[HN Gopher] Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
___________________________________________________________________
Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
Author : GreenWatermelon
Score : 165 points
Date : 2025-05-28 16:55 UTC (3 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?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so
| much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly".
| Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it.
|
| But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into
| equipment from the company that is of little use besides
| working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
| theturtle32 wrote:
| > This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
|
| It is, unfortunately, the natural result of insufficiently
| regulated capitalism.
| banannaise wrote:
| [nitpick] I think it's more the natural result of capitalism
| that is well-regulated only on the consumer side.
|
| There are very few poultry processors largely because it is
| difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations
| and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine.
| But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there
| needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their
| workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is
| neither.
| mystraline wrote:
| Even regulated capitalism exploits. Surplus labor theory
| easily shows that even in the best of intentions, businesses
| absolutely must exploit the worker.
|
| Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than
| their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is
| exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the
| pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation.
|
| Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people
| can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that
| discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism.
| Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip
| controls from the get-go.
|
| No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of
| history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more
| were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine.
|
| I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it
| is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost
| breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware
| of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other
| concerns.
| dml2135 wrote:
| I'm all for critiques of capitalism, but it's extremely
| unconvincing to say capitalism must go, but at the same
| time, you don't know what to replace it with.
|
| How are you so convinced that there is a better solution
| than capitalism if you can't even articulate what that
| solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all
| it's flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of
| bad options?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is usually the extent of online discussion. Everyone
| can agree that "just build more housing" is the answer to
| the homelessness epidemic, but nobody has anything to say
| about HOW to accomplish that. The person saying it can't
| build a house on their own, nor can the collective number
| of people who regularly eject that sentiment. So the
| question is "how do you get enough money in one place and
| apply it to building more housing". And that's the tricky
| part. Because as you keep asking "how" you eventually
| arrive at thorny problems like "how do you ensure that
| the politician you elect who promises to build more
| housing... actually does it?"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Lots of people are screaming at the top of their lungs
| about how to build more housing. Primarily through
| deregulation. Examples would be zoning codes, building
| codes, relaxed public comment and relaxed environmental
| impact assessments.
| mystraline wrote:
| Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!
|
| In fact, its the complete financial ideation of rentals
| and homes. That's what's even pushed 2 earner homes to
| even afford a house.
|
| But those who have, can get a house loan, rent it out for
| 150% of the total mortgage and paracitize off the public.
| And nobody is the better, except for the paracite class
| (landlords).
|
| Rent controls would also do a great deal. But we hear
| howls from the libertarian types over controls ala Adam
| Smith.
|
| And progressive heavy taxation on more than 3 houses
| would also help the situation of houses being bought for
| rental or AirBNB purposes. Again, those are parasites on
| all of us.
|
| Of course, all these mean housing number go down. And
| those who own a large stake will definitely complain. But
| these are steps that would help, alongside building more
| with a rent-controlled and reasonable cost.
|
| And reforming how banks are required to provide loans
| (proof of X rent = proof of covering x mortgage). But
| really? This country is going the opposite way of the
| common person, and has been for decades. Now, that
| strategy has been ramped up to extremes.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!
|
| No, its not, restrictive zoning preventing actually
| building housing is. Which is why the mess is most acute
| in places which have the most such restrictions, and
| least in places that have less of them, wven when they
| are similar across all the dimensions you suggest are the
| real issues.
|
| > Rent controls would also do a great deal.
|
| At further reducing supply of housing by discouraging
| development? Yes, they would do a great deal of that.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Rent control doesn't build more homes. Neither does
| forcing banks to take on high risk borrowers.
|
| Are you confusing home ownership vs renting with total
| housing supply?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just to point that most places with a "housing problem"
| actually have a transit problem that will get even worse
| if one goes naively building more housing in single-use
| or empty land.
| int_19h wrote:
| For starters, we have to acknowledge that capitalism
| isn't really a system as such. It's a set of ad hoc
| economic arrangements that each came into being as a
| result of historic evolution in many different societies,
| not some kind of coherent arrangement with any specific
| goal. If you were to have the same discussion 400 years
| ago, proponents of then-existing economic relationships
| would say, "how are you so convinced that there's a
| better solution than what we have right now if you can't
| even articulate what the replacement would be?".
| nradov wrote:
| Surplus labor theory doesn't show anything. It's
| unscientific bunk that people just made up for ideological
| reasons.
| roenxi wrote:
| The obvious thing to do is for the farmer to learn how to
| package their own chickens, then sell it themselves. The hard
| part of this should be the however-long-it-takes a chicken to
| grow + feed for the bird.
|
| Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been
| made illegal by the regulators for some reason. Or that
| "chicken packaging" is wildly misnamed, because it sounds like
| something you can ... just do. People ate chickens for
| millennia without relying on 3 chicken packers.
|
| I've had neighbours who keep their own chickens (curse them for
| the mice). It didn't look so hard a quasi-monopoly could form
| naturally.
| bcoates wrote:
| The only winning move is not to play. My grandfather tried
| his hand at chicken farming about 100 years ago (didn't go
| well). It was a bad business then and it's a bad one now.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| If it is bad for humans, imagine what it must be like for
| the chickens.
