Oh, it's definitely in line with what the rest of the left is doing. You should work harder to stay abreast of current events in the post-Contributor Covenant world, like what happened to the Python dev.
Yeah I'm not thrilled with the level of effort in his replies so far, but I still detect a weird quasi-earnestness at times.
You know, with the amount of time I put into *some* of these posts (not all of them, as evidenced by some really ridiculous typos), I really should have some moddable socket puppets lying around so they get seen. Alas, I do not.
That's straight up insane. Even for a devil's advocate, that's just insane. Yes I understand technology can sometimes fail but that doesn't mean a lack of technology is automatically easier, like TFS says.
Looking in your wallet to see how much money you have left is not and cannot, in itself, be a good way to "track your spending more easily." More easily than *what*? What could possibly be a LESS effecient or reliable way of tracking spending than looking in your pocket and counting out the bills to see how much money you have, trying to remember how much you originally withdrew, trying to remember how much is in your bank account, trying to remember what the recent cable bill hike was, trying to remember *when* the money was spent (last week did you you spending $10 a day or did you spent $30 in one day and $40 the next and nothing for the rest of the week) etc.
This is not a method of tracking how much you spend. There's no "tracking" going on here whatsoever. It's a lack of tracking, and they're saying it's a better way of tracking. If someone wants to just say "well I have a great memory and don't need a paper trail", that's fine, but that's not what was said.
I responded in greater length in my other reply, but a simpler way to decide which one of us is delusional here is to simply examine TFA.
So put aside everything I said about regret and female peer pressure and wet t-shirt contests... how do you justify your interpretation of (what I call) the left's slut shaming in the context of *this* article? Sony is removing sexually explicit content in games supposedly as part of a cultural response to #MeToo.
Yes. That is not the thing they are complaining about. It's the coercion, the Weinsteins, the "sorry but to advance your career as an actor you are going to have to get your tits out".
But this is *uncritically* removing media *only* because they contain "tits out". It's in no way examining the process to see if any women were coerced into doing something they didn't want... and indeed, in this case the tits are far more likely to be computer generated. So what does any of this have to do with the casting couch or sexual assault? No, this is explicitly, overtly passing judgment that sexual content in media is bad and TFS says they chose to adopt this attitude because of #MeToo.
I maintain that this sort of across the board, un-nuanced demonization of sexual content in media is a form of slut shaming that harms women even if it's being done in their name, because on some level it makes millions of females feel guilty about ever behaving in a way that they've been told leads to the objectification not just themselves, but also somehow all women in general.
The in-practice goals beign pursued and the paternal (a word I use advisedly), sanctimonious tones of voice are extremely similar to the Christian right. The religious right has always attacked female sexuality by talking about self-respect, and the narrative of objectification has the same message at its very core--"don't you want to be more than just a set of tits? if you take your tits out, aren't you afraid people will think less of you?"
This is all candy coated with a narrative of evil masculinity and other identity politic warfare nonsense, but the implications are clear enough. Sony is not concerned for exploited actresses. The issue here is not sniffing out coercion. Sony doesn't care where the tits came from (and indeed, we're most likely talking about 2d cartoons and 3d models with jiggle physics here, not live actresses.) Sony is only concerned with the end product. And (whether rightly or wrongly) they're doing this in the name of the most popular form of modern feminism, #MeToo.
You're twisting yourself in knots and setting off chaff to avoid the real issues here.
No, sensible sex-positive second wave feminists originally coined the term "slut shaming". Modern SJWs might borrow the term whenever a woman is being mocked, but they aren't using it in a sex-positive manner except perhaps by accident (they're primarily using it as part of a nonsensical identity politic narrative of all members of group A oppressing all members of group B. If This sounds like hyperbole, go read the first draft of the Contributor Covenant, one of the most popular CoCs circulating among software projects right now, recently adopted by no less than Linus Torvalds. Yes it's true that language was eventually removed, but it reveals the mindset of the architects of that document, and those same people are still some of the most active SJWs in OSS and indeed maybe the most active in in STEM right now.)
There are a few reasonable sex-positive egalitarians left in the world who still embrace the term "SJW" as a self-descriptor, but they don't yet realize they are in the minority. You may be one of them; I don't know. I haven't seen particularly egregious out of you, but I've not been paying super close attention.
Expressing regret is not intended to shame anyone.
Yes it most likely is. Women tend to rely more on implication than men, particularly techie men.
And even if there was no intended undertone there, even if they have nothing but the purest of feelings for women who participate in wet t-shirt contests and love it, as self-decribed progressive women who are ostensibly holding themselves up as role models (a fairly obvious implicit part of their narrative that young girls are lacking good role models), they're being (at best) extremely reckless. They should be aware of the value judgments they are vocalizing.
It's been years since I read the interviews, but as I recall neither one said "oh, I regret doing that because *personally*, I didn't really want to do it but I let myself get talked into it anyway." It was no, this is *inherently* objectifying and bad.
Have you ever talked down a mortified drunk girl after she's putting her shirt back on at a party? I have. More than once, in fact. And it was pretty clear to me that it wasn't the presence of males that bring out this feeling of embarrassment and regret. If she's not regretful, the guys go "woooo" and she goes "woooo" and life is good. It's only when there's a group of girls (and/or their boyfriends) there that don't go "woo" and she catches a look on their faces that leads to her regret.
(Don't come back at me with some anecdote about a girl who was assaulted at a party. Yes that happens and it's a major problem that needs better pushing back against. But it's totally beside the point. Assault is assault and yes that can lead to shame, but "slut shaming" is something quite different.)
That is not the thing they are complaining about. It's the coercion, the Weinsteins, the "sorry but to advance your career as an actor you are going to have to get your tits out".
The movie Yeardley Smith was topless in was a nothing of a shit independent film (and not of an artsy sort) that did nothing for her career.
More importantly, the wet T-shirt contest Kristen Schaal participated had nothing whatsoever to do with her career. She didn't give some big story about being pressured into it or impressing someone or anything. She just said man, that was such an objectifying thing to do, I wish I hadn't done it. In what way does that not pass value judgment on the hundreds of thousands if not millions of women who've let loose and had fun in a wet t-shirt contest at some point? If you don't think that's a value judgment, man you don't understand how women typically interact.
Complaining about the coercive casting couch is fine. Cultural slut shaming is not. There is widespread demand for sexually suggestive media because this is both an accurate reflection of reality and it caters to basic human hungers. If wom
I have to admit, I laughed pretty hard the first time I saw the picture of the etherkiller. (Several people have made similar cables, usually much less hacky looking, e.g. with matching colored cables.)
I always wondered if some poor bastard ever unwittingly plugged in one of these things that some malicious person left lying around and if so, what happened (and if anyone was ever charged.)
I think that our culture has finally reached the point, at least on a corporate and governmental and celebrity level (though not on an average family unit level), where the left is much more concerned with and vocal about slut shaming and other assorted neopuritan bullshit.
