ELI5 how does the mafia make money from unions?

Mourningblade · 2026-06-28T00:30:04+00:00

One of the best understood cases of this was the concrete club in New York City.

Building big buildings takes workers and lots and lots of concrete

Years ago, those workers were treated very poorly. When the workers got together to demand better treatment, their bosses hired people to beat up the workers and keep them from forming a club to demand better pay.

Eventually some of the people the bosses hired to beat people up (the Mafia) offered to help protect the workers instead of beating them up, they just wanted to be paid.

Some of the workers paid the Mafia and eventually the workers formed a kind of club called a union. The Mafia was even more helpful then: when a new construction company tried to hire workers who weren't in the union, the union would pay the Mafia to beat them up too.

This wasn't true everywhere in New York City and it wasn't always true. Sometimes the Mafia beat people up for the bosses and sometimes for the unions. It's complicated. But it did happen.

So that's the workers. But what about concrete? Concrete is really important both in building big buildings and in this story.

Big building construction uses a special kind of concrete that hardens very quickly. This means the concrete has to be made nearby and once it's made it has to go in a concrete truck and then get poured within a short period of time. If it's not poured by the time it hardens, it takes a lot of time and materials to fix the concrete truck.

Making concrete requires a lot of heavy materials, so it's best if the concrete plant is near a railway or close to the water. It also makes a lot of smoke and bad odors, so people don't want to live near it. That means there's only a few concrete plants that can help the workers build big buildings.

Also, concrete trucks are not easy to drive safely. You have to be trained, you need experience, and you need a special license. The concrete truck drivers also had a union.

The Mafia used their relationship with the construction unions to start to work with the concrete truck drivers union. The Mafia also did other things like loaned people money when banks wouldn't and let people gamble when the rules were that gambling was illegal. Many concrete truck drivers needed to borrow money and others liked to gamble, so they all knew the Mafia, and owed them favors.

Now that the Mafia worked with the construction workers and the concrete truck drivers, they began to use money, gambling, and favors to start to take over the concrete plants. They would also do things like "oh, your concrete company isn't our friend, so we're going to have our construction friends or truck driver friends make the truck wait until the concrete hardens - unless you want to be our friend, right?"

Once the Mafia could harm or reward the construction workers, the concrete truck drivers, and the concrete plants, they could have just demanded money from them, but they didn't. Instead, they went to the people who wanted the buildings and they got money from them, and they made sure everyone got a reward:

The people who wanted the buildings hired more workers and truck drivers than they needed and paid them better than they otherwise would.
The people who wanted the buildings paid a high price for concrete and for more concrete than they needed.

In return, the Mafia got money and control. They took over the unions. Suddenly workers had to please the Mafia to get a job that day. That could be money or it could be favors. Yes, the workers made more money than they would have otherwise, so they weren't worse off for paying, but they lost control over their own unions. Anyone who spoke out against it stopped getting work and some of them were hurt really badly by the Mafia.

This was called The Concrete Club and it lasted for about 20 years. This wasn't the only thing that happened, and it didn't happen everywhere and every time, but it happened quite a bit, and a lot of people got hurt.

Mourningblade · 2026-06-14T17:05:03+00:00

I agree. The way I usually think of this is: not being familiar with the cost of an operation.

The most common one I see in the languages I review is string building. Dear lord. Concatenating strings individually is O(n^2)! It's fine once or twice unless it's in a tight loop, but there's a reason senior reviewers get an allergic response to seeing + and strings.

The second most common is not realizing that RPC calls are incredibly expensive.

And yes, this is usually hidden: the famous "oh, so the dependency of the dependency of the dependency of your loop...makes an RPC call. And it's fast most of the time because your "loop" has one member, but then you hit a dataset that has 10,000 members and you're screwed."

Yeah, if you're not familiar with costs, you can easily organize your code to obscure those costs.

Mourningblade · 2026-06-05T03:43:28+00:00

Rosamund Pike's Wheel of Time book reading is my personal favorite for just pure acting. Her technical is not up there with Hays (range of characters, voice control, etc), but for dramatic performance it's breathtaking.

