- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.world
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There are two schools of thought:
Those who want as good life as possible, and Those who want to have a better life than everyone else, no matter what.
Lol the fact that she even has a contract at all is because of unions.
When somebody insists, “X doesn’t matter because my salary depends on X,” it’s time to stop beating your head against a wall to teach them anything.
Nah, nah, you see - I had an excellent breakfast today. Clearly that means world hunger doesn’t exist! Checkmate, leftist!
The fact that Cathy has a blue check mark proves Twitter is fucking stupid.
Well it doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. Now you just pay for a subscription and you get it. Hell, I don’t know why you ever thought the check mark pre-Musk ever meant anything other than somebody’s identity being verified as true judging by what you’re saying… Never meant that their opinions were Twitter approved or whatever.
The blue check went through some twists and turns. Originally it was meant as “your identity is verified”, then it became a status symbol, then it had extra features attached to it. At one point the people approving them were literally taking bribes to expedite or guarantee your blue check (like personal bribes, not a payment to Twitter). And at some point along the way it somehow became a “Twitter approves” thing, because at least one person had their blue check stripped for going too far as a right wing troll (Milo Yianno-whatever). All of that pre-Muak.
Post-Musk, it’s just a subscription you pay for with some extra features and there’s now a different checkmark for corporate or government entities that merely verifies their identity.
Well 50 cents are enough for cathy to forget her mathy
I got higher at position as senior. But It wasn’t until I was able to join the Union that my income doubled. Year before I joined like in 2007 manager gave me a .10 raise. This shit is real.
My company acquired a division that had a great union and we all got more vacation days. Woot!
Pretty soon we won’t be able to trust BLS data, which is frightening.
The BLS data has historically been a method by which capitalists measured and managed labor power as a fungible resource. It has historically been a tool of capital to evaluate the influence of policy on labor, not a tool of labor to pressure capital for concessions.
Not to say the information isn’t valuable on its face. But it should be worth recognizing that we are looking at autocannibalization of capital. The people most injured by dismantling the BLS are the people who do the bulk of the hiring, not the people being hired.
Cathy do the mathy. Missed opportunity
Yeah Cathy, sheesh
God damn it, Cathy, you lush.
deleted by creator
Why does everything have to be sooo left or right?
Some unions are good, some are bad.
Not left or right, it’s up and down. Only one union is getting murderers and rapists off the hook. The rest are objectively good.
I would argue that the problem with police unions is that they’re too good at what they do. They’ve managed to achieve a degree of militantism that rivals any black panther or international world worker.
A single, heavily armed, deeply insular and dogmatic, horrifyingly MAGA-pilled community of workers would be bad in any sector. But to make matters worse, police have this natural affinity with media that makes them the recipient of tons of free positive publicity.
Would that everyone could claim membership in a union this strong.
The issue is that the purpose of a union is to give power to the powerless, but police already have all the power. Their union makes them unstoppable.
police already have all the power
That’s a superficial analysis. Police departments and other military and paramilitary organizations need to extract their revenues through the bureaucracy of the state. Your municipal PD officer isn’t showing up at your house, hat in hand, and taking collections to fund his beat. He needs the comptroller to impose taxes and the financial sector to move the money and the administration to divvy it out to employees based on rank and tenure.
What’s more, the police require the consent of the public at large. Which means a friendly media and religious community, willing to legitimize their functions. The US occupation in Afghanistan failed, while the Taliban that replaced them consolidated control, because one set of police was seen as illegitimate and another seen as representative of the public will.
Their union makes them unstoppable.
Their union forms a foundation of mutual support and affords individual officers confidence in their security through collective action. But cops are notoriously lazy, stupid, and trigger-happy. When media turns on a police department and the administrative state peels away from them, these institutions disintegrate rapidly.
The reason you don’t see police chiefs walking into the offices of some Fortune 500 companies and announcing “I’m the billionaire now” is rooted in their vulnerability on these fronts.
Unions are meant to bargain against capital.
Capital is already on the side of police.
This is not nearly at complicated as your making it.
Unions are meant to bargain against capital.
Capital is already on the side of police.
Unions are meant to bargain against management, which means they may be conciliatory towards capital so long as they can extract concessions from their immediate lenders/capital-owners. This is one problem we see in trade unionism broadly speaking. The American autoworkers union isn’t revolutionary, in large part because it is predicated on the exploitation of natural resources overseas. The SEIU isn’t revolutionary, in large part because the revenues of the companies of the workers they represent are often international shipping, banking, real estate, tech, and government administrators, whose profits are derived from rent-seeking of the public at-large.
