robtherobber

Thanks for replying, Felix. That's a fair-ish point, I concur, and apologies for the dismissive tone.

On point, the article is too long for what it attempts to say, in my view, and the reliance on AI phrasing is so obvious and annoying that it would in fact put off most people who would like to engage with it meaningfully. To paraphrase someone on HN, it's a bit insulting to read texts from authors that don't bother to produce their own mistakes, let alone long texts produced by/with bots.

I am also aware that many people these days will quickly dismiss things for being "written with Ai", which of course I don't believe is automatically a good thing. But I think that in many cases the reasoning should go this way: no one owes us any time and attention for - or engagement with - the stuff we put out there. No one asked or expected us to produce that. On the contrary, the fact that we do put our thoughts out there means that it is on us to make it worthwhile for the readers; it is us who appear to ask for time and attention. We better make sure that once we receive them we treat our audience properly. If they dismiss it, perhaps sometimes it's not them, it's us.

Imagine that rather than spending any time to read through the article myself, I run it through some AI tool, ask it to rip it apart and paste a similarly long worded reply (only 5.3k words, or 40 minutes of your time) to say what I already said, which is that the article basically normalises and optimises for a labour-displacing, techno-capitalist reality that many people would reasonably call dystopian.

More to the point, you seem to imply that there is an argument worth engaging with. I beg to differ. The text is too long, too winding, written with AI (which I find somewhat insulting and unserious), and accommodating or legitimising a dystopian labour-reduction trajectory whereby some people enrich themselves to the detriment of the entire society. I dislike the fact that I've spent this much time to read through it so that I arrived at this conclusion (and I've skipped many lines).

It could be argued that both of my comments are actually engaging with the substance of the article despite the fact that it does not seem to deserve that effort.

A long, boring read written with AI and pandering to a dystopian future. Somehow these people are often applauded for their insights on Linkedin and "entrepreneur" forums. I say that we can do a lot better.

I think that that's the wrong way to go about creating economic entities and services and products. The aim should be to create something genuinely useful rather than a quick way to make money, an entity that then gets sold (I find this ridiculous), or a method to monopolise or "discover" something in order to generate profit.

People and other businesses buy services and products for a myriad of reasons; sure, cost and convenience will weigh significantly more than others, but the decision-making is never down to the idea or cost alone. In fact, after cost and convenience, trust plays a very important role; and this is translated in a number of ways, from the ability of an entity to deliver on its promises, to safety and security (where applicable), potential for growth alongside the buyer's needs, penchant and budget allocation for innovation, how it treats its workers or behaves in other respects (brand value stuff: environment, stakeholder engagement etc.), easiness of collaboration and communication, the quality of support, whether they're willing to risk losing some money in the short run for the sake of long run success (i.e. being ready to reimburse some costs for a client beyond what's legally required when it fucked up), whether the provider speaks the same language, whether it's based in a jurisdiction where the buyer can trust that the seller is not green- or white-washing on its commitments, and so, so many other factors.

It's not uniqueness of the service or product that drives success or keeps a business afloat, but a combination of factors.

Thanks for that.

I would be interested in something like this as well. I feel inundated in AI-related projects and news, and I'm only tangentially interested in that.

Wow, Microsoft is really pushing the wrong boundaries in every direction, isn't it? Executives must be thinking, like many before them, that Microsoft is too big to fail.

With the risk of sounding like I'm brushing off what you're saying (I am not) and breaking one or two rules on this forum, please read the article because it addresses your question to some degree.

For example (my emphasis in the quoted texts):

> Together they urged policymakers in 14 countries that straddle the Atlantic to take action against enshittification, arguing that it was not an inevitable process but rather the result of policy decisions.

> Policymakers were urged to double down on the enforcement of existing laws, such as those designed to protect consumers and their data, as well as work to foster greater competition in digital markets, for example through the use of public procurement processes to favour alternatives to big tech.

From the report (my emphasis in the quoted texts):

> The path we are on can be challenged and reversed – we can have a better digital world. This requires rebalancing the power between consumers, big tech companies and alternative service providers.

> The fight to disenshittify the internet is also a fight for innovation: Big Tech is able to enshittify their services after they have become dominant and restricted competition. By pruning back the excesses of big tech, alternative services can get the nourishment they need to grow and flourish. However, this requires active policy choices and vigorous enforcement of existing laws.

