9 ms·

Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs

GreenWatermelon 1y ago
Reading this made my blood boil up a little > In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds. > Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe. > The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more. This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
- Lu2025 1y ago
  Where is FTC in all this? It's a pure monopoly.
- morkalork 1y ago
  I've seen this referred to as a treadmill before. They get the farmers on a treadmill (loans for co-ops, equipment inputs) and once they're waking, they don't let them stop. The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
  - pragmatic 1y ago
    [flagged]
- nemomarx 1y ago
  This is monopsony, right? Effectively?
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly". Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it. But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
- theturtle32 1y ago
  > This amount of scumminess is mind boggling. It is, unfortunately, the natural result of insufficiently regulated capitalism.
  - banannaise 1y ago
    [nitpick] I think it's more the natural result of capitalism that is well-regulated only on the consumer side. There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    Even regulated capitalism exploits. Surplus labor theory easily shows that even in the best of intentions, businesses absolutely must exploit the worker. Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation. Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go. No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine. I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.
    - dml2135 1y ago
      I’m all for critiques of capitalism, but it’s extremely unconvincing to say capitalism must go, but at the same time, you don’t know what to replace it with. How are you so convinced that there is a better solution than capitalism if you can’t even articulate what that solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all it’s flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of bad options?
- roenxi 1y ago
  The obvious thing to do is for the farmer to learn how to package their own chickens, then sell it themselves. The hard part of this should be the however-long-it-takes a chicken to grow + feed for the bird. Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers. I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.
  - bcoates 1y ago
    The only winning move is not to play. My grandfather tried his hand at chicken farming about 100 years ago (didn't go well). It was a bad business then and it’s a bad one now.
    - hermitcrab 1y ago
      If it is bad for humans, imagine what it must be like for the chickens.
      - 4bpp 1y ago
        Well, if you or one of your loved ones is considering going into the being-a-chicken business, I would hope that HN would likewise dissuade you.
  - gostsamo 1y ago
    > Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
    - roenxi 1y ago
- grigri907 1y ago
  In my experience, the processor is actually the one who owns the chickens (broilers). The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. The processor also owns the feed and the farmer gets paid on a feed-to-poultry conversion efficiency. Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
  - chicken467 1y ago
    > The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. Actually, there are stages, e.g. some farmers just do chicks, someone then may pick them up and go to the next stage.
- chicken465 1y ago
  It both sounds and is exploitive and bad, but to add color to this: - poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades. - it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work. You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers. Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing. I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together. Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite. Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
- doener 1y ago
  Maybe this question is naive and/or influenced by decades of classic neoliberal propaganda: But why don’t do the farmers something else then?
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    There's not much else around. They don't know what else to do. Education/job training expensive. They've got loans to pay back, so they can't stop working to look for another job. They're on some government assistance program they can't afford to lose, but it comes with work requirements, so they can't retrain. The pay (including government subsidies) make it just bearable enough to keep from revolting. Etc.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Like what? Farm another product that has the similar problems? Row crop farm where generating a 2% return on investment over a decade span is considered a success? The response has been farmers dropping out of the business entirely, which ends up with some few people doubling down into larger operations, which only makes the problem worse as it is harder to pivot and makes processing and distribution even harder to divert away from the big controlling players.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Might just have called it Uberization. Or called Uber a Chicken Processor.
- doener 1y ago
  Reminds me of the 1947 "Sixteen Tons" song. From German Wikipedia, translated by DeepL: "According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members. When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the grocery store[7] where he had debts. Sixteen Tons is a socially critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that American miners and their families had to live under in the past. This included wage slavery: US miners were mostly paid not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other shops in the area; local food supplies could only be obtained in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly and could therefore charge excessive prices; The income and expenditure situation in the company stores, which was deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company store"). By the time the song was written, the miners' living and working conditions had already improved significantly, partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds of the families and communities affected." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied)
  - riffraff 1y ago
    I'm not sure why you transllated the german entry for an american song, but FYI, there's an english wikipedia version. "I owe my soul to the company store" is one of the greatest lyrics ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
    - kragen 1y ago
      Many German Wikipedia articles are better than the English versions. Maybe this is one of them.
      - 1y ago
motoboi 1y ago
You lost me at “… such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.” The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing chess in the level of alpha zero.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  You'd better start laughing, because humans plus computers beat computers, albeit with a very high draw rate, when large amounts of time are allowed. https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch
  - roenxi 1y ago
    The article doesn't actually present any evidence that humans+computers can beat computers. The closest thing I spotted was "I accomplished the feat in 38 moves, in a sequence that no computer would consider or find ... I did not subsequently find a win". So the computers disregarded a line that didn't work. The actual evidence he listed suggests this is a war between different humans to work out who has better computer hardware ("the lack of decent equipment is being felt quite notably in Russia, where embargoes have limited access to new hardware and the latest chess tools. As a consequence, the Russian team finished near the bottom of the standings in the last Correspondence Chess Olympiad"). Cool and all, I can imagine people having a lot of fun, but it isn't obvious they are competing based chess skill here. The computers are bringing the chess skill and the human seems to be bringing logistic, financial and clerical support to operate the computer.
- danilopopeye 1y ago
