9 ms·
How to Legally Own Another Person (2015) [pdf]
- ak_yo 9y agoIf you like this, you might also like Max Weber's essay on bureaucracy: https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/cerl/conferences/ethicsofsecrecy/papers/reading/Weber.pdf https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/cerl/conferences/ethics...
- mlevental 9y agocall me a dummy but i could never figure out how coase's theorem applies to firms - i've read all of the examples about allocating spectrum and land and water rights but i don't see what it has to do with hiring practices.
- ameliaquining 9y agoRonald Coase is best known for two different works, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960). What's become known as the "Coase theorem" is from the latter. The common thread between the two is that they're both ultimately about transaction costs.
- mlevental 9y agothank you
- aportnoy 9y agocan anything be more unclassy than using the f-word on every page of your essay?
- hnaccy 9y agoWhat are you? A slave?
- aportnoy 9y agoWhat are you? A slave?
- jaggederest 9y agoHe's just engaged in honest costly signaling, like any good player of a game with hidden variables and low information sharing.
- aportnoy 9y agothat is actually a good comment
- unexistance 9y agothought so, it's by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [0], quite active of Facebook :D he got other social account? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
- egypturnash 9y agoGoogling "how to legally own another person taleb" turns up a tweet from him linking to a version of this on Medium: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/767462311984529409?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/767462311984529409?lang=e... His last tweet is twelve hours ago so it's probably fairly active.
- pizza 9y agohttp://twitter.com/nntaleb http://twitter.com/nntaleb , http://fooledbyrandomness.com http://fooledbyrandomness.com
- newsmania 9y agoThe purpose of requiring a college degree, I have come to realize, is not to demonstrate knowledge, but rather to demonstrate submissiveness. It shows that you are decently capable of doing what you are told, and that's all most employers want to know.
- s3nnyy 9y agoWow, you verbalised something I thought for a long time
- comice 9y agoThe book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt explores this idea pretty well.
- tallanvor 9y agoThat's an extremely insulting thing to claim. A college degree from most universities shows that you have at least a decent ability to take in information, interpret it, and use what you have learned. GPA itself is not necessarily a high predictor for job performance in some cases - Google isn't likely to be considering many applications from new graduates who had a 2.0 average, for example. They are also able to more easily cherry pick from the top schools. And most employers don't want to waste their time doing a battery of cognitive ability tests, which is often the best indicator of performance, so your GPA combined with other information from an interview is one of the best tools they have. Smaller companies, of course, may have more flexibility and can consider a tryout period, but for larger companies, the contract and potential for IP disputes can make it not worth their while. Obviously your GPA becomes fairly irrelevant once you have a decent amount of experience and have developed personal references who can vouch for you.
- comstock 9y agoHmm I’d never thought about swearing as a social signifier of freedom. That it shows dominance and that you are “free to do as you like”. What I’d be interested in knowing is if people really respond to this psychologically? Is Putin or Trump popularity in part due to people seeing their “I don’t give a fxxk” attitude and being attracted to that?
- ehnto 9y agoYour username adds a particular flavor to your comment! I read it in Comstock's voice from Bioshock Infinite.
- irrational 9y agoMy father (who ironically was in the military) always said "Swearing is a sign that you are in the presence of an inferior intellect". I'm not saying I believe it, but having been raised around that attitude I don't perceive swearing as indicating competence.
- comstock 9y agoRight, me too, or rather it’s mostly not of much consequence to me. But is a large part of the population different in this regard?
- mslate 9y agoNot competence--dominance, or independence
- irrational 9y agoCompetence was taken from the article: "Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free – and, ironically, competent. You don’t signal competence if you don’t take risks for it - there are few such low risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power."
- SemiTom 9y agoalimony
- newsmania 9y agoI never understood how breaking a business contract gets punished, but breaking a marriage contract gets rewarded. The injured party becomes a slave to the injuring party. This country went downhill since the 19th ammendment. Every country with women in power is in insane debt.
- sctb 9y agoWe've banned this account for violating the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- t1o5 9y agoH1B employment is a legal way to own a person in IT. To Quote from the article - " Employees are more risk averse, they fear being fired more than contractors do being sued. " Rephrasing - " H1B employees are even more risk averse, they fear being deported right from the moment they are fired". A fired H1B employee is out of status from that very moment. He should leave the country asap. A winning formula for US IT companies. Hire an H1B employee. Squeeze the juice out of them. You can own them than any other type of employee in your organization.
- Ao7bei3s 9y agoNot really. An H1B employee easily transfer their visa to another company and start working even before receiving approval. But there's L1B employment... that actually binds you to a company.
