BrainWorms

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/208257

From WIRED via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/207749

From US news | The Guardian via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46573462

This was a piece from user thehomelessr0mantic on reddit found here. I thought it needed to be shared. I did not take the time to copy over his source links, but you can find them on his post.

The Great Heist: How Employers Have Stolen Over $50 Trillion From Workers Since 1975

The largest theft in American history isn’t happening in banks or jewelry stores. It’s happening in offices, factories, restaurants, and construction sites across the country, where employers have systematically stolen over $50 trillion from workers since 1975. This isn’t hyperbole — it’s the documented result of decades of wage suppression, productivity theft, and the deliberate transfer of wealth from workers to corporate owners.

The $50 Trillion Theft: Breaking Down the Numbers

The scale of this theft becomes clear when examining multiple forms of wage suppression that have operated simultaneously for nearly five decades:

The Productivity-Wage Gap: $2.2 Trillion Stolen Annually

The most dramatic evidence comes from the productivity-wage gap documented by the Economic Policy Institute. From 1979 to 2021, worker productivity grew by 64.6% while hourly compensation grew by only 17.3%. This means workers are producing nearly twice as much value per hour as they did in 1979, but seeing almost none of that increase in their paychecks.

If wages had kept pace with productivity, the average worker would earn approximately $42 per hour today instead of around $23. The Economic Policy Institute estimates this gap costs workers $2.2 trillion per year in lost wages. Cumulatively since 1975, this amounts to well over $50 trillion in stolen productivity gains.

Labor’s Shrinking Share: Trillions Redistributed to Capital

Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveal another dimension of this theft. Labor’s share of national income has declined from approximately 63% in the mid-20th century to just 56% today, while corporate profits have soared. This 7-percentage-point shift in a multi-trillion-dollar economy represents trillions of dollars redirected from workers’ paychecks to corporate shareholders and executives.

The RAND Corporation’s Smoking Gun

A 2020 RAND Corporation study provided perhaps the most damning evidence of systematic wealth theft. Researchers found that if income growth since 1975 had been as equitable as in previous decades, the median full-time worker would earn approximately $92,000 annually instead of around $50,000. The cumulative gap for all workers exceeds $50 trillion in suppressed wages.

Direct Wage Theft: The Tip of the Iceberg

While the productivity-wage gap represents the largest component of theft, direct wage theft — employers literally stealing wages already earned — adds billions more to the total. This includes:

$15 billion stolen annually through minimum wage violations, unpaid overtime, off-the-clock work, and tip theft. At least 4 million workers are illegally underpaid each year, losing an average of $3,000-$3,500 annually.

In Los Angeles fast food restaurants alone, 1 in 4 workers are illegally paid below minimum wage, costing each victim an average of $3,500 annually. In Western New York, 1,900 employers withheld $17.1 million from 23,613 workers over a single decade.

$50+ billion in total wage theft annually when including all forms of wage violations, according to Economic Policy Institute estimates. This direct theft adds over $2 trillion to the cumulative total since 1975.

The Mechanisms of Theft

This massive wealth transfer didn’t happen by accident. It resulted from deliberate policy choices and corporate strategies:

Union Busting and Wage Suppression

Research from Harvard and the University of Washington shows that declining unionization accounts for one-third of the rise in wage inequality. Union membership fell from 35% in the 1950s to just 10% today, eliminating workers’ primary tool for capturing productivity gains.

Corporate Profit Maximization

Corporate profits as a share of GDP have doubled since the 1970s while worker wages stagnated. Companies that once shared productivity gains with workers through higher wages now capture those gains entirely as profits for shareholders and executives.

Regulatory Capture and Weak Enforcement

Labor investigator staffing has hit a 52-year low, with just 611 investigators for 165 million workers — one investigator per 278,000 workers. This deliberate understaffing ensures that wage theft goes unpunished and employers face minimal consequences for violations.

