Do you have any data to back up your claims? Because from what I understand, unions were the backbone of the recovering US labor market following the Great Depression, which punctuated a period of extreme speculation and inequality (the Gilded Age) similar to what we're seeing today.
The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.
As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.
I'm not advocating for not having unions, but the idea some people have and corporations push is based on a hypothesis that companies will try their best to minimize costs.
Unions do have these real benefits for the workers who are a part of them, and these benefits come at the cost of the corporations who have to pay more and implement better practices.
This increases the cost of human labor, so when doing a purely greedy analysis of costs vs revenue, the costs go up for processes which requires human labor, which drives down the profit, disincentivizing investment or even the continuation of processes that require unionized labor. Overall, there winds up being less demand for human labor and more demand for automation.
I'm not here to speak on the truth of this, I think of it from this perspective: Information asymmetry (not understanding the opposing argument) benefits the party who has the information, so understanding their argument is necessary if you want to counter it.
Or subtly misrepresent politically inconvenient facts, or gently steer you into opinions based on a synthesis of broker data and demographic info, or quietly flag you in some database column due to exhibiting dissident-adjacent ideas or behaviors, or...
Yeah, they probably aren't doing (most of) these now, but it doesn't take much mental energy to extrapolate once you factor nearly every other tech company's ethical trajectory and the current geopolitical environment. Substituting classic search entirely with LLMs is not a savvy move.
I remember a few years ago memes were going around about how ChatGPT responded differently to "do Israelis deserve human rights?" ("Of course! Everyone deserves human rights...") and "do Palestinians deserve human rights?" ("While everyone deserves human rights, it's complicated... ")
Certainly, but with (what I consider to be) a key distinction: classic search, by definition, must serve information from many distinct sources outside the control of the search company.
A search engine could certainly tamper with which of these sources they surface/rank higher (which I suspect happening more often of late), but they're still obliged by their nature to branch out and seek information from the broader world.
LLMs, on the other hand, are self-contained opaque monoliths that can be conditioned to deceive or obfuscate with devious cleverness, and all control over their behaviors is entirely concentrated in the hands of whatever corporation trains them.
Drug dealing is profitable. Chattel slavery was exceptionally profitable.
To allow profitability to be our measure of permissibility is to sacrifice civil society at the altar of enterprising tyrants. Economics should never be a substitute for ethics.
This isn't true on a societal scale even though a few slaveholders built a bunch of grandiose mansions. Enslaved people were less economically productive than free people. It also locked economies into less productive, lower sectors like agriculture. The South resisted industrialization despite it being more profitable because it was incompatible with an economy built on minimally skilled slaves.
It was not profit that kept slavery alive well into the 19th century in the Americas and Muslim countries. It was something more sinister and evil.
In early islamic texts you will find making slavery easier again (the Eastern Roman Empire was phasing it out and tightening the rules significantly, because Christianity) was a goal of the early muslims, and you will find exactly why it was such an explicit goal, ie. what they wanted those slaves for ...
The problem with capitalism is that it gives people what it wants, and some people want bad things, or are at least indifferent to getting what they want despite bad externalities.
The hard part is that I'm not sure any other system really fixes this flaw. Sure, you can be less democratic and give fewer people what they want, but for some reason few people want to live in autocracies of any stripe.
And it's not always clear that there is a solution when the things people want are too diametrically opposed, either. I'm not sure many people would be happy with any of the solutions from "Three Worlds Collide" for example (a short story you can go read online if you don't get the reference).
Oh man. Don't google "sackler family" or "purdue pharma".
[EDIT: Added after that one person upvoted this comment.]
Slavery was big in the south because there wasn't enough low-skill labor to feel threatened. The north didn't care for it as much because a higher percentage of labor was what we would call semi-skilled or skilled today. That labor was FREAKED OUT about the idea of slaves taking over their jobs and they were able to organize before being eaten by the capitalist leviathan.
I'm pretty sure there were more abolitionists in the north than the south, I don't think your average northerner cared about the plight of southern slaves other than the institution being a threat to their livelihood if it moved north.
If you were making the assertion moral concerns or ethical behaviour eventually influenced american capitalism, I disagree. The capitalist monster acts "moral" or "ethical" because at the current time, to do otherwise is invite political dissolution. I fear the shadowy cabal of capitalist masters will move to reinstate chattel slavery. We did not respond with outrage when red-lining disenfranchised large portions of the populous or when usury was slipped back in with high credit card APRs and payday lending. We are asleep.
it wasn't. Slave economies are exceptionally unprofitable and unproductive. To take the US as an example. Liquid wealth, i.e. capital, was vastly larger in the North than in the slave owning states, the industrial output of New York exceeded the entire Confederacy and it was that profitability, wealth and mechanized agricultural production that did them in.
Even Marx recognized this by the way, following feudalism capitalism was a progressive force, it was profit, productivity and surplus that enabled civil society, the north was more civil because it was rich and had unlocked modern forms of production. The problem of capitalism is not profit or lack of civil society.