The fact that they do it under the guise is protecting women just makes it all the more reprehensible. I listen to self-identifying progress/"liberal" women make public statements about how much they regret doing nude scenes (Yeardley Smith,voice of Lisa Simpson) or participating in wet T-Shirt contest (Kristen Schaal) earlier in their lives because years later they realized that it degrades and objectifies women and I'm like... who is more going to listen to a statement like that and feel more ashamed? The millions of men who see such things and smiled? Or the millions of women who have participated in such things and smiled?
It's straight up slut shaming and they try to disguise it by pretending that really they're slut shaming men, but really women are far more likely to feel bad about this criticism they're hearing.
It is a normal, typical aspect of female sexuality to enjoy showing off. It's not a male conspiracy; it's a perfectly natural inclination (that is frequently encouraged by men, yes.) And if you tell them they're making objects out of themselves when they do that, you're a slut shaming neo-puritan asshole.
"Directly over", the original paragraph said? Well, maybe I need to see a great circle-generating map to see why that would be the case. The Faroes are pretty far north so there's probably some distortion going on. I don't have a globe handy.
Citing "the rise of the #MeToo movement" [...] concerns about the depiction of women in video games playable on its platform as well as protect children's "sound growth and development."
See, I am completely on board with women speaking up against the "minor" sexual harassments and assaults that millions have been shrugging off because they don't want to cause a fuss.
But no, that's not good enough. It has to be leveraged into some goddamn neopuritan horseshit. What the hell is wrong with the left? It's sort of like how the Occupy Wallstreet movement lost sight of its laudable goal (that actually would've had a lot of bipartisan support, at least among the populace) almost immediately in favor of turning it a generic leftist gripefest.
Actually, this is considerably worse than that. It stealthily slut-shames millions of women (for daring to enjoy or even worse wanting to participate the same risque stuff that men stereotypically enjoy.) A lot of women, the majority in my own experience, enjoy sexy showing off stuff.
Yeah, you could look certainly at it that way. The distinction here between the two being is that Boeing's system directly manipulated the control surfaces whereas Airbus' system merely changed how the pilots were interacting with the control surfaces (gave them the rope with which to hang themselves), but you can certainly argue it's ultimately the same thing.
But I also think the fact that an effective a cockpit angle of attack warning / malfunction detection could've potentially prevented both cases (well, all three I guess), should be highlighted. It's not just a measurement problem; it's a de-emphasizing what should be considered crucial information. Apparently planes didn't historically have AoA indicators so they're simply not thought of as important enough to be standard, which is just an obscenely dumb position to take. I've heard same say you don't want more "confusing" warnings/instruments, but this is the twenty-first century, damnit. It doesn't have to be another confusing audible alarm or cryptic dial; there's no reason at all why these can't be simple, small, intuitively color-coded things.
The pilots should be able to glance at the instrument panel and see a little graphic showing the tilt of the plane along with a degree number. If the computer things it's a dangerous number it shouldn't be, the graphic and the number turn red and a flashing (!) appears. If it thinks the sensor is malfunctioning (of course it actually needs some way of figuring this out, like a second goddamn sensor), it turns some other warning color and a flashing (??) appears (or maybe ?! if it's a combination of unsafe and unsure.) You could and should have similar pictoral+number instruments showing the other two plane's positioning attributes--yaw and roll. And hell, highlight the control surfaces on each picture of the plane with colors/arrows/numbers indicating the current control surface status.
This isn't an array of confusing dials you're dealing with here. That's just three intuitive instrument displays that even a (halfway clever) layman could decipher that tells you what the plane is doing and what you're trying to do with it and whether the computer is a) happy about what's going on and b) confident that it even knows what is going on. You could probably cram those three little displays in under six square inches and mentally tune them out when they're the color they're supposed to be. This should be standard on all commercial aircraft.
It's true that roll/yaw/AoA isn't as essential in daily operation as stuff like altitude and airspeed, but in an emergency? Come on. EVERYONE knows spatial disorientation is a major issue for pilots, even without issues like error-prone computer-corrections (Boeing) or anti-ergonomic human controls (the sidesticks cancelling each other out on Airbus.) This solves this more a general problem in a near idiot-proof way, at a quick glance. Instead of trying to instill more complex drills into the heads of pilots, just give them the all information they need to figure out what the airplane is currently doing and whether the computer is confident that it knows what is going on.
You know how claymore antipersonnel mines have "this side towards enemy" stamped on them? That's not a bad thing. That's not an insult to anyone's intelligence; that's just sane ergonomic design that takes into account how crazy shit can get when you're in an emergency situation where every second counts.
So yeah, of course the broken sensors and single points of failure is a huge and hugely moronic problem, but even so in both cases there's a strong chance that the humans might have been able to compensate for the mechanical failures... had they actually been able to quickly ascertain what airplane was doing that was incorrect. And in both cases, the key missing information was Angle of Attack. The idea that AoA information/alerts should be "optional" is a suicidally insane position to take. It's one of the most fundamental pieces of information you can have about the aircraft's current state.
Yes, they were very different in many ways but Air France 447 drew attention to the lack of AoA feedback in the cockpit. And then 10 years later Boeing goes and makes AoA warnings OPTIONAL in their new plane (this on top of the other fundamental flaws in their AoA correction system.) 447 was a sign that designers needed to think more carefully about AoA safety and ergonomics, that's my point, but instead Boeing managed to commit several huge bone-headed oversights.
As a side note, not to exonerate the pilots entirely (one of them clearly was a huge contributor to the accident), but there were at least two major design flaws that strongly contributed to Flight 447's demise:
1. The way the "alternate law" override was designed, the stall alarm was only coming on when the copilot allowed the nose to drop below a certain point, and it stopped blaring whenever he pulled the nose back up (the plane was actually stalling the whole time, but the computer basically derped out and said "I have no idea what is going on so I'm not gonna blare the siren or do anything else" while the AoA was above a certain critical threshhold. The way to halt the stall was to keep applying nose down until he picked up airspeed, of course. But the stall warning was only coming on when he gave it some nose down. That's pretty messed up. He should've had the sense to ignore the warning and give it a strong nose down anyway, but the avionics designers have to be faulted for allowing this perverse negative feedback loop to arise.
2. Far worse than #1, Airbus' fly by wire sidestick setup apparently allowed one pilot's stick-up inputs to silently override the other's stick-down inputs. So it was basically one pilot who crashed the plane while the other pilots were wondering why their stick wasn't doing anything. Back in the day, the two pilot-copilot controls were mechanically linked together, so you'd instantly notice if you were trying to do the opposite thing as the other person. There's nothing inherently wrong with an unobtrusive fly by wire sidestick (I can understand the advantages this change brought), but there absolutely needed to be stick vibration and alarms going off saying "you fucking jackasses; you're doing opposite things and I don't know which one of you I should be listening to." Apparently, in case of a contradiction the avionics just ignores both stick inputs and sits there quietly doing nothing, leaving BOTH pilots sitting there wondering why the plane has suddenly become unresponsive.
