BigNote
@BigNote@lemm.ee
- Comment on Wreck the economy because it only works for the billionaire class. 1 year ago:
Cool. Everything you say is true, but I’m just telling you that you’re wrong if you think that organized labor is or should be somehow against the Biden Administration.
The reality is that he has appointed the most pro-union and labor-friendly NLRB in modern history.
I’m actually a bit disgusted with people like you who think you know how it is down at our local union halls.
You are the elitist motherfuckers who tell us what we should and shouldn’t do or believe in.
Here’s a cordial fuck you!
Local 10 till I die!
- Comment on Wreck the economy because it only works for the billionaire class. 1 year ago:
You are overplaying it though. I am active in my union and in the organized labor movement more broadly here in the PNW. The railway strike left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, but there’s also a recognition among leadership that the administration didn’t have any great options if they didn’t want to further tank the economy and cause even more inflation with potentially worse long-term results for everyone.
On the flipside he has appointed by far the most pro union NLRB in history, so this is kind of a case of letting the good be the enemy of the perfect.
- Comment on Who knew 1989 was an uneventful year in China 1 year ago:
There’s nothing ironic about it at all.
- Comment on Who knew 1989 was an uneventful year in China 1 year ago:
Yes, you are basically describing Hobbes’ “Leviathan.”
- Comment on 66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work 1 year ago:
You do if you’re in a union. At least my union does. Part of our pay package includes contributions to our PTO accounts at our credit union. As far as I’m aware, the same is true for all of the other big trade unions as well. We also have paid sick days that accrue over the course of the year with any unused getting rolled over or paid out if you quit.
- Comment on 66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work 1 year ago:
The US had a strong labor movement before the 2nd world war and into the 1950s when union membership was at its highest and the middle class was thriving and wealth inequality was a fraction of what it is today. What killed it was the Cold war and the spectre of communism which was used by conservatives (there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans back then) as a bludgeon to effectively kill the labor movement over the following decades until Reagan finally put a stake through its heart in the 80s.
That’s the short version anyway. There’s obviously a lot more to it.
In any case, the good news is that a lot of people seem to be waking up and demanding change. Union membership is on the rise as are other encouraging signs. I’m way too jaded to be optimistic about it, but I’m not as pessimistic as I once was. My own union has won two strikes in the last 5 years, for example.
On the flipside, the left has managed to pretty thoroughly alienate a huge chunk of blue collar workers who should be their natural constituency, so that’s not great either.
- Comment on Is America Really That Bad? 1 year ago:
For most people most of the time it’s a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it’s a huge country with tons of variation so if you’re looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.
What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.
- Comment on The fact that people this stupid exist 1 year ago:
You call it “lazy,” I call it time management. No one has the time or intellectual bandwidth to respond to all the deeply stupid comments on the Internet, so downvotes give us a quick and easy to register our opinion and move on.
- Comment on Tick tock 🕚 1 year ago:
It’s Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen I believe. I could be wrong though since it’s been decades since I last read it.
- Comment on Tick tock 🕚 1 year ago:
There are a lot of people in this thread who became legal experts by passing the Reddit bar exam, or something of equally imaginary significance.
- Comment on Tick tock 🕚 1 year ago:
You are quite simply mistaken.
- Comment on So much for that dream. 1 year ago:
In a word the answer is cost, or economic viability. Local papers can’t operate for free, even strictly online. It costs money to hire and maintain a functional staff of college-educated reporters and editors who are willing to live and work in small towns and rural communities.
Without classified ads/advertising, a physical subscription base and real newsstand sales, where is the money supposed to come from?
The answer is that it’s not there at all, and that’s why local news has basically died over the course of the last two decades.
If you can think of a new workable revenue model for local news, by all means please do tell. The entire nation is screaming for a solution, though many of us may not know it.
- Comment on There's a steep decline in pay compared to the value workers add to the economy, closely tracking the fall in union membership. 1 year ago:
There is no universe in which Chinese labor unions are even remotely the same thing as labor unions in the western-style industrialized democracies. China is an authoritarian top-down quasi-capitalistic system which means that there is no management for workers to negotiate with apart from a single massive structure that’s ultimately controlled by Xi’s government.
Contrast that to western-style industrialized democracies wherein unions are meant to use organized labor as a ballast against the power of privately owned industrial management.
It’s just not the same thing at all.
Furthermore, while virtually all modern machinery contains Chinese-made parts, it’s just a fact that in the western-style industrialized democracies, tradesmen vastly prefer power-tools made in places like the US or Germany or Japan because they tend to be much better in terms of quality and reliability and lifespan then are their Chinese-made counterparts.
Go to any big construction site in the US and you’ll immediately see that the workers prefer brands like Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Hilti, Husqvarna and Bosch over the cheaper Chinese-made alternatives, for example.
- Comment on So much for that dream. 1 year ago:
This is because the Internet killed journalism’s revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn’t get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it’s just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.
One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don’t.
- Comment on More of a uniform than a costume. 1 year ago:
Boulder is not a small town. But even if it were, it’s a college town which, surprise surprise, always changes the small town dynamic.
- Comment on More of a uniform than a costume. 1 year ago:
Fair play. That said, you get used to it.
- Comment on BMW 1 year ago:
100 percent agree. The world is disappointingly full of morons and idiots.
There’s a Bertrand Russell quote to the effect that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and arrogant, while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
No doubt I’ve botched the actual quote, but the point remains regardless.
- Comment on BMW 1 year ago:
Well this got disappointingly stupid in no time at all. What I see here is something roughly like the same proportion of idiots as one would typically expect on Reddit.
- Comment on Part of a balanced diet 1 year ago:
Yes but typically they come with a ton of sodium, as do olives. Won’t anyone think of the sodium? Blood pressure be damned!
- Comment on BMW 1 year ago:
Yes and no. They also saw the US as ethnically impure and therefore weak. The 4th Reich wasn’t going to have that problem.
- Comment on Why is Hugging Allowed in Boxing? 1 year ago:
It’s called the clinch and is a huge part of the sport. There can be a lot happening in the clinch that casual observers won’t necessarily see or appreciate. Some of the all-time greats were masters at working the clinch.
- Comment on Does this instance have a stance on right wing disinformation communities? 1 year ago:
That escalated quickly.