They just need better PR for Big Brother. One of China's state-owned surveillance companies is way ahead at this. "Hikvision - welcoming you to a safer world".
The ads are terrifying, mainly because it shows the company has enough money to waste this much on ad production. It also makes me wonder how much the problem in China is top-down vs "middle-out". It seems that the CCP wages a brilliant kind of information warfare:
The ads build up an image around the creation of this technology as an equalizer and solution to middle and lower-class problems. The ad for face recognition, for example, is factored around making the lives of factory and service workers easier. By doing this, they gain buy-in from all social classes. The little guy lives a better life, the middle class lives in a secure and fair society, and the governing class can ensure everything runs smoothly.
I've always thought of China's government as a rather Orwellian top-down state of control. I've realized lately that their propaganda is sophisticated enough to make their populous believe it without coercion. What westerners might see as Orwellian is to them an innovation which helps the working class.
Hikvision are an interesting company with performant products. You can view CCTV as having had 3 stages. Stage 1 - the model is like a TV studio - closed circuit TV, analog cables, control rooms, monitor banks (some setups are still like this). Stage 2 - cameras are network devices - Axis the big European security camera co started life as a networked printer company, not a coincidence. Stage 3 - connectivity is all IP, but the focus is the combined sensing effect of everything on the network and the smarts to make sense of it all. Some projects have tried to do this as middleware, but much easier if you provide the whole solution like Hik. Stage 4 is combined 'pattern of life' analysis from external and on-person surveillance, maybe this comes from Google/Apple, maybe from Hik/Huawei etc. The game is afoot
About the first one. This seems like an unavoidable future, there's no denying that it's easier if all you have to do is stand in front of a camera compared to using a card/badge. Easy always seems to win.
To be honest, I would buy Hikvision because:
1. Their stuff must be good because China is using it
2. Where I am using it, the usage for China is limited
There are Chinese brands out there I would trust less...
I did notice the surveillance options, but the software tells me the logic is in the cameras and it those dont support it.
They're also using Wago 222[0] style lever nuts, which are not common in the US. In my experience, US electricians use twist-style wire caps instead to create junctions.
Yes, they are rather expensive, but nothing IMHO beats them, I first saw them a few years ago (the 222 type) in the hands of electricians working for musical events/stage settings, then I bought a set of 221 type and simply fell in love with them, they are very, very handy and safer (besides faster in installation) than both twist-ons (which are not very used here in Italy) and screw connectors which are normal here.
Recently a reknown Italian manufacturer[0] started producing similar ones and they are getting more common.
I wish they were more common here. I haven't had much problem getting the lever nuts, but the junction boxes [0] seem really hard to find. The few Amazon sellers I've ordered from all ship them from Europe.
Sounds like you're throwing a challenge to the Hackaday types out there.
And amusingly enough, using cheap hardware to mess with RF devices around you reminds of Steve Lord's hilarious/informative/vicious "Cider Kill-chain" talk.[0] Since attacks only improve over time, the code golf to make the devices more effective could prove quite entertaining to watch - from a safe distance.
Not ironic at all. Police are the agents of capital and their union is thus in service of capital, not labor. They are conspicuously the only union which isn't protested very much by the powers that be. The union protects police from retribution by the people against whom they mete out punishment, who are essentially never capitalists.
To put it another way, there is zero solidarity between police unions and unions of other types. IWW does not allow police (or prison guards) into its organization.
To give an example: In Switzerland being a direct democracy many people would say that the state serves the people who vote, but I know someone who says that Switzerland is in reality a plutocracy, so in this case the state would serve the one percent.
Well, there’s whom the state is supposed to serve and there’s whom they actually do serve. Any state that serves anything but the common good is a tyranny by definition. The US and most countries are globalist oligarchies and so you might say that the state is serving capital in our day and age. However, there is variation in the degree of oligarchic capture of the state and while it is good to reduce this capture, I am not sure I can name a single state in history that wasn’t a tyranny to one degree of another in practice (again, matters of degree). A good way of limiting the totalizing control of oligarchs is through a subsidiarian dispersal of political power. But direct democracy and mob rule are perhaps the worst options. It’s also an illusion because the mob is always just an instrument of power (communists for example mobilized the mobs by whipping jealousy).
I think the best attitude is one which presumes that corruption is an inevitable and endemic feature of all human societies and that while we can deal with some or much of it in small ways as these things occur, there is no solution. The belief in a solution ultimately leads to far worse things. Don’t immanentize the eschaton.
The state will about face and serve the people the nanosecond they start looking like they're gonna become a serious problem for the stability of the state.
