News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

2bitmachine

Re:How Puerto Rico Became a Tax Haven for the Super Rich on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @04:44PM (#18018948)
The Dig is like EconTalk for leftists. Even if you’re not onboard with the ideology, the intelligence, researched depth, and interest of the host Daniel Denvir is matched by little else in media today.
For anyone interested in a more thorough and well-introduced volume on Japanese literature, I’d recommend this two-volume work:

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-columbia-anthology-of-mode...

Re:Amazon's Bezos Launches $2B Fund to Help the Homeless on Thursday September 13, 2018 @12:23PM (#17979818)
That he subverted democracy by threatening the Seattle city council as they attempted to address their homelessness crisis makes me skeptical of this effort. I doubt we can do much to fix the underlying issues in a context where billionaires can intimidate governments into surrendering power to their unilateral, authoritarian control.
At the point when you recognize this and then choose to proceed apace, you become a “mustache twirling villain.” YouTube crossed that threshold a long, long time ago.
Re:Whole Foods workers seek to unionize on Friday September 07, 2018 @12:47AM (#17931943)
> Many grocery store chains are unionized and the jobs are still loathed.

Unions aren't about undoing alienation under Capitalism, they're about making Capitalism survivable for laborers.

Re:Whole Foods workers seek to unionize on Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:15PM (#17931611)
We’re in the middle of the best economy and wages still aren’t rising. Monopoly, monopsony, and free market extremism have crushed them for all but the very few.

https://www.epi.org/publication/its-not-just-monopoly-and-mo...

So no, there aren’t really “plenty of options” to get paid or treated better. Just better returns for those already at the top.

Re:Whole Foods workers seek to unionize on Thursday September 06, 2018 @10:33PM (#17931477)
And? If Amazon bought a company with poor working conditions, ripe for unionization, it’s their problem. They’re the bosses now.

Maybe the workers hoped things would get better absent labor organization, but now that they’re being managed by a company rife with labor abuses, their circumstances have become more clear to them.

It’s not pure speculation- it’s the worker’s side of the story. You can’t discredit their experience because the other side behaved in such a brazenly stupid fashion that they’re probably being advised to not speak to the press at all. Even if management’s perspective was included in the article, corresponded to your framing, the same would hold true. Your skepticism isn’t really skepticism when it leans consistently in favor of one party or the other.
If they can’t do basic, physical security correctly, it kind of calls into question their broader approach? For example, I imagine it’s much easier to socially engineer yourself into other access once your inside the campus than from without.
I guess I’m not sure why we’re to believe that your perspective on the situation is somehow more valid or absent a similar “agenda” you ascribe to the journalist. The journalist spoke to the people involved who described their motivations (which sure seems to be at least partially informed by perceived sexism), while you’re just making speculative assertions about “management’s perspective.” And because management seemingly handled the situation so poorly and in violation of labor laws, it’s not like they’re going to go on the record anyway...
>There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones.

This seemed pretty clear in the article? They tried to buy off senior male employees with extra stock options last minute.

>Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.

It felt like there was a fair amount of detail to me. If anything, it exposed how much sexism in tech is something management sees as a useful wedge to divide and conquer workers.