They’re just a service. Coinbase going away isn’t going to be a huge deal for people. There are dozens of other services providing same or higher quality services than Coinbase.
It mostly means that you are not forced to be part of a union to work. Which is something I agree with. But I highly encourage people to be part of an union.
You can never be forced to join a union. Federal law forces unions to represent non members. "Right to work" means non members can force them to do it for free. Other states let unions force non members to pay for what the union is forced to provide them.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't this law simply prevent a situation where a non-union employee would be forced to pay the union fees even if he doesn't want to be a part of the union in a unionized workplace? If yes, how is it a bad thing for employees?
Genuine question, because I don't understand the issue. If they want to join a union and pay the associated fees, they are welcome to. If they just wanna work a job without joining a union and paying their fees, they can do that as well. How is it a bad thing, unless you consider forcing those employees who don't care about unions to still contribute fees a good thing?
It isn't simple because federal law forces the union to represent non members still. Free riding is good for free riders. It's bad for people who pay for it.
In that user's defense, the practical outcome of right-to-work from the perspective of someone who doesn't have it is that you can quit or get fired without notice.
The definition of US gun laws isn't "you can have most semi-auto rifles unless you've gone to jail, you live in California and the rifle looks scary, or the barrel is too short", but it's probably how someone would explain the practical outcome.
Here's a slightly more rigorous version of the proof for anyone interested:
1. Suppose the list of primes is finite, and that they are P_1, P_2, P_3 .., P_n
2. Consider the new number P_1 * P_2 * P_3 * .. * P_n + 1. None of the P_is divide this number. Therefore, by definition, it it is a prime.
3. The number we found in (2) is not any of the P_is, and it is a prime. This contradicts the assumption we made in (1). So, the assumption in (1) is wrong, there must be infinitely many primes
The examples in parent's post do not work because they do not follow the framework of this proof. I see parent's point that the claim in the article isn't technically correct, but I think it's reasonable to allow some handwaving in an accessible article written in English :-)
I think a lot of people don't understand how pay works. The price of a good is determined not by how important it is to you, but by its marginal utility i.e. how difficult it would be to get more if you need it. Water, for example, is critical for life, but is basically free in most civilized areas in the first world because it is abundant.
The price a company is going to pay for your labor depends on how hard it is for them to replace you. If FB can replace a SWE in Atlanta with another for 90k$, that is what they will pay. It has nothing to do with the value of the work you're doing.
Value of work definitely is a major part of it depending on priorities, but also everything else you said. It’s not a black and white thing as some make out, all revolving around one element.
> Water, for example, is critical for life, but is basically free in most civilized areas in the first world because it is abundant.
I largely agree with your comment, but I disagree with this sentence. Water is almost free in most civilized areas because it's not subject to free market economics (for good reason). Basic water supply is usually provided by the local government (and this applies to places where it is scarce). If water were treated the same way health is in the US, its price wouldn't be anywhere close to free.
Beer costs about $0.50 a liter here in Shanghai. At 50L a day, $25 that’d be $750 a month. Doable in most of the first world.
If you want to know the realistic upper bound for local price of water see how much Coke costs. That’s not something the government much concerns itself with anywhere. Or look at the price of water in someplace like Gurgaon our Dubai, cities so hideously planned that drinking water and sewerage are transported by tanker.
Water can be provided for very low cost even with less than competent governments.
I don't know why rumors like this persist when they're so easy to fact check. When I go on Walmart's website, a 2-liter (~half gallon) bottle of store-brand cola is $0.87 and a gallon of drinking water is $1.00.
Everything is subject to “free market economics”, no matter how much you try and force it not to be. It just happens that it’s very easy to “control” the price of water, because the supply far outstrips the demand anyway.
Following this argument, the replacement cost for a SWE in SF is also 90k$ since they can hire an engineer to replace them in Atlanta. Thus resulting in most of the SF office being let go.
The point is just that if a company wants to participate in a labor market, it has to pay at the going rate in that market. For various reasons, a company might choose to stay in a pricy market. For example, it might be easier to hire for some skillset, or it might be easier to grow your team because your employees have lots of friends with similar skills that they can refer.
Companies that don't think this is an advantage should do what you're recommending, but the ones that do will continue to hire here, while also hiring in other markets. I don't know which group is more correct (it's pretty hard to make any authoritative claims about these things), but that does explain why there isn't a mass exodus from SF to ATL.
A point to note here is that labor markets vary not just by location, but also by what the job is. Many companies in the Bay Area do outsource some parts of their internal IT or Business Intel functions to Accenture and co, for example. What they're doing is exactly that - they're leaving this expensive market because they don't believe the benefits are worth the markup for those specific roles
But if employees work remotely anyways, why does it matter where the employee is (as long as they can work the same hours, so within a few hours of the same timezone)?
I think everyone is bad at hiring because hiring is hard. The problem is that companies are also bad at letting low performers go because we're human beings and public perception, conflict avoidance and empathy for co-workers influence our decisions
People don't want to join companies that have recently had a layoff because they're generally interpreted as a sign that the company isn't doing well financially, outside of companies that advertise firing low performers as an aspect of their culture (Netflix). In an ordinary market, losing low performing business functions might make your company more efficient but it comes with outsized PR cost that makes it harder to hire.
A broader economic crisis offers good cover for such an action. If everyone is laying employees off, it's not as bad if you do it too.
Credit karma lets you file both federal and state for free . CreditKarma's filing service is pretty new, so there are lots of edge cases they don't handle well or at all (for example the UI to enter stock trades is awful). I put my numbers into TurboTax and CreditKarma to make sure they match for validation, then filed with CreditKarma.
You give them a lot of data about you that they then use to sell you insurance and loans and so on, but I actually find their services useful so I consider that a fair trade.
I used CK the past two years and started getting a ton of robocalls and credit card offers. Not to mention my college that never had my phone number previously started calling me on a weekly basis hounding me for donations.
The slavery rhetoric is very commonly used to dehumanize immigrants. This makes it morally easier to justify treating then like an outgroup.
Many, many people cannot afford to lose their jobs because they live paycheck to paycheck. Funny how they're never called slaves or referred to as having owners.