Profitable/unprofitable is the wrong way of looking at it, because it implicitly ignores opportunity costs. Putting your money in a savings account at a big bank might be "profitable" in the sense you're getting paid some meager interest rate (eg. 0.1%), but it's definitely not the best option, like a money market fund or equity ETF. What OP probably meant was that slavery was worse than the alternatives, like putting your money in a savings account with meager interest rate.
I think you're missing the point OP was making. He's saying it's profitable but not optimal, those who recognised that quickly outstripped the slave owners in wealth.
I could ask you about your spending habits and why you don't pump all your money into an S&P 500 ETF, but that's ignoring time and consumption preferences you have, as well as perceived opportunity cost. It's not a useful observation to make at an individual level.
True, but "better than slavery or feudalism" isn't a winning tagline. Nor should it be an excuse for letting capitalism tear down civil society as it has been doing in the US recently.
How can you be certain that the ChatGPT "research" you cite is a faithful representation of facts? How do you know that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google haven't introduced RLHF to subtly steer model output on specific topics to align with their political/economic interests?
I'm seeing increasing numbers of people credulously citing ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini output as ground-truth fact. Many more are increasingly lulled into a false sense of security by the citations models append (to the point of neglecting even a bare-minimum skim of the cited sources, much less critically evaluating/contextualizing the nature of the sources themselves). My fear is that most people are blissfully ignorant at the new paradigms of propaganda that AI could enable; most of us here wouldn't be taken by the "slop" image-gen deepfakes (right now), but can you say the same about a couple of citations taken out of context?
We already know how trivial it is to win over a sizeable chunk of society by introducing red-herrings, misrepresenting statistical data, etc. -- oil companies perfected that art, and now as a result a huge number of voters in the US believe that climate change (doesn't exist|isn't man-made|is unavoidable). And that effort was "fully manual" and carried out without the aid of extensive psychological profiling at the individual level via an ad-surveillance complex. Today, society is almost completely defenseless against the extreme granularity/subtlety of manipulation that ownership of frontier AI models enables, especially when it's armed with even a fraction of the torrent of personal data that's being collected on each of us every day.
Last I checked, Fortune 500 CEOs weren't mandating that their employees use and find more ways of integrating Reddit and 4chan into all of their business processes and products. And I also don't recall the owners/CEOs of Reddit and 4chan touting their platforms as eventual replacements for all human knowledge labor.
This is a rather vacuous piece, and for anyone looking to avoid wasting time, the stated reason is: "corporate profits keep going up."
I think the byline is a bit of a disingenuous sleight-of-hand: "The boom is not as untethered from reality as it may look" presupposes a majority view that the stock market "is untethered from reality," but whether or not that's an accurate read of prevailing sentiment, it subtly shifts focus away from what most people ought to understand: profits of the largest corporations are now mostly untethered from the financial health of individual citizens.
I've been seeing more and more of this type of underhanded writing from billionaire-owned media outlets lately (the number of which is growing on a nearly daily basis).
As a quick-and-dirty measure of corporate profits, the S&P 500 P/E ratio is at 33 and rising. A "good" number is more like 15-20. Historically, the market has crashed whenever the number gets in this range.
It's far from a perfect measure, but it does suggest that the market is untethered from reality. Profits just aren't going up fast enough to justify the increase in stock prices.
A deeper dive would try to untangle some of the more obviously egregious prices, especially in the AI space, where expenses are high and profits are nonexistent.
Not sure if it was the intent, but this is a rather grating and shallow reply. Is that unattributed "quote" meant to be an appeal to inevitability?
If so, I'd just like to point out that none of this is inevitable, and the argument of "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a lazy excuse for abdication of social responsibility and the common good, a textbook race-to-the-bottom mentality. It's possible for a critical mass of individuals behaving ethically to prevent the "someone else" from taking actions that are harmful to society overall in the name of "disruption", as much as those bad actors would try to convince us otherwise.
Oh boi, imagine this:
Someone discovered fire, and the people distributing raw meat had the same fear.
Someone invented the wheel, and the people carrying things on their shoulders had the same fear.
The list is long. Labeling a perspective "grating" or "shallow" is easy when you don't stop to ask what the other person actually meant. If you disagree, it’s usually better to ask for clarification than to assign a "lazy" motive to a stranger. My point wasn't an appeal to "social irresponsibility." There is a massive difference between "If I don't do it, someone else will" (an excuse for an action) and "Something else will" (an observation of evolution). I was not defending the ethics of corporations. I was pointing out the inevitability of change. The world moves forward regardless of whether we find the process "grating." So, NietzscheanNull (I hope it is borrowed from F. Nietzsche), it is not about a race to the bottom, it is about the reality of the road.
Congrats on your independence! What you're describing is my goal state, but sadly I'm not there yet. It seems like it's the last 10-20% of "sticky" dependencies that always trip me up (granted, some of those are merely "nice to haves" like tap-to-pay, not actually hard barriers).
