skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems incredibly significant that only 230 people are officially involved with these plans to unionize. As of 2019, Google had nearly 120,000 employees.[0] That seems quite small, relatively speaking.

Legally (I think, just learning about this now), to form a union, a majority of workers must show their willingness to form a union. Alternatively, to choose an existing union to join, an election with 30% of the workers support is required.[1]

So with that said, am I reading this right? Does this group of 230 people need to find at least ~40,000 more people for this to be a valid effort to form/join a legal union?

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

[1]https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/how-to-form-a...
> it causes severe psychological distress. That's what prison is.

Depends. Some penal systems are there for "retribution" or punishment, and those match your definition. Other concepts available are rehabilitation and simply separating proven dangerous elements from society at large. Apart from the loss of freedom of movement (which I would not describe as "severe psychological distress"), there is no hard requirement for a prison system to be even unpleasant.
Aren't most employees also shareholders, in the tech industry? Don't we have representation through that mechanism and why isn't it enough?
> Firstly the fact that the leaders and all the population are squashed up against one another exerts a massive influence on the government. They're much more vulnerable to protest than other governments because they can't hide as easily. This makes them much more nervous and more willing to placate the populace than the government in, say, Myanmar, is.

Singaporean here. They've done well in the 55 years we've been around to make sure that people don't protest — people here value wealth and personal comfort over the thought of going to jail for their freedoms.

Even a solo person holding up a smiley face might get charged and indicted for an "assembly" in Singapore: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55068007
How would you describe your experience being a unionized digital worker?
I researched this several years ago and for various reasons it's best to use: sign up, log in, and log out.
Buying up competitor does not immediately make it a monopoly or duopoly. Especially in industry where barrier of entry are low.

Exclusive / Special agreement with serving only one kind of Soda ( or no Pepsi where there is Coke ) are Anti-Competitive arrangement. Not Rent Seeking.
And sometimes the guild took the reins from the the state! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

Say what you will about (proto-)mercantilism vs capitalism, but I rather live under guild-ocracy then cyberpunk megacrop-ocracy.
I think this is an oversimplification of the political dialogue and interaction of the EU, ECHR and HRA.

The passage of the Human Rights Act (which brings Convention rights into domestic law) was not a requirement of EU membership and we could have repealed it while still an EU member (this would be separate from leaving the ECHR itself). Moreover, reducing the impact of the convention and repealing/"reforming" the HRA was most notably proposed in the past by Theresa May as Home Secretary, who campaigned for Remain.

I don't think the ECHR/HRA is particularly likely to go away here any time soon. However the government may attempt to reform the way judicial reviews can be brought to limit their impact or remove the ability to bring "last minute" challenges which could have been brought in a more timely way (theoretically this is already supposed to be the case but in practice the politically controversial cases aren't often dismissed for lack of timeliness).
>When I talk to colleagues in tech about unions I hear a lot of misconceptions

Because everyone talking about unionization refuses to get into the nitty gritty of what I might gain, what I might lose, and the structural changes to the workplaces that are inherent with unionization.

And if/when I/others start spitballing about what those might be we're treated like dolts uneducated on organized labor, and should just shut my mouth and get on board.

>they don't always get it right

This is the closest anyone every gets to saying something, but it doesn't mean anything. Where the fuck is the actual case study about the structure of the system, constraints, influences, incentives? How does it evolve and how does the contract change and evolve that system?

>I don't pretend that Hollywood is a perfect utopia of worker relations, but I think it's pretty undeniable that the industry is a much better place with the unions around.

SHOW don't TELL.

tl;dr: Don't tell me I want a union contract, tell me what the terms of the contract will be and I'll decide for myself. I'm probably on board, but every time someone glosses over the details you push me further and further away.
But isn't the big difference there that Tyson is a science communicator and not actually a researcher?
Timing is perfect, Google reputation is in taters and US + a gazillion states are suing them.
The latency on twitch has been around 4 seconds or 30 seconds. I believe their low-latency doesn’t get quite close to being nu able to collaborate.
that's ominous, so if you don't tow the union line on the social issue of the day then they can prevent you from being a member which will be required for employment?
This is the first I've ever suggested an opinion on it publicly, and I'm a line engineer, not management. Internally, I don't usually talk about things like this, either.
> I maintain dual sims in my iphone

That's a very good idea, thanks for this.
My advice is to only buy the winning lottery tickets and to stop wasting it on the losing tickets.
Perhaps somewhere during the planning, design, development and testing phases they considered this issue and mitigated it?
Reading https://alphabetworkersunion.org/principles/mission-statemen... gives me hope that they will!
Please don't.