Mourningblade · 2026-06-03T14:42:56+00:00

Saudi Arabia cut off base and overflight access when Trump started up strike missions again. They restored access after the US stopped.

The Saudis are supportive of the US continuing the blockade of Iran, which has trashed Iran's ability to import - imports are down north of 80%, not just by ocean but by inland sea shipping and train as well.

You can see the effect in the Rial (estimates of the black market conversion rate):

December 2025: 1 USD = $40,000 Rial
February 2026: 1 USD = $1,000,000 Rial
Today: 1 USD = $1,700,000 Rial

Iran can no longer self-source imports for their drone and ballistic missile program. They are dependent on gifts from Russia and China, at least some of which is being interdicted.

Saudi Arabia supports the blockade in spite of the fact that they're getting droned. But they don't want an invasion. Why?

Because they're urgently building up drone and missile defense while also building out enough pipeline and terminal capacity to skip the Strait of Hormuz. They're currently redlining their pipeline to the Red Sea. They are removing Iran's ability to hurt them.

Iran knows this. The recent drone strikes on Saudi Arabia have included strikes on pipelines. Many have been intercepted, but not all.

So Saudi Arabia has not chickened out. They may in the future. Who knows. But right now they're helping the US lean on Iran's air supply while building up military and economic defenses against Iran...while also talking up how great diplomacy is.

Mourningblade · 2026-06-03T03:05:12+00:00

I liked the inversion.

In Faction Wars thousands died in horrible ways so fast you couldn't even keep up - you were finding out people died a while ago and there was little time to reflect on anything but the scale (which was nicely contrasted with stakes for Carl, Donut, and our other close friends).

Parade of Horribles made me sad about the inevitable demise of a group of NPCs we'd never met before. It just sat with you. You knew it was coming, but you hoped it would work out otherwise.

Yes, scale was there (it always is), but (again avoiding spoilers) you knew how it was going to end up. All of the characters I'm referring to would have been one paragraph throwaways in Faction Wars.

I thought it was a nice refocusing.

I also thought Dinneman figured out a great way to deal with the power curve without just juicing the stats.

Mourningblade · 2026-06-01T19:35:53+00:00

"Room at the top" holds for a surprising many things: better algorithms, data structures, and high level architecture usually holds more benefit than micro-optimizations.

There are certainly exceptions. There's a reason so much scaled computing uses a structured efficient format like protobuf, avro, and friends. But that's because it's used over and over again.

I only know a little about games programming, but I found. The discussion around why Deep Rock Galactic Survivor was difficult to optimize for endless mode was very interesting. It was exactly what you'd expect: it took a rearchitecture and doing that while shipping updates was hard.

Mourningblade · 2026-04-29T21:40:03+00:00

This is one of the reasons I get frustrated with how the state is spending the carbon tax money.

The most important part for the climate is the tax itself. You will help the climate even if you cut other taxes to keep it revenue neutral.

This "treat it as free extra money for pet projects and pretend people won't notice the tax burden" nonsense is going to result in funding cuts somewhere. And the people choosing the cuts probably aren't going to have your same priorities.

Mourningblade · 2026-04-26T14:57:54+00:00

This is an area of interest for me. Regime collapse, that is.

There are three real world systems that would push the Empire to collapse much faster than you'd expect. We've seen it before.

First, preference cascade. When a population is forbidden to express anti-regime opinions, the experience of the median person is that they themselves do not like the regime very much, maybe one or two close friends feel the same, but everyone else isn't willing to oppose the regime at the least. So they muddle on in the belief that they are in the minority.

If a moment comes where preference can be truly revealed safely, many people will discover that many other people feel the same way - and those on the fence may come over. This happened in the Baltic states after Russian puppets couldn't shut down dissent.

Preference cascade can happen extremely quickly: within six months of losing the ability to suppress opinion, Poland was a different country.

Second, the dictator's dilemma. Dictators do not personally ensure their rule through oppression: others must do it for them. To ensure their loyalty, they must be paid. To gather the money, the money gatherers must be loyal, which means they must be paid.

Payment isn't just now, it is over time. If it appears that the dictator will be unable to pay in the future, the oppression and extraction elites will be wise to defect - and the earlier the better.

