Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

> On the other hand, as the Associated Press notes, California Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher estimates that not requiring human drivers in trucks would cost around 250,000 jobs. “We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety and jobs for increased corporate profits," Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous, said in a statement. "We will continue to fight to make sure that robots do not replace human drivers and that technology is not used to destroy good jobs.”

At least they are being honest and not pretending it is about safety or consumer benefit.

View on HN

> and not pretending it is about safety

> We will not sit by as bureaucrats side with tech companies, trading our safety [...] for increased corporate profits,

Did you skip over that part of the sentence?

Yes, it was obviously filler.

Says you. On the other hand, we have no reqson to think they don't value their (and their family and freund's) safety like everyone else.

They can always smash looms.

The people who were smashing looms had their own looms. They were being undercut by automation and forced out of running their own one family business to working for a factory.

The factory could also cut costs by employing child labour to crawl among the machines fixing breakages at risk of their limbs.

That's capitalism for you. Are you really surprised people opposed this?

200 years later, we are unfathomably better off materially, because automation was slowed to destroy jobs.

Right... because working conditions in communist countries are so great, totally zero child slave labor going on in China. It's awesome when you're forced to work and still starve right?

This has nothing to do with communism, which hadn't even been invented at this point. It's about cottage industry vs capitalism.

It has nothing to do with capitalism either but you decided to insert it because your pink haired sociology professor and Berkley told you so.

Of course it does, it was literally when capitalism replaced cottage industry. I'm not an American, so I didn't go to Berkley and in fact don't have a degree because I went out and got a job.

Perhaps if you'd done the same you wouldn't have such a limited view of the world?

You got a job? Provided to you by capitalism? So you're working for the man? Dude, you're not being a very good socialist.

Fletcher, who called autonomous trucks dangerous

You were taken in by the selective use of quotation vs summarization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com