| 4bpp wrote:
| Well, if you or one of your loved ones is considering
| going into the being-a-chicken business, I would hope
| that HN would likewise dissuade you.
| gostsamo wrote:
| > Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has
| been made illegal by the regulators for some reason.
|
| the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the
| market are a market failure modes that could bring in the
| same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming
| exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants
| from achieving market share.
| roenxi wrote:
| Theoretically a lot of stuff can happen. As a practical
| matter, this has to be regulatory. Eggs and chicken meat is
| a very well understood product and by nature a completely
| normal market. I've literally been offered chicken meat by
| roadside sellers who butcher them on the spot and cook up a
| meal; it is a bit gruesome but not outside the complexity
| of operation that one family can manage.
|
| The part of the supply chain acting as a "monopoly" is too
| simple to replace. Someone can literally set up a new local
| butchery, buy directly from the farmers and the exclusive
| dealership network is broken. Probably need some know-how
| and a refrigerated truck. It is barely possible that the
| sort of monopoly structure being described could have been
| built over the entirety of the US without regulatory
| support. It'd require something approaching a mind control
| ray to keep the competition under control.
|
| I believe the other comment saying that chickens are a bad
| business, competition would tear through the margins like a
| rooster eating a mouse. But a country wide monopsony on
| chicken purchases is absurd (unless the regulators are
| pushing it). If nothing else there are a bunch of low-
| income people who'd be happy to buy and butcher their own
| chickens if it cut out a middle man. It isn't feasible to
| build a natural monopoly.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Theoretically, it is possible to do anything of that, but
| what is missing from your business plan is selling a
| commodity product at scale on a competitive price. And if
| you somehow manage to do something like that, nothing
| stops the big player of your region from going to any of
| your clients and offer them dumping prices for ditching
| you or going to the local vendors of animal antibiotics
| and offering them premium price if they supply only
| chosen farmers thus squeezing you and your suppliers from
| both ends.
|
| If you have a market with low margin and no
| differentiation between the offered stock, the gains are
| in size and it logically leads to a few players in the
| market so I doubt that the independent butchery has to be
| butchered and won't die of natural causes due to high
| costs or because a few of its partners are having a bad
| year.
| nmcfarl wrote:
| The horrible thing is there can be lots of
| differentiation here. I grow my own meat birds for my own
| consumption, and they taste radically better than
| anything I've ever had in America. (Barring when I eat my
| friends' birds.) Artisanal chicken could definitely be a
| thing, although it would definitely cost more.
|
| I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem -
| processing your own birds is safely is definitely
| possible, but what is required to process them for sale
| makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge
| as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that's just not
| viable.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Aren't both of the examples of what they could do illegal
| ?
| gostsamo wrote:
| You saying that consumers having meet on dumping/low
| prices is illegal? You are a communist! /s You saying
| that a businessman is obliged to go against their own
| interest in stead of selling their meds to the highest
| bidder? You are a communist! /s Free market without
| regulation is exactly that - freedom for those who can
| shape the market as they wish and no government violence
| necessary so it is kosher.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Meat packaging isn't something you can "just do." The hard
| part is the equipment and manpower to disinfect a meat
| packing plant, which is done several times a _day_ when in
| operation.
|
| The reason regulators made it illegal is basic food safety. A
| meat packing facility - whether that's an industrial plant or
| a small group of farmers in a commercial kitchen or whatever
| - is a hot and humid environment that is an ideal place for
| bacteria to grow. Now that's going to happen anyway, but the
| public safety goal here is to minimize the bacterial load
| that transfers to the meat so that by the time it reaches the
| kitchen, the pathogens haven't reached dangerous levels. That
| means an entire facility that's designed to be sprayed down
| with a foaming disinfectant from wall to wall and crevice to
| crevice. Small groups of farmers simply can't afford that and
| be competitive unless they're already selling high end
| organic/free range/etc meat.
|
| Before refrigeration, people ate meat right after slaughter
| or cured it. They grew the animals at so low an intensity
| that >80% of the population were sustenance farmers that
| lived a precarious life prone to starvation at any time. It
| just makes no sense to compare the infrastructure to feed
| hundreds of millions in a single country to small scale pre-
| industrial agriculture.
| roenxi wrote:
| Which part of that is the tricky part? Spraying down a
| facility sounds straightforward. Killing bacteria in food
| products isn't particularly novel either; there are a lot
| of abattoirs around the world.
|
| We're talking about farmers here. Having to do something a
| couple of times a day is not going to intimidate them. In
| an extreme case they'd hire someone and promote them to
| chief sprayer. These aren't challenges of the magnitude
| needed to get natural monopolies to form - they're standard
| style challenges for running a business in an industrial
| sector. Challenges that farm owners are quite acutely aware
| of.
|
| If there are monopolies in the US chicken supply chain it
| is probably just everyday regulatory capture.
