Basically the real conclusion should be that strikes only work if there is also some additional force preventing outside people from filling the void left by the striking workers.

In the case of the union, their wages were probably artificially high due to the government keeping out competition.

> someone would come in to fill in the void

If a good or services is demanded by the consumer, then someone will find a way to satisfy that demand, barring market interference by the state (for legal business - you get black markets otherwise).

That can coordinate and tackle the scale of problem of New York waste disposal?

Come off it, you’re going to fall and hurt yourself.

Someone who collects your garbage for a dollar and takes it to the dump is not violating a regulation prohibiting them from dumping it in the river or your yard.

The problem is the regulations that prohibit them from doing nothing actually wrong while not fulfilling some arbitrary formality or greasing the right palms.

Those regulations about waste management didn't happen in a vacuum. They're not just there to cause headaches or corruption. They were created in response to observed problems - like dumping trash right into rivers. And that "trash" might include really dangerous substances. Moreover, the raw profit motive of capitalism encourages such behavior. If it costs two dollars to dispose of the waste safely, or one dollar to drop it in the river, the market's response is to drop it in the river. That's just free market economics. Tragedy of the commons is an actual thing.

The economic term for this is externalizing costs. The market, on its own, is strongly motivated to externalize costs whenever possible. There's no inherent morality to economics, any more than there is an inherent morality to thermodynamics. It's just a fact of nature. But externalized costs are a form of theft - they push cost of business onto the general public, without payment. Regulations exist to keep business from stealing from the rest of us.

You may be the one missing the point. What prevents ordinary people from taking trash to the dump for $1? Regulation.

> If it costs two dollars to dispose of the waste safely, or one dollar to drop it in the river, the market's response is to drop it in the river. That's just free market economics. Tragedy of the commons is an actual thing.

And if it costs one dollar to dispose of the waste safely but incumbents can charge two dollars if they get a law passed to impede competition, the market's response is to get a law passed to impede competition. That's just "free" market economics. Collective action problems are a real thing.

> The economic term for this is externalizing costs. The market, on its own, is strongly motivated to externalize costs whenever possible.

It's also motivated to internalize benefits, which organizations do through the mechanism of regulatory capture. And those regulations exist to enable businesses to steal from the rest of us.

In this light, regulation isn't an impediment to business - it's an opportunity. By making the task more difficult, we make it more profitable.

Now, I'm sure you're anxious about some sort of corruption where businesses collude with government to lock out competition. So, tell me... what is a contract? Is it anything other than a regulatory mechanism to exclude competition?

Suppose you start the BuckABucket Trash Company, and charge a buck. I hire you because you're cheap. Then you come back next week and find out I've ditched you for GayNinety Trash Company, who charges 90 cents. Sucks, right? Makes it very hard to commit capital to the business! You just bought a truck and everything. The way you prevent this behavior is by locking me into a contract - you'll take out my trash for a buck, but you get to do it for the next year. Everyone wins. I get cheap reliable trash service, you get a steady customer.

Except now we've just regulated away your competition. Funny, that.

Really, put down the right wing ideology feed about economics and think about how it actually works.

In any real system with non-zero scarcity, profit is relative. If you have less of it in one place there is more of it in another. In the case of things like garbage collection, the other place is when consumers use the money they didn't burn on artificially wasteful trash collection to buy something else. Which benefits both the consumers and the suppliers of the other product.

Creating friction on purpose to artificially increase the profits of one industry is a deadweight loss. The transfer of wealth is the broken window fallacy but the resources wasted on the artificially imposed friction are real.

And many types of contract are a violation of antitrust law for exactly that reason.

As I've pointed out, contracts are friction. And, since profit without friction is impossible (scarcity is just one form of friction), contracts are a Good Thing, a thing that makes capitalism viable.

Illegal monopoly behavior is just a pathological corner case of contract law, and it's silly to focus on it. Consider an alternative - you contract me for a service, and I reduce my costs and increase my profit by simply not providing that service. This isn't exotic. This is common as dirt, happens every day.