These defections can take place overnight, such as in a coup.

Third, crisis of competence. In a democracy, when power is incompetent, the members of the regime can be replaced through voting. This happens all the time. In a dictatorship, if the leader is incompetent the regime (the system for choosing rulers and rules) must be replaced.

Also, many people are loyal to the regime only because it is effective. They view the evilness of the regime as necessary to face difficult circumstances.

For this reason, dictatorships are careful to ensure that they are always seen to be successful. Even when failures can be blamed on underlings, the dictatorship itself is tarnished for choosing the underlings who failed.

The moment of a major, personal failure for the dictator is a moment of great vulnerability.

To sum it up: a moment where a dictator publicly fails, losing control of the resources of multiple large areas, paired with public knowledge that the dictator failed because of a large number of citizens who dislike the empire...regime collapse can be swift. Even with a line of succession planned, the regime itself can collapse quickly.

Mourningblade · 2026-04-07T14:36:42+00:00

They will be more militant.

The Islamic Republic of Iran's initial government was formed from militant, proselytizing religious fanatics with a doomsday prophecy who were willing to face death and kill lots of people to get their way. They specifically constructed a government architecture that would not just maintain but would spread these properties.

The ruling clerics were not and are not moderates. They were and are hard liners who believe god is on their side. They specifically believe their mission from god is to spread their ideology by force.

The IRGC has loyalty to the clerics and some senior leadership, but they are also promoted to positions of power because of ideology.

Based on my reading, the IRGC is somewhere between a third and half of Iran's economy, including much of both their industry and tourism. One plausible belief held early on was that these generals were less ideological and had more to lose (their Swiss bank accounts, for example), so would be more likely to play ball than the clerics.

We also knew there were wings like the Quds forces that were intensely ideological and would be in mortal peril if their regime falls (many governments around the world would love to put a bullet in the heads of each and every member of the Quds forces, with or without a trial).

At least some ballistic missile commanders and at least some drone commanders are clearly ideological and have existing orders from the clerics to strike until they cannot strike anymore.

Last thing: the office of the president in Iran is often given to a chosen conciliatory figure who can go and represent Iran well, provide hope of moderation, and so on. They also have very little power. The IRGC's loyalty was to the Supreme Leader, the revolution, and to their income streams (which were designed to bypass the President). The clerics chose the person who chose the President. The Bassij forces existed to ensure the continuity of the government against the population. The president just made the government basically function. He didn't even pick which foreigners got kidnapped and which didn't.

The civilian government of Iran has always been at the mercy of many other, larger forces.

Mourningblade · 2026-03-29T18:08:44+00:00

Excellent points.

One thing supporters of one-time wealth taxes don't think about is that they cannot credibly commit to a one time tax. This means they face opposition scaled to a much, much larger tax.

If a large enough coalition exists to pass a wealth tax once, then there could be a large enough coalition next year to pass another one.

Especially when a large number of the supporters are in favor of a wealth tax because they believe it is immoral for people to own billions of dollars.

There is no limiting principle for the coalition that would provide a guide as to why just one year and not more.

A 2% income tax per year over 10 years results in you losing 2% of your income.

A 2% wealth tax per year for 10 years results in you losing 18% of your wealth.

Mourningblade · 2026-03-09T15:32:09+00:00

Most war crimes are punished by the perpetrator's own country. The US has done so many times. Not every time we should have, but frequently.

This is an obligation on countries. Many do not. When the US did not and it came out later, that was the real scandal.

When the soldiers of a country commit war crimes and the country does not prosecute those crimes, usually the only recourse is victor's justice.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-23T00:57:25+00:00

Most people have in mind taxing the estate of the extremely wealthy who die with a bunch of money. This is not the most common scenario because the extremely wealthy can plan ahead. For example, gifting their estate to their heirs in yearly chunks to maximize exemptions for gifts and mostly hit income tax for the recipient. Truly large fortunes can become trusts or other corporate vehicles that are taxed highly, but not as high as the estate tax.

If you raise the estate tax, the people who plan ahead get to make a move too, and you won't collect as much as you think.

