@dangillmor @pluralistic

Awesome assessment on the current state of the tech business world - a highly recommended read.

"[...] if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized."

Unions were a foundational building block of today's society. When workers stand together, the union has a constitution, with an executive board, chief stewards and shop stewards looking out for the best interests of the workers they represent. When contracts are negotiated, they define compensation and all the terms of the relationship with management - for ALL members.

The sad part is, that membership has been falling, dramatically.

"Fifty years ago [1964], nearly a third of U.S. workers belonged to a union. Today [2015], it's one in 10. But the decline has not been the same for every state."

As quoted from:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map

A classic line sung by the Brotherhood of Man in 1969:
"United we stand, divided we fall".

Sly's 1978 movie F.I.S.T. is a great depiction about the early days of unions and why they were / are so important:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0077531

@akareilly

Anyone who extols the idea that 'proper training' prevents people from making mistakes, ever, should be immediately fired, preferably in a ballistic manner.

Human beings have this natural tendency to screw up! Sometimes we do so cataclysmically! And one of the benefits of diversity and inclusion is that when one person screws up, we don't just mill about in a homogeneous herd, someone has the ability to recognize the fault and the skills to fix it.

Meanwhile, Boeing execs who can't see past 'Money == Good' are making unilateral decisions and getting people killed through their blinkered incompetence.

The problem with Boeing is that a bunch of bean counting assholes from McDonnell Douglas were allowed to take over a company run by engineers.
McDonnell Douglas planes were on my "oh hell no, rebook my flight" list for years. Now there's a Boeing plane on that list.
People who paid attention to the lessons learned from Challenger and other aerospace engineering disasters were pushed out by the same MBA-toting football bats who enshittify everything they touch.

Diversity in STEM is good.