overton

Authors like this frame the UBI/minimum wage debate as if we just haven't figured out the right policy mix to fix poverty or precarity -- as if it's a problem of ideas. I propose that it's in fact a question of power -- 1) who benefits from people being poor and how much 2) power do they have?

1) Owners of capital, who don't want to see their labour costs escalate and use firing/the poverty gun as a disciplinary tool.

2) Overwhelming power, channeled through vectors such as billions spent in lobbying or campaign contributions or threats to take their capital to friendlier jurisdictions.

The lack of trust and community participation described in the article.

The framing of this piece itself is a symptom of the problem. Everything, including our social relationships apparently have to be "capital" that make us "productive." This amoral, economistic view of human life is what got us into this mess in the first place. Why would people trust each other in a system that essentially rewards sociopathy, avarice, greed, and deception? It's telling that they can't provide a better prescription than "we should just trust each other more."

I wish Firefox would consider adopting some of Vivaldi's best UX improvements instead of fiddling with the size of the ultramegabar and dropping TV show promos into updates.

Vertical tabs is the one that most comes to mind. For people with many tabs open, tabs at the top is a completely broken experience. Tree style tabs is OK but it doesn't remove the redundant tabs at the top, cluttering the screen.

Edit: If you want to compete for market share with chrome, this is a great way to do it! =)

+1 for Pothos. They're pretty much impossible to mess up, and they're also easy to propagate from cuttings! So you can eventually turn one plant into many.

How about instead of fetishizing ascendance to the middle class we start building a society where working class people can live in dignity too?

The fact that Facebook can even make this kind of argument seriously in the public sphere is a sad commentary on the prevailing ideological environment. Everything ultimately has to come down to "economic cost" and "economic benefit." I truly hope we're able to transcend this way of understanding value someday.

I agree that all of those have much fewer obvious negative externalities, and do provide very useful services. But I can't help but think that work in general is a hostage situation for most workers: "sell your labour for less than it's worth or die. Also you will have to simply accept a host of petty tyrannies (in the best case) or abusive behaviour (in the worst)." You have to accept because most people don't have enough capital to make it on their own, and are prevented from accumulating that capital because they are exploited in the first place. Then the CEO's/founders/funders will turn around and say "Look at this amazing thing that I personally built." The value extracted from workers (and the real suffering that entails) is ideologically erased in the narrative about why the company was successful.

I think this dynamic is generally less recognized by software developers because we're frequently comparatively well paid and well treated at work, and can occasionally accumulate enough capital to break out of this vicious cycle (though we're still paid less than the value of our labour and still deal with much of the BS noted above). However the same can't be said for the people making our computers.

Here's another way to look at it.

Is there any way to be really successful without being some kind of disingenuous sociopath or at least blithely unaware of the broader context of your success and the suffering it's built on?

No, not really. And if that makes somebody bitter, then I think that makes them sane.

This is story is the perfect example of the above. PG is selling us same old story that these two made it through hard work and attitude, while they really made it by opening up residential housing to rent-seeking speculators to use as hotels.

He's right that exploitation isn't what distinguishes billionaires from other capitalists. There are many unsuccessful/less successful capitalists who nonetheless still exploit people. But it's impossible to become a billionaire without exploiting people at a grand scale. And by exploitation, I mean something very simple: paying workers less than the value of their labour. Without exploitation there is no incentive for capitalists (within a capitalist system) to hire people. Since capitalists (billionaires and non-billionaires) still hire people, it's clear that exploitation is endemic to the capitalist system, and is required to become a billionaire.

You depend on: - millions of square kilometers of paved roads and parking garages - a long and complicated supply chain producing an difficult to maintain, expensive, and fast decaying machine which requires a non-renewable resource as fuel - the forced indulgence of your fellow citizens as you pollute the air with noise and poisonous gases and make them deal the danger you impose on them (sometimes it will cost them their lives) - the arrangement of our cities for cars and the damage that does to communities, quality of life, and aesthetics

You have lots of dependencies, the government and the car industry has just naturalized them and largely guaranteed them to you. That's why you see non-drivers as serfs. And that's why we see drivers as entitled.

