On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality.
The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.
I'm generally pro-union. Don't think that just because I criticize them that I don't think they're generally a good idea. The problems I'm pointing to are general problems of democracy in general. Incumbents tend to ignore future generations well-beings when it comes to current generations ability to negotiate.
The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."
I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.
Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.
You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.
You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.
If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.
There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.
No argument from me, other than: All those things can be also be said about corporations.
You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.
Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.
> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.
Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.
It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.
It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.
I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
And unfortunately Meshtastic fails miserably at that. Meshcore is better, but maybe not anymore. I'm not even sure Lora is the best technology for this either since you'd really want something that can listen to more than 1 channel at a time.
Lora seems to be a great technology for remote sensors within a 1km of each other that can transmit occasional data. But once that single channel fills up, the channel stops working.
Because of the split. But your right, meshtastic does have dumb routing. And I haven't used meshcore, but I probably won't now until the dust settles on this for a while.
I would like to disagree with you here that perfect is the enemy of good for mesh networking. It's not that meshtastic is good, it's not. But the barrier to get to good is far harder than the offerings. There are three primary issues.
1. Lora can typically only receive and listen on one channel at a time. This prevents listening and transmitting on anything but the one channel. If you could have multiple channels, the incidence of radios stomping on each others signals would go down.
2. The FCC limits 900MHz unlicensed operators to 1W of effective radiated power, and Lora really isn't optimized to make that 1W go as far as possible.
3. A good mesh network will have reliable delivery and routing. Meshtastic is more "spray and pray".
FT8 works very well as a digital modulation, and it solves the first two, but it doesn't solve #3 even though it makes it so much easier to design a solution for #3.
For a real life example: FT8 on 5W of RF power can often get my signal from North America to South America, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.
If you listen to 14.074MHz, that's the channel that primarily is used for FT8 on the 20 meter band. Pick a random Web SDR from this list [0] and tune to that frequency and set it to USB (Upper Side Band). The channel width is only 3Khz, but each one of those squiggly lines is one station transmitting a signal.
I was getting very good signals with this one [1].
I vaguely remember reading an article where someone had somehow transmitted digital signals over HAM, could feasibly be a transport for a reticulum network, right?
A lot of startups are cults. Tesla maybe the final form of a culted startup where the stock owners don't care about anything anymore.
That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.
em-dashes help flow ideas better than other means. For whatever reason, it's easier to process in my brain a comment with an em-dash rather than trying to split the idea into separate succinct sentences.
You can do small succinct sentences, but style-wise it sucks for longer passages.
It's not just data, right? Power can be abused as well. That person has power to control the narrative and can make a large bet on the number of times he can say the word.
So now it's public servants military power, congressional power, and they look to enrich themselves with making (or lobbying for) decisions which affect the outcome of a bet.
You could imagine an army general that lobbies for the bombing of Iran knowing the president has his ear, and then bets on the bombing of Iran by March 2026.
Go for it, don't spend a lot of money though on the first one. If you enjoy it then figure out the next one to spend the money on.
The big issue for me right now is that a lot of the smaller bed printers can't really do some of the larger projects I want to do like wall hanging systems or drawer organization systems.
Also Bambu the company mostly is fine, but there's some worry that they'll eventually lock people into using only their filament, but doesn't seem to have happened yet. So buyer beware.
> Also Bambu the company mostly is fine, but there's some worry that they'll eventually lock people into using only their filament, but doesn't seem to have happened yet. So buyer beware.
I'm not sure how Bambu could actually do that. They use RFID tags to identify their filament type/color. I taped a tag from a used roll to some prusa filament and the printer couldn't tell the difference.
Just in case, my Bambus are LAN only and don't get updated. I use Orca Slicer instead of the Bambu slicer.
Bambu can't even keep their filament in stock, plus they ship the printers with multiple preloaded profiles for other filament vendors. I don't foresee them making that change any time soon.
That's certainly the implied threat when people show up with AR-15's in the Idaho statehouse. Yes it's legal. But what is the point? This is ruby red Idaho.
I've always said when peaceniks start to carry weapons, it's time to worry. Alex Pretti didn't pull his gun, but still got shot. At what point will some escalation tactic end up in a gun fight between the local police and ICE?
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
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