| xg15 wrote:
| I don't know anything about the chicken farming business,
| but I imagine if there was a simple straight-forward
| solution for the farmers to escape the stranglehold
| ("just build your own packaging plant and hose it down
| couple times per day") then the farmers would have
| already done it (or rather the situation wouldn't have
| occurred in the first place).
|
| I don't say this to despair but to argue that we'd need
| more details before we can make recommendations how to
| fix things. Also, there is an obvious power imbalance
| here, but then it's important to identity the source of
| that power, so you can address the imbalance.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Cool, bro. I look forward to your wildly successful
| independent chicken farming business that grows so fast
| it acquihires all its competitors, since it's _so easy_
| and all
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Butchers and meat markets that sell meat from locally
| raised animals is what this looks like.
|
| The post above yours talked about this:
|
| > "Small groups of farmers simply can't afford that and
| be competitive unless they're already selling high end
| organic/free range/etc meat."
|
| It absolutely does happen. It's at small scale with
| higher relative costs, so it's only profitable as a
| specialty product. It can't compete with industrially
| farmed meat on price. This would be the range of the
| farmer who doesn't mind doing some things a few times a
| day and perhaps hires a helper.
|
| Growing beyond the small scale requires the capital to
| build facilities and hire staff to run them while you're
| getting the operation going. You might need to be
| cutthroat on price to be competitive with existing
| players, so your revenue might not be great for a long
| while.
|
| How much output do you think a farmer and a helper are
| capable of, versus a fully staffed modern industrial
| poultry farm?
| morkalork wrote:
| Agricultural co-operatives exist, even for meat packing and
| processing.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| setting aside regulatory issues (and not commenting on
| whether any of that is good or bad), there is no universe
| where independent chicken farmers, solo or in a group, are
| going to compete with a group like Perdue in the industrial
| foodstuff space. maybe you get a cottage industry farmer's
| market business going or whatever but you aren't going to see
| Farmer Bob's Foghorn Leghorn Boneless Breasts on shelves in
| the local Wally World any time soon.
| enaaem wrote:
| Big box stores want high volumes of a standardised products.
| This is hard to do for a lone farmer. It would be easier if
| they could sell to smaller supermarkets and butcher shops.
| Smaller supermarkets and butcher shops require walkable
| neighbourhoods and a vibrant down town; I call it the
| walkable neighbourhood theory of everything.
| zhivota wrote:
| Bingo! It's also an antitrust thing but yes, look up the
| number of grocery stores in a northeast city 100 years ago
| vs now, it's mind boggling. Like at least 25x difference,
| maybe more, I can't recall.
| nradov wrote:
| People who live in walkable neighborhoods will always drive
| to big box grocery stores to buy most of their chicken. The
| local butcher shops charge too much, and for busy families
| it's a huge hassle to have to visit multiple small shops
| for meat, dairy, produce, bread, etc. The big box stores
| are a huge time saver.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, reverting food distribution to the pre-car situation
| is a lost cause that would also create plenty of problems
| anyway.
|
| Given that, it's a market in dire need of governments
| messing with it. The current situation is really bad.
| int_19h wrote:
| Around here there's a trend for the local butchers,
| veggie and dairy farmers etc to do doorstep delivery.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> then sell it themselves._
|
| One word: "Distribution." ( _The Graduate_ reference).
|
| Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical
| goods. You can't sell something, if you can't get it to
| market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all
| over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on
| distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a
| dark art.
|
| That's one reason that the Internet has upended so many
| industries. It's democratized distribution of digital goods,
| and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes,
| because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and
| promotion are the new Distribution. You can't sell your
| apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Maybe an independent nonprofit can do the research and
| score food based on how much the pipeline taking it to your
| table is monopolized vs democratized.
| thejoneser wrote:
| My impression (partly from reading Zephyr Teachout's
| excellent book Break Em Up) is that a farmer cooperative
| would not find the big grocery stores willing to carry their
| products. Those stores are intimidated by whichever of the
| big-3 processors is active in their region. Selling at a
| farmers market or mom & pop store may be totally feasible,
| but the grower had better be sure that was a long-term
| solution, because the big processor will blackball them for
| trying.
| grigri907 wrote:
| In my experience, the processor is actually the one who owns
| the chickens (broilers). The farmer is essentially a baby-
| sitter for 6-7 weeks. The processor also owns the feed and the
| farmer gets paid on a feed-to-poultry conversion efficiency.
|
| Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates,
| chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-
| established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers
| have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take
| on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like
| a pretty oppressive relationship.
| chicken467 wrote:
| > The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks.
|
| Actually, there are stages, e.g. some farmers just do chicks,
| someone then may pick them up and go to the next stage.
| chicken465 wrote:
| It both sounds and is exploitive and bad, but to add color to
| this:
|
| - poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been
| going on for decades.
|
| - it's provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that
| had land, some money, and a willingness to work.
|
| You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses
| can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result
| in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their
| workers.
|
| Some may then extrapolate to say "all business is bad", but
| it's a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where
| there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing.
| Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible,
| and that's a bad thing.
|
| I'd argue that finding that balance in business is why religion
| and capitalism spread together.