As someone who is also on the border between "good mentally ill" and "bad mentally ill," this is a really accurate portrayal of what it's like. The feeling that you're holding it together now, just barely doing the right things and making yourself seem normal enough, but that in the past you couldn't and the fear that in the future you won't be able to. I can't understate how much economic worry there is. Even for a software developer who is now doing pretty well financially, I can't help but wonder if I'll slip into another crushing depression where my brain works at 1/3 the speed and clarity and I can barely make it through a work day before collapsing on the couch. To anybody who sincerely wants to help, you can help by supporting strong social safety nets so that people don't have to shoulder the anxiety of being out on the street in addition to whatever else they're going through, and can also access affordable therapy. You can also support flexible or shorter work weeks.

Edit:

I would estimate that at least for me personally, at least half of the disease burden has been from second-order effects -- from economic anxiety, anxiety about stigma, and working through illness at an unsustainable pace.

> Instead of finding a singular solution to a problem we need to think about a system-wide solution, healthcare is a great example of this. There are many structural problems in healthcare and just like we did with Spotify, you need to go, piece by piece and create something that actually is a win-win for all stakeholders.

Ah, Spotify, famously a win-win for all its stakeholders, including the musicians who can no longer make a living by recording music.

Tech sucks for the same reason that Exxon buried their own climate science, or the tobacco industry hid their knowledge of polonium 210 in cigarettes. Capitalist corporations by and large have nothing but amoral contempt for their customers and the general public. Tech can be good, but not within this irrational and obviously decaying economic system.

People often make the nuclear war comparison but it's different. With nuclear war, we just have to hope that a couple hundred people are sane enough to not push the button. In comparison, with climate change, it seems like the vast majority of older (and much of younger) generations simply don't care that the status quo is going to screw us. Also consider the fact that a private corporation (Exxon) had all the knowledge to give us enough lead time to avert this situation and decided to make piles money instead, and it gives you a pretty bleak picture of humanity.

I relate to this story personally. Wish you the best, and here are some resources that have helped me:

- after many failed attempts doing CBT and mindfulness based therapy, doing psychodynamic psychotherapy with a therapist who takes relationships and trauma seriously

- "Complex PTSD: From surviving to Thriving" (Pete Walker)

- "The Tao of Fully Feeling" (Pete Walker)

- "Treating Adult Survivors of Emotional Abuse and Neglect" (Hopper/Grossman/Spinazzola/Zucker)

- "Adult children of emotionally immature parents" (Gibson)

As others have said, maybe doing tricky CS-heavy coding puzzles and applying to the companies that screen for them is not the way to go. Lots of companies just need someone who knows their way around particular language and web framework. How about building out an idea for a website in Rails or Django and putting it on Heroku? Go to meetups, show it to people, network, and get advice. Not a sure thing but definitely an alternative strategy to consider. Best of luck!

+1 I'm pretty sure multiple rounds of CBT made my anxiety disorders worse. The approach attracts hyper-rationalist types who aren't willing to say anything other than "Your thinking patterns are wrong, you need to fix them." No serious discussion of trauma, identity issues, or relationships. Pure gaslighting. Recently, I finally realized that what I needed was some serious introspection and an empathetic therapist who would help me work through it. For all the bluster about psychoanalysis being quackery, I'm not sure you can disagree with its basic premise that maladaptive personality traits are likely to come from the social context you spent most of your first ~18 years in.

I'll fully get behind mat leave if it's taken as bonus paid vacation time that's available to everyone. Having a child is a choice, and a selfish one at that, the world being as overpopulated as it is. No problem with that. You want a kid, I want to take time off to make music and travel.

Take from this what you will:

If you don't have a serious mental illness, you can't even imagine the excruciating agony.

To the extent that it's difficult or impossible for the workers to get another job, the employer has buyer's market power (in the extreme, a monopsony). It's a well-recognized phenomenon in economics literature.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

Like a monopolistic market, a monopsonistic market is inefficient compared to a competitive one. Employers gain "utility" at the expense of workers, but less than the workers lose compared to a competitive market.

Unions can remedy this by becoming a monopolistic (or near monopolistic) supplier of labour, by negotiating a higher wage (price floor), bringing the wage closer to it would be in a competitive market.

Long story short: if you're pro competitive markets, you need to recognize the benefits of unions. They're not an ideal solution, but the alternative is not a competitive market outcome.

Edit: this seems like a pretty good explanation: http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Business_economics/Monopson...