I'm a Slate Plus member, mainly for the extra segment on the Slate Political Gabfest. Ironically, none of the three hosts of that show have worked at Slate in years, which is probably a large part of what makes it enjoyable.
For reasons I'd be hard-pressed to explain, I listen to a number of other Slate podcasts, even though I often find them irritating. Most (but not all) Slate writers and hosts come across less like thoughtful journalists or experts in their field, and more like college bloggers writing an angry screed about how everything in the world is terrible.
There are a few exceptions, but not many. And I do enjoy hearing from the actual experts they have on the various podcasts.
Kind of looking forward to watching this group of clowns destroy their own jobs.
> like college bloggers writing an angry screed about how everything in the world is terrible.
In my country we seem to have this phenomenon for most of the established media, even more so with newer news outlets.
I think of this as a problem for our society, because the repercussions from the 'fourth-column' becoming this way are spilling over to the other three columns: E.g. once clearly differential political parties reshape their programs to align with what journalists want, lest for diminishing their attack surface. The result is a parliament with parties distinguishable by name only.
That creates huge vacuums in voter representation. Voters then turn to alternative news sources and political parties, which by their nature are more prone to be filled with/usurped by fringe extremists.
That in return leaves the repelled voters with increased attack surface and thus even less chance to participate in the democratic process, making them feel disenfranchised and ultimately not caring for what the "mainstream" says - even if it is good, correct and in their interest.
Edit: Regarding the strike itself, I'm not aware of the situation at Slate, but in general striking for me is an important tool of representation as well.
I finally gave up on the Political Gabfest. Mostly because I am fine with the cadence of the primary three hosts righteousness or overt partisan moments, but I have a hard time listening to the rotating fill-in hosts, which happens more frequently now and causes the show to take the shape of the rest of the Slate podcasts, which are past my irritation threshold.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP shouldn't have included that bait, but taking it and upping the ante is just the wrong response for a good discussion here.
Seems reasonable. Unionism hasn't historically been very successful outside of monopolistic industries but digital media seems a good place to experiment.
Worst case it'll bankrupt a company that won't really be missed. Best case we find a sustainable model for digital media. If I were a betting hominid, I'd say the former is more likely than the latter but you never know.
It’s exactly the opposite. If you have skills that are rare (and exist at a level below demand), you have a lot of bargaining power. Unions are for people who didn’t have much bargaining power in absence of the union.
Collective bargaining power stems from the ability to combine the leverage of the individuals towards a common purpose. That still relies on the individuals having some baseline of leverage. You see this when you read about Walmart firing an entire store's staff just on the rumor of a union forming.
Irrational economic behavior is something one would expect to become concentrated in dying industries purely as a result of rational decision makers having already left.
Why are you certain it’s irrational? If your employer is going to go bust anyways, better to be paid $100,000 for one year than $40,000 for three years. You get an extra two years to earn money somewhere else.
I'm very much irritated by how opposed HN seems to be to unions existing.
Not that I'm surprised at all. The "Hacker" in "Hacker News" never included the anticapitalist and anarchist tendencies that are normally associated with "Hacker" in Europe/Germany. But what should one expect from a site run by a VC fund.
I’m not anti-unions. If employees want to band together and negotiate as a group, that seems fair. Public sector unions are a little different to me, but let’s avoid that landmine, shall we?
The biggest thing I object to here is their demand that Slate force every employee to fund the union, regardless of whether they want to. That’s ridiculous. Why are your ideas so weak that you have to force people to support them? And yes, I’m aware of the free rider problem. Still unconvinced that compulsory dues are justified.
Not really. Sort of hard to boil that one down into a HN comment, but there are a lot of forms of anarchism and honestly, anarcho-capitalism/voluntarism is probably the most naive political ideology I know.
Usually I define anarchism not as the removal of all authority, but the removal of all unjustifiable authority. From there unjustifiable depends on your moral compass.
