RodericDay

The Economist is not an unbiased publication. It exists for the explicit purpose of arguing for the liberalization of markets.

edit: classic anti-left liberal, not "american progressive" liberal

Good.

Same reason people buy diamond rings, gendered deodorant, banned nonwhites from boxing, etc.

Culture rules. People are not far-sighted logical market agents.

Consider the opposite: If sharing your salary is so inoffensive, why do companies go to great lengths to stop you from doing it, necessitating enshrined legal protections (that most people are unaware about)?

He said qc accent not fr accent. Unnecessary comment.

Public salaries make it much easier for bad negotiators to attain a good salary. You just look at your future co-workers, and ballpark around that.

Without that, people without industry contacts or knowledge can get utterly screwed.

Current hires are not a fixed supply to be taken for granted.

Hire someone else for a ton extra, refuse me a raise, and I'll leave.

That is, if that information was available. Kinda convenient that it isn't, huh?

There's a reason why it's called "a craze".

I'm being hired for my software skills, not my negotiation skills. The fact that negotiation is so important is cargo culting from business-types who benefit from it.

(I happen to be quite savvy at negotiation, but I've seen many shy people exploited because they're not as cocky as me).

More to the point,

1) If my team was hiring a new guy with skills indistinct from mine for 50k extra, and I found out about it, I'd ask for a raise. If they refused, I'd quit on the spot.

2) If the skills are indeed a whole class above mine, they'll probably have a different title, and it's much less of my concern (I wouldn't call it "a fluctuation among members in my team").

Information may not always make things better, but it always -- no exceptions -- makes a market more efficient.

Moreover, stop focusing on two team members fighting against each other. The big prize here is employees finding out how much their bosses make, especially when it comes to "tightening belt" periods. I don't honestly care if Jeff-next-door is getting 20k extra because he plead for his newborn, but I absolutely care if my salary gets frozen and my boss gets a bonus.

Opponents to salary transparency are basically arguing for an inefficiency that favors higher-ups, preying on the ignorance of less resourceful subordinates.

I'm not questioning whether you can get a raise.

I'm questioning whether this raise will usually immediately make you the best paid person on your new team.

I think your prediction of how things would play out is just wrong.

Employers usually have an HR team that is dedicated to knowing what the labor market looks like. They may not know exactly your previous salary, but they keep very up to date tabs on industry trends. They also know exactly how their current human resources are paid.

You know nothing except your past salary. They have more cards than you do.

Public salary means they know your past salary, but it also means you know what they pay their current employees, and can negotiate accordingly.

The only way this is not beneficial to any given employee is if they think they are a huge positive outlier.

edit bc hn limits me if I post like 3 times in short succession:

I don't think you understand the public policy implications of this.

The vast, vast majority of people aren't negotiating 20k increases. And people who are negotiating far more, like CEOs, do fine even with public information out there.

The equation here is one of giving employees more bargaining power over employers. An insignificant proportion of employees currently benefit from secrecy, and many of them aren't even sure they benefit, they just suspect they do.

If it's all "rounding errors", as you say, consider how this alters the dynamics between you and your bosses, not only between you and your peers.

Because free flow of information makes free markets operate better.

> We notice that you're not using the Google Chrome browser. You're welcome to try continuing—but if some parts of the essay are rendering or behaving strangely, please try Chrome instead.

what a world

Much like voting, being at the table should be opt-out.

Else, as first poster said, the process is tyrannical.

"no deterrent whatsoever"?

I really don't think this is correct. It may not be a foolproof deterrent, but it's certainly a deterrent.

I don't like when this argument is trotted out for gun control and I don't like it here.

I prefer for 1gb+ of latex code to not touch my laptop if I can avoid it.

> So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for

depressing thought

Trickle-down environmentalism is not real environmentalism, and the ruse is becoming clearer by the day.

gender bias in japan is not imaginary

If you want power you can

    fprint = lambda string: print(string, file=somefile)

and use fprint all over the place

that little chevron trick is bad imo

The whole point is that even if they are easy to ignore for you, they aren't easy to ignore for others.

I find it callous to decry the poor decision-making of poor people, eg: someone buying a fashion accessory when they're struggling to pay rent, and then go on to defend advertisers in a cavalier buyer-beware kind of way.

I agree with you and it's frustrating that this is sunk without a substantial response.

A few months back, Matt Bruenig nailed it: "The unwritten story of the Juicero debacle is that high income inequality causes capital to be misallocated towards luxury production."

Not really a direct alternative, but applicable to the spirit of the question:

I don't really like any news organization very much, so instead anytime a political/current events piece pops up here and I like it, I check to see if the author has a Twitter account, and follow them on there. Then, via their RTs and posts, I discover new journalists. If they consistently put out good stuff, I follow them too.

As an example, someone here once put out a piece about Silicon Valley and politics by Emmett Rensin, which I thought was spot-on. Rensin showcased Nathan Robinson, then Abi Wilkinson. And so on and so on.

If you keep a sufficiently varied crowd of followers, geographically and topically, you always see RTs of pertinent news events from eg: BBC, Reuters, AP, or what have you.

In essence, what some of these services do algorithmically, I rely on humans for. As a result I seem to be aware of just about any current event topic that comes up, so it's working for me.

Don't use Twitter like Twitter itself suggests, e.g: "Follow Lebron! Follow Donald Trump! Follow CNN!". Add people very very judiciously, so that your feed looks like the news aggregator you wish to see.

So his shallow tonal dismissal is fair game, but an identificarion of a pattern which undermines it is unlawful ad-hominem?

Seems like cargo cult moderation to me.

I think monospaced should be like

``` monospaced ```

And the four-space/tab indentation should denote

    a quote

But that's just me.

Your deflection of Peck's comments is verbose but insubstantial, you basically say he's being too charitable or losing perspective. Bad form.

And as for the suicide point, I'm not challenging the idea that US forces are depressed or suicidal. I'm challenging the idea that they're depressed and suicidal because they're such compassionate warriors that they feel their victims' pain and suffer for the deaths that they cause or some such nonsense. I think these are much more related to the drudgery and boredom of this new form of warfare.

I'd address the definition point or the Canadian sniper point, but I'm busy. I will check back later and see if I can complete this.

> In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, [my working group was asked] to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress [passed] U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331 ... the US definition of terrorism. […] one of the terms, "international terrorism," means "activities that," I quote, "appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping." […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. […] And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.[62]

- Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) and former ambassador to Mauritania

For what it's worth, I'm not american (canadian), but your post reads like pure unadulterated american propaganda to me. Stuff like putting "communist revolutionaries" in quotes, repeating the unsourced myth that american patriot soldiers suffer with suicidal ideation because they feel remorse, etc.

It's like we're from two different worlds.

I wouldn't say that desctibes political philosophers like Karl Marx very well.

Snapchat adds value in the way meth adds value.

Current Affairs is insanely high quality. I endorse it fully.

Actually what we need is a huge corrective in media, the stuff feminists complain about all the time.

e.g. bell hooks' film stuff, The Bechdel Test, Anita Sarkeesian's work, etc.

This problem forms in large part because men are too attached to media that reinforces notions of women as secondary people, objects, and reward trophies.

The problem is that people's empathy with women going through harassment abruptly stops when they themselves are implicated in some manner.

All those questions seem perfectly reasonable to me.