> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
morkalork · 2h ago
I've seen this referred to as a treadmill before. They get the farmers on a treadmill (loans for co-ops, equipment inputs) and once they're waking, they don't let them stop.
The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
nemomarx · 2h ago
This is monopsony, right? Effectively?
GuB-42 · 1h ago
Yes, for some reason the term "monopsony" is little known, so much that the autocorrect tried to turn it into "monopoly". Maybe for not having a famous board game named after it.
But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
droopyEyelids · 31m ago
Unfortunately, unionization is not “coming back with a vengeance” in the United States and it is not allowed to by our laws.
Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts.
On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
fc417fc802 · 10m ago
> Our laws ban ... secondary boycotts
I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me.
Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
motoboi · 2h ago
You lost me at “… such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.”
The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing chess in the level of alpha zero.
margalabargala · 2h ago
You'd better start laughing, because humans plus computers beat computers, albeit with a very high draw rate, when large amounts of time are allowed.
I think the autor reference is from a chess master bing helped by an IA.
> (…) that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
QuadmasterXLII · 1h ago
stockfish + human beats stockfish OR there are no new commits to stockfish that increase its ELO OR all new commits to stockfish are coded by AI.
> In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
> Farmers are “independent small businesspeople” who nominally run their own operations, but because all their products must be sold through a single poultry processor, that processor is able to exercise enormous control over the operation. The processor tells the farmer which birds to raise, as well as what the birds are to be fed, how much, and on what schedule. The processor tells the farmer how to build their coops and when the lights are to go on and off. The processor tells the farmer which vets to use, and tells the vets which medicines to prescribe.
> The processor tells the farmer everything…except how much they’ll be able to sell their birds for. That is determined unilaterally when the farmer brings their birds to market, and the payout is titrated to the cent, to represent exactly enough money for the farmer to buy birds and feed and vet services through the processor’s preferred suppliers, and to service the debts on the coops and light and land, but not one penny more.
This amount of scumminess is mind boggling.
The craziest thing is this is well known trick, historically. In the 1800s there was a company run by a man that was both wholesale buyer of fish from fishermen and also supplied the mortgages for fishing boats. He was the only one for both in many small fishing communities and was universally hated for it.
But here it looks even worse as workers have to invest into equipment from the company that is of little use besides working for that company, making it borderline slavery.
Our laws ban: sector unionization, sympathy and general strikes, and secondary boycotts.
On top of that, we have a very narrow definition of employee, an employers can permanently replace striking workers. The right to strike can even be taken away with a mandated cooling off period.
Even having one of those factors can hamstring unionization in a country, so they’re pretty much never going to “come back with a vengance” here
I never understood this. How can boycotts be banned? Seems inherently unconstitutional to me.
Not that it really matters to me in the sense that it's definitely an area where I'd do as I pleased regardless of the law. But I've always found the headlines that I see from time to time odd.
The ideia that a chess IA needs a human to be able to win is laughable. No human being even close to be capable of playing chess in the level of alpha zero.
https://new.uschess.org/edwards-32nd-ICCF-ch
> (…) that’s not the kind of centaur that we talk about when it’s a chess master paired with a chess program. That chess master is being augmented by the machine, and the machine is the junior partner in the relationship. The human is the head, and the AI is the body.
currently we are in option 1