.
Of course in reality you need groups to represent the workers to put pressure on the government to do that. But I'd rather give money to groups like the EFF who specifically push policy and lawsuits over a group like a union.
This is an assumption, and a logical fallacy. The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not. Trying to do so is the bottomless rabbit hole we call ethics. OP is correctly pointing out that your view of unionizing being advantageous is subjective.
>You are contradicting yourself. If a union could be a good or a bad thing, then one cannot use the argument that we do things for the greater good without presupposing that a union is a good thing. You are indeed assuming your own premise as true, which is indeed a logical fallacy.
No I'm not. In these comments I am arguing against the premise that a closed shop union is automatically invalid because the coercion would be wrong. The advantages that a union can have is not subjective under pretty much any reasonable ethical framework. If your ethical system can not produce judgments about public policy based on evidence, then it is useless.
Subjectivity is a different thing from uncertainty. The goal of ethical systems is to provide a way to make ethical decisions based on evidence. If we can agree on some ethical concepts, then objective decisions can be made given those concepts. The selection of an ethical system is subjective, but it's pretty obvious that it must allow for coercion.
Your comment seems dismissive of the notion of ethical behavior. We can argue the finer points, but we can agree for example killing let’s say innocent people is bad. Feeding hungry people is good. The point of collective power is not to agree on everything, but to find enough in common agreement to organize around it. As a collective you can better negotiate for your common interests.
> We can argue the finer points, but we can agree for example killing let’s say innocent people is bad. Feeding hungry people is good.
This is simply moral relativism. That argument holds up only under specific, ad-hoc circumstances. A group of people can very easily come to a conclusion that an action should be taken because they agree on it, and find out later that the consequences of that action were detrimental.
Yes, decisions must be made under uncertainty, because we don't ever know the exact outcome. Sometimes, even when acting rationally using available evidence, a decision winds up having negative consequences. Them's the breaks in our uncertain reality.
If a group of people collectively make a decision that is not consistent with evidence and their ethical system, then they are not making decisions correctly. I don't think anyone here is debating that decisions can be incorrect.
No it's not. The poster was seemingly espousing a belief that because he didn't want a union, it is morally wrong to force one on him. That is inconsistent with a belief in the benefits that government coercion can sometimes be a good idea. A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing, but to dismiss it with a rights-based argument simply doesn't make sense.
> The whole problem of doing something "for the greater good" is that no one on Earth can definitively define what is good and what is not.
All endeavors may fail. We make decisions based on probability of outcomes. This is the same for both individual and collective decisions. If we cannot make collective decisions under uncertainty, then there is no point to any government whatsoever. Also, if we cannot come up with a baseline of ethics to evaluate possible outcomes, then we can't make any collective decision either.
> A union could conceivably be a bad thing or a good thing
> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
You are contradicting yourself. If a union could be a good or a bad thing, then one cannot use the argument that we do things for the greater good without presupposing that a union is a good thing. You are indeed assuming your own premise as true, which is indeed a logical fallacy.
>> As a society, we make decisions against the will of individuals for a greater good all the time.
> Is it hard to see why an individual might be against that?
It's not hard to see, but individuals who prioritize their own desires over the greater good of their community are often (rightly) regarded as selfish. It is hard to have much empathy for someone who has their selfishness thwarted.
Fair point, but applied to the original comment, is "not wanting to join a union" so selfish that one can't even understand how someone would have that position? I'd consider anyone who thinks so to be thoroughly ideologically possessed.
The poster I was responding to was actually asserting that unions are bad because he would be forced to pay the dues, which you also seem to be asserting here. An argument that unions are bad because closed shops violate an individual's autonomy is completely incoherent if one also holds a belief that sometimes coercion is justified. This particular logical fallacy is commonly used by libertarians to dismiss policy proposals out of hand, in my experience.
To see why this belief is fallacious, abstract the proposition "Unions violate individual autonomy, therefore unions are bad" to "P violates individual autonomy, therefore P is bad." Replace P with criminal penalties, taxation, etc, and it is immediately obvious that this belief is logically incoherent if one also holds the belief that civilization is preferable to the state of nature.
Logical consistency matters. You can't make rational decisions without it. Either you believe that sometimes coercion is morally justified to achieve other ends, or you cannot have a consistent belief that any societal organization is morally correct. We can debate the pros and cons of unions, and yes, there are cons. But it makes no sense to dismiss it out of hand due to an incoherent moral belief.
You can coherently believe that coercion in and of itself is a bad thing, and I agree. That must be weighed against the benefits of said coercion when making such decisions. For example, most people don't like to go to prison, so I think there should be a really good reason to violate someone's autonomy in such a massive way. Thus, I only support prison for serious crimes that I really don't want people to do.
