Then it should be discussed. Along with the policies already mentioned in the article and it's disingenuous not to do so. How can we expect to make informed decisions if we selectively choose what information to expose or hide for discussion?
I agree that engagement and discussing policies is important. But it does feel disingenuous and aimed at provoking outrage (to trigger a knee-jerk reaction) when you just mention a fact like "look at these rich guys that don't share anything!" and ignore the context of why it got to be the way it is.
And I'm not saying that there aren't changes that could and should be made. Just that this particular article doesn't have the feel of a fair debate aiming to inform people, but more of an outrage-inducing propaganda.
jealousy leading to anger is all part of the political play book and the NYT is there to serve its political masters by running stories that will soon be picked up by candidates to run with.
it is all part and parcel with an upcoming election. get your direction from the PAC you deny feeds you stuff, write an article with enough truth in it to pass muster but leaving out enough to make a "rational" decision. Thereby upsetting people by appealing to jealousy, envy, and such, by playing on their morals. After all everyone is for justice, protecting children, the environment, and fairness, aren't they?
tripe like this doesn't belong on HN but with the election season spinning up we will get flooded with both direct and indirect stories that are politically driven.
Right, except the candidate with the most detailed and thought out policies designed to tackle these issues (and one of the front runners currently) is Elizabeth Warren, a senator who has built her career doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The vast, vast majority of her funding comes from individual contributions and the vast majority of the rest comes from such "lobbying powerhouses" like Emily's List. Are you seriously claiming that the NYT's political master is the woman who spearheaded the CFPB?
Intellectually void "everyone is corrupt why cant the sheeple see" tripe is best saved for Reddit.
I'm fine with outrage-inducing propaganda against people who have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars since that class as a whole spends so much time putting out propaganda in their favor. I'm not particularly interested in the details as long as it elevates consciousness about the inherent problems with a society that allows Jeff Bezos to have more money than he could spend in ten thousand lifetimes while millions of people aren't entirely sure how they're going to afford food next week
Out of all the rich people we could talk about, Bezos is actually one of the ones I have the least problem with. Bezos has a lot of money, but he doesn't have tens of billions of dollars of "money". His net worth is mostly tied up in Amazon ownership, and if he tried to liquidate more than a small fraction of it then it'd suddenly be worth much less, both because of increased supply, and because Amazon's value is very tied up in his ability to drive the company. Maybe we could talk about problems with a system that allow Amazon to be worth as much as it is, but for the founder of a company to be worth a lot because they built a big company, that doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Amazon is not Jeff Bezos. Taxing him would be a whole different topic of conversation. Probably more on the topics of executive compensation, taxes for high incomes, and a bunch of other possible subjects.
Interesting discussion to be had, for sure, but not what the article is really about.
It all falls under the same umbrella, which as you accurately described as "rich guys who don't share anything" and as far as I'm concerned any amount of elevated consciousness around that is a good thing, even if strictly speaking taking money from Bezos the man and Amazon the company are two separate types of taxation and two different discussions. Bezos and his company Amazon both make almost unfathomable amounts of money and don't pay anywhere near what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society. As Amazon's PR people point out this is legal, naturally, but this article does a good job of contrasting Amazon using every tax trick in the book with normal human beings who aren't able to deduct their expenses for cancer treatment. Likely because the lobby representing the financial interests of individuals with cancer is not all that strong.
"Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, but I pay taxes" is a very good sound byte from this, even if the reasons why that's the case are obviously more complicated.
How about we don’t encourage outrage inducing propaganda against anyone? If you have an issue with some someone has actually done (like for example putting out their own propoganda) then by all means be critical of that. What value is there in accepting vapid nonsense, just because it targets someone you dislike?
Fair enough. I agree that the word count would much better be spent on discussing the relevant legislation and resulting tax codes.
But let me be honest. I wouldn't read that story. I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine on the legislative process except to express exasperation at the gridlock. I am however qualified to vote for candidates who are and that first requires awareness of the issues, a topic orthogonal to a precise understanding of the solutions, just like I need a doctor to tell me what to do about my infection after the pain has brought attention to it, not explain the intricate details of how assays work or how antibiotics disrupt bacterial functions.
> I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine
Which makes it so easy for the NYT to manipulate you into jealous frenzy.
