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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.”

    What I’m saying is that if they can set “$0.50 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone, they can also set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.

    That’s you. That’s what we’re talking about: why they can’t “set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5”.

    You were told it’s because of the unions contract that they can’t cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
    You then replied about how that wouldn’t work because everyone left the union so they don’t have bargaining power.
    And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don’t have a good contract, but that’s aside from the point of “a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim”.

    I’m treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can’t cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn’t stop that, in which case they can.


  • … What?

    Your screenshot has the founder saying it’s reparable. It also has him telling someone with unreasonable expectations that they would be disappointed.

    If you literally take his comment out of context you can construe it as him saying they didn’t consider repairability or lifetime. But why wouldn’t you look at the context that’s right there?


  • There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.

    Literally the first reply I sent you.

    If you don’t know the basics of labor law and how companies are ostensibly prohibited from preventing organization, you really don’t have a lot of room to get upset when people think you don’t know stuff.

    That… is literally the thing being discussed here.

    No, it’s a nonsequitur you brought up out of nowhere. You asked why the company doesn’t just pay the union less, and when people told you replied assuming that everyone knew that all the workers left the union.


  • And you won’t, or can’t, respond to my point. It doesn’t matter that it’s a nonsequitur, you’re still obligated to respond to it premptively, you fool.

    Yes, if everyone leaves the union it doesn’t have power. Fucking duh. It doesn’t work that way because it’s illegal to pay people to not be in the union, since it infringes on people’s rights to collective bargaining. Which I politely said in my first reply to you when I just thought you were ignorant, rather than obstinate and rude as well.

    You just started randomly attacking me for no reason

    Crystal more. You’re the one who kicked off being angry when you found out I thought you were just genuinely ignorant, as opposed to properly stupid.


  • You also didn’t take into account every person in the state being in the Union, and the company only employing union workers, and the one non-union person, the CEO, was so afraid of loosing business at his company that only makes pro-union T-shirts that he wept openly at the thought of not capitulating to the unions every demand.

    Clearly a bird has eaten most of your frontal cortex and you’ve confused the concept of negotiations with women’s freestyle swimming.



  • Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it’s not a negotiation, and “why wouldn’t the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut” is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn’t know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn’t know how bargaining worked.

    Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.

    Okay.



  • Sure have!

    He told someone not to buy it if they expect more than five years without repairs. That person seemed to think spending more than $100 should get them a product that lasts a lifetime, and was irritated the founder said he thought it was pretty good that a piece of low cost consumer electronics made it five years before needing repairs.

    What part of that says to you that it’s not reparable or won’t last five years?


  • The workplace is deducting the union dues from union workers checks automatically.

    Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don’t just lower union pay outside of negotiations.

    There’s no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you’re weirdly smug about it.




  • It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
    The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

    Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

    It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

    Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?



  • They can’t cut union rates since they have a contract. So they can, within reason, pay non union workers more but not lower the pay of union workers. One of the benefits of being in the union is that they can’t just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.

    There’s a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they’re trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.


  • The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

    It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
    Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

    Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.


  • I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?

    I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
    I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)


  • Yup. Violating IP licenses is a great reason to prevent it. According to current law, if they get Alice license for the book they should be able to use it how they want.
    I’m not permitted to pirate a book just because I only intend to read it and then give it back. AI shouldn’t be able to either if people can’t.

    Beyond that, we need to accept that might need to come up with new rules for new technology. There’s a lot of people, notably artists, who object to art they put on their website being used for training. Under current law if you make it publicly available, people can download it and use it on their computer as long as they don’t distribute it. That current law allows something we don’t want doesn’t mean we need to find a way to interpret current law as not allowing it, it just means we need new laws that say “fair use for people is not the same as fair use for AI training”.