Taxation is also coercion. I don't like paying my taxes, but I support coercive measures to make sure everyone does because I like having a government.
> I can negotiate my own salary, hours, and working conditions
I'm represented by a union at my job and I also negotiate these things myself (well, the union has a bargain for minimum working conditions, so I can't say "if you pay me $1000 I'll move my desk to the HVAC room"). The union comes into play more for things like health insurance and retirement benefits. I can't imagine an individual having much luck getting their insurance copays reduced, but the union seems to have a decent amount of success.
I agree that no one should be forced. However without organized labor most people may be negotiating from a weaker position, and therefore free to negotiate their own (low) salary. Collectives do have real power.
I think a lot of people would be better off with a union, though really I more advocate cooperatives.
Actually, personally hiring an agent seems like a GREAT idea, and these things exist in all jobs, even if it's not common. Your incentives are quite closely aligned.
Having a collective agent is almost the polar opposite.
Can you explain how is it almost the polar opposite?
Things like retirement and health benefits are not negotiated at the individual level. having a personal representative likely wouldn’t help much in that area, but a union would.
Sure, maybe "polar opposite" was a bit much, but there's a big difference between negotiating for a collective set of shared benefits vs specifically negotiating for your interests. Of course, your personal agent has other clients, but is not only negotiating for precisely what you ask for (of course you will not get everything you want!), but is also likely not even negotiating on behalf of anyone else against the same organization!
In the event that your personal agent is negotiating for you personally, but also for several teammates, of course there is then a conflict and your interests may be traded for the interests of another one of his clients, which is an issue.
This is still better than having your interests pooled together, but not as good as having ONLY your interests advocated for.
It's far from certain that your interests get traded for someone else's; just as likely the opposite. Further, on some things you are in a much weaker position individually than you are collectively.
It's not objectively better to negotiate by yourself, stop pretending like it is.
Threadripper 3 with 64 cores is going to be mindblowing! Not that long ago since Parallella board advertised 64 slow cores and soon we can get all x86/x64 high-end cores like that!
It is pretty crazy. I felt the same way. Individual x64 cores tend to be so much more powerful than other architectures, and now single chips will effectively have 128 logical cores.
For my purposes (large builds and rendering), I think RAM prices are holding back AMD here. To feed that many cores, you want really big RAM sticks. The CPUs have become a comparatively small cost compared to the RAM these days.
I've recently built a TR-based DL/ML workstation and bought 128GB ECC 2,667MHz UDIMMs for ~$1600, roughly the same price as 2990WX, but would have vastly preferred to get 256GB instead. Unfortunately, only Samsung is now sampling 32GB ECC DDR4 UDIMMs - I haven't seen them anywhere yet, and I expect the price is going to be insanely high :-(
Speaking of insanely high RAM prices, I just came across receipts for a PC I built in 1992. So 26 years ago, I paid $495 for 4MB. Yup, that's MB, not GB.
Admittedly these were AUD rather than USD. So maybe halve that for the USD cost.
When we complain about how expensive memory and compute, a slightly longer term view shows it's still pretty good value!
You realize that it's not about compared to 25 years ago though, right? When I looked at the beginning of this year, the same RAM size and speed was about twice as expensive as it was two years ago.
The most important bit WRT to TR3 is going to be the central I/O chiplet instead of dividing memory controllers between individual Zeppelin dies. No more NUMA headaches to deal with on their workstation/enthusiast CPU's, I'm glad that AMD saw that such an approach wasn't going to work long-term (at least not for the time being when basically anything outside large database systems and hypervisors lack even basic NUMA-awareness).
Do you know if that would allow all cores to have the same memory access speed like the current (16c in 2990WX) directly connected ones, or if it imposes a penalty (the same?) on all of them?
It's really hard to say what the memory latency is going to be, but at the very least this will mean that latency will remain consistent for access to every installed DIMM regardless of which CCX the request originates from.
On that note I'm really interested to see if a dedicated I/O chiplet will help with the memory frequency scaling issues with see with the IMC on Zen/Zen+. I'm not sure what made the integrated controller on Zen so finicky compared to Intel's IMC, but this move will at the very least allow AMD to bin memory controllers if they want to or maybe work around some issues with their design.
Free Markets aren't amoral at all, if I produce something of value and we swap value, I fail to see how that is amoral. In fact, preventing that transaction is amoral. Slavery itself was amoral, and codified and enforced by the state.
Many in the South abhorred slavery and segregation, but had no choice but to follow the law.
Killing and maiming people has been a State activity since they've existed. It's one of the things they're very efficient at.
