LimesTheif
1yr ago
If Musk unbans Trump, but Trumps ignores Twitter, that will reduce Musk's and Twitter's status.
What status? What is the fallout for Elon Musk if he says, “We’ve got Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on here, I’m lifting the ban on the 45th Potus,” and then Trump just stays on Truth social?
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Do they? Or is it that working conditions and wages are hammered out only every so-many years during contract negotiations, and that, by intent and structure, isn’t going to be something that can occur just whenever.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
They also have to maintain solidarity. The union is an organization and the business is an organization.
When the MİT murders some mouthy Kurds in Turkey, the PKK doesn’t want the heat that a retaliatory killing is going to bring, but if they don’t offer one up every now and again they will lose support from their base.
Right. The efficiency engineers at Amazon didn’t have any business incentive to budget in time to allow people to walk the distance required to urinate in a bathroom when picking orders. The plan was, pay $15-18 an hour when that was above most other entry level jobs and the labor market was weaker, and replace anyone who places a higher price on their dignity. The end result is ultimately people on the line pissing in bottles. The union does not exist to make the business efficient. It exists to give current employees bargaining power, where they’d otherwise be on the short end of an imbalance.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Well, not everyone, no. Maybe if UPS was opening a brand new sort facility in that area. But a few, sure.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
I was just taking a shot at poor old Rod, but I’ll do that more plainly in the future. I was and am not expecting to accomplish anything.
I do appreciate the Mottizens that have provided info about the current specifics of excommunication in this thread.
In America, sports teams are vanity projects ultimately run by billionaires who want a boost in name recognition. Their teams are exempted from anti-trust and artificially scarce, so the owners feel relatively secure they can flip their team if they run into financial problems, elsewhere, or pass it on to their children where it will retain some value. And, if those owners are bad at hiring general mangers, it’s not too much of a problem. They just need to be liked, or at least not disliked, by the other owners in their league. (Think Donald Sterling, who all the other NBA owners hated, versus Robert Sarver who just got a one year suspension and a fine, for pretty much the same offense. Not that Sarver is everyone’s favorite.)
The Sacramento Kings, New York Jets and Buffalo Sabres are all sitting on 10+ year playoff droughts in leagues with a salary cap. They and their owners will not be removed if things don’t improve.
Also, bad GMs love churning through multiple head coaches before ownership stops letting them pass the buck.
Sports teams in America are franchises of multibillion-dollar corporations.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Do you think any other model could win games? If so, why hasn't it been done? How does this example not apply more generally to every organization?
We’re talking about the economy, not some game where a higher power tells every firm they’re only allowed to have the exact same number of employees and set a salary cap on their wages and restrict which company employees can sign with when entering the industry and can extract concessions or prevent an employee from changing firms if an opposing firm doesn’t offer a higher guaranteed salary. It’s apples to oranges.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
I don’t think anyone argued hierarchy wasn’t efficient, or at least I have not. I think you said small business, like sports teams, are pillars of efficiency. But sports teams aren’t finding their size in pursuit or as a result of efficiency, but literally by the arbitrary rules of their sport.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Dallas is a pretty good market, to be fair. It’s the fourth-largest metro in the U.S. and the top two house a pair of teams, each, where the Bears and Cowboys have nos. 3 and 4 to themselves. Also, culturally, Texas is football mad. But 💯 on your point about Jones being a savvy businessman and bungling sportsman.
NPR is often embarrassing, but I am curious if you are willing to co-sign Wesley Lowery’s “moral clarity” replacement for aiming in the direction of objectivity in journalism?
While your politics might or might not differ from Lowery’s, who is on the id-pol segment of the American left, you certainly seem to share his idea that a news outlet interviewing someone with controversial opinions is an endorsement of them — as evidenced by your framing of that NPR interview with an author who does not work for NPR but thinks looting is justified.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
A sort-of mistaken costume is a now a in-joke in my family.
One year, while handing out candy, my father was dressed as Frankenstein’s monster. He and my mom had set up on the front porch.
My father asked a seemingly-shy, small child, who had approached, “Happy Halloween — would you like some candy?”
The child enthusiastically replied, “Thanks, Einstein!”
It took my parents a moment to work out the child had meant “Frankenstein”, and was not being condescending.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
…but it seems to me that everyone was waiting to see if the Ukrainians had a shot at some semblance of victory, or whether all this money and guns were just going down the toilet.
I know there are a non-zero number of American foreign-policy think tankers that view the proxy war as a good on its own, to the extent it weakens a potential rival in an emerging multipolar world. For those folks, the money and arms are not wasted so long as the conflict was prolonged.
Throat clearing: this can be true even if the Ukrainian cause is worthy of support on its own merits.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women.
I’m not as familiar with the driving forces behind sex-positive feminism, but for women in the work place, ☝️ this is not only dubious, but appears bad faith and near-infalsifiable since a hand can be waived in the direction of some cohort of elite men and their plan(s) to get more women into the office, which of course they couldn’t and didn’t openly articulate, leaving no historical record.
Post-war, expand high school graduation percentages met with an increased demand for clerical work. Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry). Women found office jobs, which were far less dirty and dangerous, more appealing. And this, among other factors, led to increased participation in the workforce, and specifically by married women, who were less motivated to drop out of the work force as office work was more palatable.
After a couple decades, women began to expect to spend a significant period of their life in the workforce where prior generations had not. And from here, many women, of their own agency, began to pursue higher education and assert themselves professionally.
If you want to subjectively debate whether this was “good”, feel free to embark on that tangent. But if you want to objectively deny that a subset of women, through their own agency, pushed for greater economic opportunity and independence, then you’ll need to show your work.
LimesTheif
1yr ago
Man you argue in bad faith. Where did I say feminism was all women versus all men? Where has anyone said that?
They also allow people to negotiate over working conditions in a manner other than simply changing jobs. I slung cardboard in a FedEx unload bay in college where I was reduced to an hourly total, and their entire staffing model was to pay one tick above minimum wage and then burn through employees at whatever rate occurred. The management style was, whenever understaffed and for however many months, to tell the grunts to work yet harder. It’s very common for FedEx sort facilities to have over 100% turnover in a year on average. And, we didn’t have it Amazon bad.
It wasn’t horrible for someone like me because I knew I was out of there and on to better things in a short time. But if you’re a HBD, heritable-intelligence type, then there are going to be some folks for whom that’s their lot in life. And I’ve met a few of them. If they’re, say, loading four delivery vans at 300-400 boxes a van, and arranging boxes based on the seven-to-eight digit code that organizes the boxes along the delivery route, that’s more than honest work for one shift. I one-hundred percent want people for whom that’s their level in life to have a union say, “No, you can’t put someone on more than a four-truck pull during the holiday-season peak. You can adequately staff your shifts, or you can have management come in and start loading trucks for failing to do their job.”
A significant part of what is driving unionization pushes at places like Starbucks, Amazon, etc. are working conditions.
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