>Hacker news has a lot of owners, managers and what John Steinbeck called "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (e.g. future failed startup founders).
This way of thinking is so depressing to read about. If we ignore the strawman argument and just look at what 'point' you're making, you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations. A bit of a 'look at this guy, he thinks he can run his own business! Dummy' energy.
>I'm sure many of them are reaching for the downvote as they read this.
In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now where I wouldn't have had to read this at all.
>you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations.
I'm recognizing that some people have aspirations to become CEO and own a company and thus represent those interests in a class war, instead of their real interests as a laborer.
As it happens startup founders have more in common with labor than they do with capital. It's pretty routine for them to be screwed out of the wealth they created by investors and control over the company they created.
It's also routine for 90% of them to fail and for them to return to wage slavery.
Nonetheless it's common for them to take the side of their aspired societal position than their actual one.
>In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now
I can tell I hit a sore spot. Am I right in guessing that you aspire to own and run a successful company one day but are not there yet and were triggered enough to hit the flag button?
Anti union propaganda has been thoroughly effective in America, and union membership coincides with the decline of middle class real wages and political power quite nicely. Ofcourse the causes are multivariate (As they always are), but seeing all this anti-union discourse in this thread gave me a chuckle.
Worker here, with no aspiration of being a millionaire, a manager or an owner:
I hate unions. They always end up being led by parasites that have no idea how to do the actual job, looking to rent-seek on the backs of people who do.
Singapore is actually a great example of somewhere where communists and trade unionists fought and won a lot of concessions (especially in the 1950s) and where that contribution was airbrushed out of history.
The HDB building program was a reaction to the popularity of 1950s communists, for instance. Lee Kuan Yew yielded to a lot of good ideas like that (and CPF) under intense domestic pressure which he later pretended were just artefacts of his prescient genius.
Singapore has also had its share of wildcat strikes which the government reacted to by cracking down violently on the strikers but also reacted to them by trying to placate the others. They would then the rewrite history to pretend that they weren't pushed into that so you wouldn't accidentally credit "the wrong group".
So yeah, you're both the beneficiary of a rich history of trade unionism in Singapore and the follower of a personality cult that airbrushed that contribution out of history.
Labor rights are also steadily getting worse there because there IS little organized pushback these days and because NTUC has been turned into the government department that provides supermarket discounts, thus nullifying it as a force for advocating for labor rights.
If you've ever wondered why your government is so ridiculously abusive towards bloggers and has one of the worst press freedoms in the entire world: this is why. They need a tight control of that narrative to maintain their grip on power and to get labour to knuckle under and do as it is told.
>Hacker news has a lot of owners, managers and what John Steinbeck called "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (e.g. future failed startup founders).
This way of thinking is so depressing to read about. If we ignore the strawman argument and just look at what 'point' you're making, you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations. A bit of a 'look at this guy, he thinks he can run his own business! Dummy' energy.
>I'm sure many of them are reaching for the downvote as they read this.
In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now where I wouldn't have had to read this at all.
>you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations.
I'm recognizing that some people have aspirations to become CEO and own a company and thus represent those interests in a class war, instead of their real interests as a laborer.
As it happens startup founders have more in common with labor than they do with capital. It's pretty routine for them to be screwed out of the wealth they created by investors and control over the company they created.
It's also routine for 90% of them to fail and for them to return to wage slavery.
Nonetheless it's common for them to take the side of their aspired societal position than their actual one.
>In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now
I can tell I hit a sore spot. Am I right in guessing that you aspire to own and run a successful company one day but are not there yet and were triggered enough to hit the flag button?
Anti union propaganda has been thoroughly effective in America, and union membership coincides with the decline of middle class real wages and political power quite nicely. Ofcourse the causes are multivariate (As they always are), but seeing all this anti-union discourse in this thread gave me a chuckle.
Worker here, with no aspiration of being a millionaire, a manager or an owner:
I hate unions. They always end up being led by parasites that have no idea how to do the actual job, looking to rent-seek on the backs of people who do.
How much do you hate for time off at weekends, paid vacations and medical leave?
We have these in Singapore as well, and our unions are toothless.
Singapore is actually a great example of somewhere where communists and trade unionists fought and won a lot of concessions (especially in the 1950s) and where that contribution was airbrushed out of history.
The HDB building program was a reaction to the popularity of 1950s communists, for instance. Lee Kuan Yew yielded to a lot of good ideas like that (and CPF) under intense domestic pressure which he later pretended were just artefacts of his prescient genius.
Singapore has also had its share of wildcat strikes which the government reacted to by cracking down violently on the strikers but also reacted to them by trying to placate the others. They would then the rewrite history to pretend that they weren't pushed into that so you wouldn't accidentally credit "the wrong group".
So yeah, you're both the beneficiary of a rich history of trade unionism in Singapore and the follower of a personality cult that airbrushed that contribution out of history.
Labor rights are also steadily getting worse there because there IS little organized pushback these days and because NTUC has been turned into the government department that provides supermarket discounts, thus nullifying it as a force for advocating for labor rights.
If you've ever wondered why your government is so ridiculously abusive towards bloggers and has one of the worst press freedoms in the entire world: this is why. They need a tight control of that narrative to maintain their grip on power and to get labour to knuckle under and do as it is told.