A lot of people see an outrageous headline and too few ask "what's the other side of the story?" The media knows this and can use it to direct your ire at any of their competitors because it's so effective
The other side of it is what my personal and business's accountants do. I don't need to know the intricate details of their work to look at the final bill and realize that maybe I should be paying more for the benefits I enjoy in this country, especially considering my native tax rate - which gets me a hell of a lot less in Russia than the nearly equivalent effective rate does in the US.
The problem is that the NYT ignored the why almost entirely to generate outrage because they are creating an issue. Most people wouldn’t be outraged if you said “this company didn’t pay tax this year on its $2B in profits because it lost $1B last year, and invested $1B in a new research facility (and got accelerated depreciation)”
I thought this (among other paragraphs) provided context:
"Though both parties have sought to lower the top corporate tax rate in the last decade — President Barack Obama proposed lowering it from 35 percent to 28 percent — Republicans in 2017 pushed it down to 21 percent, in addition to expanding some generous tax breaks. The new law allowed immediate expensing of capital expenditures, for example, in order to goose investment. That was one of the primary reasons that more corporations paid no federal taxes, according to the report.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies argued that the tax changes would stimulate investment and economic growth. That has happened, though not by as much as they predicted."
There's no debate here, the article was written by one person. It juxtaposes several facts (changes in tax law over the last 10 years, a group of profitable corporations with an effective corporate tax rate of 0 (or negative), poll results, factory closings, and a number of statements by presidential contenders) and, for context, adds a handful of statements from voters and minor activists to give the reader a sense of of how voters in Ohio are viewing these changes.
It's full of charts and dates and numbers. While the title is a little provocative, I find the body text to be informative and interesting, and feel the temperature is kept relatively low given the extremely contentious subject matter.
It mentions tax rate laws, but those don't actually cover why Amazon effectively paid no taxes. I.e. massive investments in R&D, stock-based employee compensation, carry-forwards losses, and whatever else I may still be missing.
I don't think it can be considered fairly informative if it doesn't cover how we got to those values. From reading this article, one could still ask if a tax rate is at 21%, how does that mean a profitable company doesn't pay any taxes?
I don't think its an article about Amazon's tax bill as such. It's about how Ohio voters and presidential candidates are reacting to Amazon and several other firms' effective tax rates.
If they went through what Amazon and Goodyear and GM and Duke Energy all did then they would just be rehashing the report that they conveniently linked.
Perhaps I'm still too naive and innocent, but I don't think this represents the overall reality of the company. A lot of people participated in the protests mentioned and only two statements of retaliations were given (edit: or at least leaked to the media), with "more than a dozen" shared during the meeting in question. Given the sheer size of the company, if there was "systemic" retaliation I'd expect these to be in the order of a few hundreds, or many dozens at the least.
In addition, we're only seeing this from the perspective of those who feel they were retaliated against because of those protests, with absolutely no additional context or perspective of the managers/execs/peers (which I think we will never obtain for rather obvious reasons).
Personally, I have found Google to have a really open culture of communication. You're generally free to give your opinion. I'd be much more afraid of retaliation from peers due to something I said being considered offensive by some of them, than by an executive or my manager due to speaking out against the way the company does things (which happens all the time and by large amounts of employees). Of course that's just one experience and I may have been lucky with my own team.
disclaimer: I recently joined Google but I'm only aware of these incidents from media publications such as this and everything above is just my personal opinion on the incident.
Edit: Added that "more than a dozen" other stories were shared in the meeting according to the article, as I had originally missed that.
For each reporter - how many people do you think did not report?
Do you honestly think ALL people reported?
If its not dozens unreported per one report (or more) I'd eat my hat.
In my history of corporations, almost all bad behavior goes unreported because those in power are doing the bad thing. It seems like Google is not different in this respect.
> For each reporter - how many people do you think did not report?
For group discussions with no negative impact, there tends to be a 1-9-90 rule. 1% of the group is highly active, 9% are somewhat active, 90% are passive.
I believe it's safe to assume that similar ratios can be found in incidents like this - 1% or fewer will go public, 9% will go to their colleagues, and 90% will suffer in silence.
You could also question the validity/fairness of existing complaints.
Ultimately, I don't think taking the argument down this path of conjecture over allegations (or lack thereof) will help clear our view of what is or is not the reality at the company. That's what company wide satisfaction surveys or platforms like Glassdoor are for. And in both accounts I don't see many signs that Google is doing poorly.
Edit: and the results of investigations prompted by these accusations might shed some light as well.
