There is only one way to determine what is a fair wage: It is the price on which an employer and employee agree.

So Walmart moves into a rural American town, uses cheap labor, foreign production, and unfair pricing to drive smaller stores out of business. Then the unemployed workers and former business owners, who live in a small town with limited employment, must choose to either work for Walmart at a 40% pay cut or leave town. Now, where in that real life scenario that played out in thousands of towns across America, does the employee have any negotiation leverage?

The answer: none.

Go ahead and tell me that Walmart workers deserve medicare and food stamps, costing American taxpayers $6.2 billion dollars, just so that the Walton Family can have their hundreds of billions.

Our corporate overlords love that you're believing in that lie, and arguing with me on the internet, dividing us apart, just so that they can get richer and richer. Then they get to dictate what you're going to earn, and tell they you that you're going to like it.

Or you can go to your local library, check out and read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, learn how history is repeating itself, then join me in saying Fuck our Corporate Overlords.

Work is actually an exchange of money, for labor. Anybody can make that exchange with anybody else. And when someone accumulates money through this exchange, they can invest it largely how they want.

This statement assumes that money is exchanged fairly in exchange for the value of the labor that was performed. This has not been happening since 1970. There is a gap between the value of what is produced and what is paid for that production, called the Productivity-Pay gap. If I am your boss, and you produce for me a $1 of value in goods or services from your labor, but I only pay you $0.60, then I get to keep the remaining $0.40 for myself as profit. That means that, if I have a sustainable business with 100 full-time employees, earning a median $60K salary, I am, on average, profiting $40 million dollars annually from money I'm not paying my employees.

This is money I can then invest in political lobbying to make sure that minimum wages don't get increased, and that tax shelters remain legal so that I can have zero tax liability. You know, instead of that $40 million dollars going to employees, as well as $8 million going to federal, state, sales, and property taxes.

They rely on many, many others to work with them to make it happen.

Yup, that's exactly my point. The filthy rich become filthy rich because they restrict how much salary goes to their workers, then they extract that wealth from the workers' productivity in order to possess a significant concentration of it themselves.

Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year

Well, there's your problem.

If we look at dollars as tokens of labor, we as a society are allowing an extremely limited number of entities to possess an extremely ridiculous amount of tokens that should instead be possessed by the labor-producers, the people. This extreme concentration of power in the hands of a very few individuals is both an injustice as well as an imbalance. It should have never been allowed to happen, but now that it has happened, the only way to remedy the problem is to seize it and return it to the people, because everyone knows that nobody is going to give up that concentration of wealth/power willingly.

And before anybody cries out, "But that's stealing!", you fail to understand that the money has already been stolen in the first place.

...but why is this headlining on Slashdot?

1) The entire "news" blurb is rooted in a single Substack comment from "Manish Singh", who appears to work for "India Dispatch", which, despite the name's suggestion that it's a news publisher, is as best as I can tell, an independent commentary blog not associated with any major news publication.

2) There are no credited sources of reference from his written piece. He claims his information is from "Goldman Sachs", but Googling sentences from his "quoted material" turn up nothing on Google or Bing except for his posting and other websites that link to it. The only place in what he writes that says "link" is not clickable, as what is posted is not hyperlinked plaintext, but rather a .JPG copy & paste of the supposed Goldman Sachs quote.

3) Given today's age of AI slop, the fact that this "Goldman Sachs" article is posted as a .JPG makes me all that more suspicious that this information was taken from ChatGPT instead of an actual article, especially given that the article reads like ChatGPT.

I would hope that Slashdot editors would do some more due diligence in the future to verify information provided in story submissions before posting content like this to its homepage.

For everyone's information, Kushner is bankrolling the Paramount hostile takeover deal via his private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as additional investment and backings from David Ellison's dad, Larry Ellison, as well as the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Warner Brothers Discovery has a lot of powerful media subsidiaries, most notably CNN and HBO.

I wonder if Kushner's father-in-law might have some vested interest in controlling CNN and HBO?

"Ellison said he’s had “great conversations” with Trump about Paramount’s plan for its proposed news business". Yup, no conflicts of interest there.

If there ever was an economic time to justify the a Mission to Mars, it was the early 80's. National Debt to GDP ratio was at an all-time low, space program was at its peak, and the Space Shuttle program had just begun.

Instead, Reagan decided to cut taxes for the rich.

Now, with a national debt of $38 trillion dollars and China taking over the world, the penultimate thing America can afford right now is a Mission to Mars. (I would have said "the last thing...", but honestly, the last thing America can afford right now is more tax cuts for the rich.)

Just search for "Axis Network Dome Camera" on eBay. There's tons of cheap IP cameras for sale there that'll do exactly what you need them to do, no cloud necessary.

The medical industry already profits greatly from medical testing. Testing earns the industry lots of money; then, patients with positive results receive follow-up treatments, which nets the industry even more money.

Everyone screens for cancer now. Breast cancer. Colorectal cancer. Prostate cancer. The list goes on. (I'm even a cancer survivor myself.) And yet, to this day, studies question whether more testing results in longer life spans. Generally, it does not. Meanwhile, all the testing and treatments and post-surgery therapies reduces one's quality of life, especially the older one gets.

The cited article says it best: "How could it be that many cancer screenings don’t have an impact on overall lifespan? While screenings prevent some deaths from cancer, they don’t prevent all...At the same time, cancer screenings have associated harms such as false positive results, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment (not to mention the financial cost of all these cascade events). It could be that the benefits of screening that some people receive get washed out by the harms that others experience when looking at screening on a population level."

We are already pricing ourselves out of paradise when it comes to medical care, and full-body MRIs are only going to make it worse.

It's a hell of a lot cheaper too. I was spending about $10 / week over a decade ago on new releases at Blockbuster. Now it's about $0 at the library.

Tell them, "I got an invention that'll eliminate half of all the jobs in the world, then my investors get to keep all the money we used to pay them!"

Based on that logic, I'd love to see ChatGPT try to explain to Uncle Sam why they're not responsible if an assassin got instructions for how to successfully kill the president on ChatGPT.

AI = "Amalgamation of Information"

AI just uses probability calculations to amalgamate together an "average" of information on the subject. It's not smart. It doesn't think. It's not self-aware. It just is a digital hamburger grinder that churns out a paste of what gets put into its hopper.

You know this isn't about geothermal...Trump is trying to forge the ring of power.

You oligarchs aren't engineering AI to work for people. You're engineering AI to work for corporate interests. It takes far more than it gives in return. It's taking our jobs. It's taking our electricity. It's taking our wealth. It's taking our creative works. It's taking our data.

And what is it giving in return?

It's giving the executive and corporate leaders at eight companies on our planet a ridiculous amount of wealth. To hell with the dog-and-pony show going on in the foreground.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Search in Slashdot for "COVID19". Nearly every story has hundreds of comments to it. Meanwhile, this story has all of four comments at the time of this posting.

Boys and girls, Tuberculosis has killed over a billion people. COVID19 is only in the single millions right now. The only reason why this article received four comments so far is because it's not affecting the western world where the Slashdot userbase is most prevalent. It's destroying the developing world instead, but I guess nobody here really cares about that.

The world is in desperate need of new Tuberculosis vaccines. If you don't understand why, please watch this Kurzgesagt video on the subject.