I can't tell if this is parody, some kind of "sovereign citizen"-esque bullshit, or a bit of both

This is written by Taleb, he is an interesting fellow and I find his thoughts valuable. Recently he made +$1B in a single day with his hedge fund by evaluating risk vs reward with unconventional methods.

Nah. Volume shows there wasn't enough transactions to net a Billion, but his firm made a ton. Mark-to-market for a few hours showed +$1B though.

I read through the whole chapter and I didn't see anything sovereign citizen-esque in there. It's an analysis of the modern employer-employee relationship.

get the person an H1B visa and you legally own him. Indentured servitude at its best.

An employer of an employee on a sponsored H1B visa is unable to keep that employee from finding new employment at another employer who is willing to file an H1B petition. There isn't any way for the current employer to find out the employee has applied elsewhere. If the employee already holds an H1B, then the new employer is not limited by the yearly H1B cap [1].

I am by no means an expert on legal or immigration matters, so you'll have to do your own research. Also, since you refer to an H1B but did not explicitly state the country, I'm assuming you're referring to the US where Skilled Immigration for Work visas are typically called H1Bs. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Cheers

[1] <http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-visa-transfer-faq.html> -- looking for a better source that's not commercial, happy for pointers.

My understanding is that changing jobs can be detrimental to your application for a permanent green card in some cases.[1] Sometimes that is bad enough to keep you where you are.

[1]https://www.quora.com/If-an-employer-has-applied-for-a-green...

Yes it is. Changing jobs will reset the greencard process ( which is 8 years for Indian & Chinese citizens ). So H1B jobs cannot be changed easily. Cannot ask for raise because the employee's destiny is in employer's hand. H1B's spouse ( H4 ) cannot work even though they are well qualified. ( I feel restricting spouses to work is something similar like in Saudi where women can't drive )

I am in H1B. I cannot change my employer because my greencard has been filed recently. I have to wait for 8 years to get permanent residency. Every three years I have to renew my petition. I will be 40 when I get my greencard. I am going to get married now , my spouse resigned her job in India at Oracle and is going to sit at home watching TV & cooking in US, because she is not authorized to work with H4 visa. She is a Master's degree holder in Finance and fluent in English & French. Now she has to spent all her productive years in a rented apartment.

I140 work authorization is a ray of light. USCIS is like a chameleon , changing rules all the time , putting many skilled workers under anxiety and stress all their life.

So me & fiance is planning to apply for PR in Canada as soon as we get married through the express entry system and get out of this mess soon.

I'm sorry, but she doesn't have to spend her productive years cooking and watching TV. She can perfectly write, read, blog, or stay in India at her oracle job, among a myriad of alternatives.

I'm not defending the H1B system, which sucks, but you always can find a better way.

Not everyone likes to write,read or blog ,people are different, nor can she stay in India. I don't think you understand how marriage works in Indian culture. How does it feel for you to get married and then stay away from your partner. I don't how it works in this part of the world. But it won't work for me.

I see many (most?) people block themselves into false dichotomies, in this case: "Either I can work as whatever I was trained at or I must stay at home". There are more options, always.

I was not presuming to know what will work for you, just mentioning there are lots of alternatives. Many require courage and effort, but still, they are there.

Don't forget that if the Canada plan doesn't work.

In my case , it not only needs courage and effort. The USCIS restricts me from working on anything else than the occupational field for which I got my work visa on. I am not whining or anything, this country has given me a lot of good things. In fact the pros outweighs the cons. I am just pissed off with the fact that my spouse can't work , just because she is married to an H1B worker. As an individual , its not her mistake that she married an H1B worker. She is not even allowed to have a SSN ! An alien who do not have SSN cannot open a bank account among many other restrictions.

"The best slave is someone you overpay and who know it, terrified of losing his status."

As I sit here entering my 12th hour of work for the day, this sounds remarkably legit.

Except it conflates a voluntary relationship for a forced one.

Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output.

What about being taxed 40%?

I recently severely pissed off a correspondent (who'd written Yet Another Article on the evils of capitalism) by equating compulsory taxation with slavery.

The difference being that you get something back for that. Also, that you're free to leave at any time.

A key part of slavery involves restriction of movement. You're generally free to emigrate wherever you feel like. Or stay where you are and join a commune. You'll be self-sufficient and not paying tax. It's not slavery if you can escape it by merely choosing to do something else.