So yeah, pilot error was a big part of it but you can't tell me there wasn't also a pretty big contribution from design flaws. They had more than enough time to fix the problem if only the pilots had been able to figure out what was going on and get on the same page, but the "smart" avionics were working against them. And again, their lack of feedback re: angle of attack (and also the role the attack of attack reading played in the switch to alternate law) should have been an indicator to everyone that angle of attack information needed to be handled more intelligently and urgently, instead of being an "optional" add-on layered on top of a shitty single-point-of-failure system.
Engineers and the like will start throwing adjectives out "cold, wet, white, sticks for arms", but people with other personality types come up with all sorts of stuff. Last time this exercise was done at a shitty team building event I was forced to go to, one person wrote a poem about children building a snowman, the other only described what he felt "joy, happiness, Christmas, etc"
Heh. Funny you should say that. After I read that bit the GP was complaining about, I immediately thought "The Faroe Islands? Well, that's not exactly the sexiest... um, a commercial flightpath right over the Faroe Islands without stopping? I'm not sure if that's ever happened. If so, it would have to be something like nonstop Reykjavík to Oslo, maybe. In which case, I really doubt you're missing out on very much you couldn't get at either your origin or your destination, except for perhaps.... [checks Wikipedia]... nope, nevermind, you could gorge on freshly killed puffins while you're still in Iceland."
For example letting passengers unlock the "optional" safety features of their 737 Max the airline was too stingy to purchase
The sad part is people who haven't been following the 737 Max debacle closely (I hadn't until just last week) will assume this is just humorous hyperbole.
Between this "optional safety" thing and the fact that 737's AoA correction system relied on only two phyical AoA sensors--but then goes on to only use data from one sensor at a time, effectively making it single point of failure--and all of this comes 10 years after AoA issues lead to Air France flight 447 falling from the sky like a stone (despite there being nothing whatsoever wrong with it other than faulty airspeed sensor readings)--it's all damn near self-parodying. And the FAA knew about this stuff and shrugged and signed off.
Mods: please read this in greater detail before writing it off as a troll. The subject line and some of the story I'm going to be about relay may sound a bit ridiculous, but it's dead serious. My screeds may be lengthy but I have a pretty good track recorded here (I'm not certain I've ever been modded troll, except for insufficient praise of Elon Musk.)
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Hmm... well, I guess it's story time. If this all sounds overly detailed and prurient, well, I can't really make my point without it. This is a really important point I'm going to try to make with very far-reaching ramifications (including but not limited to the Linux kernel. I wish I were joking).
A few years back I spent the night with a female to male transsexual. Post-hormone, pre op. She had only been on testosterone for something like 6 months, but she could pass as a guy rather well. (She actually had a job that brought her in contact with state politicians and she joked about how she should start a relationship with one of them for blackmail purposes.)
I admittedly had been going through a drought for the past few months, but really more than anything else I was curious about my own desires and psychology on the matter. I've always been attracted to a pretty wide variety of women, but not men. I could never imagine myself with a pre-op male-to-female transsexual and probably not a post-op, either. (I wonder if I'm not the opposite from most guys in this regard, as the "chicks with dicks" genre seems way more popular.... there's weirdly large number of guys who like to go on and on about how female genitals aren't actually attractive to them.)
Anyway, female to male didn't seem like an instant turnoff for me. Well, depends on how "male" the male was. She still had her breasts and everything else, but I was conflicted. But curiousity won out. In the end, it turned out it was only the hair that bothered me. The voice and mannerisms didn't bother me at all; it just registered as a tomboy-ish female. Her clit was still a clit to me, even though it was slightly bigger than my thumb (I'm not joking, even by FTM standards she was big. I think she said that as a teenager she had some suspicions she was actually intersex to some degree.) She still struck me in every way as female except for the hair. She had shaved her beard for me, that was very sweet of her, but she didn't go for a full body wax. That part did feel a bit male. Why is maleness sexually repulsive to so many guys, I wondered. But then things moved along and she felt and and smelled and responded in a familiarly feminine way, and I relaxed.
So why am I saying "she" right now? Well, if she were here and she asked me to, I'd say "he", sure. That's no big deal. Just as a favor from one human being to another.
But if I do find myself telling this story again at some point in my life and I'm rattling off all the sordid little details. at no point will I be hearing myself say "his vagina" . Because I didn't have my fingers in his vagina. I had my fingers in her vagina. Am I a participant in this story at all? If someone asks me if I've ever had sex with a man... am I allowed to say no?
Some people do seem to want to tell me that she's the only one who has the right to perceive and define the femininity and masculinity of herself in that moment. Well, to the degree that these abstract or "constructed" concepts are real (and yes, of course I'd agree that there is an abstract and subjective part to gender beyond biological sex), I would say no one person owns them. These things don't flow in one direction. It's not something that is dictated; it is something that is felt, something that resonates. And while you can force yourself to overlook one thing or another (like I managed to overlook her body hair, which again in that moment was the only thing about her that struck me as male), you can't change your innate perception any more than you can wake up one day decide that you're going to see that the sky
Yeah but what's *honestly* a bigger problem: union-driven corruption or corporation-driven corruption? Keep in mind that over half of the states have "right to work" laws that severely hobble unions, using sickeningly cynical and hypocritical justifications.
And you're toeing that same line when you attack closed shops. Vast portions of the corporate world revolve around exclusive partnerships, either implicit or explicit. C-levels have a singular organization to represent them. It would be chaos if the CFO were somehow legally decided to start his own organization and disregard what the other C-levels were doing.
No legal protections for unions, sure. I'm in full agreement there. But union dues + "closed shops" (which should be expected to naturally arise) are the only logical way that they'll ever manage to get anything done, and for all their negatives and potential abuses they aren't doing anything that the corporations aren't doing considerably worse.
I apologize for the typos (which mostly seem to be missing or wrong word typos; I need to figure out why that happens) but I'm not going to spend an hour proofreading. The bottom line is if you want to be paid for doing a specific job, you're going to have to sign on the dotted line that someone else created and sometimes that means joining organizations you would rather not be a part of.
It's intellectually dishonest cold war propaganda (and indeed, it's pre cold war propaganda going all the way back to the 1800s) to say that mandatory union membership violates rights of people who don't want to join and don't want to pay union dues. That's insane. The union doesn't demand anything out of you that a corporation couldn't also demand, and unlike all of the millions of corporate middlemen in the world, they use the money that they make off of you (or at least some of it) to fight for your rights and your salary (unlike middlemen who take a cut of your paycheck only to enrich themselves, like Geek Squad in my example.)
When you agree to work at a certain place, you agree to abide by a list of contractual rules. If membership in a particular union is part of those rules, then that's the rules.
