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Posts by Lanny
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2025-01-13 at 3:16 PM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage System
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2025-01-11 at 3:02 AM UTC in Anyone else using Linux?
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2025-01-07 at 2:42 PM UTC in What do you think happened to the Vikings in north America?I think lions bit off their knee caps
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2025-01-06 at 2:26 AM UTC in Cigarette tea
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2025-01-04 at 7:07 PM UTC in Just to walk the dog around the block
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2025-01-04 at 7:06 PM UTC in Just to walk the dog around the blockFuck heat. I’m down with the cold though
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2025-01-04 at 6:28 PM UTC in Anyone else using Linux?After years and years of Mac machines locally and Debian on servers I switched to nixos as my daily driver about a year ago and I don’t think I’m going back. I have my complaints about nix, it’s far far from a perfect solution, but I think it’s where I’m going to stay for a while. Nixpkgs is too unstable for my tastes and it’s not at a point where you can sit on a release channel for 3 years like Debian yet. On the up side, migration between release channels in much much easier than Debian because of the declarative package management.
Kinda surprisingly I’m less happy with it on the server than locally. Again the rate of change is fast enough that upgrading is a regular thing and I have less excitement for the latest and greatest. Pinning deps is possible outside of flakes world but it’s not pretty. I’m thinking I’m going to move to docker based deployments on a nixos host, I don’t love it but I think the ecosystem has matured enough that there’s a sane way to do it without drinking the k8s koolaid (k8s k5d?) -
2025-01-01 at 5:54 AM UTC in A New Year LOOMS
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2025-01-01 at 5:22 AM UTC in Is 1600mhz enough?lol
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2025-01-01 at 5:17 AM UTC in A New Year LOOMSHappy new years east coast loomers
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2024-12-31 at 11:16 PM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage System
Originally posted by Kingoftoes Salary is economically inefficient, meaning that supply and demand are not in or close to equilibrium. Salary is inefficient because it does not accurately allocate pay to a worker based on their output.
Supply and demand for what? Labor? I’m not sure I buy that this is an actual economic reality. I don’t really see any evidence that employers have an excess of labor (supply exceeding demand). If employers can roughly gauge their demand for labor and always seek to salsify that they’ll have on average .5 employees excess per role which for all but very small businesses is inconsequential.
I’d you’re talking about compensation, I don’t think you can talk about comp in terms of supply and demand, employees have an effectively unlimited demand for comp.Yes, it is not suitable for all types of work, especially if you are working for a corporation/union that you are bound to. That's why private contractors are private. Even if salary is inefficient for all parties involved, I suppose corporations have the extra money to blow on an employee that has specialized in their field.
I don’t think it’s a matter is blowing money because corps have too much. Again I’ll point to the overhead implied by contract work (negotiation, assessment). I think most employers rightly judge that that overhead exceeds any benefit of deliverable based work. -
2024-12-29 at 7:12 PM UTC in A New Year LOOMSFucking loomers
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2024-12-29 at 5:36 PM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage System
Originally posted by Kingoftoes My point was not that tearing down salary pay would help corporations squeeze more labor out of it's workers, my point was that tearing down salary would make for a more efficient wage system because salary pay is not directly contingent on output, instead it depends on the passage of time itself, not even the amount of time that is spent working.
Hmm I guess to back up for a second, what do you mean by efficient? A process can only be efficient with respect to some input resource relative to the output of the process, and often one sort of efficiency is traded for another (eg riding a bike is money and energy efficient relative to a car, but time inefficient). So when you say salary is inefficient relative to contract labor, inefficient with respect to what? Capital? Time? Human suffering?
It is true that salary is not directly tied to work output, but this is generally a feature rather than a bug. To effectively contract out work you need a fairly precise definition of the work product, and a comprehensive rubric of what a satisfactory quality of work is. Take construction for example where contracting is the default mode: there is an elaborate and expensive process of specification in design and Byzantine system of codes and inspection for QA. This makes sense for building structures but certainly not for all sorts of work, it’s an idea that’s been tried over and over in my field but routinely fails outside of a few marginal domains. Salary is instead a system that’s vague by design, it lends an employer a lot of leeway in specification (and ability to change specification) and the laborer gets steady work and doesn’t have to litigate a contract (which when it happens is a fundamentally inefficient thing since contract negotiation Is definitionally not the work product of the contract) -
2024-12-29 at 4:26 PM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage System
Originally posted by Kingoftoes I made a point earlier in the thread that these things are a temporary solution to the lack of overall higher wages, simultaneously the money provided by bonuses is lacking, while compensation is only paid out in certain scenarios that are not contingent on worker productivity.
