Counter-offer: Make tents for the homeless out of landlord skins
Stat.
“What does that mean anyway?”
“I don’t know, but that’s not the point.”
What about food? ;)
Live inside the rich.
I posted this comment already yesterday but i’ll post it again because it’s still relevant:
Do we want to get higher wages? The obvious answer might seem “yes”. But i argue it’s not that obvious.
People should be able to live without being forced to work. When your only income is from wages, that effectively forces you to work. I think we should strive for a society where basic needs are fulfilled even without jobs.
Every take that excludes this perspective is ableist.
Just my two cents as a person who was born and will die disabled.
except the national economies aren’t organized in a way to enable any form of UBI.
Yet
it’s not like governments are trying to get there when it’s not an election season though
Elections aren’t going to save you.
I mean Somalia is right there, mate
What?
exactly. If elections ain’t doing the trick, Somalia is doing all of the tricks
national economies handle being welfare states just fine, which isn’t so different from what a UBI would be. Also developed service economies live and die by consumption. A UBI would stabilise and stimulate domestic consumer demand.
there’s massive difference in scale though that brings in a lot of variables that would require a full lock-in before implementation. Given how globalised and interdependent modern economies are - there are too many unpredictable factors outside of governmental control that can whiplash onto national economy and wreck the plans even more than usual. And that might render any UBI-type system a huge burden that would get targeted by folks from IMF making “valuable” “suggestions”.
The Comingle app (beta) is seeking to start our own UBI without relying on the government to do it for us. Seems very promising
How?
It’s a nonprofot org which basically just does monthly UBI to your bank account when you sign up… They did the math and it turns out you only need a few thousand people of diverse economic backgrounds for it to be viable.
From what I understand it’s like a phone banking app, but more secure, and it takes something like 10% of your earnings each month, then returns a lump sum to everyone of around $500 almost immediately. So people earning $40k/yr will net a couple hundred dollars per month. If you make nothing that month you will get closer to $1000 People who make $100k/yr will lose a couple hundred dollars. And the multimillionaires will lose a couple Gs a month (which sounds like a lot but it’s negligible to them).
the multimillionaires
Why would any of them do this instead of charity donation that they can deduct from their taxable income?
Great question. So this money goes directly to people, instead of through a charity. We are cutting out the middle man, and it affects EVERYONE with cash, not just a select few who know how to benefit from the charity and qualify for their supplies or whatever the charity provides. It’s awesome for us, but not as awesome for the billionaires and multimillionaires. The only real benefit for them is, they get to keep their heads!
how so? why not?
We should strive for that society, sure, but that’s going to take generations. Meanwhile, people need to eat today.
It will only take 1 generation willing to fight for the change.
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There should be a clear definition of what “basic needs” means. Opinions will vary greatly when you broaden the discussion.
I’d define it as such:
- Health care (this includes good food and water)
- Housing
- Transport
- Education & Information systems
Medical care
Housing
Food
Water
Internet
Replace internet with access to means of acquire knowledge and communicate with others. Internet just happens to fulfill both very efficiently.
If you’re capable of working, you should work. It should be a fair wage and billionaires shouldn’t exist. Our society should support those who can’t work.
I’ll tell you what. I have had to interact with some people in retail or fast food who were technically able to work, but I really wish they didn’t. I would chip in some money from every paycheck for those people to stay home, do something they enjoy. Maybe do a kind of work they are good at, but doesn’t pay much. Some people are born with the drive to be a ceo, nfl level athlete or what not. Some are born eith the drive to solve problems, help people, or what not but also to relax. And some people are born with no drive at all. They are capable of working, but the lack of drive means they will never be any good at it. So if you don’t force people to work, you will find most still will in some form. And the ones who don’t… it’s better for all of us that they don’t.
Why? We don’t have enough work for the number of people that our work can sustain. Our ancestors literally dreamt of a time when the labor of a few could allow the leisure of the masses. We would be better served at this point addressing workaholic tendencies and refocusing that energy into something they actually enjoy doing.
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Explain what you mean by “should work.” What qualifies as “work” and who makes the determination that it is valid or correct?
If you’re capable of working, you should work
in what country do you live, if i may ask?
That ain’t happening in America in your lifetime.
Except with insurance they probably made money. The trick is for it to happen often enough that insurance gets too expensive.
