My understanding about the US Steel/Nippon Steel thing in particular is that there's some emotional resistance to having foreign ownership but that the big sticking point has been that union doesn't believe Nippon's claims about guaranteeing employment for its members. (Nippon offered a binding commitment to no layoffs through 2026, but the initial approach to US Steel didn't involve outreach to the union--Nippon says that was at US Steel's request--and that seems to have really poisoned the relationship, on top of whatever xenophobia is out there.)

I mean, I have food with expiration dates in 2026.

Maybe they'll get confused by the U.S. Steel Tower having "UPMC" on the side and accidentally buy UPMC.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot as more and more things get automated amend more and more of the automation improvements go to capital/ownership class. I think the goal should be a 4-day workweek (staggered) with not everybody off on the same day with no reduction in pay.

At some point almost all of us could have our jobs automated and retraining won't solve it. Redistributing the fruits of productivity increases should be the goal.

In my view, the deal we make with industry to get everyone on. 4-day work week is to sever the tie between employment and healthcare, through something like Medicare for All. If you want to keep it private, then do some kind of voucher "here are 5 plans: pick one". But don't require individuals to write checks themselves. Too many people aren't that organized or would de-prioritize it.

Couple that with universal childcare.

I mean, none of this is feasible now, but unions brought us the 5-day workweek. It used to be 6.

I don't have an educated sense of the specific automation issues here, but in generally I do think that's it's not practical to resist automation, as opposed to managing the transition to automation.

Re: US Steel

I saw Joseph Stieglitz on Democracy Now talking about the judicious use of tariffs to ensure some domestic manufacturing. If you don't have any, everything will be sent abroad and then when you have a major disruption -another pandemic, war or other political instability, a natural disaster etc., your supply chain just seizes up. Since we need steel for defense production, there may be a atrategic interest in keeping it insourced/domestically owned.

I got an e-mail yesterday that there is a major shortage of IV fluid bags. The major manufacturer, Baxter, is based out of North Carolina. I think we néed some resilience in the supply chain. The market will just go back to just-in-time delivery etc., because that's more profitable. But if there's a hiccup, society is in trouble.

My understanding is that the Longshoremen's hardline anti-automation stance in this strike is an initial negotiating position and they expect to compromise on it. I haven't been following it super closely though. I have noticed a significant irony in that a lot of online centrists are railing against the Longshoremen while Joe Biden is conspicuously refusing to intervene and putting out statements generally supportive of their position.

. If we had a strong social safety net and job-retraining program, would it be a bad idea to fight against automation?

Not at all; to take one obvious route, if automation is going to cost 10% of longshoremen their jobs (as is apparently the case) you just don't replace the ones who leave until you're down to 90% of workforce, and you retrain as necessary to fill the gaps.

We had a similar situation to US Steel here; British Steel got sold to Tata. It was a minor story for a bit. On the defence side, mind, the government did intervene to save Sheffield Forgemasters by nationalising it in 2021, because it was IIRC the only place that could make nuclear submarine parts and artillery gun barrels, and (as became really clear the following year) we can't risk buying that sort of stuff from the US because you're not reliable allies any more.

Dockworkers' union suspend strike until Jan. 15 to allow time to negotiate new contract

Both sides also reached agreement on wages, but no details were given, according to a joint statement from the ports and union Thursday night

More Perfect Union reports: "The union and shippers have reached an agreement that includes a 61.5% wage increase over 6 years. Final details will be negotiated in the coming months."

More Perfect Union

I would like to get more of my news from sources with puns as a title.

10.last: Yeah. We're having issues.

I don't know the details of the dockworkers' automation concerns, but I've been following related stories pretty closely for about 18 months. Perhaps not surprisingly, automation is increasingly prevalent across many industries, and the pros and cons of its implementation are HEAVILY affected by:

1) Worker power relative to owners (or stockholders)
2) Historic degree of exploitation in the industry (meatpacking, food service...)

I don't have solid research to back this part up, but I strongly suspect that it would show these factors too:

3) Degree to which automation is sold as a "black box" to workers/managers vs. something they can understand and critique
4) Degree to which automation products are being developed by people who have even a modest background in the relevant industry, vs. those that are entirely outside vendors with no subject-matter expertise
5) Degree to which company protocols/processes are centralized and standardized vs. not.

Shorter me: Whatever power differential issues exist in your job today, automation will magnify them.

I'm going to figure out how to fuck over various software companies if they don't make it easier for me to not use AI.

14.4: Dock automation is mature tech. World leaders are the Dutch (though maybe the PRC has caught up by now).

I'm going to figure out how to fuck over various software companies if they don't make it easier for me to not use AI.

For real. Google search results are deteriorating so rapidly right now, although AI is only part of it.

For the first time EVER, tonight I got a pop-up when I did a Google search, asking me to rate the quality of my search experience. Sadly, it was a search for sports scores, and there was no question about AI results.

Acrobat is the worst for me. I'm reading manuals and codebooks.

Adobe is absolutely the worst. Almost unusable for basic functions like Ctrl+F.

So far I can ignore AI garbage pretty easily in Microsoft products, thankfully.

Why does Adobe feel the need to create their own file browser interface when you open or save files? Every other goddamn app in the world uses the Windows default, but no they have to have a different interface with buttons in different places.

17. Punjabi Kabbadi ? There was some kind of cup championship yesterday

17: Is duck duck go acceptable? I don't like bing. I wish we had Excite or something.

I must admit I am entertained by the comically old school criminality of the dock workers union head (has own yacht, acquitted on racketeering charges after a fellow defendant vanished - later found decomposing in the back of a car )

22: It's covering an entirely different set of stuff (essentially prioritizing/only indexing non-commercial sites) but https://www.marginalia.nu is really great as a niche search engine.

This podcast series from some years ago on LA/Long Beach was interesting.

8: also possibly useful, anti-trust redesigned to be anti-producer-monopoly even if it makes consumer prices lower. (Paul Krugman thinks centralization is part of what's making the US housing market so terrible -- there are now very few cities with significant company headquarters. I think centralization unto the roll-up is making US production terrible.)

22: I set it as my home browser's default search engine. It works almost as well, though there are big holes where I've trained myself to hop from search to maps (say, for restaurants near somewhere) and the maps they use aren't intuitive to me. (And their directions don't have a bicycling option for direction, which I admit is a niche complaint.)

So it works, just with some pain points that google's integration solved.

26: We lost Gillette and financial services has really shrunk. We now have a bunch of biotech, but those companies aren't as philanthropic.