lingo.lol is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A place for linguists, philologists, and other lovers of languages.

Server stats:

59
active users

#exploitation

2 posts2 participants0 posts today

#Capitalism causes #inflation. Period. Nothing else.

The simple process of #trade, repeated ad nauseum, is all that is required to create inflation. Inflation is a baked-in consequence of capitalism. Every bit of profit that one transaction creates for the "winner" necessitates another winning transaction for the loser of the first... and so on. Inflation is continual, progressive, and inevitable: a consequence of non-stop one-upmanship and mutual #exploitation.

Don't let any jackass indoctrinated economist convince you otherwise. This #propaganda of the One Percent needs to end.

We [Karen Hao and Andrea Paola Hernández] found through a spreadsheet the company [Scale AI] left public that … workers who started with earnings of forty dollars a week were soon making less than six dollars or nothing at all. …the company…reverted to its standard operations, doling out tasks in a piecemeal fashion with no standard or guaranteed hours.
—Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
#ScaleAI #work #worker #exploitation

Continued thread

It is poor, in the Global South, with a government hungry for foreign investment from richer countries. All of these are a part of Kenya’s legacy of colonialism, which has left it without well-developed institutions to protect its citizens from exploitation and often in the throes of economic crisis, both of which make circumstances ripe for overseas companies to find an immiserated pool of labor that will do piecework under almost any conditions.
—Karen Hao, Empire of AI
#kenya #exploitation

It’s no coincidence that Kenya became home to what would ultimately turn into one of the most exploitative forms of labor that went into the creation of ChatGPT. Kenya was among the top destinations that Silicon Valley had been outsourcing its dirtiest work to for years.
—Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
#chatgpt #openai #kenya #work #exploitation

”World War II created another shortage of laborers, and to regularize the system of migrant labor, the U.S. government in 1942 started a guest worker policy called the Bracero Program… The program was supposed to guarantee that migrant workers were well treated and adequately paid and housed. But it didn’t work out that way. Employers hired illegal as well as legal workers and treated them poorly.”
—Heather Cox Richardson, July 14, 2025
heathercoxrichardson.substack.
#work #worker #exploitation

Letters from an American · July 14, 2025By Heather Cox Richardson

Today in Labor History July 14, 1791: Birmingham Riots against religious dissenters, the chemist and liberal political theorist Joseph Priestley, and supporters of the French Revolution. Priestly discovered oxygen and invented carbonated water. Just prior to the riots, he tried to form a society in support of universal suffrage. However, he had also published a pamphlet describing how to extract the most work out of the poor for the smallest investment. He also held religious ideas that conflicted with the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church. Throughout the 18th century, Birmingham was notorious for Church-and-King riots, stoked by the ruling elite. In 1751 and 1759, mobs attacked Quakers and Methodists. In 1780, there were the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. One contemporary described the Birmingham rabble as the "bunting, beggarly, brass-making, brazen-faced, brazen-hearted, blackguard, bustling, booby Birmingham mob."

Continued thread

We must remove the leeches, harvesting us perpetually for our wealth, resources, labor, and power. The businesses where we labor to produce wealth for ourselves and our fellow human beings have been hijacked and turned into exploitation mechanisms. Businesses should be owned by the communities they serve, not to billionaires milking us like cattle.

#exploitation
#capitalism
#business

Continued thread

We must close the leak, the means by which this exploitation began: private capital investment. There are other ways to have a free market economy. There's nothing magical about capitalism. The idea that capitalism is the only way to make it all work is propaganda from those who benefit from that system -- the ones who exploit us and steal from us.

#FreeMarket
#capital
#capitalism
#exploitation

Yet another example of ‘it’s the funding model, kids’.

Wherever there are uncapped government #subsidies to private businesses the opportunities for profit are huge. Industries shape themselves around maximising throughput / turnover & profit.

Where universities are not funded adequately to perform their functions of offering education & research, the role of highly paid executives is to implement systems that bring in maximum income - often by rorting uncapped programs & screwing the people those programs are meant to serve - in order to create funding streams to keep basic services afloat. Staff are screwed. Students are screwed. Vice Chancellors & aspiring leaders are paid astronomical sums to abandon their ethics.

Add to this a visa system that invites those who can pay to take endless courses as a path to permanent residence & we have a perfect storm.

This is a failure of governance.

We see you #AusPol #UniversityFunding #StudentVisas #exploitation #profit #ItsTheFundingModel

abc.net.au/news/2025-07-07/fas

ABC News · Fast-tracked childcare courses are putting Australian children at risk, insiders warnBy Adele Ferguson