mundo (u/mundo) - Readit News

mundo commented on Supreme Court Rules Companies Can Sue Striking Workers for 'Sabotage' vice.com/en/article/n7eej... · Posted by u/belter

shukantpal · 3 years ago

The idea that strikes are intended to cost the company does not lend itself that workers can do anything that damages the company. Are workers allowed to blow up the trucks using TNT (as long as no one gets hurt)? Can they steal all the gasoline in the trucks and sell it on the secondary market? No.

Strikes are intended to lose the company money in a very specific way - by a lack of labor. They are not intended to lose the company money by intentional destruction of property (nor should they be intended to do that)

mundo · 3 years ago

You sound like you're arguing with me, but all of the rules you described seem to suggest that what the strikers did in this case was legal. They didn't blow up anything or steal anything, they quit working at an inconvenient time.

Also, I think you're imagining a set of gentlemanly Marquis of Queensbury rules around strikes that don't exist. This isn't an elaborate ritual like the filibuster; labor dispute precedents are written in blood.

mundo commented on Supreme Court Rules Companies Can Sue Striking Workers for 'Sabotage' vice.com/en/article/n7eej... · Posted by u/belter

nullc · 3 years ago

In this case, workers intentionally waited until they'd filled up all the trucks with concrete to go on strike, so that the concrete would harden in and destroy the trucks. The company was able to clear the trucks to save them, at the cost of all the concrete.

Wonder how the author here would feel about surgeons going on strike scheduled intentionally after beginning open heart surgery on a loved one?

mundo · 3 years ago

What a terrible analogy. This strike didn't hurt anyone, it cost the employer money, which is exactly what they're supposed to do! A strike that doesn't cost money isn't a strike, and a union that can't strike is a social club.

mundo commented on The Cruise Ship Suicides bloomberg.com/features/20... · Posted by u/danso

freedomben · 5 years ago

This is heartbreaking, and by no means anomalous[1]. I know a number of people that have committed suicide during the lock downs.

It is becoming a political topic, which is always risky to weigh in on publicly, but I do implore people to keep in mind when deciding on policy the law of unintended consequences. Everything in life is a series of trade offs, including the decision to lock down. Even if you believe the lock downs have been effective, they cause real damage and disruption to people's lives and mental health. It is serious and needs to be considered and weighed.

What we have is a variation on the trolley problem, not a simple "save people with lock downs or not." I have no idea where the right balance is, but I've been shocked and saddened at the unwillingness of pro-lock-down people to consider the unintended consequences here. I have plenty of criticism for the anti mask crowd too, but this comment is already long enough.

[1]: I have no scientific data to back this claim up. This is my opinion extrapolated from anecdata. Take with a grain of salt

mundo · 5 years ago

The underlying assumption here, that there are some areas that decided to lockdown and others that didn't, and each had different pros and cons, seems wildly inaccurate.

The reality is that almost everywhere in the world did a lockdown of some kind, but in some areas it was effective and in other areas it was not; and, while everyone has suffered consequences of some kind, the consequences suffered by the latter group exceed those of the former by a wide and obvious margin.

mundo commented on Magician-turned-mathematician uncovers bias in coin flipping (2004) news.stanford.edu/pr/2004... · Posted by u/keithwhor

thoughtstheseus · 5 years ago

Flip the coin the same number of times, catch consistently and get good at adjusting the catch. Use a large and heavy coin like a silver dollar. - former magic enthusiast.

mundo · 5 years ago

I can imagine that on a slow, lazy flip with a big coin, but is this realistic with what I think of as a "normal" flip, i.e. a US quarter, flipped rapidly end-over-end with the thumbnail, 2+ feet in the air? It's hard to believe that even decades of practice would get this reliable, and I don't think I've ever seen a stage magician rely on it in a routine.

For comparison, the other method (where the coin rotates about its vertical axis) is something you can learn to do tolerably well in a few minutes, and to do very well after a month or two at most. The motion of the coin will look perfect, and you can even get the "ding!" noise of a real flip. The only giveaway is the hand position; a real flip is done with the thumb under the coin, and this trick (for me, anyway) requires the thumb to be on top.

Source: taught myself to do this many years ago. I'm not a magician and have never used it to win money, I just use this to settle arguments between my kids.

mundo commented on Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit distributedweb.care/posts... · Posted by u/deegles

mundo · 5 years ago

Watching Urbit through the lens of HN comments over the last few years has been utterly fascinating. The hatred it attracts is unmatched - no topic has reached the front page only to be brigade-downvoted off of it again so regularly.

