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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

The plebs should just unionize in retaliation. And if you're having difficulty figuring out who the plebs are, you should probably be in a union.

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I find it amusing that someone making $500k+ at Meta would consider themselves a pleb.

NFL Players are in a union with various rules around contracts, pay, benefits, etc. A corporation exploiting employees and those employees wanting protections against that doesn't need to be limited by what those employees earn.

I said nothing about unions but merely that Meta employees are not plebs. You don't need to insult your own socioeconomic standing to fight for a better deal from your employer.

Salary = pleb, living off capital = elite. Pretty simple for some people.

I can point at $12M/yr professional footballers who have been lied to and screwed over by the billionaires that they work for. They certainly won't be going hungry at night, but their careers have been affected negatively. Power imbalances can still exist between multimillionaire employees and their multibillionaire owners.

Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual.

If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient.

[1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

[4] "without hatred, partiality, or reasoning", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio

As I see it random selection means every leader will pillage as much money for themselves as possible as quickly as possible. More so than right now since there's some risk of them losing power (current or future) over it right now.

Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness.

The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness.

[1] https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

Upvoted, but why not unionise because altruism, rather than retaliation?

Why not both? Any reason to seek democratic control over the workplace is a good one.

That's the wrong way to think about unions.

Unions are an idea to counter the power imbalance against the company. It turns it from many->1 to many->many. Now all of a sudden lots of things are negotiable, like different contract terms, which were off the table before.

Altruism is about giving things away. If you want to donate to charity, fine, if you're at the union for charity you're misunderstanding things.

Altruism makes unions work. From a purely utilitarian perspective, being a freeloader is almost always a better choice. You get most of the benefits of the union without having to pay for it.

Altruism is about the concern for the welfare and happiness of others. It's particularly important in organizations that fight, both figuratively and literally. An army that runs out of altruism collapses, because people generally don't want to die for no reason.

Solidarity is important. Charity isn't. We're all working, it's not charity to be treated right.

Look at that dumbass alphabet worker's union for example. They offered nothing to workers for joining, all their goals were social justice culture war stuff.

How are they doing? If they called for a strike, would anyone notice?

How many lives have been made significantly worse by 24/7 on-call being made the norm for engineers by these companies? These companies deserve plenty of retaliation even if they pay good salaries.

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