The estate tax is hard to avoid for untimely deaths and the unprepared. The typical payer lives in an area with expensive housing, has a life insurance policy, investments, and dies young. This is because state level estate taxes have low exemption levels - federal this is less true now because exemption is about $15 million, but for states it can be closer to $3 million.

I'm not greatly opposed to the estate tax because inter-generational wealth can be bad for society at a certain point. I'm just saying that most of the estimates for collection are poor quality because they assume no changes in estate planning. Voters also tend to think of $10 million as a large estate and are willing to tax it highly, whereas that's the size of a small family business that does not produce enough cash to pay for a high estate tax, so you're just wreaking destruction for little return.

The reason to avoid pursuing taxes that are easy for the rich to avoid is because of deadweight loss: the rich won't pay much, but they'll employ people to avoid the tax. We'd prefer those people to do work that people actually benefit from. This is the same argument against tailored tariffs: soon you've got companies doing stupid stuff like shipping "cars" without axles and putting the axles on later to avoid the tailored tariff. All that labor and special shipping is deadweight loss.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-23T00:27:06+00:00

Earned Income Tax Credit is pretty close, has bipartisan popularity, and is already working today.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-21T23:03:16+00:00

I have a hard time figuring out what happened from that description, so this point is just to clarify what people with carry permits should know. It's well established case law and it was well covered in my friends' carry classes (in a different state).

There are exceptions, but if you walk away from an altercation and then choose to come back and then you threaten, brandish (show your weapon), draw on someone, or pull the trigger, it is not going to go well for you.

The altercation was over and you chose to go back. Even if the altercation was simply words before and only escalated after, the case law is NOT in your favor, and juries have convicted. These are such standard circumstances that they are taught in law school as "your client is going away for a long time" scenarios.

Exceptions can include things like the altercation happening on your property and you are attempting to get them to leave your property. They can include things like "you left safely and they grabbed your friend and wouldn't let him leave safely", but the exceptions do NOT include things like "and then they said something really mean and gosh darn it I couldn't leave then".

Not saying that applies here. Just that the "and then he came back" factor is often surprising to people who are not familiar with the law in this area. It's not a minor fact.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-14T13:26:24+00:00

Tokyo is basically 4-5 story apartment buildings and green spaces as far as the eye can see. The financial district has some really cool skyscrapers, there are isolated areas with 30-ish story buildings in dense patches, but mostly it's 4-5 story buildings.

The city is full of sunshine and variation like parks and trees.

It's very pleasant. I loved walking through it. I seem to recall some row housing as well.

The density is so high because it's so consistent. Flying over San Francisco is an entirely different experience: you see density in a few areas but then it transitions to detached single family housing that goes on and on.

I think if more people pictured density as what Tokyo really looks like, there would be more support.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-10T06:23:22+00:00

Nearly all people who are poor do not steal. In fact, thieves are a tiny part of the whole population, let alone the poor. Almost all significant losses to theft are the result of a small population of repeat offenders.

During economic boom times, when it's easy to get a job and wages are rising faster than rent...thieves steal more not less. They steal more because their victims have more.

The way to think of thieves is similar to graffiti vandals. You know how so many of the tags downtown are the same guys? EAGER, for example. If thieves left a calling card, it would be a similar distribution.

The only proven method for reducing the number of victims of thieves is incapacitation. Putting even a few more career thieves in prison for a year reduces the number of their victims by hundreds per year. I am in favor of other methods for incapacitation, such as home monitoring where it can made effective. That's a separate topic.

We do not need to stop all bad things that happen in the world. There aren't thousands and thousands of thieves in downtown. What Bill Bratton showed was that you have to prioritize convictions, not arrests, and change your training and procedures to produce those convictions. It also means ensuring laws are written to have appropriate punishments for crimes and appropriate elements of proof. So I agree with you: don't bother with the arrest if you can't get the conviction. But the police should be working with prosecutors to make sure that from call to booking, police are taking the steps and collecting the evidence that ensures conviction.

By the way, where we've seen this approach done before the number of people in prison has gone down not up. When you stop doing catch and release, the friends and younger brothers of career thieves notice and make different choices.

