My first job was at a tech company with a union. Boeing.
It was ridiculously bad. I've never worked with less talented people. One of my coworkers did nothing, at all, for 2 years. But with 17 years of experience, he couldn't be fired.
I carried the team, but they couldn't pay me what I was worth or promote me. I left as soon as I could.
I've worked at a few non-union shops that were the same way. I don't think the existence of a union is a large factor in that regard. I think the size of the company is.
Was it the union that was the problem or was it that you were working for a Dinosaur that hadn't been required to operate in today's high-tech world? Experience has shown that AT&T and Disney are the same sort of thing when working in tech, yet they don't have unions. But what they do all have in common - they are old companies that formed well before the internet.
Disney is a very big company. Maybe there are parts of it that our dinosaur-like but there are other parts that are doing the sharpening of the cutting edge. They'll fall behind every so often but then they catch back up and have been known to pass ahead.
When I was at Boeing, there was a story that a worker slugged his supervisor. The worker was fired, the union got him reinstated.
Boeing is a big company with a lot of inefficiency, but there clearly was
inefficiency due to union rules. For one thing, layoffs went by seniority, not merit.
Been in a similar environment as an intern. Can concur was worst professional experience of my life. Very glad I experienced this early on to avoid whenever possible for the rest of my days.
Staff couldn't even be disciplined without going through the union rep and everything was based on seniority... with no other reason.
That business no longer exists... its competitors that were non-unionized are still thriving.
People love simple answers to complex problems. Unions are such an example. The core idea behind a union makes sense - it's legalised extortion. Unions have codified in the law the ability for everyone in the union to hold the owner of property at ransom until they meet the union's demands. The only counterweight is the threat of bankruptcy, which ruins everything for everyone, but because the ideology of labor is very anti-business, they don't really care about that anyway.
Very few intelligent, educated people are part of unions, so they have no idea how they actually work. As I am against extortion, I am against unions.
> They don't? Employers cannot fire striking employees. Or fire any that may look like retaliation for union activity.
Who said anything about that? Scab labor is an extremely common thing. How you come to the conclusion that "the company is not allowed to hire other people to replace the striking workers", I'm entirely unsure. For two very popular examples, both in the air travel industry, both pilot's strikes and ATC strikes have had "other people hired to replace striking workers", with varying degrees of notoriety (being at Boeing, I can't imagine you being entirely unaware of either).
Moonlighting is not the same thing as getting another job elsewhere.
The ATC was a special case. It was illegal for them to strike, they struck anyway, so Reagan fired them.
"It shall be unlawful for any employer willingly and knowingly to utilize any professional strikebreaker to replace an employee or employees involved in a strike or lockout at a place of business located within this state. 1134.2."
I think the notion of "we are all going to quit and/or refuse to work if employer doesn't do (or does do) x" is arguably pretty extortiony. One could also argue it's just makes the market hyper-efficient by signalling the reaction of the supply of labor to a change in the asking price very quickly and directly.
I genuinely don't know why employers do not hire non-union employees in such circumstances; I think most of us assume they "can't", but would like to hear from someone who actually knows.
It's no more extortiony than how employers treat their employees.
Collective bargaining is pretty much the only tool workers have to even begin to correct the power differential between employer and employee. Ideally, it allows employees and employers to negotiate on more equal terms than is otherwise possible.
Ridiculously naive take. And both of these on an individual level are so diluted as to basically be meaningless.
1. An individual quitting at a company where they are one single cog doesn't impact the company in any measurable way.
2. The court system in the west gives an asymmetric level of power toward the corporation, an individual has neither the time, the money, or the ability to navigate an ongoing protracted lawsuit with a corp that dwarfs them in all three aspects.
Unions are extortion in the same sense that a utility company or something like Amazon is extortion; I need to agree to some terms and conditions and pay up, or they’ll stop providing service.
Which is to say, most ongoing services in a capitalist country are provided under the “threat” that if you break the deal you agreed to, you’ll have to look elsewhere to get that service going forward.
Burry is a hedge fund manager. The most important part of his job is to scare people away from the S&P and entice them to put money into his fund.
