• 6 Posts
  • 127 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

    A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

    A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

    I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

    1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
    2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

    Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

    Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

    1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

    Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.









  • I was thinking about why a small landlord might be better, and I know there are exceptions, but usually a small landlord is is not going to squeeze every penny out of their rentals, sometimes out of the goodness of their heart, but most importantly, a small landlord has other ways to be productive.

    A small landlord who has a normal job, if they want to improve the world, they do it through their job or personal projects, they build something or create something or whatever.

    A big landlord who does nothing else, they aren’t actually creating anything, they’re just rent seeking and the most creative way they can imagine to improve the world is to rent seek even harder.

    Our economic system gives greater rewards to those who move money around than to those who create things or cure cancer or anything else. The ways of turning a lot of money into even more money are taxed less (usually not at all) than more common ways of earning money like working a job or creating physical goods. The richest people didn’t get rich by creating something that improves everyone’s lives, they got rich by moving money around.


  • That’s a good example. If I’m regularly running a command that is a single whitespace character away from disaster, that’s a problem.

    Imagine a fighter aircraft that had an eject button on the side of the flight stick. The pilot complains “I’m afraid I might accidentally hit the eject button when I don’t need to”, but everyone responds “why would you push the eject button if you don’t want to eject?”, or “so your concern is that the eject button will cause you to eject…?” – That’s how I feel right now.


  • Just checked my command history and I’ve run 60,000 commands on this computer without problem (and I have other computers). I guess people have different ideas of what “comfortable” means, but I think I consider myself comfortable with the command line.

    I have shot myself in the foot with rm -rf in the past though, and screwed up my computer so bad the easiest solution was to reinstall the OS from scratch. My important files are backed up, including most of my dotfiles, but being a bit too quick to type and run a rm -rf command has caused me needless hours of work in the past.

    I realized the main reason I have to use rm -rf is to remove git repos and so I thought I’d ask if anyone has a tip to avoid it. And I’ve found some good suggestions among the least upvoted comments.



  • That’s a good suggestion for some, but I’m quite comfortable with the command line.

    It’s not that I’m irrationally scared of rm -rf. I know what that command will do. If I slow down an pay attention it’s not as though I’m worried “I hope this doesn’t break my system”.

    What I really mean is I see myself becoming quite comfortable typing rm -rf and running it with little thought, I use it often to delete git repos, and my frequent use and level of comfort with this command doesn’t match the level of danger it brings.

    Just moving them to /tmp is a nice suggestion that can work on anywhere without special programs or scripts.