Um. You are misinformed. Exclusivity contracts aren't illegal across the board. They're only a no-no as they aren't used too aggressively in antitrust/monopolistic situations. I mean, for instance you can't get Pepsi products in most fast food places where I live, including McDonalds. That's not because McDonald's loves loves LOVES Coke products and hates Pepsi, and it's not because all Coke products outsell all of their Pepsi equivalents--it's because McDonalds has an exclusivity contract with Coke. If they sold any Pepsi products as well, Coke wouldn't give them as low of a price.
This is a very, very common thing. I've heard customers ask the question "Coke products or Pepsi products?" several times , and I've never heard the cashier/waitress reply "we have both" or "we have a mixture (7-Up plus Coke plus Mountain Dew)"
The exact language and form of the exclusivity varies from contract to contract. Many times it might be implicit and not spelled out but I'm pretty sure in other cases it is very explicit. Sometimes you can hear and see these partnerships very loudly and proudly proclaimed "the *official* drink/shoe/computer/etc. of ________!", like Nike being an official shoe for the NBA or something. Those sorts of partnerships are done primarily for advertising purposes these days, but they started out as one company literally winning the contract to provide all of the X to another company.
why on earth would anyone even think they any right to come to you and demand that you interview and hire them instead? Or is this some socialism ideal I am not aware of?
Well, I guess my analogous explanation wasn't as clear as I thought it was. Not to sound too smug or accusatory, but I think people are just so so SO used to thinking of unions as a certain thing, they can't take the same logic and apply it to non-unions.
Again, you said this:
Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union.
Again, the non-union version of this logic is wanting to work at Best Buy as tech support without being a member of Geek Squad because you want to be paid directly and not have them take their cut of the money. Again, you can claim exclusivity doesn't exist but that's just nonsense. If the local movie theater has a 10 year contract to have their sidewalks cleaned by Acme Cleaning Services well guess what, that's an implicit exclusivity contract. If you go in and say you want to clean their sidewalks as THEIR employee, they will tell you no, you need to be a member of this other entity--Acme Cleaning Services--in order to clean our sidewalks because we are contractually obligated to use them for the next 10 years. And yes, Acme will be taking a cut of your profits just like union dues (except it will be a much bigger cut than union dues and that money isn't going to be used to benefit you and your interests.)
If it's a violation of your rights to "make" you join a "sidewalk cleaner's union" before you're allowed to work there, it's also no less a violation of your rights for them to say that you have to work for Acme Cleaning Services if you want to be paid to clean that particular sidewalk.
I'm not arguing that every single facet of this situation is exactly the same as an employer-union relationship, but the essentials are all there to make it a valid comparison. If you have a problem with required union membership--if you think it's "violating individual rights" to say that I have to join a union in order to work somewhere (and of course pretty much the only reason why this "violation" ever annoys people are the union dues)--then it must be an equal violation of my rights if Best Buy says I can't perform a job directly for them, that instead I have to go apply for work at this other company (Geek Squad) that will
One more thing I haven't yet mentioned: one probable consequence of my proposed system is that, by dent of being an employee of the union (and only of the union), a significant amount of work and liability would be shifted away from the original corporation and onto the union-corporation. This means that the workers end up self-policing on a wide variety of liability issues, including but not limited to peer workplace harassment. I think this has the potential to be a good thing, an unexpected side-benefit that frees upper management from many (not all) of the distracting issues that they'd otherwise have to deal with.
Oh and I guess I didn't explicitly mention it but the union-corporations I was theorizing about should in theory be immune to the laws targeting them (mentioned in #2), not just immune to the laws that help unions (mentioned in #1.) Legally speaking, they would not be unions even though they would be worker-owned and would have all of the traditional bargaining powers of unions and all of the traditional downsides, including "paying dues" (which would just be treated as normal corporate overhead expenses. The workers can always vote to reduce this, of course.)
Way to totally miss my point. Stop thinking in terms of what other people told you unions are and what they do and start looking at the actual facts and implications of what you're saying.
1. You're right that unions *sometimes* receive special protections by law. however, the entities I'm talking about would not legally be considered unions (even though they would end up filling the same rolls).
Generally speaking, I agree with you here: I'm against unions receiving this sort of legal protection (though in an imperfect world held together by duct tape, in some fields it might not be a good idea to simply start removing these protections without any other reforms being considered. I don't know; I haven't looked into or thought about it in any depth. Instead, I've talking about starting over from scratch when defining what a union is and what it does.)
But regardless, with the corporate-unions I've been talking about this would be moot. They would not legally be considered unions (because technically all of the members would be employed by them and them alone), and thus they would not be able to benefit from these laws.
2a. You fail to mention that at other times and in other places, unions have been the target of legislation designed to hobble them, particularly "right to work" states in the USA that basically prevent unions from collecting dues (thus significantly limiting the amount of power they can muster, since they are entirely dependent on volunteers to do anything at all.)
2b. You're implicitly supporting the laws (or at least the rationale for those laws) I mention in 2a. And this is bullshit. Observe:
Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union.
In the context of our current society that allows corporations, this is a pure propaganda. It's blatantly hypocritical to single out unions like that, unless you are also criticizing the very foundation of ALL corporate dealings (which I don't think you are.)
To illustrate this: Let's say Geek Squad is a separate organization that is contracted with Best Buy to provide all of their tech support. Once upon a time I know they started out as something independently owned; Best Buy probably bought them out eventually but I'm just saying JUST FOR THE SAKE OF THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, let's pretend they're still independently owned but are an exclusively contract with Best Buy--they agree not to work for or endorse Frys or other Best Buy competitors, and Best Buy in return agrees to guarantee Geek Squad business by using only Geek Squad for all their customer service tech support needs. (These types of agreements happen all the time, so it doesn't matter whether *in reality* Best Buy owns Geek Squad now or just bought them out. I'm just choosing something easily recognizable for the sake of a thought experiment. It happens all the time--company X enters into contract with company Y that is either explicitly or implicitly exclusive.)
If you were using your anti-union propaganda logic in a fair and non-hypocritical way, you're saying that (in this hypotheical example) as a non-employee of Geek Squad, you should still be able to walk into Best Buy and demand that they interview me for a tech support position. Imagine how that conversation would go:
Best Buy: "Uhhh... we don't do that."
You: "Yes you do! you provide your customers with tech support! I want that job."
Best Buy: "Right, well, you can go talk to Geek Squad if you want a tech support job."
You: "But Geek Squad is a for-profit company! They're just gonna skim off my salary. No, I want to work directly for you guys."
Best Buy: "Uhh. We don't do that. We have an exclusivity contract with Geek Squad and besides, we don't want to be directl
Careful not to oversimplify this. The bigger problem is incompetence in bureaucracies. This issue is going to crop up regardless whether there's an outside regulator. The downside to having an external regulating body is that in the case of incompetence-induced disaster, the company can shrug and say "well, we were just following best practices as defined by the National FOO Organization" and that's an argument that sometimes lets a company dodge charges of incompetence. It gets particularly bad when you have industry ex-leaders, former c-levels and former board members in charge of the regulating bodies (because they have "experience.")
