Be careful, the LLM evangelists will downvote you, smear you for not using “human-like” names like Lora or Alex to describe AI models and/or terminologies, call you a Luddite, etc.
I got a job once that required me to join the union. It was bagging groceries part time for minimum wage at a grocery store. Sorry I don’t mean to be a downer, I see union membership as a good thing. Unions are like democracy. They are only as good as the people they are made of.
I’m sure the union rep made it sound like you must, but I wonder if you were actually required. The major US grocery chain I worked for, the union shoved themselves down your throat but it was NOT required. It felt to me that their negotiations amounted more to collusion than actually fighting for the workers. I hope they’re the weakest union in the history of the world and that they don’t all suck as badly.
It depends on the state. Some states don’t have right to work laws, meaning that you can be forced to join a union to work a certain job. Unions are great ideas but some of them really do suck. My ex was sexually harassed repeatedly by her manager at a grocery store and the union reps told her to take a compliment and quit complaining.
Why tf would you ever join a union for a minimum wage? What are they even doing for you in that case beside making you actually make less than minimum wage now after you pay your dues.
A lot of times it is another way to “pay your dues”. Once you’re “in” the union, you probably get preferential treatment for higher level full time jobs…
The way I remember it (40 years ago) the manager told me joining was required but I could be wrong. It was an awful union. Former employees were suing the union and grocery store chain for how bad they were screwed over
Yeah, my brothers first job in a grocery store, sane thing. He was required to join a union and the dues taken out of his pay, despite being part time minimum wage for the summer . All the union benefits were for full timers, so it was basically stealing money from people who could least afford it.
I’m generally pro- union but for sure there are some taking advantage
Yeah, I got really screwed by Pepsi and their “union”. Overall though, unions are great and we need more of them to combat shit employers. Just don’t let your union reps be company men…
There is nothing more American than being in traffic. You’re never more in touch with a systemic failure, yet we blame it on the choices of individual drivers, all the while unaware that we’re part of the problem.
No, but they definitely don’t have traffic in Germany. They have the Autobahn, the perfect solution to any and every traffic problem that could ever exist.
Hogwash! It’s impossible for Berlin to have any traffic, all the cars are on the Autobahn, and they always go fast. Always. Nobody ever goes slow on the Autobahn. It’s actually illegal to go slow in Germany. You can cruise through Berlin at 200 MPH (but never slower than 100 MPH, that’s illegal) anytime of day thanks to the Autobahn dramatic reverb
It’s a little of column a and a little of column b. When I’m driving and some absolute piece of garbage is riding directly next to the car to their right, I equate them to a blood clot, which is funny, because they also make me feel like having an aneurysm. I also don’t forgive the driver on the right, because they are more than capable of allowing a space for other drivers to pass.
The absolute lack of awareness on the road is startling. I swear to God, people are looking through straws and their neck doesn’t move.
Building extra lanes, though, does not solve the problem.
No joke, I see this becoming more common. They’re even doing it the way I imagined: straight up integrated with onboarding.
Maybe it’s an outspoken prediction, that in the future many more businesses will prefer a unionized workforce, but I think a number of current societal and market vectors would suggest that trend. In particular, consider the variety of HR-related logistics, liabilities, and relational concerns of a modern business that amount to operational overhead. You can likely imagine ways that unions might simplify, stabilize, or fully externalize that friction, such that the increased productivity outweighs higher labor expenses, similar to the way efficiency wages in labor economics can ultimately reduce turnover related expenses. That’s just one way unions could become an attractive solution to employers and employees alike.
At any rate, it’s what I would prefer if I needed to hire W2s, to the extent that I’d be willing to help spin up local chapters if necessary, and it only takes a handful of successful examples to accelerate labor trends.
They still have a leaver on outside vendors. And yes, power is ultimately their goal. If there’s a conflict between power and profit, they choose power.
What I’m saying is that you can’t go to businesses and say “a union will make this whole place run better for everyone” and expect them to take that for an answer. Unions have to fight. Some of those fights have been bloody.
That’s not doomerism, tedious conspiracies, or despair. It’s what has happened already in the history of unions.
Edit: You’re angry, hurt, jaded, and need others to feel your misery. I understand the feeling. What comes next, however, is the work. Angsty rage-baiting is a dead end.
Of course, union battles are a matter of history. And yes, today the rational agents of global economies often see unionization as a threat, clearly.
I argue that it’s only a threat insofar as it’s a disruptive paradigm. On the whole it’s a more fiscally advantageous schema for all but the monolithic “vertically integrated” international corporations that profit largely from self-dealing (and probably need to be broken up anyway).
