Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | vincnetas's commentslogin

Lost couple of evenings to nostalgia because of this recently :)

More SQL functionality?

There is a substantial opposing force to that "US$790 billion ad market for 2024"


yep! it’d be hard, but we’re already at most people nodding their head when you say “social media is addictive, detrimental to individual mental health, and overall negative for society”

you just got to get enough people to nod at “…and this is caused by the underlying incentives from digital advertisement” then to “and the most effective course of action is to ban digital advertisement”

I truly don’t believe it’s a big leap, especially after a few more years of all this


"unions dont set max salaries" you are free to negotiate better salary. fact that union had agreed with company on minimum salary, does not change anything for you. yes the company can say "hey you asking too much, we talked with unions" but company can say the same either way "hey you asking too much, market is tough". so unions just the lower bar.


Who is free, individuals or the entire group?


being part of the group does not limit your max salary.


why do you think maximising profit for company is ok and everyone is cheering about that, but when employee tries to maximise profit then "oh noes the society will collapse "


I don't have an issue with an employee maximizing profit. I do have an issue with employees banding together and bargaining collectively. Exactly the same way I don't have an issue with a company maximizing profit, but I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively.

A difference is that there's not necessarily an inherent size limit on companies while there is an inherent size limit on individuals because you can only be one person. One person can only be so economically valuable.

However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up. And that's exactly what we should do. And we definitely should prevent more mergers as well. What I would do differently w.r.t. antitrust is say that instead of only looking at harm to consumers (those who a company sells to), we should also look at harm to workers (aka those who a company buys from).


> I don't have an issue with an employee maximizing profit. I do have an issue with employees banding together and bargaining collectively. Exactly the same way I don't have an issue with a company maximizing profit, but I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively.

One flaw in your logic you seem to thing "an employee" and "a company" are peers. They're not. A company is an equivalent level of "banding together" as a union. A company and an employee union are peers, an employee and a company are not.

> However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up.

And you're mixed up here too:

1. The employee-company relationship is entirely different than the customer-company one. Talking about consumer prices in the employee-company context is nonsense.

2. You're neglecting that all companies have certain interests in common as employers. So even if you break them all up, you're not going to solve the problems a union solves.


> I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively

Use of "would" implies you believe they don't.


Cartels are generally considered pretty bad when formed by companies.


What? I try to negotiate maximum profit every time I apply for a new job, don't you?


sweden has unions and sweden has software companies. could it be that reasonable approach that benefits both parties can be achieved?


Sweden isn't famous for good tech salaries and stock grants though, even among the best/high profile engineers.


And this is where the union threads die, every time.

Top post is essentially saying Americans/SWE are dumb for not being in a union, then comparing to other countries. As soon as someone companies US SWE salaries to these union countries it falls apart quickly.


The residents of many of these countries are able to tolerate lower salaries because they have guaranteed free/cheap at POS healthcare, stronger employment and disability protections (yes, often union-won, see Denmark), controlled and low educational expenses, and so on. Not to mention, after you get below top companies, dev earnings are much closer to other white-collar jobs


The average tech salary in Sweden is $50K-$80K from doing some quick Googling. In at major city in the US just doing run of the mill CRUD development a US developer should easily be making $130K-$150K after 3-5 years in the industry.

On the other hand, when I was at $BigTech, interns straight out of college in 2022 were being offered total comp packages of $165K and within 3 years and one promotion were making $240K and that was at Amazon. It’s nowhere near the top paying company.

Right now on my 10th job out of college I’m paying $700 a month pre-tax for family coverage through my company and even that is about the most I’ve ever paid. If I hit one with a low deductible it would be around $1100 a month.

Long Term Disability coverage if added on is around $10 a month.

But the larger point, with the discrepency between comp in the US and Sweden, a US tech worker should be able to build up an emergency fund.


So show us non-US countries without SWE labor unions that have high SWE salaries.


I don't know???

I'm an American SWE, I still haven't seen one good reason why I would want to be in a Union.


Solidarity with the users of the systems you make. Collective bargaining is useful for more than salary and perk setting. It also gives you a front to push back against unethical project requests by management. Without a Union, you just get shluffed out of the way and the work gets handed off to the next sucker. With the Union, things like Google's "Don't be evil" can be more effectively enforced from the bottom.

Capital hates organized labor specifically because they have to worry about the risk of collective action, which changes the risk calculus to favor less extreme profit generating opportunities at the expense of minimizing poking the workforce the wrong way.

You alone can be ignored. You and your Union brothers, in great enough number, cannot be.


It's ok to not have an open mind. You can just say that.

You haven't given any good reasons why unions are bad that I and other people haven't already given counterexamples for.


Yes, to get rich in Sweden you have to start a company. Wages are terrible.

But this is, I think, a result of a historical government strategy to favour exports by keeping the Swedish krona weak rather than a result of unions. This whole business with alignment between the Swedish social democrat party and the big industrial export companies are a thing which simultaneously allowed Sweden to develop but which also brought enormous problems. The immigration madness of, 1990 to now is probably also a result of this alignment.


Is your argument for unions that if we had them software engineers may get the benefit of making 1/3 the compensation in America that they do now?


such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.


There are multiple variables, claiming weight is important is wrong.

Volume is important because the more volume the more space there is for batteries.

Aerodynamics is important because at common highway speeds this is the dominate energy cost. This is a factor that goes up by the square of speed, so at low speeds it doesn't matter but at high speeds it does.

