Amazon: We can't make money if our workers get bathroom breaks

The secret ingredient is ~~crime~~ legislative, 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
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?
- https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.

Lemmy: we can't make money lol

HP: We can't make money if we don't help apartheid an entire nation

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.
- 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.

easy solution: stop making money

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.

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.
- I was on Nextdoor for a little while until I realized it was literally nothing but griping. Even the stuff that has nothing to do with Karen racist bullshit is just griping, mostly about other people's properties and how they are offensively not arranged in whatever way the complainer wants them to be.

Then I can't be assed to use Amazon.

Is sampling and analyzing publicly available data and not storing it considered stealing?

I'm not defending anyone here, but that's just weird. It's also weird to take a meme seriously, but w/e.

Public data still have licenses. Eg, some open source licences force you to open source the software you created using them, something OpenAI doesn't do.
- If you're using it as you found it, then yeah. But if I take derived data from it like word count and word frequency, it's not exactly the same thing and we call that statistics. Now if I draw associations of how often certain words appear together, and then compound that with millions of other sources to create a map of related words and concepts, I'm no longer using the data as you described because I'm doing something entirely different with it. What LLMs do is generates new information from its underlying sources.
You can't use someone's work for whatever you want just because it's publicly accessible.
- I'm actually still not sure how I feel about this.
  I can use books to learn a new language. AI can use texts to learn their kind of language in a sense.
  I'm not sure where the limit is or should be though.
- Hasn't web scraping been done for like forever, though? How is this any different? You get publicly accessible information and you derive data from it. You're literally not stealing anything or storing it as-is.
It has to be stored in some form for the AI to "learn" from and remember it, and a lot of the debate is around whether AI is actually able to learn, or if it can only really blindly combine 1:1 copies of elements into something derivative.
There's also the debate of whether what humans learn and produce based on influence can be compared to AI, but humans aren't able to consume millions of records in seconds like AI.
- They're not storing the original data and OpenAI even state so themselves. LLMs compound derived associations between words and concepts from whatever it analyzes, which is further modified by all the other sources it analyzes and that's what gets stored during training. It doesn't matter if it's a few sources or a million sources, it's not storing any of it as-is. It's very much like how we process information ourselves for the length of our entire lives by making generalizations. We don't memorize everything precisely besides the foundational blocks of language, but our neurons do fire in a certain pattern when given a trigger. How is that stealing?