But it's not about reciprocity if you're truly committed to free speech right?

> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.

Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.

The problem is that second and third order effects _are_ the concepts in many cases.

> If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.

Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.

C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.

> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.

The rule is vacated by an injunction.

> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.

I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.

> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.

> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.

> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.

Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.

> What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?

* Employer-bound health insurance in the US

* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members

* Noncompetes and NDAs

* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers

> An econ 101 observation

Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.

In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.

Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

Very much so.

> Either a) you do know what you’re talking about, or b) you are not confident in the results. It can’t be both.

You've been coding for a lifetime yet you don't seem to get that certainty in software is a spectrum? I have sufficient confidence in the output of LLMs to sign my name under the code it writes when putting up a PR for a specialist to read. That's good enough for 90% of the work that we do day-to-day. You think that's not hype-worthy?

> Doing it for K8s configuration, if you don’t know k8s is stupid. I know what I’m talking about when I say that. Having it help you if you do know what you’re doing is perfectly legit.

"Knowing" k8s is an oxymoron. K8s is a profoundly complicated piece of tech that can don insanely complicated things while also serving as a replacement for docker-compose or basic services that could have been hosted on ECR. The concepts behind basic k8s functionality are not difficult, but I saved myself two weeks of reading how to write helm spec files, a piece of knowledge I have no interest in learning because it doesn't add any appreciable value to the software I produce, and was instead able to focus on getting what I needed out of my cluster automation scripts.

This really isn't that complicated to understand. I don't care for being a k8s expert and I don't care for syntactical minutiae behind it. It isn't hype that I now I only need to understand the essential conceptual basics behind the software to get it working for what I need instead of doing a deep dive like I had to do years ago in when reading similar docs for similar IaC producs to get lesser functionality going.