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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible how many people here are against transparency and a better labor market providing more information to the supplier side.

Lord knows companies have probably 80% of the leverage in the job market.

Tech people are doomed not by AIs, but by lack of solidarity, raw greed and lack of long term vision.

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The lack of worker solidarity in tech is really astounding.

I've been in this industry for almost 20 years and have been trying to instill some sense of it in every workplace I worked. Some decades ago it really seemed that tech workers felt like they were just tech moguls that hadn't made it yet, any kind of labour protection was looked at as "stifling innovation".

Only lately I've seen people listen to me when I bring up that if you depend on a salary you're on the same side as 99% of other people, no matter you have a run away of 6 months saved, if you lose your job for 6-12 months and will be fucked by it you should have solidarity with others in the same spot or worse.

Trying to bring up class struggles used to be mocked in the tech scene, I feel that people are slowly waking up though, the latest layoffs definitely got me surprised about some folks I know finally understanding what that means.

> The lack of worker solidarity in tech is really astounding.

It's because those that are overpaid relative to others in the industry are very aware of the situation.

I've seen what "solidarity" did to the manufacturing industry. I'd like my job to stay in my city. And anyone in tech has a lot more to gain from efforts to break the remaining guild-like systems in medicine and law making those services more affordable and available than they do from attempts to build a new one in tech.

And I've seen what solidarity (without the scary quotes) did to Sweden (and other Nordics), Germany, etc. as societies for the working class.

A union is not a guild, it's not about creating barriers of entry like in law or medicine, unsure why you conflate those concepts. Perhaps it's from ignorance, or perhaps from the fears that the ruling class instilled into you.

And yet it's exactly what it does.

If we're going to copy the Nordics, someone is going to have to start by translating their laws into English so we know what it is they are actually doing. I don't like arguing based on what they are hypothetically doing and I don't think many of the people pointing at them as an example know either. They're tiny, homogeneous and Norway has obscene oil wealth. It isn't obvious we can copy them piecemeal, even if it does make sense which I doubt it does.

And although it isn't exactly fair, note that Germany is a wasteland for tech. In the centre of a tech desert. The EU can't do tech. Copying their policies we can do, but it'll probably involve a lot of jobs heading to Asia. All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.

The US also has oil wealth, but it goes to shareholders instead of to the public purse. Which is funny because none of them created the oil.

I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that.

> All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.

Because USA's wages are the massive oddball here, not the standard. And to be honest, shouldn't be replicated anywhere else, having such a vast part of your population living how the bottom 50% of the USA lives is not really a goal for most developed countries, it doesn't create a healthy society (as you can see yourself by living in the USA).

Comparing purely on a wage basis is a reduction of what societies actually are. Great, you earn a lot more in the USA but now has to deal with all the stresses of living in the USA. Is that really what the average person in an advanced economy should be under? If you believe so, the USA is for you, I don't believe in it.

> The EU can't do tech.

The EU has a large language and cultural barrier that is nonexistent in the USA, it's not only a purely economical output.

ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? Tech couldn't exist without ASML...

On the point of tiny "homogeneous" Nordics:

Each US state is also pretty tiny with a few exceptions, isn't that the model of the USA? Why can't each tiny state also have their provisions for labour protection? Because it's not part of the culture.

>ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech?

My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW)

Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?

Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it from here?

Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil.

Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China.

US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition.

>Tech couldn't exist without ASML...

False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either.

Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence versus their Japanese competitors.

Longer story:

"The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA.

Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details.

The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1]

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319

> Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?

Some examples of Eu based tech would be: Nokia killed by MS, an US company. Skype. SAP. ARM, UiPath, Bitdefender.

But is true, we are unable to compete with US on tech. Part of the reasons is that we don't have good startup ecosystem and hubs, we don't have tech hubs, we don't have tech investors, our tech and entrepreneurship culture might be lacking. But another part is that big US tech companies are monopolies and they are trying to stifle the competition and succeeding at it.

Both EU bureaucrats and each country's politicians don't care. No one does a single thing to try to improve the EU tech ecosystem.

ARM is not EU

It was when it was relevant. ARM right now is in shambles and outside of the EU, but for the majority of time the company existed it was in the EU.

it is more relevant today than ever before

having a monopoloy is good business. as long as you don't rest your laurels. all the big tech companies - microsoft, apple, google etc are monopolies in their own particular niches. as econ 101 says - perfect competition drives profits to zero. the thing that kills europe tech ecosystem is complacency. there's plenty enough smart people.

