Experts say there aren’t enough state and federal inspectors to adequately vet whether labor contractors who oversee farmworkers are following the rules.
You are told you are free.
But your #freedom ends where rent begins.
Where debt begins.
Where #healthcare begins.
Where #survival begins.
This is not freedom.
This is The Hunger Games, except the Capitol convinced the districts to blame each other for the rules.
The poor fight the poor.
The middle class defends a system that is slowly deleting it.
The rich watch it all like a live stream, asking only one question:
“How do we monetize this?”
You are praised for exhaustion. #Burnout is called ambition.
Rest is called weakness.
A system that needs you tired cannot afford you awake.
They say: Be grateful you have a #job.
As if survival were a gift.
As if obedience were a virtue.
This is the #Matrix, but instead of machines farming bodies, corporations farm attention, energy, and years of your life — and call it “career growth.”
First, it poisons the water.
Then it sells bottled #hope.
First, it destroys #community.
Then it sells “networking.”
First, it creates loneliness.
Then it sells algorithms pretending to be love.
It tells you:
If you are unhappy, it is your fault.
If you are poor, you didn’t optimize hard enough.
If you fail, you didn’t brand yourself properly.
This is not a system of opportunity.
It is a system of blame #management.
No billionaire earned their wealth alone.
They inherited leverage.
They bought laws.
They rented governments.
Every fortune is built on invisible backs.
Every luxury stands on unpaid overtime somewhere else on the planet.
This is Titanic economics:
First class debates wine pairings.
Third class floods.
And the band plays louder so no one hears the structure cracking.
They don’t fear protests.
They fear understanding.
‘It’s a disaster’ drought measure to suck water from River Wharfe met with anger
England has not invested in water storage and the environment is taking the pain while overseas companies extract the profits from underinvestment and profits move overseas. But still Westminster fails to act and protects the organisations leaching from the English public
Cartoon showing Jeff Bezos sitting on a pile of money bags under an awning holding a glass of champagne. Below him, slaves are pulling giant cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo, building an enormous pyramid. In the back stands a sign with the text 'Amazon: building a monument to capitalism'
"The experiment begun in 1492 was accompanied by a new relationship with the world and with each other, based on the novel idea that the prosperity of human societies lay in the submission of a wild and free nature to the rational act of exploitation. From then on, the entire living world was put to work, and in this first planetary empire, people, plants and animals became commodities circulating from one corner of the hemisphere to the other."
wrote Sylvie Laurent in her book "Capital et race : Histoire d'une hydre moderne"
To meet this artificial demand, the plantation system laid the foundations for the future capitalist organisation of labour and production. The sugar industry at the time was a ‘synthesis of the field and the factory’, a veritable “agribusiness” that was ‘unlike anything known in Europe at the time’. Sugar cane juice had to be processed quickly after harvesting to produce sugar crystals and molasses, which, when distilled, produced rum, a product that would soon become popular on European markets as well.
Plantation farming was therefore an integrated system that required major innovations for the time in order to organise and improve production. The accounting system put in place made it possible to calculate yields more accurately and, as a result, to cut back on the ‘needs’ of slaves in terms of food, housing and clothing in order to extract as much value as possible.
As our beautiful environment is being burned up and destroyed by the greed of Big Tech and the tech bros, "OpenAI’s chief executive officer Sam Altman joked: “Can y’all please chill on generating images. This is insane, our team needs sleep.”
The tech bros gloated as they stole the handdrawn work of Studio Ghibli. Millions of new signups. Millions and millions of images created. The apocalypse has never felt such fun.
Continuation of Matthew Boroson's social media post on Neil Gaiman, part 4 of 4:
I have no difficulty believing the accusations against him.
Because I know--KNOW--that he has felt entitled to take what he wants from a woman, without her permission, and without any acknowledgement of her contributions.
And, finally:
If you loved Neil Gaiman's stories, if you are heartbroken to learn the storyteller you loves is apparently an abuser, here is my suggestion:
Track down Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth books. Her prose is more xquisite and imaginative, her ideas more original, her empathy real.
“Understanding this goes a long way in explaining why fundamentalist Christians vote the way they do.
They don’t want to solve hunger.
They don’t way to solve homelessness.
They don’t want to solve poverty.
The same person who will donate to the foodbank will vote against food stamps. They don’t want a political solution, they want to remain the triage unit. At the church’s triage unit, people are desperately grateful and the church has the perfect sales pitch.” - Iblamebill (Threads)
Religion In Remission @RiR LifeCoach
Ever notice that most people do not *find god" when they are happy? It's because the psychological tactics of religion work best on an emotional and vulnerable mind. When people are at their lowest, they seek something to fill the void. Religion is the best predator.
My son has an assignment from school: test #LexicaAI. I want to make this an opportunity to learn about all the ethical issues of #LLM including: sourcing material for training violating creators' moral and legal rights, worker #exploitation for labeling the training sets, the #energy and #water consumption associated with their use, and the exploitative goals of these models. I know the #askFedi#hivemind can help be gather a sizeable collection of references on these issues, so GO!
I'm fascinated by the concept of measuring attacker-defender advantage in software, devices, and even entire IT environments. What do I mean by "attacker-defender advantage?" Lemme sum up and then share a chart.
Let's say you could measure the speed at which defenders remediate various types of security vulnerabilities across all relevant assets. Then say you could detect and measure the speed at which attackers find/exploit those vulnerable assets across the target population of organizations using them. Finally, plot those curves (across time and assets) to see the delta between them and derive a measure of relative advantage for attackers and defenders. That relative value is what I mean by attacker-defender advantage.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a visual example of the concept. The blue line represents defenders, measuring the speed of remediation. Red measures how attacker exploitation activity spreads across the target population. When the blue line is on top, defenders have a relative advantage (remediating faster than attackers are attempting to exploit new targets). When red's on top, the opposite is true. The delta between the lines corresponds to the relative degree of advantage (also expressed by the number in the upper left).