The reason money buys power is because the people are divided or don't care. Money only wins when all else is equal.
Police are not agents of capital. They are agents of the government and nothing more. Police make a modest government salary and do not (at least in the US) have a history of reacting well to bribes.
Police meet out punishment all of the time to capitalists (a.k.a people with retirement accounts and savings accounts). I’m not sure why you think otherwise.
And since government has always sided with capital against labor, it usually amounts to police serving capital, at least in matters of capital VS labor.
Remember that the US has a history of using police and even armed forces to crush unions and strikes.
The government does not side with capital. If it did, we wouldn’t have unions at all, minimum wage, etc. Standard Oil would still be dominating and AT&T would never have been broken up.
To say the government serves capital, even in the US, is laughably wrong. Look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it’s literally designed for maximum employment.
The government serves those in power, many of whom are rich. Being rich is not enough to have the government serve you though.
The fact that it's not 100% dedicated to capital's desires does not mean that it doesn't essentially serve it.
Sure, if it were a purely capitalist state, we'd all be slaves, bought and sold by corporations, and we're not there of course.
But in monetary policy, employee benefits, tax breaks, environmental protection, social securityand virtually any other domain you care to name, government cares about the interests of capital first, and everyone else only a distant second.
So you admit it’s not dedicated to capital’s desires. Therefore the police are not there to serve capital, it’s that simple. They are agents of the government and whatever its interests are, which is serving those in power.
More refutations of how these are not in the interests of capital.
Monetary policy does not serve capital (see employment mandate).
Environmental protection does not serve capital (see the very establishment of the EPA).
Social security does not serve capital (it’s an unfunded liability that will need funding through further taxation or inflation).
The covid bailouts and current policies are destructive to capital. (Real negative interest rates are destroying capital)
This is merely a technical nitpick. A person with a savings account is technically a capitalist but they typically get most of their income from labor. Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.
It’s not a nitpick. Anyone with social security, 401ks, etc are all depending on capital markets to retire.
> Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.
This is incorrect. They would only lose if they were part of the effected labor pool.
Break up the California teachers union and pretty much everyone in California except for the teachers will benefit. Tax revenue shortfalls mean worse services and/or higher taxes for everyone else to pay for fat retirements for incompetent teachers.
Teenage targeted publications are actually pretty common ground for extremist viewpoints. It’s an audience pretty receptive to new ideas. Not having “adult responsibilities” nor having to really be a functioning member of society in general makes Marxism, Ayn Rand Capitalism, etc all pretty palatable and reasonable ideas (albeit normally to different cliques).
Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.
The TP I'm referring to is the oft repeated idea that young people can't coherently weigh options because they are young, have no responsibilities, don't earn money etc. That's not what I see in the young people (approx 15-25) I know.
Oh and that when they are older they'll all become conservative voters of some type in the political centre, but that's another thread.
While there’s plenty of crap on Fox, this kind of attitude is also ignorant, narrow, and dismissive and fails to break out of the current American political dialectic. Social engineers often use various tactics like teen magazines to influence the young, often by appealing to sexual appetite (post-war Bravo in Germany comes to mind). Sexual liberation is an effective tactic for control. Communists, for example, have always sought to subvert societies from within and perhaps especially by targeting the young. Fox has its purpose, CNN has its purpose, and Teen Vogue has its purpose.
"Sexual liberation" propaganda? What decade are you from? Have you met any teenagers lately?
All political movements attempt to harness the energy of youth. But seeing men move the invisible levers to control the world's youth via Teen Vogue? In the era of Tik Tok and FB Instagram?
In the same vein, are there not a worryingly amount of adults with actual "adult responsibilities" that think conspiracy theories, failed political ideologies and screaming batshit insanity into social media are "palatable and reasonable ideas".
In fact, I'd argue they outweigh the younger audience by a far margin, are supported by media organisations and have done far more damage to our society and world.
Almost every young person I know wants one thing. A fairer, safer, more equal world. I can't say the same for most older people I know. If that makes them the extremists, then we are lost.
The Memphis Police Department has been under a federal consent decree for over 40 years. Spying on labor and civil rights groups is just part of their act.
To be clear, the 1978 federal consent decree is essentially the federal government telling Memphis PD to quit their spying bullshit “or else”, and yet they’ve continued this surveillance anyway, over the years?
At least as far back as 2009 Pinkertons still existed. They were in the business of being contracted by major US companies to perform background checks on staff who needed high security clearance.
The Pinkerton Agency still exists now. Unlike Blackwater/Xe/Academi/whatever, they haven't even dropped the name. One gets the sense that they don't mind the associations the name's gathered.
