knucklesandwich

If you think politics is not the realm of intellectual curiosity and that there's nothing political about this article you're a fucking sickening human being.

lol thanks for popping in. It sounded like he was being derisive, but not sarcastic. Sounded like he was legitemately trying to level a critique about Bezos not dogfooding, in other words (instead the fact that he's a garbage human being). Fair enough if I'm wrong, but the same kind of shit has and will continue to be said here in complete sincerity.

Looking at his comment history I'm started to think I misread irony for sincerity, but its still not clear to me where that's delimited.

The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You shouldn't have to "test" the ethicality of overworking your employees or paying yourself a huge amount of money while your worker' wages stagnate. Then again, I'm a socialist and find the entire idea of these companies to be ethically compromised because they aren't worker coops.

> Leaders are willing to take a 100x salary compared to their line employees because they know they can hustle hard enough to live up to the expectations.

> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.

Sometimes I just have to sit and marvel at how many layers of ideology some of you folks are on.

Planning is not the problem, and open borders is not a market solution. There's a fair point to be made that it's an overreach of the state, that it's unethical and pointlessly carceral and represents the kinds of things we shouldn't have government doing, but that has nothing to do with it being a failure of planning. And the soviet analogy is really going out of your way to score redbaiting ideological points when you can compare it to every other needlessly cruel and punitive policy that leads to social ills in our own legal system. At least that would be a comparison structured around the actual problem, which is one of morality and justice.

It's a failure of policy to be sure, but it's not as though planning is really at fault here, just as open borders isn't really a market solution (even though the implication that it is somehow worms its way into this argument). A market solution would be to use the government to perpetuate scarcity of visa slots and enforce property rights around a visa, and allow visa holders to sell or trade their visa rights. As a corollary, the problem with immigration is not inefficient allocation of slots caused by planning, its that we have immigration limits to begin with.

It's a neoliberal trope to try to work markets into every social problem, but this is really an issue concerning ethics and justice, not allocation.

Cool, seeing lots of garbage opinions in this thread. Either H1Bs are bad because they create greater competition with people who aren't American citizens, or if you got fired from a job that replaced you with someone on an H1B you must be a bad worker.

Haven't seen a single comment in here acknowledging that our immigration policy exists solely to benefit the wealthy (the wealthiest immigrants, or the ones with the most marketable skills and the wealthiest employers who often choose to exploit their immigrant employees via the precarity of immigration status created by an H1B). It would be great if people started having the conversation that we can have a mutually beneficial policy if we expedite citizenship for foreign born workers and actually work to build labor power in our industry instead of adopting nativist rhetoric or attempting to justify the various ways in which workers in tech are marginalized.

Love the wobblies, and from what I understand they've organized one of the few existing tech workers unions, the IWW 560. Definitely very interested in organizing with them.

No comrades of mine would see guest workers or immigrants as a threat. I wouldn't join a union that didn't stick up for all workers, regardless of their citizenship status.

Maybe we have different perspectives on how popular the anti-immigrant position is in tech (and how many neo-reactionary/dark enlightenment dipshits there are), I guess I'd just ask that you keep an open mind about this and make a decision if and when workers approach you to join a union. I certainly wouldn't knock you for opposing a group that doesn't have your interests at heart, but the union I want to form would take solidarity seriously and would explicitly go to bat for women, people of color, lgbtqia people, disabled people, and immigrants.