Imagine if the manufacturer of your washing machine came into your house at night to completely change the way you interact with it, every 2 years. "But it's brand new! It's modern! Why are you complaining? You can delay the update for 2 weeks if you want."
Precisely, you can end up having people working for a company under terms that are technically legal, but still exploiting the weakest. The strongest people easily move on to better positions, but some, single parents, less skilled, psychologically weaker individuals and so on are more easily pressed into working conditions they may not like, because they fear losing the job they do have.

In the US the minimum wage haven't moved in decades, at least not significantly. Denmark doesn't even have a minimum wage, yet people are better paid, that's due the Danish unions. Interestingly the Danish unions are actually oppose a minimum wage, because they believe it makes it easier to legally pay people less.
This is not the case with the European Arrest Warrant anymore. France only retained the right for the accused to spend the eventual sentence in France.
In theory the unions should be a place to organise employees, to help improve working conditions. But I suspect for most people the real benefit will be protection from miscarriages of justice.

I've personally seen people put through the wringer by HR teams, and even when the HR team acknowledges they've fucked up, there's no apologies or an attempt to make things right. Unions can provide protection in these case, whether that's access to legal help, or just having a 3rd party on your side sitting in on employee dispute meetings.

I think a lot of people don't appreciate how badly they can be screwed over by a HR team, accidentally or maliciously, until they find themselves in a meeting with three members of the HR team, with no one telling them what's going on. At which point, it's already too late to save yourself. A union gives you recourse and support, something invaluable when it you're up against the entire HR team.
My union membership more than paid for itself this year. My employer wanted to defer merit increase due to covid and all the uncertainty. The union called them on the bluff.
I think you misunderstood what he wrote.

My business also sell only to other business, and Google kept calling us nagging us to do some "experiments".

One of them involved enabling "display network" ads on mobile.

Like the guy side... it "attracts" fraud.

So, what kind of fraud?

I am not talking about no conversion or no click, I am talking about all our clicks, or almost all to the point it was impossible to tell the difference, were fraudulent, for example most our ad spending was going into a musical keyboard app for kids, that has nothing to do with my business, despite me blocking the category multiple times, the app in question just kept being reuploaded in different categories to avoid bans.

When I went to check out the app Google Play page, it was rated 1 star, and lots of complaints similar to this:

"App is just a fraud, it keeps opening ads in the middle of the song while my toddler is playing to force my toddler to click the ads, then it automatically closes the page that opened and keep running, using all my battery and making my toddler see weird stuff."

So yeah, it is fraud, it is not "failed conversion", it is an app conning toddlers into clicking my ads that are selling stuff that shouldn't be anywhere near a toddler, both the parents and my business were being scammed.
That's a very risky proposition. From what I can tell from the outside, many "progressives" throw equality and freedom out of the window when it comes to voting.

By the tone of that article, I would not even be surprised if white males don't get to vote in that union or are excluded from influential positions.
It’s really good. Costs money on Steam but is much easier to do multiplayer then, which is really where the game shines in my opinion.
Sadly this is true.
I was going to say the same ... there's a positive cost to the user to learn how the service works and have it become second nature (like writing on paper). There's no guarantee that a Venn diagram of your idea of "fair" and mine overlap as we're both (so far) imagining what $? might be.

There are two additional hurdles that keep me from signing-up (well really from entering data since the sign-up is free). My notes might be for my eyes only but there's no mention of being able to export them ... are they really mine then? If there were an export feature, can any other systems use the exported notes?
> For example, could a union stop the payout of that high-level exec that was eventually shown the door for harrasment with a good bonus?

No. Unions protect workers, not the business.

> In this beautiful part of the world you would even sometimes pressured to pay and join as if you're not a union member can have consequences that are unwanted.

Are you a citizen of your nation and do you pay taxes? Just as a nation protects its citizens in exchange for taxes, a union protects its members in exchange for dues. Everyone has to participate for the system to reasonably work.
Strangely the title in French use "Milliardaire", the title in German use "Milliardäre". So the number has been divided by 1000 in translation.
It's possible to build bigger turbines at sea, which are more efficient. The limitation on land is transporting the blades which often requires roads to be modified.
If CCP want to prosecute Ma, he would be trialed live on CCTV similar to disgraced politburo members like Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang.

