Our court will protect the rich interests of Bayer, because they only work for the rich. Bayer doesn't want to have to fight 50 potential lawsuits in 50 states; that's too many election fund donations they'd have to make. Much cheaper to just pay off the feds to make the ruling for everyone.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Well, thank you for the discussion. It has been a long, long time since I ever had one like this before on Slashdot. I wasn't expecting this conversation to continue well past the story expired past the front page, especially as this site slowly fades into obscurity.

I can clearly hear through your words that your worldview is a product of your financial success, and you attribute that success to hard work, fortitude, and tenacity. I am happy for you.

But the fault in your arguments is that you believe that everyone else in this country has the same opportunity for success. That is not the case. I've tried to convince you otherwise with numerous links and citations, but you dismiss each source as biased without reviewing the evidence within. Your "System 1" brain, as Daniel Kahneman would put it, is quickly dismissing information that does not align with your present worldview.

But that is OK, because I've been there too.

Having worked in public schools for 20 years now, the vast majority of school board members just went along with rubber-stamping about 99.9% of everything that was recommended by school officials. They had practically no reason to not trust what was happening in their school. Also, a majority of board members I've worked with didn't have college degrees, so I think some of the materials presented to them might have felt a little over their heads in the first place.

What's really concerning is that, when it comes to policy, at least in our state of Minnesota, there's a Minnesota School Board Association that has actual lawyers that monitor state statutes and craft template policies for school districts to use. Most adopt them without any modifications, because why argue with the lawyers that do this work professionally?

I guess a more accurate title to this paper should be "Usurpation of the School Boardroom".

The context remains the same; greed is greed the world over. And greed, left unchecked, can never, ever, be satisfied with what it has; it only wants more.

But you're fooling yourself if you think that corruption is limited to countries without rule of law. For example, the Philippines has a constitution; it has rule of law; but it is a very corrupt country. And you're truly fooling yourself if you think corruption doesn't exist in the United States; they just have a different way of facilitating it. For example, politicians get bought out every day by corporations that "donate" to political action committees in exchange for the passage of legislation favorable to their business operations. And this current administration isn't making any attempt to hide the corruption; before our very eyes, Venezuela's president was kidnapped and replaced with a leader more favorable to providing the United States with exclusive oil contracts. Trump himself said that he didn't notify Congress about the operation, but he did notify oil companies. And you know they didn't get that information for free.

In the US, we do exploit child labor. We've just outsourced it to other countries, to give corporations plausible deniability that they have no knowledge of the exploitation, despite how well known it is. If you're buying anything with a Lithium Ion battery, then you, in America, are paying for cobalt mined by children in the Congo. If you're buying any chocolate, then you, in America, are paying for chocolate harvested in the coastal West Africa region picked by children. And if you really want to enlighten yourself, feel free to look through the entire list our government has on goods we buy produced by child labor here.

And I'm trying very hard to tell you, many people don't have the choice you think they do. You naively believe that everyone working fast food is a teenager finding a starting job? Have you even been to a McDonalds in the last ten years? Many, many fast food workers are working double-shifts or multiple jobs just to make ends meet. But don't just take my word for it. Take your pick of good reporting that has documented the struggles of real people who are stuck, and listen to their reasons as to why it hasn't worked for them to escape where they're stuck.

I'm glad we have something to agree about with the Farm Bill. But don't just throw the baby out with the bath water on it. A lot of it is necessary to provide food stability for the country. But there is a lot of pork and waste that has become baked into the bill, and a lot of both rural and corporate America that is now trapped in dependency on its government welfare. Which means that, if you do throw the baby out with the bath water, it would so greatly disrupt food production in this country, it would lead to drastic food shortages and upheaval.

You are displaying a great example of availability bias, where you're using immediate examples of recent events to quickly reinforce your existing stereotype. Yes, we have had two significant commercial airline accidents in the United States this year, the Potomac Mid-Air Collision and UPS 2976. But these are outliers in an otherwise continual trend downwards for accidents and fatalities as a whole in the commercial airline industry. You cannot deny these statistics. And we can use these accidents and learn from them, which pushes that trend-line further and further down each year.

Commercial airplane travel is incredibly safe, and it continues to get safer, assuming no current president decides to mess with air traffic controllers, regulations, and enforcement.

