[HN Gopher] Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
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Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
Author : GreenWatermelon
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-05-28 16:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Reading this made my blood boil up a little
|
| > In labor circles, "chickenization" refers to exploitative
| working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American
| poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by
| three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into
| exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one
| buyer for their birds.
|
| > Farmers are "independent small businesspeople" who nominally
| run their own operations, but because all their products must be
| sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able
| to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor
| tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds
| are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor
| tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are
| to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to
| use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
|
| > The processor tells the farmer everything...except how much
| they'll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined
| unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and
| the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough
| money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services
| through the processor's preferred suppliers, and to service the
| debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
|
| This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
| morkalork wrote:
| I've seen this referred to as a treadmill before. They get the
| farmers on a treadmill (loans for co-ops, equipment inputs) and
| once they're waking, they don't let them stop.
|
| The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically.
| In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both
| wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the
| mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in
| many small fishing communities and was universally hated for
| it.
| nemomarx wrote:
| This is monopsony, right? Effectively?
| motoboi wrote:
| You lost me at "... such as when a human chess master and a
| chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their
| competition."
|
| The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is
| laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing
| chess in the level of alpha zero.
| margalabargala wrote:
| You'd better start laughing, because humans plus computers beat
| computers, albeit with a very high draw rate, when large
| amounts of time are allowed.
|
| https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch
| danilopopeye wrote:
| I think the autor reference is from a chess master bing helped
| by an IA.
|
| > (...) that's not the kind of centaur that we talk about when
| it's a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess
| master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is
| the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head,
| and the AI is the body.
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