I think we need to start looking at it like at a spectrum. Yes, current employment situation is not a literal owner-and-chains slavery and in principle you can always join a commune. But for upwards of 90% of population this is not a viable option they can realistically take. There are problems, and just because they're not literally slavery doesn't mean they ain't close.

It does mean they aren't even close. If your situation doesn't meet the criteria of slavery, then you aren't a slave. You may not be completely free, but you aren't a slave.

You don't seem to be fully understanding of what slavery is. There is also a legal category. Slaves have no rights, they could not avail themselves of protections against abuse. Also there is a ownership / fungibility aspect, you can buy slaves on a market. This is what separates serfdom from slavery.

The basic idea of slavery is that an entire country, state and nation, participates in psychological and legal domination of subject people. If that's not happening, then what you're looking at isn't slavery. Human trafficking isn't slavery, the main difference is that it's a group of people that are surreptitiously creating a regime where people can be traded and not an entire country. One may call human trafficking "modern slavery", and people being trafficked as "slaves", because it is, after all, an abhorrent practice.

But slavery doesn't exist in the world any more and to say otherwise demeans the numerous armed conflicts humans have fought all over the world to end real slavery. People are not permitted any more to openly treat humans as cattle and expect the law to respect their 'property'. Not even North Korea could get away with instituting slavery, though one could speculate on whether slavery would be better for the people in their gulags now.

You can look at a particular criteria on a spectrum and draw a line. But we have better words to describe what happens when you remove criteria. There is a rich lexicon of terms we can employ to describe removing freedoms from people. Slavery becomes serfdom when you remove fungibility. When you remove state-participation, it's called human trafficking. When all it is is one person forcing another person to keep working, it's called forced labor.

The modern employment social contract is in no way, shape or form anything like actual slavery, to call it such is to misrepresent both employment and slavery.

Then I see another problem - people using the word "slavery" to describe various periods in history when what they mean is the "American-style black on cotton plantations type of slavery". Slaves in history had various amounts of rights and, particularly in Ancient Egypt, Israel and Rome, there were much closer to employees than many think today. The American version of slavery seems to be more of a historical aberration.

I think we focus too much on those rights and less on the overall big picture. US slavery was bad, but Caribbean slavery was much, much worse, what made it worse was the conditions the people labored under.

Personally, if I were in a minor outlying area of the Roman empire, I perhaps would have preferred to become a Roman slave rather than be free out in the boondocks. I've read that a Roman conquest would always start with a call for anyone in the opposing army who wanted to be part of the empire to defect now and become a Roman slave, that was supposedly a better fate than losing in battle. In Rome I could, by hook or by crook, earn my freedom and perhaps even become emperor.

If I were in Africa, and I had a choice, I would perhaps choose to become a slave on James Madison's plantation rather than stay in Africa. You should read the book written about one of his slaves, he was truly extraordinary.

What made US slavery so bad wasn't so much the slavery but the racism. Roman slaves looked just like their masters. But when US slaves earned their freedom through manumission or simply buying themselves off their masters, a somewhat common practice in the run-up to the Civil War, they had to be careful or fall prey to slavers capturing them and re-enslaving them.

If it weren't for the racism, you could make a credible argument that enslavement in the US was, on the whole, better for the people involved, going by the standard of, if you had all the relevant information, would you prefer to stay home or go to the US as a slave.

Of course, American intellectuals made this argument at the time as a justification for slavery. The practice of indentured labor where people willingly sold themselves into bondage to escape their homeland lends some credence to this, but in my opinion the racism blacks experienced and still experience places it solidly in 'wrong' territory.

"The modern employment social contract is in no way, shape or form anything like actual slavery, to call it such is to misrepresent both employment and slavery."

I'm in complete agreement with you, until you introduce compulsory taxation. That is morally equivalent to slavery: your time is being literally taken from you by others, for their own reasons.

Sure, it might also buy you healthcare and so forth, but the same argument could be made in defense of historical slavery too.

your time is being literally taken from you by others, for their own reasons.

That is not slavery, it's not even close to slavery. And it is not your time being taken away from you, it's your money. One can figure out how to earn money less onerously, then taxation becomes less onerous.