So I’m kinda of of two minds here. In my personal experience, I see a lot of talent lost because internal advancement is limited and hopping jobs is more lucrative. But my industry is kinda weird. And on the other hand I still see people busting their humps for disproportionate potential comp. Maybe the logic is comp or no, you still want a good recommendation for you next gig. In any case, the system seems to work fairly well for reasonably well paid labor at least in terms of extracting effort from a labor force.Corporations are no different, except in that they can get away with more poor business practices because they can be approaching impervious to public dissent. Independent contractors are not quite so.
If you are a highly skilled and efficient salary worker, perhaps it is possible for you to work 30 hours a week for a salary. It may be OK for the employee, but it is still an inefficient wage structure, it attempts to bind the behavior of man to that of a clock, which is as previously stated not conducive to any sort of minimization of economic inefficiencies.
How does salary bind anyone to a clock? How is it inefficient? It may not extract as much labor from the worker as possible but that’s volume, not efficiency. The fact that a salaried employee might work less than a 40 hour week is actually a demonstration of time efficiency, no more time is spent than is necessary to fulfill the need for labor. The market can set a price salary labor as well as contract labor. -
2024-12-28 at 4:16 AM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage System
Originally posted by Kingoftoes Salary is even worse. Instead of an employer averaging employee productivity over the period of a shift and using the amount of hours worked as a basis for determining payment, salary does not even attempt to pay an employee according to any metric even loosely based on worker productivity.
The worker is essentially given a static allowance for completing a certain task(s).
Originally posted by Kingoftoes Contract pay.
So I 100% get the argument here and agree in principle. In my experience though it doesn’t seem to work like this. If you’re salaried you typically have a career ladder and bonus and comp structures to incentivize better performance, losing comp isn’t really a thing, at least as far as I know, but there is the threat of being laid off.
Conversely contractors are infamous for taking whatever shortcuts they can because they are unlikely to have maintain their own work -
2024-12-27 at 11:07 PM UTC in The Inefficiencies Of The Hourly Wage SystemYeah like someone pointed out, salary exists for a reason.
Fast food is also a great example of where hourly pay makes a lot of sense. As long as my cook can flip burgers at a rate that meets the demand of my business I really don’t care if he’s faster or more efficient than the next guy. I need him to be available during my operating hours, and no gain in efficiency can change that. The goal of a restaurant isn’t to produce the maximal number of burgers per time unit but to satisfy an inconsistent and fluctuating volume of demand across its operating hours. -
2024-12-27 at 10:54 PM UTC in on christmas day
Originally posted by Jiggaboo_Johnson Um again rap doesn't require background music…and background music doesn't mean rap is musical. Have you never even been to an underground rap off???? It's just two dudes talking shit to each other.
..and a "beat" isn't music either…it's a "beat".
REMAIN IN AN ESTABLISHMENT OF FURTHER EDUCATION CHILD!
This is dumb and pedantic. Yes, it’s sometimes useful to draw a distinction between “rap” as a vocal style and hiphop as a broader musical style. But if you have two brain cells to rub together you can figure out that that isn’t the only possible definition of rap and the term “rap” is much more commonly used to refer to hiphop music which involves rap vocals. If I said “yeezus is a rap album” everyone who isn’t retarded would realize that’s a description of both the vocal and instrumental styles of the music and not think I was saying it was an a cappella album or something -
2024-12-25 at 1:06 AM UTC in This Thread is a Christmas Checkpoint
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2024-12-24 at 12:26 PM UTC in This Thread is a Christmas Checkpoint
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2024-12-24 at 12:17 PM UTC in Luigi “Fuck CEOs” Mangione read and favorably reviewed Uncle Ted
