> you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left?
What was the core reason that readers gave donations? Probably most donors want employees treated well and to ideally keep their jobs, and yet the main thing they probably had in mind was the existence and continuation of the service itself.
> or when they’re so bad that people might actually die
Care to elaborate? Am I understanding correctly that the implication here is that there is some condition for which a software engineer having a union agreement could prevent that worker from dying?
Yes, certainly: the ability to say “no” to abusive labor conditions without risk of irreversibly losing any source of income while living in a society that treats lack of income as deserving of whatever pains and suffering come with it.
The word “any” is doing a lot of work here—I’m implying a denylist or “social credit score” or other way of persisting punishment against an individual beyond mere job loss.
You’re right that we’re not there right now. We’re in the wide middle and still closer to the “we have lots of bargaining power because we’re in demand” end of the continuum—_directionally_ it does not feel that way, but we don’t have a ton of folks dying of Boolean lung in the code mines. But I’d not rule out the possibility. The range of possible human experiences is vast.
I’m not even sure that’s a useful question. It almost points at “what’s the other end of the continuum so we can discuss points on the axis”, which _is_ useful, but I’m not even convinced that “merely” treating those without income as deserving pain is at an end of a continuum itself. It’s a point upon it; things could be worse yet.
Instead let’s break away from opposites and into pieces. What would be _different_ in a society that doesn’t judge harshly the less fortunate?
I’d suggest that would include ensuring that nobody starves or sleeps on the street for want of work.
Richard Rorty describes liberalism as the idea that cruelty is the worst thing that exists. Cruelty, of course, has just as many forms as suffering.
Universal income protects only basic needs and it does so in part. Even if you have income, you need to have housing, clean water, food that isn't poisened and some form of healthy environment to live a good life: income doesn't guarantee it.
On the other end of the income spectrum is the unlimited amassing of wealth. After some point, wealth turns into power. For example, Musk is able to buy twitter influencing public opinion, and Starlink can make or break the battlefield.
If we are talking only about income, I think we would need both a minimum (universal) income and a maximum (a cap on wealth). If we do not, then we will eventually lose democracy.
>It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty.
In the Europe, like several rich western countries, we mostly replaced the extended family with the government welfare state, for better but mostly for worse.
So current young workers are contributing to a failing state ponzi pension system that will leave them in poverty by the time they retire in several decades, and they will also lack the care of the extended family unit that was the norm decades ago thanks to collapsed birth rates. Double whammy.
Unfortunately this does not work at nation scale. We are not insects. Tribes fail at levels over a few hundred and that scale only works because of blood ties. Communism has failed to produce good outcomes every time it's been tried. Even coops aren't competitive with traditional corporations.
What if health and liberty to someone looks like them not providing any net positive to society? What compels someone to work 12 hours a day to share those resources with such a person?
You’re making a point about loafers but non-wage earners are always going to outnumber wage earners, and able bodied loafers are a minute fraction of who we must provide for (the young, the elderly, students, the disabled, etc)
It mostly just feels like basic maths, not really a world model. Productivity is a finite resource. If there's a deficit in productivity, people will necessarily suffer and, in the worst case, die. The problem is world views that suggest giving everyone a free choice that enough people will choose productivity while everyone else chooses leisure. I'd be more apt to believe it if we had evidence of it being a natural outcome.
It doesn't have to be so extreme though. Basic scenario: 20% of everyone's income is taxed and then distributed equally to everyone (no matter what, and without setting any fixed dollar amount), another 10% pays for administrative functions and government stuff except welfare, and the remaining 70% is theirs to do with as they please. What would happen? Would everyone quit their job? I don't think so, because 70% is a lot. Some people with jobs that pay so poorly their 70% is less than everyone's average 20% would quit, but that's good, because those were zombie jobs.
I'd be fine with this so long as people who didn't contribute any taxes couldn't vote. Otherwise you're just signing up for those who choose to work to get exploited by the leisurely.
Are there historical examples of this ever happening in any significant numbers? This idea that people en masse just won't work and live off of the state where opportunities for work are reasonably available seems more like a boogeyman than a real thing. (obviously, if work is not really available, I can see this happening, but I wouldn't describe the people unable to find work as "leisurely" in that case)
The screen time crowds out time they could be interacting with the real world, engaging with all of their senses, and interacting with people. Two hours per day adds up over a critical time of their life that their peers are beginning to learn how to accurately learn to model the world and communicate.
At one years old, 2 hours is massive percentage of their "awake and aware" time, considering how much time they sleep and eat at this age.
The hot path goes: parents choose "long" version of name. Everyone calls them the "short" name. The short name is their name for the majority of life. They have to deal with administrative-type friction and confusion every time their long name is needed. Therefore, you make their life less frustrating by making their inevitable shorter name equal to their real name.
thus reducing their agency, it'll be interesting at least to see if this generation grows up to prefer a lengthened name (or "long name") equivalent to todays "short name". For a period my parents called me Jim, a name I despise as an adult, thankfully the root of that short name has many branches, not that it matters because I only use the initial.
Isn't Wikimedia a non profit? Who exactly are the employers on the other side negotiating with the union here? They're higher on the hierarchical structure, but they're not actually stakeholders the same as there are in private for-profit companies.
Some of the largest unions in the world are for teachers, police, and government employees. I’m not sure why you would think a for-profit company is uniquely subject to its staff unionizing?
I have similar questions about public service unions as well. The reason why it makes sense to me for private for-profit companies is because stakeholders have a profit incentive to exploit workers. If non-profit tech workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation, then I guess it makes sense too, but I'm having trouble finding evidence for that.
Not by a mile, at least for pasta. When you compare the calorie density and glycemic index of pasta with other grains or grain-derived foods, it's really not bad. The dose makes the poison.
From what I'm reading, it was a big factor that children were walking to school in the dark. One stat I read was that since that time the percentage of kids walking/cycling to school went from almost 50% to now 10%. Maybe that could make the difference this time around.
I'm guessing that if it is a real tag, then consumers have a "know it when I see it" feeling for certain kinds of food that they'd describe as "healthy." As a word that could be consistently well-defined, it's garbage. But that doesn't mean it's not useful for real-world consumers to find what they believe they want.
What was the core reason that readers gave donations? Probably most donors want employees treated well and to ideally keep their jobs, and yet the main thing they probably had in mind was the existence and continuation of the service itself.
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