But the regulations are already in place. In the UK especially there are very strict and broad-range hate-speech laws. And most of the content referred to as problematic already breaches the ToS for the platforms mentioned. And evidence suggests those companies have already been pouring resources into trust and safety teams to detect and stop such content.
Getting rid of "problematic" user content on social networks for the masses is a very hard game of whack-a-mole as people quickly adapt their way of sharing content when it's being blocked. Ultimately you'd have to destroy the value of the social network altogether to ensure you block all of it.
This is just going to give legal power for government PR campaigns whenever a particular "problematic" opinion gains too much traction, since it's so vaguely defined that any website with user content could be penalized at any time at an official's discretion regardless of context and whether it's true hate speech or not. All the actual problematic crap (real hate speech, actual abuse/mutilation videos, etc.) will never gain that kind of spotlight and will continue to find new ways to circulate faster than it's stopped.
> But it also covers harmful behaviour that has a less clear legal definition such as cyber-bullying, trolling and the spread of fake news and disinformation.
So, basically any site with user content can be fined/blocked at any time at the official's discretion.
This child-porn and terrorism is the propaganda catch-phrase to make people agree with it. Like the UK porn-filter.
While it never will happen, this rule would mean that the BBC should be banned too. It published fake news that started the Iraq war, and one of the famous hosts was a child molester.
Instead they will ban sites that disclose the military propaganda that is published by the government media. Will they now try to block wikileaks and other similar journalism?
My greatest fear is that these waves of censorship are there to remove resistance against a 3rd world war. The US, Israel and UK are currently very aggressive.
Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news.
> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact.
What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1].
We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them.
I was part of the protests. It was widely reported in the media that WMDs weren't found, that Iraq was cooperating with the UN, and that the government's evidence was debunked.
The "anti-war" thing was just a big-tent message that most of those against the war could agree to (with each group having their own reason for being against it).
As someone who was against the war, I would say I didn’t know they didn’t have WMDs.
What I did think was that even if they did, there were other options on the table and that those had not been pursued to their full extent. Yes Saddam was playing 3-card Monty, but never the less we had time at our disposal we also didn’t pursue corroborating evidence and it all seemed like making up a reason for war rather than an actual casus belli. I mean, so what some known terrorists had passage? It’s not as if Saddam didn’t have his own insurrections to deal with.
There was no nuance. It was all let’s go! Most dissenters were more like, slow down, we’re not there yet, we haven’t exhausted all options yet.
The UN Weapons inspectors debunked the WMDs before troops even entered the country.
> In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active program.
I don’t think that was conclusive (they didn’t have free access). Also, often times a first go at anything is typically faulty. It was; however, a reason to put things on hold and be more rigorous and investigate further.
I think mostly it was the establishment (Dems, Repubs, Globalists, etc. m) that wanted Saddam out, no matter what. Only old-style conservatives and leftists and other small constituencies dissented.
I’m not going to rehash the Iraq war timeline.. you’ve clearly missed my point. Just replace Iraq with gulf of Tonkin. That deception lasted a lot longer.
The correct information was available, but largely ignored by mass media. For example:
> 13 March 2003
> The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.
> Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.
> Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student's thesis).
> General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons programme.
[...]
> In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.
> For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.
> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact.
Key US/UK claims were debunked by UN weapons inspectors in the same UN hearing where they were presented.
That the “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction” weren't the mobile WMD labs they were portrayed as (and that the US and UK knew because the UK had literally sold them to Iraq) was also also public before the war.
> In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news
No, worse, it would just be ignored by large masses of the public who would believe the government anyway, and even forget that they'd been given repeated information about how they were being lied to.
Did he aplogize yet for spreading outrageous lies about Khan-Sheikoun 2017 chemical attack, smearing doctors and first responders? The investigation of that attack is over. It would be appropriate, now that there has been a 2nd aniversary a few days ago.
thanks for sharing this phenomenal video. not from the US so I wasn't familiar with him. really enjoyed the tear-down and explanation on this propaganda campaign and how it works in contrast to before the internet.
Don't forget to check his track record on claims about past incidents from his past videos, that were actually later investigated by competent third parties.
You may be less excited as a result, about his other claims.
This is probably a tool the government wants to use when something like a mass shooting manifesto is published. Facebook can't stop people reading it? Well then let's block Facebook for a week.
Interestingly, this is the same tactic dictatorships use to quell rebellions.