  I think the autor reference is from a chess master bing helped by an IA. > (…) that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
droopyEyelids 1y ago
Unfortunately, unionization is not “coming back with a vengeance” in the United States and it is not allowed to by our laws. Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts. On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period. Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > Our laws ban ... secondary boycotts I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me. Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
  - Amorymeltzer 1y ago
    In this context, "strike" is probably the better term, and "solidarity strike" or "general strike" are more likely the ones you might have heard.
  - kragen 1y ago
    There's an overview in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action#United_State.... You'll probably be interested in reading https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4368&context=uclrev https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti..., "Secondary Boycotts and the First Amendment", in the University of Chicago Law Review, by Barbara J. Anderson: > Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)¹ makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to "threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of requiring that person to cease dealing with another.² In NLRB v. Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),³ the Supreme Court held that this section proscribes union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected to threaten [the picketed retailer] with ruin or substantial loss."'⁴ Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful picketing is entitled to some first amendment protection, the Court found it "well-established" that Congress had constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."⁵ I'm not sure whether NLRB v. Retail Store Employees is still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often understood as something much more coercive as simply "union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4677&context=dlr https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the Taft–Hartley Act" Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953): > The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it is directed against a neutral party rather than against the employer directly involved in the labor dispute. The target of the secondary boycott is a third party who is engaged in business dealings with the employer as a customer, supplier, or otherwise. The object of the secondary boycott is to cause the boycottee to cease doing business with the employer. Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or employment unless you recant your homosexuality.
MichaelZuo 1y ago
If a business, after unionizing, ultimately delivers more value per dollar to the end customer… then why would anyone even need to write essays arguing for it? Customers will vote with their wallets, assuming there are any durable net advantage to the customer base, so the cumulative effect would be far more penetrating and enduring than millions of written arguments.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  Well, that’s the naivest thing I’ve read this week.
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    Can you write out the argument for why?
    - neuroelectron 1y ago
      Actually, human flesh is delicious.
      - MichaelZuo 1y ago
        Is this some kind of bot reply?
        aziaziazi 1y ago
        Neuroelectron comment is provocative. I think he wants to demonstrate the absurdity to let consumer choices resolves value delivered to customers. A bit the same the same as I did in a peer comment, but way more implicit.
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        That doesn’t follow… opinions aren’t automatically guaranteed to make coherent sense.
euroderf 1y ago
Obv the American chicken industry is a nightmare for farmers. Where can I read a comparison to the EU, which presumably takes better care of both farmers and chickens altho I would not bet my life on it ?
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  EU has obliterated the small African farmers by dumping cheap unwanted cuts (legs) there. (Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)
kragen 1y ago
Marshall Brain, who recently committed suicide, wrote a book in 02003 about this; it's called "Manna". Unfortunately, before he killed himself, he removed it from his website. Fortunately, he didn't remove it from the WABAC machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbr... It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.
- mooreds 1y ago
  I came here to post the Manna story. I've read it multiple times and found it eerily prescient. (It reminds me a bit of what L. Bob Rife[0] was trying to accomplish as well in Snow Crash.) I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1]. 0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife 1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/12/16/nc-state-employee-denounced-university-his-suicide https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yeah :-(
- brendoelfrendo 1y ago
  It appears to be back up on his website? Unless this version is in some way incomplete or not the original: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
  - kragen 1y ago
    You're right! Thank you! This is a better link.
cosmicgadget 1y ago
The Youtube recommender is already EOLed. I'm thinking business wins here, as soon as any labor organization method gets popular it'll be declared a violation of terms of employment. In another timeline this might be prevented with regulations.
ses1984 1y ago
Why doesn’t someone make a gig platform with a cooperative ownership model?
- quinnjh 1y ago
  Interesting question. I ran some quick numbers on Google, take last years profit for uber ($10B) and naively distribute it between all drivers (est 7M) and it comes out to a raise of 1,428. Most drivers would probably be enticed by that, but it’s not going to radically alter their situation. Also, Ubers board and investors are compelled via profit, as the purpose of a company is generating profit for its shareholders. Would be great to see something like you suggest take off and gain national appeal, but I suspect that VC money helps with getting billboards/ newspaper ads/ etc. You would need to craft a new sort of coop model that can generate enough profits at the top to be an attractive investment but also share some. AFAIK this works best in small teams doing high value work.
  - ses1984 1y ago
    That sounds like the number of worldwide drivers, and I imagine some of them would be super happy with a $1400 bonus.
theptip 1y ago
I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society into an attractor state that’s hard to get out of. It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take. It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job. If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job. Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable. UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  > unskilled labor I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree. Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers. What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon. I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs. I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。 Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
Animats 1y ago
Organized labor doesn't seem to use those terms. There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1] The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations. [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1509 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/150... [2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmers-of-america-of-creating-monopsony-in-the-northeast/ https://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmer...
scotty79 1y ago
When a workers is chickenized with AI isn't that the case that it's the manager who just lost his job? That's what means to replace a manager with few lines of java (or with AI).
bitwize 1y ago
I thought they were going to be talking about that old-timey drawing of a creature with human legs and a rooster upper body.