(i'm a "commie" if you haven't caught on, anarcho-syndicalist if you want to google something)
I live in Tanzania and I think you lack perspective. Many people here would appreciate any home at all that isn’t made of mud and shit. There are price controls on grain and export bans in order to make things “cheap”.
The result? People are hungry, some are starving. Businesses can’t function due to the high taxes. Farms are closing down because they can’t turn a profit. The country is falling apart.
I came the from the US, and it has completely reframed by perspective. People desperately want capitalism: they want cheap phones, they want cheap food, they want the government to stop exploiting them in the name of “social good.”
The only people in the world who want socialism are those who are already in rich capitalist countries. They can’t appreciate what capitalism has delivered for them because they have nothing to compare it to.
Capitalism delivers and is by far the most optimal system (and also the only stable system).
We talk about “the poor” in the developed world. But the poor in the US would be in the top 1% over here.
If you don’t think that capitalism has helped everyone, I think you might be misinformed.
You omitted the part where first world countries exploit everyone else for resources and cheap labor. Especially Africa. There's a reason China is investing into basic infrastructure there. Capitalism does not work in isolation.
I don't know anything about policy decisions and local resources in Tanzania, so I can't comment on specifics, but socialism doesn't really work in less developed countries. Look at pre-soviet Russia. The only reason the soviet union was ever a world power was their authoritarian but rapid by-all-means industrialization (aka "Stalinism").
It also doesn't work well in total isolation; the DPRK is doing much worse than East Germany ever did because they lack natural resources and soviet support is gone.
Capitalism isn't falling apart but neither is it a panacea. There are better systems, by most humane measures. Scandinavian social democracy, for example, other than being extremely expensive has its merits.
But anarcho-syndicalism et al rely on a variation of the adage "there's no bugs in the application I haven't written yet".
There is no way unionized writers/editors are going to be impartial in their political media coverage, given all of their leverage hinges on laws restricting the contracting rights of their employer.
It's not an issue when the benefit that biases them doesn't hinge on a law limiting someone's elses rights, the way their leverage as unionized workers does.
True and within articles those experiences can serve to inform, which isn't a bad thing. It's actually sort of the point; interpreting the facts and outputting them through your lens of experience
And generally journalists are aware of their biases and good ones actively work against their impulse to favor one side.
The idea that journalists can be biased is not something the profession was somehow unaware of previously.
In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility.
But of course society is presently at the adolescent phase of realizing you can physically say and do whatever you want...whether bad science and bad journalism are confronted by the social analog of thr prefrontal cortex is uncertain. Maybe repercussions will help (collapse of democracy and global warming being the two most likely)
> In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility
Unless what they are saying (journalists and scientists) conform to the dominate politics of the day. Plenty of major media outlets run stories with anonymous, non-corroborated sources but since those stories fit the desired narrative of their consumers, they get away with it, credibility intact.
A conservative outlet can have corroborated evidence, multiple sources and be chastised strictly on the basis of their conservative angle, while an outlet like The NY Times can publish anonymous op-eds without any corroboration and it doesn’t make a dent in their credibility among the majority of their readers. How many anti-Trump stories feature “anonymous” sources without a single shred of on-the-record corroboration? Yet, since the story confirms the bias of the readership, again, credibility remains intact. The Supermicro story is another example: completely uncorroborated, yet I bet not a single person cancelled their terminal subscription because of it.
Credibility only matters if the writer is going against the biases of their readers.
As far as global warming, plenty of scandals, such as Climategate, but the credibility of the climate-alarmists hasn’t been affected one bit among those that are predisposed to believe that the sky is, in fact, falling. Climategate was a serious scandal that calls into question the entire premise upon which the climate industry is based, yet that probably changed not a single person’s mind. It’s would be like telling Christians that Jesus never existed. It wouldn’t convince anyone who is already a believer. Global Warming is the modern world’s version of “going to hell if you don’t repent.”
Credibility doesn’t matter as long as you affirm fashionable biases.
