The majority of the employee pool in America is in a deeply economically precarious position. A month or two, or even a few hundred dollars make the difference between being able to house and feed their family or not. Employment in America is a gun to the head. The idea that choice is a factor in accepting (or doing anything to retain) a job is the delusion of a privileged few.
> Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers' dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? By what charm do these great companies immure human creatures in the bloom of youth and first glow of life within their mills, away from their homes and kindred? A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.
> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.
And 100% of people who accepted jobs in union shops accepted jobs in union shops. If accepting the job counts as a "vote" "for" the company, why doesn't accepting a unionized job count as a vote for the union?
In a few cases I've had to ask for changes to the contract. I have never and will never sign a non-compete. I'll sign NDAs, and IP agreements and relinquish patent rights, but never will I sign something that dictates what I can or cannot do once no longer employed.
Once I walked away from a contract where they refused to remove the 1-year non-compete.
Another time I worked for a for a startup which had started out as an open source/volunteer project. After a big disagreement about the contract with the lawyer, the principal investor told me to 'sign the contract I wanted.' I refused to write my own contract and insisted the lawyer stop being insane and send me a contract without the non-compete section. She never did, but I started getting paid.
It worked out. The startup failed, I gutted the two commits that weren't mine and back-ported all the changes to the OSS version, keeping it all GPLv3.
TL;DR I accepted a job without accepting a job contract.
I take your point to be that you negotiated on your own behalf, which is great.
I think it's fair to say that very few people have the savvy to know that offer terms are negotiable, and further that very few people are employed in high-demand careers where they can negotiate their employment terms 1:1.
The companies have information asymmetry on their side, since these negotiations are performed sequentially and in private. Mathematically, the Nash Equilibrium looks very different for n sequential negotiations of "who will sign this non-compete?" vs a single all-or-nothing negotiation where the company ends up with <n|zero> employees.
I don't like the "SJW" metaphor, but that said, there's really nothing to choose between those so described and their opposite numbers on the other side of the Assemblée Nationale. Different as the ends they profess to prefer may be, they eventually converge upon very similar means. Those of us with qualms about consequentialism find this unsettling.
Not sure how it works in the UK, but here in the US there's a difference between "conservatives" and "Republicans". The key being that Republicans love big government when it's them in charge of it whereas conservatives want less government.
So from the conservative conferences I've attended, the general sentiment is that people DON'T want an authoritarian government watching them. Further right into Nationalism is where you get the "if you didn't do anything wrong you have nothing to hide" mentality.
> So from the conservative conferences I've attended, the general sentiment is that people DON'T want an authoritarian government watching them.
May, as Home Secretary, made the laws that give the UK government 72 hours (IIRC) to read your personal email and 3 months to see all the subject lines / senders / recipients.
To be clear: I'm not advocating voting for Corbyn by the above.
I guess I'm misinterpreting all these antifa videos. Here I thought it was just a human thing, and both sides have the capability of pulling dumb, dangerous ideas out. No it's just conservatives right?
One important difference is that Theresa May is leader of a major western country, while Berkeley students you saw in a video on the internet aren't. This makes one of them a much more pressing threat.
True among people on the same "side" of the political spectrum too. The Tories' brand of authoritarian conservatism is much more dangerous than Westboro Baptist Church, for example. You can find Westboro advocating plenty of outrageous things, but they aren't in charge of a country.
It's still an excellent compendium of verifiable data. I'm left leaning, but like the Labour front bench, the Labour voters, and the Guardian I have to stand against hard left extremism rather than support it. in which case, the LibDems and Greens are excellent choices.
What makes you think Corbyn is an "extremist"? If you think the Labour party, with its strong social democratic is extreme, what must you think of the Communist Party? Perhaps I'm in a minority, but I don't think Corbyn is left enough.
For those who don't live in the UK, Corbyn (and Momentum, the hard left group which has recently taken over the Labour party in the UK) is well known to support various groups who commit political violence against non-military targets.
Yep, not just Bahrain but the Saudis as well. I won't vote for the Conservatives for other reasons but UK governments both left and right have always sidled up to awful regimes in the name of diplomacy. We don't need to add extremist groups to the list.
How about we reject both the dictators and the terrorists?
There has been a huge partially successful smear campaign against Corbyn, some written by reputable politicians, some like this so laughable and ridiculous that only the already convinced manage to read through the whole thing without rolling their eyes and closing it.
It means people with power are afraid of him which is quite encouraging!
The article addresses the 'smear campaign' theories - that:
- the Labour front bench
- the Labour electorate
- the Guardian,
- Jewish groups
- Caitlin Moran
and anyone else opposed to this madness are all involved in some kind of organised conspiracy against Corbyn, quite well:
> Labour’s communications team lies about “the IRA thing”, claiming that Corbyn’s glorification of butchery should be seen as “helping the peace process”, as though the man who voted against the Anglo-Irish Agreement was secretly urging Gerry Adams to compromise.
Corbyn fighting against the trial of the Brighton bomber and voting against the Anglo-Irish Agreement are matters of record. As are his statements of support for:
- Hamas
- Hezbollah
- Fidel Castro
- Hugo Chavez
and other hard left groups who've attacked innocent people.
They're laughable, but more in a: "this man thinks he has a shot of running the UK". Thankfully we reject this kind of populism more than the US does and a large chunk of the left isn't participating in or voting for Labour until/unless he's gone.
