The secret ingredient is ~~crime~~ legislative, judicial, and regulatory capture.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Enemies inside the gates.
User shared their Netflix password with a friend, RIGHT TO JAIL!
Have copyrighted music play when your phone rings while streaming? Believe it or not...jail.
Delivery guy catches a moment of a pay per view you bought, also jail
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This notion that big companies have is just ludicrous. They come up with whatever business model that obviously cannot work in the long run but then see it as their right that society make it work for them.
Oh, and put OpenAI on the slave labor list as well
OOTL, why should OpenAI be on the slave labor list?
The pay and the TASK, holy fuck, being exposed to images and content that most people can't take in even small doses, and with NO therapy options. Horrible.
Oh crap.
There's been recruitment here in the Philippines for similar AI training tasks with very little pay, too. But that thing in Kenya is much much worse.
I took on a music-related task out of curiosity and I got these recruitment emails after
Holy shit those are absolutely abysmal rates for the amount of (potentially psychologically scarring) work you'd have to do. wtfff
A business that cannot operate without breaking the law is a criminal organisation and should be treated as such.
If a corporation has legal rights as if it were a person, why aren't they punished like everyone else?
We execute people for committing multiple murders. A corporation can kill hundreds or thousands of people with their pollution or their emissions or whatever else they are doing to skirt regulations and get slapped with a fine far smaller than their profits.
Because, like wealthy people, wealthy corporations just get a slap on the wrist rather than be made an example of.
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France farmers protests see 79 arrested as tractors snarl Paris traffic https://lemmy.world/post/11442916
breaking environmental laws
criminalize wage theft
More than a year after leaving my job, I got a letter from them... and I initially thought it was some kind of scam. Why would I think that? Well, because it was a check for about $1k. They had apparently miscalculated overtime/differentials during the height of the pandemic (when I worked myself to the bones in an indescribable, fearful/stressful environment), so they owed money to almost everyone who worked during that time.
~$1k for just me. It was a hospital. In a capital city of the US. I don't even have an estimate of how many of us hourly's were working then... RN's, RT's, CNA's, LPN's, PT, OT, Security, Housekeeping? Let's just imagine an extremely low number of employees for the hospital, like 500.
If $1k was held for 500 employees over a year, you're telling me they got to profit/sit on $500,000 for over a year? What's the interest on that? And I'm low-balling this number to a huge extent.
It's like, "Whoopsies, we didn't pay y'all enough at the time, but it's cool because we recouped most the loss anyway over the past year". They hedged their profits by stealing wages is how it seems to me. "Oopsie daisy, we had an error; But don't worry cause here's your pay a year later". Cool cool cool, no worries friend. Didn't need it anyway
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Don't forget about Meta somehow committing mass copyright infringement of books but playing the 'information should be free but only for this specific instance of rocketing our AI training' bullshit.
Open AI uses mechanical Turk, which is the closest you can get to slave labor while still technically paying somebody, except for prison labor I guess.
Yup...I've had the displeasure of being on that thing for a few months some years back. I couldn't shrug the feeling of feeling like a sweatshop worker. "Ah yes, do these menial tasks that'll take you 40 minutes of your time to earn...5 cents! woo!"
I always assumed that shit only made sense if you were living in a place with very low cost of living when paid in US dollars.
It doesn't pay nearly enough as a good source of income.
There's a very stingy and narrow set of requirements you have to meet before you see or even do dollar-amount tasks.
If you're docked by a single 'Requester' aka your micro-bosses on there, then your chances slip.
So, I can't recommend Amazon Machine Turk to anyone. Only do it for beer money. Don't do it for a living income.
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Elon Musk: "I can't make money if I can't torture and kill humans. It's the next logical step from all the other animals I have tortured and killed"
Also Musk: I managed to set the GDP of Paraguay on fire when I was high, and now my job has to give me more or I'll cry.
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Lemmy: we can't make money lol
All companies: We can’t make money unless we make you subscribe to everything.