If you get a second, would you mind sharing any general advice and/or specific recommendations that might help me and other like-minded people follow in your footsteps?
First thing is nuke tap to pay. That is surveillance capitalism dependence masquerading as convenience.
Step one, and I am serious, is just use cash. Every time you pay with cash at a drug store, a liquer store, a casino, donation boxes, clothes, that is a tiny bit less information corpos and politicians can buy about how healthy you are, what causes you support, and how to manipulate you.
Just use cash, falling back to cash-purchased prepaid gift cards for edge cases like parking. You will pay more attention to how much you spend, you are helping ensure the unbanked can still participate in society, you are opting out of funding surveillance capitalism with your data, and at a busy restaurant you can just leave cash on the table and leave whenever you want.
From there when you are making a quick trip to the grocery store or something, just leave your phone at home.
Meanwhile, keep your phone in airplane mode full time. Use wifi when you must but do not use cell and see if you can go a month or two without actually having to be reachable every second of every day, but only when you choose to be on wifi.
Whenever you are connected to a cell tower your location is being actively documented and sold at all times, and even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make. When it is off, and you know it is off, you can just focus on driving, on thinking, on processing the shit in the back of your head that wont go away on its own.
Anyway, once you are wifi only, and no longer dependent on your phone for commerce, its just a boring wifi tablet. Now, delete your least productive of your top ten ten most used apps every month until your phone is so boring you find you only use it a couple times a day.
At that point, tackle those final things like GPS and flashlight which could be handled by your own brain plus printed maps, paper maps, and an actual flashlight, a mechanical watch... and then you are free to move about the world comfortably without any electronics at all whenever you want.
People will ridicule you constantly for not having a phone, but those are just addicts feeling threatened.
That is a useful guide in terms of the personal psychology of how to go about doing it, which is an important side of it, thank you.
I'm also interested in the mechanics of how you actually do it: for eg. your mention of paper maps for travel makes me think if a lot of that becomes workable because you're in planned cities with reliable maps. I'm a mid sized town in India where maps are vague guides for the general layout, but are missing the many many alleys and connecting roads that people actually live on (or have shops at). Roads, road names, traffic restrictions - pretty much every part of it is chaotic and incredibly hard to put together without a GPS on a digital map.
On the family aspect too, do you have a Matrix or similar for the larger family to connect through and share news on (their own travel for eg., or difficulties they might be having, or news like child birth), or do you only use phone calls or texts to connect?
In any case, I can definitely relate to:
> even worse, you are mentally always ready to be contacted, for a new dopamine hit of information or a new decision to make.
and feel the negative effects of that, so I'll be moving actively towards what you're suggesting. Maybe to a different point on the line and with different workarounds, but it sounds at least 90% workable and with significant benefits too.
> Roads, road names, traffic restrictions - pretty much every part of it is chaotic and incredibly hard to put together without a GPS on a digital map.
If digital maps on GPS know about directions, then so does the internet, and the directions can be printed or jotted down in advance which is my go-to solution in new cities. A little trip planning makes trips safer and less stressful. You also end up remembering it faster. Regularly using a GPS provably atrophies parts of our brains in MRI scan studies. We were evolved to regularly reason about our position in the physical world and making decisions about where to turn from our own memories.
> On the family aspect too, do you have a Matrix or similar for the larger family to connect through and share news on (their own travel for eg., or difficulties they might be having, or news like child birth), or do you only use phone calls or texts to connect?
We helped move all family to Matrix. Most also use Facebook, but everyone worth talking to understands it is not reasonable to ask us to agree to Zucks terms of service to talk to them. They probably created facebook accounts in the first place for the same reason, so we do not feel bad about this ask.
That said we also ported our cell phone numbers to a voip provider so we can still access calls/texts from any wifi device, or DECT phones around our home.
> [...] a lot of young founders here seem to have since embraced a punishing work culture — the 996 ethos. What are your thoughts about what’s happening?
> I kind of love it, honestly. I think Silicon Valley got really lazy during COVID
Honest question: is this the type of culture that anyone outside of VC actually wants?
Do a majority (or a significant plurality) of people support this infinite-grind mentality, and if so, to what end? It's framed in the context of a "race" with China, but all I see is a race to the bottom. What prize do we win if we beat China in this "race"? What is the goal here, who benefits from achieving the goal, and what purpose does it serve? (Aside from enriching a handful of VCs and executives, that is.)
For everyone's sake, I hope you're correct. A quick scan of the article's comment section is enough to seriously curb one's optimism, though. I don't know what the demographic makeup of participants in WSJ's comment threads is, but the views expressed are surprisingly homogenous in both substance and tone.
I like to challenge myself with a little "game" in which I attempt to guess the most commonly expressed opinions in WSJ comments based solely on the parent article title; it isn't a particularly difficult game.
The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.
As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.
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