|
| Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their
| religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep
| working conditions better than they would've been because of
| their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn't
| enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know
| the Marxists may say the opposite.
|
| Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do
| so without morals, we risk evil beyond what's discussed in this
| article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers
| from being exploited, but it's an uphill battle, and
| money/power may win.
| doener wrote:
| Maybe this question is naive and/or influenced by decades of
| classic neoliberal propaganda: But why don't do the farmers
| something else then?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| There's not much else around. They don't know what else to
| do. Education/job training expensive. They've got loans to
| pay back, so they can't stop working to look for another job.
| They're on some government assistance program they can't
| afford to lose, but it comes with work requirements, so they
| can't retrain. The pay (including government subsidies) make
| it _just_ bearable enough to keep from revolting. Etc.
| AngryData wrote:
| Like what? Farm another product that has the similar
| problems? Row crop farm where generating a 2% return on
| investment over a decade span is considered a success? The
| response has been farmers dropping out of the business
| entirely, which ends up with some few people doubling down
| into larger operations, which only makes the problem worse as
| it is harder to pivot and makes processing and distribution
| even harder to divert away from the big controlling players.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Might just have called it Uberization. Or called Uber a Chicken
| Processor.
| doener wrote:
| Reminds me of the 1947 "Sixteen Tons" song. From German
| Wikipedia, translated by DeepL:
|
| "According to Archie Green, the lyrics contain several key
| passages that Travis took from quotes from his family members.
| When asked about his health, his father reportedly replied that
| he couldn't afford to die because he owed his soul to the
| grocery store[7] where he had debts. Sixteen Tons is a socially
| critical song about the sometimes inhumane conditions that
| American miners and their families had to live under in the
| past. This included wage slavery: US miners were mostly paid
| not in cash but with tokens (scrips), some of which could only
| be redeemed in company-owned stores, as there were no other
| shops in the area; local food supplies could only be obtained
| in these stores (company stores), which had a virtual monopoly
| and could therefore charge excessive prices; The income and
| expenditure situation in the company stores, which was
| deliberately controlled exclusively in favor of the mine
| owners, resulted in unavoidable debts for the workers (Another
| day older and deeper in debt), which created a relationship of
| dependency similar to serfdom ("I owe my soul to the company
| store"). By the time the song was written, the miners' living
| and working conditions had already improved significantly,
| partly as a result of numerous strikes. Payment with tokens had
| been banned in 1938 by a federal law, the Fair Labor Standards
| Act of 1938. However, working conditions remained harsh and the
| memory of exploitative practices was still fresh in the minds
| of the families and communities affected."
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons_(Lied)
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm not sure why you transllated the german entry for an
| american song, but FYI, there's an english wikipedia version.
| "I owe my soul to the company store" is one of the greatest
| lyrics ever.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
| kragen wrote:
| Many German Wikipedia articles are better than the English
| versions. Maybe this is one of them.
| doener wrote:
| I don't know if "better", but when I read Doctorow's blog
| article I was reminded of what I read about the 16 tons
| song on Wikipedia. I first read the English version and
| did not find what I was looking for. Then I tried German
| and there it was.
| doener wrote:
| Yes, I know. I read it and the information I translated
| from the German article was not in the English version.
| 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
| roenxi wrote:
| The article doesn't actually present any evidence that
| humans+computers can beat computers. The closest thing I
| spotted was "I accomplished the feat in 38 moves, in a
| sequence that no computer would consider or find ... I did
| not subsequently find a win". So the computers disregarded a
| line that didn't work.
|
| The actual evidence he listed suggests this is a war between
| different humans to work out who has better computer hardware
| ("the lack of decent equipment is being felt quite notably in
| Russia, where embargoes have limited access to new hardware
| and the latest chess tools. As a consequence, the Russian
| team finished near the bottom of the standings in the last
| Correspondence Chess Olympiad"). Cool and all, I can imagine
| people having a lot of fun, but it isn't obvious they are
| competing based _chess skill_ here. The computers are
| bringing the chess skill and the human seems to be bringing
| logistic, financial and clerical support to operate the
| computer.
| 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.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| stockfish + human beats stockfish OR there are no new commits
| to stockfish that increase its ELO OR all new commits to
| stockfish are coded by AI.
|
| currently we are in option 1
| kragen wrote:
| I'm out of the loop; how well does Stockfish do against
| AlphaZero?
| Scarblac wrote:
| There was a brief period, from about 1998 to 2010-ish, where
| computers were stronger than humans but computer-assisted
| humans were stronger still. That was when the term was used.
| There were some tournaments held with the concept.