This is some absolutely disgusting historical revisionism with regards to how the south treated slavery.
Make no mistake, Slavery was an intended feature. Not a bug, nor a result of a state gone wild. It was considered part of their economy and part of their free market.
I think you confused the words "amoral" and "immoral". OP was talking about "amoral" - lack of concern about moral principles. You seem to be talking about "immoral" - actively breaking moral principles.
Wow. Laws which were put in place by plantation and slave owners wishing to preserve the profit and status quo they created. They controlled most of the machinery of government as well as their little plantation.
Slavery was only ended at the insistence of laws put in place by the state.
I wonder if we'll look back at the Bloomberg "chip implant" story as fake news, and if that's the case, can you imagine the police breaking into their offices with a warrant because of it?
Fraud is one thing, but hiring some e-celeb to pitch your product isn't something we need jack-booted thugs kicking in doors for. We don't even have an objective definition of "fake news", and you'll never convince me the State should be the one defining or enforcing that.
If this stands as-is, it could set a precedent enabling registrars to hijack domains, which is frightening.
Netsol absolutely has the right to no longer provide them DNS and/or registration, but they cannot simply place the domain on hold indefinitely due to their own capriciousness.
How is it acceptable to let a corporation arbitrarily decide, after taking your money, that they no longer wish to provide you with that service AND block your ability to use what you paid for?
"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."
For all the talk of "negative externalities" I see on HN and the valley in general, I never see people discussing the rampant "negative externalities" of the laws and regulations we pass. It's unfortunate there's so little introspection going on, and so much reliance on the monopoly of the Government to further what Group A or Group B wants. (But it's OK, because I agree with Group A!)
> "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."
A cute saying, but misleading. A government big enough to impose even a modest constraint on violent crime is also more than big enough to take away everything you have; anything weak enough to avoid that threat is not the government and will be replaced in that role but something else that is. So, mitigating that threat necessarily is about managing aspects of government other than its size.
Because corporations have never ever colluded together to repel interests from outside their industries, or participate in asymmetric exchanges, or have more knowledge about you than you do them.
Or because you seem to believe you can opt out of anything. Try lasting too long in many industries without a cell phone number. Oops, it's a natural monopoly. Try opting out of buying a car when you don't agree with the policies of any auto manufacturer. Can you even understand a product's supply chain to see if there aren't companies there that you vehemently disagree with?
What about your peers? If you work in most industries there's always a push towards standardized solutions. Try forcing a company to use all open source software and see how far that gets you.
We haven't even gotten to the point where a large corporation has enough power to break or make small towns due to the capital they bring in. They have them by the balls.
No, your statement has no factual basis whatsoever.
The mining companies, however, refused to meet the demands of the workers and instead hired Baldwin-Felts Agents, equipped with high-powered rifles, to guard the mines, but more important to be strikebreakers.[2][1] After the Agents arrived, the miners either moved out or were evicted from the houses they had been renting from the coal companies, moving into coal camps that were being supported by the Union.[1] Approximately 35,000 people lived in these coal camps.[1] It wasn't until a month after the strike began that it became hostile with the arrival of the Baldwin-Felts Agents who provoked the miners.[1]
So when corporation lobbies the government to eminent domain your property, how does one opt out of that transaction? Ultimate power is money as it buys anything.
But at that point you've brought the government back in to it and we're right back where we started. If the government didn't have the ability to create monopolies for the sake of their donors, it wouldn't be a problem.
Monopolies are natural; they are the end state of most markets in most market economies. Capital distribution follows a power law, and that implies that a few big players always end up controlling the majority of a market unless you explicitly break them up. This is really basic.
>Monopolies are natural; they are the end state of most markets in most market economies. Capital distribution follows a power law, and that implies that a few big players always end up controlling the majority of a market unless you explicitly break them up.
The latter does not imply the former. A monopoly is defined as _a single big player_. That's what the mono means, one! Like in monorail or monotone. If there are "a few big players", that is by definition an oligopoly, not a monopoly. This is _really_ basic English.
That's both incredibly condescending and wrong. "One mega company owning every industry in the world" is not the only way to have a monopoly.
You can have monopolies on specific industries or in specific regions (e.g. AT&T and Comcast split up towns in a state and each one is the only provider in that town).
So was the parent's statement of "This is really basic" when they hadn't provided any evidence or even a clear claim (did they mean a few big players controlling each market, as in the fuel market, apple market, etc., or a few big players controlling a market as in the American market, European market etc).
The corporations are limited in their power to compel you by the government. Remove the government, and they will compel you to do whatever they feel is in their best interest.
If your choices for the food you eat and housing near work, work itself are all determined/influenced by corporations, then "opting out" is not possible
