Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.
Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.
Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.
I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"? I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom. Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things.
Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan.
On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.
You can't outlaw bad decisions - but it seems that some people will never get tired of trying...
Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. No water lines to urinals fits that descriptions nicely.
Built to code == the worst construction that is legalAnother case in point: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0UG0H720160102
I don't know real estate developers to be any sort of exception, do you?
On another note, the obvious parallels to software engineering tasks seem very interesting. This shows that ideas like YAGNI very much depend on a cost-benefit-calculation that's very dependend on variables like scale and the anticipated cost of changes.
Some building developers will reap the reward if it was a good decision, others will suffer the consequence.
Requiring a water line in a building is not the same thing. It's a private building, and the people who own it are well within their rights to decide to risk later disruption and cost if they need water lines. Legislating away that right is insanity and just make-work that costs the building owner money up-front for something they've decided they don't need.
That's why the city cares. Every time one goes up or comes down there's a risk involved.
You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't pay your taxes and the township ends up owning a lien on your house. They don't want to have to spend fifty grand installing electricity or running water before they can sell the house.
Depending on how big the technical deficit is here, it may not even be cost effective to retrofit after the fact (after all it still needs to meet code). And knocking down a house because the previous owner was a weirdo is terribly wasteful.
Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building.
Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation.
Just to meet your last point: - Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary? - Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?
You could say the same thing about much of the building code.
A lot of code is there to ensure that the floor doesn't collapse if you fill the tub up with water, have a room full of people jumping up and down, or buy a piano. There's more on ensuring the roof doesn't collapse if there's lot of snow on it, and making sure the house is solid enough to safely sustain reasonably high winds or an earthquake.
If there are no earthquakes, wind or snow storms, you never buy a piano or have a party and only ever use the shower, is the effort put in satisfying these codes wasted?
When it comes to safety--because we understandably put such a large value on human life--small risks are something we consider.
I believe all of your examples fall into the safety category. Even worse about your examples is that the situations are unsafe and misleading. I think our regulations surrounding the safety issues that you listed are reasonable.
(Additionally, building codes do consider expected usage and alters allowances. No one expects a piano in an attic and the floor load per square foot requirements reflect that.)
Building busted stuff in the middle of NYC hurts everyone, because there's limited space.
Visionaries can build where other people don't want to be, or convince the people around them that what they want to do is a good idea.
Someone could buy an incredibly valuable vacant lot and fence it and never use it. As far as I know, that's not illegal but would cause the same problem you've pointed out. I don't think the utility hookup regulations are based on such "waste of space" reasoning.
Liberalism goes both ways.
I have been nauseated every time I entered a public lavatory where waterless urinals were installed.
I have certainly avoided those lavatories in the future but once I'm nauseated, the damage is done.
Personally this is not tooooo far off that. Ensuring toilets always work.
Urinals have a very long life cycle, and by the time one needs to be replaced, it is likely any patent left would be in Design only, and thus other manufacturers can build and sell them, allowing the market to rebalance the cost.
In other words, "they're patented" is a bogus argument for needing a water line.
There are better arguments which you tried to hit on - what if you want to replace a urinal with a stall or some other fixture, e.g. - but this one alone isn't a good one. There are also plenty of counter arguments for why this kind of thing is a really bad idea in the case of a water line (e.g., a blind water line is going to be a much more ugly problem when renovations do happen if they aren't well enough noted in the designs or if the designs are unavailable, and what happens when a blind water line leaks, bursts or corrodes through inside a wall due to freezing/accidentally drilling or nailing through a pipe/etc.)
As it turns out in capitalism "extracting questionable value from society and taking it for yourself" is really the currency of power so an organization that doesn't do that is completely toothless and may as well not exist.
Capitalism rarely extracts questionable value from society, and when it does it's normally the result of government interference in an industry in order to advantage one business vs another - creating non-value-based power imbalances like monopolies.