The Real-World Impact

This isn’t just an abstract economic debate — it’s about millions of families struggling to survive while corporate profits soar:

Housing Crisis: If wages had kept pace with productivity, median workers would earn $84,000 annually instead of $42,000, making housing affordable for millions more families.
Healthcare Bankruptcy: The $42,000 in annual income stolen from the median worker would cover health insurance premiums and medical expenses for most families.
Education Debt: Workers losing $3,000-$3,500 annually to direct wage theft could pay for college tuition or vocational training instead of going into debt.
Retirement Security: The $50 trillion stolen from workers since 1975 would have provided retirement security for an entire generation.

The Enforcement Charade

The current enforcement system is designed to enable theft, not prevent it. While property crimes worth millions receive massive law enforcement attention, wage theft worth tens of billions goes largely ignored:

Understaffed Agencies: Some states have just one investigator for every 500,000 workers; four states have no investigators based in-state.
Weak Penalties: Employers often face penalties less than what they saved by stealing wages, making theft profitable.
Retaliation: Up to 98% of low-wage workers subject to forced arbitration never pursue stolen wages, knowing they’ll face job loss and legal costs they can’t afford.
Minimal Recovery: Only $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered between 2021–2023, representing less than 1% of the estimated $150+ billion stolen during that period.

Corporate Criminals

Major corporations appear repeatedly on wage violation lists, treating theft as a business strategy:

AT&T: 34 different wage and hour violations totaling $140 million in penalties since 2000
Walmart: Hundreds of millions in wage theft settlements
Amazon: Systematic wage theft affecting hundreds of thousands of workers

For these companies, wage theft penalties are simply a cost of doing business — a small price to pay for stealing billions from workers.

The Bigger Picture: Class Warfare

The $50 trillion theft represents the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history. It’s not a bug in the system — it’s a feature. Corporate America has successfully:

Decoupled wages from productivity through union busting and political influence
Captured regulatory agencies to ensure minimal enforcement
Shifted national income from workers to capital owners
Normalized wage theft as acceptable business practice

This systematic theft has created unprecedented inequality, with the top 1% capturing nearly all productivity gains while working families struggle with stagnant wages despite producing more value than ever.

Reclaiming What Was Stolen

The $50 trillion theft isn’t inevitable — it’s the result of policy choices that can be reversed:

Strengthen Labor Enforcement: Hire thousands of investigators, impose criminal penalties for wage theft, and protect workers who report violations.

Restore Collective Bargaining: Make union organizing easier and require employers to negotiate in good faith.

Link Wages to Productivity: Implement policies ensuring workers share in the value they create.

Criminal Penalties: Treat wage theft like the grand larceny it is, with prison sentences for repeat offenders.

Wealth Redistribution: Use progressive taxation to reclaim some of the stolen wealth and invest in public services that benefit workers. ** The Crime of the Century**

The theft of $50 trillion from American workers since 1975 represents the largest property crime in world history. It has impoverished millions, destroyed communities, and created a feudal economy where workers produce enormous wealth but receive subsistence wages.

This isn’t a natural economic phenomenon — it’s organized theft enabled by corrupt politicians, captured regulators, and a legal system that prioritizes corporate profits over worker rights.

The evidence is overwhelming: productivity gains that should have gone to workers have been systematically stolen by employers for nearly five decades.

The time for polite economic debate is over. American workers have been robbed of $50 trillion, and it’s time to treat this theft with the seriousness it deserves.

Nothing less than a complete restructuring of economic power will restore what has been stolen and prevent future theft on this scale.

Data sources: Economic Policy Institute, RAND Corporation, Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Harvard University, University of Washington, and numerous academic studies documenting the systematic theft of worker productivity and wages since 1975.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/205556

From US news | The Guardian via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/1378501

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/66544085

Text to avoid paywall

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”

For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.

An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.

Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.

“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.

