The secret ingredient is
crimelegislative, judicial, and regulatory capture.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
Didn’t drink a verification can? Automatically straight to Jail
Breathed the fresh air that is exclusive to the rich? Do not resist the jail
I used my phone on Netflix and they acted like I’m a fucking criminal. Had to prove that it’s my phone. They’re like “omg you used a different WiFi network than your TV!” Which actually isn’t true at all.
Movie web doesn’t do that when I go to watch Netflix shows for free, just saying
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.
Because a corporation is just a group of people and punishing the corporation and calling it a day would allow those people actually responsible to get away with it.
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
How is there a special category of theft that isn’t criminal?
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.
They originally paid Nigerians a pittance to look at horrific material all day to weed it out of the training and gave them very little in terms of mental health treatment for them.
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.
I find people shitting on neurallink a little silly. Animals die in animal trials, and if the device was the direct cause for them dying the device would not have been approved to move on to human trials. Or it was the device causing issues, the issues have since been resolved, because that’s what animal trials are for if you weren’t aware.
Bottom line is if the device is successful as they want it to be, it’ll be fantastic for people with crippling disabilities. Shit on musk all you want for the shity things he directly does and says, but I find it stupid and childish how everyone trashes everything he has an ounce of attachment too.
Same thing with SpaceX, they are the most revolutionary company for space travel in the past 50 years and are doing amazing things to advance human space flight capabilities, but people just want to shit on them because of musk.
But that’s just like my opinion man
Animal trials are important in medicine and science as a whole, and casualties happen. We have ethics standard to minimize suffering and loss. Especially when doing primate trials. They are generally treated as humans would be in an emergency experimental procedures. If you lose a few, it’s acceptable, so long as suffering was suppressed, and all reasonable avenues to save the animal were explored. Also, primates are hella expensive, so you generally can’t afford to kill them on a whim.
No, animal trials aren’t the problem. It’s that the company basically disregarded these practices. Last I heard (and this was last year), they burned through 15+ primates out of 23 test subjects. These creatures suffered fungal and bacterial infection, were left to tug at the implant leads causing damage to their tissue and the device, had the device fail during implantation and had broken pieces lodged in the primate brain for over a week before deciding to euthanize. Absolute carelessness, and disrespect for these poor creatures.
These are all very fair complaints
Bottom line is if the device is successful as they want it to be
That’s exactly the problem. The animal trials didn’t show any positive results. Those apes died for nothing. The product doesn’t fucking work.
The product obviously works, do you all think the FDA would let them put a device into a human that only killed the animals and showed no positive results? This device is already in it’s first human subject, the FDA isn’t as lax as you seem to think.
Maybe you’re right and the first human subject will die though, I guess we will have to wait and see. Hopefully you’re wrong or that sucks for them.
The product obviously works, do you all think the FDA would let them put a device into a human that only killed the animals and showed no positive results?
Yes. The FDA can be bought just like all other government agencies. We are living in a late stage capitalist hellscape and Elon is one of the richest people on the planet. You need to realize that we don’t live in a just world. Bad things often do happen to good people, and bad people often get away Scot free. Mark my words: the first test subject will die, and Elon will refuse to admit that there is anything wrong with his product and blame the victim.
Lol, okay well yes the first subject definitely will die someday. Only time will tell what causes their death. Although brain implants of a similar but significantly more invasive type already exist in humans, I actually think this will be a safer product once flushed out compared to what’s already available. I really think you all are over blowing the corruption level of the FDA, no I don’t think they approved a device for testing that they thought would likely kill the first human patients.
Also, you know who hates musk as much as you guys? Joe Biden, who also appointed the current head of the FDA. They aren’t that corrupt and especially not for any of elons companies.
I’ll check back in a few years if I remember to say I’m right if the persons not dead, yes I am that petty. Feel free to do the same to me if they die, although bragging about that is a bit more grim.
Hey moron, just wanted to to drop in and link you this update. He’s definitely not dead, and seems to be doing really well with his new brain control powers. https://x.com/neuralink/status/1770563939413496146?s=20
Gwynne Shotwell needs far far more recognition regarding the success of SpaceX. Musk could do the song and dance and get the attention but without her they’d just be making really expensive tubes.
I don’t know how much she was involved in ruthlessly squeezing every once of brilliance from the engineering team, and there’s the whole Ukraine drone thing, but it wasn’t musk that landed those rockets.
I’m well aware and that’s why I have the opinion I stated above, the engineers at these companies are working on incredible things. These engineers are the modern day equivalent of magicians, it’s magical and humanity should be cheering them on.
Oh yeah i understood ya, i was backing up what you were saying and kinda just wanted to give Shotwell a shout-out for anyone that doesn’t know about her role there. :)
The problem I have with implanting tech in your brain is support lifecycles? What happens when some vendor refuses to update a firmware blob and now you are faced with surgery to upgrade? Not a hypothetical, this has already happened. Relevant Link
Right, that’s a big risk. I guess the hope would be that once a company is successful enough they will get to the “too big to fail” stage. Or there is some kind of legislation on what a company has to do to support old customers if they stop operating
You deserve to be shat on given you posted this absolutely shitty misinformation while using it as evidence that you are correct. Go fuck yourself, the neuralink is being developed in an absolutely fucking barbaric setting.