Where did get the US has better wages than Sweden? According to my sources they are similar but Sweden is higher, $65k vs $74k.

Some of salaries you hear on HN are insane by US standards and only a few, relatively speaking, offer these kinds of salaries.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/media...

> I live and work in Sweden, even though worker solidarity here is almost at an all-time low it's still quite ingrained in society, it's one of the engines of making this society more trustworthy, less unequal and all the benefits that stems from that.

By "worker solidarity" you mean laws enforced by socialist bureaucrats? Equality of outcomes, no matter the merits or the work put in? Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?

>By "worker solidarity" you mean laws enforced by socialist bureaucrats?

Socialist movements and ideas, although fair, win votes and elections, especially in tough times like these, even though those ideas aren't financially viable or would backfire in the long run. Because which voter doesn't want bigger wages or bigger pensions, who cares where the money comes form? It's why my Spanish, Greek and Italian friends tell me their countries are sliding downhill economically.

> Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?

It was a sustainable model before the rise of globalization, back in the '50s till the '80s, when it weas the west vs the east, capitalism vs communism, so western labor and governments had leverage over their large corporate entities. Now, in the globalized world, free of trade and capital barriers, not so much.

Tax corporate profits too much to pay for infrastructure, and social services that serve their workforce? The companies will just relocate to Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland or other complex tax voidance structure involving some British overseas Territories.

Factory workers want more pay and less hours? They relocate production somewhere else where those aren't an issue.

Corporations have managed to have their cake and eat it too, at the expense of the workers and the environment.

I guess you don't know anything about labour laws in Sweden, given it doesn't define much at all (it's pretty barebones) and most of the labour protections come from agreements based on the tripod of government, employer and employee-representative unions negotiations.

And I guess you don't know much about Sweden in general if your follow-up question is "Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?"...

Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc.

While certainly not perfect and lacking in many ways, it is a system that is at least in theory aimed towards providing a decent standard of living to all, instead of allowing a lucky few (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) to juice the income statistics by earning insane amounts of money and giving the middle finger to the rest of society.

> (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself)

This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck.

Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.

According to wikipedia, 9 of the 10 richest persons are white men from an upper-middle-class or upper class social background. Even people like Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim, while not born in the U.S. or Western Europe, have parents that were part of their countries' academic or business elite. Do you have any conception of how lucky you have to be to be born into such circumstances instead of being raised in the slums of Nairobi?

Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.

I didn't say that hard work is all that matters.

You said it is "mostly not luck". I said and believe I did at least prove to a first approximation that it is indeed mostly luck. Yes, hard work matters at the margin. Among the people I studied with, those with a good work ethic are mostly in a better place today than those who slacked during college. But we were all able to attend college in the first place because we were very lucky, not because of any particular great achievements on our part. And in terms of standard of living and luxury, we are more or less all in the top 5% globally, I estimate.

Meanwhile I have worked and travelled across quite a few African countries and I can positively confirm that almost everyone I met there has worked quite a bit harder than I have throughout their lives and despite that, practically all are financially worse off than I am today.

I don't loose sleep over that, there is no cosmic balance I am upsetting with my privileged existence. But the least I and everyone else profiting from this privilege can do is to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with efforts to redistribute some of that extreme profits that the most lucky people in our societies reap through no real sacrifice of their own.

Rich people should simply accept that they are rich mostly not because of their genius and/or hard work, but because of the privileges afforded to them by birth and chance, as well as the services provided to them by greater society. Consequently, I am all for enjoying the fruits of your labour but all this talk about systems like the U.S. "rewarding innovation" or "risk taking" etc. is simply propaganda by people who would rather see other people literally starve than lower their bank account balance from 10 to 8 figures.

I more meant that I don't split things up into "luck" and "hard work" - I think that's too broad. However, sticking to your framing, I would say a lot of that thing you call luck is the hard work of your parents, or their parents.

Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating.

Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought.

And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful.

Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".

Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump.

Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.

On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.

> Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump

You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people.

> But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.

You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means.

> European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.

You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.

