Pretty much every time anything that vaguely looks like a union exists, there are a group of consumers who start calling for a boycott. They will circulate this message widely and make it seem like “the way to support the union.”
But in truth these efforts can actually do serious damage to the actual organizing.
Types of Boycotts
There are essentially four broad categories of things that often get called boycotts (there are other models, but this is one that I like):
Consumer Boycotts
Solidarity Boycotts
Symbolic Boycotts
Moral Purchasing
All four of these get called “boycotts” but in truth refer to three very different things. What it comes down to is “what are you trying to accomplish” and “with what power.”
Sometimes things also involve elements of multiple types, but that could be another essay.
Consumer Boycotts
When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed. [Charles Parnell at Ennis in County Claire, which became the foundation of pressure method on Charles Boycott]
A consumer boycott is the “classical” model of a boycott where a group of consumers organize to not engage with a business or set of businesses so long as some state or condition holds true.
There are variations, but the basic form is:
Find people who are consumers of the product
Get them to agree to not purchase the product until after a situation is resolved
Keep up the pressure and continue to organize until the company relents
Resume normal purchasing behavior once victory is won
For example, there have been a few successful boycott campaigns around advertising on some show or another. These work by looking for advertisers on the show and getting a group of people who might normally buy those products—regardless of whether they watch the show in question—and promise to not purchase until after they stop advertising.
Campaigns like this depend on people who are purchasing the product withholding their purchases for a period of time until the boycott has ended. Building a consumer boycott requires finding people who use the service or buy the product and convincing them on a short-term good to pressure the company in question.
I can’t boycott men’s soccer because I don’t watch men’s soccer and am not going to start pretty much no matter what they do. This form of a boycott relies on consumer purchasing power, and if I’m not willing to purchase the product even if things change, then I can’t exactly threaten them by removing what I am already not giving them. If I wanted to build a boycott to pressure them, I would have to find a way to convince people who are true fans of men’s soccer, not just people like me.
Solidarity Boycotts
Solidarity boycotts are where you act at the behest of the workers and refrain from purchasing a product at their request. Usually while they are striking.
The idea here is that you are amplifying the union’s power: by not purchasing, you are demonstrating to the company that the union has teeth and that failure to acquiese will be disasterous to the company.
There have been many successful solidarity boycotts. Both primary boycotts (boycotting a grocery store because the workers are striking over their working conditions) and secondary boycotts (boycotting a grocery store because they sell, e.g., grapes and the grape workers are striking over their working conditions).
But it isn’t always the right strategy. A boycott is an escalation, something that unions want to keep in their pocket but which jumping to right off the bat means that they don’t have that escalation tool for later. There are even some situations where not purchasing when you normally would can act like a scab by reducing the amount of work that needs to get done. It is difficult to know for sure unless you work at the company, and so it works best to listen to guidance of their union to know what to do.
Sometimes it is also more nuanced than simply “don’t buy”:
It should go without saying that you aren’t supporting the workers if you do this of your own volition, and boycotting without the union’s request can seriously hurt their organizing efforts.
Symbolic Boycotts
It’s more “symbolic than substantial,” but that doesn’t mean it’s consequence-free.
A lot of boycotts the intent is not to actually put any pressure at all on the company per se, or perhaps only indirect pressure for the future. The goal of such is to get people activated about some other issue. By calling for a boycott the hope is that they will raise awareness about that issue and bring focus onto something that is being neglected.
Mostly symbolic strikes are good for something other than applying pressure to a company: Bringing public attention on a much ignored issue. Often one that is shared between groups. They can be used by unions for structure testing, but for the most part their goals aren’t about worker power, they are about shining a light in the darkness.
In this way of thinking, #BoycottMulan wasn’t about Mulan at all. Not really.
It was about Hong Kong.
The point was not reducing support for Mulan. The point wasn’t to make Mulan crash. The point wasn’t to put screws into Disney or make Disney change their behavior (though if they made it sufficiently uncomfortable for them that was a nice perk). The point wasn’t what the actress said specifically or why she said it. The point was that China’s treatment of HK is reprehensible, and what the actress said and what happened was a vehicle to shine a light on it. That doesn’t mean that what she was was remotely okay, but it also means that the reason why she said it is kind of irrelevant: It doesn’t matter if she must say things like that to be successful in China, because the point isn’t about her, or Disney per se, it’s about China.