Because that's what we're talking about -- the thing that prevents an ordinary person from collecting trash for $1 and taking it to the dump in a way that doesn't involve externalizing costs or doing anything nefarious, yet is still prohibited.

There are approximately zero people who think it should be legal to dump trash in the river.

> As I've pointed out, contracts are friction.

Except that contracts are anti-friction. If you have someone collecting trash for $2 even though it costs $1 because they're the only one with a truck (so scarcity), someone else might be willing to buy a truck and do it for $1 but only if they're guaranteed the business for a period of time sufficient to pay off the cost of the truck. So the contract reduces friction by $1.

Your claim is that it then prevents it from being reduced by another $.10 when the first guy offers to do it for $.90 to try to regain the business, but the only reason that would happen is that the contract allowed the second guy to enter the market. And you can do all of this negotiating before signing with anyone -- go to the first guy and demand $.90 or you'll sign with the second guy for $1. Then the existence of contracts gets you to $.90 when otherwise you would be stuck at $2.

You may not even need to actually enter into the contract for the existence of contracts to reduce friction, because each provider knows you could enter a contract with the other and at least one would prefer to provide you service at a low price with no contract than have you sign with the other guy.

> And, since profit without friction is impossible (scarcity is just one form of friction), contracts are a Good Thing, a thing that makes capitalism viable.

Unless you're just defining friction to mean scarcity, I'm curious what these other forms of friction are that can produce profit without scarcity.

For example, adding any amount of friction to the process of producing table salt by chemical reaction isn't going to make table salt more expensive because there is so much in the ground that even a hard prohibition on manufacturing it chemically wouldn't materially affect the market price.

And the fact that profit comes from scarcity still doesn't mean you ever want more scarcity on net as a society -- there is plenty of "real" (no known way to avoid) scarcity to profit from without wastefully creating more on purpose.

> Illegal monopoly behavior is just a pathological corner case of contract law, and it's silly to focus on it. Consider an alternative - you contract me for a service, and I reduce my costs and increase my profit by simply not providing that service. This isn't exotic. This is common as dirt, happens every day.

And then you get sued for breach of contract, the judge orders you to make good and now you have that expense plus the legal expense. How is that supposed to increase your profit?

Unless you mean breaking the law and getting away with it, but in that case what's even more profitable is bank robbery, right?

The reason these things are all illegal is that they're a form of conduct that increases rather than reduces friction, which is why they're against the law. Because friction is bad.

I had the impression that profits are derived from the reduction of economic friction. The more efficient a process is the more profit it can produce (compared to a less efficient process).

If the chef can make dinner for 30 people in an hour at the same price per person, now the restaurant is more profitable because there is less friction -- 30 people eat in one restaurant instead of 10, so for 30 people you need one chef instead of three, one building instead of three, etc. Less friction, more profit.

What you need for profit isn't for you to have friction, it's for someone else to have more than you -- relative advantage. The more you eliminate the more profit you make. Or the more surplus ("consumer profit" if you will) you create for the customer, if you have similarly efficient competitors engaged in price competition.

And that's where regulatory capture comes in. In competitive markets a large fraction of the total surplus goes to the consumer because otherwise a competitor could gain market share by charging lower prices. 100 times $6 is more than 50 times $10. But if you exclude competitors with regulations then you can charge $10 margins and still have 100% of the customers. Then there is more "profit" but not more total surplus -- there is less total surplus because the artificial friction consumes some of it. So you're shrinking the pie in order to get a bigger piece of it for yourself, at the expense of everyone else. Which is effectively stealing.

The law of private property. Thats not regulation.

Do they get access to the dump for free? Round my way access to the dump is something in the region of €6 ...

Presumably the professionals have economy of scale and a prerential fee schedule to work with ...

I don’t think we need regulation to explain this economic phenomenon. Basic laissez faire works fine.

Commercial carting (everything but households and public trash cans) in NYC is done by enterprising people with some regulations that get flouted because of the impossible time pressures they're put under. They die and are injured at a terrible rate. https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...