It's hugely luck though. I don't want to discount the work I did to pursue a graduate degree and maintain and enhance my professional skills, but none of that would matter if I didn't win the birth lottery of being born American to a family that pushed me to higher education.

> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream

So all this justifies German employers paying their workers less? I'm not sure how should this make sense. All of those things you've mentioned are great and are financed through taxation paid by the workers...

So just compare pretax salaries? Which are still considerably lower in Germany. ...

Yes, it justifies it because public services and insurance do, well, insure you against a lot of negative events that you would have to compensate for with much higher disposable income otherwise.

I.e. my child is severely disabled (not an example, it is actually the case) since birth. Adequately caring for his health, his special educational needs and required assistance in daily live would cost me between 5,000 and 10,000 Euros/month. I actually do not know the exact figure for sure, because I pay only a fraction of this out of pocket. Within the framework of the U.S. financial system, this would have ruined our families finances, my parents (considerable) savings and likely my other son's future earning potential, despite me and my wife both being the offspring of quite well-of families and us not having any student debt despite both having an M.A. degree. It would have locked both me and my wife into potentially sub-optimal employments simply to have some form of health coverage, while still under the soul-crushing fear that someday some manager decides I'm not "efficient" enough to merit payment.

As it is, I have to spend a lot of time on bureaucracy and even more time on caring for my son, but guess what: he is getting some of the best health and educational care available anywhere and I can still afford to go out for dinner once in a while and know that while certainly unnerving and disruptive, a bad turn in my personal luck will not sentence my child to suffer because I can't afford to care for him.

In the same way that it's OK to pay people in SF more than in Detroit, it's OK to have a lower number in Germany if it comes hand in hand with massively cheaper cost of living.

You need to compare the fully loaded cost, including health insurance and university access. If you add the fees that you had to pay in the US to send 3 kids to world-class universities, German salaries would probably come out as a higher value.

True but it's not unreasonable to expect to have an extra 30-50k+ per year left in the US that you can save or do anything with (save for retirement, move to Germany/Europe after a few years etc.) which is not unlikely to be close to the entire disposable income of someone working in a similar position in Germany.

That gives you a lot of freedom longterm.

We have get healthcare, disability pensions, pensions and care via insurance in Germany. They aren't provided via government budgets.

If you earn enough or you are self employed, you can in some case opt out of the public insurances, and get private insurance.

Essentially all of these insurances are subsidized by the government and would not function without taxpayer money. Also because the insurance part is in many cases compulsory, not having these programs run on the government budget is mostly an accounting trick. The effect is essentially the same as leveling a tax it is just called differently.

In the case of health insurance, AFAIK the subsidies are the government paying on behalf of people who are insured but don't pay in (children, spouses out of the labour market, unemployed - "versicherungsfremde Leistungen") and amounts to about 14 billion out of the 280 billion paid in via employees.

My point is that we don't have "free healthcare" over here in Germany, as Americans often think. We pay in 15% of our income up to the limit into health insurance and we get ok, no-frills healthcare (shared rooms in hospitals, waiting times in big cities to see specialists) relatively equally distributed to the population.

German education systems scores slightly worse than US's system on the 2018 PISA score for what it is worth.

> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc.

Still, if we add all those expenses with the wage, the total is still lower for a SWE in EU vs a SWE in US.

In terms of median income (which might arguably be better suited for this particular question than average income), the U.S. is on fourth position with Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway occupying higher ranks. Germany is only about 3,000 USD behind the U.S. in that measure: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

In terms of median wealth, half the E.U. scores better than the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

Here's a few EU and Europe technology companies I could find information on, including their market capitalisation:

  ASML (Netherlands, Market cap: $262.07 Billion)
  Accenture (Ireland, Market cap: $171.21 Billion)
  Deutsche Telekom (Germany, Market cap: $118.43 Billion)
  Schneider Electric (France, Market cap: $91.00 Billion)
  Dassault Systèmes (France, Market cap: $54.24 Billion)
  Adyen (Netherlands, Market cap: $48.95 Billion)
  NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands, Market cap: $47.24 Billion)
  Orange (France, Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
  SAP (Germany, Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
  Ericsson (Sweden,Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
  Vodafone (UK, Market cap: $30.67 Billion)
  STMicroelectronics (Switzerland, Market cap: $45.92 Billion)
  Infineon (Germany, Market cap: $50.75 Billion)
  TE Connectivity (Switzerland, Market cap: $39.56 Billion)
  Amadeus IT Group (Spain, Market cap: $28.69 Billion)
  Nokia (Nokia, Market cap: $26.18 Billion)
  Cellnex Telecom (Spain, Market cap: $26.24 Billion)
  Spotify (Sweden, Market cap: $25.34 Billion)

