-- A proud programming union worker in South Korea since 2018.
Tech pulled a great trick here: equity.
America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k
It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.
Would love to but I'm afraid you grossly misunderstand how the power law distribution works. Unfortunately the billionaires are running away from us exponentially faster than we are catching up.
Speaking as someone who will almost certainly become a multi millionaire in the next decade or two. (even if I stop adding more savings manually)
But crucially this only happens if there _isnt_ a big revolution in USA. If there is, I'm fucked.
Why does that matter? Who is trying to catch up with a billionaire? They are not even playing the same game as the rest of us.
This corresponds to the first stage of Marxs theorized progession from capitalism too communism
Done hate the messenger. I'm just taking what I read and applying it to observed reality and telling you it fit.
Self described commies are dumb because they are incapable of enacting the very system they claim to idealize.
My impression of all these communes is:
- idealistic people move in
- they realize 90% of the people that moved in are lazy and don't want to work
- the rest of the 10% run the show and the commune either breaks down here or kicks out many people
- kids are born, they grow up and by the time they get to university age they find the whole thing cringy and leave to go have normal lives
- commune ends
Other than some that also degenerate into sexual abuse between members and other weird power games. My impression of these outsider hippie / communist groups is that their failure rate is very high.
Maybe avoid opining on topics you have no idea in the future as not to make an ass of yourself in public.
First, the general public would have more disposable income if we shift more of the tax burden on the ultra rich.
Second, people like Elon Musk won't be able to give themselves massive bonuses that are essentially paid by diluting common stock.
Also, with regard to the U.S., the U.S. could wipe out its national debt with a one-time wealth tax, and also pass a balanced budget const. amendment so it never ends up deep in debt again.
Lastly, perverse and extremely greed-based exploitative businesses might become less common, since there aren't ultra fat executive paychecks. Although it might still happen if a large group of people are able to make a somewhat high salary off such schemes.
The other issue is the U.S. deficit is a feature not a bug. As long as the world buys the bonds, it’s “free” and no one will care until forced austerity happens.
Look into the end of the Gilded Age to see how this really gets fixed.
We'd largely be transferring shares in companies to the treasury bond holders, ie the people and orgs who hold US debt.
The federal government might for example force mega-sized private companies like Koch Industries to go public to get an accurate market valuation (or just sell it to private equity by starting a bidding war on it across many private equity investors).
The wealth tax cutoff would be determined by the national debt. It might fall to a relatively harsh / low threshold like 99.9% of assets over $20 million. Or maybe 99% of assets between $20 million to $1 billion, and 99.9% on assets above $1 billion.
Treasury bonds themselves would be subject to the wealth tax, so someone with $100 billion in T bonds might just see 99% of $80 million erased. So even the total number of T bonds payable will drop under this wealth tax.
But someone with $100 million in shares in private and public companies will see their shares transferred to the federal government, and then eventually sold.
Once every T bond has been paid off, Congress and the states could try to close the centuries-long chapter on debt by trying to pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.
No not a gift but they sure do align incentives
[GIF of Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money]
Also the fact that people in group $X are getting screwed more than people in group $Y is no reason not to fight to not get screwed if you are in group $Y.
For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.
I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.
It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.
There are also revolving doors between the regulator and the relevant professional bodies.
I'm pro union in cases where employers are a monopsony and workers have few options - it completely makes sense for coal miners in a coal town to form a union to even things out. I just don't think US tech right now meets the conditions for it to make sense, the market is too liquid for employers to capture all the upside.
US tech workers have real problems and complaints - PTO, maternity leave, health care to start - but these feel to me more like structural features of the US labour market? It makes more sense to me that these should be subject to national regulation rather than specific advantages for tech workers carved out by a union.
Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.
Developers don't set EE wages. It's always the management class that is the source of your woes, not your fellow workers. We're in this together.
The number of people making "moon money" is very, very small compared to everyone else in the industry.
If you don't need to buy a product to make a product, or when you have to that's typically pennies on the dollar you can share a lot more of that.
