wfo

It is how war is usually conducted, and perhaps there is a justification for total war if something poses an existential threat.

But you need to consider this in the context of actual reality, where nearly all "war" is really a police action taken extrajudicially by ultrapowerful states against guerilla groups or civilian populations in order to ensure the dominance and power of wealthy global interests. Every war in the cold war was like this.

The doctrine of the acceptability of mass slaughter of innocents is how the people with weapons have chosen to use them in these non-existential "wars" but that isn't a justification for that choice.

What if revealing that information would ensure your permanent imprisonment and the immediate death of your family and friends? Because this is almost always the case. Interrogators are not trying to find things out because they are curious, they are looking for your allies in order to kill them or capture and torture them.

The prevailing thought and media narrative can never be dismissed, no matter its factual basis or lack thereof. If it is not identified explicitly and challenged, it anchors the starting point of all discussion and thereby sets the bounds for it.

In my experience certain children (and adults) -- ones who live in successful, wealthy neighborhoods are completely terrified of the idea of failing, at anything. They will start weeping if they feel like they performed poorly on an exam. Any test, no matter how meaningless, determines their self-worth. I'd imagine these students do disproportionately fantastic on this test. At this point it's culture/personality test, not a reasonable countrywide baseline.

Because it is, always, every time it's brought up, every time it's stated. Sometimes people are clever and hide their racism in a few layers of "look at this lazy white person! I don't like him either!" but dig for a minute or so and you'll always find the truth. Occasionally it can be about other minorities, which you are correct to point out -- Hispanic Americans, etc.

But my two hypothetical quotes were simply examples of the attitude that is so common, not explicitly trying to accurately characterize the parent or GP.

"Why do blacks even have a problem with the police" is an excellent question. The correct answer is "because the police disproportionately arrest them far more for behaving the same way as whites" and "because the police often murder them on the street in cold blood and face no repercussions" and "because the police are known to explicitly harbor white nationalist sympathizers and explicitly make racist comments publicly, in official internal communications, and informally in person". And finally "because the police as an institution in the US is primarily a force designed to protect property, and at its inception property was black slaves; traditionally, the US police are a psuedo-military force whose primary reason for existing was to chase runaway slaves".

If your follow up to "Why do blacks even have a problem with the police?" is "all they have to do is stop commiting crimes!" then it is the second statement that is explicitly racist. With the second statement you make the claim that the fault of police abuse lies in the abused, not the abusers, and that black people have no reason to mistrust the police except for the obvious fact that they are criminals.

The bigotry is not the disdain for laziness, which is just plain nastiness and a fundamental lack of empathy and human understanding. The bigotry comes first, in the perception of laziness itself. Who is perceived to be lazy? Hard working working-class whites, or lazy working-class blacks living on the dole?

The massive and well-funded propaganda effort to destroy unions at all costs has been extremely successful, as we can see from your post.

I have never heard of, read, talked to, or even imagined that any living person would consider contributing to open source to be "depriving a union worker of their wages" or "scabbing". Have you ever even heard of an actual existing union before? Have you ever known someone who has participated in (well, let's be generous: imagined) a strike? Has any union ever banned its members from donating their free time to charity? Are you listening to yourself?

It is not very expensive. It is not a utopia, it is a tiny but meaningful increase in quality of life for the vast majority of citizens and society as a whole. And your question is fundamentally ideologically flawed: were you concern trolling about how we were going to fund the bombs we dropped on weddings last year? How did we fund the Saudi Arabian genocide in Yemen? What taxes did we raise to give them this money?

Corporate taxes basically don't exist in the US. Taxes on the wealthy barely exist compared to the most productive period in US history, when they were 94%. Your question reveals more about its asker than the subject. The whole point of having a country is so that the resources we generate together can be used to help the country, not so that a tiny wealthy oligarchy can siphon off all our resources and leave us to die, then when we ask to live, say "how will you pay for it?" [because I, after stealing your money, obviously won't give any of it back to you]

The entire point of the article is that you (or a local technician) should be allowed and able to repair your washing machine and not rely on the company exclusively to fix it. Having to throw it away is exactly because you don't really own it without the right to repair. You "own" a machine that it is impossible and illegal to fix or modify, which is not ownership at all, which means you already are renting it as a service, the company has just lied to you by redefining ownership in a way that makes them more money.

It is natural to phrase it as a right. People have been able to do this for the entirety of human history, every moment in every civilization repairing things has been legal. In fact, it has been celebrated, respected as something obviously good. It is not good for the profit of some large corporations so it is now, for the first time, being banned.

It was never thought of as a right before because it is so obviously acceptable and good that nobody had even conceived that somebody might try to deny it.

We aren't there yet, things are still much better for us than teachers, yes. But I'm proposing we do something about it now, while we are in demand and have power instead of waiting until it gets that bad.