I’m not asking you to boycott this series so much as I’m asking you to CARE ABOUT GENOCIDE.
Similarly, Cixin Liu’s comments and fame are being used, via calls to boycott Three Body Problem, to bring attention to the genocide happening right now, right this second. It doesn’t matter why he said it, that’s not the point. The problem is that not enough people are aware of the attrocity happening.
With symbolic boycotts it often isn’t relevant if you ultimately end up seeing it, reading it, etc. Because the goal was much greater.
Moral Purchasing
The way we spend our money can help to change the world.
Moral purchasing—typified by movements and groups such as Ethical Consumer—is not attempting to influence corporate behavior so much as individual behavior. Moral purchasing is often conflated with a boycott but is something else entirely: an attempt to make the most moral choices possible given the capitalist dystopia.
To the extent that these can be cosidered “boycotts” they are qualitatively different from consumer boycotts: the goal is not to get back to eating veal (or meat) and the companies that produce veal are not being boycott (usually). By spending money and/or putting attention on “more ethical” causes, the goal is to shape the world accordingly.
Supporting Unions
A lot of people like to insert their own views about what “should” support a union, or they want to “show solidarity” with a union and so they reach for the tool they have seen used in the past: the boycott.
Sometimes they’ll even put the union logo or branding onto it, making it to all perspectives as if it is actually coming from the union.
This came up pronouncedly when a group of people decided to “boycott Amazon” during a union drive. Which was exactly the wrong time to be doing such:
"A boycott like this really just plays into management’s hands by giving ammunition to the idea that this is going to be about conflict all the time and that you’re going to have outside people interfering in your life, which isn’t what a union is," said Connor Lewis, editor for the labor publication Strikewave.
This also came up during the IATSE strike authorization:
Strike strategy is all about building to a crisis for the employer. Most (if not all) strike strategies and plans include a series of escalations before and after a strike.
It is incredibly important to listen to the union in these situations. Not just individual members—who do not speak for the union as a whole—but to the union itself. You aren’t helping the union if you aren’t doing what they ask and are speaking over them.
The idea of “consumers should never cross a picket line” is a good starting point, but it is just that: a starting point. When there is no picket line then you aren’t “crossing the picket line” to go to a company.
Another variation in the “speaking over the union” is when people insert their own views over what the union is promoting. For example, a relativley common pattern is something like:
Someone says in response “Yes! Never buy Apple products! They are anti-consumer!”
Regardless of your position on Apple’s market position, this is speaking over the workers. It isn’t doing what the union has requested, it is substituting your own agenda for theirs.
This isn’t to say that you should purchase from Apple, or Amazon, or whoever if that doesn’t fit within your morals. That is instead to say that you aren’t supporting the union by telling people “never purchase” when the request is not that.
Similarly, it is important to communicate within the domain of the requested action. So if the request is “don’t buy made-in-Mexico Nabisco products” then the request isn’t “don’t buy Nabisco products” without qualifier.
It’s really incredibly frustrating to see eight million twitter messages that all read “BOYCOTT TO SUPPORT THE UNION” and calling people “scabs” if they don’t when there was no request to boycott and the union does have specific requests that aren’t being shared.
It sucks the air out of the room.
Conclusion
This is a basic rundown of how I think and talk about types of boycotts. Some main takeaways:
Not all things that are called boycotts are actually boycotts.
The moral calculus on breaking ranks varies with the circumstances. Not participating in a symbolic boycott is a very different situation from not participating in a solidarity boycott, but also the infrastructure of support looks very different. In a symbolic boycott there is very rarely any infrastructure to support people who might be impacted, in a solidarity boycott you can often find resources and guides to help obviate the pain, at least for a little while.
Listen to the organizers on the ground. You don’t have to agree with them, but they are usually the ones with the most context and understanding, so let them lead.
References
[1] T. E. Hachey, J. M. Hernon, and L. J. McCaffrey, The Irish Experience: A Concise History. Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, 1996.
