Jon Oliver is a very partisan comedian and therefore cannot be trusted. And when I say ‘him’ I refer to the very politicized team of writers and their network.
At least he provides the references to the info that he presents. I assume that you did your research and the vast majority of the information he presented was verifiably false. Can you please share your findings with us ?
Watch literally any episode of Jon Oliver on something you've glanced at the Wikipedia article for, and his partisan bias is grossly apparent.
Guy you're replying to didn't really make an argument, no, but it's worth ridiculing someone for posting Jon Oliver, because it is a thing to be ridiculed. That's about as bad a linking to a Bill O'Reilly op-ed as far as I'm concerned.
Dismissing facts based on the accompanying commentary is fundamentally flawed. You may not agree on the commentary part of a journalistic piece but you cannot dismiss their stories a priori. Same applies for Fox News.
People will debate whether mail in voting is good or bad, fraudulent or not, etc. That's fine, let them debate, legislate, appeal to courts, etc.
But besides all that: There is simply no scenario where allowing the USPS to half-fail improves the situation.
Even if the USPS was running perfectly, this election would still have unusually low trust, because of the pandemic and because of our especially toxic political climate. Adding a hobbled USPS to the mix makes things much worse.
Lots of people are saying Trump is trying to "muddy the waters" of the election. I suppose Trumps motivation may be debated, but I think the result is clear: A half functioning USPS will "muddy the waters" of the election result. Does anyone disagree that this will be the result? Even if (being charitable) that was not the intention.
> Ballot-printing firms couldn’t keep up with demand, and the already rickety U.S. Postal Service didn’t move the ballots to and from voters quickly enough.
Every single human that spends a single dollar is directly and demonstrably connected to systems that are rapidly (in historical proportions) destroying almost everything that humans of past eras considered wealth and value.
Mother earth.
Downvote this, but let it sink in.
There are humans on this planet that are not fueling these consumptive mechanisms. I hope.
How can we detach ourselves from these systems as we build out alternative systems?
If we reframe the problem as:
How do we run an economy not based around GDP growth, ie. Not based around birthing more people to increase labour?
Japan is ahead of the curve here in that it has an ageing population, they appear to have placed their bet on robotics.
Fundamentally this is an energy issue, with enough free energy everyone can have a high standard of living ie. BI becomes possible, we can automate away most mundane jobs with cheap robots (BOM goes down with cheap energy).
With a good standard of living, births drop- viz population charts globally except Africa, thus we get into a virtuous cycle.
The only issue is the environmental impact of lots of energy in the ecosystem, I'm not sure how that would pan out.
20 lanes of stop-and-go SUV's all single driver traveling over an hour to jobs that they hate. Terrajules of energy to create a single piece of electronics designed to break in less than 2 years. Massive manufacturing of throw away disposable items. The list goes on.
This is Hacker news. Que's Computer Users Dictionary 5th edition defines hack:
"An inordinately clever rearrangement of existing system resources that results, as if by magic, in a stunning improvement in system performance - or an equally stunning prank."
Build another one, then the story goes that you have to build weapons to defend it against "the old systems", as now the cake is all divided and such, and there is no new world to discover on earth but in space.
Why do you see the employer/employee relationship as adversarial? Perhaps you are working in the wrong company. You need employers as much as they need employees. It’s a myopic view.
An employee/employer relation is mutually beneficial but that doesn't stop conflict. The employer is still going to try and optimize to get more out of that relationship than it puts in. The employee should also do the same.
Just because you're working together in a circumstance that benefits the two parties doesn't mean each party is not also working against each other to some degree to better optimize their self-interests.
An employer may need an employee to create something and by creating and selling that thing, an employer and employee may both get a cut and benefit. None of that prevents the employer or employee from attempting to get a larger cut or do less work (invest less time) to receive their cut. Extremes to either side cause the relationship to collapse but there's definitely wiggle room in the margins beyond a 50/50 split.
I've yet to meet a single employer that doesn't try to optimize on labor costs in that relationship through some component or another, directly or indirectly.
This is a pretty fascinating perspective to me, one I had never considered. I had always thought of the employee who is paid more than the value they provide as being lazy and a leech. But that’s exactly what the corporation is doing: trying to make a profit by paying for less value than they capture from their employees.
I don't see my employer as paying less than the value they get from me. I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept. If I go do things on my own I have so many things I have to deal with. Assuming you start a business then insurance, taxes, deductions, payroll (gotta pay yourself from your company) plus I have to market my skills, network, find customers, negotiate contracts, and always worry if I don't I'll go hungry or miss rent. Or, I can just show up at some other company as an employee and in exchange for getting less than the full amount they take care of all of that and all the risk.
>I see my employer as accepting a risk I'm unwilling to accept.
Which is also true. At the same time, risk is highly relative which is why this situation is feasible at all. What's risky for you to do as an individual is not of the same order of magnitude of relative risk when you consider scaling of available resources.
Example, Alphabet, Amazon, or Company Y decide to invest $1 million in a new SaaS 'X' effort with some monthly fee in an attempt to build a successful product/service. These companies have arrays of pre-existing successful products/services they've built (typically diversified) that generate stable profits. Relative to that sort of expected profit, SaaS 'X' is a drop in the bucket. If 'X' fails, it's the same absolute monetary loss ($1 million) but the relative risk of losing $1 million isn't significant to any of these businesses, it's small relative to their total resource pool of disposable assets. Loss recovery will also take significantly less time.
On the other hand, if I as an individual go through the effort to form an LLC, develop SaaS 'X' myself and fail, $1 million is nothing to scoff at. Even if you're in the higher income scales of our industry and making $300-500k+/yr for labor, you're looking at ~3-4 years or so of potential losses and values that are probably near or a bit more than your total personal assets, at the very least I'd say 10%. If you start an LLC and get a loan or have some investor drop money on you, $1 million is still likely going to be a lot relative to your loan. It's highly likely that if 'X' fails your business will fail. There's high relative risk here (there are some mitigations strategies from your personal assets but it's still significant). You're probably going to face noticeable financial hardship or have to revert back to the labor market due to business small failure rates.
Risk is mitigated through scale, snowballed growth, and diversification (amongst other strategies) in our economic system through initial successes that often occur either through true innovation/market creation/penetration and/or sheer luck.
I think you may be reading something into the term “adversarial” that isn’t there. A relationship can be both adversarial and cooperative at the same time, that is just the nature of human behavior.
My personal take on things is that if you don’t recognize the adversarial part of the employer/employee relationship, then you will suffer for it. It’s more healthy to recognize where parties have competing interests, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them.
I’d also say that the people who can ignore the adversarial aspects of employment can only do so because of a fair bit of privilege. For example, people will throw around the saying here that “HR is an advocate for the company, not the employee,” but many of us will never really have to deal with HR in a way where it really matters.