I don't necessarily have a good answer here. The problem is instutionalized incompetence is something I could rant about for days (Feynman's appendix in Challenger Report is a good starting place.) I just don't think external regulation is going to solve the problem. If it gets more people looking at decisions and commenting on them I suppose that is an improvement because it can increase the odds that someone will pipe up, but I worry about it becoming a rubber stamping pass-the-buck mechanism that actually decreases responsibility.
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Oh, it's definitely in line with what the rest of the left is doing. You should work harder to stay abreast of current events in the post-Contributor Covenant world, like what happened to the Python dev.
What about blaming you for you being lazy?
Yeah I'm not thrilled with the level of effort in his replies so far, but I still detect a weird quasi-earnestness at times.
You know, with the amount of time I put into *some* of these posts (not all of them, as evidenced by some really ridiculous typos), I really should have some moddable socket puppets lying around so they get seen. Alas, I do not.
That's straight up insane. Even for a devil's advocate, that's just insane. Yes I understand technology can sometimes fail but that doesn't mean a lack of technology is automatically easier, like TFS says.
Looking in your wallet to see how much money you have left is not and cannot, in itself, be a good way to "track your spending more easily." More easily than *what*? What could possibly be a LESS effecient or reliable way of tracking spending than looking in your pocket and counting out the bills to see how much money you have, trying to remember how much you originally withdrew, trying to remember how much is in your bank account, trying to remember what the recent cable bill hike was, trying to remember *when* the money was spent (last week did you you spending $10 a day or did you spent $30 in one day and $40 the next and nothing for the rest of the week) etc.
This is not a method of tracking how much you spend. There's no "tracking" going on here whatsoever. It's a lack of tracking, and they're saying it's a better way of tracking. If someone wants to just say "well I have a great memory and don't need a paper trail", that's fine, but that's not what was said.
Maybe they meant some other verb.
So put aside everything I said about regret and female peer pressure and wet t-shirt contests... how do you justify your interpretation of (what I call) the left's slut shaming in the context of *this* article? Sony is removing sexually explicit content in games supposedly as part of a cultural response to #MeToo.
Yes. That is not the thing they are complaining about. It's the coercion, the Weinsteins, the "sorry but to advance your career as an actor you are going to have to get your tits out".
But this is *uncritically* removing media *only* because they contain "tits out". It's in no way examining the process to see if any women were coerced into doing something they didn't want... and indeed, in this case the tits are far more likely to be computer generated. So what does any of this have to do with the casting couch or sexual assault? No, this is explicitly, overtly passing judgment that sexual content in media is bad and TFS says they chose to adopt this attitude because of #MeToo.
I maintain that this sort of across the board, un-nuanced demonization of sexual content in media is a form of slut shaming that harms women even if it's being done in their name, because on some level it makes millions of females feel guilty about ever behaving in a way that they've been told leads to the objectification not just themselves, but also somehow all women in general.
The in-practice goals beign pursued and the paternal (a word I use advisedly), sanctimonious tones of voice are extremely similar to the Christian right. The religious right has always attacked female sexuality by talking about self-respect, and the narrative of objectification has the same message at its very core--"don't you want to be more than just a set of tits? if you take your tits out, aren't you afraid people will think less of you?"
This is all candy coated with a narrative of evil masculinity and other identity politic warfare nonsense, but the implications are clear enough. Sony is not concerned for exploited actresses. The issue here is not sniffing out coercion. Sony doesn't care where the tits came from (and indeed, we're most likely talking about 2d cartoons and 3d models with jiggle physics here, not live actresses.) Sony is only concerned with the end product. And (whether rightly or wrongly) they're doing this in the name of the most popular form of modern feminism, #MeToo.
You're twisting yourself in knots and setting off chaff to avoid the real issues here.
There are a few reasonable sex-positive egalitarians left in the world who still embrace the term "SJW" as a self-descriptor, but they don't yet realize they are in the minority. You may be one of them; I don't know. I haven't seen particularly egregious out of you, but I've not been paying super close attention.
Expressing regret is not intended to shame anyone.
Yes it most likely is. Women tend to rely more on implication than men, particularly techie men.
And even if there was no intended undertone there, even if they have nothing but the purest of feelings for women who participate in wet t-shirt contests and love it, as self-decribed progressive women who are ostensibly holding themselves up as role models (a fairly obvious implicit part of their narrative that young girls are lacking good role models), they're being (at best) extremely reckless. They should be aware of the value judgments they are vocalizing.
It's been years since I read the interviews, but as I recall neither one said "oh, I regret doing that because *personally*, I didn't really want to do it but I let myself get talked into it anyway." It was no, this is *inherently* objectifying and bad.
Have you ever talked down a mortified drunk girl after she's putting her shirt back on at a party? I have. More than once, in fact. And it was pretty clear to me that it wasn't the presence of males that bring out this feeling of embarrassment and regret. If she's not regretful, the guys go "woooo" and she goes "woooo" and life is good. It's only when there's a group of girls (and/or their boyfriends) there that don't go "woo" and she catches a look on their faces that leads to her regret.
(Don't come back at me with some anecdote about a girl who was assaulted at a party. Yes that happens and it's a major problem that needs better pushing back against. But it's totally beside the point. Assault is assault and yes that can lead to shame, but "slut shaming" is something quite different.)
That is not the thing they are complaining about. It's the coercion, the Weinsteins, the "sorry but to advance your career as an actor you are going to have to get your tits out".
The movie Yeardley Smith was topless in was a nothing of a shit independent film (and not of an artsy sort) that did nothing for her career.
More importantly, the wet T-shirt contest Kristen Schaal participated had nothing whatsoever to do with her career. She didn't give some big story about being pressured into it or impressing someone or anything. She just said man, that was such an objectifying thing to do, I wish I hadn't done it. In what way does that not pass value judgment on the hundreds of thousands if not millions of women who've let loose and had fun in a wet t-shirt contest at some point? If you don't think that's a value judgment, man you don't understand how women typically interact.
Complaining about the coercive casting couch is fine. Cultural slut shaming is not. There is widespread demand for sexually suggestive media because this is both an accurate reflection of reality and it caters to basic human hungers. If wom
I have to admit, I laughed pretty hard the first time I saw the picture of the etherkiller. (Several people have made similar cables, usually much less hacky looking, e.g. with matching colored cables.)
I always wondered if some poor bastard ever unwittingly plugged in one of these things that some malicious person left lying around and if so, what happened (and if anyone was ever charged.)
I think that our culture has finally reached the point, at least on a corporate and governmental and celebrity level (though not on an average family unit level), where the left is much more concerned with and vocal about slut shaming and other assorted neopuritan bullshit.
The fact that they do it under the guise is protecting women just makes it all the more reprehensible. I listen to self-identifying progress/"liberal" women make public statements about how much they regret doing nude scenes (Yeardley Smith,voice of Lisa Simpson) or participating in wet T-Shirt contest (Kristen Schaal) earlier in their lives because years later they realized that it degrades and objectifies women and I'm like... who is more going to listen to a statement like that and feel more ashamed? The millions of men who see such things and smiled? Or the millions of women who have participated in such things and smiled?