“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”

“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”

“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”

The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31588003

On my first day, the second official day of the mission, we were overrun; it was pure chaos. At the aid site’s entrance gates, we had people waiting in five lanes separated by metal fencing. One lane was strictly for women and children. The other four were all men, and they were letting people in, five, 10, 20 at a time – whatever we could handle. It was not organized, and people were getting smushed and trampled. Eventually, there were so many people in the lanes that the gates burst.

We fell back, letting people get the aid. They were never aggressive towards us. They were only trying to get aid – aid, by the way, that consisted of flour, rice, lentils, tea bags, and noodles; things that need water. They don’t have any water. And we’re not giving out water.

We soon had to fall back again, to a second perimeter. At that point, some personnel started firing warning shots in the air. I was later told that the Israeli military needed to clear those people out because they were going to come through. They soon showed up with tanks, as some sort of security presence, but we had pushed people out by then.

This idea that the Israeli military isn't involved is bullshit. They're very much involved. They have offices in our compounds. We share our radio communications with them. The higher-ups claim the Israeli military is not involved, but it feels like they’re the man behind the curtain. Sure, they’re not on-site with us, but their snipers and tanks are just hundreds of meters away. You can hear them shooting all day.ere.

People sometimes have to travel miles to get to the sites – and that means through Israeli-controlled areas. Any excuse the military can come up with to say someone is a threat, they’ll take. There’s not really any international media in these areas, and the West doesn’t really want to believe the Palestinian media, so you get to this point where the truth itself is murky. All the while, all I’ve heard all day is Israeli tanks, machine guns, snipers, and bombs.

But never any fire from the opposite direction.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31425473

The British government privately threatened to defund and withdraw from the International Criminal Court if it issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, Middle East Eye can reveal.

David Cameron, then foreign secretary in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, made the threat in April 2024 in a heated phone call with Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the court.

Cameron told Khan that applying for warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant would be “like dropping a hydrogen bomb”.

Cameron said it was one thing to investigate and prosecute Russia for a “war of aggression” on Ukraine, but quite another to prosecute Israel when it was “defending itself from the attacks of 7 October”.

He claimed the warrants would have “profound implications” in Britain and within his own Conservative Party. Cameron then said that if the ICC issued warrants for Israeli leaders, the UK would “defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute”.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/202270

A memorial for a victim of gun violence, Rey Dorantes, on what would have been his 15th birthday, in January 2013 in Chicago.

From NYT > Top Stories via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30976486

The Base is emerging from shadows and ramping up its ranks as White House turns blind eye to the far right

An international neo-Nazi terrorist organization is boldly continuing to build in the US and planning a new paramilitary training event without fear of local authorities or the FBI, which once dismantled it in a nationwide effort.

The Base, founded in 2018 by a former Pentagon contractor living in Russia and now suspected of Kremlin-sponsored espionage, once boasted close to 50 stateside members before the bureau made more than a dozen arrests in a years-long counter-terrorism operation.

But since the presidential election campaign last year and what many then believed to be a surefire victory for Donald Trump, the Base saw an opportunity in a potential administration uninterested in policing white supremacy and went about ramping up its ranks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45863466

For years, a powerful ‘Big Ag’ trade group served up information on activists to the FBI. Records reveal a decade-long effort to see the animal rights movement labeled a “bioterrorism” threat.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/20220922

As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.

Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn’t feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first.

“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”

“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5013999

Don't worry, Steiner will make sure it won't pass in the Senate.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/38551804

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino had said earlier Thursday that the strike was illegal and included some 5,000 workers.

“Unfortunately, following the unjustified abandonment of work at our plantations and operations centers since April 28 and continuing today, (the company) has proceeded with the termination of all of our daily workers,” the company said in a statement. It said the company had suffered losses of at least $75 million.

Protests marches and occasional roadblocks have stretched from one end of the country to the other as teachers, construction workers and other unions expressed their rejection to changes the government said were necessary to keep the social security system solvent.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30114584

Archived at https://archive.is/9z4kT

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22456117

The world’s biggest polluters are also the most protected from the environmental harm they helped create, a new study finds.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• EcoWatch article
• research cited