Well insurance only pays out on the value the retailer bought their inventory for, not the sticker price. Yeah they’re getting a lot of money but rebuilding inventory and a new warehouse is probably more money. And Insurance companies might start considering underpaid employees as an insurance liability.
And Insurance companies might start considering underpaid employees as an insurance liability.
That’d truly be righteous but I suspect they’ll start expecting more surveillance, security, and fire systems instead.
They turned the fire suppression system off once the firefighters arrived, reportedly. I hope the insurance company denies their claim. Seems like an act of God to me.
suspect they’ll
automate
Assuming it wasn’t a company owned warehouse, the landlord will probably be making an argument that their disgruntled employee makes the fire their fault.
They announced they’re moving their entire operation out of CA, lmao.
Funny, if they weren’t already planning that, seems like an awfully knee jerk reaction based on a single incident.
Wow, its like… direct action works, when complaining loudly and formally doesn’t!
They probably didn’t make money. Insurance won’t cover the retail value of unsold product, just the cost to make it. The building owner can get replacement cost for the building, but still loses out on rent.
The insurance company will raise rates to compensate for the payment, but it’s probably enough to hurt them for a quarter too.
If it were profitable to burn down a warehouse, there’d be a whole industry around it
If you’re in the warehouse building industry, them burning down can be very profitable…
Maybe, or maybe sales have been shitty and instead of product sitting on the shelves this let’s them write stuff off and pocket cost of materials.
Just saying there’s more to it than what it would mean to you or i if we had all our eggs in one basket and had to count on an insurance payout to keep above water. It’s likely not a windfall for them, but i wouldn’t be surprised if one warehouse fire is much more than a line item in a meeting or two, or even good news for some department or other if they were overextended in stock or something. A second or third big loss like that, though, would probably be required before anyone important is motivated towards any kind of inspection based on the bottom line though.
I dunno. I think that insurance will usually only cover Replacement Value, so if it cost them $20 per item and they sold it for $25, they could only claim $20. Then compounded with failure to meet contracts and updated cost of production (may cost $21 to make now) I doubt that they made money. You’re right that the cost of insurance is where the real hurt will be - see ship insurance in the Strait
We’ll there are lots of kinds of insurance, a manufacturing and distribution company isn’t going to have the same insurance you buy as a homeowner. I would expect they are covered for whatever they calculated into their cost/risk contract?
That said, i maybe know enough to know most of what i don’t know, but far from inside into on the topic.
They are probably “self insured”
Certainly could be, and doubtful that they are fully insured against all contingencies… Possible they are underinsured against for intentionally, since they could conceivable think it’s low enough risk that it’s cheaper to allow a loss even as big as this to fall under operating losses for rare or occasional incidents like this.
Once a company is big enough even subjectively huge losses are simply a calculated risk. Do you pay a million dollars a year for 10 years to subsidize something that might cost 10 million dollars that only happens every 20 years, or do you bank on it not happening and write it off as a bad quarter if it happens?
Way more goes into those calculations than one might think, and if they’re self insured there’s just a budget item that takes a hit for this and someone gets chewed out it fired for being the one that gambled this way… While someone else loses a promotion if they signed off the other direction and paid for a million dollar policy they didn’t need.
Insurance is all mostly the same regardless of type. You aren’t going to find a company willing to take the counter party risk of you losing a claimed retail value of a product, especially a commodity. If it was collectables or bespoke crafts then it would likely be different.
Sounds like you’re more familiar with the industry than i am, but my understanding is that insurance policies are written based on what you want to cover and the value is reflected in the premiums. Companies often have an assumed product, returns and stale inventory loss calculated in. Possibly just recuping costs for ‘all’ inventory could be a plus for the bottom line, especially if there were anything like a rider for opportunity costs. The building itself could have been out of step on depreciation and now moved up with a more modern facility in planning.
May not be the same situation but plenty of business owners have considered it a windfall having insurance pay out on replacement costs for things they you weren’t utilizing and an opportunity to put up a bigger shop and roll the payouts into more modern supplies and equipment rather than gathering dust on sunk cost stuff they never would have gotten their money out of otherwise.
If you consider insurance payouts a windfall there’s probably fraud involved. Insurance generally doesn’t pay more than a thing is worth because of fraud. It’s a little more loose with things that can’t easily be valued, like art or a life.
