Every business’s biggest expense is labor. Skilled labor costs more. The people in charge like it when you save money.

I think it’s wrong. But only because the interests of the people who own the machines and businesses diverge from the worker’s interests. I’d like to see more worker cooperatives. If the workers own the machines, then it’s good when things are automated.

I also don’t believe anything will ever be truly automated, or that it’s a good idea to try.

All that to say we don’t have to resort to an explanation of “managers must hate engineers” to understand why they would want to eliminate positions.

I don’t think it’s just managers saying hey we could automate such and such a thing away. It’s human nature to think “how could I improve this” which almost immediately leads to “if I get this right it could mean no work at all”

This is one reason I’m especially interested in worker cooperatives.

You’re right, people spend 8+ hours a day at work, strengthening business owners, who are essentially working against them. Then some small fraction of people have/take the time to learn about issues affecting them and volunteer a couple hours a week for their chosen cause.

Even those in a union are negotiating from the standpoint of “the company owns the equipment/processes/customers and we own our labor”.

What if instead the workers also own the business? Now you’re spending eight hours (or less) a day working on something that directly benefits you, and with which you’re intimately familiar. It’s possible to make democratic decisions because it’s not some abstract issue or far away politician. And every successful worker cooperative reduces the money going to some micro-king, and in turn reduces the distorting effect of corporate money on our electoral system.

Looks cool, thanks for sharing.

It’s big for sales people too - I research who is the right person to contact at an organization, and also to find out what they’ve been up to lately that might be useful in a sales pitch.

Well you know, “quantity has a quality all its own”

I just use it for snippets - “here’s my function, how would I go about changing x?” Or, “here’s my block of code, I’m getting this error, what am I missing?” (I know, I’m fine to share my code but not company code)

Same, would love to switch completely to an OSM based app. But my main use case currently is for hiking, the trails are usually better, and for situations where I have poor cell reception.

How is metro defined here?

Mostly unrelated but I had a client who balked at our price to make changes to their conference website (a week before the event). They suggested their high school son could be given administrative access and make the updates.

It’s also good to think of other differentiators because pretty much every business offers financial incentives to win an initial contract if it means recurring revenue.