As you can see, it's not merely a case of building better alternatives, although that plays a role. The biggest issues stem from market dominance, preventing the emergence of new players and innovators, using existing (huge) leverage to pass preferential laws etc. This is a systemic problem, not one that "the market" should solve.

I think that normally that may be the approach (and I'm not singling out Italy for this, it probably applies to most countries).

On this occasion, however:

> In all previous cases involving other international groups, once a settlement was reached and payment made, prosecutors closed related criminal investigations, either through plea deals or by dropping the cases.

> This time, however, Milan prosecutors did not share the tax authority's approach and decided to press ahead with their probe, leading to a request that the suspects be sent to trial.

The trend reversed, according to a comment in that thread.

More info can be found here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=how%20to%20instal...

This very much reads like that Economist hit piece that was complaining about how worker protections are but an abomination that needs doing away with, because what's the point in protecting anything at all if wealth is not generated? Naïve, if we're being generous.

I haven't spent too much time on it, so there's a good chance that I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be satire. I think that it's merely depressing and predatory, or depressing and predatory because it's a cynical sales pitch - a conversion funnel - that conflates what could be deemed to be real risks (supply-chain attacks etc.) with major exaggerations. They probably worked with a PR agency to devise this approach and thought that is was a very clever way to capture the attention of this exact community - which it may very well happen if it spurs a heated discussion and people end up mentioning their brand name and visiting their site.

To be clear, engineers should not be required in the least to "maintain mental maps of which packages are safe and which will detonate their employer's IP strategy" simply because in the vast majority of cases they're not co-owners of that business or that strategy. That is overstated and intentionally misleading, I suspect. AGPL obligations depend on how software is combined and distributed or network-served, not on some magical "contamination" event from merely touching a package.

Rhetoric through and through, in my opinion.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

I think that this was somewhat obvious to many in the last 10 years or so. There's no reason to fault them for that and, in all fairness, there are few corporate clients on here - or even online, considering Microsoft's market share for certain products and services - that complain about the quality of Microsoft's services and products.

What I find difficult to understand is the amount of effort and money that Microsoft puts towards making life painful for the B2C user; if your focus is on B2B, let the fucking user create offline accounts and let them crack the license and let them do whatever they please, as that would likely be less of a burden to you than a way to ensure market domination. You take care of the security, the UX, and availability parts and let the general public carry on with whatever it does. I am, of course, oversimplifying things here for the sake of the argument, but surely I can't be part of a tiny minority of people who see things this way.

At the end of the day, there are multiple and interconnected rational, irrational, economic, legal, social, political, strategical etc. reasons for why a company emerges as the dominant player in their respective niche, it's never down to the quality or convenience of the system alone. Microsoft stands more to lose than gain from their toxic attitude towards users, especially in the context of US playing the bully, and the EU considering disentangling itself from what is perceived a dangerous relationship that could undermine its very existence.

Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware that dev.to is of such low quality.

Sure. Here is an older list that I shared a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28911253

In the meantime I've bookmarked quite a few more on literature, politics, and such, if it's of any interest. I've also made (a fairly weak) case for Jacobin here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44309069

Unsure why @Nathanf22's comment was downvoted to death. I would also suggest Lobste.rs and Reddit. But then again, RSS seems to work quite well in my case.

Of course.

Fair points.

Oh, it's even 'better' than that. To quote from an article in the Guardian:

It’s a short book but if you read it you’ll see that a decent editor could have got it down to one sentence. “When we seek to protect the vulnerable we limit the freedom of the rich and the privileged – and that is a disgrace.”

It’s a wretched read – a series of assertions and hunches freed from the chains of argument or evidence, with the intellectual rigour of a YouTube conspiracy rant. The prose occasionally soars to the level of clickbait, as in its most famous sentence: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” Most of its authors are now cabinet ministers in a government that no one would call exactly Stakhanovite.