It's straight up slut shaming and they try to disguise it by pretending that really they're slut shaming men, but really women are far more likely to feel bad about this criticism they're hearing.
It is a normal, typical aspect of female sexuality to enjoy showing off. It's not a male conspiracy; it's a perfectly natural inclination (that is frequently encouraged by men, yes.) And if you tell them they're making objects out of themselves when they do that, you're a slut shaming neo-puritan asshole.
This needs to be pointed out more frequently.
"Directly over", the original paragraph said? Well, maybe I need to see a great circle-generating map to see why that would be the case. The Faroes are pretty far north so there's probably some distortion going on. I don't have a globe handy.
Citing "the rise of the #MeToo movement" [...] concerns about the depiction of women in video games playable on its platform as well as protect children's "sound growth and development."
See, I am completely on board with women speaking up against the "minor" sexual harassments and assaults that millions have been shrugging off because they don't want to cause a fuss.
But no, that's not good enough. It has to be leveraged into some goddamn neopuritan horseshit. What the hell is wrong with the left? It's sort of like how the Occupy Wallstreet movement lost sight of its laudable goal (that actually would've had a lot of bipartisan support, at least among the populace) almost immediately in favor of turning it a generic leftist gripefest.
Actually, this is considerably worse than that. It stealthily slut-shames millions of women (for daring to enjoy or even worse wanting to participate the same risque stuff that men stereotypically enjoy.) A lot of women, the majority in my own experience, enjoy sexy showing off stuff.
and people believe that using it allows them to track their spending more easily [emphasis mine]
Uh, that's a really weird thing to say. Unless you don't know how to use a computer/phone or your bank's website is absolute shit or something.
Yeah, you could look certainly at it that way. The distinction here between the two being is that Boeing's system directly manipulated the control surfaces whereas Airbus' system merely changed how the pilots were interacting with the control surfaces (gave them the rope with which to hang themselves), but you can certainly argue it's ultimately the same thing.
But I also think the fact that an effective a cockpit angle of attack warning / malfunction detection could've potentially prevented both cases (well, all three I guess), should be highlighted. It's not just a measurement problem; it's a de-emphasizing what should be considered crucial information. Apparently planes didn't historically have AoA indicators so they're simply not thought of as important enough to be standard, which is just an obscenely dumb position to take. I've heard same say you don't want more "confusing" warnings/instruments, but this is the twenty-first century, damnit. It doesn't have to be another confusing audible alarm or cryptic dial; there's no reason at all why these can't be simple, small, intuitively color-coded things.
The pilots should be able to glance at the instrument panel and see a little graphic showing the tilt of the plane along with a degree number. If the computer things it's a dangerous number it shouldn't be, the graphic and the number turn red and a flashing (!) appears. If it thinks the sensor is malfunctioning (of course it actually needs some way of figuring this out, like a second goddamn sensor), it turns some other warning color and a flashing (??) appears (or maybe ?! if it's a combination of unsafe and unsure.) You could and should have similar pictoral+number instruments showing the other two plane's positioning attributes--yaw and roll. And hell, highlight the control surfaces on each picture of the plane with colors/arrows/numbers indicating the current control surface status. This isn't an array of confusing dials you're dealing with here. That's just three intuitive instrument displays that even a (halfway clever) layman could decipher that tells you what the plane is doing and what you're trying to do with it and whether the computer is a) happy about what's going on and b) confident that it even knows what is going on. You could probably cram those three little displays in under six square inches and mentally tune them out when they're the color they're supposed to be. This should be standard on all commercial aircraft.
It's true that roll/yaw/AoA isn't as essential in daily operation as stuff like altitude and airspeed, but in an emergency? Come on. EVERYONE knows spatial disorientation is a major issue for pilots, even without issues like error-prone computer-corrections (Boeing) or anti-ergonomic human controls (the sidesticks cancelling each other out on Airbus.) This solves this more a general problem in a near idiot-proof way, at a quick glance. Instead of trying to instill more complex drills into the heads of pilots, just give them the all information they need to figure out what the airplane is currently doing and whether the computer is confident that it knows what is going on.
You know how claymore antipersonnel mines have "this side towards enemy" stamped on them? That's not a bad thing. That's not an insult to anyone's intelligence; that's just sane ergonomic design that takes into account how crazy shit can get when you're in an emergency situation where every second counts.
So yeah, of course the broken sensors and single points of failure is a huge and hugely moronic problem, but even so in both cases there's a strong chance that the humans might have been able to compensate for the mechanical failures... had they actually been able to quickly ascertain what airplane was doing that was incorrect. And in both cases, the key missing information was Angle of Attack. The idea that AoA information/alerts should be "optional" is a suicidally insane position to take. It's one of the most fundamental pieces of information you can have about the aircraft's current state.
Yes, they were very different in many ways but Air France 447 drew attention to the lack of AoA feedback in the cockpit. And then 10 years later Boeing goes and makes AoA warnings OPTIONAL in their new plane (this on top of the other fundamental flaws in their AoA correction system.) 447 was a sign that designers needed to think more carefully about AoA safety and ergonomics, that's my point, but instead Boeing managed to commit several huge bone-headed oversights.
As a side note, not to exonerate the pilots entirely (one of them clearly was a huge contributor to the accident), but there were at least two major design flaws that strongly contributed to Flight 447's demise:
1. The way the "alternate law" override was designed, the stall alarm was only coming on when the copilot allowed the nose to drop below a certain point, and it stopped blaring whenever he pulled the nose back up (the plane was actually stalling the whole time, but the computer basically derped out and said "I have no idea what is going on so I'm not gonna blare the siren or do anything else" while the AoA was above a certain critical threshhold. The way to halt the stall was to keep applying nose down until he picked up airspeed, of course. But the stall warning was only coming on when he gave it some nose down. That's pretty messed up. He should've had the sense to ignore the warning and give it a strong nose down anyway, but the avionics designers have to be faulted for allowing this perverse negative feedback loop to arise.
2. Far worse than #1, Airbus' fly by wire sidestick setup apparently allowed one pilot's stick-up inputs to silently override the other's stick-down inputs. So it was basically one pilot who crashed the plane while the other pilots were wondering why their stick wasn't doing anything. Back in the day, the two pilot-copilot controls were mechanically linked together, so you'd instantly notice if you were trying to do the opposite thing as the other person. There's nothing inherently wrong with an unobtrusive fly by wire sidestick (I can understand the advantages this change brought), but there absolutely needed to be stick vibration and alarms going off saying "you fucking jackasses; you're doing opposite things and I don't know which one of you I should be listening to." Apparently, in case of a contradiction the avionics just ignores both stick inputs and sits there quietly doing nothing, leaving BOTH pilots sitting there wondering why the plane has suddenly become unresponsive.