- t1o5 9y agoIts not easy as it sounds. Its not a transfer per say, its a new petition. Recently premium processing was stopped. Many H1B transfers were in limbo. If an employee transfers when he has I-140, his greencard process might get jeopardized. There are many quirks for an employee to change his employers. Many employers will not allow an employee to join unless his petition is approved. This is also good for the employee, because there are high chances that an H1B transfer can go wrong. So no, its not easy.
- lycidas 9y agoThat aspect was ameliorated slightly this year with a 60 day grace period after loss of employment. https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-final-rule-certain-employment-based-immigrant-and-nonimmigrant-visa-programs https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin....
- t1o5 9y agoOnly applicable for an approved I-140 employee. That will be a slight relief though.
- theyregreat 9y agoCombine H1B with debt like for cars, education, housing, etc., and that’s full-on indentured servitude. People under such duress maybe convinced to work for $30/hr or less.
- toast0 9y agoIf you are on H1B, and lose status and leave the country, and don't intend to come back, do you really need to pay car or house loans? Be nice and mail in the keys, but how are they going to collect anything else? I assume someone in that situation would cash out their us accounts as they're leaving. Education debt may be different, there's a good chance that was incurred in the country of origin, so it's likely the lender has recourse.
- kc10 9y agopeople who get laid off have to leave the country, but mostly they have every intention to come back. So they try to settle everything, leave the country and try to comeback again. One of my friends left US to get married, but his visa was denied. He had to sell all the stuff, cars remotely (with friends help) and it took whole 6 years to come back (because of the visa quotas, denials etc). But he eventually was successful in returning and it's good he settled all his debt when he was kicked out with a visa denial.
- denom 9y agowhen I read NN Taleb at first I’m intrigued. The ideas and language clicks together. He says ‘I’m a trader’ but really he is a philosopher courtesan. He has the sensibility of a wise man. But after some time, and some more reading, the feel-good effect ends abruptly. High praise for autocrats? Criticizing the leaders liberal west as intrinsically defective? Observations on “renting” women to f*? It’s all much too boorish, and _it gets in the way_ of some really solid ideas. Personally, I’m not sure his ideas are worth the effort of redemption. Maybe after a good editor cleans it up? I stopped following him on Twitter. But every time I see some new fragment of his writing I perk up, only to be disappointed in the end.
- madmax108 9y agoThis pretty much perfectly sums up my opinion of NN Taleb as well. Initially, you are in awe of his near-prose like writing, and a couple hundred pages later, you realise that writing style is just about everything he has (all style, less substance). His ideas as well are usually pseudo-philosophical and I'm unsure if any of his writings would hold ground if it wasn't tied along with the fact that he made millions hedging on a black swan event (Again, which is a combination of picking your bets and sheer dumb luck). Also, the more NN Taleb I read, the more pretentious he comes across as being.
- olala69 9y agoHe made nearly a billion hedging on dozens of events, and thousands upon thousands of trades. I bet you haven't read a single page of his actual published papers, just his poplit stuff.
- Animats 9y agoHis trading results aren't clear. When editing the Wikipedia article, we kept running into the fact that he boasts about the performance of his funds in the years they're up, but refuses to release results for the years they're down. His funds buy options that are way out of the money, which means they lose money in years nothing bad happens. In years with a big crash, they win big. It's not clear that this is a net win over time.
- raldi 9y agoThe opening story talks about how much of a disaster it is when a contracted pilot quits on a gig because he got a better offer that paid so much it covered his breach-of-contract amount... if this is something that terrifies you, you need to negotiate a higher breach-of-contract value next time.
- s3nnyy 9y agoThis article accelerated me quitting my well-paid coding job and starting my own little tech recruiting agency.
- MrLeap 9y agoNeat! I'm basically doing this exact thing. I've got a tiny team together and we're contracting with a structure like a co-op. Any interest in talking about it?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sideshowb 9y ago> Consider that the English “manners” isn’t something that applies to the aristocracy; I disagree. The aristocracy have a special type of manners finely honed for putting people at ease while concealing the truth of the situation. Always distrust anybody too polite.
- acqq 9y agoThe newer version, non pdf too: https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person-4145a1802bf6 https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...
- analog31 9y agoMy impression is that a lot of this ownership has to do with persuading someone to become emotionally dependent on their situation. Thus a potential antidote is to maintain a sense of detachment, and to be financially rational.
- acty1 9y agoOnce I started foraging and hunting for my pay...I started to feel more free and much less likely to take bullshit from anyone (afterall, there is always the next hunt). The core of your being is changed when you start with yourself as your mental point of origin and take nothing for granted when it comes to the "mythical job security". It's doubly so liberating when you do not have to deal with the ghosts of past employers and the shadow of what "future employers" will think.