Note that I selected those for being strictly "tech", as in software, electronics and telecoms. That leaves out plenty of big names in other sectors like fintech, or biotech, etc. For example:

  AstraZeneca (UK, Market cap: $209.57 Billion)
  Novo Nordisk (Denmark, Market cap: $338.28 Billion)
  Siemens (Germany, Market cap: $117.07 Billion)
  Air Liquide (France, Market cap: $85.75 Billion)

And so on.

Note that the EU is 28 independent countries in a common market being built in the last 40 years or so whereas the US is one country, so the comparison is not straightforward. For example, Orange's $31 billion may not be a lot compared to Apple or Gogole, but France is ~70 million people whereas the US is ~330 million.

Edit: info from:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

That list of market caps is comparable to Google, and EU fragmentation as an excuse is grasping at straws - not only is that an example of the absurdist over-regulation in the EU (why are they all so excited about banning trade with each other?) but Google actually makes 30% of its revenue from the EU so it isn't like fragmentation is stopping Google from success.

It isn't like the EU is short of great coders, they just regulate their way to oblivion. With good ideas like the one in the article, I cheerfully add. They are making it transparent that anyone with a choice should go work for a US company.

Google is based in the US, so why would it matter whether the EU is one country or many for Google's market capitalisation?

If it easier for a US firm to move into European markets than it is for Europeans to? That is 100% on the Europeans. The difference between 70 million and 300 million in the home country doesn't make that much of a difference of how easy it is to break in to the German market - the problem is that French regulators would never allow a French Google to grow.

If France had a Google-like company, it'd end up like Nokia. Hiding at number 16 on a list somewhere, rather unremarkable, trying not to think about what could have been.

Equality is a socialist fairytale and unions is what keeps innovation from happening. All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this, stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on.

As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible with no impediments to this. And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.

That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.

"When education isn't liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor" fits really well with your comment.

If unions keep innovation from happening how can Sweden be considered one of the most innovative countries on Earth? Or how can Germany be a powerhouse of engineering and building the machines that build machines?

Your take is a regurgitation of the usual talking points that the elite class use to keep workers separated. Unions aren't forcing socialism, unions are there to build up labour power against employers, who have a much higher leverage in any working agreement you can think of.

Your comment is exactly what I hear for the past 20 years of my work life. Workers are, ultimately, the ones creating value, you are defending the class that has the means to take risks due to their accumulation of capital. The rare oddity of a self-made man is the carrot that those use to push you to regurgitate their points.

Technology leapfrogged everyone because it's an immense value, it's immensely useful, not because there weren't labour protections. That's such a sideways view of everything that's a bit laughable...

High skilled workers in Sweden and Germany and severely underpaid compared to their US counterparts? So either they suddenly become much more productive after moving the US, they are subsidizing their less skilled colleagues or most of that surplus is going to their employers instead?

Probably a bit of each depending on the location/sector/etc.. However Sweden in particular has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the word (even a bit higher than the US)...

I would argue workers create indirect value, because what they do in the end is to execute the vision of the founder of the company. They would have created actual value for themselves if they would have had the vision and the grit to start a company.

What was invented in Sweden that is so groundbreaking they're the most innovative country on the planet?

Regarding technology, it happened in a country unencumbered by unions at every step. Yeah, the US sucks at a lot of things, but at least it's crazy bent on have unions everywhere.

I think that if you're good enough you have all the leverage that you need to be successful. You don't need to join an union for this.

> What was invented in Sweden that is so groundbreaking they're the most innovative country on the planet?

Although I don't know which country is the most innovative on the planet, I think it should be noted that Sweden has a fairly small population (smaller than some cities), so we should probably consider whether Sweden's inventions are in proportion with its population.

I think of Sweden as the home of Volvo, Saab, Skype, Sictus Prolog, Spotify, Minecraft, seatbelts, dynamite and Angstrom's spectroscopy. Don't the Swedes punch above their weight?