Pretty sure he is just laying low or negotiating with the government right now.
'she had to kill the guards at the door' .

Why stop there, while we are at it, imagine she had to commit a terrorist attack and a genocide at once and Assange volunteered to help
> It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening.

On the other hand it got displaced by Oogieloves which had $40 million in marketing costs. Critics found it mostly bad and the only award it won was for films produced in Brazil. Maybe there was a reason no one wanted to spend ad money on that movie?
It's worth pointing out that in those situations unions aren't better for all workers. Also notice there's a strong gig economy component to establishing professional credentials.
> To be clear, in my opinion we definitely changed for the better

I'd say most things changed for the better. But I'd be a hypocrite if I said there are no dark aspects. There are organized thugs on the Internet who will do everything to make your life miserable at the slighest hint of you not conforming to the current view on $SUBJECT. What's equally bad, it doesn't really matter if you actually did what you are accused of, it's enough that someone says so. As a consequence, many people just prefer to keep silent, including the ones who have the most meaningful things to say.
This isn’t true. It just creates artificial scarcity in the form of the union membership, similar to artificial scarcity of the Bar exam, and college degrees in general, but mere union membership has even less claim to indicate skill, competence, etc.

When unions function as an exclusionary fraternity, they are actually pretty horrible. A good indicator of a well-functioning union is: the union doesn’t have negative effects on people who don’t join, and they are free to do their jobs side by side with union members and nobody cares, nobody judges anyone for their personal choice, no one discriminates on pay or opportunities.
Those Japanese and Korean companies were also unionized. Mighty strange how did they compete, right?
>>engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better".

This "if you don't like it here, go work somewhere else" kind of reasoning disproportionately balances the power towards the employer. Instead of fixing problems, it leads to removing those that are affected. This is exactly what unions are for.
> Once someone's app picks up your signal, it's logged on their device and there's no way to delete it.

Unless they've changed the schema, it should be just a SQLite database [1].

Most people with some competence at app development should be able to access the data file on their (Android) phones, and delete any rows which might prove troublesome.

They could also just uninstall the app and wipe all data if they want.

[1] https://medium.com/@frankvolkel/tracetogether-under-the-hood...
The idea that leaving equates to collective bargaining is false, and even if it had a ring of truth it would be ineffectual at FAANG companies.

Leaving changes nothing, it just accelerates the bad behaviour because the obstacle to the bad behaviour removed itself. A single person, even a team of engineers, leaving a FAANG company will have near-zero impact on the behaviour, functioning or profitability of that company. The action will not change management or ownership's perspectives on anything. They'll simply hire someone else, and promote internally if they need too. Even when you have a celebrity engineer like Tim Brey leave Amazon, publicly explaining why, outright slamming some of their behaviour, nothing will change. Mozilla seems to think it can function exactly the same as it did before (in terms of mindset) having let go of 25% of its staff. In the UK we recently had several politicians leave their senior positions within government or their party over disagreements in policy... and nothing meaningful has changed.

Unions are not just for protecting jobs, they're much more about staff having a voice, if not a seat, at the executive table. Unions can help influence senior decision-making. Most of that is about job protection, pay, quality of life issues because in blue-collar jobs those are the key issues. But in white-collar jobs a union can represent the opinion and aims of staff in a way that isn't obvious without them.
I'm not completely sure was it planned, but Stringer Bell was a character who attended community college, got his food from an organic food market, didn't want to be connected with the street. Almost like "coastal elite" and the New York slang would make sense there.
That pension thing probably isn't the union's fault. Pretty much anyone that had a non-government backed pension lost it or had it severely reduced. They simply were not financially sustainable. But I do agree they sometimes the union can be their own worst enemy. For example, I knew a sterl plant manager and he was telling me that they had a hard time competing with imported steel and that the union was constantly asking for more and more money and time off. Eventually management was forced to give them everything they wanted dispite explaining that it would bankrupt the company.

Overall, I think unions can be good. I would like an actual contract and no forced arbitration.
Employees can ask for better, but when you already work at the company that pays and treats their employees like Google, I'm not sure what more you are entitled to. It seems clear to me that these are people who are unwilling to sacrifice some of the money they earn to follow their ideals and principles, so they are trying this instead.

There are very few perils of leaving Google - a top tier company in an industry that is continuously struggling to hire enough people. If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.

Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.
In France it often does, and in other country's too, like a trade...China and the US trade allot of "bad boys".