They're now a subsidiary of Securitas AB, a Swedish company.
Securitas is known for having their people wearing uniforms that are designed to be confused with local law enforcement and for heavy lobbying for privatisation of the prison industry in the Nordics.
Afaik those days ended only about a hundred years ago, perhaps after the Great Depression. Some say that things changed because the USSR showed what happens when workers seriously organize, plus Europe and Central/South America were too curious about socialism.
I mean… the fact that it’s in the news and notable enough that it was voted to the front page of HN suggests that it isn’t exactly “business as usual” in the US, either.
Your link suggests it took six years for the Metropolitan Police to admit wrongdoing. This camera was found last week. Let’s give it time to actually blow up to “scandal” proportions.
Sorry for sounding baity. It was a genuine question as I don’t see the connection. I’ve never been in a union, but my understanding was that it was just a contract between a private corporation and it’s workforce. I just don’t see how the police has any interest in this.
Not just the US, but the US and those that is trying hard to be just as bad (like the UK) are not like the rest of the western world. For example a union in the US versus one in Scandinavia is like comparing apples to ...something not even a fruit. The US unions are not real unions and haven't normalised since the war against the police and their mob ties.
So an operation against people who unite and protest legally and who are then beaten, killed or hunted like cattle? What better place than a union leader to catch "bad guys".
Because the police's primary revenue stream is taxpayer money and therefore they are very interested in anyone who may affect political change for any reason.
It is probable it has nothing to do with politics and the individuals (or people in the area) in question are suspects in a standard criminal activity.
It is also possible it is political.
The lack of transparency in government / police operations leads to this kind of speculation. The massive lose of trust in police (rightfully so) over the past few years also has eroded any "benefit of the doubt" people may have given them in the past
Unless an arrest is made or a lawsuit files we will probably never know the real truth.
The accusation that the police are surveilling union organizers is extremely troubling, and harkens back to the early 20th century when cops killed union organizers. The police should stay out of such political matters; especially if they expect their continued funding to be above political reproach.
Given how prevalent police unions are, and how incredibly quick they are to raise complaints, you'd hope for more self-awareness/solidarity and less hypocrisy.
There has always seemed to be an antagonistic relationship between police unions and trade unions. Police unions are often disallowed membership in so-called "big tent" unions due to their perceived past and alleged ongoing role in union-busting. Since the early 20th century, there hasn't been a meaningful reconciliation between the movements (and often, the role of police in general is perceived to be inherently antagonistic to the goals of labor activists.)
It might be worth reading about how police performed aerial bombardment and gunned down union workers during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Even though this nears over a hundred years worth of distance, the effects ripple through today.
What a fantastic link! This era in America's history is so rich with amazing stories, yet hardly ever touched by Hollywood ..
I followed Mother Jones to Industrial Workers of the World, which necessitated a visit to American Federation of Labor, which led to Knights of Labor and Terence Powderly and the Haymarket Riot:
Btw, just from the logos and the titles of AFL and KoL, I got the sense that they were masonic in origin. And sure enough, per wikipedia, "[t]he Catholic Church had opposed the unions as too influenced by rituals of freemasonry. The Knights of Labor removed the words "The Holy and Noble Order of" from the name of the Knights of Labor in 1882 and abandoned any membership rituals associated with freemasonry."
LOL at the hand-shaking execs in the logo of AFL. Life is truly stranger than fiction.
Gangs of New York is another great movie, and the second floor of the FDNY museum in SoHo is a real eye opener to the 19th century crossover between fire crews and gang culture.
If you're going to take the time to respond to the throwaway portion of the comment, why not respond to the actual counterpoint which was the reason for the comment?
That's absurd. Your parent post said, "most society sectors that happens to be outside America". All it takes to disprove is a few examples. I showed you a search link to pages of them.
Don't be lazy, blaming others for an unscientific bias in your own post is a logical fallacy.
Why do you keep changing the subject of the discussion?
First, you wrote that most police and police unions are not antagonistic towards sectors outside of the usa.
Now, you wrote what is called a red-herring or a strawman.
You made a very strong but incorrect statement at first. Strong statements are easy to debunk, just with a little proof. I provided a link to pages of that. It's very telling that you now characterize that as "one case every four year average". That's telling, indeed.
funny you call Google searches as proof and debunking, when they are at most confirmation bias, since they only return what you ask for.
if you think that is research, there's no more point to discuss.
the statement stands. the fear of police is deeply ingrained in the American society and the antagonism is deeply American.
dropping fallacy names at random is not gonna help your case either.
the populace here deeply trusts and support the police. there have been few bad cases and the individuals responsible were immediately ousted and eventually had justice brought to them, with little to none cameradrie that you'd see in the 'police Vs everyone' characterization you're trying to blanket upon the world.
there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
What I showed was a google search of images. You have failed to show any as belonging to a different subject than the search requested. The reason for that is that the searches accuractly showed pictures of police beating people in Europe.