Yes, but relatively often you can get underwater on the cost of stuff that is sitting there no longer making you money. If half your warehouse is full of stuff that isn’t moving or is outdated product, then recovering even the cost of making it can be a windfall. The amount of stuff a company has to write off, dispose of or clearance for pennies can make an insurance payout a win.
Things don’t always depreciate at their started number on paper, especially when using certain completely valid forms of accounting. Not saying this is certainly what is happening at an active warehouse, but there’s a whole lot more to it than thinking everything sitting there was absolutely going to sell at a good profit. Equipment and structures, for instance, often pay out at replacement value which can easily be more than you’d get for them at disposal rates.
Is that a lack of fire suppression equipment? Insurance won’t like that at all. 😃
Insurance companies too exist to make money. If their customers generally went plus, the insurance company would go out of business.
That’s thinking of it way too much like an ideal one for one transaction. Insurance companies don’t based their profits on how much the stuff costs to replace directly, they make money based on the cost of payouts compared to premiums. If they can get enough clients to pay the premiums, they could pay 10x costs and it would make exactly 0 difference to their bottom lines.
It’s actually the reverse in many situations, insurance exists to help recoup costs in an emergency and if you have a policy that doesn’t pay enough to recover from a loss then you are underinsured, and the only way to ensure that is to buy a policy where you’re at least slightly over insured. That’s why homeowners insurance is based on replacement cost, not on the cost when you bought it.
Business insurance admittedly is different, but to be fully covered, you are also getting replacement costs for things like stale product, depreciated equipment (which depreciates differently for insurance purposes than for taxes and accounting) and things like building and infrastructure which are at replacement costs vs purchased prices.
Basically insurance companies are less concerned with having to make absolutely sure everyone gets as screwed as possible on every individual payout, than they are making sure they’re collecting premiums much faster than they are having to payout at all. Writing every policy so that no one ‘ends up with a plus’ is far less profitable than making sure they are selling policies that are useful. Of course they also want to pay out as little as possible, but that is not nearly as attainable as calculating the likelihood of risks and raising rates whenever possible.
I’ll bet you that Walmart is selfinsured, and this absolutely hits them directly.
Likely, but self insurance is a thing for a reason, if it was cheaper to insure than self insured they’d probably do that, but they have that risk wether it was arson or an accident and if one warehouse would actually hurt them, they wouldn’t be self insuring.
Any way you look at it, unless it hits them enough that they have to be concerned about the price of champagne they’re filling their swimming pools with, ‘one’ incident isn’t going to make them rethink their whole salary structure. At this rate it’s shifting from one budget line item to another, and they’ll probably just take it as an opportunity to invest in two warehouse to replace the one that went up.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the insurance industry is the underlying problem?
Oh, for sure that’s part of the problem, they definitely have their own issues, but they are more like a layer. Insurance itself isn’t a bad thing, but like basically ever industry they suffer from greed and loopholes too.
Insurance will only pay out actual value (i.e. what it cost to produce those items). They’ll still miss out on all the potential profit from selling those goods.
They’ll miss it on some things for sure, but if there were sunk costs or put performing products, that money can be reinvested in better performing items. I’m sure I’m an active, perfectly running warehouse, having to replace every item just with an at cost payout would be annoying, but there’s also the possibility that the payout gets them out from under old stock they would otherwise have lost even their costs on.
It was the fuck aroundest of times
It was the find outest of times
This is an absolutely hilarious way to hear about this news.
The beacons are lit! The working class calls for aid!
I’ve posted this in another area regarding this event, but I think it would be wise to post it here, too.
From Malcom X’s Ballot or the Bullet:
“Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job, you’re in bad shape.”
“You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion. But this government has failed us. The government itself has failed us. And the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us. And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves.”
“He made a chump out of you. He made a fool out of you. He made you think you were going somewhere, and you end up going nowhere…”
“So today our people are disillusioned. They become disenchanted. They become dissatisfied. And in their frustrations, they want action.”
“You, today, are in the hands of a government of segregationists, racists, white supremacists…”
“America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh, yes, they are. They have never had a bloodless revolution, or a non-violent revolution. That don’t happen even in Hollywood. You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems. A revolution is bloody.”