Edit: Lots of medical inventions, too: pacemakers, local anesthetics, ECGs, ultrasounds and ventilators. And more computer technology: graphics cards and Bluetooth.

Dear god what an indictement of your school system this comment is.

>All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this

No, what they want is for all workers _of the same job_ to earn a fair wage, at the very least. Not a single time has a union prevented people from having a higher wage than their colleagues.

>stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on.

Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.

>As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible

So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?

>And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.

You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.

>Equality is a socialist fairytale

"Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.

> people from having a higher wage than their colleagues

That's not really true though is it? I mean unless you assume companies have an infinite amount of income to distribute...

> No, what they want is for all workers _of the same job_ to earn a fair wage, at the very least. Not a single time has a union prevented people from having a higher wage than their colleagues.

And who decides what is a fair wage? And even considering this is what they want, then why should then the ranges be public and tight for a specific job? There are a lot of people here saying it is not in the spirit of the law to say a position pays between 100k and 900k.

> Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.

You are basically a cog in a machine. Yes, its callous, but it is what it is. This is why you have unemployment benefits in care you're fired. And do you mean fired properly and respectfully? A red carpet when you leave the premises?

> So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?

This is laughable, it's the kind of socialist speech that has no basis in reality. This is why you are paid in the first place, to do some work that someone else designed for you. If you want to reap the fruits of your labor, start a company and sell your product(s).

> You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.

I don't know if you know, but there are a lot of stories about people quitting their jobs to start successful companies. And some of them joined YC and so on. Just because most people don't do it its because they prefer the perceived confort of a job to the stress of being an entrepreneur.

> "Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.

I worked hard and got rewarded. And it works. Regading your comment: It is simply the perceived value of the physical work that is put in. That's why you have a lot of low paying jobs: their perceived value to other people.

Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class (largely anointed by luck and/or heritage) to a broad segment of society. This in turn enables broad segments of society to give their children a decent education, which is the pre-requisite for society-scale innovation and (technological and social) progress.

The U.S. has long profited from being able to leverage plentiful natural resources and a dominating international position into being attractive to well-educated people from around the world and thus never having to fully rely on its own broadly abysmal but narrowly elite education system and other social services.

That is probably something you see as a victory, but it is also the definition of unsustainability: at some point the stresses introduced by this approach will start to crack the social fabric. Arguably, it already has.

> Unions are the best way known to man that allows the re-distribution of profits from a small upper class

Wealth inequality is still huge in Scandinavia (especially Sweden which is even worse than the US in that regard), Germany and the Benelux (especially when compared to many other European countries which might not have very strong unions..). So unions didn't really help that much with that...

I can't speak for other countries because I never looked at the data but in Germany, increasing wealth inequality correlates with decreasing union membership in recent decades while the big and broadly distributed wealth gains of the post-war era correlated with historically high levels of union memberships. Intuitively it would make sense that rising income inequality is the result of too little unionization, not too much or it being irrelevant.

Also, there is plenty of actual research that backs this up, i.e.:

- https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-help-reduce-dispariti...

Data from the World Inequality Database refutes your statement - https://wid.world/world

Every single socialist European nation (including the Scandinavian ones) has a better wealth distribution than the USA.

> So unions didn't really help that much with that...

Can you back your statement up with facts instead of hand-waving away paragraphs of meaningful discussion that came before this comment?

> refutes your statement

Credit Suisse says otherwise when measured using Gini:

https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

Of course they are possible not the most trustworthy source given the recent events..

To be fair I don't know how to explain the disparity, the report even says this: "For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated"

This ignores all of the decades of government and university research and funding that went into these technological advances. The US also had the great advantage of being one of the only countries to not be completely devastated by two World Wars.

Almost all countries were not devastated by two world wars.

Most of the ones that weren't were previously devastated by colonialism.

Well, that applies to the US as well.

Not really? The indigenous peoples of North America were absolutely devastated by colonialism but it was the United States doing the devastating.

That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.

The most financially successful innovations in US tech this century have arguably been business models based on venture capital and barely regulated corporations achieving monopoly/oligopoly levels of control and engaging in exploitative behaviours at a larger scale than ever before. Is that really the kind of free market, light regulation economics to be proud of?

