I mean, you have power over their lives with force. You can decide at a moment's notice that their livelihoods could be taken away. Or, you could sell your company to someone who would do that. A union just levels the playing field.
From my perspective, they have power over me. I need to keep them happy or they're going to find other jobs. Sometimes this means changing plans to ensure they're not overworked or to ensure that they get to work on interesting stuff after something reasonably boring like UI development (none of them really enjoy it but it has to be done). The business fails pretty rapidly without my development team and I know how lucky I am to have them.
Absolutely. I love where I work, and I love my coworkers. I want to make sure that the culture of openness and transparency stays that way. I believe that the best way to do this is to form a union and give the employees formal power in the corporate decision-making process.
While ymmv, in my experience regarding all human systems, if you love something, injecting massive entropy into the system structure in the hopes that you will love it a little more, is not worth the risk that you'll break the whole thing.
> Forming a union is a great tool—for marginalized workers. Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable members of society, and we feel the demographics of this union undermine this important function. We're concerned with the misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers, some of whom receive compensation more than twice the average income in NYC, in addition to flexible work from home hours, above-and-beyond industry standards for parental leave, 25+ days of paid vacation, a wellness stipend, a bike stipend, an education stipend, a weekly catered lunch, and a great deal of other benefits. We're already a radically thoughtful and ethical company with our PBC, and can do more to lead the way in the tech industry by providing an open environment that's free of hostility.
Because a company treats their employees well, they always will. And employees should just take what they are given instead of trying to get a seat at the table. Welcome to the brave new world of woke stools and scabs.
It’s not a guarantee that collective bargaining will help privileged workers, and union dues aren’t free. The statement is a bit cheerleadery, but isn’t necessarily irrational.
Yeah, I used to work at a company with a mix of union and non-union sites, and the unions were good in a sense that the company standardized a lot of general union policies across sites. So the end result was the non-union sites had most of the pros of a union and none of the fees.
Not to mention, that's not how/when unions got formed. Unions, as a derivative of trade guilds, formed exactly under the conditions we are seeing today. The capitalists _needing_ in-high-demand skilled laborers. If you consider that unionization requires a large concession from capital, it makes sense that unionization can only form during periods when labor is strong.
Yes, of course unions help marginalized workers, but that's only because they have been put into place by powerful workers to help out when that time inevitably comes. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
I think you have a good point here. I see a time when programmers become somewhat replaceable and when the industry as a whole reduces benifits for programmers bit by bit. Currently, there is a huge increase in the number of freshmen joining the computer science department in the university I attended and I see it only growing. In the future, a computer science degree might become something like the biology degree and that's when programmers will feel the pain of not being high-demand skilled laborers any more.
Congratulations Kickstarter! I hope this becomes a trend in the tech industry. A union is not only about getting better pay, or more vacation - it is about having a voice in the future of the company.
Wow! You are right! Nobody is entitled to anyone's labor! We should make sure we let the capitalists who use the labor of everyone around them to extract profits.
Nice. Got a bite. Clearly you view the world as a zero-sum game. That's not reality. Reality is - I need help to get something done. You and I talk about you helping me get something done. You and I agree to exchange X value for Y labor. You get something of value and I get something of value. Nobody forced either of us into the agreement... we both did so freely. Wow. So right! So simple! Me like freedom. Me go eat waffle.
Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.
College is largely an exercise in social credentialing and signaling. If we make college free, the people who want to get ahead in society will just go to expensive graduate programs in order to distinguish themselves. Then the discussion will shift to fully funding those programs...
Our current system is very fair. Take out a loan if you need to, but make sure your post graduation prospects justify taking a loan out. If they don't, then don't get the loan.
One of the major reasons why college is so expensive today is because the availability of loans means Universities are able to continuously hike tuition in support of ever expanding bureaucracies (not in support of the core educational mission) without fear of students not being able to pay, because the loans mean students can always secure funding! Society is basically writing them a blank check... The answer is NOT to give them even more money!
College education has become a financial black hole that will only expand if we throw more money at it.
PhD students getting stipends are essentially contract employees. They are doing work, either as associate instructors or research assistants, for that money.
You prefer an under-educated population? The most valuable asset we have in the technology and service based economies is human capital. We need a creative and educated population to continue to compete. I think we should eliminate all for-profit education and preferably make all universities public.
Why do you assume that degrees are "worthless?" How are you defining "worthless?" Based on the research, getting a degree significantly increases your earning potential. But I would argue that even if that wasn't the case and everyone got philosophy, literature, and history degrees, our country would be significantly better positioned globally.
And I agree with your statement that the problem starts earlier. Although most of our issues with primary and secondary public education can be traced to poverty and racism. So, I think we should raise taxes to address those as well :D.
You have to be careful with conflating causality. As we turn college more and more into highschool 2.0, we're going to see the correlation with increased earnings start to deteriorate. There's a simple matter that we're greatly increasing the supply of college educated individuals which, in turn, will have a diminishing effect on their demand which will drive earnings down. The only way this will not happen is if there's a proportional (which is to say sharp) increase in the number of available and desirable positions for college educated individuals.
