- moorhosj parentEvery barrier we can out in place will result in fewer bullies making it through the funnel. It’s like a marketing funnel in reverse.
- ==This ecosystem has made Silicon Valley what it is today.==
I assume this is referring to the technological innovation and corporate profits of Silicon Valley. I would ask you to consider, from a broader perspective, what Silicon Valley is today. Specifically, in relation to elevated levels of depression [1], suicide [2] and inequality [3].
Isn't it worth exploring whether the same working conditions that benefit the top 10-20% are having a negative effect on the other 80-90%?
[1] https://money.cnn.com/mostly-human/silicon-valleys-secret/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
[3] https://fortune.com/2018/10/16/silicon-valleys-income-inequa...
- ==then why have far older and desirable professions like law and medicine continued to be incredibly well paying?==
These are actually two perfect examples to illustrate my point. Both industries are represented by organizations that systematically make it harder for more people to enter the profession (AMA for medicine and Bar Association for legal). They have eschewed the free market in favor of regulatory capture in order to maintain their market advantage.
==Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.==
Same could have been said of building cars and planes 50 years ago.
- No goalposts were moved. I questioned the premise of OP's comment on whether unions can exist in a world where employees choose to switch jobs every 2-3 years.
You responded with an authoritative answer backed up with zero evidence or supporting data. That it was about unions is an embedded assumption based on that fact that the entire discussion is about unions.
- ==Do people actually think that software engineering is going to become a job that isn't skilled, and isn't sought after?==
I'm not sure why you would be so sure it wouldn't. Are the software engineers of today truly that different from the machinists of yesterday?
If you believe in the free market, then it is elementary that more people will flood into these careers which will lower the wages and diminish the bargaining power of existing software engineers.
- ==We can form a union when we need to form a union.==
In my 35 years of life, it has become harder to start a union, so it isn't out of the question that it becomes harder and harder to start a union when software engineers "need to". There's no guarantee that what exists today will exist tomorrow.
- But not all tech workers are programmers. To compare to another union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) represents machinists from Boeing and Harley-Davidson, distribution center workers at IKEA, and also wood, pulp and paper workers.
- ==makes everyone spend money they don't actually have.==
So much for all that personal responsibility we used to hear so much about. Far easier to blame the government for everything.
Companies use credit to buy back stock because we deregulated that activity. It used to be that the government didn’t allow it. This point is actually a counter-point to your theory.
- I think the point is that once the cat is out of the bag it’s hard to put it back. For example, at first more people were helped by opiates than harmed. As time passed, by the time we realized that relationship had changed, we already had a bunch of addicted citizens.
It isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an authoritarian government using our own surveillance video for nefarious purposes.
- I think we read the same book. I don’t really think of Middletown as a Rust Belt city. It’s a town of 50,000 people. I am talking about big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and smaller ones like Youngstown and Erie.
As someone who lives in one of those cities, it seemed like a clear correlation could have been made. It was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...
- I think his biggest miss was failing to connect the region to the rest of the country. He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection. It could have made the story of the region more approachable to more people. It seemed so obvious to me how the areas are linked by economic circumstances, environmental degradation, poor education levels, distinct culture and problems with drug addiction.
- ==for the same reasons they fail to draw a line between their current insurer's negotiated rates and cost of care.==
Insurance companies are not subject to FOIA requests like the government. People tie Medicare to the Government, why would this be different?
==A single negotiator will likely only make pricing more opaque==
Not sure it's possible to be more opaque than today. All of the other country's who do it this way have far more transparent pricing than the US, so I'm not sure I buy this reasoning.
- ==I'm interested to know why you think the government is incentivized to negotiate the best pricing for citizens.
I can think of two. First, so they can spend the money on other things they want (military, social security, education, etc.). Second, is so they can get re-elected by those same citizens.
==There is no way to tell if the price we are paying is at all good value for money compared to what it could cost.
We could look at the dozens of other developed countries who work like this, should give us some clues.
- I took the argument to mean that it is better to regulate bad things in a way that might be ham-fisted, but allow for future improvements than to do nothing about a known problem.
The idea people seem to be repeating is that this will be ineffective. It seems to me that GDPR provides a pretty strong framework to learn from and build off. Europe effectively launched version 1.0, so now we can implement the best parts and eliminate or improve the weakest parts. We aren't starting from scratch or searching in the dark.
- In reality, we can never know the full impacts of new legislation until it's released into the wild. You said yourself that "legislate first, fix later" makes you incredulous because you feel it is never fixed later.
I am suggesting that the perfect bill which requires no future fixes is non-existent. Thus, advocating for this solution is the equivalent of advocating for nothing. Just as building a product and showing it to nobody is functionally the same as not building a product from the rest-of-the-world's perspective.
- ==The parent was suggesting to regulate first==
The assumption is that introducing a bill to regulate dark patterns is the same as "moving fast". This bill hasn't even made it to committee [1] and darkpatterns.org was started in 2010 [2]. I think an argument could be made that the US government is actually moving pretty slowly on this topic. GDPR has been in place for over a year, so there is significant data to understand the implications of this type of regulation.
==and fix broken regulations later.==
How is this different from a software product releasing an updated version? Microsoft Excel is on v16 and I don't think anyone is accusing that product of moving fast and breaking things. I wish we spent more time adding features and fixing bugs from past legislation.
- ==But now that it's getting more popular, it seems to me the value of it being unique would get washed out fast.==
Or, the prices will rise and Cameo revenue will increase. Each celeb has only so many hours in a day, so there is an upper-bound on the number of Cameo's they can realistically record.
From Crain's Chicago [1]: "On average, customers are paying $62 per video, nearly triple the amount just 12 months ago. Cameo keeps 25 percent."
==Like being able to invite them to parties, or events, and pay them for an actual true "cameo." It would obviously come with a price, but to me, that would be much more innovative.==
Isn't this idea basically the Fyre app? It seems like Cameo took a solid route, it will be interesting to see where this round takes them.
[1] https://www.chicagobusiness.com/john-pletz-technology/cameo-...