bleah1000 (u/bleah1000)

bleah1000 commented on Google scraps minimum wage, benefits rules for suppliers and staffing firms msn.com/en-gb/money/other... · Posted by u/kaderr

Animats · a year ago

No such luck. Texas Eastern District court overrode that NLRB rule on indirect employment.[1]

(Read the link. This is all about who's the real employer in indirect-employment situations.)

[1] https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2024/03/nlrb-blocked-from-i...

bleah1000 · a year ago

That case could still be appealed and overruled. And then it could go to the Supreme Court, which would likely take years to resolve. Better to be safe than sorry, rather than hope that the case will stand.

It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.

bleah1000 commented on Google Fires 28 Employees After Multi-City Protests cnbc.com/2024/04/18/googl... · Posted by u/disqard

viraptor · a year ago

Unless you think that the company does something so bad that you need to bring more attention to it and can't work there anymore in good conscience. Then, just like these employees, go for it - that's exactly the audience. You have to be prepared for the consequences of course.

Protests don't work if you do them quietly in your corner without affecting anyone in a meaningful way.

bleah1000 · a year ago

I can guarantee you this made more people adverse to the cause than for it. They did everything wrong, and many of the people who might have had a chance at trying to change things are out of Google and will not be able to do anything.

It's also likely that people who saw this might now not want to be involved at all for fear of losing their job.

This action likely did nothing but make it less likely that anything will change, and been the absolute worst way to attempt to persuade people.

bleah1000 commented on Google sued for negligence after man died following map directions apnews.com/article/google... · Posted by u/dimitropoulos

dragonwriter · 2 years ago

Google is a deep-pockets target that doesn't have the problem of the range of immunities that must be navigated around in suing a state.

Not at all an odd target.

bleah1000 · 2 years ago

But that assumes that Google would settle. Without that happening, you are looking at years before getting a result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees and a high likelihood that if they lost they would appeal.

This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a logical one.

bleah1000 commented on A new CEO says employees can’t work remotely after all, and they revolt wsj.com/articles/a-new-ce... · Posted by u/shaburn

jedberg · 2 years ago

> Office landlords applaud these decisions. They see the return-to-office push by new bosses as a crucial step toward reversing the slide in rent prices, occupancy levels and property values.

This right here is the entire reason. They like to say things about collaboration and innovation, but commercial real estate is really the reason (and tax breaks).

I wish companies would just be honest and tell people, "look we know you don't like it but it's better for our business because we need those tax breaks and real estate price support".

Edit: Instead of replying to everyone, I'll add it here: the tax breaks are butts in seats tax breaks. They have already committed to long term leases or own the buildings, so they can't get out of it by "just closing the office". They can't close the office. So they need those butts in seats tax breaks and if they own the buildings, they need the prices to stay high.

bleah1000 · 2 years ago

I see this all of the time, but without any evidence. Even your edit says they get a "butts in seat" tax break. But how much is that? I can very easily see the savings of remote employees being way higher than this tax break. You might need to spend a bit more on IT and maybe on equipment. Then again you save on cleaning (not needed as often), garbage, electricity and anything else related to maintenance. Maybe it's slightly more expensive, or slightly less expensive. I've never seen anyone break the numbers down before making this claim. It feels like an appeal to emotion, those bad companies only care about money. Even if that's true, this argument doesn't prove it's true in this case.

And this all assumes long term leases or you own the building. It's possible to pay to get out of leases some time, and you can sell the building if you think it's going to cost millions to keep owning it.

Also, we are seeing lots of smaller businesses also requiring people to come back to the office. If they are getting some huge tax break for a 100 person company, how much is that? I'm happy if I'm wrong, and this is some huge tax break that saves companies millions of dollars, but I think it's fair to ask for evidence that this really saves the money people claim it saves.

I think there are other dumb reasons people are being called back, it just doesn't feel like this is one of the reasons.

bleah1000 commented on How much can you earn creating content on Youtube? blog.bassemdy.com/2023/05... · Posted by u/Link-

CM30 · 2 years ago

As someone who's posted videos for about 10 years, and posted them seriously since 2017, the best period I ever had gave me about £1,500 for a couple of months worth of videos. Usually it's closer to £250 a month or something.

This is entirely from YouTube ads, since at the moment I don't use Patreon, sell merch or run sponsorships. And it's for a channel with approximately 33,000 subscribers.

So I can definitely back up this point from the article:

> Only a handful are getting rich in the process. The drive for many of us is to add value to the world and share our knowledge.

Unless you're in a very lucrative niche (usually finance), you'll need hundreds of thousands if not millions of subs to make a living through YouTube ads and content creation alone. Hell, if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where creating content on a regular basis is tricky or overly time consuming, or where ad clicks are low (usually animation or music), then you may struggle to make enough for a living even then.