To the contrary, Capitalism has been proven time and again to provide maximum value for society.
May I suggest cigarette / smoking advertising?
Part of the reason there's so much make-work in unions today is because as a percentage of the workforce unions have largely been relegated to public works projects and other niches reliant on political support. It's an existential crisis for unions and their middle-class laborers, and so they're going to flex every political muscle they can.
Even though unions dominate in a country like Germany, the number of union workers required for any particular task is significantly less than is typical in the U.S. And that's because there's more union work available for their members. When union work disappears in the U.S., the union members don't just disappear, too.
In terms of building codes, real-estate development interests have significantly more clout than unions. Partially that's because real-estate development is general seen as a net good. Partially it's their money talks several magnitudes louder because it is several magnitudes larger.
The fact that waterless urinals are allowed might be seen as evidence of the disparity.
[0]: http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/50076-22-09_build...
See also: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/local_laws/ll41of2012.... for the larger law as of 2012.
Corporation acts in it's own interests: "Well you can't blame them for that".
One of the best arguments I've heard for unions [0] is that a negotiation between workers and companies is usually very lopsided: a company can afford for an employee to quit, but a worker often cannot afford to get fired. A union is powerful enough to negotiate equally with companies. But in the case of Local 14, it seems like the power is actually lopsided in the other direction: Local 14 can afford to boycott one particular construction project, but the building developers can't afford to go without cranes.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta... (see section 2.5)
That's a monopoly practice, right there.
When a union does it we blame the union.
It's a double standard. Worse, theoretically rent seeking by unions should be more tolerated than by corporations. We should minimize all forms of rent seeking, but some forms are worse than others. The rent seeking profits of unions are distributed to many more workers than of corporations, notwithstanding the fanciful image we have of the corrupt union boss.
Except for those on the far left, people generally perceive corporations as amoral. But almost all Americans, right and left, not only judge unions by a different standard, they're typically cynical about unions. Even well paid union members are cynical! It's... incredible.
It makes sense to license electricians, crane operators, doctors, lawyers, and many other professions who do safety-critical work.
Only a very small minority of programmers work on software that could actually hurt someone (at Boeing, Toyota, etc...).
There's no reason to create a legal barrier to entry for programming.
Similarly, there would never be a general licence for "programmer". But some day there probably will be (and indeed probably should be) specific licences for things like "have back-end access to personal medical data", "modify source code of nuclear reactor control software", and "install networking hardware via which credit card details are transmitted".
It's not about creating a barrier to entry for a whole profession. It's about licencing people to work in specific situations where there are specific risks, such as privacy risks, public safety risks, and risk of fraud.
The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. That is when you know what it will do.
If we make the union, we can make plenty of reasons and ways for it to be different. Whether or not those result in a difference, is not very predictable.
Our day jab is literally understanding, predicting, and building complex systems out of ideas. Why would we be unable to make a union with a reasonable - even likely - chance of not developing the same problems these (much) older unions have?
Tell me you've never seen this story... I've worked with managers who would absolutely go for hiring more people to continuously do the same stupid task rather than improving the process. If they were protected, it would be a very sad place to work.
But it will require much less people to build the AI. And that's the only relevant point when stepping into the investors' shoes.
The real problem is wealth concentration. Unions and professional associations are one way for the working class to push back when the society they live in is failing to do so.
It's the wrong tool, not addressing the root cause, has implementation challenges, and will create problems in the future.
But the ship is sinking right now. Since the 1970s.
Yes, conceivably the DOB could be in backroom cahoots with Local 14-14B, and nixing the crane on stated grounds of structural design concerns -- whilst in reality having other motives. And not only "conceivably"; stuff like this happens in NYC all the time.
But we'd still need to see some actual evidence of such collusion, please; not just speculation (or arguments on the basis of "unions bad!", more or less)
City agencies don't just cave in to protests at the drop of the hat. Especially not NYC agencies.