> That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.

i have a lot of questions. what do you mean by technology and what are the other domains? when did technology leapfrog those other domains? what are technology's innovations with respect to those other domains? why was technology free to innovate so fast? why were other domains not?

at a very basic level, the tech sector advancing must corrispond to advances in other sectors because tech only advances by advancing other sectors. if it doesn't advance other sectors of the economy, then it's just a waste of time and energy, which is a fair characterization of the tech sector for the last couple decades. in contrast, the advancement of tech happening now is nothing compared to the 1920s to the 1940s, when unions were a lot bigger in the united states.

not that that has anything to do with it. in truth technological breakthroughs happen every once in a while, take several decades to be fully exploited, after which point there's no real development for who knows how long until the next breakthrough happens, and it doesn't really make a difference (for technological development) how work is organized.

I've seen what socialist governments did in Sweden: income taxes that can reach 72%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden

During the most prosperous times in American history (post WW2 economy), income taxes on the highest earners were even higher than that. I don't like taxes, but capitalism does that too.

I've seen what no solidarity and no unions did to the US job market and work conditions.

You are not a temporarily embarassed millionaire about to disrupt the medecine and law sectors. You're just yet another drone that corporate is happy to use, expandable and easy to throw away.

you are a fucktard

Solidarity and diversity are opposing forces. Now you understand why Tech is so obsessed with diversity. There will never be the solidarity you seek while companies, to the cheers of their employees, atomize their workers as much as possible. But diversity is now a secular religion whose tenets are ever changing to keep everyone divided. Any solidarity that arises in such a religion can quickly be quashed by changing some of the previously unquestionable core beliefs.

What are you on about? Diversity in the makeup of a group isn't the opposite of the ability for a group to unite for a common cause. Being employed in the same industry is already more than enough to practice solidarity, e.g. unions. I cannot fathom how one would bring a diversity argument against a statement like "workers deserve better protections".

Your argument sounds like a stepping stone for racism and anti-diversity rhetoric to me, and I vehemently disagree.

Fucking whitey. Pound sand

> Solidarity and diversity are opposing forces.

This sentence is close to brain cancer. Diversity means accepting others amongst yours despite your differences, it's the essence of solidarity.

>But diversity is now a secular religion whose tenets are ever changing to keep everyone divided.

What you are referring to is the ever changing propaganda theater of "left" vs right, which pictures a caricature enemy stereotype, the simple minded can easily hate. "Look here a radical transgenderist!" and suddenly the whole concept of diversity is subject to scrutiny.

I think, the lesson you need to learn is not getting triggered by pink hair.

> but by lack of solidarity, raw greed

Their salary is because they are exceptional, other people are not as exceptional and are unworthy of such things.

It isn't a lack of solidarity or greed, its a lack of humility.

I don't even understand how they would be against something that benefits them personally. I wonder if it's the mentality that "one day" they would become the IT moguls that own one of these companies, and wouldn't want this to disadvantage them?

They probably think that they've gotten one over everyone, and are super-skilled negotiators that are earning 40% more than their peers for the same work.

Reality is probably quite different from that imagination.

Narcissism. [polemic rant incoming]

They believe they are exceptional and deserve even higher pay than the ones listed, that the leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party won't eat their faces if they vote for it, that they are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires in a bit of a ruffle and golden times are just around the corner, they believe that they are better off if their surroundings are worse off, that the invisible hand of the market will fix everything except when it is them that suffer within the market, that is when the government needs to step in. The idea is vampirism, the polar opposite of Karma. Take as much as you can, kick down when you gained an slight angle on others, always priorize winning over any set of consistent principles, have a flexible relationship with the truth and underline aspects of it in inconsistent ways, as your goal is not to be truthful, but to win over others. Everything is a zero-sum-game, others having it good means they took something from you.

I really think you strawman to the extreme with this. I’ve never met one of these people, but on the internet they get made up because they need to exist in order for posters to feel so justified and unarguably right in their political opinions.

Rather, the point of caricature is to make something recognizable by exaggerating the distinguishing features.

How would you describe a polemic rant?

The purpose of a polemic rant as I see it is precisely to take it to the extreme — otherwise it would neither be polemic, nor a rant.

Also, many people refuse to grant someone else the same salary, as it is seen as a matter of social status.

> it is seen as a matter of social status

Just rewatched the film "Margin Call", and salary as social status is one of the main themes that arises in almost every scene with the junior members of the firm.