Programming and teaching are similar; they are prestige positions (for now) that mark you as one of the professional class, people who do them are by and large hugely passionate and would be unhappy if forced to do something else (many programmers I know started before school because they loved it, do it in their spare time, etc). Passion in capitalism gets taken advantage of and exploited, since dispassionate economic assessment is how a 'rational' actor works in economic models; passion is a weakness from the perspective of wealth accumulation and economic success. The thing that links the fields in my view is passion.

>Unions are great at establishing entrenched interests.

s/Unions/Companies/g

Unions can be for unskilled labor. They can exist without qualifications and gatekeeping. That's why I presented that as a distinct option, separate from them. All they need to do is bargain with employers to make working conditions better. That's it. Unpaid overtime "just this once because we're all part of the team, guys" every month? We strike and make a deal that says you have to pay us OT. 80 hour weeks on salary for 40? ops strikes and your system goes down and nobody fixes it until you make a deal and cut hours. Employer tries to put a clause in your contract that says they own your side projects? They have to go through the union first, and programmers vote hell no.

The rest of the stuff you've cooked up inside your head are sure things I can imagine but they have nothing to do with unions; they are imaginary FUD.

Resources are not limited at all, we have more resources today in the US than any group has ever had in all of human history. We just choose to allocate them on things that are bad, like bombing hospitals or buying tanks for police departments or jailing millions for nothing or corporate welfare, and not things that are good, like learning or healthcare. In the golden age of prosperity for the US, the highest tax bracket was 94%. We tax nothing and demand nothing because we have been trained to think we deserve nothing; through no fault of your own, you have been tricked into accepting this status quo as 'necessary' when it is anything but, it is explicitly contrived and enforced by wealth to keep wealth in the hands of the wealthy at the expensive of the lives and livelihood of everyone else.

Self-directed learning is great, but if you've ever been a teacher or a student in a genuinely difficult subject you know autodidactism is VERY limited and works for a tiny few on a tiny number of subjects. Autodidacts generally have an oversimplified understanding of a subject they think they know because they lack the social engagement in the topic and deep understanding that comes from engaging with true expertise. They think they know far more than they do, nearly every single time in my experience interacting with them. Which is not bad, as a teacher this is an excellent place to have your students start because you can quickly disabuse them of this notion and they become eager to learn more.

Say it with me friends and colleagues,

Union.

This is the future for all of us, when programming becomes commoditized just as teaching has. When our salaries are pushed to the bottom. We are not owners, we are not capitalists, we are not bosses, we are people with a skill you can learn on the internet and a corresponding talent for it.

Either a) this will happen to us as programmers, b) we have credentialing and gatekeepers to keep supply low c) we have a union to collectively bargain, or d) radical changes in the government save us from this fate.

In the U.S. (d) seems impossible. Programmers as a group seem to be virulently opposed to (b). So choose, unions or barbarism.

Or, better, you will have school divorced from 'lifestyle' which is completely unnecessary and wasted money. You will have students of all age groups (since it is free) and students who take classes in the evening after work and many students who save money by living at home as well as many students who find cheap residences together exactly as they do today. The school could provide dormitories if they break even but only then.

Why should the school provide housing at all? It is there to provide an education.

It's possible Betsy Devoss has something to do with it; students always knew they were giving an incomprehensible amount of money to monstrous vultures by paying back their loans, but this time it's impossible to ignore that fact with her at the head of dept -- millennials loathe her.

Perhaps more and more students are simply refusing to pay, taking the free college they should have been given by economic force.

No, "Free" is covered by printing money which the government does all the time (where does it get money for billions of dollars in military increases? It just appears out of nowhere, handed to military contractors). Taxes are to manage the amount of US dollars in circulation and to constantly create demand for them after the services are created and money is printed.

And we would have educated our citizenry and let millions of people learn about the world and the expanses of human knowledge instead of just the rich for nothing, since those citizens wouldn't be able to generate extra wealth for their bosses. What a nightmare.

Well, the point of college isn't to do job training. There are trade skills for that. College exists in the exact state high school did before it was made free for everyone. It is a barrier for entry into "good" jobs and the middle-upper class. It is simultaneously a way for people to learn and become informed citizens, to get some context for the world around them and how it operates, to learn economics and philosophy and mathematics and physics and computer science if they are interested in it.

After a while we said "no, everybody should go to high school and learn civics and math even though they aren't necessary for most specific jobs". Before that, we had the poor starting manual labor or apprenticeships at 12, never learning anything beyond their specific skill, while actually becoming educated and a citizen was reserved only for the rich. We decided to make our workforce and citizenry more thoughtful and educated and improved society as a whole significantly.

It's time to do it again. Our world is much more complicated now, human knowledge has expanded vastly. College education is now the baseline for 'educated person' and that's okay. It's great, even. Thanks to free high school the poor can study math and history. If there were free college, the poor could study economics and philosophy and computer science too.