To be completely fair, this isn’t a leftist phenomenon: plenty of anti-Obama news outlets could play loose with the facts and still have “credibility” with those predisposed to have opposed Obama’s policies. Same for the anti-vax crowd, the anti-GMO crowd and every other crowd where any challenge of their reality is tantamount to sacrilege.
Their interests in efficient delivery of healthcare and effective protection of the environment align with the general population's. Not so their interest in laws restricting the contracting rights of employers.
It's not in the general population's interest for collections of workers to be able to extract wealth from employers by imposing collective bargaining on them. This is Econ 101. You don't raise the standard of living through expropriation of wealth.
In the long run, involuntary transfers of income and other violations of market rights stunt wage growth by reducing the incentive to invest, and to perform well at one's workplace, both of which inhibit growth in productivity.
Wealth can be expropriated in both directions. Employers by default have more power; collective bargaining is just a check on their ability to exploit laborers.
It also doesn't follow that increased incentive to invest in employers translates to higher wages for laborers — why wouldn't employers keep wages stagnant and pocket the money themselves? (In practice, this is often what happens.)
Employers in a market economy have no power in the general sense to expropriate wealth. Their only power is in offering employment terms better than the next better offer. Offering the market rate for a unit of labor is not wealth expropriation. It's compensating people for exactly what their labor is worth.
Force people to pay any more than the market rate for labor, and you're artificially under-valuing investment capital, and thus disincentivizing delayed-consumption/long-term-investment. In other words, you'll be incentivizing people to save/invest less of their income than is optimal for maximum economic development, and it is economic development that is responsible for virtually all reductions in poverty and improvements in quality of life for the general population.
>>It also doesn't follow that increased incentive to invest in employers translates to higher wages for laborers — why wouldn't employers keep wages stagnant and pocket the money themselves?
Employers have to compete with each other for employees. Why else do you think wages would ever increase? I really recommend you study standard economic theories on wage growth, or the economic history of any major country, to better understand the interplay between per capita production and wages. Look at China over the last 20 years, where wages have tripled. There is no force that increases wages as much as economic growth, which hinges almost entirely on investment capital.
"Impartial" is an admirable aim, but ultimately unreachable and undefinable. We all bring our unique upbringing and view of the world to our creative efforts.
I think most media outlets like Slate gave up chasing this goal. Unfortunately, the consumers have rewarded them for doing so.
We all bring our unique upbringing and view of the world to our creative efforts.
I don't even think that "impartial" is necessarily even worth striving for. No one is impartial and I'd much rather journalists be open and honest about their world view and assumptions rather than trying to hide them behind some thin veneer of "impartiality". As long as you're not being underhand or deceptive in your reporting there is nothing wrong in saying "This thing happened and I think it's great/terrible for these reasons".
Very fair point. I think most media (and consumers) would agree with you as they've found success with opinion-based programming and editorials.
I usually get frustrated with opinion-based content though because it seems to me that it's more about posturing, being the loudest/funniest, looks/appearance, etc. and less about trying to uncover good solutions to real problems.
However, as you mentioned, no one is impartial, so that leaves me with very little content I enjoy consuming which is not that great either in terms of staying informed or engaged.
I get where you're coming from, and if all you want is a chronological list of things that happened there always Reuters. But let's say Congress passes a bill. One story could be "Today the bill passes X votes to Y, all Republicans and 47 Democrats voted for. Here's a link to the complete text to the bill" But that's not really what I want. What I want is for someone to tell me the potential implications of the bill, and that cannot be done in a truly unbiased way since you're essentially speculating. Then it is better to have two 'biased' people putting forward their best, honest and good faith arguments for and against the potential impact of the bill. Ideally with both of them being willing to concede the relative merits of the others argument.
Totally agree, I just don't know how we get to "best, honest and good faith arguments" or if that really exists. News seems so dominated by posturing and pandering to a target audience.
