Blake

joined 2 years ago
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[–] Blake 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For workers, unions are 100% upside.

The extent to which you are arguing against overwhelming evidence cannot be understated. You are arguing against something less controversial than evolution.

We know that unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions.

But that’s not all unions do. Unions also have powerful effects on workers’ lives outside of work.

High unionization levels are associated with positive outcomes across multiple indicators of economic, personal, and democratic well-being

Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%.

Unionized workers are more likely to receive paid leave, have health insurance and pension plans.

Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers.

Unionized workers receive 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave

How unions help all workers

Workers get significant economic benefits from labor unions

Unionized workers earn 10.2% more than their non-union peers

Supporting workers’ right to organize is a key way to help boost wages and support quality jobs.

Unions provide major economic benefits for workers and families

[–] Blake 7 points 1 year ago

This is the difference between a trade union and an industrial union. You can join an industrial union elsewhere in Europe or even in the US, such as the IWW.

[–] Blake 25 points 1 year ago (40 children)

It would being better pay, better benefits, even more stable careers and better work-life balance.

It doesn’t matter how much money you’re already making, or how good your benefits already are. If you have a Union, you can negotiate for improvements. There is always room for improvement, unless you’re working at a fully-mutual workers cooperative.

I know first hand that some trades even make more than their unionized counterparts

I’d be interested to learn more, do you have a source or anything?

[–] Blake 1 points 1 year ago

I didn’t say it had to be open source. Copyright is irrelevant as far as this topic is concerned - compiling code into binary is transformative. The only thing that matters here is patent law, and it seems easy enough to just make a law that allows non-profit infringement of patents for this explicit purpose. I don’t think there’s any legal roadblocks to releasing server software.

[–] Blake 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As SI prefixes, they’re all multiples of ten, technically speaking. So referring to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte is incorrect, it’s 1.024 kilobytes or 1 kibibyte. Microsoft deciding to ignore industry and international standards is the reason for the confusion.

But either way, hard drive manufacturers will sell a 1TB drive, and Windows will see that as a 935GB drive - that’s basically the difference between 2^40 bytes vs. 10^12 bytes

[–] Blake 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Unless you’re a hard drive manufacturer, of course :)

[–] Blake 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lmao okay, yes, defeating every single one of your arguments logically and soundly is absolutely “going straight for ad-hominem”. You’re projecting so hard it’s genuinely very funny.

[–] Blake 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can’t really compare small-scale clusters of highly available services with the scale of the entire Internet, it’s just an entirely different ballgame. Though even in small scale setups, there is always a sweet spot between too many paths and not enough paths - VRRP (which is the protocol usually used for high availability) actually has quite a big overhead, you can’t have too many connections on the same network or it causes lots of problems.

Internet scale routing usually uses BGP, which also has quite a heavy overhead.

I guess all you need to understand is that routing isn’t free, and the more routes, the more overhead. So there’s always going to be a point where adding more routes just makes things slower rather than faster. And BGP… is just a bit of a mess, right now, honestly. The BGP table has grown so big that a lot of older devices can’t keep it in fast memory anymore, so they either have to be replaced with newer hardware or use slow memory (and therefore slow processing of packets). So it’s not really in everyone’s best interests to just keep adding more routes. It’s harder and harder to justify.

why there are so many more connections in the north east and west coast if more connections slows the whole system down

I’m not from the US, so at best it would be an educated guess.

Firstly, it’s not as simple as just “more connections is more slow”, it means there’s a greater overhead. If the improvement from adding another line is greater than the overhead, then it can be worthwhile. For example, imagine a simple network with three routers, A, B and C, where A is connected only to B, and C is connected only to B, meaning that B is connected to both A and C. If there is a large amount of traffic between A and C, it may be worth adding a direct connection between them. If there isn’t, then it’s probably not worth doing.

I guess it’s a bit like adding a new road between two existing roads. Is it worth adding a junction and a set of traffic lights to some existing roads, or would that slow down traffic enough not to be worth doing?

Maybe, since you work with software more, it would make sense to put it this way: why don’t you create an index for every single possible column and table in SQL?

Or just look at it like premature optimisation. There’s a saying about premature optimisation in software engineering! ;-)

Another thing to keep in mind though is that there’s definitely still quite a few bad decisions still kicking around from when the internet was new. It takes time and effort to get rid of the legacy junk, same as in programming.

[–] Blake 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We aren’t recycling solar panels enough

This is pro-nuclear scare mongering. Go ahead and compare the numbers for tons of solar panel E-waste produced compared to tons of nuclear waste produced per year.

Under EU law, producers are required to ensure their solar panels are recycled properly.

We haven’t had a lot of need for solar panel recycling yet because they last so fucking long and even when they reach “the end of their working life” they’re still generating a decent amount of power, so they can just be sold off or given away to someone with no solar panels.

It’s only if solar panels become damaged or really really old that they need recycled. It’s basically a non issue, especially when you compare it to nuclear waste.

Wind still is killing birds

Yet more pro-nuclear propaganda nonsense. Wind turbines kill an absolutely tiny fraction of birds compared to house cats, not to mention birds getting hit by cars, let alone commercial and private aircraft. It’s a non-issue.

uses massive amounts of land

As mentioned above: the entire United States could be 100% powered by renewable electricity if we converted just 5% of the land currently used FOR PARKING SPACES and turned it into renewables. It’s not a real issue.

that’s before we get into the cost of transporting

Which is all factored into TCOE, which, surprise surprise, is around the same or better than the TCOE of nuclear. So, nope, irrelevant. Go ahead and prove that utility-scale renewables have a greater TCOE than nuclear if you want to argue it though. Looking forward to you providing a source.

very real human rights problem

Ah yes, and the extraction of uranium ore, the handling of nuclear waste and the construction of nuclear power plants are all notoriously free from human rights issues!

[–] Blake 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’m not using Chernobyl as an example of anything. I’m mentioning it because a number of people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, therefore it has a bearing on the number of deaths caused by that source of power.

nuclear is the cleanest, safest way to do it

That is not true, and I have posted evidence demonstrating that it isn’t true.

Also, IPCC says that all of our energy sources can be 100% renewable and that it’s totally viable. Sorry, but you’re not better informed on this topic than the experts. You’re no better than an anti-vaxxer with your science denial.

[–] Blake 8 points 1 year ago

I didn’t say they should keep the servers up forever, I agree that’s unreasonable. But it isn’t unreasonable to require that they release the software necessary for hosting the servers so that the fans/community can host servers if they so choose.

[–] Blake 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is what she’s angry about

Get a fucking grip, Ayesha. This is like being offended by Tesco selling tampons or toothbrushes or something.

an older child, who is also innocent, might understand what it is

By definition, if someone knows what these things are, they aren’t “innocent”. It’s not like they scream sex toy. They even look like they could be vapes or something.

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