Notices by weilawei (weilawei@mastodon.online), page 3

Capitalism is a system which cannot get itself out of local minima, as demonstrated by the continued contraction of the average person's wealth and well-being the world over.

Meanwhile the people calling the shots by the resource allocation heuristic (~3194 billionaires under globalized capitalism) are choosing paths that destroy the life-support system of the one small rock we're all trapped on.

It's a death cult.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/620926/global-billionaire-population-by-region/

Another video of a cop kneeling on the back of a black person.

"Celena Morrison, the city’s executive director of the Office of LGBT Affairs — who videotaped a portion of the police encounter — can be heard saying, “He just punched me,” apparently referring to the trooper moments after he walked toward her. [...] The trooper can be heard telling Morrison to “shut the f— up.”"

https://www.inquirer.com/news/trooper-pennsylvania-police-celena-morrison-mayor-parker-20240302.html

#ACAB #policeBrutality #racism #philadelphia

"The millions of dollars AIEF gets from its funders goes toward AIPAC’s goal of securing bipartisan consensus on Israel. In 2019, the year for which The Intercept has unredacted tax records, AIEF sponsored trips for 64 Democrats and 65 Republicans, who left for Israel on 14 separate dates, according to LegiStorm. Each trip can cost upward of $10,000 per person, and members of Congress can also bring senior members of staff, spouses, or children."

https://theintercept.com/2023/11/18/aipac-congress-israel-trips-donors/

#AIPAC #corruption

@aral Nice, that seems plenty for day trips around.

@aral I used to take the train with a guy who had one of those, and it looked really cool.

How long did it take you to learn to ride it, and what's the battery life/range like?

I don't think it's possible to overemphasize just how much authority figures would prefer you didn't like math or thought it was boring and useless, because most of their cons aren't particularly sophisticated and graph pretty well.

Try plotting the three averages (median, mode, and mean) of per capita wages together, and the economic inequality/wealth gap becomes pretty trivial to measure.

"Capitalism is when your tax dollars pay to bail out the bank that foreclosed on your mortgage"

For a fictional inversion of this scenario, where the bank that wanted to foreclose on the mortgage gets paid back with their own money,

Hell or High Water

is an amazing movie.

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/112007555642633047

Hot take: Fines need to start at a minimum of ~4x the estimated damage value/value gotten by the perpetrator, in order to comfortably dissuade companies from breaking the law.

That's generously assuming we know about, investigate, prosecute, convict, and collect on half of every offense that actually occurs.

Realistically, we need a minimum of 10x given the extreme laxity of enforcement in labor laws.

Treble damages are just the cost of doing business.

#wageTheft #abolishPrisonSlavery

If the cost of 950 investigations was $8 million, that means that the maximum risk exposure (magnitude of cost wrt probability of occurrence) of a company across the industry is $8421/child at the worst. If they're catching 1% (I'd be shocked if they investigated more than that.), that means it effectively costs $84.21 to use a child for illegal labor.

https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/alabama-company-fined-117175-over-15-year-olds-fatal-fall-on-first-day-of-work.html

In order to make fines effective, that 950 would need to both represent investigating every case that actually occurred, and also $8 million needs to be about $7.6 billion (if say we choose $8 million/child).

If you say there should be 95,000 investigations resulting in fines because 950 is 1% of actual cases, then we're talking about $760 billion they should be on the hook for to make the fines more than the cost of doing business.

Okay, less dyscalculia, correcter graph. Z up is savings by breaking the law, X is fine per infraction, Y is proportion of cases investigated of all total (including unknown).

The surface height is how much money they have to save by using illegal labor before it's the better option economically. Above means they'll break the law.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=3d+plot+%28z+%3D+x*y%29+for+%7Bx%2C0%2C10000%7D%2C%7By%2C0%2C1.0%7D

In point of fact, it shouldn't be hard to calculate a surface showing when fines become cost-prohibitive for a given legal labor cost and presumed enforcement effectiveness.

That, plus making -all- fines uninsurable, would go a long way toward eliminating it, simply because it would be in their own pocketbook's interest.

Anything less than that won't do.

Right now, we're in the region where nearly any kind of fine is an acceptable cost, because it carries nearly no risk of occuring to a business using illegal labor.

If enforcement were perfect, their costs would scale 1:1 with the fines, but lax enforcement lets them abuse labor laws for nearly any miniscule cost savings.

A $10,000 fine is nothing, even if they would only hypothetically save $10,000; if it's never collected.

Let's say a business saves $5,000 per worker by using an illegal laborer, taking risk into account.

The plane is $5000. Only fines and enforcement (the surface) that are above that plane are effective.

Again, X is fine per infraction levied in $, and Y is the enforcement effectiveness from 0 (being none) to 1 (being total).

https://www.math3d.org/iu5puQlWn

When you compare the cost savings of using slave labor (like forced prison labor) over legal labor, it quickly becomes clear why abolition is the only sane route.

Enforcement is 0 by definition (government-run by UNICOR), therefore no amount of fines, and even a $0.01 savings is an incentive to force people into the prison system.

#slavery #abolishPrisonSlavery #illegalLabor

If a company can save $100 by using illegal child labor, and it costs them $84.21/child, even an environment with perfect enforcement will do absolutely nothing.

It needs to cost at least what they save, divided by the effectiveness of enforcement (which is from 0 to 1.0, so this is multiplying the fine to account for low enforcement).

Lax enforcement and low fines mean that companies will nickel and dime workers at nearly any opportunity.

Enforcement would need to be 10x more effective than the hypothesized 1% for even a $1000 fine to deter a business from trying to save $100 illegally.

Everything above the blue surface is where it is cheaper to break the law. As fines & enforcement go down, the bar for breaking the law drops.

The pink plane above the blue region shows wide latitude to profit by law breaking for just $100.

Modern slavery is rooted in an economic evil, and permitting it in any form only makes the perpetuation of the system more attractive to those in power.

Putting more people into prisons or using illegal child labor weakens the ability of the state or the people to fight back, directly making it more profitable.

It's a nasty feedback loop.

Let's take Alabama prison slavery:

They save $56 a day, or $14,560 a year over legal labor, per person.

That's a lot of incentive to put YOU and your children in their prison.

Farmers in Alabama are literally arguing that if they're forced to pay real wages instead of doing slavery, they won't be able to "hire" anyone.

This is from the "Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network" or ASAN, which appears to be a trade organization set up to promote slavery.

https://asanonline.org/how-alabamas-immigration-law-is-crippling-its-farms/