So again, what I request is simply: evidence, not speculation.
So... ya might as well just believe whichever side of the coin you like better, right?
Works for some people, I guess.
You might want to question the validity of that assumption. Most likely the truth (was) basically knowable in this case, with a modicum of effort.
Just that Crain's apparently didn't want to take even baby steps in the direction of that effort -- i.e. the standard proactive, iterative follow-up that, you know, real journalists do: like contacting the entrepreneurial crane operator before publication to get their response to the DOB's claims about the composition of their rigs; and asking the DOB for their response to his response, etc. Or like, you know, talking to an independent expert or two. That kind of thing.
Instead they just did the usual throw-it-at-the-wall, see-if-it-sticks thing -- and presented it as a "he said, she said" story. Which may not have been all that illuminating or informative -- but at least got people to click on it, and (judging by the response here in this forum), to allow their buttons to be pushed.
But this all makes for poor ad copy, of course. "Bold, Crafty Innovator Thwarted, 'Cause Unions!" -- that's what gets people to click on your article. And share it in venues such as this one.
Sometimes Goliath stomps David, and we all lose.
Just that it's kind of weird (in my view) that so many people seem to be happy to conclude that we somehow "know" that it was union arm-twisting which (at least temporarily) sealed his fate. Despite the complete lack of primary (or even secondary) evidence for such a connection.
• Is the data being backed up? Is that backup process actually correct (i.e. if the backing data-store is a file on a SAN, and we perform filesystem-level snapshots of that SAN, can all the data actually be restored from such a snapshot, or will it be partially corrupt?)
• For that matter, is there a documented process for restoring from such a backup, such that whoever's on the ops shift could do it if need be?
• Is the backing store transparent/auditable, esp. for compliance to our privacy policy—i.e., can we write an indexing agent to determine whether any Personally Identifiable Information is being stored, without needing to ask the software's ISV for their format spec?
• Can the backing store be locked down with ACLs such that getting access to the app's connection to its backing store as an unprivileged user, doesn't let them grab our entire database, or execute arbitrary storage changes (e.g. DROP TABLE)?
• Can audit-trail logic be installed in the backing store (rather than in the app layer by the ISV), so that we will know if some contractor takes a copy of the data home with them?
When your software speaks to a formal DBMS, all these questions have easy answers. When it manages its own little proprietary DB/file-format thing, they're up in the air.
Then when the access app gets "important", IT uses it as a hostage for more funding, using the absurdly expensive cost model that they build.
So they've become "extractive" in the parlance of economists and sociologists studying 3rd world economies?
Those waterless urinals are a bullshit green thing used to suck up grant money -- sort of like the "big smelly" trash cans that appeared with Obamas stimulus program. Most often, if not usually, they are removed from service because they get disgusting unless you train your janitorial staff and keep good track of when maintenance is performed.
The pipes are there so when you decide to flush the waterless urinal, you can do so without engaging in some massive project.
There are a few places here that use those urinals and the smell hits me in the face every time I enter the lavatory.
In the case you describe, perhaps the unions are a net positive because their protectionist rule will make it easier to replace those waterless stink pits with actual urinals in the future.
All of these unions that center around apprenticeship programs or requiring special training that is near-impossible to get without being part of the union is all just protectionist garbage. Its sole purpose is to control the supply of available labor for certain types of work.
But the parent is right that anything questionable done by unions is labored over and repeated again and again and again and again while corporations (for the most part) don't face the same scrutiny.
Able-bodied men and women don't have jobs in America and you want a 'decent' wage floor of 150k for the chosen ones. Trade unions, the supposed bulwark of the left. Worker's rights, etc.
I fully expect people to support all this, have the unions endorse the Democrats, and then have discussions at afternoon tea about how everyone else just considers themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and votes against their own interest.
They want the jobs, man. And rightfully so. And when you stand there with your $150k-wage-floor job and they have to subsist on the dole because you decided to 'control the supply of labour', you shouldn't be surprised when they don't like you.