> there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
Why do you pretend I engaged confirmation bias, when you consistently write statements of that nature? You have literally created a strawman of what you beleive to be inside my head. No matter how much you believe that you are smarter than everyone around you, all you have written is a textbook, stereotypical set of logical fallacies.
I’m aware, but that’s pretty different from the purpose and structure of modern police departments.
Edit: After reading about the Romans a bit more, it does sound similar. I still hesitate to agree with the assertion that police predate democracy though.
> Also I don't follow on how democracy implies socialism.
Political and economic power are different names for the same thing; pretending they are different and one can be distributed equally when the other is intensely concentrated is self-delusion.
If a police union demands too much, they don't threaten their employer with going out of business the way private sector unions do. The private sector union is naturally constrained to saying, "We want to help you build a reliable business for the long term; treat us fairly and we will do good work." Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times, but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist. There is no such pressure on the police union. No demand for higher pay will cause their employer to shut down - it will at most go deeper into debt. No demand to put up with worse work (be it worse quality or simply more illegal) will cause the market to find a different supplier - there is no market. No overreach by the old guard will risk losing newer folks to an un-unionized competitor - there are no competitors. And so forth.
So I don't think this is even hypocrisy - effective police union leaders have very different approaches from effective private sector union leaders.
Yes, I think this argument applies to public sector unions as a whole. I think empirically, teachers' unions (and the postal worker's union, and so forth) have not been so, well, inclined to defend illegal and unconstitutional activity as police unions, so I'm not going to advocate as urgently for getting rid of them, but definitely they're also not quite like private sector unions for similar reasons.
(That said, both public schools and the post office have meaningful private-sector competitors, in the sense that the government can decide that they just don't need to fund so many teachers or postal workers anymore, and systems like vouchers for private schools make it look even more like a private-sector market.)
> but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist.
Yet, that’s what they do. The Packard car company is one such victim.
Unions bankrupted Twinkies.
The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa.
All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions' members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy.
The labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using oil instead, because they couldn't depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis "the world's greatest oil salesman." The higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil. They also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.
There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
French unions bargain on behalf of the entire sector, and the government enforces the deals even for non-union workers. Comparisons between French unionization rates and US unionization rates are not entirely valuable.
> The OP said it was never in a union’s interest to harm a company. And I provided counter arguments where they did exactly that.
No, those are not counter-arguments. You provided cases where unions acted against their self-interest. You didn't demonstrate that such self-interest doesn't exist.
Of course there are countless such cases. There are infinite stories of people, companies, countries, organizations, political parties, investors, wild animals, etc. acting against their self-interest and meeting their end. That doesn't mean the self-interest doesn't exist.
I am sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying.
But we do seem to have diametrically opposed views.
You pay a union worker more, that means that everyone else pays for it through higher prices.
You pay a union member more and they put more into the economy creating more opportunities for local business - the economy is circular.
Union membership has taken a nose dive since the 1980s which also correlates with the nose dive in share of company profit with workers. Insecure work is at much higher levels now which again correlates strongly with this.
I'm not arguing that union's have their fair share of mediocre workers, I would argue that they protect all worker's including the mediocre ones and it's better to protect everyone than no-one.
I would argue that there are just as many mediocre workers in non-unionised workplaces, they are everywhere and being in a union is not a predictor of this.
We get mad at businesses for monopolies, yet a union is a monopoly on labor.
I also disagree with your stance regarding unions create a monopoly, this makes no sense. It's the same as asking medium sized companies to break up into smaller companies because they have too much power - unions give poor workers some negotiating power rather than none which on the whole produces better results for society.
Silicon valley comment - is an outlier / strawman , I'm not advocating programmers who are making outlier amounts of money need to implement collective bargaining (which see below is different from a union).
You talk about unions as though they are a monolithic organisation and all unions are the same, this is certainly not the case.
I've been a member of a union for five years now, I treat it as a democratic institution that makes society stronger it keeps a balance between capital and labour.
I do not agree with the direction that the union takes sometimes but that's ok, it's democratic and I believe collectively we can work together and make things better.
