• BullishUtensil@lemmy.world
    51·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • Alaknár@lemm.ee
      3·
      5 days ago

      Nah, nah, you see - I had an excellent breakfast today. Clearly that means world hunger doesn’t exist! Checkmate, leftist!

    • Someone64@lemmy.world
      51·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        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.

  • auginator@lemmy.world
    22·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      6 days ago

      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.

  • sfu@lemm.eeEnglish
    327·
    6 days ago

    Why does everything have to be sooo left or right?

    Some unions are good, some are bad.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.todayEnglish
      19·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        6 days ago

        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.

        • suicidaleggroll@lemm.eeEnglish
          6·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
            14·
            6 days ago

            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.

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                5 days ago

                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.

          • sfu@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            A union getting rapists and murders off the hook is not what the image is about.

            • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.todayEnglish
              1·
              5 days ago

              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.

              • sfu@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                5 days ago

                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.

    • Vreyan31@reddthat.comEnglish
      16·
      6 days ago

      “Why do Unions have to be considered Left?”

      Tell me you have no idea about the history of labor rights without telling me…

      • sfu@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        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.