It's generally a mistake to trust the financial advice of any hedge fund manager, and they usually provide advice that makes the S&P seem like a bad bet.
That's a vapid take. If I have information that isn't widely known, and I have established a vested position, then it is always profitable for me to promulgate my information. That doesn't suggest my information is wrong.
What if I don't have information that isn't widely known but I've people listening to me because I was once right in 2008 so now everyone is listening to what I have to say, and then I use it to influence people to do what I want based on what I say?
Couldn't that be other side of the coin?
it's not information being promulgated, but speculation.
Time will tell whether said speculation will turn out to be right. However, if more people believed such speculation, it might make it more likely to be right in the future. Therefore, there's a selfish reason for said person to promulgate such speculation.
That depends on your alternative options. The S&P 500 has averaged 6.6% real returns historically. Better than bonds? sure. Better than unleveraged global real estate? sure. Better than gold? sure. Better than PE? no. Better than leveraged rentals? hell no. Better than investing in productive capacity in your own startup? lol.
No one ever became wealthy from buy and hold index funds. The returns are relatively low because most people are lazy and it's the easy thing to do. That's why I split my time between active investing (https://grizzlybulls.com) and working on my private business ventures.
> No one ever became wealthy from buy and hold index funds.
Nobody ever became poor from it either (unless they panic). At least your money keeps pace with inflation to some extend. It certainly beats the money sitting in your bank account doing nothing (the alternative for most people).
There were long periods were it barely beat inflation and some were it didn’t even do that.
e.g. it took 30 years to recover to 1929 levels, then also 30 years to reach the 1960’s peak, in 2010 it fell to mid 90’s levels (all inflation adjusted).
So yes, you’re right but it depends on how long you can wait. Over 50-60 years you should be fine. 20-30 who knows, if you’ve entered just before a peak it might not recover within your lifetime.
I don't think the expression applies to harder physical limits such as gravity or exists as a statement of epistemological nihilism in most cases. I don't doubt that inductive reasoning is useful however. It's difficult to impossible to use it effectively or consistently profitability to predict market swings if i had to hazard a guess based on the phrase.
The amazing thing here is that rats are intelligent enough to learn to drive, albeit a simple vehicle. That alone is newsworthy, without the experiment on stress reduction.
Ehh, it's not clear to me that humans should be particularly good a driving. It's not like we evolved for it, we can just understand spoken instructions. I'm not convinced that an octopus, a dolphin, a raven, or a cheetah would necessarily be worse at the task than a human (given training in the proper format) -- it's perfectly concievable to me that a cheetah might have evolved to handle object avoidance at higher speeds than humans have, for example.
So can a private company. We're talking about the comparison of private to public. All things being equal, a public trust will always cost less because profit is not necessary as part of the cost of service.
This article significantly misconstrues Buffets investment style. He does invest for value. But he doesn't even think whether a stock has "bottomed in the market price". Predicting when a stock has "bottomed" is not possible as it's dependent on the whims of an irrational market.
The first half of this statement is correct and the second half is completely wrong:
"He only buys when he's sure that an asset is undervalued and is likely to have bottomed in market price."
This is very useful, and to call it disappointing is rude to the creator of the tool. Why would you say something so negative just because it's not perfect? This is the problem with Hacker News these days - people can't wait to say something nasty.
I have edited my post to hopefully make it less "rude", that was certainly not my intention. I do want to point out, and I think I am not alone in this, that in 2012, lack of IPv6 support (at least at the basic level of parsing IPv6 addresses and showing AAAA records / reverse lookups) in a network tools suite doesn't make it "not perfect", it makes it "not useful".
Au contraire, if anything, consistent rudeness risks getting you hellbanned.
I don't think it's unreasonable or rude to state that one is disappointed that a tool doesn't have a feature. Especially an important feature such as IPv6! Given that the disappointment is that ViewDNS.info bills itself as "your one source for DNS tools", it doesn't entirely live up to it's own billing.
It was ridiculously bad. I've never worked with less talented people. One of my coworkers did nothing, at all, for 2 years. But with 17 years of experience, he couldn't be fired.
I carried the team, but they couldn't pay me what I was worth or promote me. I left as soon as I could.