[2] O. P. I. R. G. Toronto, “Boycott Nestle,” Alternative Toronto. 1977. [Online; accessed on 16 April 2022]
[3] J. Kirby, “What the US’s diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics does — and doesn’t — mean,” Vox, 10 Dec. 2021, [Online; accessed on 16 April 2022]
[4] J. Hunt, “Why Shop Ethically?,” Ethical Consumer, 06 Apr. 2021, [Online; accessed on 16 April 2022]
[5] A. Mak, “The Bizarre Amazon Boycott That Its Unionizing Workers Never Asked For,” Slate, 09 Mar. 2021, [Online; accessed on 17 April 2022]
One of the skills that I use, teach, and consider fundamental to being a good engineer is the idea of a “rule out.”
The idea is basically that, when debugging, you reverse the question from “what could be happening” to “how do I demonstrate that this set of things is not happening.” Not asking “what will prove this theory correct” but rather “what will rule out these other possibilities?”
The term comes from medicine, where it is a critical component of differential diagnosis.
A Definition With Wordle
By now everyone has at least a passing familiarity with Wordle. It’s a game where you try to guess a word in six tries, with it letting you know, at each guess:
Which letters you get in the correct position
Which letters appear in the word but are in the incorrect position
Which letters do not appear in the word
In a real way, each guess you take with wordle is a theory where you are trying to figure out what words it can’t be. From the start, you have no information with which to make a guess, with each guess you gain more information, so the best strategy is often to focus on eliminating as many words as possible.
For the first few guesses especially, you are more focused on what it can’t be rather than trying to guess what it is.
This is a rule out.
An Example
We had a problem at work that had occupied three developers over two days. The compiler was hanging and they couldn’t figure out why.
It took me thirty minutes to solve it and come up with a solution.
Not because I am all that, but because I knew the system well enough to start doing rule outs immediately.
Everyone in this group was convinced up one way and down the other that it had something to do with Guice—a library we were using. They couldn’t figure out how, but they knew that this was the problem as the element in all of this that they had no experience with.
I knew from the symptom—the compiler hanging—that it almost certainly couldn’t be Guice. Guice doesn’t affect the compiler and is largely downstream of the compiler. I devised a test to double check this case and hit the compiler hang without the guice annotations.
Great.
What else could it be?
I know that the Java compiler has quirks, but is usually pretty solid and doesn’t randomly hang. So what is changing the compiler?
I run the compiler and I note that we aren’t getting to the test phase, so it isn’t jacoco—a library that is frequently responsible for this sort of thing because it munges bytecode.
We also have a static analysis tool running that runs its own version of the compiler as part of the compiler step?
I disable the static analysis tool. Rerun it. No hanging. Culprit found. A little more diagnosis and I find the specific rule and fire a commit to disable it then file a bug with the team that handles the static analysis tool. I quickly do differential diagnosis and also determine how we can circumvent the problem in the meantime (it has to do with a final check, so we can either disable the final check or just… not trip the final value check).
You are paying for the 20 seconds of pushing the button and the 20 years of experience to know which button to push.
The Core Loop
The process is essentially one of making rule outs:
Identify the apparent error.
Determine what it can’t be.
Determine what it might be and start proving each one as Not the Problem, starting with the easiest ones and the ones that will clear the most possibilities.
Goto 1.
In any given situation with software a given error could be an almost (countably) infinite number of things. So being able to quickly prune entire trees and know how to test to rule out significant parts of the trees becomes a critical skill.
Why This Works
We have several biases as humans that work against us for debugging:
We tend to view things as more likely culprits that we are less familiar with and tend to overestimate the likelihood of things based on recent events. This is a form of the availability heuristic.
We tend to, on finding a possibility, try to find answers that confirm our hypothesis and reinforce our beliefs, rather than answers that eliminate the hypothesis. This is a form of confirmation bias.
We tend to look mostly to the tools we know in order to diagnose and fix the problem, which is a form of anchoring bias.
Performing rule outs is a way of breaking these (and other, related) biases. It forces our brain to consider alternatives and, by considering the alternatives, allows us to more quickly eliminate possibilities and narrow down on an answer.
Basically: Before we can accept something as true, we must first/also prove that other possibilities are false.