I don't belong to a union that stops non-unionised workforce but I am in a union that demands and fights for minimum conditions for all workers especially the most vulnerable. I have never been part of industrial action either!
I've worked non-union workplaces including startups, commercial property, travel, professional services and I'm currently now working at a university. I don't fit into any of the categories that you have mentioned of a union worker. I am certainly not mediocre or average in my workplace.
And unemployment rate? Before corona skewed everything, the US unemployment rate was below 4%. In Sweden? Close to 7%.
I don't live in the US but I look with utter fear that my country will follow America's workplace relations.
Sure it works well if you earn good money (see Silicon valley worker) but the way the poorest workers are treated in the US, that is the stuff of nightmares.
Having to have two or three minimum-pay jobs just to be able to survive in the 'richest' country on earth is certainly a dystopia that I hope my country doesn't follow.
I don't think all unions are good, or make good decisions in the same way I don't think all business managers are good or make the right decisions. They are just humans making decisions and taking actions, some are good, some are selfish and bad, most probably in the middle.
But unions on the whole do ensure the lowest paid and the most vulnerable have some power and leverage in a society that based on a lot of history has not cared how they fared.
I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").
The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.
There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.
Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.
> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?
The Twitter that exposed pics of this linked elsewhere on HN claims it's related to Operation Legend, which has nothing to do with union organizing per se -
My understanding is that this was a SkyCop camera, which is what has been used in Memphis. Those cameras are requested by the neighborhood, and the neighborhood raises the money for the camera. Then, the MPD purchases the camera, installs it, then hooks it up to the RTCC feed.
If this installation went according to that same format, this activist may know full well why the camera is there - assuming he attends neighborhood meetings.
If this installation didn't go according to tbat format, I am completely against people being specifically surveiled without a warrant. Volunyary video of the place where people live is one thing, the other is completely against the foundational principles of this country and the natural order that should be followed by our government.
Thanks. I'm well aware of how Skycop cameras appear, as well as their website address. The MPD has over 2,000 of them deployed.
Did you consider, if this camera box existed and was covert, how it was located immediately after it was placed? Who was it that climbed the pole to open a box that said, "High Voltage," and take pictures of the inside? If the actual box looked nothing like a Skycop deployment, why was the finger of blame pointed at MPD? There is more to this story than the blurb that was reported in this article.
You seem to imply that the activist/article is lying. Apart from the video and that there being no good reason for him to lie (too easily exposed)
This is not the first time that these high voltage boxes show up in the news about surveillance. So if you're someone aware of theses issues you would certainly not fear opening up a high voltage box (also what would be in the box if it actually was something high voltage, they don't appear overnight).
Your assertion that this is likely a skycop seems to however not based on any evidence.
> You seem to imply that the activist/article is lying.
That's completely false. I said there is likely more to the story than was reported - and there is more to the story. I did not say that the activist or article is lying. That is solely your inference.
The article, however, is incomplete and inaccurate. This particular activist has a long history with MPD. Two years ago, he was involed with a lawsuit against MPD. This house belongs to his grandmother, so he wasn't specifically being surveiled. The police have arrested his cousin and non-related drug-dealers while at his grandmother's house - in possession of drugs. They also served papers at that address for another one of his cousins for aggravated assault.
As I wrote, there is more to this story than is written in this article. At best, this article was superficial.
> Apart from the video and that there being no good reason for him to lie
Yes, there are resaons for him to lie, but I didn't sat that he lied - I don't know whether he lied or not. But, why did he jump to the conclusion that MPD was surveiling him, personally, at an address that isn't his?
This is the website that he has had for years for his activism. It's been completely empty for years. http://15.org
> Your assertion that this is likely a skycop seems to however not based on any evidence.
I said based upon the thousands of already deployed skycops, the camera used by MPD, that if this was by MPD my understanding was that this was a Skycop camera.
The union should stay out of such political matters; especially if they expect their continued funding to be above political reproach.
That funding is a private tax, backed by force of law, imposed on the income of the workers. Via political "donation" a large part of it goes to politicians, ensuring that the politicians continue to allow it. This is deeply corrupt. We have here a money pipeline from the worker's paycheck to the politician, with the union and politician splitting the ill-gotten cut of the paycheck.
I'm sorry but that is just insane. What about the company employing the workers? What about the owner/CEO/board members of that company? Will they be similarly restricted?
The whole point of the union is collective bargaining and providing a united front, and they need to be able to defend their right to exist in the political arena. If they can't make political contributions, it won't be long before they are outlawed. It's not like they wield disproportionate influence, anyway. They are far outspent by the capital class, as evidenced by the gradual erosion of union power and the passage of anti-union laws such as "right to work" in recent decades.
