Maybe, but from simple game theory perspective assuming one assumes this is the end product, union gives at least a chance at favorable outcome.

The middle part is most likely that many will die. (This is not an endorsement!)

> I'm very pro-union but I feel like at this point attempting to organize will just speed up the process of replacing as many people as possible with machines, not slow it down. It's too little, too late.

Honestly, I think the only shot workers have is unionization plus really aggressive political action.

The problem is successful action will require setting aside pretty much all the culture war issues that are used to divide the working class, and I don't really see that happening. If anything culture-war polarization is getting worse. It will also require some formally-privileged groups like software engineers to jettison their self-deceptive libertarian delusions, and properly understand their true role in society (software engineers should have unionized pre-2022 when we had more economic power, but economic comfort and those delusions prevented it).

No one is giving them a 20T valuation. That's an order of magnitude larger than the market is currently targeting

But but but... organizing.. be it in form of democractic/market processes (non-violent or otherwise) can act as a speed breaker.

> I'm very pro-union BUT

You are 'pro' an abstract, unrealized union, which is not 'pro union' at all.

You have abdicated your obligation to align your actions with your stated beliefs.

Do not give up before trying. Do not believe the hype that your labour power doesn't matter. Even Amazon couldn't stop their most exploited workers from unionizing, is your company bigger that that? Is your position weaker than theirs?

Worse that can happen is that you started talking with your fellow workers and they aren't interested.

Just because SV is run by several millenarian cults doesn't mean you should take their delusions about neo slavery and feudalism (Thiel/Yarvin; your doomerism stems from here) or apotheosis (anthropic, EA) as inevitable. You should assume they believe their own hype, but not assume they understand material reality outside their insular social bubbles.

Thiel's last 3 or 4? attempts at building his techo-utopia collapsed before even starting; They have no motion outside of what they can purchase.

Sure but proper weekends are much much more recent.

But far away enough that we need to look at this again and get more time back to the workers.

Did religious edict also eliminate child labor, give us more humane working hours, and establish labor laws? Or was that because of unions?

and politics. The last wave of worker bargaining wins happened in the wake of the Great Depression when the last of the capitalist prosperity gospel promises were defaulted upon and the electorate finally became willing to consider alternatives other than giving rich people everything they wanted all of the time and hoping it would trickle down.

I'm hoping we don't need another Great Depression this time, a collapsing economy brought about by mistaken belief by those on top that they should have the right to keep it all... but that might be exactly what we need. We'll see.

I started asking for specific example/answers each time a conversation stopped before of the end of the task. I got the sense that frequent checkpointing is baked into Opus 5.5. I then added some language that amounts to “carry this through to completion only stopping if you’re truly blocked” and it really helped lengthen the loop

Details are not on the side of yours. Care to elaborate and contribute at least something to the conversation?

> Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.

That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.

They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.

It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.

Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.

Unions also require the right structural conditions.

For example waste management generally has very strong unions in the developed world because 1) capital intensity 2) operations immediately seize on labour withdrawal 3) consequences of strikes are in a golden zone of painful but not existential so are tolerated 4) extract a relatively small proportion of local gov funds, so don’t create that much powerful opposition 5) labour force is locally concentrated and highly socialised.

Those pillars of power don’t rely much on any particular legal or political system.

If you're not getting a part of that "achieve more" profit, why should you care? Because I don't see the profit being shared with the workers, at all.