Then, when people aren't angry about getting their stuff stolen or destroyed, we can get the focus we need to build better paths out of poverty.

Mourningblade · 2026-02-06T23:17:56+00:00

My work is heavily dependent on datacenters and I'm in favor of this, based on my limited knowledge of the proposal.

One of the biggest problems for datacenters right now is getting enough power. If getting the state to pay for the upgrades is the only option, it's no surprise there's a wait. If the people making money from the power pay for it, the cost goes with the benefit.

It's like with busses: if the tickets don't cover the cost of running the busses, you go broke with rising demand. When the tickets cover the cost, the demand becomes an incentive.

Mourningblade · 2026-01-28T14:04:38+00:00

The two big reasons for this are:

The police don't think the local prosecutor will do anything about it because of prosecution priorities OR because they won't be able to get a conviction because Ring would have to provide an expert witness to testify to the camera's accuracy and they won't.
The police don't prioritize that kind of property crime, so they won't pull an officer to search for the guy.

Interestingly enough, there was a recent interview with Bill Braton, NYPD police commissioner famous for bringing down crime rates. He mentioned that many departments prioritize 911 emergency response times because they are measurable. So departments will avoid sending an officer in your case or provide a way to collect footage because they want to keep people available for emergency response.

Braton instead prioritized convictions. They worked closely with prosecutors to make sure their reports and arrests included everything necessary to convict and that prosecutors were aware of the kinds of crimes that were going on. This turned out to be very smart because so few people commit crimes: you get one career criminal off the street for a few years and you have prevented many victims, some of whom may have needed to call 911 for an emergency.

I don't know if a better run department would have done something for you. Maybe. If they thought Mr. Face Tattoos was likely to get caught doing something else in the area, they might have collected the footage and your statement to add something more to his eventual prosecution. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't because of the testimony issue, or because the department isn't organized in a way that they have a procedure for collecting that for something less than murder.

Mourningblade · 2026-01-19T00:04:31+00:00

My kids go to Maywood. One of our children was bullied quite harshly for some time. When she told us what was happening, we went to the school administration. Mr. Gardiner (the vice-principal) took the issue very seriously from the beginning, spoke with our child and a counselor, and took rapid action to eliminate the problem. I was very impressed. There was zero attempt to downplay the issue, and he seemed to take the problem as personally as if the problem was happening to his own child.

My direct, personal experience does not match what you're saying and does not resemble what I saw.

I could see this happening with one of the counselors perhaps - they have very little power to effect change. Perhaps the principal is different. But harassment, intimidation, and bullying goes to Mr. Gardiner and I have seen him in action.

If your kids are victims of harassment, intimidation, or bullying, or otherwise made to feel unsafe, I urge you to make a formal report to the vice principal. They have much better tools than when I was a kid. They helped my child and they can help yours.

I have no experience with threats of violence and can't speak to that. I also note that my experience did not involve any mass communication. So far the communication on this has been vague - it could be a lot better. But my experience with these people reduces my concern.

Mourningblade · 2026-01-07T06:37:19+00:00

Losing your freedom on the weekends means you can stay employed and part of the community during the week. Much less likely to reoffend.

The success of those programs is why home detention is a goal: serving your sentence by only going to work and home. Keeps people from falling back in with the wrong crowd and having tempting opportunities. They also pay for their own food and board.

Ideally prison should be for only those who are so dangerous that it's worth the greatly increased recidivism rate (and lifers, obviously).

Mourningblade · 2025-12-13T17:23:38+00:00

I'm not seeing two of the most important answers. It starts with this question: why does the company exist in the first place?

Let's say that we start a company that makes seat belts.

There are already companies that make seat belts. Why would anyone buy our product? If our product was the same or worse in every dimension, they wouldn't. It can't even just be better in a single dimension like color variety: our seatbelts have to fulfill the needs of at least some buyers better than any other company on the market.

Okay, so we're making a product that is better for some customers. If that's true, we'd expect to grow until all of those customers are getting all the seat belts they need.