Weight is least important because it has a linear change and is a small factor in efficiency.

There are real safety concerns with SUVs, but their larger size means there is more space for batteries and so they can overall go farther then a Sedan in normal driving despite the other costs.


i have not seen any submarines with flags though.


I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever.

Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)


Their is an entire DIY submarine community around the Caribbean and those guys aren't part of any navy or military and don't fly flags.


Is USA at war though?


In the modern sense, yes. We no longer declare wars explicitly, nor do we limit that decision to Congress. Trump's decision to attack these targets is consistent with every other conflict we've engaged in since before either of us were born... national security threats. Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.

Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.


> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.

Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.

Personally, I find public officials murdering unarmed people objectionable in practically all cases. And I think it's probably the worst thing a public official can do.


>Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.

I see no evidence of that. The only places I've ever noticed any complaints there were from the alt-right and libertarians (same thing?). You can see this in magazine titles like Reason if you care to check.

>I find public officials murdering unarmed people

What evidence is there that these people were unarmed? And what if they were? If there was 800 pounds of cocaine (or whatever) on board, and they didn't even have a butter knife with them... why should that somehow exempt them from the hostile response they received?


> the alt-right and libertarians (same thing?)

lol, no. Alt-rights may call themselves "libertarian" while they're testing the waters before they can admit to themselves that their real desires are rooted in coercing people. But libertarianism, being concerned with individual liberty, is fundamentally leftist. The rightist axiomatic conception of the US "Libertarian" party can be useful on a small scale, but scaled up it doesn't amount to much beyond just another system of control. Proof by contradiction - definitionally ruling out coercion based on intrinsic market inefficiencies means one can merely reframe any government as a monopolistic corporation with onerous contracts to achieve a hollow "Libertopia".


We should probably enact harsher laws on drug smugglers / narco traffickers. A lot of asian countries have essentially declared the death penalty to drug importers.

The administration wants to see results and it would seem that the problem is that the American judicial systems is set up to simply cost money, which is something narcos have.

If you take a cartel to court, they just have a lawyer tie up your law team. We've made the mistake of allowing capitalism to influence too many of our systems of government from judicial (cost of lawyers) to electoral (advertisement costs and political campaigning). Isn't this the problem?


Actually i find all those other interventions unacceptable as well. Nobody on earth should be accepting summary executions in international waters without evidence. Today "cartels," tomorrow journalists.


> Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.

You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?


>You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future?

Smuggling of any sort is a weapon with disastrous consequences. We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"? Yes, I'm fine with this. That they promise not to use it for really bad stuff for now wouldn't make a difference (and they're not even making that promise).

>Without even seeing any evidence t

I'm not interested in being the internet jury for this, no.

>Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?

Gee. That's something I really want to wait until after they commit the offense before we do something about it. You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.


The boats they are attacking won’t have drugs, these are the slow fishing boats that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs. Killing these people is just murder and nothing else. We have been doing drug interdiction for years without killing everyone until the orange dictator came into power.

Source: I did a deployment in counter drug interdiction in the Navy.

Edit: if you really want to know how threatening these guys are, they usually spotted our aircraft and the first thing they did was ALWAYS to jettison any weapons they had immediately, then start throwing out the drugs. They knew they weren’t fighting a USN ship and that we weren’t guns to harm them if they were peaceful. I suspect they might fight back now, though.


> that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs.

Oh. Wow. That makes it ok then. As long as they can all play hot potato and the drug runners don't have it on their own persons when the missile hits, it was unjustifiable.


Most of the fishing boats we boarded that were suspected to be resupply boats were, in fact, regular old fishing boats. The 1 we found that was a resupply boat had only external signs of fishing, but internally had fuel bladders instead of fish and ice. We, of course, didn't murder those guys or the 4-5 go-fasts we caught: we captured them and turned them over to partner country navies for legal processing.

In other words, most of the boats our intelligence apparatus thought were possible supply boats were simply fishermen. We are definitely killing some innocent fishermen with these strikes, and even if we weren't it's not ethical or legal to murder a bunch of guys selling fuel to drug runners. By the way, all of the drug runners are basically indentured servants or slaves and their families are being held back home as collateral.

Keep thinking you're on the side of right, though, and when you realize the USA is the baddies on this one you will hopefully be horrified at the realization.


> We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"?

Because usually we only respond to behaviours and actions that actually exist in the real world. By this logic we should charge all shop lifters with treason because they're not promising they'll never steal state secrets.

> Gee...You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.

I'm not sure why you're choosing to take this tone but I would hope we could have any further discussion like adults.


> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.

Saying the quiet part out loud: "Murdering people without due process should be at the bottom of the list of things to care about." Yes, thank you for clearly outlining the "right's" position on the issue.


It would be possible to board and arrest smugglers with “a nuke or whatever”. Why the fetishization of murder?


>It would be possible to board and arrest smugglers with “a nuke or whatever”.

Oh sure. A 5% chance of finding that boat on that particular day, and confiscating the device. That sounds like a great idea. I think I'd rather stick with causing the smugglers enough misery that they consider another line of work.


The “smugglers” are exploited serfs forced into smuggling through threats of violence on themselves and their facilities. There is no shortage of people who exploit.


garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)


Person A: Says something exceptionally inflammatory and provably false

Person B-Z: That's a horrible thing to say, why are you like this?

Algorithm: Wow, this post must be awesome, I should show it to more people!


and the sad part is that this is by design. no one who runs the algorithm cares why yo engage with content. engagement = good = money


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: