I don't think anyone was ever necessarily under the impression these workers are all landowners living dream lives in some socialist utopia.
They just didn't think they were eating products created literally through domestic slave labor.
3,058 karma · joined September 12, 2011
They just didn't think they were eating products created literally through domestic slave labor.
1) At the end of the day your boss' job is to take as much from you as possible and give you as little as possible in return. Same as customers. The difference the company makes there is literally the definition of profit.
2) If you're non-union in the US, you have zero power. Your only real recourse to any grievance or unfair treatment is to quit, forgoing your severance and losing your health insurance. Your only weapon is a freshly updated resume.
But at the same time if you've ever spent time with people with serious dehabilitating mental illness, it's clear there are a lot of people who are very seriously struggling and very much need help and aren't capable of seeking it out on their own. And if you've ever experienced any kind of mental illness or talked in depth to someone who has, it's clear it's a very real phenomena and not just someone daring to be different.
So while I agree with the general thrust of your post I think this:
>It makes the subjective and critical judgement that the behavior exhibited by most people signifies health, and any deviance from the statistical mean is diseased; evolution be damned.
Is unfair. It's a tough line to thread, which is why psychiatrists and philosophers spend lifetimes working on these issues and trying to figure out where the line is. It's absolutely not the case that "any deviance from the statistical mean is diseased"; this is not an unfair characterization of what was done at the inception of the field when people understood nothing, and it's certainly a good warning about how powerful and dangerous it is classify something or someone as 'insane' (read Foucault! Who is shockingly missing from this article!) but it's not a fair critique of modern day psychiatric medicine.
I'll give you my perspective on your question as someone fairly left of center, so take it with a grain of salt. Or take it as God's truth, whatever you fancy.
People, inevitably inexorably being strangled to death by the neoliberal free market capitalist economic system which has controlled nearly every western government since the 80s, are struggling and striking out for anything that will save them. People often turn to extremism and fascism of all stripes in situations like that. They become more extreme, because the status quo is a slow and painful death so anything that seems like it will bring change is good. When you are drowning you don't worry too much about the kind of boat that's offering to pull you up, you just climb onto it. Even if that boat is a slave ship.
Leftists have seen some success recently when they drop the ridiculous affectation of 'reasonable centrism and compromise' (centrism is only ever reasonable to people for whom the status quo is working, almost by definition), stop focusing on race/gender to the exclusion of class, and present real, radical, explicit and understandable changes to improve the lives of voters: Corbyn, Sanders, even Melenchon have all had encouraging and very high levels of success relative to expectations and the recent past, though they are mentioned in the order of their absolute success (Corbyn, topping the list, won a huge number of seats, the largest increase in labor vote share since 1945, caused a hung parliament which is pushing the Tories to make an uneasy alliance with an extremist group).
But these movements are still beginning and have a lot of work to do; they diametrically oppose the entrenched order explicitly (for the ultrawealthy, a Muslim ban is gauche and unbecoming of their senses of civility and properness; nationalizing private industry to take it from robber barons or providing healthcare for the poor is a very assault on their power/way of life), so they receive no support from above.
In real life people are just trying to get through their day, and if you're decent and polite to people they will usually appreciate and reciprocate it. Black people aren't walking around hunting for racists. Nobody is walking around looking to accuse others of things in real life. The guy has a job to do and he wants to do it. He appreciates people who are nice and friendly, and doesn't appreciate people who are nasty and mean, just like anyone with a job.
You are always vulnerable to accusations, no matter what you do, no matter who you talk to. You could be accused of anything at any time. If somebody wants to be a jerk and make your day worse they can do that. But the vast majority of people don't. Walking into an interaction with someone else, almost everyone wants it to be polite and friendly. All you can do is try to do your best to treat everyone like a person and be decent. Don't let toxic Internet culture stop you from developing friendships in the real world. The environment is not hostile, even if it seems like it is because us tech people are extremely online. If something bad happens, shrug it off as the rare one-off crazy event that it is and move on.
If you want to talk about antitrust action against the big 5, I'm absolutely with you -- they are monopolists and they need to be broken up. But your solution is to redistribute ultimate power back to the most hated monopolists in the country? Who have a physical monopoly, often enforced by law and physical reality, not because people of mindshare and some unpleasant anti competitive bundling?
The gilded age was worse than the 90s. Then 90s was not great, but we punished Microsoft and moved on to something better. The solution is NOT to return to the gilded age with ISPs as modern monopolist robber barons which is what removing NN does.
At this point, I'm glad the big 5 are ultra powerful -- they are the only entities with the power to support consumers (the government won't) if they choose to do so. And sometimes, they do. Amazon is, for example.
