i just picked up an edition of “The Evolution of Cooperation” that has a foreword by richard dawkins. was cool to see his take, from writing the selfish gene, on axelrod’s contributions to the study of cooperation. by any chance, did your edition of his book mention those cooperation studies? dawkins said he updated a later edition in this foreward i just read
yes and no, i’d call the distinction collective ownership. you can sell your shares (by quitting), or you can stay and participate democratically. but you can’t do both, and that protects your say in the company, preventing investors from overruling worker-owners.
> i have no influence
neither do the current workers. the issue isn’t retail investors, but the ones with board seats. if boards only had one seat for an investor, that’d be one thing, but usually workers only get a single seat, if any.
> protect current workers’ democratic governance
you could do this with preferred shares, voting shares, etc. investor shares are non voting, voting shares can only be owned by workers, etc. you still have to counter their concentration though.
Any organization that arranges for its workers to govern it has some organizing document that describes this structure. Any organization that arranges for its workers to become owners must pick mechanism for this to happen. My view is that these can be basically independent choices:
- A firm can pursue a profit-sharing-for-current-workers approach as described for Mondragon, or can issue RSUs or options ("real" and transferable ownership)
- And regardless of what "ownership" vehicle they pick, they can still be organized to be democratically governed by its workers (establishment of which need not be dependent on any stipulated "ownership"). I.e. your organizing docs can describe a board composed of current employees, elected by employees, etc.
I am skeptical of the claim that profit-sharing while you're an employee is "ownership" in part because you are incentivized to prefer that the firm take profits while you work there. By comparison, if as a worker your vested stake persists even after you leave or retire, you might be much more inclined to vote for large reinvestments this year (and for the next several) which may not yield a profit until after you've left. Temporary "ownership" may not encourage the same long-term view as ordinary literal ownership.
Cooperatives guarantee that only people working in the company benefit from the profit of their own work. If one can stop working and still take a share from the profits, everyone else would have to not just work for themselves and lose part of their profit to an increasing amount of people, who are not taking part in creating that profit. Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.
I think you may be too committed to dogmatic stances to constructively discuss other possibilities. I think this is no better when it's from the collectivist side than when it's from the capitalist fundamentalists.
> Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.
I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately. Workers can create value which only shows up in contributions to revenue much later. If you and your coworkers figured out the design and manufacturing process for a new product and the product only goes to market after you retired, you helped create the profits even if they arrive after you left the firm.
If the coop structure as you narrowly define it doesn't allow workers to receive the profits of their labor in industries that have a long time to market or R&D cycle, then isn't that a recipe for those high value industries to be inaccessible to coops?
Try to imagine an alternate history where Nvidia was a coop. A lot of the value behind its current high revenue was done many years ago. Cuda was released in 2007. I don't know how much of the hardware has inherited from older designs. If only current workers benefit from the current high sales, has the organization really ensured that "profit is owned by the people who create it"? That seems implausible.
> I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately.
And as the worker creating that future profit you are very well aware of that, plus everyone else working on the design and manufacturing is in the same situation as yourself. The good news is: all of you are also owners of the company. So together you can decide how an exit package should look like for people deciding to leave before the design reaches the market and generates profit.
The same situation in a non-cooperative is a lot worse, because you have no stake in the company. The owner might be willing to negotiate an exit package before you even start working there, but they also might not. Plus before working at the company, you have no idea what the profit margins look like and what you might be working on. It’s the worst time for you to agree on an exit pacakge. Also during employment you are in a worse position, because the owner(s) can just let you go, if you are the only one asking for your fair share of future profits. You don’t have a say in the company. Most often they see your current salary as your share of the profit, no matter how much profit your design might create in the future.
I understood from the article that workers remain working for the coop (possibly in different companies) until they retire, and then, the coop provides them with pensions; so they continue to receive value after retirement.
What if they pass away? I assume their shares are sold immediately and the money paid out to their estate.
Now suppose that all the work they did was in the R&D phase (and fundamental to the project) but the final product had not been released at the time of death of the contributor — so the profits had not been realized — thus the payout on those shares would be a small fraction of their true valuation.
Imagine if a novelist died just after submitting their final draft to their editor but prior to the book’s publication. Forcing the estate to sell off the book before it had a chance to hit the shelves — and become a bestseller — would be an outrage, yet the rigid nature of worker co-ops (cessation of work forces the sale of shares) guarantees this.