You said businesses prioritize “Control” and “Power” over profit — i.e. they are not rational economic agents but despots. It’s a bleak perspective since despots can’t be reasoned with, only overthrown, and moreover it dismisses economic theory entirely.
I’m just weary of the defeatism. I know we’ve been through a lot and many of us are terribly jaded, but giving up is not an option. I want to win.
It’s important to remember that “they” is specific people with varying goals. Similarly, merely saying “profit” doesn’t tell us anything about where the money is going.
Unions help to fight inflation and price gouging as well. Unions are good for the entirety of any economy in which they exist. There are decades upon decades of independent and government funded research that supports this.
Seriously in Europe many investment funds activly go to the unions and ask which problems the company have. They are often better informed and honest then the normal management. They also have an obvious intresst in keeping the company around.
In this case, nothing. High dose testosterone is a hormone, hgh is a hormone. Both are PEDs (performance enhancing drugs). Now, the difference between them is a bit more interesting.
Testosterone, the original steroid, makes you big by maximizing your existing muscles (super paraphrased, as is everything I’m about to say). It’s the one that gives you breasts and shrinks your balls (for those that have them).
Human growth hormone makes you big by inducing the creation of new muscle. As well as everything else. The stand outs being the heart, which you really don’t want to grow, and the intestines, which gave bodybuilders roidgut.
Like I said, very paraphrased, but that’s the gist of it. And doesn’t touch more advanced things like tren.
Hormone: Pretty much any chemical your body uses for intra-body signaling. Signaling in this case can be anything from dumping adrenaline in order to move blood preferentially to the muscles, to the production of estrogen in order to promote cell growth in certain organs.
Steroid: A particular class of compounds grouped by the existence of a particular quartet of carbon atom rings inside each of the molecular structures. They have a very wide range of roles across the tree of life. Examples include, but are not limited to: testosterone, cholesterol, ergosterol, and progesterone.
Steroid (colloquial meaning): Pretty much any performance enhancing drug, including hormones and actual steroids.
Such a shame. I grew up a couple of miles from his old house, Terry/HH would be out on the town, autoparts, picking up take out, riding his motorcycle, regular dude / dad stuff etc etc. He had a reputation of being super nice, soft spoken, and a good tipper, you know in the before times of long ago.
In the business he’s known as a racist, a deviant, union buster, and a pathological liar. Dude lies about the most easily verifiable shit like “I partied with Jon Belushi after WrestleMania 1” (Belushi died 2 years prior to that) and “I was the first choice to be the lead in the movie the wrestler” (meanwhile the director confirms that’s 100% not true).
I used to also love that wrestler Chris Jericho back When I was a teen watching wrestling, and I checked him out recently. He’s a trump supporter and his wife was at the Jan 6th insurrection. Trump has at least caused these guys to show their true colors, which makes it easier for us to chuck em in the bin.
Yeah I’m with you on that. Not all of them are racist, greedy, amoral or fascist either, some of them are just genuinely stupid, which doesn’t make them less of threat to freedom or to me.
Just ONE car can reduce traffic jams. Try it: leave enough buffer such that when the car in front of you stops, you almost reach their bumper at like 5 MPH but never stop b/c it’s time for them to move again. The guy behind you may never actually stop too.
So you had all these stoppers in front of you, and several cars not stopping behind you.
Enough people do this, and there’s no more stop & go. Just cruise 5mph the whole time (not 10, 0, 10, 0, 10, 0, which sucks).
This is how I operate in most traffic jams, since I only own manual cars & it’s much easier on my leg.
I genuinely don’t even remember any specific scenarios where somebody merging in caused me to have to come to a full stop (where I wouldn’t have had to stop if they didn’t merge). Not saying it never happened, but it was so rare and unnotable that I don’t remember.
I do live in the northeast US, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I don’t usually feel like I spend meaningfully more time in traffic because I let a few people in front of me.
Bonus benefit: my life is measurably better since I stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me. Road rage had such a broad impact on me, even after I got out of the car.
stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me
The world would instantly be a better place if all the mouth-breathers in it could figure this out simultaneously. Wow, you’re pissed off at someone being “in front” of you. That’s because there’s totally an Earth-shakingly significant difference between having 9,784,326 cars in front of you vs. 9,784,325.
I leave a gap between me and the driver in front of me. Rarely does anyone pull into that space. They usually are in the lane that gets them where they need to go
Honest answer involves deep breaths (at least as one first adopts the method), chuckling at one’s favorite podcast, and recreating the buffer.
