Notes from November 28 Meetup of Bay Area Tech Solidarity
sfbay.techsolidarity.org
sfbay.techsolidarity.org
If this happens, I will seriously consider becoming Muslim, and urging other irreligious people I know to consider doing the same, to dilute the database. I'd remain an atheist, but I'd be a Muslim atheist instead of a Christian atheist. I'd buy a Quran and read it once, then put it on the shelf and not believe it, replacing the Bible that is currently on my shelf not being believed. For local charity giving, I'd direct that to a local mosque instead of a local church.
Only 0.9% of people in the United States are Muslim. Atheists and agnostics make up about 7%, so if a large fraction of atheists and agnostics registered as Muslims, it would greatly dilute the database. There are also a substantial number who believe in some sort of spirituality but not in traditional gods, and quite a few people who believe in gods but as a personal thing and not as part of an organized religion. All of these together make up about 20% of the population. If a lot of those people would register as Muslims, it would really really dilute the database.
Plus, it's nice to have a second form of photo ID sometimes.
In SF, you need an appointment to get an ID. You can make one here: http://sfgov.org/countyclerk/sf-city-id-card
Anytime people are removed from the cost of a thing, the price goes up. Housing, education, healthcare. Even buying groceries people spend more than twice as much with a credit card vs cash.
If removing something from the market led directly to massively inflated costs, we'd expect those systems to be the most expensive, but that's just not true.
Elective services like dermatology and cosmetic have managed to keep prices in line with what people can afford to pay out of pocket.
The other inflators in the US has been emergency room visits for people with no coverage at all, which are 10x more expensive than simply visiting a primary care physician. Plans pushing for funded HSAs would totally eliminate this problem as even the poorest people would have a reason to go where they could get more cost effective care.
I want to mention one very specific thing about this though, these services are very different than other medical services not just because of the difference in insurance markets, but also because unlike many, many procedures they are elective.
The health market is so interesting because one of the normal recourses available to market participants normally, that is doing without, is not available in certain situations int he health market.
> The war itself played a major role in the growth of health insurance, according to a March 2002 history of health insurance benefits from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank that examines employment-based benefits. Wages had been frozen by the National War Labor Board amid a shortage of workers as many potential employees went off to fight in the war. Employers sought to get around the wage controls in order to attract scarce workers. Providing them health insurance was one way to do that, EBRI said.
> "During this time, employers petitioned, and were granted to have benefits, particularly health benefits, not be considered part of wages," Stephen Blakely, the director of communications and managing editor at EBRI, told us. "Congress agreed to exempt health insurance benefits from taxation."
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/oct/30/ja...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_Unit...
See History
Nobody is saying unions are perfect, but corporations and plutocrats aren't going anywhere, and labor is the only countervailing force.
You don't have to be arrogant about your own abilities to realize that promotion based on seniority would privilege longer-tenured workers over better, lesser-tenured workers.
That doesn't just hurt the best workers -- it hurts anyone who is above the average.
Promotion based on seniority is a common feature of union contracts, so it's a valid concern.
Some people like seniority-based promotion because it can reduce discrimination in promotion decisions. For example, a woman could be promoted based on seniority even though her sexist boss might prefer a less-qualified, less-tenured male candidate. That would certainly be unfair, and seniority-based promotion could prevent that. However, the tech industry is currently mostly men, which means that any female employee who joins a large company will have at least a few decades' worth of men ahead of her in line for a promotion, no matter how good she is at her job. Seniority-based promotion would actually entrench gender diversity problems for at least 20 years, rather than solve them. The only way it would have positive effects vis a vis diversity would be to impose it on a workforce that is already diverse but has discriminatory managers.
If you are average: Given that most people are average (because that's what average means), you aren't an outlier, so you wouldn't expect a faster or slower promotion timeline in a meritocratic system than in a seniority based system. After all, the majority of people more senior than you at any company are likely to be average too (because that's what average means), unless the company has an unusual distribution of employee skill across the tenure spectrum. In a meritocratic system, you are still average, and you would still have an average promotion timeline. If you are average, it doesn't much matter what system you have.
If you are above average: Your talent will be recognized, and you will be promoted faster than most of your peers in a meritocratic system. In a seniority-based system, people who are not as good as you will be promoted before you because they have worked at the company longer. This hurts you, and it hurts the company, because both could do better under a meritocracy. You should prefer a meritocratic system over a seniority-based system.
If you are below average: In a meritocratic system, you would be promoted as a last resort, when better people are not available. In a seniority-based system, you will be promoted just because you stuck around, even if you suck. You should prefer a seniority-based system over a meritocratic system.