> Tech people are doomed not by AIs, but by lack of solidarity, raw greed and lack of long term vision.

I see the same.

If there would be an "IT people"'s union it would be likely one of the most powerful organizations on this planet—as verbatim nothing in business works without computers these days (which need to be constantly operated and maintained by some).

But even mentioning the idea of such an union will give you instant backlash, up to pure hatred. Even in the EU where unions in general are seen as mostly positive by the majority of people. (But for some reasons not the IT crowd).

In the US I had to work with unionised workers and they would come in at 7am, do whatever they did and at 4pm they would drop everything and would not care if you needed them to work overtime to finish a project on time. Obviously paid overtime, in case anyone wonders.

In other cases I worked with non-unionised workers and they worked more and they were actually cheaper by the hour.

Tell me, how are unions good for business?

There's a lot of "I didn't expect the leopard to eat my face" around here at the moment.

Very few of us are currently suffering from a panthera pardus to the face despite recent events. I'm also not even sure how many on this forum voted for the LEPF party either, given that while it's focused on Silicon Valley it's definitely got a global user base (I'm in Berlin!)

There is always a segment that thinks or even is better than the other lackeys, and that the king will reward this now and in the future.

Let's call it the temporarily embarrassed billionaire syndrome: one day I'll own the factory, as long as I parrot the king.

Not to state the obvious but the fact that this commend is the most upvoted in this thread kind of proves one of the premises wrong.

It seems that a lot of people are for transparency (I certainly am) despite them not being too vocal about it.

When I commented all the top comments fell under "lack of solidarity, raw greed and lack of long term vision".

And there were about 5-10 of them.

I'm just saying that the demographics of the audience were probably skewed in the beginning of the thread.

I wonder about the correlation between being against this and working in the US.

I just abhor the EU and everything it stands for. I can't wait to see how Europe comes crashing down.

I love EU and everything it stands for (even if the execution is not always perfect). Why do you want to see Europe crashing down?

Unelected bureaucrats who think they are above the citizens, too much reach, too much influence, insistence in regulating every industry and every activity. This can only end in a can a cashless mass-surveillance social credit system dystopia even worse than China. Give it a few years.

Give me a break. Parlimant is elected directly, commission is made of PMs of the member states government, that were also elected. If feels like hearing Brits touting those 'unelected bureaucrats' while at the same time having unelected PM and house of Lords... no voting system is perfect nor the EU is perfect but this is one of the dumbest arguments there. As for policies - they are quite often very pro-citizen and having lived outside the EU for a couple of years I appreciate them even more...

I definitely agree that in balance the EU has been greatly beneficial but let's not get overoptimistic...

> Parliament is elected directly

The institution is a joke with no real power compared to national parliaments. They don't get to appoint the government, can't propose legislation etc. basically they just rubber-stamp anything which is brought by the commission by them. Barely any anywhere takes the EU elections seriously.

> made of PMs of the member states government

PMs? National governments can appoint anyone they want and often use it as a way to reward their buddies with a very cushy job (with close to zero political accountability) for a few years. Or to get someone influential/popular/etc. but whom the government finds dangerous from the country for a few years.

The process for picking ("electing") a commission president is a bit different but perfectly illustrates my point. They just appointed the most incompetent high ranking politician they could find in Germany...

> unelected PM

Just like the head of government in every single non-presidential country in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria etc... (the only excpetion is France). Anyway be any objective metric this is more democratic than the EU government.

> and house of Lords.

I agree. But it's an anachronistic and a powerless institution. Basically a retirement program for retired influential politicians...

> The institution is a joke with no real power compared to national parliaments. They don't get to appoint the government, can't propose legislation etc. basically they just rubber-stamp anything which is brought by the commission by them. Barely any anywhere takes the EU elections seriously.

Agreed. By the push towards more powerful Parliament is greeted with huge opposition from "nation states" because you know... "sovereignty"... :|

> PMs? National governments can appoint anyone they want and often use it as a way to reward their buddies with a very cushy job (with close to zero political accountability) for a few years. Or to get someone influential/popular/etc. but whom the government finds dangerous from the country for a few years.