Senseless. Money governs access to political power in this country. You would take away nearly the only alternative tool regular working people have to make their voices heard with impact and call it "deeply corrupt" - how do you reason yourself into this place?
> Money governs access to political power in this country.
Billionaires who failed to get anywhere in the Democratic primary: Bloomberg, Steyer.
Remember, all political campaign funding plus all think tank funding plus all media funding is less than the US spends on almonds each year. Money doesn’t buy political influence in the US, it flows to it.
> (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)
Money will only get you so far in your public facing political ambitions if you are politically incompetent (Bloomberg) or devoid of charisma (Steyer). But money got both of them to the stage.
So what? They lost comprehensively. The point of politics isn’t to be heard. It’s to win so you can get what you want done done. If being heard led to political change US politics would be a great deal more libertarian. You don’t just need to be heard you need to persuade people to believe what you believe and to vote for you. Money doesn’t do that. It buys you a bigger megaphone but if no one likes the message they hear from you they won’t vote for you. Then you end up like Bloomberg, having spent a ton of money on a Presidential bid that failed utterly.
> you need to persuade people to believe what you believe and to vote for you. Money doesn’t do that. It buys you a bigger megaphone..
A megaphone is a naive and unsuitable analogy.
Money buys you the two-party system where the only viable candidates are the ones that have been paid for, that do the bidding of the lobbyists and special interests that actually dictate national policies and run the country.
Money buys you the mass media, that surrounds and saturates the public with messages, dis/misinformation and values skewed to suit your agenda.
Money buys you the power to shape laws and regulations, so that your industry is.. You get the idea.
"Money governs access to political power in this country."
As an American, I'm ashamed to learned over the decades how much this statement is true. Didn't you see how money bought the presidency? How else did we end up with utterly corrupt and incompetent (or maliciously competent) politicians running the country?
I saw how money partially bought the presidency. (people actually love him, but the big luxurious personal jet certainly helped in the primary) In this case I don't mind. He's a good man. His money makes him far less tempted by bribes. The adventure has cost him over a billion dollars. Our more typical presidents get rich from the experience, despite the salary being pitiful. The US president gets paid like a San Francisco software developer, yet has the responsibility for running a nation with a GDP of roughly 20 trillion dollars. Somehow that pitiful salary turns into riches for most politicians. It's really delightful to see a president who is in it for fame and for duty to his nation.
The only reason why you need to state that "people actually love him", is because they don't. There is no other reason for that.
How do you know he lost a billion dollars? Did you see his tax records? I'm pretty sure it's ain't because of the lack of trying if it was so.
In a normal situation, I can't imagine any scenario that a businessman can lose a billion dollars by becoming president. But this is the only guy that is literally capable of failing upwards.
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Criminal indictments with the current administration : 215.
With Obama: 0, but... Obama did 8 years. The current one isn't even at 4.
In real life, I don't even know a person who dislikes Trump. I have never encountered a pro-Biden sign. Maybe it would be different if I worked for Twitter in San Francisco?
I love how you point out that our criminal justice system wasn't prosecuting the criminals because it was infested with corrupt Obama appointees.
It's not zero though. Here's one convicted just last week:
"Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign."
The crime was altering an email so that it would work as evidence to get the FISA court to allow spying on the Trump campaign. That is far worse than the incident with Nixon.
It is interesting to hear the other side of the argument. Perhaps I've become cynical over the years, witnessing what "duty to nation" really means in practice.
As far as national interest goes, public well-being seems low in priority, far below enriching those who hold the reins of power. The attempts to justify these skewed priorities, in my opinion, fall apart from the view of the people, who must live with the resulting social conditions.
I'm not sure Bloomberg failed. He stepped in because he was afraid that Sanders or Warren would win, which would be bad for him personally. He's fine with Biden. Seems like a pretty effective return on investment to me.
The point of politics is to get what you want done done. You don't have to win to do that. In fact, if you can achieve your goals without spending four years of your life being president of the US, that sounds so much less stressful.
Suppose they were republican organizations. Would you feel the same? Picture this:
You take a job writing software for camera boxes on power poles. It happens to be direct employment with a police department, and it isn't management, so somehow you wind up forced to join the police union. Every election, they give millions of dollars to the republican candidates. They supported Bush. This year, they give Trump $42,000,000 to thank him for his support for the police. It's about $5000 per year of your paycheck that is going to this. Do you mind?
Lowercase D, but also, I'm sorry to break it to you, but where you work has an impact on the world whether or not you see union dues on your paycheck, and if you have the luxury to decide between jobs, you should decide based in part on that.