Arguments that modern institutions are basically slavery cannot simply boil down to "the lives of poor people suck". That's always been true, your argument is so general it's meaningless.

States have always survived on institutionalized violence towards its citizens. The question is not of whether, but of what kind. There is no way around violence, we can only try to get by with less of it.

Taxation is much, much, much less onerous these days than slavery was. In fact, Taxation, in the agrarian empires of antiquity, was one step removed from slavery. Ancient peoples had to be coerced to produce an agricultural surplus.

It was basically like the mob. Produce as much as you can and give us 95% of it and we'll protect you from other bands of marauding barbarians. You wanted the people you gave that surplus to to be well-organized and powerful, because that had knock-on benefits.

It was better than slavery because your masters only showed up during harvest. They didn't take your kids and trade them away for a profit. They didn't kill you if you couldn't make quota, otherwise who would work the farm.

Slowly things like social contracts and human rights evolved. Taxation became less onerous.

I don't get your point. Has there ever been an example of a succesful tax-less capitalist economy? Or are you saying that at some tax level below 40% capitalism shifts from slavery to non-slavery?

No, I'm saying that I think that a compulsory tax of 1% of your income means that you're 1% enslaved.

Sure, if you want to ignore the part about not having freedom of choice.

Last I checked the consequence of not paying compulsory taxation was jail (if you didn't resist physically as well) or death (if you did).

But you have a choice of whether to work and what to do for that work don't you? Can we say the same for slaves?

If you're arguing for some radical libertarian theoretical economy with 0% taxes then you're not really arguing for anything that would normally be called capitalism. In a way you're being an anticapitalist yourself.

0% compulsory taxation. Why does everyone assume that it has to be compulsory?

Voluntary taxation is not a thing. That's called a donation.

Has there ever been an example of a succesful tax-less capitalist economy?

I think the GP means income tax since the conversation is about being a slave === being 100% income taxed. And yes, there had been an example of a successful income tax-less capitalist economy. The United States of America for most of the time pre 1913.

Maybe in terms of the income tax that we know today, but if you did any importing or exporting you paid a heck of a lot of taxes via tariffs. If you ever get a chance to read up on the pre-Civil War period you'll find that the south was responsible for about 87% of total Federal revenue and almost entirely due to tariffs.

It's an interesting subject.

Why don't we go back to that system?

It's not really voluntary if it's that or you and your family going hungry, without heat in winter, or even home. It's still slavery, but you are "free" to chose your master, and some of us are lucky to be bound by comfortable chains of gold and velvet called "software industry".

(In a way, it's recursive slavery - masters are often bound to someone else.)

Redefining 'slavery' to include all forms of "I must expend some effort to put food in my mouth" (a condition that affects all animals) makes the word 'slavery' meaningless.

We are more than animals. And at this stage in our development, it's no longer necessary to spend more than half of waking hours on it. Just because it has always been like that before doesn't mean it should continue. Social inertia is holding us back here, unfortunately.

You've just moved the goalposts, from 'having to work' to 'having to work more than half your waking hours'. Plenty of people don't work more than half their waking hours, including plenty of us poor chained slaves in this software shtick.

It's not me who's moving the goalpost. What I described applies to vast majority of population, and includes vast majority of software developers. You can't point at minority that has it better and therefore say there's no issue.

Redefining 'voluntary' to include the situation where you must do X or die makes the word 'voluntary' meaningless. And in fact I'm inclined to agree with you -- here slavery is not appropriate, but nor is voluntary, choices are forced or not forced on a continuum and much more complicated than both the black and white "wage labor = slavery" or "Libertarian" ideologies would have you believe.

Did you read the article? He has a particular definition of slave.

Sure, he's redefining the term "slave", but it's a loaded term he's using for illustrative purposes.

On the other hand, you're commenting on HN instead of actually working :)

Tell it to a twelve year old kid working a mine in Burundi, I'm sure he'll sympathise.

The existence of a worse scenario for others does not make your scenario any better. There are many systems built to fuck people, and there is no shame in addressing the one that directly afflicts you.

Maybe not, but maybe one should be more circumspect about using a word like "slave", which has a very literal meaning, and which applies to actual slaves, who are still an actual thing, and not even slightly to you.

If you want to complain about the fact that you've chosen to work long hours for a six figure salary (I know, it can be frustrating sometimes!) then go right ahead, but pick different words.

