840 karma · joined December 24, 2009
You'd see a lot more people doing insane things to cross items off of their bucket lists if this was true. Instead you see these young people going about their lives as if nothing is any different.
Why is Joe Rogan so popular? Because he's Oprah for men. It's that simple
If you are a major world superpower, and you want to impede other powers from threatening you, but you want to avoid any kind of overt conflict, you might be interested in developing weapons that would slowly, over time, degrade a rival's ability to aspire towards greatness. Secrecy and plausible deniability would be most important, so something that is slow to take hold would be useful, since nobody would be able to trace it back to you. It doesn't even have to do anything in particular, it doesn't even have to target any specific thing. It just has to degrade their capabilities.
So if, for example, you had a weapon that you could deploy completely undetected, that would, over the course of 20 years, cause widespread low grade health problems which cause the target nation's expenditures on healthcare to rise by 3 percentage points of gdp... well that degrades their ability to spend that money on military or other threats to your hegemony.
That said, I think this particular conspiracy theory is stupid. What one of the above posters said is true: we have too much knowledge of the source and origin of Lyme for this particular one to be true. But, in general, I don't think that _a version_ of conspiracy theories like this are _laughably and obviously_ false
I don't know why I keep expecting consistency in my public policy but I am once again thoroughly disappointed.
Is the internet that much worse than when we were kids?
Great, another thing everyone will ignore. Literally nobody pays attention to these warning labels. And further, the more things get labelled, the less trust and confidence people put in existing labels.
Every single Starbucks in California has a sign somewhere warning you that their coffee causes cancer. Does this make people drink less coffee? Or does it just make people ignore experts when they say things cause cancer?
Or some other nation. By far the most likely explanation to me is that this is some classified military tech.
Solution: "Why don't we give more accurate arrival times, so passengers can be more confident in those stated arrival times and minimize disruption to their travel plans"
The Guardian: "This is bad for the environment"
Literally the article is saying that when airlines stopped optimistically lying about arrival time, this somehow poisoned the planet. Despite the fact that both before and after the change being complained about, flights took off at the same real timestamp, spent the same amount of real time in the air, and landed at the same real timestamp.
This is more a reflection on the author than a reflection on America. There are plenty of extremely high quality things available here and it's not America's fault if OP settles for junk instead
I really, really hope that this project is successful.
But also, that's what negotiation is. If the company didn't want to be occasionally held hostage, it should have included a "you can't hold us hostage" clause in its employees' work contracts, and also given them enough compensation to get them to agree with it.
But, super serious: If the union decides they will only accept a 50% raise, and the company _can't_ give it to them, what has happened several times before is that the company will cease operations of the facility that is unionized entirely, and move to a new geography where that union has no power.
Just as the union has the ability to hold the company hostage, management also has this ability. Theoretically, mass layoffs are not good for union members, and so they would not make such an obviously ridiculous demand.
However, you run in to major problems when for whatever reason the union does not think something is a ridiculous demand, when it is. Or, like I mentioned in my big comment somewhere else, if a union is representing multiple factories for one organization this can happen.
Say, hypothetically, the union for ABCTech represents ABCTech employees at two facilities, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle. Perhaps the union demands that, because the cost of living has risen so dramatically in SF, they require a 50% raise for all SF employees effective immediately. The company cannot afford this, and so they say no. The union says I don't care, fuck you, if you won't do this we won't work.
So ABCTech says well if we can't afford your contracts, we have to close up shop. They close the SF office. Every single employee there loses their job.
However, the union also represents ABCTech employees in Seattle. And now, ABCTech knows that the union is serious. They will make severe demands and not back down. This improves the unions bargaining power in the Seattle office, by sacrificing the SF office.
If you're the union, you're probably quite pleased with this state of affairs. If you're an employee of ABCTech in Seattle, doubly so. But maybe not so much if you were a (former) employee in SF
There is absolutely pressure to loosen the (enforcement of) laws when crime is down
I can understand why this would seem hostile to someone who isn't acculturated to it, but I don't find it hostile at all. I find it _honest_. The other side isn't pretending to care about me, and they aren't making hamfisted attempts to look out for my interests in ways that I don't like but they think I do (or should).
1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union
2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union
3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff at the company in any and all negotiations and disputes with management. The leadership of the union will engage in collective bargaining with management, establishing a single working contract that encompasses every employee<->employer relationship in the company.
So, right now, in a non-unionized company, if you go to work there, you and the company negotiate a contract which is the terms of your working relationship. Frequently, the company will dictate the terms of the contract and then you will exercise some marginal negotiation power regarding, say, pay or vacation time or whatever, although (especially for specialists and highly paid staff) these are far more open to negotiation, generally, than people think.
When you do this, this is a private relationship between you and your employer. Your coworkers are not involved. They have their own private individual relationships with the employer that have nothing to do with yours. Their contracts could be radically different from yours. That's between them and the company.
What a union does is get in between you and the employer, and collectivizes all of those individual negotiations into one larger, general negotiation. So now, instead of you negotiating a private contract with the employer, the union will negotiate a general contract that applies to _all_ staff, and then you will sign that contract.
The main argument in favour of unions like this is that by collectivizing the bargaining, it gives them negotiation power. So imagine, for instance, that you are getting a job at Google. As an individual, if you don't like the contract Google is giving you, you can demand dramatic changes to it. And then Google will laugh at you, spit in your face, and kick your ass out the door, because they're one of the richest corporations on the planet and you dare to think that _you_ can dictate terms to _them_? But, if the staff at Google were unionized, suddenly it's different. Suddenly, when the union pushes back on Google and demands drastic changes, Google has to negotiate in good faith. This is because the union represents _all_ of the employees; if the union threatens to walk away from the negotiation, then _all_ of Googles employees stop working. Google might be able to kick any individual out the door, but if the entirety of Google's staff stops working suddenly there are massive problems.