For the meagre effort of keeping a few extra tabs (something they were already used to) they could earn increased reputation or advertisement (while you go the pub 'bank' you might as well have a drink on your way out). The realy price at which people start providing banking functionality is much lower than the average wage of a banker (the banking sector is permission oriented!).

The price to get non-garbage collector to start collecting garbage tends to be much higher than the average wage of a garbage collector (the underbelly of society is obligation oriented!)

Stated otherwise, if everyone received the average rent, wages for dirty/unhealthy/boring/complicated/... jobs would rise, simply because they can stay home and live cheap. This would be the most neutral and emergent determination of wages since there is no master table from Washington/Moscow/Brussels to decree the relative wages. No need for endless protests and strikes.

Examples:

- dirty: toilet cleaner, garbage collector

- unhealthy or risky: fire fighter, chemical sector

- boring: monotonous factory work, high quality assurance inspection

- complicated: physics, engineering, ...

This does not mean everyone would end up with the same wage, the more collectively undesirable a job, the higher it would earn on top of your average rent.

There are plenty of other interpretations here. The simplest one is that in NYC trash collection is treated as municipal infrastructure, not a commercial business. People already pay taxes for garbage collection, so it's highly unlikely they'd decide to also pay vendors in short order.

What makes you think they didn’t?

The scale of the problem in New York means you’d need an awful lot of such individuals to keep up and the workforce isn’t that flexible ...

These guys work very hard and in a highly coordinated way that is hard to replicate. Which was the point that they were proving by going on strike.

Bankers in Ireland in the 70s not so much though if it happened in Ireland today it might be a different story ...

When talking about labor and unions, this is essentially a tautology because the power of unions is the power of collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining cannot obtain unless all human capital (laborers) is deployed through the union. Human capital that is outside the union fractures the power of the union and destroys the power of collective bargaining.

In vulgar terms, human capital outside the union is referred to as "scabs" that temporarily heal the wounds produced by a labor dispute.

EDIT: readability, grammar

Yes, there are laws to protect unions. You cannot look at that in isolation. There are also laws to prevent some types of collective bargaining. Think of it more as a negotiated arrangements - unions agreed to avoid some behaviors in exchange for certain legal rights.

For example, in a free market, a union should be able to use its collective bargaining power to negotiate a closed shop arrangement with an employer. This is illegal in the US. In the same free market, employers can agree to blacklist people because of their union membership. This is also illegal in the US.

We could remove all laws which would protect unions, leaving them hobbled by all the laws which prevent them from fully exercising collective bargaining. But pressure builds up, as you can see by the (successful) wildcat strike this year by teachers in West Virginia.

> If some enterprising people in New York had tried to set up their own ad hoc sanitation service

they would also be doing very useful and important work (would just be paid even less perhaps).

Especially if the help articles are on an internal network.

I'm confused. All your arguments seem to be for why sysadmins _do_ need a union. If they're irreplaceable (at the current wage level) and underpaid like you seem to claim then it sounds like they're leaving money on the table by not bargaining collectively.

I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.

There are very few doing the essential jobs.

As a counter-example, I think everyone who is currently working to reduce environmentally-damaging emissions of industrial processes are essential to society, but if they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little immediate impact.

Sysadmins in an org are there to stop you from doing things, not help you.

In fact in most companies this is always the case. They routinely lay off sysadmins, qa and other support personnel and ask developers to take over.

I'm now seeing trends of tech leads sort of roles doing the same jobs as a managers.

If your job involves some prime mover to which you are just a helper/enabler, its likely you can be easily eliminated.

Basically, we see exactly how it unfolds when a ransomware epidemic breaks out. Ransomware, in many ways tying people hands, such that an outage occurs.

In many areas, servers would chug along undisturbed. In other areas some of them would halt, either requiring input from some attended task, or because of a fault of some kind.

Two other considerations would remain variable, per specific scenario: remote sabotage in the form of zero days appearing in coordination with strike activities, or local on-prem sabotage, in the form of erased disk drives, unplugged cables, or physical damage however subtle.