Like someone mentioned already, it's a demonstration of power. But it goes well beyond that: it's about domination, discipline, constant monitoring, the reduction of individual agency, humiliation (you need permission for a basic human need) etc. The labour process theory says that that management systems are not only about coordinating work but about securing control over workers, that the drive for efficiency is also a drive for managerial control, including monopolising judgement and pacing work from above [0]

In many cases it's an intentional dehumanisation of the workers - they're seen as assets or numbers, as a type of machines that should be worked to their maximum physical and mental capacity and that are not owed any dignity [x], as if work is nothing more than mechanics. Foucault (in his "Discipline and Punish") speak about how disciplinary power produces "docile bodies" by making bodies more useful and easier to control, breaking functions and movements into optimised segments. [1] This is consistent with how the capitalist workplace normally operates, where employers want to control workers' time and actions, not just the finished product. We could see the toilet restriction just as an extreme, contemporary expression of the same thing. [2] For example, dodgy Amazon does that by making bathroom use hard and uses strict worker monitoring mainly as control/discipline thing, a sort of integrated control architecture (crazy pace + surveillance + comparison + dystopian ranking and whatnot) [3][6]

For all his faults, Heidegger's point (especially in his writing on technology) is relevant here, as he claims that modern systems tend to treat everything as a resource to be ordered, measured, and used. He says that things and people get turned into "standing-reserve" (basically stock to be managed) [4]

Many employers believe that loo breaks should happen in a workers' own time [5], which is both ridiculous and an shirking of responsibility towards society from businesses (which has always been the case).

What is certain is that this is certainly not as a serious productivity argument, despite what predatory companies like Amazon claim [z], because this kind of treatment can have (and often does, like the article shared above shows as well) severe consequences for health, dignity, and productivity. [7]

The fact that regulatory bodies like OSHA in the US, and especially in the EU, recognise the abuse pattern shows it's not just anecdote or rhetoric (like the Economist and similar papers often suggest), or that it applies to countries that aren't as developed as we like to think we are in the US and the UK, but a real issue that's rather common.

Also relevant: https://www.un.org/en/observances/toilet-day

[0] https://academic.oup.com/cpe/article/43/1/61/7684997

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

[2] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/38/1/56/14546...?

[3] https://cued.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/219/2023/10/Pa...

[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

[5] https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/give-us-loo...

[6] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/09/they-treat-us-worse-than-an...

[7] https://sif.org.uk/why-workplace-toilet-access-matters/

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/19/thousands-uk-w...

Not contradicting the second part, but I want to emphasise that they are different things. Slavery (and capitalism) can be extremely inefficient and simultaneously wildly profitable.

Thanks for clarifying.

> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.

I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.

As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]

Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship (selling labour) for multiple reasons, the two most important being that this is inherently good for democracy and also because what's good for workers/citizens may legitimately override narrow "economic efficiency" metrics. [4][5]

> My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.

I am fairly sure that this push doesn't come from citizens/workers, but from the private business sector, which has all but accaparated the political power in the US and other countries, UK being the closest in terms of mentality and approach (think Thatcher & Reagan). US can now be considered without any exaggeration an oligarchy. It is more or less a consensus among economists and historians that privatisation generally works against the best interest of the citizen and very much to the interest of the wealthy and the business class. [6][7][8][9]

The privatisation of public services and the other mechanisms that you mention have had undeniably negative effects on citizens and workers, and it was very much not a choice they made, but it was forced upon them. US and the UK have been the only two countries that have embraced neoliberalism so fast, blindly, and without guardrails, and it definitely shows. [10][11][12][13][14]

[0] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-economis...

[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/09/16/failing-globa...

[2] https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/home/

[3] https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/3109/files/65b9360509de1...

[4] https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL401/um/Pateman_Dahl...

[5] https://economicsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/the...

[6] https://aeon.co/essays/privatisation-is-bad-economics-and-wo...

[7] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/chiara-cordelli-harms-...

[8] https://truthout.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-preda...

[9] https://weownit.org.uk/privatisation

[10] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-dark-side-of-e...

[11] https://www.eurozine.com/the-us-and-the-uk-after-neoliberali...

[12] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-...

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/14/the-fatal-flaw-...

[14] https://www.socialeurope.eu/neoliberalism-still-to-shrug-off...

Yeah, that is expected I speculate. Or maybe it isn't, depending of how one chooses to look at things. But it's not public subsidies, as it actually runs the highest surplus, both in absolute terms and per capita: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

Precisely. There are even strong arguments to support this take; they speak about a "free market" that simply never existed, an "invisible hand" that supposedly beneficial, the ridiculous belief that competition always improves outcomes, the equation of price with value, the (HN favourite) that profit proves virtue / merit, consumer choice = freedom, and so, so many other unfounded or partially true beliefs.