The whole idea of employment (as opposed to being a founder) is that you take a job that is lower risk and lower reward. Instead of taking home every penny (minus taxes) that your software sells for, you take home some fixed number in your employment agreement, and management (or shareholders) take the rest. If it doesn't sell, management's still on the hook for paying you until they lay you off, but if you work hard and do a fantastic job and write the world's most intuitive and reliable and high-fidelity software for camera boxes on power poles and you make them tens of thousands of dollars a year in sales, they keep the profits. Maybe they'll give you a small bonus.
Now, what do they do with the profits that you made them? Several things, but donating to politicians is probably one of them. Go look up your own CEO's donations and tell me if you mind.
As far as I understand they are "partisan" not by design but as a result of representing their interests (which, in my opinion, should always represent the aggregate of the workers the union represents -- which is sadly not so)
Please do correct me if I'm wrong! That's my favorite way to learn. I've grown a lot from being the least-informed gal in the room.
I'd agree with that understanding, but it only makes it so much better, since it still means a union can end up supporting candidates or legislation that I oppose even though they might be bad for my career interests.
Whatever the cause may be, that counts as "partisan".
It infuriates many of the workers. They start off angry from being forced to pay an undesired membership fee, essentially a private income tax, and then the union pours salt in their wounds by lobbying to maintain the forced relationship and by supporting politicians that anger the workers.
Imagine being forced to fund your most hated politician. That is the reality for millions of American workers.
Unions represent the interests of unions. Workers would be better served by class-action lawsuits, which sadly are being suppressed due to a supreme court decision that allowed forced arbitration. That supreme court decision was not based on constitutionality, and thus could be undone with a simple ordinary act of congress. Unions could also be wiped out by congress. Doing both at the same time would make sense. Class action lawsuits are a far less corrupt way to address worker abuse.
There is no US industry so dominated by unions that you are forced to be a member of one, if a worker takes a union job they know what they're getting in to.
I don't understand why you're connecting forced arbitration to unions. Also, it's hard to see how unions aren't a form of free speech.
My preferred solution to this kind of problem would be more akin to worker ownership or at very least worker involvement in steering decisions (board positions, etc). But I also despise forced arbitration. Absolutely abhorrent.
It's funny that you lament the suppression of class-action lawsuits without considering why they are in decline. They are in decline because corporations want them to go away.
The scenario you advocate is:
1. Unions are outlawed.
2. Class-action lawsuits are fully restored.
3. Employees seek redress from their employer by filing a class-action lawsuit for every instance of abuse.
This is not a stable scenario. You can't just set it up and expect it to stay that way. Laws change. Corporations delight in changing laws for their own benefit. The inevitable and near-immediate result of this:
1. Corporations lobby the government to make class-action lawsuits (in general, or just specifically workers vs their employer) illegal, or to allow employment contracts to require forced arbitration.
2. Corporations rewrite their employment contracts to require forced arbitration, which always favors the corporation because it has more resources than a single person and is the one paying the arbitrator. I can guarantee you they will include a clause like this even if it's illegal, because who's going to stop them?
3. Corporations can now deal with workers one-on-one, which is a recipe for abuse.
4. Any worker who agitates to start a new class-action lawsuit is summarily dismissed for violating their employment contract.
5. In the interim period before class-action lawsuits by workers are neutered and made impossible, corporations will simply drag the cases through the court system slowly, accepting the ongoing lawsuits as a cost of doing business. They will always by definition have more resources and more ability to absorb this cost than the workers.
The only way workers can exert any power over their employer is by organizing and striking, because that's the only way to comprehensively disrupt the corporation's capital flow and bring them to the bargaining table before the workers run out their savings. The end result of this strike must always be the formation of a union, or the strike is ultimately pointless. A union must be formed so that the employer knows any attempt to abuse its workers will result in an immediate response which hurts their bottom line. A class-action lawsuit takes years to play out, and workers don't have that long!
The formation of a union requires the following:
1. The corporation recognizes the union and agrees to deal with it by signing a contract.
2. The corporation agrees not to retaliate against union members for union activities.
3. The union is allowed to conduct its activities and collect fees to pay administrative costs, legal fees, and for political activism (to defend its right to exist against corporate lobbying).
3. The contract must always stipulate that the corporation will not hire non-union workers. Allowing this would be a death knell for the union because the lack of such a clause means the corporation will just hire non-union workers in the future until the union has been starved of funds and collapses.