You don't hear discussion of neoliberalism often for the same reason fish don't often discuss water; it's the prevailing ideology of our time so it is pervasive and "the way things are". Things which are not neoliberal are, by definition, radical and extreme. The only people who talk about it are the people like philosophers who do deep critique of society and our economic and moral system, or those who wish to set themselves apart from it like e.g. communists, nationalists, socialists.
But high school for all is generally considered by everyone to be a Good Thing and having a more educated populace is good for everyone: jobs change, times change, and generally educated, intellectually flexible citizens are better able to adapt with the times, vote intelligently, be part of modern communities, etc. You can go to a trade school after high school.
We've come along far enough it's time to recognize that high school is no longer good enough as a general education, and that's a good thing: a college education where students study philosopy, history, science, mathematics is now the basic standard for an educated citizen and we should provide it to them regardless of how wealthy their parents are or how well they take IQ tests.
Indeed the math subject GRE was (when I took it) primarily many, many tricky calculus questions with a very strict time limit, because these problems are fairly straightforward to write and standard.
But the main point I'd like to bring up is this: what you're saying is true about politics in general. But there are a lot of politics which are explicitly about technology and more specifically software technology. Political decisions are being made and laws are being passed that effect our industry, livelihoods, and lives and the community as a whole is infected with this head-in-sand "I'm above politics, politics isn't truly 'geeky' so I don't deal with it, I check out when people describe their emotions or lives instead of technical runtime analysis" attitude. I've observed it online in forums, in industry, in academia, it is an unfortunate facet of the cultural place the tech community inhabits.
But if all of the technical experts eschew politics then these political decisions that seriously effect our lives and our work will still be made: but without our input. By refusing to discuss and create politically active technical communities we cede all power to people who know nothing and care even less about the important technical issues of our time.
The tech community is pretty wide ranging in its political beliefs, but when we discuss the politics of technology there is general consensus on many issues among most: NN is good, banning encryption is bad, unrestricted access to the Internet is of fundamental importance and a liberating force, it would be better to have a choice of ISP, software patents are too broad, copyright/IP law is too extreme and stifles creativity, mass surveillance is troubling (whether you think it is also necessary or not).
There are a variety of extremely political issues that are fundamental to tech:
1) Should developers have a professional organization or union with e.g. ethical standards and certifications?
2) As a fundamental moral question, how do we feel about/what should we do about the millions of workers we personally displace and leave jobless through automation?
3) How, if at all, should the Internet be regulated? Is it a utility? Antitrust?
4) Immigration and outsourcing technical jobs.
5) What should happen when law enforcement demands information that is protected by encryption? Should encryption that the FBI cannot break be allowed?
6) How should copyright and IP work with respect to software, algorithms, APIs?
7) Should developers be held accountable for writing software that leaks data? Should users have fundamental rights to their own data? Privacy?
8) Regulations on IoT devices like cars
The list can go on and on and on. While I'd agree a thread on climate change might not be particularly insightful or interesting here, it is crucial the tech community discusses the issues above regularly so that when a bill is put forth, or input is elicited, there is an actual community of experts that present a (reasonably) united front, who have discussed these things amongst themselves.
If we had banned political discussion on HN and sites like it, SOPA would probably be law right now. It was stopped because the entire tech community discussed it constantly, came to an agreement that it was bad, and took extreme collective political action against it.
If saying nice things about bad people were actually a problem, no politician in history in any western society would ever be allowed to rule. Pick any politician and you will find them endorsing, funding, supporting or any combination brutal dictators, apartheid regimes, terrorists like Al Qaeda (years ago), slave states, various factions fighting in Syria, Iraq (pre Iraq war), Qatar, Turkey, Dubai, Iran (pre islamic revolution or post), Israel, death squads in South America, Pinochet, on and on and on. To have any "serious" position in modern foreign policy is to support evil.
These "statements of support" are of course ridiculous 'gotcha' red herrings that actually mean nothing that neoliberal ideologues use to smear his personality and avoid talking about actual policy that could seriously effect the lives of ordinary UK citizens which they desperately do not want to improve, policy like for example the devastating and horrific one that is supposed to be the subject of this discussion thread.
The government is chosen by the people. This is not Saudi Arabia. If people do not want May, if they care about being free, they will vote against her. If you care, you will organize people against her to stop this. If you work at an Internet company, you will push them to lobby against her in the coming election; destruction of the Internet will be bad for everyone. Wikipedia should block the UK and show a black page that tells them what is about to happen, then links them to register to vote. You can change the government instead of whining on the internet about dystopia.
A corporation, on the other hand, behaves exactly as you have described, and you will never have any recourse, because the people who own it own it.
