yetAnotherUser @ yetAnotherUser @discuss.tchncs.de

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1 yr. ago

contract rights

Isn't that why unions are allowed to exist? Freedom of association and negotiation is the necessary foundation which I believe is inclided somewhere in the US constitution. And strikes - at least from what I've read - are part of what's granted through this freedom. After all, labor disputes are between two private parties (company + union) and limiting one of the parties violates their freedom of forming contracts. I might be wrong though, its been some time since I researched the legal foundations of strikes, at least in Germany.

t'was political calculus

Was it though? I don't see who benefitted but the rail companies. The workers only got some of what they would've striked for but not everything. Any political benefit usually vanishes a month after the headlines have moved on, so I don't think breaking up the strike has helped them win any "moderates" who would've voted Republican. And it might have alienated some workers from the Democrats, seeing them side with the companies instead of them.

systemic suppression

That's what this is about though. Biden is part of the system and has used it to systemically suppress unions by literally preventing one from striking. Why should he be praised for limiting his suppression slightly when he could have just... not suppressed unions? He certainly had the required votes in Congress to block any legislation preventing the railway strike.

Also, is your comment written with the help of AI? I can't quite put my finger on it but some your writing sounds like it could come straight from an LLM. You also used this symbol: — earlier which isn't on any standard keyboard layout I know - unless you have some autocorrect feature replacing short dashes with long one's.

Other countries’ systems aren’t directly comparable to the U.S., where federalism complicates labor law uniformity

Federalism is enshrined in the German constitution and does complicate a shitton of things too though. Labor and contract rights just happen to be there too but isn't the latter in the US constitution as well?

Rail strikes in the U.S. directly impact interstate commerce, which federal law prioritizes above all else.

But so would truck driver union strikes or port worker strikes. As far as my limited knowledge and quick research goes, the latter does strike somewhat frequently and the former doesn't exist as each company has their own small union, if any.

Federal law also prioritizes the economy in Germany. It's just that courts must rule whether the violation of labor rights can be justified with this argument - the government cannot unilaterally disband a strike. That's the point of separation of powers.

In the U.S., rail unions face systemic hurdles like the Railway Labor Act, designed to limit disruptions. Comparing outcomes without acknowledging these disparities oversimplifies the issue.

To some extent, yes. Biden and congress however were not forced by this act to act the way they did if I can read this law correctly. They could've easily permitted warning strikes or put significant pressure on the involved companies.

Even then, indefinite strikes rarely happen in Germany either. There are always several warning strikes beforehand which cause limited damage.

Finally, your sidetrack about a song and TV production is irrelevant to the discussion of labor rights.

I thought it was fun to bring up in this topic. The song is quite apt w.r.t. the impact and perception of rail strikes. The GDL is despised by rail companies, politicians, tabloids et al and usually portrayed as unreasonable monsters targeting poor commuters.

But that's the entire point of strikes. They must hurt, otherwise they are meaningless. Don't you think that had Biden not intervened, the workers would've gotten all their demands fulfilled - including paid sick leave (mandatory in countries with labor rights btw)?

The only thing I'm certain about is that if the German government had the same capability to end strikes willy-nilly, rail unions would be neutered until they exist on paper alone. Like they seem to in the US.

Other countries manage to allow for rail workers to strike though. Why should the US government and not a court of law be able to evaluate whether limiting strikes is an appropriate measure for protecting the economy?

Take German as example. There's this union:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewerkschaft_Deutscher_Lokomotivf%C3%BChrer

They are one of the only unions that is willing to actually fight in Germany and have achieved results exceeding those of significantly larger unions. Why shouldn't they be permitted to strike? Strikes in Germany can be blocked by labor courts if they cause too much economic damage by the way.

Also, as a sidenote:

Aren't you doing something right when you get an actually decent song praising you shown on - and created by - a publicly founded TV channel?

The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2fVMSKfI7E English translation by me: https://pastebin.com/c3YXtpGN

Further context: The song was uploaded shortly before the 2023/2024 strikes were announced by the union. Claus Weselsky, the union leader since 2008, retired after the union got its demands fulfilled.

That's excessive compared to the extremely low risk of a blackout in developed countries (excluding the United States which has regular blackouts). To illustrate:

US households spent 5.5 hours without electricity on average in 2022. Excluding major events like hurricanes, the number drops to 2.1 hours.

German households spent a whopping 12.2 minutes without electricity on average in 2022.

A portable gas heater, blankets and a camping stove are completely sufficient for the average person considering most longer power outages last for a couple of hours at worst. Exceedingly rare longer blackouts will always have a government aid program, such as a heated gym with free food, near your location.