If you are a worker at any level, and you improve your job skills and your value to the company, that will increase your promotion prospects in a meritocratic system, but not change them in any way in a seniority-based system. So why would anyone try to improve or work hard in a seniority-based system?
It's very simple: when a group of people are considered for a promotion, the person who has the most seniority, i.e. has been at the company for the longest time, will automatically be given the promotion.
That doesn't mean the guy in charge of the mail room is going to be promoted to head of engineering because he's been there longer than any of the engineers. Promotions happen within departments. But you can damn well bet that the guy in charge of the mail room is the mail room employee who has been at the company the longest, no matter how good he is at his job.
Any system that doesn't work like this is not a "seniority-based" system, and is outside of the scope of the discussion.
Can you provide empirical evidence with actual seniority based systems that match the very strict description you've supplied? Because if not what you have is an unsupported hypothesis, not a description of reality.
For example, we could push for industry-wide standardized job level requirements that are demographic-blind. This would reduce agism, sexism, and other blind (or not-so-blind) biases.
This would also benefit businesses by normalizing job requirements across businesses (for example: reducing interview costs and avoiding spending internal resources on defining requirements).
But in the short term, I suggest the focus be on preserving the industry from the large number of threats it now faces via cooperation from all roles in the industry. Once a habit of cooperation emerges, further future cooperation among members would be very likely.
As far as I know he didn't say he'd turn a blind eye to police violence. What he said was essentially he wanted less antagonism toward police.
I think playing loose with words like this and confounding things kind of elicits skepticism.
Pelley: "Eleven, 12 million illegal immigrants --"
Trump: "Or whatever the number is."
Pelley: "Still in the country, what do you do?"
Trump: "If they've done well, they're going out and they're coming back in legally. Because you said it--"
Pelley: "You're rounding them all up?"
Trump: "We're rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And they're going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesn't sound nice. But not everything is nice."
Or he could ask someone to develop an app where people could report people who are working without proper docs and fine the workplace and schools for violations. It could even be incentivized and non false positives get rewards of some sort --tax credit, whatever. False positives get demerits, etc.
That said, if employers are not willing to pay citizens a minimum wage of $15, then we will need a way to allow cheap unskilled imported labor to work on farms etc. Set up a system where you allow seasonal work visas. If you overstay, you are out 5 years. If you want to stay past a season extend your visa by exposing someone overstaying their visa so you get self policing. However, since this creates underemployed citizens, tax the employers who employ imported labor to underwrite citizen unemployment benefits.
People in these areas usually are fine with them because "who cares". Businesses are fine because they usually represent cheap labor. Local governments have a lot to do on their plate already, they don't want to go in the immigration business.
These policies are basically "federal overreach". Feds fly in to do something the locals do not want.
Do you think LA is a sanctuary city because of Obama? It's the will of the people. Who cares what people in Iowa think?
All the feds have to do is enforce e-verify. If anything Trumps win likely signifies distress from the working class. If the Dems dig in their heals and cater more to non citizens than they do their own citizens, I'm afraid they may lose in the next election again.
No, that is plainly not sufficient, which is obvious because many states already do this. Unless by "enforce E-Verify" you mean something far more drastic.
This is precisely why Trump won more than any reason. He made an appeal to the most important group in America, the middle class, and they agreed with him.
Trump should learn one thing. Black families like jobs. They'll vote for jobs. They also want, if not always like the police but jobs would go a long way to smoothing things over, as with any pop.
He won because everyone voted along party lines + similar turnout to 2000 (Dem marginally above Rep turnout). All other narratives do not match the actual results.
Sounds contradictory to http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/upshot/how-did-trump-win-o... for instance, but that's a bit older. Maybe I missed something.
[1]http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2016/10/12/nearly-100000-penn...
So theory is Trump mobilized a ton of voters who sat out in 2012?
Wrong. Trump won the election in a landslide of the electoral college and likely a majority of the popular vote if you audit the southwestern states you abhor to filter out "undocumented people" who voted. That is also not taking into account that Trump primarily campaigned in a small handful of states due to the nature of our electoral system and likely would have won larger in a system without the electoral college. He won the rust belt states which voted Obama into office for 8 years. Attempting to strip his victory from him by making empty statements about the white working class does little to advance any sort of counter-argument to his policies or achievements.
Nixon 1960: 49.55%
Gore 2000: 48.38%
Kerry 2004: 48.26%
Ford 1976: 48.01%
Romney 2012: 47.15%
Trump 2016: 46.17%
And if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills...
Most people welcome immigrants, so long as they follow the rules others have to follow.