...while we ignore our safety and maintenance needs on the planes

I vehemently disagree. Airplanes continue to be the safest way to travel, and airlines are mandated to follow maintenance schedules routinely. Because insurance. If airlines (at least in the US and EU) don't follow standard safety and maintenance procedures with their aircraft, then they have an accident resulting from that, the FAA and NTSB will discover the negligence, and then ohhhh boyyyy, there'll be hell to pay.

Guess someone took a page out of the "Al's Glass" playbook.

What is my view? That in our current world trending towards further economic de-regulation, the disadvantaged are exploited by the advantaged, leading to a ever-widening gap between the advantaged and the exploited. I take umbrage with this, because I had the experience of being an exploiter in my past, but later in life, I directly witnessed and was moved by the affects of exploitation on the exploited.

You are myopic in your worldview of economics. It's very easy to perceive the world can work for everyone just as it has worked for you. You have succeeded in life, but you fail to perceive that your success cannot be duplicated by the population at large. And, believe it or not, the choices you make as a consumer are actively keeping lots of people throughout the world economically challenged.

For example, next time you bite into a chocolate candy, don't forget that child labor in Africa made that bar of chocolate affordable. Say all you want about "the price on which an employer and employee agree." The fact is, there are poor people in Africa that sell their children to cacao farmers to harvest cacao for chocolate producers, because existing economic inequality get taken advantage of to maximize profit. You could choose to pay more for a chocolate bar that guarantees that it wasn't produced using child labor, but hardly anybody does, because chocolate.

I cite this example to highlight that, in a world of pure capitalism, there are some winners, but there are lots of losers. Without strong regulations, capitalists will exploit the losers, who are just another resource to be leveraged to maximize profits. This only stands to accelerate with how A.I. is being leveraged to replace workers, which many capitalists see as another economic opportunity to enrich the already rich and powerful. Meanwhile, I see it as further harm to the average individual who just seeks to pursue happiness. Hard to accomplish that without a job that pays a sustainable wage.

We all depend on one another to live. I assume you're not growing your own food, or building your own home, or programming your own cell phone; I assume you aren't paving your own roads, or generating your own electricity, or teaching your own children; I assume you aren't forging your own steel, or drilling your own oil, or defending your own soil. Everything you depend on to make your own life livable is the actual product of the labors of a world around you. Should each contributor not receive appropriate compensation so that their lives are just as livable as your own? Instead, the world we presently live in allows for someone to be paid $0.20 / hour to pick coffee, someone else to be paid $7.75 / hour to sell it, someone else to be paid $30 / hour to buy it, and yet someone else $5,000 / hour to profit off of it. How do you justify this inequality, when every individual is of the same flesh and blood? I don't. In fact, I call it some real fucked up shit.

(By the way, we do need to and actively support farming communities. It's called the U.S. Farm Bill, and it pumps billions of dollars into the farming industry annually. Because every president realizes that food shortages are a political bombshell that can cause nationwide upheaval if the government doesn't do everything within its power to minimize food shortages.)

You speak as if everyone has the choice to move to a major metro area. But as long as there are natural resources in rural areas, whether it be farm fields or oil fields or what have you, that will induce people that move there to harvest the resources, which induces communities, which induces jobs. And since I assume you need to eat, we need to support the farming communities. And since I assume you drive to work, we need to support the oil communities. (Sure, you might drive electric, but the argument still stands nonetheless.) These people may become rooted in these communities, with jobs, with families, with mortgages. Sure, you can always break free of these roots, but these ties still impede economic mobility.

You also speak as if everyone has economic opportunities in a major metro area. They often do not. Home prices there are unaffordable, and rent is so expensive in most areas that it's pricing people out of urban paradise. Additionally, the cost to move to these communities, plus the cost to put down a deposit on an apartment or house, is nearly economically impossible for a lot of them.

I congratulate you that you have found economic success, and have the means to move to a new community to find it. But not everyone has that mobility.

And I disagree that the only choices people have for their economies are either U.S. Capitalism or Soviet Communism. That is a false dichotomy.

I used to think as you did, decades ago. But the passage of time brought me to witness people in communities suffer who do not have the means to find success, and successful opportunities don't often come their way. I'm not saying I expect everyone to live rich. What I have been saying is that the rich don't have to keep mining wealth from everyone else just to make themselves even richer. And if you don't see that happening right now with your own eyes, then I guess there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. Enjoy your financial success, at least while you still have it.

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.)