On certain roads, monkey see monkey do and eventually folks behind you kinda copy you and there’s a chance fewer and fewer folks will be cutting you off. Notice this most on the longest trips. Perhaps they’re not copying you, btw, rather the most aggressive drivers continually pass you until a small cohort of Big Spacers remain behind you. If some of these Space-Not-Racers are in front and around you too, aggressive drivers passing are passing without cutting you off as much - they have enough space to jam themselves into the bumper of the car in front of you.
Kinda funny going around a curve and seeing a hundred cars bumper to bumper ahead, then checking mirrors to see safe following distances :) (oh yeah this style is safer too not just more efficient!)
Can require some SERIOUS brain hacking. How mad would we be if someone cut in front of us at the grocery store? We’d go butts2nuts in a blink. Gotta just, like, flowww mannnn
sounds like you’re no worse off, and now you’ve given things a chance to improve. Keep doing that and you still won’t ever be worse off and eventually maybe that chance actually works and things get better.
From above the whole thing looks like an accordion. Drivers who tailgate tend to overreact when they see brake lights 50 feet in front of them, compound this by the guy tailgating them and so on. Leave a buffer to absorb this and it smooths out
If I leave any kind of gap between me and the car in front, it is an inevitability that some jackass will swoop in to cut me off. Happened 7 or 8 times just yesterday. Texas drivers are a menace
That’s what it’s for, for people to use. Let them, create new buffer. Let somebody else, create new buffer. There is exactly zero wrong with any of this.
Yeah when I do that then every time there’s a gap another person comes to cut me off, so it ends up with me pretty much at a dead stop while people go in front of me over and over. People underestimate just how many asshole drivers there are around here lol
And burning money in gas as you sit there all day going nowhere and shutting down your entire lane. That’s like saying you should congratulate yourself for throwing yourself in a puddle and letting people walk on you.
If you ever wanna spend seven minutes (no gas needed) on YouTube, I’d be very curious to know of any timecodes where you think this driver/philosopher has shortcomings:
I’m not arguing the philosophy. It’s a wonderful idea. As someone who regularly drives a stick shift I very much wish that it would work. But like many wonderful ideas it doesn’t survive contact with actual humans. In any large city if there is a car length open in front of your vehicle then someone will be zipping into it. I’ve had people do that while we’re traveling at 65mph let alone in slow moving traffic. If you keep sitting there and letting people go in front of you until there is room then you will not move and you will probably get shot by one of the people stuck behind you. It’s like if you were at the grocery store durring a busy time and you kept telling people to go in front of you then you wouldn’t be able to check out until everyone was gone.
Somehow that driver managed to exit! Not suggesting one stops…
This is something I do and I’ve made it out of California and back - perhaps I’m leaving less space than it sounds? 6 figures of miles and it’s worked on the West Coast! The other commenters who have chimed in, at least half, seem to be able to pull it off as well.
I’d linked to the video because I do see your point. There must be a disconnect if this is a filmable, anecdotally reproducible practice. (…uh-oh, that’s how a homeopathic astrology witch would defend their Ouija board! 😬😉)
I concur. I used to be able to leave a huge gap and nobody would care. I drove a manual and didn’t want the hassle of stopping. But, I tried this recently, and I ended up making the fast lane the slow lane and I had the guy behind me honking and yelling out his window to stop letting everyone in.
Piss off the wrong guy in Texas and see where that gets you. I was lucky all he did was honk and yell.
I learned this technique – we called it “cutting off the head of the snake”.
Traffic moves like water, and becoming fluid and just rolling sometimes can kill traffic completely, I was on a stretch of bright red (5-10 mph) that began moving at 55 MPH after patiently rolling – there was no actual reason for the traffic jam.
Driving stick, I would do this all the time. In fact, I’d do it in the left lane, which I would never do, but for the fact all of the lanes are just constant stop and go. I’d leave massive buffers, 20-30 cars, and just cruise 5-10mph, and never stop. I just don’t understand why anyone wants to use their brakes at all, I hate using my brakes. I’d rather just coast in perpetuity than feel inertia in any direction.
When I do this, I hear horns behind me, telling me to stick it into the car in the front, which is clearly stopped on a red light counting down from 20s.
people who insist on going full speed and then SLAMMING their brakes drive me to drink, and this applies to literally all modes of transport.
If you’re walking through a grocery store and are about to round a corner, fucking slow down so you have time to see anyone else coming your way, then you can speed up again when you know the coast is clear.
If you’re driving a car and coming up to a red light, or even worse a pedestrian on a crossing, FUCKING SLOW DOWN and just coast slowly, it’s not worth the off chance that you get to blast through at full speed, not for you or anyone else.
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