So why might you not want a union? Well, there's a few reasons. One might be obvious from the previous paragraph. Say you are quite happy with your current job at Google, but some of the unions _other_ members are unhappy and are demanding change. Eventually, negotiations come to an impasse. The union threatens to walk away. If they do that, you _must_ stop working. The fact that you are quite happy with your job doesn't matter. You are bound by their collective agreement, and they just suspended their collective agreement.
More generally, unions take a distributed, private, individual process and turn it into a politicized, public, collective process. This can reduce the company's flexibility to make different arrangements with different groups of people, and if you are someone who benefits from such a different arrangement you might rationally be opposed to this. Additionally, if you are someone who is heavily skeptical of the ability of political processes to make effective decisions, you might not want a board of elected union activists making decisions on your behalf.
Unions also cost money. I admit I don't know how much they cost; for all I know it's $5 per paycheque. But fees can be substantial; a long time ago, back when I was a clerk at Safeway, my salary was $7.50/hr and my union dues were $1.25/hr. This was almost 20% of my (pre-tax!) pay. If you feel that the benefits you get from collective bargaining do not outweigh your unions dues, you might start to wish you were not a member of the union
(Note that, generally, when your workplace votes to unionize, you are _required_ to pay those dues, regardless of whether or not you wish to become a member of the union. In some states, Republicans have succeeded in passing what are known as "Right-to-work laws", which prohibit unions from collecting fees involuntarily from non-members. However, California has no such laws).
Another reason why you might be opposed to unions, which might sound absurd at first glance, is that by fighting for the best interests of all of their members, they may sacrifice the best interests of some of their members. Because most unions are national-scale, with various chapters for different companies, your local union chapter may occasionally require you to do things that sacrifice your own best interest in order to support a remote chapter (striking in solidarity is one example: The union calls a nationwide strike even though there's nothing wrong with your particular office). A union might decide to make strategic sacrifices. Perhaps a union is in dispute with an employer that has multiple offices. A union might negotiate very aggressively in one office, overplaying their hands and ultimately losing substantially for the workers in that office, in order to credibly signal their resolve for when they are negotiating in the second office. Even though this is better overall, you probably don't think so if you're laid off because you were unlucky enough to work in office #1.
Finally, unions can cripple an industry with excessive demands. Unions may gain concessions from employers that are economically unsustainable. Eventually, this can cause the company to go out of business as more nimble competitors are able to perform better in the market than the unionized company is. In some dramatic cases, the company may decide that dealing with the union is too much trouble, and shut down operations in a given area entirely, putting all of the members out of a job.
A very real fear that I have is that I observe that a lot of the success of Silicon Valley is driven by a culture of work. Some might say _over_-work. Maybe this is not healthy for the people doing it, but it certainly seems that a key component of many tech companies' success is people working weekends and evenings when the situation demands it. One likely outcome of tech unionization, if I was to guess, is unions collectively enforcing a strict 40-hour work week, no exceptions. This sounds great, overworking is a scourge on all of us. It sounds great, right up to the point where a bunch of un-unionized starts who are burning the midnight oil start offering dramatically better products than the unionized established company, who can't compete because they can't leverage as much manpower towards their projects due to contractual limits on working hours.
I do this even if the price is rather large. I think the most I've ever paid is $25 but I'd go higher.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in agreement that this is a bad use of limited space. But the cause of this bad use is "mandated by law", not "accidentally incentivized by a policy". Tweaking the policy changes nothing if the requirement remains
Do you use electricity?
Do you own anything plastic?
What about metal?
I think you'll find if you ask yourself these questions you will find that the answer to your rhetorical question was within you all along!
a) Google is about 70% men; and b) The "error" in pay (eg how under- or over-paid you are) is randomly distributed
Then it will be trivially true that more men than women are underpaid
If you, in addition to this, assume some level of sex discrimination, such that in addition to (b) there is additional 'error' in womens' pay, depending on the relative strengths of each of these errors, the following two things can both be true at the same time:
1) A higher percentage of women are underpaid than are men. 2) Most of the people who are underpaid are men.
If this is surprising to anybody, they should be taking a remedial statistics class immediately.
To illustrate, assume that Google is 100 people: 30 women, 70 men. assume that 25% of men are underpaid, and 50% of women are underpaid.
That means that 0.2570 =~ 18 men and 0.530 = 15 women are underpaid.
That means that more men are underpaid than women.
That means that 18/(18+15)*100 =~ 55% of the people who are underpaid are men.
So in my hypothetical, is Google biased against men? Or is Google biased against women? Or is Google not biased at all?.
The fact that some countries have a decades long wait list and others do not is not because different countries are being treated differently. They're all of them being treated the same. The wait lists are a result of more people from some countries wanting H1Bs and fewer people from other countries.
Of course I agree that this state of affairs is not good. It is stupid to me that countries with 1M people get the same number of visas as countries with 1B people. But it's important to understand the proper causes of problems if you want to fix them
1) One day somebody posts a handful of really obviously faked janky looking porn videos. We all have a good laugh, briefly imagine the possibilities, and then move on
2) Like 3 weeks later, every social media platform explicitly bans this dumb toy that wasn't even any good
3) a year or so passes
4) Now governments are passing dramatic legal bans on these things, and there's all kinds of shady things happening. Like, this is the first instance of this kind of public restriction I have _ever_ seen on github.
So: which major news events were completed fabricated?