So yeah, pilot error was a big part of it but you can't tell me there wasn't also a pretty big contribution from design flaws. They had more than enough time to fix the problem if only the pilots had been able to figure out what was going on and get on the same page, but the "smart" avionics were working against them. And again, their lack of feedback re: angle of attack (and also the role the attack of attack reading played in the switch to alternate law) should have been an indicator to everyone that angle of attack information needed to be handled more intelligently and urgently, instead of being an "optional" add-on layered on top of a shitty single-point-of-failure system.
Engineers and the like will start throwing adjectives out "cold, wet, white, sticks for arms", but people with other personality types come up with all sorts of stuff. Last time this exercise was done at a shitty team building event I was forced to go to, one person wrote a poem about children building a snowman, the other only described what he felt "joy, happiness, Christmas, etc"
Heh. Funny you should say that. After I read that bit the GP was complaining about, I immediately thought "The Faroe Islands? Well, that's not exactly the sexiest... um, a commercial flightpath right over the Faroe Islands without stopping? I'm not sure if that's ever happened. If so, it would have to be something like nonstop Reykjavík to Oslo, maybe. In which case, I really doubt you're missing out on very much you couldn't get at either your origin or your destination, except for perhaps.... [checks Wikipedia]... nope, nevermind, you could gorge on freshly killed puffins while you're still in Iceland."
For example letting passengers unlock the "optional" safety features of their 737 Max the airline was too stingy to purchase
The sad part is people who haven't been following the 737 Max debacle closely (I hadn't until just last week) will assume this is just humorous hyperbole.
Between this "optional safety" thing and the fact that 737's AoA correction system relied on only two phyical AoA sensors--but then goes on to only use data from one sensor at a time, effectively making it single point of failure--and all of this comes 10 years after AoA issues lead to Air France flight 447 falling from the sky like a stone (despite there being nothing whatsoever wrong with it other than faulty airspeed sensor readings)--it's all damn near self-parodying. And the FAA knew about this stuff and shrugged and signed off.
It may be the most egregious thing I've seen since the day I first read Feynman's appendix to the Challenger commission report.
Mods: please read this in greater detail before writing it off as a troll. The subject line and some of the story I'm going to be about relay may sound a bit ridiculous, but it's dead serious. My screeds may be lengthy but I have a pretty good track recorded here (I'm not certain I've ever been modded troll, except for insufficient praise of Elon Musk.)
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Hmm... well, I guess it's story time. If this all sounds overly detailed and prurient, well, I can't really make my point without it. This is a really important point I'm going to try to make with very far-reaching ramifications (including but not limited to the Linux kernel. I wish I were joking).
A few years back I spent the night with a female to male transsexual. Post-hormone, pre op. She had only been on testosterone for something like 6 months, but she could pass as a guy rather well. (She actually had a job that brought her in contact with state politicians and she joked about how she should start a relationship with one of them for blackmail purposes.)
I admittedly had been going through a drought for the past few months, but really more than anything else I was curious about my own desires and psychology on the matter. I've always been attracted to a pretty wide variety of women, but not men. I could never imagine myself with a pre-op male-to-female transsexual and probably not a post-op, either. (I wonder if I'm not the opposite from most guys in this regard, as the "chicks with dicks" genre seems way more popular.... there's weirdly large number of guys who like to go on and on about how female genitals aren't actually attractive to them.)
Anyway, female to male didn't seem like an instant turnoff for me. Well, depends on how "male" the male was. She still had her breasts and everything else, but I was conflicted. But curiousity won out. In the end, it turned out it was only the hair that bothered me. The voice and mannerisms didn't bother me at all; it just registered as a tomboy-ish female. Her clit was still a clit to me, even though it was slightly bigger than my thumb (I'm not joking, even by FTM standards she was big. I think she said that as a teenager she had some suspicions she was actually intersex to some degree.) She still struck me in every way as female except for the hair. She had shaved her beard for me, that was very sweet of her, but she didn't go for a full body wax. That part did feel a bit male. Why is maleness sexually repulsive to so many guys, I wondered. But then things moved along and she felt and and smelled and responded in a familiarly feminine way, and I relaxed.
So why am I saying "she" right now? Well, if she were here and she asked me to, I'd say "he", sure. That's no big deal. Just as a favor from one human being to another.
But if I do find myself telling this story again at some point in my life and I'm rattling off all the sordid little details. at no point will I be hearing myself say "his vagina" . Because I didn't have my fingers in his vagina. I had my fingers in her vagina. Am I a participant in this story at all? If someone asks me if I've ever had sex with a man... am I allowed to say no?
Some people do seem to want to tell me that she's the only one who has the right to perceive and define the femininity and masculinity of herself in that moment. Well, to the degree that these abstract or "constructed" concepts are real (and yes, of course I'd agree that there is an abstract and subjective part to gender beyond biological sex), I would say no one person owns them. These things don't flow in one direction. It's not something that is dictated; it is something that is felt, something that resonates. And while you can force yourself to overlook one thing or another (like I managed to overlook her body hair, which again in that moment was the only thing about her that struck me as male), you can't change your innate perception any more than you can wake up one day decide that you're going to see that the sky
Yeah but what's *honestly* a bigger problem: union-driven corruption or corporation-driven corruption? Keep in mind that over half of the states have "right to work" laws that severely hobble unions, using sickeningly cynical and hypocritical justifications.
And you're toeing that same line when you attack closed shops. Vast portions of the corporate world revolve around exclusive partnerships, either implicit or explicit. C-levels have a singular organization to represent them. It would be chaos if the CFO were somehow legally decided to start his own organization and disregard what the other C-levels were doing.
No legal protections for unions, sure. I'm in full agreement there. But union dues + "closed shops" (which should be expected to naturally arise) are the only logical way that they'll ever manage to get anything done, and for all their negatives and potential abuses they aren't doing anything that the corporations aren't doing considerably worse.
I apologize for the typos (which mostly seem to be missing or wrong word typos; I need to figure out why that happens) but I'm not going to spend an hour proofreading. The bottom line is if you want to be paid for doing a specific job, you're going to have to sign on the dotted line that someone else created and sometimes that means joining organizations you would rather not be a part of.
It's intellectually dishonest cold war propaganda (and indeed, it's pre cold war propaganda going all the way back to the 1800s) to say that mandatory union membership violates rights of people who don't want to join and don't want to pay union dues. That's insane. The union doesn't demand anything out of you that a corporation couldn't also demand, and unlike all of the millions of corporate middlemen in the world, they use the money that they make off of you (or at least some of it) to fight for your rights and your salary (unlike middlemen who take a cut of your paycheck only to enrich themselves, like Geek Squad in my example.)
When you agree to work at a certain place, you agree to abide by a list of contractual rules. If membership in a particular union is part of those rules, then that's the rules.
