You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.
In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.
I only speak for myself here, but: While it would almost certainly be very easy for a sufficiently-motivated person to track me down and knock on my front door, I don't like broadcasting the details of where I am.
I might occasionally mention something like "some small city in Ohio [of many hundreds]" when that seems pertinent to the context, but that's about the extent of what anyone will ever get out of me on a public forum.
Y'all generally seem to be rather swell here, but this is a very public place that gets crawled approximately-instantly by search engines, and the world doesn't need to know what block I live on or the name of the bodega on the corner that I might feel like writing about.
Yeah I don’t need people to dox themselves, but even just generic “look at this apartment building, it’s built on top of a supermarket” (iirc I found that in downtown San Diego) would help.
And if it’s common and something people look for, it should be findable relatively easily.
A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.
A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.
But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.
Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
The article does go into this and gives lip service to the idea that a secure third party could expose age without exposing identity. Ultimately, there's still the problem that even if point of verification can be done in a zero trust way, you are still entrusting very sensitive information to a third party which is subject to data breach.
If you do it right the only sensitive information exposed to the age gated site is that your age is above their threshold.
The party that actually has to at some point verify who you really are of course has your sensitive information, and there is no obvious way to work around that. However, there is a way to make it so that it doesn't matter.
That is by making them be a party that already has that information. Probably the simplest would be to make it be the same government agency that issues your physical identity documents like passports or drivers licenses. If we don't want it to be a government agency or we want to have competition banks would be a possibility.
Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.
> they are able to represent labor as a single entity
They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.
One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
> One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though.
Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.
As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
> antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time
That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.
> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company
That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.
What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.
I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.
Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?
It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.
I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.
> Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions?
Once the companies start branching out to sell other things besides the service of organized labor, they're no longer just an alternative to unions. In what follows, I'm only talking about the aspect of selling organized labor as a service.
I do believe that workers owning companies that sell the service of organized labor is better for the workers than unions as they exist now in the sense that it would do better at improving the workers' bargaining position with the management of the companies that union workers now work for. But it also exposes the workers to business risks that unions as they are now don't have to face--the companies do. That's an unavoidable tradeoff--if you want more of the upside, you have to be willing to take more of the risk. I think that one of the main obstacles to unions as they are now properly representing workers' interests is their refusal to face that fact. Making the unions into worker-owned corporations would force the workers to face the tradeoff directly and decide which way they want to make it--take the increased risk and get more upside (by becoming owners of the worker-owned company selling organized labor as a service), or give up some upside to avoid the risk (by remaining as traditional employees of the companies they work for now).
> you restrict company ownership to the active employees
I'm not advocating this, at least not as a matter of law. A worker-owned corporation could certainly make it part of its charter that you have to be a worker in the relevant industry or with an appropriate set of skills in order to own a share of the company. In that sense the company would have no employees--every worker-owner's income would be dividends based on share ownership. But other companies would still be free not to do this--to have a more traditional ownership structure in which employees don't usually own any shares.
>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down
This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.
> Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system.
Not in the cases I gave.
> Oil barrel prices
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean crude oil, Standard Oil was not a seller of crude oil; it was a buyer. It bought crude oil and refined it into various products that it sold. The prices of those refined products went up after the breakup.
Specifically, during the Reagan Administration, the official policy on how to interpret antitrust law shifted from one major economic school to another—I'm not fully up on the details, but my understanding is that the latter is the Chicago School, and that a big part of the shift is to focus not on how much of the market the company dominates, or whether a merger will be bad for competition or employees, but rather to look solely at consumer prices.
This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.
Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.
Having a relational database in a gui was great. The problem with access was that it tried to support network applications as a backend but supported a punishingly low number of connections. Having an application that crashed with 10-50 connections put it in an awkward space. Businesses without a strong technical team would build on it, release with N=1 load testing, and get surprised when it crashed out at scale. MS wasn't going to improve it, because they wanted more sophisticated customers to buy SQL server.
It's a myth in the most literal way. Fleming published and promoted his results despite a lack of reproducibility. By the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had backformed or misremembered a folksy story about an open window. That's textbook mythmaking.
It can both be fine to have a glib story to tell schoolkids and important to recognize that the actual intellectual process is messier and more complex.
I have now actually read Flemming's 1929 manuscript that first described penicillin [0]. It is a careful and well documented scientific report describing the action of penicillin on various species of bacteria, how to produce it, and some of its chemical properties. It describes how penicillin can kill bacteria isolated from the throats of nurses, and shows that it has low toxicity in mice, and is possibly safe for use in humans: "Constant irrigation of large infected surfaces in man was not accompanied by any toxic symptoms, while irrigation of the human conjunctiva every hour for a day had no irritant effect."
It is far from having a "lack of reproducibility" and in fact allowed others to quickly and accurately replicate his discovery.
The path to his discovery may have been difficult to replicate, but the fact that the mold could kill other bacteria was not, and was immediately replicated.
It just wasn't seen as relevant because, at the time, few people imagined its internal use in humans and it was instead seen more as a tool for other microbiologists and the like. The jump to "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?" took quite some time.
So many other good details that get to how impossibly multivariate biology research is, like the need to have several days at the exact temperature.
It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be patented and privatized.
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