To deny that race is a social construct by word salads full of "left-wing victim-hood" etc is even more deluded than your "the news is a union conspiracy" posts.
219 karma · joined February 14, 2021
Well, indeed, day labouring and precarious work nothing new under the sun. And the past experience with those is why societies have laws that limits them to various extent. I mean, employers could've just called people on their phones and said it was necessary due to the spread of phones to abandon the now obsolete labour laws. But back then people (and a stronger labour movement) would've just laughed it off and businesses knew that they couldn't pull that trick off. But atm the times are more ripe for this.
> But, the scale, implications and context is not the same.
What implication and context? That suspiciously vague. Why is scaled-up day labouring suddenly not the same? If any thing it's even more obvious - and important - that it breaks the rules.
> if you want to play thick
A bit cocky for someone that seem to ignore history. You've said nothing to answer the question what's fundamentally different to justify the regression. The dread of day labouring what one of the very reasons for the existence of these laws in the first place! Now you come along with an app and say that day labouring is henceforth necessary? That makes no sense whatsoever.
> Create some.
They are already there? One of their very purposes is to protect against exactly this.
> App-work exists > it exists
What kind of an argument is that even? Still doesn't mean it's legal, just that corps feel the times are ripe enough to try to challenge them by just refusing to comply and spend vast resource on lobbying and taking it to court.
> I agree that it shouldn't be a workaround to paying pensions
To avoid paying proper benefits/pensions is the very reason of their existence.
What's the point of having labour laws if all that's needed to just discard them to reduce labour costs is a very thin veneer of an app? What's so fundamentally different about an app?
Will it be nice with generics for carefully crafted and cherry-picked use-cases? Absolutely.
Will it make the average large codebase less readable after a dozen coders have been doing their own cleverness with generics 3-5 years down the line? In my experience, most definitely.
Of those two, I'm much more afraid of working with the latter than missing out on the former.
It sometimes feel like we as devs have a habit of optimizing for the individual dev's convenience (not to mention what's fun) rather than for the collective effort's best interest - like the long-term maintainability/coherency of the code base. To some extent I assume that's just being human, but in other professions I think it would be seen as a bit lazy and thus more stigmatized.
I have even answered to you directly on this topic before, but maybe you missed it? Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28831893
If you're curious about the context of that quote (written in 1920) it is the following, my emphasis:
"By far the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is as an attempt to realize Communism. I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of Communism in the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind.
But the method by which Moscow aims at establishing Communism is a pioneer method, rough and dangerous, too heroic to count the cost of the opposition it arouses. I do not believe that by this method a stable or desirable form of Communism can be established. Three issues seem to me possible from the present situation. The first is the ultimate defeat of Bolshevism by the forces of capitalism. The second is the victory of the Bolshevists accompanied by a complete loss of their ideals and a régime of Napoleonic imperialism. The third is a prolonged world-war, in which civilization will go under, and all its manifestations (including Communism) will be forgotten."
Lucky for me I happen to be Swedish and can call you out on that absolute garbage FUD post that doesn't in the slightest reflect the general Swedish opinion of the parental leave system.
Du borde skämmas, dagisnivå.
What's even the upside if you're just trading universal tax to paying a for-profit corp monthly instead? Skipping the queue through wealth instead of need?
Why won't you just provide a single respectable, non-lobbyist, historian/economists that supports your claim?
But since you are HNs most blatant free market fundamentalist (proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism) I'm not expecting much more than tone policing.
For example by giving undeservedly high grades that upper-middle class seemingly happily accept to get their kids into high-status high education. These grades then conveniently becomes part of their marketing.
An even more sinister example is their willingness to actively segregate their schools to have "easy", as in cheap, students that don't require as much resources (like actual teachers) as people - on average - from less privileged backgrounds.
No. But do I think that their "interpretation" is even close to charitable and that there's a even faintest chance that we'll get somewhere from that starting point? No, not a chance.
The author is of course the author of some "abolish the NHS book/report" as well. Do you honestly believe that this sort of such stuff is represented by anything other than monied interests?
Not true at all. Why are you making shit up?
They were introduced to "give choice". And marketed - by the right-wing government at that time btw - like small teacher-led "idea-based" companies or similar would be the primary result, rather than the large stock-market school corps that have been the natural result.
> Regardless, the point is that Scandinavian countries are not “socialist” in the way leftist Americans think of socialism.
Just because Scandinavia (Sweden in particular) too has suffered with a massive wave of neo-liberal privatizations the last 30 years or so doesn't mean that the former more "socialist" way was in any way shape or form worse than the corrupt mess that we have here now.
When what's tried is not fundamentally (authoritarian vs democratic) different from the start.
That has been a disaster in Sweden. With increased segregation, corruption, and inflation in grades to please "customers".
It's fascinating how uncomfortable it is for some to even acknowledge the existence of democratic minded socialists, even when we've existed as long as socialism itself (obviously).
Hence the fierce insistence from large parts of the socialist movement throughout history that it must be radically democratic - otherwise oppression, rather than liberation will be the result.
It's disrespectful to throw Chomsky in together with something that he's spent his entire life to very prolifically oppose, namely authoritarianism.
It's basically like this:
Degrowthers, like e.g. Jason Hickel, generally want a more equal society, perhaps even socialistic, and think that the climate crisis is a blatant proof that capitalism is unsustainable and that to keep trying to save it is basically to prefer go down with the ship than to even try to change course.
On the others side, people like Noah Smith are more in the status-quo lane that most of all want to save capitalism from itself using massive investments in technology etc - but not necessarily any systemic changes.
This naturally have caused these two crowds to throw pretty heated arguments at each other, and certainly not "unbiased objective facts" - if that ever has existed.