If I were an Intel employee I would never accept a pay cut "justified" by the company's willingness to pay dividends. Investors get dividends when the management creates a reasonable amount of profits, not when employees have to waive their dues to do investors a favor.
It's a textbook example of how owners of capital can extract economic rent from wage workers they hire to utilize that capital to produce something valuable. The whole point of any for-profit business that is not worker-owned is to "do investors a favor" with the money obtained by paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce.
No. Employees are neither VCs, nor credit institutions, nor social benefactors, nor non-profit, nor pro-bono volunteers. They work for a wage – And, yes, first hired that joined the ranks of executives with a vetted interest in the company (e.g. stock options) are already something other. Paying the wage is an obligation, if the employers want the work to be provided. Risks – and the associated rewards - are primarily with the investors. A work culture that shifts the risks onto workers has to be rethought.
> paying workers less than market value of the goods they produce
Have you ever owned a business? If employees got paid the value they produce, why would any business bother to exist?
If you want to get paid the value you produce: start a co-op; join a co-op; start contracting; or become a founder. Stop whinging, and do something about it. So many employees choose to work for a business - it is a transaction where they get paid and the business makes money, and both are usually better off for it.
I too dislike seeing employees get taken advantage of, but “fixing” capitalism is not trivial.
Note that I didn't make any moral judgment on the matter, or any specific suggestions on how to fix it. I merely pointed out what the arrangement is explicitly - yet all the replies are, essentially, saying "this is fine" (or, at least, "this is the best that we can do"). Fair enough, but let's at least be explicit about what's on the table, and let's not pretend that the resulting distribution of produced wealth is not a consequence of a pre-existing and self-perpetrating economic power imbalance.
Co-op employees seem to be doing better off on average, so I would argue that "usually better off for it" is not really true. Better off than trying to run their own business - yeah, probably true for most; regardless of who gets the profits, businesses still need professional managers to run them effectively.
I answered why I think your original statement is nonsensical, yet this new reply goes off on other tangents. Plus you appear somewhat hypocritical to me: you are complaining about the fruits of capitalism, but yet you chose to move from the USSR to the USA and work at Microsoft!! You also appear to write a lot on politics, which is definitely something Hacker News discourages on the site (and here I am engaging with you, sorry). Edit: I am just saying that idealistic political clichés are usually meaningless. Capitalist businesses and the consequences are a compromise, and I agree it would be nice if we could make better compromises, and it is worthwhile trying to. My personal definition of engineering is: compromises with reality.
I moved from Russia to the US; capitalism is certainly better in the latter than the former. Besides that, there's also the question of social and political freedoms, which is largely orthogonal to economic systems; you can and we do have brutal capitalist dictatorships, and there are democratic socialist polities (e.g. Rojava). I'm also no fan of USSR and authoritarian socialism in general, but the choices aren't limited to that vs capitalism.
In any case, to reiterate, the point is that for it to be a compromise, we should all be aware of the nature of that compromise - that is, who is giving up what exactly, and for whose sake. It is only a true compromise if people knowingly choose to preserve it, because they feel that it's the best deal that they can get.
> If I were an Intel employee I would never accept a pay cut "justified" by the company's willingness to pay dividends.
Maybe they intentionally want to cause some attrition with this move without announcing additional layoffs? It is kinda win-win for them since they both save money on payroll and don't do explicit layoff with pay severances, risk of lawsuits, etc.
Obviously such approach can cause "dead sea effect", but they either don't care or assume it won't happen.
Yes, this is a tactic some companies resort to in order to incentive resignations. However, as you correctly highlight, this typically results in a loss of talents. AFAIK, Intel is already experiencing challenging times. Attracting – and retaining – new talents is especially hard to do, when the job marketplace learns about this peculiar work culture that prioritises paying dividents to talent retention. I would be very happy to be proven mistaken, for the sake of friends working at Intel.
Interesting op-ed. I support the remark about how the scientific community made science a team sport – for no good scientific reason.
However the claim "[the approach] was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths" is not demonstrated in the article. Conversely there were countries (e.g. Italy) where the epidemiological distribution of SARS-CoV-2 and the determinants (e.g. risk factors such as young and old people living together in the same households) were costing lives, that if regarded in the thousands would be grossly underestimated.
> I support the remark about how the scientific community made science a team sport – for no good scientific reason.
No good scientific reason, sure. Political reasons abound. But had Science not presented as much of a unified front as they had, any message of theirs would have been fragmented to oblivion.
It's basic psyops; even children know how to do it-- take a unified front and split it over arbitrary issues. When players on the same team opt for melee between themselves instead of the other team, the opposing interest quietly advances their own goals.
So in his bid to "restore credibility" to Science, he's indirectly advocating for opportunities to get two experts on the same team to publicly disagree (by invoking Diversity), thus making the entire institution look non-credible. He's outright trying to do this himself by publicly acting as though Science has a deserved credibility problem, while also waxing apologetic as a [junior!] member of that team. It's scummy.
Where Science at least tried to act in good faith based on things like evidence and data, they were competing with fabricated/unsubstantiated claims and mockery. They didn't always get it right, but they weren't trying to cause harm/chaos or derive personal benefit through deception. But clearly, it's Science that needs to atone-- we'll just ignore the hostile noncompliance and lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated by everyone else.
Nothing he presents here is helpful; it's apologetic to the point of subversive and would have paralyzed a public-health effort that struggled to cross the finish line already. Trying to derail it with appeals to diversity is contrarian shit-stirring.
> But a sequence of rapatronic stills would be very interesting.
You have a short sequence of stills in the Wyckoff's footage linked somewhere else here. Rapatronic cameras – Wyckoff explains – where typically mounted in a rack of six, where each captured a single frame.
In the early 1980s my father had in his office a couple of these Olivetti BCS 2025 [1], which share with the Bellini's TCV 250 some design ideas, such as the metal plane encapsulating the keyboard.
Well, this is something that happens pretty much often in a number of verticals. Just think about how cars, even the most sophisticated, look when compared to the prototypes exhibited by the their manufacturers years before at the car shows. Manufacturing is also about costs/margin tradeoffs.
That being said, having had the chance to tinker with those machines in the 1980s I can tell you that I owe them, and to my father, very much about my obsession for computer science.
> [Researchers] discovered something new – a multicellular self-assembly process in E. coli. Researchers observed unattached, single-celled organisms combining into four-cell rosettes, a natural multicellular formation thought to be uncommon in bacteria.
When I request new imagery my expectation is to have the copyright of the resulting image. Whilst I would have the need for high-resolution satellite images, I am not interested in acquiring licenses of any of them.
Probably most businesses will not charge any interaction with ChatGPT per se. They will either bill more abstract services (e.g., booking service, where ChatGPT will be hiding under hood of a support agent) or down to earth goods.
Whilst ChatGPT is built on a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model, I was wondering whether it will be possible to further fine-tune ChatGPT models on Azure. There are quite a few ideas I would like to tinker with.