Of course, other means of monetisation do make more money than ads alone. If you've ever wondered why ever big YouTuber starts with an ad for Raid Shadow Legends/NordVPN/whatever, that's because those endorsements are a more reliable way of making money than ads alone are. Same with Patreon, donations, merch etc... anything that isn't at the whim of Google is a much more sustainable way of paying the bills.

But yeah, unless you're absolutely huge on YouTube (or have a decently large following in a very high paying niche), then it's not something you'll be able to turn into a realiable day job, let alone a high paying, FAANG software engineer level one.

bleah1000 · 2 years ago

While most of this comment is true, there are lots of youtubers that can make it full-time without getting millions of subscribers. The key is that you can't rely on adsense, you need to get as many different ways of getting income as possible (patreon, sponsors, merch, etc).

From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.

The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.

bleah1000 commented on Twitter source code was leaked on GitHub shortly after Musk’s layoff spree arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/denisw

bazmattaz · 2 years ago

If the disgruntled staff member simply copied the code over then surely there would be no way to track down who it was? Even if they found a staff member had accessed tonnes of source code before they left, how could they prove it was that person who leaked it?

bleah1000 · 2 years ago

I mean, if they went after someone civilly, Twitter doesn't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, only that there is a 51% chance it happened.

So proving that someone downloaded all of the source code right before the leak would be pretty strong circumstantial evidence. It's not impossible to prove it just because you don't have a smoking gun.

bleah1000 commented on Ask HN: Are forced gender distributions for hiring interns legal? · Posted by u/throwaway429310

altairprime · 3 years ago

Discriminatory actions that redress a preexisting bias aren’t legally discrimination.

Setting a “no hiring men” policy is not allowed. Setting a “no hiring more than 50% men until women are 50% of total workers in the area being hired into” is approximately allowed, though there are nuances in how that can be defined that an employment lawyer would care to advise you on.

There are one or two relevant Supreme Court cases confirming the specific details and caveats around this, but

(I’m not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)

bleah1000 · 3 years ago

What references do you have for this? As I understand it, any quotas are also illegal, and this would be a quota.

I think you might be confusing affirmative action programs with whatever might be happening at this hypothetical corporation.

Adn AA programs are going up before the Supreme Court, so could be ruled illegal within the next year.

bleah1000 commented on Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook technologyreview.com/2023... · Posted by u/robin_reala

bleah1000 · 3 years ago

The problem is with all of these new devices using AI related features. They all seem to decide that it's a good idea to use contractors to "verify" or "categorize" the pictures. There is always a leak because they have to rely on the contractor's security protocols to make sure that these pictures don't get out. And, surprisingly, contractors might not have the best security, and it doesn't seem like the companies have any incentive to verify the security.

bleah1000 commented on Twitter at 1am on a Friday teamblind.com/post/This-i... · Posted by u/Ice_cream_suit

bleah1000 · 3 years ago

It's kind of sad to see so many people just take this story at face value. Is it really 1am? I could certainly believe it, but some random picture doesn't make it true. Also, even it is 1am, it's possible that work ended hours ago, and that some people are staying late to talk to Musk. Who knows, but to assume that everyone is being forced to stay, maybe, maybe not. I guess I'd like a little evidence.

The number of people saying all of these completely unsubstantiated things about Twitter, and everyone believing them without any questions is weird.

In addition, how could this person know if mostly H1-B workers are present. I certainly can't tell who is and isn't on a H1-B. Or is it because the bulk of the people are not white that this person assumed they were? That seems like an immensely racist assumption.

bleah1000 commented on Meta and Google are cutting staff wsj.com/articles/meta-and... · Posted by u/pondsider

dymk · 3 years ago

Thats what a PIP is for. Layoffs are for firing a lot of people at once. Doesn’t have to be due to performance.

bleah1000 · 3 years ago

PIPs require a tremendous amount of effort and work. It also doesn't guarantee that the person would be fired. There are many times where the employee might do just enough to get off the PIP, but still be a really low performer.

It also sucks for the employee, a PIP is really stressful not knowing what will happen next, will you get fired, should you start looking for a new job.

In addition, the PIP can take months to get to the finish. Maybe even six months in some cases.

A layoff takes way less time, but it does suck for the employee. I don't know which is worse. But if you have a good employer, you still might be able to transfer to another part of the company. Being on a PIP usually means your only choice is looking outside the company for a new job.

Layoffs always hit good and low performers, there is no way it can't. But if a company wants to get rid of a number of low performers at the same time, PIPs are not the way to go.