The only one's who should really prepare for blackouts are:

• the government
• people who live hours away from civilization with very limited infrastructure connecting them

Ah, I meant increasing the pressure when I notice it's a bit too low for my liking.

My shower lever has to be pulled in a specific diagonal direction to increase pressure without causing the temperature to change drastically.

Oh god, same.

I have nearly figured out how to increase the pressure without changing the temperature.

I still boil/freeze myself sometimes though.

Try Mullvad browser, it works well in my opinion. It should be used with a VPN (i.e. shared IP address space) though.

They have repos for each "grab". The warrior is pretty much just a wrapper and doesn't need to be updated frequently.

Most users are running the specific docker containers anyways as they allow for a higher concurrency than the warrior and perform better.

You mean bread baskets. Molotov brought the bread baskets and received cocktails.

Yes, if the induced demand results in similar levels of congestion - which it very often does - there would be more emissions in the end.

And you're right, cars will exist for the forseeable future. I do not however want the government subsidizing car dependency since it is destructive to the environment and to everyone's health and safety.

A couple of possibilities to drastically reduce traffic:

• turn all multi-lane streets within cities into single-lane streets for cars with exclusive bus and bike lanes to treat all forms of traffic equally
• reduce all inner-city speed limits to 30 km/h to reduce car noise, emissions and increase pedestrian safety
• traffic lights should prefer public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists instead of cars
• stop subsidizing parking spaces for cars with city money and drastically reduce on-street parking as cars take away massive amounts of space
• put toll roads onto highways as their cost is massively higher compared to fuel taxes. After all, trains have to pay a costly fee to use train tracks already - why should cars have this privilege?

There's a lot more I could write here but you get the gist. Making car traffic more efficient does not reduce emissions in the long term in the slightest. Making car traffic less efficient reduces emissions instead because people will not use cars as frequently.

And keep in mind, I'm not talking about Bumfuck Nowhere (population: 725) when mentioning public transit. Cities have insane amounts of car traffic which can be massively reduced with just a couple of decisions. This would make car traffic less efficient as right now it enjoys many privileges over other forms of transportation.

And next year the congestion will be the same as before, except with even more cars and even more emissions.

This is equivalent to building another lane on a highway to increase throughput and decrease traffic jams. In the beginning, emissions will be reduced since traffic jams occur less frequently. And then, through induced demand, there's congestion again.

Improving car throughput directly leads to increased emissions with a small delay.

From the paper:

Increased speeds from adaptive signals may induce additional travel, as people opt to drive more or travel farther, potentially offsetting some congestion benefits. Our models do not fully capture induced demand due to data limitations, but adaptive signaling generally supports higher traffic volumes and smoother flows.

There are none of them as good as Proton.

For example, AirVPN hasn't had any security audits and doesn't seem too interested in them either due to monetary concerns. That's a deal breaker for me.

Brandalism's Subvertising manual [PDF]

Do you seriously think this "ad" would be approved by the company selling ad spaces?

Nah, I think it's neat as well. Lemmy would be more boring if no user had idiosyncrasies.

Hell, I've even tagged you with "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0" in my Lemmy client - which means I will confront you if you ever stop doing it.

I'm genuinely confused how college sports is so big in the US.

Who in their right mind besides parents and maybe friends gives a flying fuck about sports tournaments of amateur young adults?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-troops-raped-tortured-children-ukraine-un-panel-says-rcna49168

The report:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2022/09/update-chair-independent-international-commission-inquiry-ukraine-51st-session

In the cases we have investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gendered-based violence ranged from four to 82 years. The Commission has documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined. Children have also been killed and injured in indiscriminate attacks with explosive weapons.

Google doesn't sell your information. That would be the quickest way to create competition.

What Google sells are targeted ad slots.

Not at all.

Hardly any Lemmy instance is hosted in the US and other countries never had this section to begin with.

Most Lemmy instances already need to comply with laws making them responsible for keeping illegal content up.

There's the BSW which has the social policy of the left, the economic policy of neoliberals and the reactionary policies of the nazis.

They are hardly better than full blown nazis and vote in lockstep with them on topics concerning minorities.

It's source available, not open source.

It severely limits what can legally be done by restricting modifications and prohibiting "commercial" distribution:

You may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

Non-commercial purposes is extremely vague by the way. Depending on the country - or even the court in a country - nearly everything distributed on the internet is for commercial purposes.

For example, in Germany, only commercial websites have to put up a legal disclosure consisting of address, full name, phone number and email. Yet courts have ruled that every single website that is available to the public is "commercial" - only private webpages available to a handful of people are non-commercial. If anyone redistributed the software in Germany this license would be grounds for a successful lawsuit.