Cops are the ur-example of this phenomenon, as their primary role is to surveil and defend private property on behalf of the wealthier tranches of society. The police unions bargain against the elected representatives of the general public for the betterment of their membership. And because their primary purpose is providing heavily subsidized security services for private interests, they are often - implicitly or explicitly - bribed by those interests to weight their coverage towards wealthier quarters.
That said, capital is not “on the side of the police” from an ideological perspective, because the police are still fundamentally a public service administered by a democratically elected administrative system. To that end, police privatization has been a stated goal of libertarian and hyper-capitalist political interests since police liberalization became mainstream in the last century.
This is not nearly at complicated as your making it.
There’s a lot more history to the modern western police state than you’re giving credit. The dynamics are not as straightforward as you make them sound. And the police, as individuals and as an institution, are kept on a much shorter leash than you might realize. Police unions are not simply extensions of capital interests, because they are organized and administered contrary to capital structures. And neoconservative/neoliberal activists have had their eyes on police union abolition for a long time.
No idea what you are referring to.
Yep, I figured as much
A union getting rapists and murders off the hook is not what the image is about.
You do realize I was responding to someone else right? Like this isn’t a direct response to the image. There is context that you clearly didn’t see or understand.
You replied to me, so I assumed you were responding to me. And I guess I still haven’t seen another message that you would have been responding to. Just a mix up.
My bad for sounding rude.
“Why do Unions have to be considered Left?”
Tell me you have no idea about the history of labor rights without telling me…
I’m not talking about the history, I’m talking about the present. And I was really talking more about the comments I was seeing. People acting like unions are totally this, or totally that.
Besides, I’ve been in 3 unions. 2 of them were bad, the union workers didn’t do anything for the members, and were literally taking all the dues paid them and wasting on themselves, like expensive vacations and buying expensive things. Both eventually were shut down. The 3rd one was much better, but a negative result of the union was members who should have lost their jobs due to poor work, not only keep their jobs, but get promotions before people who actually deserve it.
I love how one person cites a statistic, and another person just dismisses it as false because of their anecdotal experience.
If these people were good at critical thinking, they wouldn’t have these stupid fucking opinions to begin with.
And I’ve never heard of a contract that explicitly ties non-union workers’ pay to the union contact, but I’d be cheering the union guys on if they ever asked for a raise if that was the case.
That’s actually more common than you think. It’s not explicit.
My niece who works at a very popular coffee shop where some are unioned, the non-union ones get paid a bit extra and reminded on the daily about that benefit of higher pay for being non-unioned.
And my aunt works as a receptionist in a non-union hospital. Her counterparts in a union, when they went on strike and got a huge pay bump… She suddenly “mysteriously” got a pay bump aligned with it because the non-union hospital was afraid of employees unionizing (which secretly, they were).
It’s in the news that Starbucks does that
Sounds like every online platform ever.
False! Source: my ass
That’s good. I’m taking it haha
It was more like False, Source: this paper that says True.
Cite it
False! Source: (my ass, 2025, jerboa for lemmy)
Is that acceptable?
Actually, that’s not true at all. This one time, I met a guy who…
This is how most people think and see the world, which is why we (the US) are in the boat we’re in now. People don’t see the big picture if they never have to or aren’t taught how to think critically.
I think it’s a complicated problem. To start with, the studies are usually paywalled. If you can afford to purchase access, you still need the capacity to understand and parse the formal academic language. Most people have neither of those requirements, and have to rely on the media to report the statistics accurately, which doesn’t happen.
This leads to a situation where the media keeps trying to say, idk employment statistics are better than ever, and then everybody updates their mental blocklist to filter out the word ‘statistics’.
That was the whole point of the media before it became entertainment
Not to mention most issues are extremely nuanced and complex, not something that can be accurately broken down into 5 second sound bits.
Almost as of by design of corporate overlords and billionaires. Almost as of billions of dollars and collective hate can’t fill the emptiness. Almost as if we should focus on healing everyone’s (including billionaires ')wounded inner child schisms and social divides may start healing. Maybe
My thoughts exactly. And how I love this complete dismissal style with the “False.” at the beginning, that has established itself online. it’s a perfect giveaway for " now my personal but universal opinion, also called Truth bomb, is going to destroy your statement" - which in my opinion is just extremely patronizing and never really true.
Especially when comparing your personal anecdotal experience with a fucking statistic.
Oh and nobody talks like that in real life, or at least the people that do start their verbal line of argument this way are idiots and everybody knows it.
False. Bears eat beets. Bears. Beats. Battlestar galactica.