Indeed the neoliberal consensus is that he and anyone who rejects it should not have any say in the government and extremist neoliberal ideology has taken over much of the elite power structures in the UK (as well as the US!)
If saying nice things about bad people were actually a problem, no politician in history in any western society would ever be allowed to rule. Pick any politician and you will find them endorsing, funding, supporting or any combination brutal dictators, apartheid regimes, terrorists like Al Qaeda (years ago), slave states, various factions fighting in Syria, Iraq (pre Iraq war), Qatar, Turkey, Dubai, Iran (pre islamic revolution or post), Israel, death squads in South America, Pinochet, on and on and on. To have any "serious" position in modern foreign policy is to support evil.
These "statements of support" are of course ridiculous 'gotcha' red herrings that actually mean nothing that neoliberal ideologues use to smear his personality and avoid talking about actual policy that could seriously effect the lives of ordinary UK citizens which they desperately do not want to improve, policy like for example the devastating and horrific one that is supposed to be the subject of this discussion thread.
> To have any "serious" position in modern foreign policy is to support evil.
Saying the trial of the Brighton bomber is a "show trial" and protesting it has very little to do with foreign policy. The IRA did not represent a foreign government and the five people killed were neither military nor government ministers.
Neither does mourning Fidel Castro, after he's dead.
Also:
- The mainstream left people you'll find not voting for Corbyn are normally referred to as 'classical liberal' - liberals have always been against people inflicting violence upon others. The people handing out copies of 'Socialist Worker' outside the tube, Corbyn and you are 'extreme left'.
- Acting as if supporting Momentum is the only way to challenge the conservatives on privacy is insincere.
I can believe some people (perhaps you!) genuinely object primarily to Corbyn's viewpoints on foreign policy, Northern Ireland, etc., but much of the media commentary seems disingenuous to me. Do people really think if Jeremy Corbyn took over from Theresa May, it would lead to him instituting gulags in the UK or something? This feels like trying to stretch disagreeing with something he said about the Cold War into some kind of actual worry about 21st-century policy he is likely to enact, for mostly election-campaign point-scoring reasons.
My usual assumption is that people focusing on those issues among the large media companies and especially the Blairite Labour-right, are mostly people who actually object to other parts of Corbyn's views. Namely the ones that are in the Labour manifesto and most likely to be enacted if he's elected. But such opponents don't want to attack those openly stated policy positions head-on, so they try to change the subject to Fidel Castro, as if talking about Fidel Castro in 2017 is relevant. For example, some people think re-nationalising significant parts of UK infrastructure is extremist, a return back to the bad old days of sclerotic state-owned companies. And if you did think that, it is completely fair to attack Corbyn on it, because that's something he supports, is in the manifesto, and would have at least some likelihood of enacting if in office. But many of Corbyn's opponents, even among people who call themselves Labour, seem allergic to debating his proposals to nationalise the rail system, i.e. to debating the actual policy direction the UK should or should not take. They don't like those proposals, but they would rather attack them indirectly, by debating something else.
I think most people be the primarily to Corbyn's viewpoints on terror (not foreign policy, as we have discussed, most of these groups are not governments), and polling bears this out.
This speaks volumes about his character, and I think to the extent his party would allow him he'd wreck incentive to work, yes. Obviously Corbyn's opponents do note this policies, which are based us an unfounded utopia where everyone can work for the NHS, nationalising rail won't make it as shit as the last the it was nationalised, and police officers cost GBP 7.50 a year.
> and I think to the extent his party would allow him he'd wreck incentive to work, yes.
Please be aware that all the research we have shows the current DWP system implemented by the Conservatives makes it harder to return to work; cause harm; are more expensive than other systems; and are causing death.
We do need to protect public money. The benefit system should help people back to work. The current system does not do that. I don't think any party has properly addressed this.
A hundred 20 year old kids rioted one time against people they perceive to be nazis and were managed by the police, which is definitely the same as a modern mostly free society actively sliding into authoritarian dictatorship.
Right, but that's not helpful if I'm unable to efile because of their "new measures." Why not allow several forms of ID, like maybe a driver's license or passport? Why is a phone number the blocking step? Who designed this system?
That's how I feel whenever I am forced to interact with the IRS. Once, I went to one of their fully automated systems only to find that the entire website was only open between the hours of 9AM-5PM on weekdays! What?
I'm getting real tired of this shit. It's just unreasonable to expect me to jump through all of these hoops for something that they insist is so essential. If it's essential, then make it easy! If it's not easy, then don't make me do it!
Life is hard enough without the government ordering me to do busywork, and then failing to support the systems which they want me to use. Either it shouldn't be an order, or the system should work. Full stop. And I wouldn't be so upset if this horseshit bureaucracy and presumption of malfeasance wasn't starting to permeate every single aspect of modern life.
Damn, if your time is so valuable just hire an accountant for a few hundred bucks and let them file for you. That's what I do since I own a small consultancy. Total bill this year: $150. Time spent on taxes? < 1 hour.
Tax evasion and fraud affects us all, whether you want to admit it or not.
There have been efforts to change state/federal law so that tax agencies can send you a bill for what they think you owe, potentially saving you a lot of work. Unfortunately tax-prep companies have lobbied against it.
They finally added a way to easily get the original URL (click the link button in the AMP header). Not ideal, but better than trying to get it out of the address bar.