The real difference here is that when the market is favorable you CAN share more. And Samsung is doing so. In the US you probably wouldn't be able to do this because the shareholders will cry and will happily give a 100M bonus to whoever will 'lead' the company better. Where better means diverting as much as possible to the shareholders
You have a point. But on this precise topic it’s pretty hard to make. A tiny handful of companies who are winners beyond anyone’s expectations simply do not matter.
There is exactly zero percent chance this profit sharing contract would have been negotiated by either party as it is if this had been remotely predicted in advance. Same as the retrospectively extremely lucrative RSUs granted to nvidia employees just five years ago.
Tech folks employed by the top tech companies have been fine. I do not cry even a minute for them. The fun part of the Korean memory worker compensation is that blue collar folks finally are getting just a little bit of the taste the laptop class has been part of for so long. And it is likely to be comparatively very fleeting.
Of course I'm late to the game. My colleagues who have been here ten years are either extremely wealthy and bored or sailing the Caribbean at this point. Every other week someone is taking a sabbatical
(It sounds like the union got a great deal for these workers, though.)
You seem surprised? Do you know how things (sometimes) work in Silicon Valley?
Labor is entitled to all it creates.
The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.
Markets are fundamentally just a proxy for the interests of rich people. There can be no fair allocation of resources as long as the mechanism to do so is a figleaf for the oligarchy.
If you do not feel gratitude to your employer I suggest you find a different one. If you cannot find such an employer over an extended time frame, perhaps the problem is you.
That is, a US tech worker is taking much more for their own from those billionaire employers, compared to what Samsung's workers managed to do after a lot of haggling.
Just the average doesn’t say enough.
I think I am making a shrewd decision here if my math and equine knowledge holds.
The average person on hacker news is easily in the 90th percentile of software engineers, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the most people here make somewhere around there.
The biggest confounding factor is the other fact that most HN users are startup founders living off ramen in Peter Thiel's garage, so that probably brings down the average some.
Almost 6x the base, not bad.
product regulations and antitrust as examples
There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them.
So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.
“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.
Take another example, someone who won a lottery vs someone who hasn't, but otherwise lived the same life, in your world view one deserves it and the other doesn't. And their their offspring forever on as well? If you accept this now your list of exceptions is using force, connections and also luck. But we can keep adding examples and exceptions to the rule until at some point you need to admit that way of looking at the world is too flawed, no? BTW this luck aspect is the same as the "Texan got a knock on the door offering them millions forever because they have oil under their house" so I guess I did end up re-arguing that.
You're ascribing a level of agreement with your opinions about who deserves what level of credit people deserve for results that are far beyond the scope of a single person to vast swaths of people who have no power to contest the system that has existed for so long that no one alive created. The reason I "pay my dues" to the grandchildren of random rich people from 100 years ago is not because I owe them but because there's literally nothing I can do to avoid it regardless of how plausible I find the extreme opinion you're confidently asserting is some sort of self-evident fact.
Also, it's not sharing with society that makes people billionaires, it's taking from society. Had all that profit gone to society, they wouldn't be billionaires. Now often (not always) they provide some value to society but that generates that profit, but quite often even that was based on taking from society. They take natural resources to exploit, monopolise a market, exploit workers, etc.
Since 2/3rds of American billionaires are from industry, if it is true that their parents were multi-millionaires, that is wonderful. The fact that children here can take the platforms their parents build them and turn that into great value for the American people is a good thing and one of the reasons I am drawn to this country.
Brings to mind a certain creature that thrives in festering wounds.. It's in the tip of my...
I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.
I don't have any problem with people getting insanely rich from stock price increases, but the argument that it's society sharing the value they created ignores the fact that they were only responsible for the initial foundations of that value, and not all the work that continues later.
That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.
And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.
She gets more utility than she pays for (that's the one trick of capitalism).
Is that trickle down?
Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.
That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.
I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.
That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit.
One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion dollars.
The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.
Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.
This is not true, and somewhat confusing, because "takes the risk" means two distinct things - making decisions and living with the consequences of them. Economic production is a collective effort. The management of the company is who usually makes the decisions; these might coincide with owner (especially in small business) but often they're just another employee.