The SpaceX stuff is correct, just you deserve to test a beta neuralink since you seem to like them so much.
If you think three wires sending an electrical current through your mid brain is going to work for anything other than seizures or scientific curiosity, at least in this millennium, I’m not surprised you think it’s successful.
Lemmy: we can’t make money lol
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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.
Sweden must be under constant attack by forgien governments that want to destabilize the country though. I know nothing about the politics of Sweden. Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?
I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.
Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?
I’m sincerely asking because it seems so bizarre to me that there are still functioning countries like that after all this globalization of wealth and greed.
Are the media companies run by propaganda groups like they are in most other countries?
Kind of. We have state media in the form of SVT (Sveriges Television) and SR (Sveriges Radio), and through lobbying they’ve been kind of hamstrung in the sense that they’re not allowed to compete with private media. In reality this means that articles from SVT tend to be rather terse. They’re good, but they never offer much in the way of details. On the other hand I feel like they’re typically very objective. There are never really opinions included in things.
Pretty much all publications have a political affiliation though, and that tends to colour headlines and such. It’s something to be aware of.
Then there are obviously smaller propaganda outlets. Samtiden for example is owned by the party Sverigedemokraterna and is highly influenced by their neo-nazi politics.
I’d be curious how education works as well, most free economies can be broken by attacking education… it seems like there must be a ton of pressure to not have working examples of this kind of regulated capitalism in the world.
Education is pretty regulated. Homeschooling like in the U.S. just isn’t a thing here. All children have a thing called “skolplikt” (duty to attend school), and while there are private schools, recently they’ve all fallen under really heavy scrutiny for not living up to the standards they’re expected to hold.
Private schools are publicly funded. I’m not 100% sure how all this works, but I believe each child has a certain sum tied to them, so if a child decides to attend private school, that sum goes to the private school. There’s likely also grants and such for schools, but school isn’t really something that’s on my mind a lot.
Private schools are more about different forms of education, like Waldorf or Montessori. There are also religious private schools. As far as I know, schools don’t charge individuals for attendance, so going to a private school isn’t really something prestigious here.
Schools are also expected to feed kids. Boggled my mind first time I heard of a kid having “school lunch debt”, the notion strikes me as ridiculous. Schools are meant to be safe spaces for learning and growth.
Is everyone taught to hate foreign workers that are lazy and also steal all the jobs?
Nah. This strikes me as the kind of thing your racist old grandpa might say.
That’s not to say that people don’t shit on foreign workers. I know Eastern Europeans aren’t very highly regarded among truckers, but I’ve also heard that they tend to be really incompetent and outright dangerous, not obeying traffic laws and whatnot, so I expect that at least some of the animosity is deserved.
It’s not all perfect though. I belive a union recently negotiated that ready personnel (so like, firefighters, ambulance, life rescue personnel etc.) got a rule through for forced downtime. Which sounds great in theory, but it effectively screws over smaller departments (like in my town) where they have a very small staff pool, and rely on people being on-call. Most of the time nothing comes from being on-call, but with forced rest they’d need to actually schedule people. I’m not 100% sure how it works, but the workers were not happy and several threatened to quit. In my town they requested an exemption from these rules, and they got it through.
It seems like it’s a rule that’s really good for larger towns and cities, but in a small town like mine it just makes things harder.
Sweden is also by no means a perfect country. There are so many areas we could improve on. The housing market (like everywhere) is pretty rubbish. We have a lot of immigrants, but the integration efforts are incredibly half-arsed. We’re very digital, and you basically need a BankID to operate anything digitally here. For that you need to be registered at the tax office, and getting registered there can require you to hop through a bunch of hoops. It took my roomie almost 4 years to get properly registered an receive a social security ID.
There’s also barely anything that’s private information. If you knew my name, you could find out so much about me. How many vehicles I own, where I live, the size of my apartment, who my employer is, what I make, if I’ve been involved in any legal cases, if I’m politically engaged, if I own property, if so what, where, and how much it’s worth, if I have a car, then the make, colour, last time it was checked. My phone number (if that’s public, mine thankfully isn’t), my social security ID, etc. etc.
I heard of a case where a guy found out that he was legally declared dead when a letter arrived telling him so. Someone had basically signed a death certificate with his details, then they’d signed it as a doctor or whatever that didn’t exist, and submitted it to the right place. You’d think there’d be more checks and balances in place, but nope. It took the guy ages to get stuff at least partially sorted out, because shockingly there aren’t any procedures in places for when people magically stop being dead.
We also paid out social security to the defense minister of Iraq, so our systems definitely do get abused. The sad part being that when they restrict things and make these systems more conservative, people that really do need them end up getting hurt.
Wow thanks for the indepth response! I really appreciate the time you spent ☺️
Right? I gotta upvote for how thorough this post was, and it was interesting on top of that!
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.
Innovation sometimes comes from government investment which is taxpayer funded but then the profits are kept private.
easy solution: stop making money
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All companies: We can’t make money unless we make you subscribe to everything.
apple: we can’t make money without an overpriced ecosystem
You mean without? And Apple is also in the Monopoly camp too.
yes
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.