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| It's just an example to illustrate a term and is not germane to
| the actual point of the article.
| banannaise wrote:
| It helps to do basic research before dismissing as laughable
| the actual chess format, often called "centaur chess", where a
| human and a chess engine play as a team, and are generally
| stronger than a chess engine alone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Unfortunately, unionization is not "coming back with a vengeance"
| in the United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.
|
| Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes,
| and secondary boycotts.
|
| On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an
| employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to
| strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
|
| Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a
| country, so they're pretty much never going to "come back with a
| vengance" here
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > Our laws ban ... secondary boycotts
|
| I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems
| inherently unconstitutional to me.
|
| Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's
| definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the
| law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time
| to time odd.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| In this context, "strike" is probably the better term, and
| "solidarity strike" or "general strike" are more likely the
| ones you might have heard.
| kragen wrote:
| There's an overview in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidari
| ty_action#United_State....
|
| You'll probably be interested in reading https://chicagounbou
| nd.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti..., "Secondary
| Boycotts and the First Amendment", in the University of
| Chicago Law Review, by Barbara J. Anderson:
|
| > _Section 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act
| (NLRA)1 makes it an unfair labor practice for a union to
| "threaten, coerce, or restrain any person" with the object of
| requiring that person to cease dealing with another.2 In NLRB
| v. Retail Store Employees Union Local 1001 (Safeco),3 the
| Supreme Court held that this section proscribes union
| picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck
| product whenever such picketing "reasonably can be expected
| to threaten [the picketed retailer] with ruin or substantial
| loss."'4 Although the Court noted in passing that peaceful
| picketing is entitled to some first amendment protection, the
| Court found it "well-established" that Congress had
| constitutional power to prohibit "picketing that predictably
| encourages consumers to boycott a secondary business."5_
|
| I'm not sure whether _NLRB v. Retail Store Employees_ is
| still valid law. But "secondary boycotts" are often
| understood as something much more coercive as simply "union
| picketing designed to influence consumers to boycott a struck
| product" (https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a
| rticle=46..., "Secondary Boycotts Under the Taft-Hartley Act"
| Philip Hornbein, Jr., 01953):
|
| > _The distinctive feature of a secondary boycott is that it
| is directed against a neutral party rather than against the
| employer directly involved in the labor dispute. The target
| of the secondary boycott is a third party who is engaged in
| business dealings with the employer as a customer, supplier,
| or otherwise. The object of the secondary boycott is to cause
| the boycottee to cease doing business with the employer._
|
| Consider disputes other than labor disputes. Suppose Phyllis
| believes that, because you are gay, you are so immoral that
| she won't sell groceries to you in her grocery store. This is
| deplorable but not really threatening and coercive; you can
| still buy groceries from Chad's grocery store down the
| street. But suppose Phyllis convinces Chad's employees to
| strike unless Chad refuses you service as well. Suddenly the
| situation has taken on a much darker cast; Chad may have
| nothing against gay people, but he may start refusing you
| service simply as a matter of self-preservation. If this goes
| on, you may rapidly find yourself without sources of food or
| employment unless you recant your homosexuality.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| That's interesting. A quick note. It's probably useful to
| distinguish "secondary boycott" and "secondary strike"
| here. The cited material sometimes interchanges those,
| seemingly due to the fact that the former has historically
| encompassed the latter. It seems plausible to me that
| someone might have differing views of those two things so
| they probably ought to be distinguished.
|
| I guess a lot of meaning rests on the use of "coercive"
| here. What immediately comes to my mind when I see that
| term is violent threats directed towards someone so it's
| worth noting that isn't what's being described here. Rather
| it's being used to describe the effect of a boycott (in
| this case the secondary one) on the targeted (third party)
| business. That seems tautological to me because what is the
| point of a boycott if not to nonviolently coerce the
| targeted business?
|
| So the court seems to be saying that if you view businesses
| as individuals then it is illegal to organize with the aim
| of coercing one person not to associate with another. The
| indirection (going via the consumer) doesn't seem to be the
| issue here. Your second link cites an electrical workers
| case where picketing with the express goal that the
| employer should terminate a subcontractor was deemed
| illegal.
|
| Certainly I would agree if the coercive measure was
| violent, but is that really the case if it is exclusionary
| in nature? Would the court find the same way if I told my
| neighbors that they must not hang out with some guy who
| lives down the street or else they won't be welcome at my
| pool parties anymore? I certainly don't think that's a good
| way to conduct oneself but it seems inconsistent that
| somehow upon adding economic activity into the mix my
| speech can suddenly be restricted in ways it couldn't
| before.
|
| To me it seems to fundamentally be a matter of free speech
| - engaging with other people and managing to bring them
| around to your way of thinking on the matter. If you hadn't
| managed to convince a large group of consumers (or non-
| unionized laborers) of the merit of both your position and
| your proposed course of action then they wouldn't be
| participating in the first place. It seems to me that the
| court is ignoring the part where your ideas won out as well
| as ignoring the individual agency of the consumers (or
| other laborers) and treating this as nothing more than
| direct action on the part of the organizing union when it
| is clearly much more than that.
|
| To your example, I don't see any issue with Phyllis
| advocating and would note that she isn't going to get very
| far (sans coercion) unless Chad's employees, and by
| implication the community at large, generally agree with
| her. That is, Chad has to be the odd one out for this to
| work. That's not a pretty situation but I certainly don't
| want the government hamstringing community organization
| either. Free speech and freedom of (non)association can't
| only apply when it's convenient for those currently in
| power.