Arguably our system is in need of reform or many kinds (it's our prerogative to seek immigrants of high value to the economy, for example, or those who fill a skills gap or labor gap -say farm workers)
It was the same with the trans bathrooms. You might be surprised how many of us parents have kids with trans friends. The issues get real clear real fast when you see how they affect your kids friends. It's not at all hard to get a glimpse of how they'd affect your kids, if circumstances were different.
When people get into a country illegally, they know it's illegal. They know the consequences (for themselves and any dependents), but they hope they will not get caught and do it anyway, so it's hard to see it as if the state "did this" to them. I've seen this in China, Japan, etc. They know any day could be their last. Many had to have their friends sell their belongings for them because in those places you may have a week at most to get out.
However, the administration should consider these a lower priority but should enforce immigration policy so that we do not have as many of these cases come up. Basically continue the Obama approach but with better border security.
A "lower priority"? Shouldn't it be the opposite: the priority being that we don't tear up the families of our countrymen over paperwork issues?
I mention it because some people think "Oh, we're throwing the parents of American citizens out" --no it's the parents of someone who both hold foreign as well as American citizenship. So one could as equally say they're deporting the parents of a Serbian or Brazilian citizen, but it'd be most accurate to say the parents of a dual Brazilian and American or dual Serbian and American citizen.
So your parents were not more American than say they were Irish [if their parents were still legally Irish at their births]. They were the same. But we're trying to say they are more American than they are Irish and by law they would not be.
And replace it with what, exactly? That clause [0] is, after all, what created uniform national citizenship, and eliminated varying and discriminatory state citizenship policies. Even if one agrees that the "anchor baby" problem is something that warrants limiting citizenship to combat (highly contentious proposition itself), simply blowing up the entire post-Civil War model of US citizenship is a rather brute approach with wide ranging consequences outside the immediate target area.
[0] "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
For just one of so many appalling stories: https://www.thenation.com/article/immigrant-workers-are-bein...
If we actually wanted to stop illegal immigration, getting serious about e-verify and levying enormous fines on employers would get the job done.
But so far, the populism looks like hokum. For just one example, Carrier was bribed to stay. And probably in a way that gets more money to the execs than to the employees. My bet is grift all the way down...
On HN it's 50/50.
> When people say Trump wants to deport all illegal immigrants they are misconstruing his words and are contributing to this problematicly combative atmosphere
> Trump quote explicitly saying he wants to deport all 11M undocumented immigrants
> 0 response to idlewords, instead a series of half baked policy ideas to keep immigrants out. No edit to the original post saying that it was wrong and in fact completely contradicted by the next post. Nothing.
HN prides itself on discussions and while many a silly idea has been aired here I really expect basic factchecking to be respected. That this remains the top thread on this post after being summarily debunked is disappointing.
Countries have many policies to keep people out. Do you think Mexico or Japan don't keep people out? They too have policies for who can enter their countries for what. It's normal. We're the outliers in terms of policy non enforcement compared to other nations.
No western country conducts mass deportations, least of all of long-term residents.
The reason most advanced economies don't need mass deportations is because they enforce immigration laws more strictly for jobs and for schools --therefore they have fewer illegal immigrants (due to fewer incentives). On the other hand we allow more legal immigrants than all those other western economies --which is a good thing.
I'm okay if those same people just get back in line with everyone else, by the way. It may take a while, but take your turn like other legal immigrants.
PS. Latin American countries from time to time do conduct mass deportations, so it's a bit misleading to say none do. Even Angela Merkel said she'd deport upwards of 100k immigrants she first allowed in (thus legal).
More or less the same rules every other nation has to control who comes in (and out) including Mexico, South Africa, etc. We are not outliers in this respect.
It's a long process --sometimes involving multi-year even decade waits for people looking to legally migrate. It's not fair to them or to me (when I want to go overseas) to have people jump the line.
I live in Florida. Border control routinely rounds up undocumented citrus workers and deports them. Nobody ever punishes the farms that employ them. If they punished the farms, it would change things.
I never see anybody push against those employers. I think it's because those complaining are more aligned with the businesses.
"I am Muslim, born in Massachusetts. I love my faith. Muslims in the US are very scared. Both my mom and wife wear the hijab, so I'm always worried they'll be attacked in the street. Even in the Bay Area it's a concern. Of course I encourage them to continue; it's important not to be affected. A few years ago, my mom and sister were at a farmers' market in Boston, what seems like a liberal setting. A big guy ran up and called them terrorists, started spitting at them. My 60 year old mom and 20 year old sister were really intimidated. My sister cried for the rest of the day. People stood by and watched. I give them the benefit of the doubt; they were taken off guard. We have to be aware of our surroundings and be ready to act. It takes mental preparation, so you don't end up reacting like a deer in the headlights."