On the other hand, bad decisions made by management affect everyone in the company, not just the owner. The rich enough owner rarely lose their livelihood (we have limited liabilities btw), but the employees might lose the only source of income.
And the system where you have only one person (owner as main manager) making decisions ("take risks") that can negatively impact many people (his employees, customers and what not) is structurally risky, it actually increases the risk of something going wrong (aside from it being a moral hazard). (POTUS is an extreme example of this.) The risk is shared (collectively owned, if you will) and so should be the decision-making.
Is this a possible failure mode of the system?
What sort of symptoms might one look for in a society if we believed this might be happening?
Or do we simply dismiss that this has been proven impossible (as per the theory of Money 101) and move on?
Right, and CEOs famously are the first ones laid off when the company is flailing and losing money, because after all, they're the ones at the helm of the ship! And of course when a CEO does leave, they never get a golden parachute.
> Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.
Sure, but plenty of people think that the way value is distributed today is completely out of proportion to their contributions, and you're presenting it like the current way is the only possible rational way rather than an emergent property of the entirety of human history being an uneven playing field.
I can think of a few. You've got things like Shapley values. But it's not a "neutral" way to attribute outcomes to actors.
It's funny actually, I read about Shapley scores ages ago, and then the go-to example was basically political corruption: assume a bunch of political parties with varying vote weight but no principles whatsoever, aiming to secure a majority to split a "prize" among themselves. But looking at Wikipedia now, it's practically presented as a method to guarantee fairness.
Either way, there's no neutral measure of value (or for that matter, effort) either. What a dollar gets you depends 100% on who else has dollars and how much, so productivity or efficiency can never be separated from distributional concerns.
I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.
Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.
Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.
There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)
Believe it or not co-ops exist just fine and some do very well. It sounds like what you would like is a co-op and I will be quite happy for you if you start one.
This is where startup seed funding comes from, capitalists like YC who are good at it rather than some incompetent. It's why bad companies eventually lose the ability to raise, freeing up societal resources.
What appears to be implicit in your comment ("There is no need for a capitalist") is an advocacy for central planning for capital. Although you also say "they can pay taxes" so maybe that's not what you're advocating for.
If you want to know what I think is best, it's possibly a wealth tax applied on global wealth, along with stronger regulations around media concentration, political spending, and a few other things. But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.
What about the control that out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats have over large amounts of taxpayers' money? Shouldn't we find that far more problematic overall?
> There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially.
Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment? Sounds like there is a need after all, otherwise you could just have a partnership structure and take no outside money whatsoever.
I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.
There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".
The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.
No billionaire is forced to break up a public company to pay taxes, the same as no average Joe is forced to sell his clothes to pay taxes. The idea in common is that if one knows that one must have cash at the end of the fiscal year, then one sets aside the money and simply avoids buying clothes or investing in assets.
I’m just a dumb blue collar worker, but I’m going to go with “No” here.
They were only ever owed what they agreed to work for.
Now, that’s changed and they negotiated a different agreement.
They were never owed this until both parties agreed they were.
A 40 year old person can’t retire on that money.
I don’t think they will be allowed to retire.
You pay them the bonus, it shows on the pay cheque, like every salary bonus. What about this is something you'd expect in an article?
How about TSMC or ASML?
Are you being sarcastic?
It's literally mentioned in the first sentence of the article, as well as the subheading.
> cost centres
What?
In what way are manufacturing workers a cost centre?
They aren’t call centre workers.
I remember when I had these kind of takes. I blindly believed in "equal treatment, including billionaires". Now I get frustrated reading them, but I have empathy from understanding where they come from (for now, at least).
This is not standard thing. This is response in situation where company has generated massively more profit than any time previously and likely any time in future after market stabilises. Expectation that at least part is shared with employees should not be unreasonable.
EDIT: just realized I'm not sure what a "chip worker" in this article is. Someone doing digital design? Someone working in the fab? Hmm