This is also ignoring that we've greatly widened the demographic attending colleges. The reduced selectivity means that the average person is not going to be as top-notch as they were at one time, which means that the average expectation of an individual with a college degree will also go down. This will also have an aggregate depressing effect on our earning:education correlation. More important than ever will become median earnings for college graduates. The top graduates are earning vastly more than ever before which will mask the overall problem.
I’m referring to all the unemployed and underemployed college graduates complaining about the debt they are in. Simplify transferring the debt somewhere else isn’t fixing anything, it is just shifting the drain on society. College is highly useful for some people, and not others. We should do more to make sure it is available to those who would benefit, and offer different things for those who prefer or need trade skills.
Who is undereducated? We managed to create a civilization that went to the moon back when the vast majority of people never went to college. Germany continues to be a leading industrial power while lagging most of Western Europe in college statistics (especially "academic" college like we have in the U.S.)
Is it possible to simultaneously have an over-educated population and an under-educated population? I am having a hard time squaring the two prevailing ideas on this issue. One is that we need more/free education because an educated population is best. The other is that we need to import vast amounts of new unskilled labor so we have someone to pick our fruit. I realize you only espoused one of these ideas, but I am curious if someone holds both those positions and would help me understand how both can be true at the same time.
People will still go for the degrees they go for today, which for the most part are degrees they believe will provide a good return on their investment of _time_. On top of that, unis would need to limit how many people are accepted to a penguin program, because how many qualified teachers can they throw at that?
Beyond admissions quotas, I imagine that if gov’t does decide to fully subsidize unis, they too will impose limits per field of study. This is already done in European countries that subsidize uni.
Finally, I think with “guaranteed” gov’t loans, unis have already taken a lot of their skin out of the game. They don’t have to worry about that student defaulting on their loan later, the gov’t does. Or even for private loans. If you had a seemingly infinite bank account, would you penny pinch or see how many new toys you could buy?
Then don't fund Shady St Uni. Put criteria in place for evaluating, and make sure the universities have skin in the game.
(Also, not every degree that doesn't immediately result in you making $250,000/year is worthless. And students are pretty motivated already in pursuing degrees that they see jobs in. Even if your education is free, if you put in 4+ years into something that you can't do anything with, you're still not profiting. Students themselves would still have skin in the game even with free education.)
Ok. Do that first and I might support it. But the guaranteed loans for everyone system of today has not only inflated costs, it supports a bunch of worthless crappy schools. Go look at the list of universities in the US, and find the bottom 100. They are as offensive and wasteful as a $10,000 toilet seat.
Not sure why this is downvoted. There are plenty of degrees that might be useless for making an employer more money, but provide important work for society.
Very well, but what is your objection to zoology? Normally, people pick an arts subject when arguing about poor-value degrees.
Zoology is a biology course, so there's a general scientific background (research, hypotheses, statistics, modelling etc), and zoology in particular is necessary for understanding the spread of animal pests (e.g. insects eating pests), invasive species, human and animal disease (bird flu?), understanding/recording what is in a particular place (perhaps before construction work, or to guide the planning of that).
I believe when most people say “make college free”, they’re referring to a “tuition free” education. There is still a housing cost, which is “skin in the game”.
Eh, my ideal would be like Europe's that gives you a stipend as well to cover room and board. Paying for housing is more than a full time job in a lot of places with universities (particularly the good ones), and ideally we'd want students to be focusing on their studies.
> I am not trying to diminish this person's personal experience nor fail to have empathy.
You did.
> However, "incredibly stressed about the state of the world" is itself a sign of poor mental state, and I think that it paradoxically is harmful to make this sort of statement so casually in an an article ostensibly supposed to bring awareness and understanding of states of mind.
This entire piece is about my mental illness, so great observation.
> We normalize extreme emotional reactions too much. It prevents many from understanding that they have an inability to cope with daily life, for whatever reason that may be.
I agree that I have a mental illness, I fail to understand how that wasn't already abundently clear in the piece. The normalization of talking about mental health is the goal here.
Comments like this only add to the overwhelming messaging that mental illness is something we should be ashamed of. I would encourage you to refrain from commenting in the future.
I enjoyed reading your story of the mental hospital. I've spent too much time visiting my friend at the mental hospitals over the past year and a half. They refused to treat her substance abuse problems, and gave her drugs that made her more depressed than before.
Lots of mental problems stem from a suboptimal metabolism. My latest shipment of t3 thyroid medication just arrived from Mexico... ;)
The issue is men don't use the app. I downloaded it on my SO's phone and was able to find most of the college age guys I know on it. None of them knew they were on there.
Have each of them demand a dump of their reviews from the service, as they're entitled to under EU data protection directive. If there's anything libellous in there, try to get a newspaper interested. The Daily Mail is probably a good choice for this mixture of sex and scandal.
No idea. You have to install the app on your phone, so it can read your phone's accounts. I think a Google account is required on an Android phone. Google accounts have gender in their profile (remember the G+ fiasco?). You also have to link it to Facebook, so it has access to your Facebook data as well. Maybe they don't like new Facebook accounts with zero activity, but certainly there is a usecase for women who want to use this app, but don't want to use Facebook (I would think there is a usecase for women who don't have smartphones as well). Not sure about the iPhone flow.
This thought exercise is really making me scared about how much the owners of the apps on my phone know about me!
