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But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?
The Motte doesn’t like unions because most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley where until recently individual employees had an unusually large amount of leverage. In five years when they’ve all been fired they will probably feel differently about the idea.
I've seen proposals for tech worker unions. It's mostly about social justice and workers refusing work due to ethical concerns. As though a union could block a corporate contract with the Israeli government or the US military. As though less work is good for us.
Another main issue is making it harder to fire tech workers. It being easy to fire tech workers is a good thing. Driving out weaklings is obviously good. It makes the rest of us more valuable.
The one defensible point they make is regarding number of hours worked. I understand why some people don't want long hours. I'm still against the proposals since hiring more people to do the same amount of work would probably result in a decrease in compensation per person.
The above points are pushing for more people and person-hours with less work. That should result in a decrease in total compensation per worker. My entire concern is total compensation. Their concern is progressive culture warring and an understanding of workers' rights that amounts to encouraging mediocrity. Our values are incompatible and I don't want a union forced onto me. They would be taking my dues and spending them on progressive political lobbying while working on goals that would decrease my total compensation. In every way bad for me and opposed to my values. And then people act like "techbros" are fools working against their own interests.
They want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and tell me it is for my own good.
As someone that's worked for a FAANG for just about two decades, yes, everything about the above. The tech workers that most want to unionize are the ones that most want to wield that union in the service of extreme progressivism. The venn diagram of tech workers who have their pronouns in their signature and have at least once in their lives shouted "from the river to the sea" unironically, and those that are organizing unionization efforts in tech is indistinguishable from a circle.
It's possible that unionization could make life in software consultancy sweatshops like Deloitte somewhat better. As a FAANG employee, I do not feel that anyone on the tech side is being taken advantage of, and would much prefer fewer protections for the employees that cannot stop their fucked up psychological problems or childish entitlement to a job from causing constant strife at work.
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Citation needed.
Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.
Most of the polyamory/aella gangbang posts are from christians/social conservatives saying polyamory and the sexual revolution have failed, fun is bad and you'll pay.
Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.
They “know” her from outrage-bait reactionary twitter. On sunday they meet in a pointy house in the sticks and sing hymns about the whore of babylon. They go home and have wet dreams. Then they come to themotte and write posts wondering why anyone cares about her.
I can’t tell if this supposed to be humorous or if it’s just genuinely delusional. No one who goes to a “pointy house in the sticks” has even heard of Aella. Her fans and her haters are both among the terminally online.
You said the motte works in SV, that is incorrect. I haven't claimed that the motte is full of normal christians, just that some christians living in flyover country are here and know and complain about aella.
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Nah, your model is totally off here. The Aella-posters on the Motte are rationalist guys, some of whom have actually met her IIRC. I only know of her through the rationalist stuff and find her generally weird, off-putting and unworthy of extended commentary. In real life she has 1/1000th of 1/1000th of the reach of someone like Andrew Tate.
who's talking about general reach? I'm talking about this sub. Your opinion of aella is by far the most commonly expressed here, and you're not in Silicon valley.
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Every normal Christian in America has heard of the Mormon church.
And? That’s completely orthogonal to the point I’m making. Joe Sixpack from Indiana didn’t hear about Mormon polygamy and then because of that decide to log on to the Motte and write a 2000 word essay about Bay Area rationalist polycules and what that says about Scott Alexander’s moral fibre and views of society. That’s clearly a very inside-baseball take from someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu.
I’m not from Indiana, but certainly from flyover country. I became aware of polyamory through the internet, the same place where I read Scott’s essays and am talking to you now. I do not identify as a rationalist, have never identified as a rationalist, but I enjoyed a lot of Scott’s writings in 2014 about the culture war (as I am a relatively conservative man from flyover country, and he was criticizing the left), and discovered them from a Reddit recommendation on a subreddit recommended to me by a high school friend, also from flyover country.
Polyamory is also widespread, yes under that name, among gay zoomers just about anywhere, so if you’re young and know anyone who’s gay (and there’s a lot of zoomers who identify as gay), you have a good chance of coming across it.
This is a second-hand anecdote, but my mother does hiring at a small organization here in flyover country and had a hilarious, if disastrous, job interview where the candidate told her he was polyamorous. He did not get the job.
This stuff is spreading. It’s not just in San Francisco any more.
I disagree with Tree, but what he said isn’t entirely false about where the criticism comes from. But all the gory details definitely suggest some of the posters are insiders.
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Sure. But "someone who is immersed in the rationalist milieu" and "someone who works in Silicon Valley" are not synonymous, as numerous commenters have taken great pains to explain to you.
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You keep making these assertions, and I am willing to tentatively grant that Aella specifically maybe isn’t on the radar of “Normal Christians,” but hearing about polyamory is unavoidable, even out here in deep flyover country.
Do “Normal Christians” have more than a surface-level awareness of the concept and a desire to grant debating the concept any more time than “That’s just fornication with extra steps?” Probably not, but I would anecdotally state that they do know it is a thing.
Frankly, I don’t even think college students at liberal universities in most of the country would know what the hell you were talking about if you started going on about your polycule.
Okay, I can’t speak to liberal university college students, not having gone to college, but that wasn’t the original assertion.
I can tell you anecdotally, n=1, that while “Normal Christians” in flyover country won’t know the jargon, they are definitely aware that people are out there, both on the coasts and in flyover country, trying a new spin on justifying sexual sin.
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I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.
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I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish
and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.
Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.
I left for France two years ago. But to add to your point I don't work in tech and have never even been to the United States.
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I'm pretty sure some of the Indian caste dynamics people are in actual India.
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Best I can do you is to say that I don’t live in Silicon Valley.
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The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
I suspect most countries now have some form of anti-trust legislation. Wikipedia has some details on the price fixing page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing However, there may have been periods of time where countries had strong unions but no anti-cartel legislation. I think Australia only cracked down on price fixing after 1974.
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