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Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
Aside from the lame reference to covid, I didn't hear much in the clip that I was unsympathetic to.
It's ironic that I've been posting so much about the impossibility of changing one's mind the last couple of days, because I have noticed myself becoming substantially more sympathetic to unions in just the past couple of years. I'm tired of corporations using "profits" as an excuse for every shitty thing they do. Big tech platforms have to implement woke advertiser-friendly censorship because that's what's best for profits, and Boeing has to skimp out on safety because they need the profits, and we have to keep importing third world migrants and outsourcing manufacturing because well, that's simply what's best for profits! It seems to me that the much maligned "enshittification" of the 21st century is just a synonym for the race to squeeze every last drop of profit possible out of increasingly thin margins.
If profits incentivize so much bad behavior, then maybe we just need to chill on the profits for a while. Take a break. It won't be the end of the world. Share some of the excess cash with your employees, or invest it in a scientific or artistic endeavor of your choosing, or just burn it for all I care, it doesn't matter much.
I frankly don't know anything about the specific demands of the longshoreman's union in this case, or how proportionate they are to the actual work being done. But I'm sympathetic to the underlying impulse, and I'm definitely not feeling very sympathetic to corporate America right now.
This paragraph literally reads as "I don't know anything about the issue, but here's my feelings." I just want to verify this is your intent.
Perhaps it's a red herring? An excuse for behavior that's actually motivated not by profits, but by greed. "But but but greed == profits!" No, not really. You can run a profitable or non-profitable company and still be greedy and pay yourself or your executives far too much. Hell, you can run a freaking nonprofit and still pay yourself an insane amount of money. Several publicly listed tech companies don't actually turn net profits (which is different from operating profits which is different from free cash flow) - But pay their executives sky high salaries and award generous options packages that have been better than cash for 20 years.
It's far worse than that. If "they" were squeezing profit out, it would be OK. They're squeezing cash out through all sorts of fun financial gimmicks and tricks. Or a very simply game of musical chairs. In fact, right now, the big vibe shift in Silicon Valley is that investors are being way more critical of a company's path to profitability.
"Profits" aren't the problem, it's the rent-seeking behavior on the way to profits. And this is what unions do; they seek rent through "collective bargaining" which is functionally synonymous with extortion and racketeering. If you have grown more sympathetic to them, you are growing more sympathetic to money being siphoned off for no other reason that those who are already there have their hand closest to the trough.
I don't know anything about the longshoreman's union, but I am here to share my feelings anyway. Yes that is my intent.
This isn't a particularly unusual state of affairs, nor would I necessarily classify it as an epistemic vice. People form opinions based on incomplete information all the time. Nothing wrong with starting with an intuition and refining as you go. It's not too unlike certain Mottizens who have very strong opinions on the Frankfurt School, despite never having read a word of the Frankfurt School's work.
I just can't bring myself to be very upset over money siphoning right now. So many awful decisions (I mentioned corporate wokeness and mass immigration) have been justified by recourse to "shareholders' bottom line". Very well then. If that's the case, then I don't care about their bottom line anymore. Siphon away.
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There has been an increasing number of posts like this here and I do not understand it.
“I don’t pay any attention to politics and don’t know anything about the candidates, anyway here are 14 paragraphs about my thoughts on the election”
Has it always been like this? I don’t remember it ever being so blatant.
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