Reading this made my blood boil up a little > In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds. > Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe. > The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more. This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.

Lu2025 1y ago
Where is FTC in all this? It's a pure monopoly.
morkalork 1y ago
I've seen this referred to as a treadmill before. They get the farmers on a treadmill (loans for co-ops, equipment inputs) and once they're waking, they don't let them stop. The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
- pragmatic 1y ago
  [flagged]
nemomarx 1y ago
This is monopsony, right? Effectively?
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly". Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it. But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
theturtle32 1y ago
> This amount of scumminess is mind boggling. It is, unfortunately, the natural result of insufficiently regulated capitalism.
- banannaise 1y ago
  [nitpick] I think it's more the natural result of capitalism that is well-regulated only on the consumer side. There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
- mystraline 1y ago
  Even regulated capitalism exploits. Surplus labor theory easily shows that even in the best of intentions, businesses absolutely must exploit the worker. Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation. Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go. No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine. I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.
  - dml2135 1y ago
    I’m all for critiques of capitalism, but it’s extremely unconvincing to say capitalism must go, but at the same time, you don’t know what to replace it with. How are you so convinced that there is a better solution than capitalism if you can’t even articulate what that solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all it’s flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of bad options?
roenxi 1y ago
The obvious thing to do is for the farmer to learn how to package their own chickens, then sell it themselves. The hard part of this should be the however-long-it-takes a chicken to grow + feed for the bird. Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers. I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form naturally.
- bcoates 1y ago
  The only winning move is not to play. My grandfather tried his hand at chicken farming about 100 years ago (didn't go well). It was a bad business then and it’s a bad one now.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    If it is bad for humans, imagine what it must be like for the chickens.
    - 4bpp 1y ago
      Well, if you or one of your loved ones is considering going into the being-a-chicken business, I would hope that HN would likewise dissuade you.
- gostsamo 1y ago
  > Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason. the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
  - roenxi 1y ago
grigri907 1y ago
In my experience, the processor is actually the one who owns the chickens (broilers). The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. The processor also owns the feed and the farmer gets paid on a feed-to-poultry conversion efficiency. Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
- chicken467 1y ago
  > The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. Actually, there are stages, e.g. some farmers just do chicks, someone then may pick them up and go to the next stage.
chicken465 1y ago
It both sounds and is exploitive and bad, but to add color to this: - poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades. - it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work. You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers. Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing. I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together. Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite. Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
doener 1y ago
Maybe this question is naive and/or influenced by decades of classic neoliberal propaganda: But why don’t do the farmers something else then?
- dfxm12 1y ago
  There's not much else around. They don't know what else to do. Education/job training expensive. They've got loans to pay back, so they can't stop working to look for another job. They're on some government assistance program they can't afford to lose, but it comes with work requirements, so they can't retrain. The pay (including government subsidies) make it just bearable enough to keep from revolting. Etc.
- AngryData 1y ago
  Like what? Farm another product that has the similar problems? Row crop farm where generating a 2% return on investment over a decade span is considered a success? The response has been farmers dropping out of the business entirely, which ends up with some few people doubling down into larger operations, which only makes the problem worse as it is harder to pivot and makes processing and distribution even harder to divert away from the big controlling players.
actionfromafar 1y ago
Might just have called it Uberization. Or called Uber a Chicken Processor.
doener 1y ago
Reminds me of the 1947 "Sixteen Tons" song. From German Wikipedia, translated by DeepL: "According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members. When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the grocery store[7] where he had debts. Sixteen Tons is a socially critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that American miners and their families had to live under in the past. This included wage slavery: US miners were mostly paid not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other shops in the area; local food supplies could only be obtained in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly and could therefore charge excessive prices; The income and expenditure situation in the company stores, which was deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company store"). By the time the song was written, the miners' living and working conditions had already improved significantly, partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds of the families and communities affected." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied)
- riffraff 1y ago
  I'm not sure why you transllated the german entry for an american song, but FYI, there's an english wikipedia version. "I owe my soul to the company store" is one of the greatest lyrics ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
  - kragen 1y ago
    Many German Wikipedia articles are better than the English versions. Maybe this is one of them.
    - 1y ago