For years the NY Times refused to use the word "torture" when talking about the War on Terror in favor of "enhanced interrogation"... what journalist is impartial?
Independent of what? There is no living outside of things. Everybody has to live somewhere, they have to eat, they have to get medical care when they get sick, they have friends, they have family. It's impossible to just show up to things without preconceptions. Being a human doesn't work that way.
Great point. Independent of an organization paying them for their work. It's impossible for a writer to not let their own preconceptions seep through but it is possible for writers to not let their editors' or institutions' preconceptions seep through. Hope that helps clear that up.
I made the mistake of choosing an example involving strictly formal barriers. A self-employed journalist can still feel the incentives offered by governments and huge multinational media conglomerates, if not also less powerful companies and organizations. And then there exist organizations explicitly and singularly devoted to rewarding and training young writers in producing propaganda, like Hasbara Fellowships.
None of their leverage hinges on laws. Laws are a caching layer for rights, which are inalienable. Their leverage hinges on a capacity to organize one another and express their interests.
No, they aren't. Law sometimes expresses either a consensus view or a compromise between views of rights, sometimes it deals with things at a level only distantly related to rights.
> which are inalienable.
Even in most conceptions of rights that include some inalienable rights, not all rights are inalienable.
There is simple dichotomy here. In the Anglo-American tradition, laws are a check on the power of government. Everywhere else, they are a tool of government power. The Anglo-American tradition observably holds little sway in modern US jurisprudence though.
His argument for why they're inalienable is completely dependent on the existence of (a particular conception of) God. I found reading the Second Treatise of Government an eye-opening experience for this reason.
If we want an argument for the inalienability of natural/human rights that works in a society with religious pluralism, I fear we'll need to look again.
This is a fundamental ethical problem. Science and logic can't demonstrate that rape and murder, just to give a couple examples, are wrong. In fact science tells us that rape and murder are hunky-dory if they increase biological fitness.
Any meaningful system of ethics is characteristically normative, which means it rests on authority; divine authority is the highest form of authority that can be thought of.
Laws are most certainly not always manifestations of inalienable rights. They often violate inalienable rights, and are based on manipulating public opinion with propaganda and ideology. Their position as the lens through which the public perceives the wider world gives them an extraordinary opportunity to manipulate public opinion to support social narratives and laws that benefit people in their circumstances.
It's interesting to see the management more aligned with the Trump admin's take on unionization and the union members more aligned with traditional union stances.
This has many interesting implications. At the moment many industrial unions like Trump's policies, so I bet there is some equivocation in some pockets.
The other thing I'm interested to see is if this strike will deal a final blow to Slate (basically see if they will go down due to principles, but at the same time risk weakening their company)
Hurt their economic interests by taxing them via tariffs and hurt their manufacturing companies by making raw materials and steel etc more expensive. That why Harley moved production OUT of the us to where it wouldn't be affected by retaliatory tariffs against Trump's tariffs.
Loss of heavy manufacturing jobs because of higher steel prices because of tarrifs leading to higher prices to end users, thus manufacturing companies move production overseas to produce them without tariff priced steel and keeping prices lower is just what has happened. The secondary cause was retailatory tariffs on us exports causing prices to go higher on exports twice (once to tariff imported steel before manufacturing, second tariff when importing into xhina). So how is this political rhetoric? Remove tariffs on both ends and we are better off.
I'm a Slate Plus member, mainly for the extra segment on the Slate Political Gabfest. Ironically, none of the three hosts of that show have worked at Slate in years, which is probably a large part of what makes it enjoyable.
For reasons I'd be hard-pressed to explain, I listen to a number of other Slate podcasts, even though I often find them irritating. Most (but not all) Slate writers and hosts come across less like thoughtful journalists or experts in their field, and more like college bloggers writing an angry screed about how everything in the world is terrible.
There are a few exceptions, but not many. And I do enjoy hearing from the actual experts they have on the various podcasts.
Kind of looking forward to watching this group of clowns destroy their own jobs.