And yet, for all the indignant posts about how it's performance art, a scam, or the ravings of a madman, it just kind of keeps on keeping on. It gets a little more stable and adds a few more features every year, like a regular old open source project.

My position on it has remained unchanged for 5+ years: I hope it succeeds because it aspires to solve a use case that I genuinely want to use, I don't care about the (ex-)founder's politics or his old blog, but seeing as the existence of the latter seems to have destroyed any chance of the former coming to fruition so I'm kind of hoping Jeff Bezos decides to build a clone (presumably, one that has much lower ambitions and elides most of the weird stuff).

mundo commented on Can developer productivity be measured? stackoverflow.blog/2020/1... · Posted by u/97amarnathk

nradov · 5 years ago

The smallest organizational unit at which productivity can usefully be measured is an agile team of about 7 people. Below that size the effort of quantifying productivity exceeds any possible value of doing so, and incentivizes the wrong behaviors.

A good manager can get a reasonable subjective sense of individual productivity but won't be able to quantitatively measure it.

mundo · 5 years ago

I agree, and I would add that there is one good subjective way to measure the productivity of individual developers, and that is talking to their teammates.

mundo commented on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down on January 20 cnbc.com/2020/11/30/fcc-c... · Posted by u/dredmorbius

zackees · 5 years ago

Net neutrality never regulated Google/Facebook or the other social media tech giants. It only regulated the ISP which have never posed any threat to free on the internet. Net neutrality was only about shoving the costs of the internet infrastructure to the consumer.

Net neutrality died, and all of the doom and gloom we were told would happened never materialized.

mundo · 5 years ago

> In 2017, Pai voted with his fellow Republican commissioners to remove rules that prohibited internet providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular sites and offering higher speed “lanes” at higher prices. Many major internet providers have not yet taken advantage of that rule change, however.

It seems likely that this is because they consider the looser regulations likely to be overturned in Biden's presidency, not because they don't actually want to make changes they spent millions lobbying for the right to make.

mundo commented on No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media turningchaos.com/essays/n... · Posted by u/s3v

mundo · 5 years ago

A number of commenters seem hung up on the actual measurement of information, which I think is a little ancillary to the point (which I think is valid). So I'll add that I think the author's point here is that the press has shifted from focusing on surprising news to reiterating things we already know, because that is a good way to reassure and flatter their audience.

Consider a headline like, "Trump says illegal immigration is a big problem." He's said that many times, it's very unsurprising that he would say it again, and hence it contains very little information. However, each time he says it, it affords the press that agree with him a fresh opportunity to talk about why he's right, and the press that disagrees a new chance to talk about why he's wrong.

That is the point here - that what we call "news" has shifted from spending most of its energy informing us of things we don't know towards reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know. If that trend is true, then certainly it represents a reduction in information (in the Claude Shannon sense as well as the everyday sense).

mundo commented on The SEC “Modernizes” the Accredited Investor Definition sec.gov/rules/final/2020/... · Posted by u/randrews543

gojomo · 5 years ago

State lotteries are rigged: marketed to the gullible & have far worse payouts than casinos. (Have you seen stare-sponsored Keno games like "California Hot Spot", with draws every 4 minutes, offered in only the very finest neighborhoods' liquor stores to extremely wise gamblers?)

Mortgages were pushed to sketchy credit risks for years, wiping out the the poor's earnings & equity with unsustainable housing costs in (temporarily) pubic-policy-inflated home values - and even now, there's minimal protection against over-concentrating in unwise housing markets.

Plenty of public securities go to zero, often in fraud. But with easy-to-get investing leverage, any amount of initial capital can go to zero with only small moves in public prices. You can lose any amount of money after a small move of AAPL up - if you purchase enough (or leveraged) securities which bet on it going down, which are available to anyone without an accredited-investor-like wealth test.

(Have you seen the promotions, and easy on-ramps, for daytrading & foreign-exchange trading & Robinhood? Or how easy it is to channel any amount of money into crypto trading?)

mundo · 5 years ago

There's a lot of risky investments. Anyone over 18 can bet their life savings on roulette. That has nothing to do with this. "Well other investments are risky too!" does not apply here because "Investing in startups is super-risky!" is not the reason why accreditation requirements exist.