motoboi 1y ago

You lost me at “… such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.” The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing chess in the level of alpha zero.

margalabargala 1y ago
You'd better start laughing, because humans plus computers beat computers, albeit with a very high draw rate, when large amounts of time are allowed. https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch
- roenxi 1y ago
  The article doesn't actually present any evidence that humans+computers can beat computers. The closest thing I spotted was "I accomplished the feat in 38 moves, in a sequence that no computer would consider or find ... I did not subsequently find a win". So the computers disregarded a line that didn't work. The actual evidence he listed suggests this is a war between different humans to work out who has better computer hardware ("the lack of decent equipment is being felt quite notably in Russia, where embargoes have limited access to new hardware and the latest chess tools. As a consequence, the Russian team finished near the bottom of the standings in the last Correspondence Chess Olympiad"). Cool and all, I can imagine people having a lot of fun, but it isn't obvious they are competing based chess skill here. The computers are bringing the chess skill and the human seems to be bringing logistic, financial and clerical support to operate the computer.
danilopopeye 1y ago
I think the autor reference is from a chess master bing helped by an IA. > (…) that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
QuadmasterXLII 1y ago

droopyEyelids 1y ago

Unfortunately, unionization is not “coming back with a vengeance” in the United States and it is not allowed to by our laws. Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts. On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period. Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here

fc417fc802 1y ago
> Our laws ban ... secondary boycotts I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me. Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
- Amorymeltzer 1y ago
  In this context, "strike" is probably the better term, and "solidarity strike" or "general strike" are more likely the ones you might have heard.
- kragen 1y ago
  There's an overview in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action#United_State.... You'll probably be interested in reading https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4368&context=uclrev https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti..., "Secondary Boycotts and the First Amendment", in the University of Chicago Law Review, by Barbara J. Anderson: > Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA)¹ makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to "threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of requiring that person to cease dealing with another.² In NLRB v. Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),³ the Supreme Court held that this section proscribes union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected to threaten [the picketed retailer] with ruin or substantial loss."'⁴ Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful picketing is entitled to some first amendment protection, the Court found it "well-established" that Congress had constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."⁵ I'm not sure whether NLRB v. Retail Store Employees is still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often understood as something much more coercive as simply "union picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4677&context=dlr https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the Taft–Hartley Act" Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953): > The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it is directed against a neutral party rather than against the employer directly involved in the labor dispute. The target of the secondary boycott is a third party who is engaged in business dealings with the employer as a customer, supplier, or otherwise. The object of the secondary boycott is to cause the boycottee to cease doing business with the employer. Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or employment unless you recant your homosexuality.