|
| To my mind the issue with your example is the ability of a
| public facing business to discriminate along class
| boundaries (ex homosexuals) as opposed to on a purely
| individual basis (ex person who previously shoplifted).
| That would be in keeping with how other public areas are
| treated.
| kragen wrote:
| > _Would the court find the same way if I told my
| neighbors that they must not hang out with some guy who
| lives down the street or else they won 't be welcome at
| my pool parties anymore? (...) somehow upon adding
| economic activity into the mix my speech can suddenly be
| restricted in ways it couldn't before._
|
| I think the issue is that, upon adding economic activity
| to the mix, your exercise of freedom of speech threatens
| _every_ freedom of the guy down the street, because it
| threatens his survival. I don 't think this is dependent
| on whether the community shunning is on a purely
| individual basis or along class boundaries. (I also don't
| think actively gay people are a "class" in any sense that
| shoplifters aren't.)
|
| I agree that this reasoning is incompatible with a strong
| understanding of freedom of speech; it could be applied
| very broadly to restrict political activity.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| It'll only come back if folks get desperate enough. union
| activity wasn't exactly "illegal" in the old days but it wasn't
| exactly protected by any laws, either, as attested by all the
| private goons that the mining companies hired out to break up
| strikes and murder striking miners
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > union activity wasn't exactly "illegal" in the old days
|
| Having a union wasn't, on its own, illegal but it gave no
| special status, but most union _activity_ was illegal, and as
| soon as the union jointly planned that activity it became a
| criminal conspiracy.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.
|
| Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they formed
| their own union towns.
|
| They even got infiltrated by the mob.
|
| Plus Europe union laws and US union laws are separate things.
| For example in France, whatever concessions union gets, are
| applied to all employees. Which isn't the case in US and is
| iirc considered anti-union. However then you remember that US
| union depends on participation for union healthcare.
|
| The biggest problem for unions today isn't the laws. It's
| ironically the free trade (lack of laws). Don't want to do this
| job for peanuts? We'll ship it overseas for someone willing to
| work for half a peanut.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > Yeah. Because at one point unions got so powerful they
| formed their own union towns.
|
| Companies did this too, but it wasn't bothering any policy
| makers.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Because rising affluence killed them. New Deal with the new
| mandatory minimum wage made them obsolete.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It did, in fact, bother policy makers (or, at least, it
| bothered their constituents enough that the constituents
| bothered the policy makers), which is why there are (e.g.)
| laws requiring pay in cash or cash equivalents; this is
| directly prohibition on the practice of pay in company
| scrip. Many other features of the company town practice
| were also the focus of direct legislative restrictions and
| prohibitions.
| nerdponx wrote:
| And that happened largely because of powerful unions.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| > unionization [...] is not allowed to by our laws.
|
| Ok sure but laws can changes, right ? And that previous
| sentence is itself protected by the law ? I understand your
| pessimism but that's not to be confused with _fatalism_.
|
| (disclaimer: am EU citizen)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| When unions arose in the US, the legal situation was far worse
| (the improvement in the legal situation was itself a _direct
| result_ of _illegal_ unions).
| int_19h wrote:
| The whole point of collective action at large scale is to be
| able to say, "fuck your laws".
|
| After all, the laws were much more hostile towards unions a
| century ago, and strikes would often be dispersed with outright
| violence using both paramilitary organizations (like
| Pinkertons) as well as police and military. But if doing so
| just means that the strike gets bigger and broader, it's not a
| winning strategy for the capital.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If a business, after unionizing, ultimately delivers more value
| per dollar to the end customer... then why would anyone even need
| to write essays arguing for it?
|
| Customers will vote with their wallets, assuming there are any
| durable net advantage to the customer base, so the cumulative
| effect would be far more penetrating and enduring than millions
| of written arguments.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Well, that's the naivest thing I've read this week.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Can you write out the argument for why?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Actually, human flesh is delicious.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Is this some kind of bot reply?
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's almost as if there's more to life than what's good for
| business.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Are you confused?
|
| What's good for the end customers is almost certainly not the
| same as "what's good for business".
| aziaziazi wrote:
| How do you define _customers_ and _good_ ?
|
| Consider someone starts a slavery business that grab easily
| pickable children to raise them as perfect specialized
| workers then put the to the free sell/rent market.
|
| End users could choose for other "moral" alternative if
| they wish. One even could point out that already happen in
| some parts of the world and that helps happy customers to
| solve their needs.
|
| However most people prefer to contraint others wallet usage
| to enforce certain ethic rules. Where to place the line of
| ethics/constraint is very cultural dependent - to its wide
| definition.
|
| One way to handle that is to look profitability for citizen
| instead of customers, then what's profitable for Uber users
| should be balanced with what's profitable for Uber drivers.
| That is usually what people want from a gouvernements and
| laws (and I guess we both agree that is not the same as
| what is profitable for business).