The remote sabotage could involve a nation-state advanced persistent threat swooping in, or sympathy attacks from external groups which may or may not include those striking, to exacerbate the circumstances. Meanwhile on-prem monkey wrenching would have to occur immediately prior to a walk-out/lock-out.

So, pretty much the same disposition as any other strike, but with the added quirk of remote access, except any or all of the servers could theoretically run problem-free for the duration of the strike, and predicting which systems go down and when would almost always require insider knowlege to accurately estimate.

Meanwhile, everywhere this happens, people in need of a database would just do stuff in Excel, and snailmail USB sticks everwhere. Once that starts happening, it’s anybody’s game.

This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former.

In general, that's not actually true.

* Nurses make good money. E.g., NPs and PAs make six figures even in smaller cities with low CoLs. It's not hedge fund money, but then, 90% of people who work in banking don't make hedge-fund money either. Also, 90k in a small city is pretty comparable to 200k in Manhattan.

* Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird. A couple of more apt comparisons:

- At the lower end of the salary scale: Teacher/police officer vs bank teller. The teacher/police officer make more.

- At the higher end of the salary scale: Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader vs. hedge fund guy.

* Farming is also extremely lucrative -- the owner of a large farm can easily make out much better than the owner of a community bank. And the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.

Even the title of the article -- why garbagemen should make more than bankers -- succumbs to this fallacy. Most bank workers are tellers and other low-level employees who ARE making a bit less (or not much more) than garbagemen!

> In general, that's not actually true.

Please do cursory searches for data to backup what you imagine to be true.

> Nurses make good money.

On average, no. There's the eventual objection about what "compensation" means versus "salary", but moving the bar introduces a number of other variables. Keep it simple, as per the article. Feel free to goole nursing salary - not counting the issue of registered nurses acting as sergeants for teams of nursing assistants who perform the vast majority of the care, they are arguably underpaid (and assistants are shamefully underpaid). This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.

> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird

Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".

> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader

Whatever that means. Making some other unclear comparison serves what purpose? Law enforcement entry pay is less/parity with a teacher, but is less than a federal worker at the post office in salary and definitely in other benefits.

> the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.

Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.

The world isn't in the state you believe it is.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse

The median salary for a nurse, nationally, is $68,450, which isn't high. The median salary (again nationally) for a software developer is $100,080.

If you drill down to best paying cities, though Registered Nurse is a well paid job. In San Francisco, for instance, the median salary for a Registered Nurse is $136,610.

https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...

According to BLS stats, that's actually higher than the median salary for software developers in San Jose (the highest paying place, at $133,010) and certainly higher than San Francisco ($122,420).

There's a lot to dig into here, in terms of data, so I don't want to come off as claiming that the stats above are conclusive.

First, nursing is a tough job, and deserves to be paid well, If it is, that's great, and if it isn't, that's a problem. I also don't have any problem whatsoever with registered nurses getting paid more than software developers.

I actually think software developer is often a more stressful, dreary, and dis-spiriting job than many people here on HN believe. I work for a university, and I definitely have cold sweat moments when I worry about lost data, broken processes, and security breaches. And a lot of what I do is wading through legacy code with a fine toothed comb. I believe a lot of dev work is like this.

Another factor is that nursing requires a specific set of coursework and a specific set of credentials. In software development, we have no such requirement - you can read a book on "PHP & MySql" (or don't read it) and call yourself a software developer. Then again, actually majoring in CS (or a related field) at a reputable university is challenging, and passing the coding interview at a place like google is also challenging (challenging for me, I failed to get through, some people here on HN will say it was trivially easy for them).

Is the job more flexible? As a developer, I can go off and grab a cup of coffee more or less whenever I want, but shifting my schedule to part time, or working three very long schedules, or leaving the field for a while and coming back where I left off - all things that I discovered would be more useful than "coffee flexibility" when I acquired a mortgage and school aged kids and a spouse who also has a full time job, honestly, I don't think that software developer offers as much.

Burnout may be common. Age discrimination? (or what I like to call "Age related employment issues, since I don't think it has to be discrimination per se that makes it tougher to be a developer as you get older)?