Yes, that's correct but how else do you want to handle it? Ideally there should be two chamber body, lower one (Parliament) with proportional representation and upper one (Commission) with representation of member states (akin to the US) but that's just yet another election (you have EU one, national one and then regional ones)...

> The process for picking ("electing") a commission president is a bit different but perfectly illustrates my point. They just appointed the most incompetent high ranking politician they could find in Germany...

Yeah... and also corrupted from what I heard. But - case in point, even incompetent and corrupted ones can be elected via direct democracy (Poland, Hungary, Tukey…)?

> Just like the head of government in every single non-presidential country in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Austria etc... (the only excpetion is France). Anyway be any objective metric this is more democratic than the EU government.

Not sure if those are more democratic or not. Problem may be that those head of states usually wield less power than Commission.

AFAIR this year was a push to give Parliament more power but was met with butthurt from nation states...

> I agree. But it's an anachronistic and a powerless institution. Basically a retirement program for retired influential politicians...

AFAIR HoL can be quite influential and can block certain laws. And it's not abolished because it's unelecetd, so they can have more scrutiny over certain laws without fearing the election... Either way - it's "wobbly wobbly" and complicated :D

The EU commission is made up of unelected members who think about themselves that they're gods and they hold the absolute truth.

The policies lately are pro surveillance and pro hardcore socialism.

I'm not from the UK, I'm from South America. It doesn't matter though, both the UK and the EU will crumble apart so fast that I'm already expecting the hordes of expats trying to find refuge here.

Which is funny, because SA lives in a perpetual economic and social crisis, but even still, even a poor and somewhat corrupted country like Bolivia or Paraguay is a better prospect than living in a dystopian communist hellhole.

> I'm not from the UK,

Never said you were. Only that you sound like a Brit...

> I'm from South America.

Greetings from Chile, the lovely state of estallido social de 2019 :P

> It doesn't matter though, both the UK and the EU will crumble apart so fast that

Lol, we've been hearing this as well for the past 20-30 years, mostly from the UK press and Leave campaign :D

> I'm already expecting the hordes of expats trying to find refuge here. > > Which is funny, because SA lives in a perpetual economic and social crisis, but even still, even a poor and somewhat corrupted country like Bolivia or Paraguay is a better prospect than living in a dystopian communist hellhole.

Arm, hasn't "the red wave" just swept the LatAm? Chile? Venezuela? Colombia? Brasil?

Besides you seem to have USA-based definition of "communism", which is even funnier :D

Haha you're right, but as I always say, Latam, despite becoming red all over, is too corrupt/poor/unstable/inept to pull anything off. There are talks of a single currency ("Sur") which will never happen because Brasil doesn't want to hold Argentina's bags, because there's always been a grudge among many of these countries.

Furthermore, there's a philosophy here: many rules, barely any enforcement (because of reasons stated above).

Ultimately I believe that the EU does have the capacity to do what they say. That's whats scary. Mercosur, not so much.

So in a nutshell, you seem like anarchist and because of the inaptitude of LatAm countries you are quite content with status quo here? :D

That's a good way of putting it, yea. I know it sounds unhinged, but think of China. Would you rather live there?

Chaos & corruption >>> oppressive order

The "unelected bureaucrats" attack line was extremely effective in the UK despite having an unelected legislature and an unelected monarch.

As an european who also had the "pleasure" of living through communism, the EU is becoming super communist and socialist with a ferocity that even the soviets lacked.

I'm also from an ex-Communist country and I don't agree.

If anything I would argue that Communist/early post-Communist generations in these countries are tainted by a ferocious anti-Socialist streak, which is kind of natural (people reach for the other extreme due to all the Communist abuse).

In my country, Romania, this leads to private development (real estate, businesses, etc) that completely ignores the public domain. Only in the past 5-7 years have people started to wizen-up that the Libertarian paradise is actually hell.

Developed countries in Europe are a lot more mellow regarding capitalism and socialism.

Random example from a supposed hyber-bastion of capitalism, Switzerland. A friend of mine working for Google found an awesome apartment close to work, super cheap. He had to provide a salary slip and the owner - either on his own or due to legislation - basically said: you make too much for this, let people with lower incomes get it, you get an apartment fitting your salary.

That blew my little post-Communist mind. The action practically screamed Communism to me.

You can call it a sort of awakening. You can't build everything on your own. We reach the stars by working together.

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