This shifts the discussion elsewhere, but I'm happy to address the points you raised.

> [regulations] appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies

Says who? If we move beyond opinion here, do we have something more to inform this conclusion? And how exactly do we connect the two here? - without more information it's a non sequitur situation.

I suggest that there are two separate things to look at here and we should not conflate them: tax politics (how states fund support) and labour law history (why employment protections exist).

On the first point, the claim that regulations appeared because voters want low taxes is wholly unsupported. It wouldn't make much sense either: regulations of all kinds existed long before democracy was a thing, as a general rule.

If we look at regulations pertaining to work in particular, labour law exists because the employment relationship has a built-in power imbalance and requires worker protection. It's really as straightforward as that. The ILO's Employment Relationship Recommendation [0] states explicitly that labour law seeks, among other things, to address "an unequal bargaining position" between parties, and it also notes problems caused when contractual arrangements deprive workers of protections or disguise the real employment relationship. It also says that national policy should clarify and adapt laws to guarantee effective protection and combat disguised employment relationships.

In fact, the ILO Constitution itself from 1919 says labour conditions involved "injustice, hardship and privation" on a scale that threatened social peace, and that improvement was urgently required through measures such as regulating hours, unemployment prevention, wage adequacy, protection against sickness/injury, protection of children, and freedom of association. That is a direct historical explanation of why labour regulation was institutionalised internationally.

Then you have the Treaty of Versailles [2] (the labour provisions) which explicitly state that labour should not be treated merely as a commodity, and list urgent principles including freedom of association and wages sufficient for a reasonable standard of life.

But the history of labour regulations is actually old, if you're into that. [3][4][5]

So let's put to rest the completely unfounded assumption that this is a tax-politics explanation and not a social-protection and industrial-order explanation.

> It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.

Again, you misstate what labour regulation is for. Labour law does not generally make firms responsible for a worker's entire "wellbeing" in the abstract. It sets minimum rules inside a specific relationship the firm controls: wages, hours, safety, dismissal, status, notice, and similar conditions. The ILO framework is explicit that labour law exists because employment relationships involve unequal bargaining power and because protections are linked to the existence of that relationship, including where firms try to structure or disguise arrangements to avoid obligations. [0] Otherwise employment would pretty much be a form of slavery; favoured by employers, for sure, but an altogether shitty deal for the employees.

It is also historically (and morally, if you ask me) wrong to reduce this to tax-and-welfare politics. The foundational international labour-law texts explain the emergence of labour regulation in terms of "injustice, hardship and privation," social instability, and the need for social justice, so not as a response to voter demand for low taxes. The ILO Constitution and related early labour principles are very clear on this. [6]

> Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others.

This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc. Corruption can exist in any regulatory domain, but that does not establish that employer duties are conceptually invalid. At best, we could frame it as an argument about enforcement quality and governance integrity, but it wouldn't refute the underlying rationale for labour standards (power imbalance and prevention of harm in employment relationships).

I'll stop here, because I need my dinner.

[0] https://wecglobal.org/uploads/2019/07/2006_ILO_Recommendatio...

[1] https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/ILO%20Consti...

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiii.asp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law

[4] https://law.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/facultysites/hass/law/hamly...

[5] https://formsoflabour.exeter.ac.uk/conference/levels-of-labo...

[6] https://www.ilo.org/resource/other/ilo-constitution

Edit: mixed to order above, but hopefully the points are still clear.

The dream.

> Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk.

I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.

A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.

In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.

The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.

As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals

I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.

We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.

This paper presents some useful details as well: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2039.pdf

That's an interesting take, which contradicts what I know. I'd be interested in reading some specialist literature on that.

It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.

Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.

Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.

Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.

And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.

I will never use dark mode if I can avoid it. The idea that it's somehow better is a bit shady [0][1] (save for mobile devices where arguably it may help save some energy), but I absolutely understand that it can be a personal preference.

Multiple discussions already exist on HN on this topic, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664079

[0] https://simplyexplained.com/videos/why-dark-mode-makes-you-s...

[1] https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/the-dark-mode-lobby...