I mean, it’d be pretty harsh for them to publicly publish that the teams commit velocity was down and they were all PIP’d, lol. Not that I think that’s likely, but there are lots of possible for cause reasons that shouldn’t be shared.
If anything, I suspect the reason is the more pedestrian “moving in a different direction” from the wish list process.
I don’t really know the details here as I can’t find any other sources or articles, let alone statements by the affected parties.
But the statement that wikimedia is rich because it has 17 months of operating reserves and a profitable unit with $8.1M in revenue seems a bit naive when said about an organization with 650 employees (likely $50M annual payroll) and misses the point, if indeed the point is about union busting as the headline claims.
For me, I’m less interested in the financials and more about the story from the fired individuals. As a monthly donor, if the team comes out saying they were fired for unionizing, then I’m happy to cancel. But if it was more to do with business or operating disagreements, that’s another story, even if I disagree with the specific operational decision.
But I tried following the links to the discussion pages and the solidarity pages. But most of the comments seem to be upset about the direction of the community wish list, the loss of the wishlist, and no direct statements about union busting. I then tried searching team member names and fired keywords, and couldn’t find any sources or direct statements.
So I dunno. I’ll wait for credible first hand statements from the team before I cancel my donation. Cancelling a community request team sucks, but union busting is a completely different ballgame.
It’s interesting; I was listening to a recent NPR Planet Money podcast about why the US doesn’t have guaranteed vacation like all other high income countries. Much of it boiled down to history and politics, but one point that stuck out to me is that unions actually at one point opposed guaranteed vacation days, because if the government has laws for worker rights and leave, it reduces the demand for unions.
I don’t know how much of a factor it is today, but for reference, I have a highly sought set of skills and experience in the US, and I get 35 paid holiday days per year, virtually unlimited sick leave, a two for one 401k match, comprehensive medical and dental, continuing education stipend, etc. Not guaranteed by law, but provided as work incentives.
I wonder if much of the middle class here didn’t have such things, how many more laws or unions we would have to get them.
So mathematically that serves as a pay cap, because once you get to 100x you are taxed 100%. Some countries do have compensation caps for CEOs that are a multiple of the lowest paid employee, and I tend to like the model because it incentives increasing pay of employees who aren’t generally considered competitive or in high demand, and those are the folks that need market intervention most.
In this exact formula, I suspect it would underwhelm. Someone who earned the federal minimum wage, $7.25/hour working full time would get a paltry $15,080 per year. Someone making $250k/year would only pay 16% income tax, a meet decrease. Now, maybe it is good to shift the cost burden more to the ultra wealthy giving relief to even those making good money. But that would require some data crunching to see where the breakpoint is.
I think the idea that taxing the rich is difficult or our tax code is too complicated feeds into the narrative around the problem being too hard to solve. I think the reality is more straightforward:
Bring back the previous top tax bracket of 39% that Republicans did away with. That will bring in a significant revenue.
Raise or add the top brackets on the capital gains taxes.
Add a new top tax bracket of you want to raise more revenue, e.g. 46% above X millions.
When you look at reports by the congressional budget office or independent budget groups, most of the other proposals are noise in the grand scheme of things. Even the buy, borrow, die strategy that gets a lot of airtime (because it rightfully violates most people’s sense of fair play) only really accounts for something like 2% of the funds used by the ultra wealthy.
Most of the things like wealth taxes would require more complex legislation and be treated by the courts, certainly going to the supreme court. But the above three bullets would meaningfully raise revenues, are simple in terms of legislation, and have clear statutory authority and case law on their side.
The only thing hard is electing enough people who actually care about the budget and the people.
I worked in enterprise IT for years, including running mail servers, and ran my own personal servers for my home domains for years. The best feeling ever was outsourcing that responsibility. If you want to do it for fun or learning with a test domain, I’d say go for it. If you want to do this for email that might matter, I would not do that. For an illustration on why, research email delivery and email reputation topics. It’s not that everything is too complex, but you can easily have something to wing without ever knowing and you just lose email.
If you want a good middle lane, I moved my personal domains to mxroute after buying a lifetime plan. I also know and have tested failing over to a second provider if needed. This let’s you make as many accounts and aliases as you want, without dealing with all the delivery issues personally.
Dead Man’s Fingers
Lots of people have lied, but one situation stood out.
Years and years ago I trained in MMA with two guys who were brothers from Europe and we competrd in martial arts tournaments around the country. This was before MMA really took off, so think lots of gyms with competition mats hosted by regional kyukushin and other styles of karate dojos. We grew pretty close, training, competing, traveling.
One day get a call from one of them from jail. With no accent like they had always had. They had abducted a 17 year old highschool kid and murdered him execution style in the middle of nowhere after being paid by a drug dealer the kid owed weed money to. And they had priors for abuse against minors.
Never had a perception of a person do such a complete 180 so fast. Literally makes your head spin. Never really trusted strangers until I did independent verification of their backgrounds after that. They completely lived a lie to a whole crowd of us while training and competing. Just crazy to think about.
Most lawyers never litigate or actively engage in matters before a court. There are whole armies of lawyers who do contract law, agreement reviews, general counsel in organizations, tech transfer specialists, etc. These folks advise clients and help manage risk and would never be in a position to need to lie in most cases. Their job is to advise business decision makers, and you don’t need to agree with the decisions made to advise on the risk landscape.
Even outside of that, there is a lot of ambiguity and conflict in large amounts of our statutes and promulgated policy, such that two lawyers can disagree about the application of law and neither one is lying.
The kind of lying that is objectively lying, like suppressing or mischaracterizing facts, are also breaches of their ethical code of conduct and would put them at risk of professional repercussions from the courts or the BAR.
So while there are bad apples like in any profession, most lawyers don’t lie more than anyone else, and probably less given they have incentives to be transparent in their role.
What a bitch…
I’ll see myself out.