It means people with power are afraid of him which is quite encouraging!
Food is heavily regulated, including the food bought by stamps. The government decides what can be purchased by the stamps, and every item of food sold in any store across the country is approved for safety and health. Without these regulations we would have massive constant food related deaths as producers compete on price and compromise safety to the detriment and possibly death of any customer who cannot afford the high quality "market regulated" product which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world. And for higher end products: the calculus of a PR cover up operation and possible civil suit vs. actually safely creating food is done by companies, and currently federal regulators weigh in on the side of 'you had better make this safe or else'. You are proposing pushing the balance here towards "well, if we can save a buck, screw it, we can tie the victims up in court until they go bankrupt and die anyway or blame it on the supply chain and promise we will do better" which makes safety much less important.
A health care spending card is perhaps a natural suggestion but is made all the more insidious because it is so. It is, in reality, an atrocious and murderous idea; the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price and that quality is almost impossible for consumers to accurately assess but that needs for different people are drastically different, usually for reasons that have very little to do with their choices or desires, which is why it is generally taken care of by insurance while people do not buy "food insurance". Health care spending cards (or HSAs) are essentially a euphemism for condemning any poor person who gets sick to death.
And of course it makes a difference whether poor people can steal the food. Remember that unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger. Putting something necessary for survival behind an arbitrary chalked in line and saying "sorry, you don't get to have that because you weren't born rich and the neoliberal market economy has transitioned and has no room for your skillset, enjoy your one free death, maybe when you are reincarnated your father will be named Koch" is a very fast way to start riots and anarchy. The only reason the rich are rich is because the poor believe they are and act accordingly, we call this belief structure market society and government; shattering that necessary illusion will likely hurt everyone, but it most definitely hurts the rich. The point is that if food is available but inaccessible to the poor the free market and governmental structure in place will cease to exist -- the market and government have evolved in a very careful way to prevent this from happening.
Unfortunately I don't see this happening: large tech companies benefit from this arrangement and so it takes moral courage to do the right thing here on behalf of the leaders of these companies. There's some of that but not enough -- maybe I'm just being a pessimist.
General grassroots political outcry to stop the actual law changing is possible, but very unlikely to matter in this case either, I think. Unfortunately while SOPA was a law passed by votes, cast by human beings who are accountable to someone and can be threatened by angry citizenry, this is a regulatory decision literally nobody who is not a senior vice president at Comcast voted for or wants -- Pai has no constituents, all the power and none of the responsibility. He can sell the Internet to his friends at Verizon and then undoubtedly receive their gratitude in the form of a cushy job and $400,000 speaking gigs.
Also food is cheap and plentiful to create.
And most importantly, food is easy to steal; the one important factor in a functioning free market libertarians tend to forget about is the natural control at the bottom, for the poor: if the poor need something in order to survive and can't afford it, they act as a check on greed and neoliberalism run amok by ignoring the fake magic pieces of paper that the wealthy wave around as tokens of power and take what they need.
It's a lot harder to steal health care so there's no incentive for the rich to modify the system to help the poor like there is with food.
(6) basic health care is not a market and pretending it is has been nothing but a moral and economic catastrophe in the US.
Similarly it's possible to have freedom of speech but no free press, e.g. anyone can say whatever they wish on the street and out loud but all major media organizations systematically overwhelm or crush journalistic dissent and control the media narrative as dictated by a tiny oligarchy of wealthy elites which is in some large part the case in the U.S. or by the government directly as in many other more traditional repressive countries.
Having regulators with interests that diverge from people in industry is exactly the point; the things they are doing are often dangerous, reckless, and careless. It does not matter if it's "standard industry practice" or part of the "byplay common in the industry day-to-day". In fact it's crucial that regulators ignore this; we didn't particularly care that it was commonplace to put asbestos or lead in products when it started killing people, we just stopped it.
I don't care if it's "commonplace in the industry" to hash passwords with MD5 and leave a telnet port on the database server open to the Internet. It should be criminal because of how careless it is with people's personal data and I wish there were more regulators in the IT industry to come down on people who do it.
The freedom to make fair and reasonable contracts among parties that all fully understand the terms and do not have a massively imbalanced power dynamic is certainly one I, and many others support and think is fundamental.
The ability to force people into unfair contracts with you under duress by abusing your economic power is not and has never been "freedom" in any sense of the word (rather, it's the opposite of freedom, slavery or indentured servitude) unless you have some kind of sick Ayn Rand redefinition of it where it is nothing more than a code word for the notion that the people who happen to currently have wealth should not be questioned, stopped, or denied anything they wish no matter the consequences.