Pay? I don't know if the BLS data includes highly variable pay such as stock options. I think it's based on tax returns, so it does include some variable pay, but may not capture it all.

There are just so many factors, it's hard to draw very strong conclusions.

I am comfortable, however, saying that the data does not clearly support the notion that in the Bay Area, registered nurses are underpaid. I'd say the data moderately supports the contention that registered nurses are well paid (again, in the bay area and a few other high cost areas).

Concretely, average SE salaries in flyover states are pretty comparable to average RN salaries in flyover states.

I doubt it goes quite this far for software development and nursing, but it may be a factor.

This is pretty off-putting, especially given a few glaring factual errors in your own post.

>> Nurses make good money.

> On average, no.

NP average annual salary: 95,523 USD

PA average annual salary: 98,180 USD

RN average annual salary: 67,490 USD

IDK what "good money" means, but ALL of these are paid much better than average for their respective levels of education. And certainly, beat out e.g. what a fresh BA/BS would make at a place like Edward Jones or Bank of America. Hell, my first SE job offers were lower than the RN average, and I certainly felt like that was "good money"!

>> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird

> Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".

Again, offputting.

Quants at hedge funds often have Ph.D.s in hard sciences from top universities. Comparing across vastly different pedigrees is no representative.

Why not compare apples to apples?

>> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader

> Whatever that means.

Yes again, offputting.

What I meant is this.

Leader: Superintendents rarely make less than $150,000 and make up to $N00,000 which, especially with CoL adjustments, is often better pay than the 200,000+ salary ranges typical for quants at hedge funds.

Vendor: And those are just the public sector jobs. A LOT of money is made in selling education products. Do you really think the CEO of Pearson is living in the poor house?

Just like literal bankers (people who sit in banks) are a very small fragment of what we think of as "banking", literal teachers are a very small fragment of people employed in education and literal police officers are a very small fragment of people employed in law enforcement.

> Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.

This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.

Cargill, for example, is family owned and pulls in 114.7 _B_illion in revenue. (For reference, BoA, America's largest bank, pulls down 87.352 Billion in revenue.)

"Family owned" doesn't mean what you think it means in American farming. Many "family owned" argi businesses (including actual farms) are really freaking huge operations.

> This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.

Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment. The feudal system also exists in banking and in lawyerings, and the top rung of the education hierarchy is doing extremely well while the lowest rung of banking or lawyering is barely scraping by. Maybe if you'd engaged politely with me instead of getting pissed off...

Ironic, given you started with none. I standby the response, as appropriate commentary.

> IDK what "good money" means,

I don't know either, but that's irrelevant to the topical subject of comparison (not equivocating over 10% here or there in difference).

> Again, offputting.

That is often the case, when you are demonstrably wrong and have to deal with the realization.

> This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.

The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.

> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.

You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

You said nurses don't make good money. I think 100k is good money. Better money than most people in the banking and legal industries make, that's for sure.

> The income of Cargill offset by costs is not 114 billion. That's just gross. It has a fraction of that income as opposed to the incomparable bank nets.

Cargill has higher revenues than the largest bank in America.

Cargill has larger assets than most US banks.

Cargill had higher profits last year/quarter than most US banks, even big household names.

You "guessed" that wasn't the case. You were wrong.

>> Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment.

> You failed and started with talking about how blue collar workers are fine and comparisons to white collar management is unfair, which is frustratingly disingenuous. Good luck with whatever.

The word management wasn't even mentioned once in my original post. I mentioned banking and law.

What I was pointing out was that low-paying jobs exist in every industry, and there are plenty of people in nominally low-paying industries who do very well (e.g., nurses RN and up) as well as many people in nominally high-paying industries who do not (e.g., bank tellers, low-level financial advisors, accountants).

(BTW, you should consider re-reading the end of the article that we're discussing. The conclusion to that article is quite literally that the exemplar discussed by the article -- NYC garbagemen -- are doing fine. So fine that people who get the job feel like they won the lottery.)