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Who said there is an unambiguous definition?
|
| Given how much it's been discussed over human history...
| it seems very likely that does not exist. And is yet
| another dispute that has to be decided via the political
| process in the first place.
| nine_k wrote:
| If all Nash equilibria were optimal, life would be much easier.
| Sadly, this is not so [1], so outcomes that are worse for most
| participants, or even for all participants, occur pretty often.
| I bet you've heard about "the prisoner's dilemma".
|
| So no, businesses may end up doing things that are not very
| beneficial to customers, and not that beneficial to the
| business, but be in a situation when _changing_ their behavior
| results in significant losses, so they won 't change. Same with
| customers: in some situations, they might get a better outcome,
| including a lower price, if they did not chase the lowest price
| outright.
|
| [1]: https://equilibriabook.com/toc/
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If the USA was the only country in the world that might
| indeed be a serious danger... but thankfully there are other
| countries that compete and it's exceedingly unlikely they all
| fall into the exact same trap.
|
| But if that scenario were to occur, then all arguments ever
| written would be likewise literally worthless.
| int_19h wrote:
| If free workers ultimately deliver more value per dollar to the
| end customer than slaves...
| euroderf wrote:
| Obv the American chicken industry is a nightmare for farmers.
| Where can I read a comparison to the EU, which presumably takes
| better care of both farmers and chickens altho I would not bet my
| life on it ?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| EU has obliterated the small African farmers by dumping cheap
| unwanted cuts (legs) there.
|
| (Also, while there are regulations on how badly egg-producing
| chicken can be treated, that doesn't extend to most eggs :
| those sold to businesses to be used in recipes.)
| kragen wrote:
| Marshall Brain, who recently committed suicide, wrote a book in
| 02003 about this; it's called "Manna". Unfortunately, before he
| killed himself, he removed it from his website. Fortunately, he
| didn't remove it from the WABAC machine:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbr...
|
| It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't
| find the optimistic ending plausible.
| mooreds wrote:
| I came here to post the Manna story. I've read it multiple
| times and found it eerily prescient. (It reminds me a bit of
| what L. Bob Rife[0] was trying to accomplish as well in Snow
| Crash.)
|
| I didn't know Brain had committed suicide :( . More details
| about that[1].
|
| 0: https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/L._Bob_Rife
|
| 1: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-
| issues/academic-...
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah :-(
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| It appears to be back up on his website? Unless this version is
| in some way incomplete or not the original:
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna
| kragen wrote:
| You're right! Thank you! This is a better link.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| The Youtube recommender is already EOLed. I'm thinking business
| wins here, as soon as any labor organization method gets popular
| it'll be declared a violation of terms of employment. In another
| timeline this might be prevented with regulations.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Why doesn't someone make a gig platform with a cooperative
| ownership model?
| quinnjh wrote:
| Interesting question. I ran some quick numbers on Google, take
| last years profit for uber ($10B) and naively distribute it
| between all drivers (est 7M) and it comes out to a raise of
| 1,428. Most drivers would probably be enticed by that, but it's
| not going to radically alter their situation. Also, Ubers board
| and investors are compelled via profit, as the purpose of a
| company is generating profit for its shareholders.
|
| Would be great to see something like you suggest take off and
| gain national appeal, but I suspect that VC money helps with
| getting billboards/ newspaper ads/ etc. You would need to craft
| a new sort of coop model that can generate enough profits at
| the top to be an attractive investment but also share some.
| AFAIK this works best in small teams doing high value work.
| theptip wrote:
| I worry about this stuff a fair bit, of all the net-negative AI
| outcomes I think perhaps the most likely group is some variant of
| this combined with dystopian techno-feudalism that drives society
| into an attractor state that's hard to get out of.
|
| It's by no means certain though, and i think the article takes an
| over-pessimistic take.
|
| It's true that uber drivers and doordashers get bid down, but
| this is the bottom rung of the ladder of unskilled labor; there
| is currently massive demand for this job.
|
| If you look at restaurants I believe post-covid you see a
| different story, where workers are not racing to the bottom and
| instead employers need to offer way above minimum wage to fill
| roles. Trades would be an even better example, where skilled
| carpenters and mechanics are so in demand that it's a comfortable
| six-figure job.
|
| Personally I think all these low-skilled jobs are quite likely to
| be automated soon. How society responds to the influx of
| unemployed unskilled workers will be the crux. And of course the
| skill bar for automation will increase; in the long term many
| (most?) jobs are going to be automatable.
|
| UBI or similar is the obvious solution, but Capital will of
| course oppose this vigorously. A new social contract will be
| needed; the slippery slope that the US is currently on does not
| end in a pretty place.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > unskilled labor
|
| I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is
| driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for
| everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as
| "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a _higher_ degree.
|
| Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs
| (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house),
| the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness
| and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many,
| many types of office work get automated long before we have
| automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters.
| It seems to me that _office work_ has the highest concentration
| of the low-skill workers.
|
| What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical
| labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to
| expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon.
|
| I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes
| enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on
| the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite.
| It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk
| of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will
| continue for a long time before this is successfully
| productized in a general case. People managers tend to be
| replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita
| goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work
| than I do of layoffs.