The web has been more or less mainstream for going on 25 years now - before that, the dominant mainstream mass communication medium was television. Television was, and still is, subject to government censorship and regulation based on very tenuous legal arguments (viciously supported by pearl-clutching moral panicking puritans), and we've seen what it becomes: mindless, thoughtless, brainless, and above-all only "offensive" or thought-provoking in very specifically constrained ways. As soon as the web started to become well known, I was idly curious how long it would take to become television - to be honest, it's taken longer than I realistically expected, mostly because world governments can't quite seem to agree on exactly how they should oppress us, but believe me, it's coming. And when it does, there really won't be many of us that see it as a negative.
> I don’t think it’s about supply and demand for game developer pay either
If there was a shortage of game developers, employers would be forced to give much better benefits and compensation to retain and hire staff (and probably there would be a lot less games and studios). There may be more to the analysis, but I don't agree that you can ignore supply and demand and turn this into just oppressor greedy guy vs oppressed exploited worker instead.
I don't want to make it reductionist at all, you're right.
A more enlightened view of compensation, if you need a more general economic way of looking at it, is: "In a world where most of economic value exists in human relationships or in computation, compensation is more about (1) how accounting reflects that economic reality, and (2) how well the compensated individual extracts accounting value from whatever big picture the accountants came up with."
In that sense, unions are exactly the remedy, because they negotiate how these employees are paid relative to the accounting value of their business.
It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.
This is totally unlike another notoriously unionized industry, autos, where a lot of the value is tied up in really objective, physical stuff like gas mileage or maintenance. Most of the economic value of Fortnite is in the experiences it makes between friends and the computer code consistently delivering that experience, whether on your phone or in the servers.
Supply/demand as the framework is kind of a stupid point of view. We can't listen to too many finance/economics people, especially the rich ones we actually hear from as opposed to the poor ones who may be right but whom we don't give a shit about. The rich ones aren't in the ground level of humanity anymore. That's what the perspective on HN is really about: sorting out which rich person you agree with.
But if you want to do the right thing, you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost.
> It's all accounting! I can't emphasize this enough--you can pay the employees 2x as much, or 10x as much, or 1/2x as much, and Fortnite will be EXACTLY as fun as it is now. That's what people are outraged about.
Yes, but there is a difference if it takes 20 devs to make it and there are only 10 available vs there being 200. Competition among the devs as to who gets to make it means each of them will tolerate worse conditions to get the offer over the other. Effectively driving down the costs of producing the game. With a union in play, the cost of production would be stopped from going down.
I'm not necessarily arguing that it is worse with a union than without. But an expected side effect of forcing high costs (high wages in this case) would be that it would make it much harder for aspiring game devs to enter the field.
> you unionize because it will get these people paid better and feel happier at basically no economic cost
This is not true. Again, unions might produce a better outcome, I don't know otherwise for sure. But to think that you can tweak the economic system to behave exactly as you want it to, producing all the positive outcomes with no negatives, is absurd. We can often fail to achieve anything similar with simple software systems, much less with something as intricate and complex as humanity.
> Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of 'passion', and to go where their skills are appreciated/where they're treated better/fairly compensated
This. Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.
Ultimately I don't think there is a right answer and which way you choose is up to you. But it sounds like a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" situation.
Lucky are those who are passionate about things the majority of the labor pool hates but many businesses need.
Edit: Just to prevent misunderstandings, this is my opinion on Unionisation in this particular industry where there are many (private) companies. It can be a different story if your only employers are not driven by profits and losses or are not in a competitive market (e.g. a government) and I wasn't trying to make a sweeping generic statement like "all unions are always bad"
You don't need to look any further than the film/TV industry in the US. There are any number of guilds with various rules and minimum pay scales, etc. It doesn't keep countless people from waiting tables in LA hoping for their big break.
I think developers are more like the background technical staff and startup founders are the big name actor equivalents. Founders move to SF, work hard, and generally struggle trying to become Zuckerburg as much as LA actors trying to become Chris Pratt.
But for every movie with the Micheal Bay or The Rock there are hundreds of unionized workers creating the explosions, car chases, and sets in the background. Just like developers they're the ones that make the production work but no one knows our name. (with few exceptions like John Carmack, but then again there are special effects experts with tv shows)
Yes, but that's important to know if you're proposing unionization in the hopes that it will make it so that every qualified person who wants to work in game development is paid fairly. Like with acting, only a small fraction of people will find such jobs, even with unionization.
