Could you please stop posting flamewar comments, including nationalistic flamewar comments, to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
It's not wimpiness, it's an essential acceptance of cruelty that is accepted as a neccessary part of the american psyche where not just individuals but businesses have that freedom.
"If I was the company owner or the boss, I might do that to in order to protect my money"
> American workers are the wimpiest creatures on the planet
American workers do put up with a lot. But the cruelty of having one’s health care access perfectly intertwined with employment probably explains much of their reluctance to engage in the sort of individual and collective action needed to address malignant employer behaviour.
This is starting to collapse with the shift towards high deductible plans and HSA accounts. Increasingly, employers are just providing a subsidy for something that partially covers you when you get cancer. You'll pay for everything else yourself.
I did. You should do it too, while also trying to grasp it. I said "essentially indentured servants", which is what most of the American workforce is (not just you and your couple of privileged friends).
They earn just enough money to cover their very very basic needs. That's essentially an indentured servant.
If you don't like it, work to change it. Don't hide from the fact trying to redefine it.
Indeed. The idea that software engineers could be in the top 85th percentile of American income and be identified as "indentured servants" is an absurd notion.
Seriously. Anyone only has to look for a second and see how many Americans are struggling day to day, paycheck by paycheck. Quick search says up to 78% of Americans do. That’s “essentially indentured servitude”.
They aren't indentured to another person, they're indentured to the laws of nature - needing to eat, find shelter, etc. When in human history has this not been the case?
Where are you living that you are getting free food and housing? Everyone I know is obligated to pay someone for those things. In that way people are "indentured" to those who can provide those things, as there is no reasonable way to procure them without money, which can only be earned by submitting oneself to another's will.
Which SOME employees benefit from. The poverty rate is too high, too many people in jail for such a rich country. What's the point of being rich when only a tiny percentage of the people benefit?
If we look at the income level of the poorest 10%, the United States ranks 16th—not as good, but still among the 10% best countries: https://ourworldindata.org/poverty (click on the Table tab)
Economists thought of that; the US is still very high income "after taxes and transfers" and most healthcare costs in the US aren't out of pocket anyway.
> Economists thought of that; the US is still very high income "after taxes and transfers"
You only have to look at the definition in their link to see that US healthcare costs don't get adjusted for.
> most healthcare costs in the US aren't out of pocket anyway.
Right, most people pay health insurance in a way that's indistinguishable from paying taxes in practice (although the US system also comes with significant out-of-pocket costs, so just including insurance costs wouldn't tell the full story). But that "disposable income" metric is defined in a way that considers US-style health insurance voluntary and therefore money spent on that is disposable income (even though it never actually hits someone's bank account in practice), whereas in a country with tax-funded healthcare or mandatory health insurance (unless it qualifies as "social insurance", but normally it doesn't) the costs of that aren't counted in that person's income.
You can expect people to have empathy and be self-aware. It doesn't mean your expectations will be met, but it's a sad world we live in where you dismiss this as unrealistic.
Well, at the very least the ones who die from exposure in the winter because they don't have a place to live, the ones who die because they can't afford medical care, and so on have a clue what real hardship is.
They don't? All the tech companies I hear about having unions are American. (They are also big I suppose, but when I worked at Arm in the UK there were frequently outsiders sort of 'protesting' for employees to join. I was never aware of anyone caring who worked there.)
It seems weird to me to have professional unions, doctors are an outlier there, where it's common, and (partly I suppose because) there isn't a professional institution (which overlap slightly) - it's split between unions and the GMC (licencing body, and as a doctor you'd whistle-blow to them for example).
I'd like to see more software engineers be professionally registered, and it be more worthwhile to. (Yes, quite chicken-and-egg I'm sure.) I'm a member of the IET, but to be honest their light on software-relevance. The chartership requirements for example seemed like they would require quite a bit of bullshitting (not lying exactly, just sort of business-speak style forcing something to fit the very specific irrelevant questions) to satisfy; I abandoned it, so far at least.