Another Illustrative Example
A while back I was working with an intern who had been banging their head on a problem for about half a day. They were getting an error when passing a file to a parser. It looked basically like this:
They had a error where it wasn’t working. So they jumped to the piece they were least familiar with: the internal library.
They started setting breakpoints inside of the third party library. Started evaluating the source code and trying to read it. They found not just the error coming out of it, but the error inside of the system that was leading to it. They were hypothesizing if the fact that it was a YAML file but the parser seemed to be geared for JSON mattered.
All questions you need to be able to ask. Eventually.
Instead, we start with the error: An illegal argument exception that is caused by some sort of parsing error. It’s coming from a shallow place in the code too.
Then my brain immediately went to the possibilities:
It can be that the parser itself has a bug, but since it’s a pretty solid and stable parser that seems unlikely. We can validate this is the case later by directly passing in the file if all else fails.
It could be a bug in the interface between their tooling and the library, e.g., calling the wrong method, needing a flag to be set, or asking it for an object type it doesn’t know how to work with.
It could be a problem with what they are giving the library. Either because it is not being properly loaded or because it isn’t in a format that the library expects.
Confirm: They got the file from the library. This is one of their example files. It’s a known-good file. So it isn’t the second half of (3). This also gives us some confidence that it isn’t (1) (Core Loop Step 2).
Okay, so how can I rule out that it is a problem with what’s being passed to the library? (Core Loop Step 3) Let’s load it out and print it as a first step. This will tell us if what is being passed in is what we expect.
Tada. Found the problem.
The contents of the file weren’t being loaded into the object, so an empty file was being passed along. The parser didn’t know what to make of that and couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the object type it was being asked to work with, so it was dying.
Conclusion
This is a difficult skill that takes practice and time, but it has helped me tremendously in my career. It’s a systematic approach to problem solving that I’ve personally found useful and that people who I’ve taught it to also seem to have found useful.
Very low headache management tools. I particularly did not want to be writing everything in HTML.
The ability for it to thrive on neglect and still look and behave basically the same.
HTTPS.
In addition I had a few nice-to-haves:
The ability to work mostly in markdown or $\LaTeX$.
The ability to tinker with it and play around.
Relatively scalable so that I wouldn't have to ever go back and redo it because I "outgrew" it in terms of sophistication of the posts or something else.
Very, very low price such that if I forget about it for a while I won't feel like I am wasting money.
I’ve set up (quite a few) Wordpress and a few other equivalent blogs over the years and they are all fine for what they are, but they failed horribly at most of these criteria.
I also do have a github account, so why not try pages out?
Thus Our Journey Begins
So there are a variety of hacks—most of which are quite old—for typesetting equations into github pages.
There have been various attempts at doing this with MathJax or by directing imgs to unsupported URLs, some strategies in that genre almost-sort-of-kind-of-work, but most of which are not what I would describe as “straightforward.” Some would work for a page or two, but became difficult to extend past that. Virtually none were set up for modern versions of MathJax.
So my first pass was to do it in the most complicated way possible: Why not just use latex directly in a prebuilt container on gitpod?
I loaded up the guide from 2019 and the guide for getting started with github pages, built a docker container, and we’re good to go, right?
i learned to code by writing html in notepad and dragging the file into an FTP client. I wouldn't even know where to start today. https://t.co/MxQgOUzChE
Turns out that downloading texlive-full requires downloading about two thirds of the internet and that gitpod really doesn’t like prebuilds taking over an hour. So that’s exciting and also difficult to debug, because it doesn’t come out and tell you that like a good process, it just kind of lets you infer it. Especially if you want to download anything after that, things can get pretty exciting.
It also turns out that ruby versions matter for compiling and that there were a variety of path weirdness from me not quite understanding how to execute the ruby code within gitpod as part of a dockerfile. Suffice it to say just doing this:
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RUN gem install bundler
…did not do what I wanted nor expected.
Gitpod, for its part, was mostly generating errors that looked like this:
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Prebuild failed for system reasons. Please contact support. Error: headless task failed: exit status 1
With no real tangible logs to speak of to let me know what happened, and things often getting conflated with what looks like the timeout.
My first instinct, of course, is that I need to install ruby, so I give that a shot:
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RUN brew install ruby
This has two main effects:
It makes the build take longer, further exacerbating the timeout.