This chart comes from prior Cyentia Institute research in which we were able to combine datasets from two different partners (with their permission). Unfortunately, those datasets/partners are no longer available to further explore this concept - but maybe this post will inspire new partnerships and opportunities!
Any surprises in the attacker-defender advantage results depicted in the chart? Has anyone measured this or something similar?
A recent study shows gig workers at rideshare companies are making less than minimum wage in the US; to stop it, we need to fight capitalism in the streets.
"So how do rideshare and other gig economy companies get away with this? Mostly by selectively cooking the data to make it appear as if rideshare drivers and other gig workers are making more than they actually are, classifying gig labor as independent contractors to skirt existing labor regulations, and spending fuck tons of money lobbying governments at all levels to exempt their workers from the types of labor laws that say you’re not allowed to pay workers less than half the minimum wage in your region. Why do politicians and governments agree to this exploitative bullshit? Mostly because they’re absolutely on the take, don’t give a damn about the labor class whatsoever, and are ideologically aligned with a capitalist order that demands maximum profits and endless growth regardless of how many people that hurts."
As anyone who works in an affected industry can tell you, the primary purpose of the "gig economy" is to "disrupt" the so-called "free market" by ignoring labor laws, forcing workers to toil for far less money than they would otherwise be making (including sub-minimum wage take home pay) and pass that extracted wealth onto corporate executives and investors. Despite the fact that we all know this, it rarely comes up in the official discourse for two reasons; first, gig companies straight up lie about how much they're actually paying their workers, and secondly, modern American capitalist society largely screens out the voices of actual labor class individuals. Given this, the exploitative nature of the "gig economy" is a story that mostly remains on the sidelines of our discourse; it's not exactly a "secret" but it's also a subject that will never be fully recognized by corporate ghouls and the governments they own either. Unsurprisingly however, whenever someone actually digs into the data, they find that gig workers are wholly correct and this "industry" is more or less a kind of sweat shop brought home to the imperial core.
Don’t Take Rideshare Companies at Their Word When It Comes to Worker Pay
"The study is particularly notable for the results it extracted about California, where in 2020 gig companies poured tens of millions into Proposition 22, legislation which allowed the industry to continue to classify their workers as independent contractors rather than employees.
The companies promised that exempting drivers and delivery workers would preserve the “flexibility” of gig work while ensuring that they would make over the minimum wage.
Four years later, that promise seems broken. Rideshare passenger drivers, the study found, take home $7.12 per hour in median net hourly earnings before tips—a fraction of California’s $16 minimum wage. When you account for the employee benefits and taxes that drivers have to pay for themselves, the number is even lower."
The study in question was conducted by the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, and while the quote I featured here talks mostly about California, it was conducted across five major metropolitan areas and found that gig economy rideshare drivers were making less than minimum wage in all five cities. Given the pay standards of this industry as a whole, I'd be willing to bet you can extrapolate that data to pretty much every city in America, and even other Pig Empire nations that don't expressly forbid rideshare companies from paying their workers a wage below the minimum; that is after all, the business model of every company in this sector.
So how do they get away with it? Mostly by cooking the data to make it appear as if drivers are making more than they actually are, and spending fuck tons of money lobbying governments at all levels to exempt their "gig workers" from the types of labor laws that say you're not allowed to pay workers less than half the minimum wage in your region. Why do politicians and governments agree to this bullshit? Mostly because they're absolutely on the take, don't give a flying fuck about the labor class, and are ideologically aligned with a capitalist order that demands maximum profits and endless growth regardless of how many people that hurts. In other words, none of the people involved here are your friends and if they can figure out a way to work labor class people to death without paying them sweet fuck all, they're gonna do so.
Of course some folks will read what I've said here and shrug, possibly while making a snide comment about "late stage capital." I don't begrudge them that, but I would like to remind them that capital itself doesn't plan on ending capitalism and extreme exploitation any time soon, and the only way this era is going to be remembered as "late stage capitalism" is if we the people start forcing them to shut down the fuck barrel. When your great grandparents realized that big business, investors, and the government were all in it together to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of them even if it meant driving them to an early grave, they didn't make pithy comments about "late stage capitalism" - they organized unions, took to the streets, fought cops, and started smashing the machinery of capitalism. The mass exploitation of the labor class still depends on the participation of that same labor class, and an orderly society where brutal extraction that violates the spirit of our labor laws is shrugged at, and complied with as "just the way things are." If you want that to change, you are going to have fight for it; not just at the ballot box, but also in the streets.
I meant to share this video last week but I got distracted by having to rush my cat Punch to the vets and the rest of my writing. This is a almost 40 minute discussion between the Majority Report hosts (Sam Seder and Emma Vigland) and author Anne Kim, who recently published a book about how poverty is actually quite profitable for some people and corporations, just not the poor.
"Profiting From Poverty: How The Rich Fleece America's Poor"
A lot of this video is about predatory marketing practices targeting poor folks, and the scourges of privatization, but I'm sharing it because if you aren't from a background that encounters these things it can be hard to understand just how aggressively capitalists target poor people for exploitation and how badly folks who don't have a lot of money are getting screwed; a good example might be the story Anne shares about shady dentists giving underprivileged children dozens of unnecessary root canals and other dental procedures simply so they can bill the government, which really doesn't care about the quality of care these children are receiving, for doing them.