These are just basic facts and inference supported by the history of the labor movement. Your assertion that workers hate the fees and hate the politicians supported by the unions is in dire need of citations and references. Your entire post seems less like a logical, well-thought-out argument and more like blatant anti-union propaganda.
Unions often don't represent the beliefs of their members, they usually represent the beliefs and goals of the highest ranking members (and sometimes the people that pay them off, unions are not exempt from corruption). Sometimes the goals of the leaders line up with the goals of the majority, sometimes not. When I was in a union, many items were decided without a vote and no effort was put in to informing new members on how to be represented within the union.
I should also add I don't think unions should not be involved in politics; I think they are used as crutch for democratic representation. The real solution is removing corporate lobbying.
Corporations are voluntary organizations that exist for the benefit of their owners and if their owners don’t like their politics they can leave much more easily than any union member can. Of course they should be involved in politics.
Contributions to unions aren’t capped and don’t need to come from members. If George Soros wants to leave his fortune to the AFL-CIO I doubt they’ll refuse.
Corporations, like unions are free to campaign independently. For example the for profit Fox, Breitbart, New York Times and Washington Post Corporations all made their political preferences very clear over the past two years. They each spent a lot of employee time and money supporting their favoured candidate. Or Disney, a for profit corporation, releasing Michael Moore films. They’re political propaganda, just like the garbage Citizens United produced to denounce Hillary.
Political speech rights in the US belong to individuals, who do not lose them by coming together in corporate organizations, whatever their form. This is just.
There is an absolutely massive difference between corporations and unions, in that corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to seek profit.
Unions don't.
This is why Unions should be allowed to campaign independently, but not corporations.
If all of the shareholders decide to contribute with their dividends, they are already allowed to, which gives them an advantage. That ought to be more than enough.
It's a little confusing to me, but this article makes it sound like the camera was set up on a pole in front of a relative's house, but pointing at a different "family property" where Antonio was living.
There's some older articles talking about how he lives at his grandmother's house, and his uncle lives across the street. Both houses were raided by cops in 2018 due to alleged cocaine dealing and they made 2 arrests (One cousin had a small amount of weed, and another cousin had an outstanding warrant for assault)
When that happened he talked about how he felt like his family was being targeted due to his activism. Perhaps, but IMO the generic "the war on drugs" is a more likely cause
Given the circumstance, it's more likely that the War on Drugs is a cover for this kind of behavior, thus the bogus cocaine dealing charges. If MPD comes out and hides behind the drugs defense, take it with a painstakingly large grain of salt.
Chill on the allcaps, and there's quite a lot of precedent that anything visible by the public is fair game. For example, evidence you throw into the trash becomes public property once you put it out on the curb
Apologies, surveillance-state apologists get me worked up. Things done in public or in other locations without "an expectation of privacy" are legally fair game for evidence gathering. Pointing a camera toward a home which may have open windows, etc. is not unless there is a warrant for that kind of surveillance.
The high voltage sticker is ubiquitous. It's not representative of anything other than what it stands for: "high voltage".
If anything else it might be a decoy to scare away ... maybe nobody that would matter.
Disclaimer: didn't read the article, am responding in general to the title. Also, I am in no way trying to discount the possibility that activists are being surveilled.
What I recently have started to think about is how these sorts of stories COULD be used as a tool to further their cause if the "victim" wanted it to be.
What better way to shine a light on a cause than to manufacture a story that shows they have real enemies who are actively trying to disrupt their cause?
Again, not saying this case is such, but only here to say the future is going to be hard to get right. Everyone will be an expert (if they want to be) at stirring up dissonance.
I've been seeing something semi-related quite a bit on Reddit. A lot of innocent/innocuous/non-political subs are now quite frankly "obsessed" with equality, rich-people/capital, race (black people in particular) and police violence. I guess you could say it's "hot" right now. E.g. Science sub-reddit having articles that talk about the cognitive science of voting, and studies that imply/prove that Republicans or anti-maskers are stupid (I paraphrase this one, can't recall the details). Or the documentaries sub now being unnaturally filled with documentaries related to the above-mentioned topics.
I understand people are trying to solve what they see as problems in society. And I understandably think politics and social-organization is broken at the moment. Especially if ordinary people have to resort to infecting normal spheres of life with politics/activism because they are essentially powerless, which I will agree with them on. Democracy is broken.
Ad for face recognition:
https://youtu.be/3-wFa8eWZ7E
Tired of looking at surveillance video? This tool speeds up the job:
https://youtu.be/KrzTAlV70bQ
Overproduced ad for the whole product line. Very funny:
https://youtu.be/otAuH6FDhgw