Hyperindividualism is a mental health disorder that needs to be studied.

I say this because any time you bring up the idea of collective action, collective bargaining or, well, collective anything, you'll get a bunch of comments from Ameribrains who say "I don't want my salary dragged down by other people" or "I can negotiate my own salary" even though there is a *massive power imbalance.

If the company doesn't employ you or has to pay even 10% more it doesn't really matter either way for 99% of people. You are replaceable. Even if you think you aren't, you are.

But if you don't have a job in the US, that's your house, school for your children, food, health insurance and your car. All of those things depend on you having that job.

For you this is literally life or death. For the company not only is it not, but they have every resource in the book. They can pit you against other candidates. They can suppress your wages with layoffs or even just the threat of layoffs. They're going to do things like this to algorithmically lower your salary.

And you think you can compete with that? You can't. You may think you can but you can't. They're using the hybris of the human psyche against you. Everybody thinks they're above average. Everybody thinks they can text and drive. At least 95% of people can't.

In a weird way this is kind of the same thing as dynamic pricing. Dyanamic pricing is using algorithms to see how much you'll pay. Well I guess this is the other side of the coin: let's see how little you'll take. The goal of all these systems, and probably the true "value" of AI, is to suppress your real wages.

100% agree and this will be impossible to explain to the largely “ameribrained” crowd on HN, we are facing pathological capitalism. It’s consolidated, it’s expensive, it’s immoral. We need to stop this temporarlily embarassed billionare crap and band together to beat these companies back down to a competitive, costumer serving, world enhancing not destroying size.

Is it so bad if different countries can have different values?

Well said. Disregard the Philistines. Clearly not worth the effort to reach anyway. Greatly appreciated the insight. Even the Ameribrain comment was actually warranted. Since the 70's, there's been a concerted effort by employers to do everything possible to discredit Unionization in the United States, in spite of the fact that during it's heyday, unionization was responsible for netting workers a much greater share of the pie than has been the case post '71. If people would group up, they'd find themselves in a far less disadvantaged position at the negotiating table.

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