This is a very, very common thing. I've heard customers ask the question "Coke products or Pepsi products?" several times , and I've never heard the cashier/waitress reply "we have both" or "we have a mixture (7-Up plus Coke plus Mountain Dew)"
The exact language and form of the exclusivity varies from contract to contract. Many times it might be implicit and not spelled out but I'm pretty sure in other cases it is very explicit. Sometimes you can hear and see these partnerships very loudly and proudly proclaimed "the *official* drink/shoe/computer/etc. of ________!", like Nike being an official shoe for the NBA or something. Those sorts of partnerships are done primarily for advertising purposes these days, but they started out as one company literally winning the contract to provide all of the X to another company.
why on earth would anyone even think they any right to come to you and demand that you interview and hire them instead? Or is this some socialism ideal I am not aware of?
Well, I guess my analogous explanation wasn't as clear as I thought it was. Not to sound too smug or accusatory, but I think people are just so so SO used to thinking of unions as a certain thing, they can't take the same logic and apply it to non-unions. Again, you said this:
Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union.
Again, the non-union version of this logic is wanting to work at Best Buy as tech support without being a member of Geek Squad because you want to be paid directly and not have them take their cut of the money. Again, you can claim exclusivity doesn't exist but that's just nonsense. If the local movie theater has a 10 year contract to have their sidewalks cleaned by Acme Cleaning Services well guess what, that's an implicit exclusivity contract. If you go in and say you want to clean their sidewalks as THEIR employee, they will tell you no, you need to be a member of this other entity--Acme Cleaning Services--in order to clean our sidewalks because we are contractually obligated to use them for the next 10 years. And yes, Acme will be taking a cut of your profits just like union dues (except it will be a much bigger cut than union dues and that money isn't going to be used to benefit you and your interests.)
If it's a violation of your rights to "make" you join a "sidewalk cleaner's union" before you're allowed to work there, it's also no less a violation of your rights for them to say that you have to work for Acme Cleaning Services if you want to be paid to clean that particular sidewalk.
I'm not arguing that every single facet of this situation is exactly the same as an employer-union relationship, but the essentials are all there to make it a valid comparison. If you have a problem with required union membership--if you think it's "violating individual rights" to say that I have to join a union in order to work somewhere (and of course pretty much the only reason why this "violation" ever annoys people are the union dues)--then it must be an equal violation of my rights if Best Buy says I can't perform a job directly for them, that instead I have to go apply for work at this other company (Geek Squad) that will
One more thing I haven't yet mentioned: one probable consequence of my proposed system is that, by dent of being an employee of the union (and only of the union), a significant amount of work and liability would be shifted away from the original corporation and onto the union-corporation. This means that the workers end up self-policing on a wide variety of liability issues, including but not limited to peer workplace harassment. I think this has the potential to be a good thing, an unexpected side-benefit that frees upper management from many (not all) of the distracting issues that they'd otherwise have to deal with.
from you're pay check
Fuck me. The internet has finally ruined my brain.
Oh and I guess I didn't explicitly mention it but the union-corporations I was theorizing about should in theory be immune to the laws targeting them (mentioned in #2), not just immune to the laws that help unions (mentioned in #1.) Legally speaking, they would not be unions even though they would be worker-owned and would have all of the traditional bargaining powers of unions and all of the traditional downsides, including "paying dues" (which would just be treated as normal corporate overhead expenses. The workers can always vote to reduce this, of course.)
Generally speaking, I agree with you here: I'm against unions receiving this sort of legal protection (though in an imperfect world held together by duct tape, in some fields it might not be a good idea to simply start removing these protections without any other reforms being considered. I don't know; I haven't looked into or thought about it in any depth. Instead, I've talking about starting over from scratch when defining what a union is and what it does.)
But regardless, with the corporate-unions I've been talking about this would be moot. They would not legally be considered unions (because technically all of the members would be employed by them and them alone), and thus they would not be able to benefit from these laws.
2a. You fail to mention that at other times and in other places, unions have been the target of legislation designed to hobble them, particularly "right to work" states in the USA that basically prevent unions from collecting dues (thus significantly limiting the amount of power they can muster, since they are entirely dependent on volunteers to do anything at all.)
2b. You're implicitly supporting the laws (or at least the rationale for those laws) I mention in 2a. And this is bullshit. Observe:
Other socialist aspects of the unions include the ability for the union to force each and every employee to join the union, conversely preventing the employer from hiring non-union employees and violating individual rights not to belong to a union.
In the context of our current society that allows corporations, this is a pure propaganda. It's blatantly hypocritical to single out unions like that, unless you are also criticizing the very foundation of ALL corporate dealings (which I don't think you are.)
To illustrate this: Let's say Geek Squad is a separate organization that is contracted with Best Buy to provide all of their tech support. Once upon a time I know they started out as something independently owned; Best Buy probably bought them out eventually but I'm just saying JUST FOR THE SAKE OF THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, let's pretend they're still independently owned but are an exclusively contract with Best Buy--they agree not to work for or endorse Frys or other Best Buy competitors, and Best Buy in return agrees to guarantee Geek Squad business by using only Geek Squad for all their customer service tech support needs. (These types of agreements happen all the time, so it doesn't matter whether *in reality* Best Buy owns Geek Squad now or just bought them out. I'm just choosing something easily recognizable for the sake of a thought experiment. It happens all the time--company X enters into contract with company Y that is either explicitly or implicitly exclusive.)
If you were using your anti-union propaganda logic in a fair and non-hypocritical way, you're saying that (in this hypotheical example) as a non-employee of Geek Squad, you should still be able to walk into Best Buy and demand that they interview me for a tech support position. Imagine how that conversation would go:
Best Buy: "Uhhh... we don't do that."
You: "Yes you do! you provide your customers with tech support! I want that job."
Best Buy: "Right, well, you can go talk to Geek Squad if you want a tech support job."
You: "But Geek Squad is a for-profit company! They're just gonna skim off my salary. No, I want to work directly for you guys."
Best Buy: "Uhh. We don't do that. We have an exclusivity contract with Geek Squad and besides, we don't want to be directl
Careful not to oversimplify this. The bigger problem is incompetence in bureaucracies. This issue is going to crop up regardless whether there's an outside regulator. The downside to having an external regulating body is that in the case of incompetence-induced disaster, the company can shrug and say "well, we were just following best practices as defined by the National FOO Organization" and that's an argument that sometimes lets a company dodge charges of incompetence. It gets particularly bad when you have industry ex-leaders, former c-levels and former board members in charge of the regulating bodies (because they have "experience.")
I don't necessarily have a good answer here. The problem is instutionalized incompetence is something I could rant about for days (Feynman's appendix in Challenger Report is a good starting place.) I just don't think external regulation is going to solve the problem. If it gets more people looking at decisions and commenting on them I suppose that is an improvement because it can increase the odds that someone will pipe up, but I worry about it becoming a rubber stamping pass-the-buck mechanism that actually decreases responsibility.
Also, if you can't suffer the truth, that's a problem for you and your platform.