I am worried what happens to a diverse country, such as the USA, when it elects a leadership that is vocally anti-immigrant. We are about to find out. All of us need to do what we can to minimize the kind of bigotry that might escalate under anti-immigrant leadership.
Maybe that's fine with you. I don't think it sits well with a lot of people.
Realize as well that immigration status is a precarious thing, and it's not always clear who is here legally and who is not. Many people spend a long time in administrative limbo. I was in the US for seven years before I learned I was "legal".
Like many things, immigration is less clear-cut when you look at it in detail. I encourage you to do that, whether or not you end up agreeing with me.
You are casually dismissing the group of people who are the main focus of controversy: people who arrived as children and have been here all their lives. They have never known the country they would be deported to. They are Americans by lived experience. They broke no laws.
I am simply not comfortable deporting those people. It brings us no benefit whatsoever.
> I have followed this election closely and I have yet to hear a single thing that leads me to think he is going to deport legal citizens of any background whatsoever
If you have a "deportation force" that operates on the kind of scale he claims to want at the speed he wants, you are obviously going to deport some citizens. It happened during Operation Wetback and there is no reason to think it would not happen again. People just don't always have their papers in order, and the immigration courts are backed up for years.
I do know that I would be hard-pressed to come up with a more expensive, pointless, and futile way to attempt to restrict illegal immigration than building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, though.
Meanwhile: since 2000, the number of by-land unauthorized immigrants to the US has plummeted, with the share of unauthorized immigrants who simply overstay visas approaching 50%.
"The wall" isn't bad policy because it's inhumane. I care deeply about not deporting unauthorized immigrants but not even a little about the social impact of a big ugly wall in our big ugly southwest states.
"The wall" is bad policy because it's an extremely expensive make-work project that won't actually meaningfully reduce unauthorized immigration. It doesn't matter how high the wall is. Even the unauthorized immigrants who get here on land aren't running across open field land borders. The policy is a con, meant to appeal to a popular misconception of who unauthorized immigrants in this country are and how they got here.
You are like 2-3 Google searches away from verifying for yourself how stupid this particular use of funds is regardless of your opinions about immigration.
Again: it's annoying that we'd consider investing billions of dollars in a make-work project that really serves as nothing but a giant monument to racism --- couldn't we just paint the statue of liberty white, or something? --- but the real issue with the wall isn't moral, it's that it's a gigantic waste of money. It won't even prevent unauthorized immigration over our southern border, because that's not how unauthorized immigration works.
You know what would also be symbolic? A solid gold trash can, burning money 24/7.
The problems with a union is of course your dues being misspent on administrative bloat, campaign donations, executive travel (go to any union site and click on events, there's often 2-3 a month requiring travel), and education costs for executive members. The actual organizers and shop stewards aren't paid anything by the union, it's the top tier executives that pocket the dues. What we tried to do was get them to take half for admin bloat, stop the campaign donations nonsense, and put the rest into a strike fund to pay us during lockouts something more than the picket line pay which is a paltry $100/week. There is typically 4-6years between contracts, and we each pay them $162 a month in dues.
Another problem is of course the adversarial situation that will inevitably become your daily workplace. Your management is now the enemy, as they will never capitulate to all your demands during collective bargaining so every single work meeting you have with them is usually a fight. Everything you do is now paid in time values, so if they ask you to do something that isn't clearly spelled out in the collective agreement you don't do it because it's free work, such as asking your contracted plumber to mow your lawn. This creates many problems, as management repeatedly tries to implement ridiculous new procedures that of course add time which is unpaid.
The positives with a union is you can directly confront coworkers if you have issues with them that are work related (and not criminal such as sexual harassment), so you don't have to go to management which could have them fired. It's nice to work out petty disputes between a floor steward and your coworker without the heavy hand of management adding complexity and fear into the mix. Another positive is you are free to speak your mind directly to management without fear of being arbitrarily terminated or screwed with. It's common where I work to see somebody walk up to management and tell them their attitude is disgusting to their face in front of everybody. Finally you get to bid on everything, so the founder's cousin who started yesterday doesn't get priority vacation over you.
Also goodbye implied forced Christmas parties, implied forced picnics with some visiting sales manager or your boss on the weekend or forced team building clownery outside of work hours, fake vacation policies that claim to be 'unlimited', unpaid overtime, and idiotic work environments like cafes or bars, my favorite idiocy being a historic theatre sized bank building converted into a very loud cafe with wood benches roped off where everybody was expected to work.