|
| I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I
| see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy
| rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to
| divvying up resources and funding development of services and
| infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that--I'd love
| to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as
| neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends
| don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing
| democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful
| lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another
| story.
|
| Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see
| people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring
| back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier
| politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic
| pyramid than it will be to basically go through another
| economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
| theptip wrote:
| It's all relative. While there is skill, pretty much anyone
| can learn it in short order. Vs "skilled labor" like trades
| which require many years of apprenticing.
|
| And no, it's not a proxy for "physical labor". Trades are
| highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be
| clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The
| key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar
| for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.
|
| (Or in the other direction from the workers perspective,
| demand is much higher for jobs requiring less
| training/certification.)
|
| I don't think working class jobs are going to go first as a
| group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in
| short order.
|
| This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch
| myself as a generalist with over twenty years of
| experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small
| sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do
| a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of
| months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not,
| but time and money can overcome that for most businesses.
|
| Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is
| difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even
| harder _still_ to quantify. I 'm not sure I'd call that
| "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x
| as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal
| world, anyway.
|
| > Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list
| is not.
|
| I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers?
|
| Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry
| here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers
| apparently can't tell the difference between a russet
| potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with _that_
| problem.
|
| But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that
| require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a
| degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This
| job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like
| the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy.
| Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some
| base level--but you still need to man the bank branch with
| humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just
| existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not
| hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if
| you think about it, the janitor probably has more job
| security than anyone else in the building from the advances
| of technology.
|
| > The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower
| the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is
| lower.
|
| Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like
| that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less
| of a chance of being mistaken for saying something
| semantically completely different.
|
| I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or
| certainly "skilled labor", is inherently _un_ useful, but
| the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense
| incoherence regarding who _ought_ to be paid what for what
| work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you
| point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory
| forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are
| just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage
| work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of
| workers leaves me scratching my head.
|
| One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil
| rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally
| even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously
| helpless with basic tasks--they can't cook, they can barely
| button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how
| their phone works (which was even more baffling back then
| when phones had about three functions total), they don't
| know how to talk to their children or socialize with
| workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran
| into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping
| to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them
| had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french
| and even some patois than she could english because of how
| much time she spent with her foreign nanny--watching her
| belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully
| unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm
| and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good
| tips.
|
| of course you would also run into people who grew up poor
| or middle class before finding financial success, and the
| cultural and social difference was like night and day--
| those are the people who would continue to thrive if
| someone took their wealth.
|
| So--to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell
| apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if
| it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of
| many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying
| that it _is_ (even if I _do_ find my work primarily through
| my own said skills).
| MangoToupe wrote:
| For some reason I can't edit, but there's a couple of
| typos in there (eg, "many if not most workers" rather
| than "many if most office workers"); please read it
| charitably.
|
| Edit: oddly, I _can_ edit this comment.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I hear you. A good friend of mine is a cleaner. She has
| the work ethic of a draft horse and takes pride in being
| meticulous and going the extra mile in a timely manner.
|
| Happy clients are of utmost importance for her and she
| cherishes the ones who recognize the extra care she puts
| into her work.
|
| She also loves cleaning in of itself. Even describes it
| as therapeutic.
|
| I look up to her in many ways. There's deep wisdom in
| what she's doing and how she's doing it. Day to day.
|
| I once used the term ,,unskilled labor" and she asked
| what it meant. I explained it. She only gave me this
| look, no comment.
|
| From then on I understood how ridiculous that term is.
| AngryData wrote:
| As someone in the trades, 85% of trade jobs are not any
| more difficult or require any more skill or amount of
| knowledge or experience as these other jobs. So I find it
| pretty messed up when people put these other jobs down as
| unskilled and use that to justify shit pay and conditions
| because that means most trade jobs are only slightly better
| off due to temporary social views.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What do you think the barriers are between the two? Why
| would anyone pick items off a list for minimum wage when
| they could make six figures in the trades? Is it simple
| credentialism and gatekeeping?
|
| Someone just quoted me 60k to renovate by backyard. I
| have been doing it myself and there is certainly a lot of
| skill to doing even simple tasks like seeding a lawn
| effectively
| Animats wrote:
| Organized labor doesn't seem to use those terms.
|
| There's a bill to provide some relief for poultry processors, but
| despite bipartisan support the bill hasn't gone anywhere.[1]
|
| The dairy industry in the Northeast has managed to get into a
| strange situation. The dairy operators are suing their own
| cooperative for creating a monopsony and holding down raw milk
| prices. Milk is a shrinking market, but dairy farmers have a lot
| of political clout, which leads to some very strange situations.
|
| [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-
| bill/150...
|
| [2] mhttps://vtdigger.org/2022/08/02/lawsuit-accuses-dairy-
| farmer...
| scotty79 wrote:
| When a workers is chickenized with AI isn't that the case that
| it's the manager who just lost his job?
|
| That's what means to replace a manager with few lines of java (or
| with AI).
| bitwize wrote:
| I thought they were going to be talking about that old-timey
| drawing of a creature with human legs and a rooster upper body.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-31 23:01 UTC)