It does not, in fact, solve my problem with bundler.
Eventually I give up and go “I’ll find some other way to manage it temporarily” and pull out all of the $\LaTeX$ pieces, since those seem to be obscuring anything else going on. “I’ll just get this set up with jekyll first, and then I’ll circle back to $\LaTeX$ if necessary,” I think.
Now having solved my timeout issue, it’s easier to debug my ruby problems—it can’t find gem—and I find someone else’s solution to that:
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FROM gitpod/workspace-fullRUN echo"rvm_gems_path=/home/gitpod/.rvm"> ~/.rvmrc
USER gitpodRUN /bin/bash -l-c"gem install jekyll"RUN /bin/bash -l-c"gem install bundler"
Okay, that works. If that didn’t work I’ve also seen people put the gem commands into a gitpod init, which also seems to work okay.
Now I can go and initialize the repository.
I quickly get it set up and running with the midnight theme, which looks pretty at first glance and we’re off to the races.
Midnight is an awfully… bare bones… theme. It doesn’t really support my use case without significant customization. It only has a default template, and that’s pretty minimalistic. It doesn’t even support the initial generated file types.
Hunting around for this I find a lot of people really like jekyll-spaceship and it does pretty much everything I need… and it is not going to get allowlisted any time soon. I first find this by trying to compile:
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\vdash\frac{1}{2}
Which it renders for me as $\vdash \frac{1}{2}$ on my local system but on pages just shows up as source code on an unthemed page.
But there is a solution to this: Because jekyll is just a static page generator, we can run it as part of a github action. That way we’ll generate it when pushing to main.
Perfect.
Gang aft agley
Turns out there is a conflict between the github pages plugin and the version of jekyll I want to use. No big deal, I’ll just pull the information out of the system and…
Wait, what do you mean all of my text is now completely without a template?
I try various things to circumvent this problem—including using the remote template plugin and downloading it locally—but it turns out that this is a consequence of two things:
The presence of the plugins jekyll-default-layout and jekyll-optional-front-matter. These were probably done to make life easier for beginners setting up sites, but what it meant in practice was that not all of the (generated! dowloaded!) files actually had any template information associated with them, and in some cases just flat out failed to do anything productive.
Because the template only has default as a base, it doesn’t include… post, or home, or, well, anything.
While (1) is an easy fix (just add the information), there seems to be no way around (2) with this template short of writing everything from the ground up.
But it is enough to get the github action working. This takes a few false starts due to some confusion about branches, but it was actually remarkably straightforward to set up. Good job to the creator of the action and to the github actions team.
The hunt begins for a theme
Okay, so next stop is to find a template that will… actually… work. The theme world is a horrid mess and while pages like Jekyll Themes exist they lack really any sort of search functionality adequate to find what I am looking for.
So I find one that seems to look reasonable, eventually, plug it in and…
…what do you mean there are more files that I need?
So it turns out that while a good chunk of the theme is in the gem, there’s also a good bit in a default project that they have to jump start things.
There is no easy way, with jekyll, to bring down the files that I can find. People are recommending strategies like bringing down everything into a clean detached branch and fixing a bunch of merge conflicts.
I solve this by copying it over and copying the files more-or-less by hand, which isn’t too bad given the new project state.
That works reasonably well, so I do a bit of mucking around with the configuration—adding CDNs or changing which CDN was used, altering a few versions, tweaking the fonts, etc.
Things look good—I can now compile things like $\frac{x:{\mathbf T} \in \Gamma}{\Gamma \vdash x:T}$, so I deploy and call it a day.
I have abandoned installing jekyll and am now making a geocities website
I have been running into the challenge recently of wanting to write out various notes and experiences and finding that twitter is the wrong format, Facebook has rapidly become more unusable for writing, medium seemed like the wrong venue for a few different reasons, and I really wanted somewhere I could jot down things.
I’ve run more specialized blogs before that were focused on a wide variety of things over the years, some of which were moderately successful by whatever metric, but really fundamentally I grew bored or something came up.
So that’s what this blog is an answer to. I don’t know who will read this or if anyone will read this, how often I will or will not post, and maybe this is just me screaming into the void, but that’s okay.