MichaelZuo 1y ago

If a business, after unionizing, ultimately delivers more value per dollar to the end customer… then why would anyone even need to write essays arguing for it? Customers will vote with their wallets, assuming there are any durable net advantage to the customer base, so the cumulative effect would be far more penetrating and enduring than millions of written arguments.

Sharlin 1y ago
Well, that’s the naivest thing I’ve read this week.
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  Can you write out the argument for why?
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    Actually, human flesh is delicious.
    - MichaelZuo 1y ago
      Is this some kind of bot reply?
      - aziaziazi 1y ago
        Neuroelectron comment is provocative. I think he wants to demonstrate the absurdity to let consumer choices resolves value delivered to customers. A bit the same the same as I did in a peer comment, but way more implicit.
        MichaelZuo 1y ago
        That doesn’t follow… opinions aren’t automatically guaranteed to make coherent sense.

euroderf 1y ago

Obv the American chicken industry is a nightmare for farmers. Where can I read a comparison to the EU, which presumably takes better care of both farmers and chickens altho I would not bet my life on it ?

BlueTemplar 1y ago
EU has obliterated the small African farmers by dumping cheap unwanted cuts (legs) there. (Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs : those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)

kragen 1y ago

Marshall Brain, who recently committed suicide, wrote a book in 02003 about this; it's called "Manna". Unfortunately, before he killed himself, he removed it from his website. Fortunately, he didn't remove it from the WABAC machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbr... It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.

mooreds 1y ago
I came here to post the Manna story. I've read it multiple times and found it eerily prescient. (It reminds me a bit of what L. Bob Rife[0] was trying to accomplish as well in Snow Crash.) I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details about that[1]. 0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife 1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/12/16/nc-state-employee-denounced-university-his-suicide https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
- kragen 1y ago
  Yeah :-(
brendoelfrendo 1y ago
It appears to be back up on his website? Unless this version is in some way incomplete or not the original: https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
- kragen 1y ago
  You're right! Thank you! This is a better link.

cosmicgadget 1y ago

The Youtube recommender is already EOLed. I'm thinking business wins here, as soon as any labor organization method gets popular it'll be declared a violation of terms of employment. In another timeline this might be prevented with regulations.

ses1984 1y ago

Why doesn’t someone make a gig platform with a cooperative ownership model?

quinnjh 1y ago
Interesting question. I ran some quick numbers on Google, take last years profit for uber ($10B) and naively distribute it between all drivers (est 7M) and it comes out to a raise of 1,428. Most drivers would probably be enticed by that, but it’s not going to radically alter their situation. Also, Ubers board and investors are compelled via profit, as the purpose of a company is generating profit for its shareholders. Would be great to see something like you suggest take off and gain national appeal, but I suspect that VC money helps with getting billboards/ newspaper ads/ etc. You would need to craft a new sort of coop model that can generate enough profits at the top to be an attractive investment but also share some. AFAIK this works best in small teams doing high value work.
- ses1984 1y ago
  That sounds like the number of worldwide drivers, and I imagine some of them would be super happy with a $1400 bonus.

theptip 1y ago

I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society into an attractor state that’s hard to get out of. It’s by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an over-pessimistic take. It’s true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there is currently massive demand for this job. If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it’s a comfortable six-figure job. Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many (most?) jobs are going to be automatable. UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not end in a pretty place.

MangoToupe 1y ago
> unskilled labor I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree. Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers. What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon. I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs. I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。 Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.

Animats 1y ago

Organized labor doesn't seem to use those terms. There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1] The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations. [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1509 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/150... [2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmers-of-america-of-creating-monopsony-in-the-northeast/ https://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-farmer...

scotty79 1y ago

When a workers is chickenized with AI isn't that the case that it's the manager who just lost his job? That's what means to replace a manager with few lines of java (or with AI).

bitwize 1y ago

I thought they were going to be talking about that old-timey drawing of a creature with human legs and a rooster upper body.