I really enjoyed reading this. If I wanted to pick up one of his books, any recommendations out there for where to start?

Black Swan is still his best in my mind, but the Bed of Procrustes can be a nice entree; aphorisms were the original tweets, and can be consumed as such. Then I'd jump into Fooled By Randomness, and finally Antifragile (which is the weakest of them...truthfully I think the entire book could have been a chapter in Black Swan, but I'm glad he wrote it all down anyway).

All of his books have been worthwhile in some way. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great place to start. Its effect of exposing the lack of objectivity in many commonly-accepted beliefs that rely heavily on perceived cause and effect can add maturity and humility to your own worldview.

Ironically, my only complaint might be that Taleb seems to get a little more self-congratulating by anecdotally revealing the lifestyle he is able to enjoy as you progress through his series of books. Perhaps this is more of a style device to broaden the books' appeal.

Whatever the case, the perspective you can gain from his writing is worth the time.

This is incomplete, but very, very good economic analysis. In the end his points are simple:

0. Employees are willing to trade "freedom" for job stability and increased average returns. Contracters will more easily defect for sporadic higher paying opportunities, which makes them less reliable.

1. Employers can overpay employees while ensuring that they know that they are overpaid, to 'domesticate' their employees and improve reliability of outcomes.

2. Decades ago, employers could also promise long-term job security to achieve similar effects, however rapidly changing markets mean their future existence (and ability to grant stability) is in question.

3. Instead, employees have fixated on cross-company careers, optimizing for general employability , which means that they must still conform to the requirements of a domesticated employeeship.

4. However, when employees have significant, direct, measurable profit impact skill, and can make or break the company, they can not be owned.

He also does an economic analysis of cursing, while explaining that maximizing employability tends to strip away the parts of people that can make them great.

Two interesting things: 1) this predicts difficulty in controlling contractors and getting them to stick to schedules. It explains why taxis suck, homejoy struggled, and showcases that uber circumvented the entire issue of driver reliability by only doing on-demand rides. It also predicts that scheduled contractors will attempt to steal clients from the scheduling company (direct measurable profit impacting skill - you can't own them). Perhaps the on-demand service strategy that works requires either the use of employees or zero-scheduling/real-time request resolution.

2) As an employee, you must figure out how to measure your profit impact and consistently represent that metric as fact - socialize the idea that you have profit impact. You also want to figure out exactly how what you do and how you do it can increase or decrease profits: being the person who's able to both represent a meaningful metric and show how you've affected that metric, and how that metric should have affected the bottom line will make you the most valuable. If what you do does not impact profitability, then do something else.

I think he does not do a good job of analyzing the value proposition of "freedom" in this context. Freedom definitely is a value by itself, but he just posits and accepts that being a contractor gives you more freedom than being an employee.

There are definitely counter examples, for example the cleaning personnel in many hotels is working on a contract basis. The more general observation is that being a contractor only gives you freedom if you have relative market power over your employer/contract giver.

The same applies as a regular employee, but less so: there is value in retaining a skilled labor force, and employers are more reluctant to give that value up by firing people, as compared to contractors. (Also, many legislations restrict hire and fire of employees, but that might be a different topic.)

Given a very acute risk of not finding any other contracts, contractors might find themselves having to live up to demands of your employer, ultimately ending up being less free than an employee in a comparable market.

Another chapter of the same book: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf

Also interesting, is the title of the book "Skin in the Game"?

I think so, but I can't find it, so I'm guessing it hasn't been released yet.

Those seem to be excerpts released by the author.

Perhaps there should be some equivalent of Godwin's law for this sort of comparison. Golden handcuffs aren't meaningfully comparable to actual slavery. If you think it is you're out of touch with history.

The pilot contractor doesn't seem like a great example, either. Contractors usually have to think about their reputations. I don't know the industry, but it seems unlikely that there's a huge shortage of pilots, given how poorly beginning pilots are paid.

I'm trying to find this book, but coming up short.

Can somebody tell me the name of the book?

Very thought provoking. It seems like a good argument in favour of entrepreneurship and risk taking.