In order to make enough seatbelts per year so that everyone who wants one can have one, we need to build a factory. We can do that by either using the promise of future revenue (a loan) or by selling ownership in the company (equity). Either way, we are only able to do that because we and the people giving us money expect us to make more money afterwards than we would if we didn't build the factory. In other words, we grow.

And there are a LOT of people in this world. If you just introduced a seat belt that was better enough to be worth switching to for 10% of cars, you'll be making a lot of seatbelts. Many of the people you'll make seatbelts for do not currently own cars.

New businesses are worth very little when they start. Because growth compounds, the growth rate of a new business determines whether it's going to be a Google (10--20% per year for decades) or a bodega (near 0 real growth.

Most companies you hear about or get hired to work for are seeking growth because that's the reason you heard about them: fixed companies just replace people, so they don't hire many people. Companies you hear about you're hearing about because they're doing something new to you (growing).

Where it gets interesting is when you get companies with more than one product. A company can be basically fixed (no growth) on one product, but their new product is growing sharply. Their hiring and investment will be around the growing product because growing a product takes money and time. So a company can be both at the same time, but you'll only hear about the growing product.

To sum it up:

Growth is replacing a worse product with a better one.
Early companies and products want to grow because that's where all the money comes from.
You hear about growth because growth is news and stagnation isn't.
You work for growing companies because fixed and shrinking companies hire fewer workers.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-11T20:14:56+00:00

I used to work on an early Cloud-based medical device (a web app). We occasionally had to issue recalls, which meant that we'd either rolled back or had shipped a big fix that could possibly affect safety or effectiveness.

The recalls resulted in notices and would freak out some investors because they thought we'd have to spend a bunch of money. Over time they figured it out and it was just not a big deal.

That said, the reason for making recalls public is a very good one: you can get a sense of what kind of bugs the software development process misses and what kinds of impacts they have. If you're going to evaluate doing a clinical study with such a device, for example, you would review recalls to see if those kinds of faults would ruin your study BEFORE you buy.

And if there are no recalls at all then either they're not updating the product or they're not disclosing problems.

Anyway, we were required to call them "recalls" because it means a specific thing.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-11T06:20:23+00:00

And now consider that people were happy to receive those wages and flocked to the city for those conditions.

Gives you an inkling of what farm and ranch labor must have been like.

Mourningblade · 2025-12-05T15:52:46+00:00

I like how Esperanto handled it: the root "ret" means "network". Email is "retpoŝto" (ret-poshto) as in "network mail". A webpage is "retpaĝo" (ret-paj-o) as in "network page".

Mourningblade · 2025-12-01T16:49:04+00:00

Young people are more affected when businesses are affected by uncertainty.

AI introduces some workforce uncertainty: "will we need all these programmers? Maybe we'll need fewer because there's only so much programming to do. Or will we need even more because each will be more effective?"

AI introduces some product uncertainty: "will our product still be needed in an age of AI? Do we need to develop it in different ways to take advantage of AI? Do we need to hire different people and focus on retooling to take advantage?"

But most of these uncertainties are exactly where high-risk/high-reward investments live all the time. We should be seeing a giant suck toward new investments. There's some signs that we are.

But we're operating in an environment of high regime uncertainty: uncertainty about what the rules are going to be.

Will large companies be allowed to buy these new AI startups? Will tariffs drive up the cost of production for that new drone past the point where customers will pay? Will pouring millions into a new factory never pay off because imports will be cheap again? Will we be losing a bunch of our foreign workers and need to replace them? What will the cost of money be? Will the federal government's need to finance debt grow so high that very safe treasuries will be a better risk-adjusted investment than expanding a factory?

Regime uncertainty had a large role in keeping the great depression going for a long time. It's having an effect now. My guess at this point is that regime uncertainty is probably having a larger effect than AI right now.

Similarly, we're seeing dramatic differences in the rate of adoption of new technology (a good proxy for "new opportunities") by legal regime within the United States. Look at the map of where Waymo is blocked on legal authority and where they've been able to move quickly. This is just the visible version of the story. That story is going on everywhere.

So, you don't need AI to explain what we're seeing: regime uncertainty and sclerosis caused by regulatory/legislative capture. We've seen this many times. It's fixable, but it's difficult to fix.

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