Where’s the cooperative in your example? Either you are a freelance author who has a contract with a publishing cooperative. In this case you have a contract with that cooperative and during the negotation process both sides decide together what happens in case of death before publication. Or you are an author inside a publishing cooperative, so you own part of that cooperative and decide together with the other authors, publishers etc. what will happen, if somebody dies before the publication of their book. In both cases the author is part of the decision of what should happen in case of an early death.
The example way above was NVIDIA. Suppose the person who passed away was one of the founding researchers at the NVIDIA worker coop. They developed most of the key technologies that go into a graphics card, but they died during the later stages of production ramp up, before the first GPUs are able to hit the market.
The issue is that the deceased researcher's contribution to the project may be so central and foundational that they may be entitled to a large plurality (or even majority) stake, but forcing the other worker-owners to buy out that stake to pay the estate would bankrupt the coop at this critical pre-production stage. Since only active workers are allowed to maintain ownership, allowing the estate to retain those shares and later receive dividends on future profits is off the table. This issue seems to tie everyone's hands and sound the death knell for the coop.
The novelist case was meant to show an extreme non-coop situation. I don't see any compelling reason for writers of books to join coops, since the writing of the book is the only hard part these days (and countless ways to self-publish exist).
I recommend reading more about existing cooperatives. They offer way better packages to their employees than manager-owned companies. This can also include life insurances, health insurances, child care etc. And since everyone working and owning a company, where the profits might come in at a later stage, you can be sure, that these people working towards that goal, will make sure that they have the security they require. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their job and their company. They have everything required to set up the necessary legal work.
The case with the novelist is also easy to answer. Publishers do more than just printing books. They also do marketing, host events, send authors to interviews etc. All of that work becomes smaller if you share it with others. Plus being new to the industry, you can get the help from experienced writers. Cooperating with other people has loads of advantages. I could go on for hours. Also nobody is forced to join cooperatives. Every novelist can decide to remain a freelancer. It’s basically a cooperative with a single worker. A lot of cooperatives are founded by groups of freelancers by the way, because already having a business mindset, having experienced the freedom of owning your own business and wanting to stay in control when collaborating with others, makes cooperatives the obvious choice.
You are always more free, have more options and are treated better when you own the result of your work.
the problem with comparing these things by their ticket prices is that markets don’t consider externalities. making and fueling a plane might allow me to sell tickets cheaper than a train, but only if we ignore the cost of the carbon output (since neither the flyer nor the airline pay for this, but society at large does)
i wonder how this comparison would shake out if you included a carbon tax that effectively measured the cost of these trips on the globe.
A SF -> NY round trip direct flight costs $362 and emits 554kg co2e according to google flights. The price of carbon by various emissions trading systems vary from less than $10 to almost $100 per tonne[1]. Of course, you could argue that such systems aren't fully capturing the cost of carbon, and therefore using prices for those systems would be an underestimate. Direct air capture literally extracts carbon from the air to sequester underground, which provides an upper bound on the cost of carbon. Climeworks says it only costs around $600/tonne today[2], with them and various startups claiming they can get it down to $100-$200 in the future. Taking all those numbers into account, here's how much airline fares would increase if carbon cost is factored in:
cheap ETS ($10): 1.5%
expensive ETS ($100): 15%
future DAC ($200): 31%
current DAC: ($600): 92%
Of course this doesn't factor in the cost of the electricity used to power the trains, which would at least partially be from carbon emitting sources. Given that, and the fact that building high speed rail is fraught with uncertainty and cost overruns, the highest fare increase you could plausibly argue for is the "future DAC" figure. This may be enough to advocate for banning air travel for short to medium length journeys, but I doubt long haul flights are going anywhere.
That’s short-sighted because it misses the fact that inventors are often not product people. There’s a big difference between creating something new and bringing it to market.
The big benefit of a functioning patent system is it allows people to make money just inventing things.
This group seems to have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” mentality when it comes to patents simply because of patent trolls, when the obvious solution is to just fix patent approval/litigation.
> "Enshittification" describes the process by which something becomes degraded or corrupted.
I feel like many get this wrong, it’s not just “when things get worse”, the term was coined specifically around the phenomenon of investor-owned companies putting profit ahead of user values, leading to a degradation of service, combined with platform stickiness keeping users locked in.
That isn’t what’s happening here, if anything selling open source code without contributing back more closely aligns with enshittification, which is what these licenses prevent.
This is really a conversation around positive vs negative freedom. Is your freedom to profit off my code greater than my freedom to benefit from your modifications of my code?
this is what i’m thinking. HTTP itself only overtook Gopher when it was released into the public domain, to compete with Gopher’s proprietary licensing.