Unions and union workers are acting exactly as they're expected to under the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem. And everyone else is acting exactly as they are expected to as well. So I'm not surprised they're acting that way, but the Mafia act as expected to, and I'm damned if I'll back either of these.
Edit: the union mentioned in the article. (I hadn't read it).
It appears you're generalizing this union to represent other unions. It's possible for one union to be exploitative while other ones to have merit. Just as some corporations behave responsibly while a few others blatantly disregard consumers and workers.
The union in the article.
EDIT: I also wonder how they get so much overtime. Surely it couldn't be because of 'controlling the supply of labour'. Yeah, that's right. Give them their half a million dollars a year. It's only 'decent'.
The claim is they make 75.91/hr when in the crane, 73.91 when not. Let's say they spend 6 hours a day in the crane, 2 hours not in the crane; that's 603.28/day. Five days a week is 3,016.40. 52 weeks a year would be 156,852.80.
So we're at $156,852.80/year from 8-hour days of work. We need to somehow get to "half a million". By which I mean we need to come up with $343,147.20 in overtime. The quote doesn't say what the overtime rate is, but traditionally it's time and a half; At a behind-the-crane rate of $75.91, overtime would be $113.86/hour. The engineer would then need to work "only" 3,013 hours of overtime a year in order to hit that "half a million" target. Or 2,135 hours of overtime a year in order to hit the $400k another commenter suggests below.
There are 8,760 total hours in a (non-leap) year and we've already used 2,080 of them accounting for 8-hour weekday shifts. So our engineer has 6,680 hours in the year left in which to work either 3,013 or 2,135 hours of overtime so we can bash him for making too much money. If he works an 8-hour shift every Saturday and every Sunday at the overtime rate, that only gets us 832 hours of overtime. We still need to find between 1,303 and 2,181 additional hours of overtime. That's an additional 3.5 - 6 hours per day every day for the year.
So... "many union members earn half a million dollars a year". To get to that number, at the quoted wages, they would have to be working 14-hour shifts every day. Not "every week day with two week's vacation". 14 hours every day: 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To get to the $400,000 estimate the comment below thinks is reasonable, they'd only need to work 11.5 hours a day all 365 days of the year. And that's probably a low estimate: I got that number by assuming the engineer spends 6 hours of every working weekday 8-hour shift behind the crane at the higher rate, and 100% of overtime hours behind the crane at the higher rate. If he's spending any more than 2 hours per weekday not behind the crane he needs to work even more hours since he's paid a lower rate then.
I hope nobody actually believes that these guys are genuinely working 11-14 hours a day, 365 days a year, or that if they are it would be wrong to massively compensate them for it.
Of course, someone will point out that I didn't account for the $32.50/hour in "benefits". But how can I? What does that mean? How many jobs have you had where you said "oh, my rate is low but I also count an hourly benefit amount as part of my wages"? Do you genuinely, truly, honestly and actively make sure you include the cost of any employer matching on your health insurance or 401(k) as dollar value and lump it into your salary? I know I don't.
But let's run with it anyway. Let's suppose the engineer gets 100% of his health plan covered by these "benefits", and what's more let's go high on it and assume that his health plan costs $5,000/month. If we only have him work 8-hour shifts 7 days a week we still need to make up a lot of money out of overtime or non-health-plan benefits:
weekday wage = (75.91 * 6) + (73.91 * 2) = 603.28
weekend wage = (75.91 * 1.5) * 16 (hours in two 8-hour shifts) = 1,821.84
Full week = 5 * weekday + weekend = 4,838.24
Full year of 8-hour shifts 7 days a week = 52 * 4,838.24 = 251,588.48
Add in $60,000 worth of health insurance = $311,588.48
To hit the "half a million" we still need to find nearly another $200,000. Specifically, we still need to find him 1,655 hours of overtime at this point. That's 4.5 hours a day in a 365-day year, so we're at 12.5-hour shifts, 365 days a year, to hit $500,000 in compensation.
