You’re nitpicking the headline while agreeing with the article.

“What is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, and that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.”

May well have been caused by the health care system: Obesity: A New Adverse Effect of Antibiotics?

Good move. It’s ridiculous (but entirely inevitable under capitalism) that labour rights aren’t on the school curriculum already. Let’s hope this sticks, and spreads.

Unions could do a lot of good providing syllabus and material support for schools to do this. And it would repay them many times over. The sorts of jobs young people do are typically hard to unionise, because of low wages and transience. Get them young, get them forever.

Peter Higgs: I wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system

Still, weird how the guy got funding and a chair while she got no funding, a demotion and forced early retirement. Funny* how that happens.

*not funny at all

You really haven’t been paying attention, eh?

They didn’t retire, they were forced to quit work. They’re not getting a pension and they’re not eligible for sickness benefits.

But you go ahead and fall for the fantasy that it’s going to affect the rich people you don’t like. That’s exactly why they’re flying this kite. Mug.

They didn’t take early retirement.

But research also revealed that a substantial number of those who gave up work during the pandemic were hard-up as a result, with reduced expenditure on food and lower wellbeing. Meanwhile, one survey found that a fifth of economically inactive 50- to 64-year-olds were waiting for NHS treatment – evidence of the social and economic damage caused by the vast waiting list for treatment. As well as queues for operations such as hip replacements, economic inactivity is linked to the rising toll of chronic mental and physical illness.

You know fine well who will be prodded back to work and who will carry on enjoying their well-funded retirements. Or at least, you should if you had a) read the article and b) been paying any attention at all to how the world works and why kites like this are flown.

You didn’t read the article then. Cool, cool.

They’re not getting hoisted by anyone’s petard. It’s not the people who can afford a comfortable retirement the liberals* have in their sights here.

• for any confused USians, that word does not mean what you (probably) think it means

t’s also possible that their transaction fees are slightly higher for fully-digital goods (the emailed code) vs physical (the actual gift card through the mail).

How on earth is that possible? If an email cost more than printing a certificate and paying postage, there would be a lot less email flying around.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to get less email. But it is not true.

Your edit approaches a reasonably interesting question but why on earth would you frame it in such a ridiculous way?

Labour is exploited the world over. And certain forms of labour are exploited more than others. I can’t find it but a few years back a hedge fund billionaire explained that nurses care about people so they don’t need to be paid well because their rewards lie elsewhere. But for psychopaths* like him, money is the only thing that matters so they need all the money.

*I may be paraphrasing a little

This is a part of the machinery of capitalism, as was (and is) slavery. But there’s no simple binary divide between exploited/not exploited. There are very well paid people who are being exploited (like the Twitter engineers who are trapped by their work visas) but there is a difference of degree, if not kind, between their situation and, say, people on domestic work visas, people trapped in the various forms of modern slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade. It is not always wholly unreasonable to draw parallels between the mechanisms of these different forms of exploitation but, if you wish to do so, you need to be very, very clear that you are not equating them.

In this case, the question is a complete non-starter.

What would have been much more interesting is a discussion of the risks of handing over your work to those in a position to exploit it without a fair return. Doing it for free applies to Redditors and Tweeterers much more than it does to open source developers, who typically make a good living out of their work (or are building a portfolio in order to try to make a good living out of it).

They are in a similar position to the SAG-AFTRA strikers, who do get paid (badly, on the whole) for their work but are now in a position where the studios can steal their words, their images and their voices to produce infinite derivative content without paying those who created the source material.

I don’t think it will happen to FOSS any time soon, if ever, because the high tech magic 8-ball can only regurgitate content that already exists, rearranged in superficially logical ways that it does not understand. It has the potential to be a labour-saving device, for sure. And that will mean higher output (and lower earnings per unit output) for human coders. But it will also mean that more ambitious projects become feasible (affordable) so the effect on total employment and total earnings is unpredictable. Unlike many of the SAG-AFTRA strikers, those high-level “make the magic 8-ball code functional” workers will still be needed. They’ll just be churning out more code than before (assuming it is quicker to correct the bad auto-generated code than start from scratch), not dissimilar to the way journalism has changed in the age of the internet.

It’s a concern. But it’s going to be very difficult to have a sensible conversation about it on a thread that started out this badly.