Part of the problem is that statistics can be abused. It takes a reasonable amount of training to be able to differentiate between reliable statistics and potentially dodgy. Even worse, we are often presented with them, striped or context.
The best solution is to teach people how to both spot problems and seek reliable data. The proper meaning of “do your own research”. Unfortunately, a significant chunk just give up with them and only trust their gut.
statistics can be abused
They can be abused, by people who understand statistics talking to people who don’t understand statistics. This is a good reason to learn statistical methods rather than reject them.
There are levels of abuse, some blatant, some subtle. Leading questions are obvious, when you have the question asked. Publishing bias is difficult to spot, even for trained scientists looking for it.
Learning about statistical methods isn’t enough. People need to be taught how to weigh the data presented against the value of misleading them.
It’s a subsection of logical reasoning, and needs to be taught as part of an integrated whole.
I think statistically (pun intended) there are more problems with people ignoring statistics or plain lying, than statistics being abused
A bit of healthy scientific skepticism or logical reasoning with some skills to evaluate sources of evidence and biases help with both understanding quoted stats, and liars and the ill-informed.
It’s a difficult and time consuming skill to learn and use though.
Even a small amount of statistic abuse will break blind trust in them. Once that trust is gone, some people will reject all of them, rather than try and differentiate.
Low grade abuse of statistics and related methods is rampant in low grade media.
But blind trust in everything else never breaks?
In reality, statistics should be trusted based on source, method and importance.
A survey of preferred ice-cream flavours by an ice-cream company can be trusted easily, even if the wording and method are a bit loose. An analysis of a potentially billion dollar drug requires FAR more scrutiny, even from multiple reliable sources. Between these 2 extremes is a spectrum of trust.
Unfortunately, most people don’t do well with shades of grey. If some statistics can’t be trusted, then none can. It’s all false news (until it happens to agree with their preconceived views).
Typically, statistics are abused by politicians/partisan hacks who take data from reliable sources and lie/spin it to their narrative. The thing is, the average Fox News viewer with a HS diploma isn’t going to dig any deeper. And I wouldn’t say they trust their gut… they trust the propaganda narrative.
When Trump and Vance said immigrants were eating people’s dogs and cats, they just nodded their empty heads… you can’t teach someone like that to engage reason.
I dont know, when most people were children they might believe their parents like that. Some of them grow up and develop minds of their own and critical thinking but others seem not to. Maybe it gets harder to grow up, the longer you spend as a child.
Or maybe you’re right and it’s an intrinsic part of human diversity - maybe the tribe has always needed some sheeple - so our genes might always create some.
I live in California, so there was a lot of bemoaning the rising minimum wage.
“Why should someone flipping burgers earn as much as I do in a trade field?”
Mate, you should be arguing for increased wages, not trying to keep others down.
This is the new American way. Zero-sum thinking all the way down. Anyone else’s win is our loss. Every situation must have a winner and a loser. Win-win situations are considered immoral for these people. We’ve moved past rugged individualism to a full-on Hunger Games mindset.
Seattle metro area has the highest minimum wage in the country. The top 5 cities in the US are all in this metro. This is because when the wage increases were passed by city, they were tied to the inflation rate so that increases every year, so no new laws have to be passed year over year to get this increase. No arguing every year for a simple cost of living adjustment.
Shit even Republican voters and Republicans “should” want minimum wage tied to rate of inflation. Why? Because it creates incentive for the Federal government in keeping inflation lower, keeping inflation lower being something that “supposedly” the average Republican voter wants.
Fucking thank you! Why is this so complicated?? Why fight for $15 or whatever if you know by the time your get the fucking laws past your dollar is worth half as much.
It’s so transparently flawed to because tying minimum wage to a formula/basket/col/astrology FFS, Would mean not having to revisit this fight every. Single. Year.
Credit for that goes to Kshama Sawant, she had to fight the Democrats on the city council and shame them to get there.
Mate, you should be arguing for increased wages, not trying to keep others down.
It’s my opinion that people like this aspire to be their own boss, make their own money, and look up to business owners as mentors.
None of that is inherently wrong, until the mentors/business owners start espousing the evils of increased wages, how paying taxes is preventing pay raises for their workers, etc.
So not knowing any better, these wannabes go out and parrot what they’ve heard their heroes say as if it’s gospel. And of course the talking heads that they listen to say the same shit, further solidifying the class warfare mentality.
Those same people get mad if nobody is flipping burgers for them.
“Why should someone flipping burgers earn as much as I do in a trade field?”
Because someone flipping burgers has more value to society than someone who spends their day making rich people richer.