But I'm not sure that I agree with Taleb's glorification of Front Office banking roles in sales & trading. Like any sufficiently highly paid corporate employee, traders are compensated mainly through company shares which vest over a long period of time. These days a trader's bonus can even be clawed back, many years after being awarded. Rumour is that Wall St traders are often caught up in a culture of excess where bosses pressure them to spend/live extravagantly and become completely dependent on annual cash bonuses. For all the supposed risk taking tolerance bravado, traders are merely risking the firm's capital and not their own. In some ways it is similar to the expat role - just as some executives are chosen to be expats, some bank employees are chosen as traders and given enormous amounts of the firm's capital to bet with. No one can say what to look for in hiring a good trader, there is no consistent basis for selection, there are no academic or professional credentials for traders, the bank executives can choose to shutdown a particular trading desk on a whim, the worst fear of a trader is to lose this coveted position, and most people do not last very long as traders as their luck runs out eventually at the poker table. If an expat executive is like a diplomat fearfully being assigned from one foreign posting to the next, then I think a trader is like a gambler-slave sent to gamble with his master's money in the casino and he is in constant fear of the dire consequences that await if and when he loses too great a sum or fails to win large sums frequently. Trading jobs are usually a better deal for the employee than most comparable jobs, but it is still an employee job and it attracts exactly the kind of people who go to business school and actively seek low risk careers and dependence on a paycheque written by a prestigious employer.

It is interesting to note that a few hundred years ago, people didn't make that big of a difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery (labor). Both were university acknowledge to be great evils, and it was as dehumanizing to rent a person than it was to own a person.

Somehow we've all accepted wage slavery as alright. Good even! If someone doesn't have a job we deride him as a lazy ass for not wanting to sell his labor to a capitalist. A solution: universal basic income. Give everyone fuck you money. Then you'll have a free society.

Where will this basic income money come from? Forced taxation, aka extortion, aka partial slavery. That's not a free society, just a different master.

Taxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with. What you "earn" is partly due to your efforts, and partly due to you utilizing the infrastructure and institutions built by everyone else. So a part of your "earnings" is society's. That part is called taxes: what you owe to those who enable you to earn.

We can also put taxes on corporations instead of people. Corporations are not humans, and therefore cannot be made slaves.

Taxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with

Ah, we have found the key contention. An interesting thought is to consider a world of fully mobile people - who will move and who will stay in a country with universal basic income and high taxes?

Do you realize that in this framework "wage slavery" doesn't exist too?

What you "earn" is partly due to your efforts, and partly due to you utilizing the infrastructure of your employer. So a part of your "earnings" is employer's.

Sure. What is meant by "slavery" in this context is not appropriation of a portion of labor value. It is being forced to sell your labor on the market in the first place - a process that necessarily sets up exploitative conditions for those with little market power.

The 'taxation' straw man is the first thing folks think of, when encountering BI for the first time. There are alternatives. Like printing the money, which is nowhere near the issue you might think it is. The 1% own 99% of it, the rest have 1%; e.g. doubling what the rest of us have devalues it by 1%, leaving us all with plenty of wealth while eroding the fraction owned by the 1%. Its not a bad option in the current economic situation.

Give everyone fuck you money.

Um, if everyone has that much money, then it's not really a dramatic amount of money is it?

Having enough universal basic income to live on meagerly is one thing, but it's mathematically impossible to give everyone enough for everyone to be rich.

By fuck you money I mean enough that they have food, rent, healthcare etc guaranteed - so they can say fuck you if someone wants to exploit them. This will be roughly the amount of a PhD stipend - like $30,000 a year.

That's not at all how most people use that term.

Yea, but who's going to fix the sewer lines when they break? Not me, I gots my basic income.

After a particular age, there is nothing more frightening than change.

I've been both an employee and a contractor for various companies.

I found that being a contractor is usually easier, the work hours are shorter, the pay is MUCH better and 'job' security is actually higher (which really surprised me - I've never been fired from a contract job).

From a company's point of view; contractors are not good value. Sure, it's better to hire independent contractors than to outsource everything to an outside company, but a contractor is nowhere near as productive as a full-time employee.

The kinds of companies which hire contractors instead of full-time staff are often interesting companies...

> but a contractor is nowhere near as productive as a full-time employee

I disagree, also speaking as someone who's seen a mix of runs as a contractor, consultant and staff employee. It's the individual who is very productive or not, not the role they are filling.