But the point is they often go beyond ensuring people are treated fairly, and artificially drive up wages by constraining the supply of labor. This is a very unfair system. It benefits those they have the privilege to get into the guild (which often entails having the right connections, and until the Civil Rights movement also had the requirement of "be White"), at the expense if those that don't get into the guild. It also drives up costs for consumers.
I think it's a difficult claim to make that there's no demand when they specifically state that unpaid overtime is the norm. Why would they need overtime work if there were enough workers?
Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours than to have more workers working for less time. Especially when you're not paying them for overtime.
>Because it's technically cheaper to have less workers and to work them for longer hours
That depends on whether fixed costs of hiring another developer (and coordination costs) outweigh the variable costs of the current developers working more. The variable costs could be lesser quality of work when the developer is overworked or overtime laws.
Overtime laws are supposed to act as a penalty on companies for not hiring enough labour for the required task.
They don't need it. They do it because it's more profitable. If you don't want those conditions they can easily find someone else willing to accept them due to the huge hiring pool available.
Edit: you're far less likely to risk burning out your employees if they are hard to replace.
I think the fact that they can get unpaid work, means they don't need to pay for it. Why pay for 10 people when you can get 5 to do it? No matter how little you pay for labor, free (i.e. unpaid overtime) is cheaper.
Which is why, in this case, unionization isn't just (to paraphrase) ignoring that there's not enough demand.
One intended result is that it would forcibly remove the option of externalizing the consequences of intentionally under-utilizing the labor pool. It prevents bad behavior (behavior that should already be illegal IMO). Freely exploiting your workers because they have no bargaining power should always discouraged.
While I certainly agree, the historical record suggests that unionization often requires a certain amount of labor scarcity in order to happen in the first place. Of course, enough scarcity and the workers won't see the need, perhaps because there isn't any, but in cases of superabundance of labor it is extraordinarily difficult (usually impossible) to successfully unionize.
I certainly agree that unions can make a big difference in the intermediate case.
You might be right here. In an ideal world, limitations on unpaid overtime would already protect these workers, and then there would be little or no perceived benefit for the unions they are talking about.
Living on a country where unions are horizontal to the industry, with a couple of them supporting people on the computing world, regardless of the company, this US point of view keeps surprising me.
I guess in that case it would come as a bigger surprise that I'm from the EU, and from a country where unions are quite well established, and have never been to, studied, or worked in the US.
> there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.
This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.
Unionization in the game industry is not about magically thinking that higher salaries will appear out of thin air. It's about low-ranking employees coordinating with each other to correct some of the power imbalance versus executives so that rank and file can get a larger share of the pie.
> This argument would be stronger if the game industry didn't also feature a large number of insanely well paid executives.
But why would a surplus of developers need to correlate with a surplus of executives?
If anything it makes more sense to see a larger rift between workers and executives/investors because the costs for developers have been driven down by competition among them.
I may concede that overall it could be better with a union, but lets not pretend this will mean all current game devs will make more money. You will have less game devs who will be making more money (narrowing the gap to execs in the industry) while others get driven away from the profession.
>Unionisation is basically an attempt to reject the reality that there isn't enough demand for all that labor to be valuable at/above market-average.
What a shallow definition of Unions.
How about it's about grabbing a larger share of the pie for workers, so the CEO of Activation isn't making 300x the average worker? Or are you of the mind he's "earned" that?
Pretty sure that comment is referring to unionizing within the games industry where there is an overabundance of qualified people who want the jobs available.
I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions).
When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.
Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.
That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.
A reverse corporation of sorts, but with only a single source of revenue. A corporation is a collective that works together to produce something. A union, on the other hand, seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it.
I guess my main points were that corporations differ in that their “host” is basically all of society and they must produce things of value or they die, but a union’s “host” is either a single corporation or industry and they do not directly produce things of value.
So, we won't find a correlation between people who go to prison and propensity to immoral behavior? Or even intentionally mislabeling immoral behavior as moral.
HN should be wise enough to know that correlation is not causation, and that statistical differences in behaviour between groups do not necessarily describe an individual from the group. But that does not invalidate OP's point.
Then it should be discussed. Along with the policies already mentioned in the article and it's disingenuous not to do so. How can we expect to make informed decisions if we selectively choose what information to expose or hide for discussion?