I was about to call that the Rundfunkbeitrag is not legally a tax (Steuer), but a tax (Beitrag). For some reason that difference does not seem to exist in English and it translates to the same word??
It doesn't matter if it's masquerading as a license fee, it's by all means a tax - it's required by law and you go to jail if you do not pay it and you have to pay it even if you don't want to consume their content.
In France we used to have the "Redevance audiovisuelle" which just like in German didn't use the same word. It was removed in 2022 but according to Wikipedia[1], this is what Germany is using. The french version has a European maps with the different sources of financement used in European TV broadcasting services.
Beitrag Wikipédia pages are available in other languages, namely Swedish and Esperanto. The meaning doesn't exactly match German's.
A specific "tax" just for TV/radio exists in many European countries, definitely not just Germany. And in general, there are many tax-like things out there where it's mandatory to pay them in specific circumstances and they go to a specific use.
I'd translate "Beitrag" literally to "contribution", maybe add a "mandatory" as qualifier.
The key difference is that taxes are completely under discretion of parliamentary control, whereas the Rundfunkbeitrag is under discretion of the individual broadcast authority governance boards (which are too closely tied to politicians for my comfort, but that's another thing).
Licence/License. (maybe like the BBC licence fee?)
Levy. (see below)
There is also the concept of the hypothicated tax. The only exemplar I know is the Australian Medicare levy, the money is solely to be used, and spent on Medicare, and no other purpose enshrined in law. People often claim petrol tax was designed to pay for roads infrastructure but it wasn't legally bound, and is not a hypothicated tax. Nor is the ULEZ and like costs to drive in the inner city with a petrol engine. They are designed to discourage use of ICE not to pay for them.
It doesn't exist because the distinction is meaningless. The government forcing you to pay money to a government (adjacent) institution is a tax for all practical purposes.
A Beitrag is bound to a well defined objective which means it is determined what the money will be used for at the moment it is collected whereas a Steuer contributes to the household as such.
Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
> Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
Of the countries I lived in, the quality of the broadcasting and reporting in Germany has been the better one so far.
And when you see the flow of vomit produced by most of the private television in the countries around, you realise that the compromise is not perfect, but it's nonetheless miles ahead of most other options.
You also quickly realise that most private channels are owned by powerful players pushing their own agenda, which can bring even more bias and one-sidedness.
Equivalent might be a bond paid by tax payers. The money collected is used only for a specific purpose, but you cannot avoid paying it. For me, a tax goes into a general fund that is budgeted for common use while a special purpose bond (or a tax) is money collected for a singular purpose and accounted as such.
The difference between Steuer and Beitrag is an artificial distinction that the German government has made in their laws. It has not much to do with the language itself. It's just that because German language is not used much outside Germany, official government terms and language basically get conflated.
If I’m understanding the concept correctly, in the USA we describe that kind of tax as “earmarked” which is a reference to folding the corner of a page in a book to mark your place.
> "Earmark" comes from the livestock term, where the ears of domestic animals were cut in specific ways so that farmers could distinguish their stock from others grazing on public land.
I think contribution is a much higher level word that is way too abstract to be useful in this context.
When I think of "Contributions" I think of a voluntary transfer of money, whether from an individual to an organization or from an individual to themselves (like "contributions" to an IRA or 401k for example). But a contribution could even be sharing ideas with a group of friends (contributing to the conversation) or anything really.
The key difference is that the government never touches the money anywhere between citizen and broadcaster, to avoid unwarranted influence. I assume that people who know the British term know that, as the German one is surely modeled after the BBC. I'm writing for other readers.
The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee.
(personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)
This often a complicated case regarding competition law. In our neoliberal world giving away something for free that was subsidized is often seen as destroying market. The national CIO of Germany at one time recommended public bodies to us copyleft (also the EC opted for EPL) , rather than putting it into public domain. I also like this idea. However, this is fundamentaly different from the US. The German weather service even had to shutdown some functions in their free app due to a court order.
As a loophole, they ended up making the app paid as not constitute disloyal competition, which, depending on the angle makes sense: you have a competitor that you can actually never compete because regardless of what they do, their funding never runs out. It’s not a fair battle. On the other hand tho, wetter online were crying like little kids about an app that was doing what a government was supposed to do.
I would rather have a model where anyone can contribute and can see the code, if they want to, than a model, where there is "competition" of who can make the shittiest but most profitable broadcast system.
Thanks, I strongly feel that publicy-funded software should be at least open source if not public domain, but the market impact is a wrinkle I hadn't considered before.
One would hope so, but they don't even open the shows for public use, they don't even keep them around so people can watch the things they had to pay for.
