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.
America is built on the exploitation of undocumented workers for the food supply and of cheaper foreign labor held hostage by employers for tech. These are forms of coercion much as tying health insurance to employment. Tools of power to keep employees at a disadvantage.
There are undocumented workers in every industry, getting exploited in a hundred different little ways. Some political factions have done very well out of creating a caste of legal untouchables.
While the USA exploits undocumented workers in agriculture etc., its not like being documented is a huge step up either. In Canada, there's a whole (sub) class of legally imported labour under the "Temporary Foreign Worker" program that's exploited in a similar way.
A big difference is that a person working in the country legally can report labor code violations to the authorities without risking immediate deportation.
For tech, I think this is a win-win situation. Tech workers have the options to stay and work in their home country. It is not like tech workers do not have a choice they prefer it this alternative, even given the uncertainty or not having a permanent residency.
America is only a Good Place(tm) for the very rich while its suffering expands out in a Power law distribution. No other "rich" country abuses homeless, the disabled, the almost homeless, and the working poor with as much unequal treatment as much except so-called "third-world" countries. The middle class of America is small, privileged, and unaware of the suffering and exploitation of ~100 M Americans below it and of its enablement of the "1%" to continue the status quo.
> The middle class of America is small, privileged, and unaware of the suffering and exploitation of ~100 M Americans below it and of its enablement of the "1%" to continue the status quo.
I would defend those in the middle class by saying that they are more comfortable than the poor in America, but have about the same amount (zero) of political power. The middle class is still a worker class, and as such is still subject to the whims of the wealthy capital owners.
I don't think I am in the middle class, as I don't even own a home, but I do make a good living and I would say I am more well-off than many people in the town I currently live in. I know about what's going on in America, and it pisses me off, and if I had the power to change a tiny bit of it I would, but I don't.
Do you have any statistics to back up anything you're saying, or is everything "just so"? How precisely are we "abusing the disabled"? Are there metrics for this? How does it compare to other countries? Can you give examples of what you're even talking about? Or how about even just... be specific?
Amazon corporate just went to 100% in-office. People who were previously remote now have to commute or would be fired. Even if there job has nothing to do with being in an office and their team is elsewhere in the world. My neighbor is one such employee where it wastes gas and time getting them to an office they don't have a business reason to be in except fulfill butt-in-seat mentality of the overlords.
And they didn't even have to put it in the content or the chumboxes. Personally, I setup a micro VPN box of my own on AWS in other countries. I'm wondering though if they alter the price depending on the currency or on credit card details.
In Mexico, there's a hotel scam. You can book one room only to be told it was "sold out" or "unavailable". There is a quiet "discussion" room to haggle to make other arrangements. You can be Mexican from "real" Mexico and it will still happen even if you "confirm" the room (which is meaningless) because it's a money-maker by holding your vacation hostage by testing your patience and enjoyment through brinkmanship. It's a classic bait-and-switch.
All right, then another story from the same trip. We're in Hurghada, a Red Sea resort popular with Russians. We go out shopping at night (it's hot, so lots of shopping at night). My wife is on the roll to get bunches of souvenirs for our nephews and everyone possible, so she's picking up I don't know, bangles, skirts, scarves, whatever. It's late, I am tired, so we skip the "I'll speak Russian" thing, so I just sit down and she's doing all the picking. The shopkeeper, who was sitting there watching some sort of local prayers on TV is very excited to have an American in his shop, and is effusive with "oh I am so glad you are an American, that's such a great country, with such great people, such generous people, not like those Russians, those stingy scummy Russians, who would take the candy out your baby's mouth, steal the last socks from the laundry, no, the Americans are rich and good looking, just like you clearly are so wonderful..." and he's going on and on. My wife is trying to not to laugh and tries to interject - "oh yeah, sure, of course, but my husband, he's Russian, so..." - the guy just doesn't listen and plows right over - "oh those evil Russians, always taking from us, always bargaining down the prices, we have families to feed, they'd take the last crumpled pound note from the ground, they'd won't give me enough for my wares to keep my grandmother fed", etc. etc. Well, my wife shrugs and lets him continue to dig, while I just keep quiet. Eventually she decides what we get, and the bargaining starts, which my cue to come in. Just a couple of minutes into bargaining the shopkeeper turns to my wife with wide eyes and affronted manner "Your husband! He doesn't bargain like American", to which she replies laughing "That's because he's Russian!"
We have a rep for being 'loud' (read, more extroverted than a lot of societies) but I'd challenge the assumption that we're known to be ruder than most countrys. At most we're more likely to be ignorant of local norms due to less international travel.
I use an Deciso OPNsense where it doesn't insist on breaking itself on the orders of corporate overlords.