A 401(k) doesn't help since his max contribution to that is $18,000/year, which is peanuts compared to the gap we need to make up to get him to $500,000.
But at this point I think we can safely say that something is very fishy with what you've quoted. And to reference my other comment, the reason this engineer isn't hanging out with other millionaires is that he can't because he spends 12.5 hours a day, all 365 days of the year, at work in order to get to that "half a million" wage you're attributing to him.
(except of course you know that the crane operators aren't really doing that, but that would sink the whole story...)
All that information is public. I'm a little suspicious of a $500k crane engineer myself, but you managed to get everything wrong. If you missed half the stuff, and the half that was available in the article and in a two-minute Google, god knows what you're leaving out. I literally had the top result in my first search showing the wage card and here you're busy making up nonsensical numbers.
An 8-hour weekday shift with 2 hours not behind the crane is:
(75.91 * 6) + (73.91 * 2) = 603.28
A five-day week at that rate is 3,016.40.
52 weeks of that is $156,852.80. Add $60k insurance (and it's questionable to bundle that as "pay", but whatever), and we're at $218,652.80. Add $18k for max 401(k) contribution and it's $234,852.80.
From there we need to find $265,147.20 in overtime to get to $500k. If the overtime rate is double time, and if literally every overtime hour worked is behind the crane, our engineer needs 1,747 hours of overtime in a year in order to hit $500,000.
Working at 8-hour shift every weekend day can eat up 832 hours of that, leaving 915 hours we still need to find somewhere else. That's 17.6 hours of overtime per week. If they're only worked on weekdays, the crane operator needs to work an 11.5 hour shift every weekday and an 8 hour shift every Saturday and Sunday, year-round, to hit $500,000.
I'm more than "a little suspicious" of that.
Without, if they work 52 40-hour weeks, it's $156k. Which is good money, but a far, far cry from the "many make half a million" claim.
And since a little bit of "let's actually run the numbers you just presented" reduced the initially claimed amount by nearly 70%, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say the initial claim was not rooted in reality, and probably the real amount is lower yet.
Therefore working 8 hours a day, for every day of the week (including weekends), for one year would earn: 225492 + 180394 = 405886
This is very big money but it's not 'half a million dollars'.
But, if not, the sentence still works with "give them their $400k a year".
I'll give you a hint: someone may trying to mislead you and inflame prejudices which have been carefully drilled into you over many years of media exposure.
"Controlling the supply of labor is very important if you want the wages to be at all decent." - I interpret that sentence very differently. I see it as controlling the labor supply is a great way to prevent the flow of labor that may be just as good and willing to work for less from entering the job market for this activity. It's also a great way to force higher prices upon your customers because no matter which provider/firm they go to they are likely to all have members of the union working there forcing the same wages.
This behavior at its core it anti-competitive. If they were in fact corporations this activity would be a felony. But as employees it is not. Just a thought.
One thing I find interesting: Will we will see some version of the odd asymmetries between corporate and union law tested out in the courts as the gig economy grows? A company providing labor, for example, can legally ask for exclusivity agreements. Aramark, a big catering contractor, does that frequently. A union can't, though; an exclusivity deal for employees, saying that catering staff can only be hired from a certain union, is banned as a "closed shop" under the Taft-Hartley act. What about a partnership of gig-economy workers? If they're not employees, it seems like they should be able to push for deals more like Aramark ones, even though unions can't do that.
I personally think that laws banning closed shops are completely absurd and undermine peoples' freedom to negotiate contracts that suit them (which labour should have free access to, because of the massive unfairness of employment as a concept, and its inherent inequity between employer and employee).
But they have, and pretending that it's not their own fault for then turning around and effectively mandating a closed shop is absurd.