You know I think it's kind of funny that there's such a tendency towards monopoly and power centralization in business, in order to "maximize efficiency", when the main argument in favor of the free market, as I see it, is in favor of competition and innovation. It's just funny that the competition doesn't actually exist, and the innovation only comes about in the form of evergreened to shit intellectual property that further enforces a lack of competition.
their copes always revolve around with "but it's actually the GOVERNMENT'S fault that we have monopolies and if we didn't have all these LAWS like PATENTS and MINIMUM WAGE and REGULATIONS destroying SMALL BUSINESSES then we'd have a TRUE COMPETITIVE MARKET!" ignoring exactly what causes the government to be able to get to that point in the first place (spoiler alert: companies buy the government out, it's inevitable in poorly-regulated capitalism)
source: me, regrettably a former libertarian "anarcho"-capitalist
We don't have minimum wages here in Sweden. It's regulated by negotiations between worker unions and companies. And the companies fucking hate it so much. Which is so funny because the government isn't involved. It's a free market, only the workers are part of it, and companies find that "totally not cool dude!"
We also have rent control functioning in a rather similar way, landlord unions and the tenant union negotiates rent increases on a yearly basis, and the landlords hate it. They're actually free to raise the rent however they please, but the tenant union can take that to the rent court (or whatever it's called) and if the increase is found to be unsubstantiated they'll have to pay back the tenants.
I think that's a solid model for democracy, but obviously companies hate it.
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I'm a fan of capitalism, but it NEEDS heavy regulation to ensure competition. The playing field is not naturally level. Left to its own devices, the market insists on consolidation and monopoly.
I have a rough idea of the best way to do capitalism: if a company in a standard industry reaches monopoly (or oligopoly) stage, congratulations. You've won. The government should buy all your stock at above market rates, all the employees including the CEOs should get massive payouts. Huge taxpayer funded party. Golden parachutes for everyone. Giant bonuses to all of their contracted labor. And then the company or companies should be broken up into tiny pieces, assets sold off, all intellectual property revert to public domain, and leadership banned from pursuing business in that industry for a period of time.
I've seen that idea before, it's not a bad one. I think there should also be the option to make it public in case it's become a service that can only really work if centralised and is beneficial to the population. I'd still rather move to an entirely different system but if we have to keep capitalism something like this would be nice.
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apple: we can't make money without an overpriced ecosystem
What have I said this entire time? Companies are not loyal at all. They will do anything, even breaking the law (re my ISP I took to the tribunal today), for profit. They aren't loyal to you, their own employees nor their own customers. We gotta start putting them back in their place now more than ever before, before it's too late
Aye, I'm honestly fucking sick to death with the bullshit companies can get away with.
It's such a minor and niche thing, it doesn't even affect me, but something about it just really stuck with me. There's this Korean online game company called Nexon, that a while ago was fined less than $9 million USD for selling a product that they lied about. There's this little gambling feature in the game where you pay a small sum of money and you get some random bullshit in return. Only the advertised features purported to be in this lottery, weren't in the lottery at all.
Over the past decade or so they've made almost around $400 million USD on this, and then they get fined 9.
And it got me thinking. If I fraudulently managed to obtain half a billion dollars and got caught, that would instantly be spirited away from me, and I'd be hit so hard with legal fees I'd be bankrupt for the rest of my life, but when a company does it they get away with it scot-free. Nine million is nothing compared to what they earned defrauding people.
So what's the message here? Companies are free to break the law however they please and they'll be hit with a slap on the wrist. They still had a massive net gain by selling literally fucking nothing since the thing they sold isn't a physical fucking good, it's a bunch of fucking pissy little bits in a shitty fucking probably Oracle fucking database somewhere and nothing comes out of it. Just fucking go ahead and defraud people, if you get caught you'll have to pay the "oopsie you did a bad thing" tax.
And sure, this is just some shitty fucking gaming company running some ancient game, but it's not like they're unique in doing this! Lots of companies exploit their customers one way or another and when they're caught very little comes out of it.
I saw an article about CPAP machines killing people by shoving plastic foam down the user's throats, and if you bought one of these machines you can get up to $100. I've no idea what these particular machines cost, but in general CPAP machines go for like $500-$1000 each!
If I as an individual get discouraged from crime by long prison sentences and exorbitant fines I can't have a hope in hell to ever pay off, then companies should too! Complete and total bankruptcy would definitely fucking suck for the workers that had nothing to do with whatever illegal BS was going on, but perhaps it'd serve as a deterrent for the corrupt stinking prolapsed anuses that run the fucking things!
We don't need to protect companies that break the law.
Only if they're black.
The Nextdoor posts about shoplifting and executing thieves is fucking bananas. And the stories they always share are always black folk.
Fortunately, nextdoor is a Karen cesspool and I'd rather keep them contained there.
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Then I can't be assed to use Amazon.
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