>some less-scrupulous nations

Like the US, where you can buy your "out of prison" Card?
Not sure if this was taken into account, but I think there's a huge issue with the study subject itself: violence has always been there, especially in the past, death was not hidden, people were beaten and executed in public, and that violence was not necessarily what would draw people to more violence.

The real question is ethics and morality in a violent context.

And I don't think that aspect was taken into consideration.
ᐅ Domestic Violence Registry – Texas (TX)
But the symptoms could.
An ode to the small habit that made work fun
> They recommend doing it that way, because what else are they going to do, post a tutorial on how to do it via OBS? I don't think so.

I think you're being rather unfavourable there. The Jackbox developers have been pretty responsive listening to user feedback in the past. For example Linux support was added after several requests on Steam forums. They've also added other features like subtitles specifically for streaming via video conferencing solutions. So if Zoom / Teams / etc didn't work well then you can bet they'd have posted another workaround and/or a game patch since the alternative is they'd lose a lot of potential business in 2020.

As I'd said, I'd used it fine over both Zoom and Teams (multiple times on both in fact) and the only reason I even bought Jackbox Party games was because several different work colleagues (I think it might have been 3 different people) recommended it to me after they had played their own games (individually) over Zoom and other conferencing solutions.

I don't have any experience with Jitsi so maybe the issues you were having were Jitsi specific? Maybe, being a techie, Jitsi was already "good enough" but you thought you could improve upon it a little and ended up over-engineering a solution? (we've all fallen into that trap -- when you spend your entire life building enterprise solutions it's sometimes hard to take a step back. Particularly when it's something as fun as OBS). Or maybe there was some issue with Linux? All I know is that myself and everyone I know has had zero issues hosting using Jackbox's recommended approach.
Reading the article, it sounds like they do need to find ~40,000 votes. The article mentions that now they've announced the unionisation attempt, they're gonna starting doing lots of public campaigning to collect the votes they need.
Unions are ideological groups...

> Now that leaves me wondering if it is wise to leave this comment here...

Oh how high minded of you.
So the way that educational outcomes have been improving as a result of union teachers with seniority being paid more?
Think of the long game. Getting a union is the hard part. The ideological fervor will change with seasons, but the core issues will remain the same across decades (the stuff workers want to be able to negotiate). Nothing is free, some price must be paid.

Nothing pisses off a company more than workers organizing, so take whatever help you can get.
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The film industry operates on a gig-by-gig basis. Imagine drafting a legal contract for every sprint. Because you're working at a different company every sprint. Or interviewing/hiring new people every sprint. Kinda how the film industry works.

Way easier to just have standardized union contracts, pay rates, and expectations for everyone involved and have the union provide benefits.
The cool thing about this is trawlers in the area have occasionally hauled man-made specimens from the era (~10,000BC), meaning there could be archaeological remains just there underwater.
> After watching how a mechanics union did absolutely nothing while CEOs ripped apart my Dad's pension and put him through hell, I have a bit of a dim view on this sort of thing to begin with.

I would say that unions aren't magical entities. They're a necessary but not a sufficient condition for protecting the interests of workers. A union is only as good as its membership. If union members think they can just pay their union dues and expect the benefits to magically accrue, that's not going to happen. Union members have to take a very active part in governance of their union, and immediately remove any union leaders who start to show signs of corruption. Complacency is the enemy. As soon as unions become "hierarchical", it's game over, and the union is no better than the management it was designed to fight against.
I was reading it and thought: wow, this guy is absolutely right! Great things he's talking about. After reading it, i saw it was Linux Torvalds :D
One thing I can see a SE guild improving is clarity and consistency with things like license compliance, unenforceable attempts to restrict of ownership and development of software created in ones free time, assistance in stock options negotiations, and other things that regularly come up here.
Agree on all points made here, though I haven’t yet been in the founding position myself.. yet :)

Relevant side note: Docker compose is SUCH a nice tool for this type of work. It is very worth learning, but learning it takes time. Be careful not to confuse “we need to move fast” with “there is no time to learn how to properly use tools”. It’s worth understanding. You will have both initial nimbleness and something that isn’t far off from production ready. To be completely honest, I am still in the active learning phase with both Docker and Compose, but it’s helped keep me organized already.
I why not actually always send an email to that address? If the email isn't registered, change the message to suggest that perhaps they signed up with a different email, or they'd like to sign up instead?
The whole point of my comment is that it isn't just up to the emperor, claiming your power is universal has always been a douchebag move. Claiming much power at all for that matter.