How many talented people do we lose by shunting the poor (who are, in capitalism, always the vast majority of the population) into non-education job training when they are young because they can't afford to learn about the world?

I think you miss the point. Sure if I have my identity stolen bad things happen to me, but I am not the victim of the crime. The bank is. Someone has defrauded the bank and stolen money from them; the bank then turns around and says, no, the money was not stolen from the bank, it was stolen from you. In reality, if the bank gives someone else my money, this is fraud. This is theft. The bank is under contract to give my money to only me, and they have broken this contract. So either they have given the thief their own money (which means someone has committed fraud against the bank, with no relation to me at all) or they have given someone else my money (which means the bank has defrauded me and stolen from me). The only way I am a victim of 'identity theft' is if we allow the bank to decide the money they gave away to some random person actually belonged to me; they should not be able to do this. It is identical to the bank withdrawing money from my account and reporting it as corporate profit, fraud and theft. There are two possibilities: I am the victim and the bank is the perpetrator of fraud, or the bank is the victim and the thief is the perpetrator of fraud. 'Identity theft' as a phrase suggests a ridiculous notion, that the thief is the perpetrator and I am the victim, which suggests I am somehow related to someone who happened to rob my bank.

Well sure, CEO compensation has.

You say

>Why does everyone jump to "demise of unions"?

And then

>Wages are not growing because of a policy to screw labor out of its earnings, and the policy is working.

Well yes, said policy would not be and was not tenable with powerful unions. Such abuses are only possible when workers have zero power, i.e. in the absence of unions as forces in the political and economic sphere. There has also been a concerted intentional policy of wealthy capitalists to demonize and destroy unions over the past few decades, continuing to this day, complete with legislation aimed at their destruction taking a variety of creative and ruthless avenues, violence and killings, extreme economic coercive force like shutting down entire businesses and factories in retaliation to even a sniff of workers talking about unionizing, and a massive and well financed propaganda effort. And the policy is working. The most powerful unions are teacher's unions and charter schools are being slammed through by wealthy interests in region after region with the explicit purpose of killing them off.

Things actually are complicated, we aren't making them so.

Well, poll people about universal healthcare. It's, what, 70% support? Poll people about legalization of marijuana. Poll people about private prisons. Poll people about police buying military weapons, tanks on streets. Poll people about asset forfeiture. Poll people about a living wage. Poll people about gerrymandering. Poll people about money in politics. Poll people about the revolving door. Poll people about student loans. Poll people about net neutrality. Poll people about the TPP. Support for the Iraq war was created by lies and propagandists, explicitly and intentionally -- public opinion was manufactured through deceit, not genuine. And there were still huge antiwar protests and massive antiwar sentiment.

You will get massive support on a wide variety of issues completely invisible to modern political discourse if you ask people. But the people asking the questions have enormous power. If you rate congresspeople by their collective votes in congress, if you let mainstream pundits who are paid explicitly to maintain the status quo ask questions, the answers will not be inspiring and most will look similar.

I don't blame people for not demanding action, for not demanding things at all, since they've been taught it doesn't work and it's a waste of time. They are resigned to being ignored, they do not consent. Most American's don't vote. The keywords here are apathy and a disconnect with the system, not agreement.

Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.

Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.

Well yes of course, we should curtail the freedoms of bosses to be abusive, steal wages, and generally behave horribly to his or her employees in the same we curtail the freedoms of a physically large man to physically assault others.

And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.

Guess what: you (almost certainly) already are. You think your business (on orders from the management, not based on a vote of the workers) doesn't arbitrarily exclude people? You don't have HR officers who filter out great programmers because they don't have credentials? Your company doesn't post job listings that require 5 years of experience and a college degree to write basic CRUD apps? You just have no control over these decisions at all, so it is easier to divorce yourself from them. If you had some ownership over the decision making process, like in a union, you'd have to own it -- this is good, even if it means you don't get your way. It is a transition from having zero say (nonunion) to making an argument, being heard out, and losing. And who knows, convince enough people, argue well enough, and you'll win the vote next time. But you have to fight to get a vote in the first place before that happens.

I've been lucky as well and all of my small business experience personally has been great (tech small businesses are pretty good on average, I think) but my point is that luck, by definition, doesn't happen to everybody and we shouldn't have to rely on it. "I got lucky therefore there is no problem" is not a reasonable position to take.

Yes, you can hop from tyranny to tyranny until you find a dictator who will have mercy on you and not abuse you as much, losing your health insurance and livelihood with every hop, hoping you don't become homeless or destitute or get sick every time you are abused. And maybe, if you're lucky, there is a company in your area that does what you know how to do and is decent, and you haven't had your reputation as a "complainer" who dares challenges your boss spread around town.

Alternately, we could institute worker protections and support unions (which are necessary to develop the political will to institute worker protections) so they all have to treat you decently and everyone who works hard for a living can have a humane reasonable life.