4 ms·

The plebs should just unionize in retaliation. And if you're having difficulty figuring out who the plebs are, you should probably be in a union.

Ylpertnodi 3y ago
Upvoted, but why not unionise because altruism, rather than retaliation?
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  Why not both? Any reason to seek democratic control over the workplace is a good one.
- woooooo 3y ago
  That's the wrong way to think about unions. Unions are an idea to counter the power imbalance against the company. It turns it from many->1 to many->many. Now all of a sudden lots of things are negotiable, like different contract terms, which were off the table before. Altruism is about giving things away. If you want to donate to charity, fine, if you're at the union for charity you're misunderstanding things.
  - jltsiren 3y ago
    Altruism makes unions work. From a purely utilitarian perspective, being a freeloader is almost always a better choice. You get most of the benefits of the union without having to pay for it. Altruism is about the concern for the welfare and happiness of others. It's particularly important in organizations that fight, both figuratively and literally. An army that runs out of altruism collapses, because people generally don't want to die for no reason.
    - woooooo 3y ago
      Solidarity is important. Charity isn't. We're all working, it's not charity to be treated right. Look at that dumbass alphabet worker's union for example. They offered nothing to workers for joining, all their goals were social justice culture war stuff. How are they doing? If they called for a strike, would anyone notice?
- dangerwill 3y ago
  How many lives have been made significantly worse by 24/7 on-call being made the norm for engineers by these companies? These companies deserve plenty of retaliation even if they pay good salaries.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual. If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient. [1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition [4] "without hatred, partiality, or reasoning", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio
- marcinzm 3y ago
  As I see it random selection means every leader will pillage as much money for themselves as possible as quickly as possible. More so than right now since there's some risk of them losing power (current or future) over it right now.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness. The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness. [1] https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-hunger-facts https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/obesity https://ourworldindata.org/obesity
marcinzm 3y ago
I find it amusing that someone making $500k+ at Meta would consider themselves a pleb.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
  NFL Players are in a union with various rules around contracts, pay, benefits, etc. A corporation exploiting employees and those employees wanting protections against that doesn't need to be limited by what those employees earn.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I said nothing about unions but merely that Meta employees are not plebs. You don't need to insult your own socioeconomic standing to fight for a better deal from your employer.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Salary = pleb, living off capital = elite. Pretty simple for some people.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- lamontcg 3y ago
  I can point at $12M/yr professional footballers who have been lied to and screwed over by the billionaires that they work for. They certainly won't be going hungry at night, but their careers have been affected negatively. Power imbalances can still exist between multimillionaire employees and their multibillionaire owners.

Ylpertnodi 3y ago

Upvoted, but why not unionise because altruism, rather than retaliation?

dontlaugh 3y ago
Why not both? Any reason to seek democratic control over the workplace is a good one.
woooooo 3y ago
That's the wrong way to think about unions. Unions are an idea to counter the power imbalance against the company. It turns it from many->1 to many->many. Now all of a sudden lots of things are negotiable, like different contract terms, which were off the table before. Altruism is about giving things away. If you want to donate to charity, fine, if you're at the union for charity you're misunderstanding things.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Altruism makes unions work. From a purely utilitarian perspective, being a freeloader is almost always a better choice. You get most of the benefits of the union without having to pay for it. Altruism is about the concern for the welfare and happiness of others. It's particularly important in organizations that fight, both figuratively and literally. An army that runs out of altruism collapses, because people generally don't want to die for no reason.
  - woooooo 3y ago
    Solidarity is important. Charity isn't. We're all working, it's not charity to be treated right. Look at that dumbass alphabet worker's union for example. They offered nothing to workers for joining, all their goals were social justice culture war stuff. How are they doing? If they called for a strike, would anyone notice?
dangerwill 3y ago
How many lives have been made significantly worse by 24/7 on-call being made the norm for engineers by these companies? These companies deserve plenty of retaliation even if they pay good salaries.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago

Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull; both random moment in time and random individual. If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power, sine ira, studio, vel ratio [4]. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles of the structure ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient. [1] "Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail", https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialecti... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition [4] "without hatred, partiality, or reasoning", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_ira_et_studio

marcinzm 3y ago
As I see it random selection means every leader will pillage as much money for themselves as possible as quickly as possible. More so than right now since there's some risk of them losing power (current or future) over it right now.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Not quite. Corruption is the side-effect of interpersonal relationships. Once the cluster of the organization's/society's leaders are random, and with a sufficiently aggressive random culling function, there is no ground anymore for fostering interpersonal relationships. Take it one step further and replace judges, prosecutors, lawyers in the same manner with a random retribution function. Now you have a third level of metastable phase control just through randomness. The current bar is so low, so artificially kept low (just on one dimension, around 800 millions of people are starving [1] while around 1 billion are obese [2]), almost anything would be an improvement, especially dispersing power through randomness. [1] https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-hunger-facts https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/obesity https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

marcinzm 3y ago

I find it amusing that someone making $500k+ at Meta would consider themselves a pleb.

mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
NFL Players are in a union with various rules around contracts, pay, benefits, etc. A corporation exploiting employees and those employees wanting protections against that doesn't need to be limited by what those employees earn.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I said nothing about unions but merely that Meta employees are not plebs. You don't need to insult your own socioeconomic standing to fight for a better deal from your employer.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Salary = pleb, living off capital = elite. Pretty simple for some people.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lamontcg 3y ago
I can point at $12M/yr professional footballers who have been lied to and screwed over by the billionaires that they work for. They certainly won't be going hungry at night, but their careers have been affected negatively. Power imbalances can still exist between multimillionaire employees and their multibillionaire owners.