“So it’s the ballot or the bullet. Today our people can see that we’re faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are a filibustering concerning your and my rights, that’s the government. Don’t say it’s Southern senators. This is the government. This is a government filibuster. It’s not a segregationist filibuster, it’s a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, that’s the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that’s the government. Any kind of pussyfooting, that’s the government. Any kind of act that’s designed to delay or deprive you in need right now of getting full rights, that’s the government that’s responsible. And anytime you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it’s guilty of today.”
“It’ll be the ballot or it’ll be the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death. And if you’re not ready to pay that price, don’t use the word freedom in your vocabulary.”
In this speech, he does say we Americans have a unique opportunity to do things non-violently. We did not get unions by being peaceful. We did not get labor rights by being nice.
I want a peaceful way. I truly do. But options are running out quickly. This is not an encouragement of terror or violence. I, like many other want other ways. But as we can see, we cannot control everyone. Some are in situations that feed the violent mind extra portions of greed’s injustice. This breeds a vengeful, hateful spirit that even the most noble and moral of humans cannot withstand.
If our world, country, and local leaders continue not to act swiftly and quickly, this will continue, not because you or I will act, spread hate, or encourage this, but because those who are starving for justice will act out. They don’t need to browse these halls of discussion to be radicalized. The ultra-rich and our dystopian nation will do that for them.
Choose wisely, work together, and eliminate injustice by any (hopefully peaceful) means necessary.
The rich forgot that before worker’s rights existed, greedy capitalists who owned factories and treated their workers horribly during the industrial revolutions would either find their factories or their homes burnt down, and themselves beaten to death in front of their own families.
Unions and worker’s rights were the compromise to avoid this from happening. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and the rich clearly didn’t.
I do worry that they are expecting it in some way. The few “smart” ones. The ones that are not flagrant with their funds and likes. The ones that don’t donate but hold hatred in their hearts. I worry about those. I wonder if they will slip out of the grasp of justice because they decided to hide in their money bushes and stay quiet.
But yes, the fools that we see in the news for sure have forgotten.
I am become death, destroyer of wally-worlds.
How many warehouses is it now? 7?
Is it really? I haven’t seen it
I’m not sure, honestly. Social media and news media seem to be telling different stories, unsurprisingly.
Initially around 20 people were inside
All survived unharmed
Physically
Edit - would be so mad if my mom worked there that shift, ‘tis upsetting b/c I immediately put myself in those kinds of shoes ya know? Even if paying workers is necessary for survival too
Guy worked for a third-party distributor, so he didn’t destroy his boss’s warehouse
Anyone know how big the 3P distributor is? Is Kimberly-Clark OK financially and were they following best practices? Ideally you would make sure everyone you pay was treating their people properly including timely compensation, right? You’d have a supplier code of conduct demanding it and a system in place to verify…
Also wonder if the head of the Kimberly warehouse was aware of their subcontractor was making life so hard for their people and whether they put them on a leash. A takeaway here for a business person, don’t let clowns put you at risk, no matter how tempting it is to sign away trying offload your liabilities and optimize your headcount spend.
Depends.
The warehouse operator will claim it on Insurance so they are not out of pocket.
Insurance will sue the person who started the fire and can never pay off the debt so the debt will be written off after a decade of near to no payments and get a healthy tax deduction for it.The only person to loose out will be the workers who are now out of a job, the tax payer who receives less taxes paid due to the write off and the loss of sales tax.
The messaging value is infinite, nonetheless.
Jesus Christ I’m tired of people not understanding what a write-off is.
It’s a reduction in taxable income, not a tax bill. If your tax rate is 20 percent and you write off a $100 loss, your tax burden is reduced by $20, resulting in a net loss of $80.
You can’t just make massive losses go away with a write-off.
It’s almost as daft as people thinking they’ll lose out by going into a higher tax bracket
The average American cannot comprehend the complexity of different portions of their income being taxed at different rates. I’ve met a guy who turned down a $0.50 raise because it would him just past the next tax bracket
I read that they turned off the fire suppression system to try to avoid damaging inventory while fire fighters tried to put out the fire.
Perhaps there’s a chance that the insurance company will try to use that to avoid paying off the claim.
Correction: The arsonist set some small fires, which triggered the sprinkler systems, which had firefighters come to turn it off and try to prevent water damage.
They then set about 4 bigger fires away from any prying eyes with the sprinklers turned completely off, which spread so fast that the firefighters present declared it a lost cause and called for reinforcements.
Interesting. I wonder if the exact method may become common knowledge, helping force Walmart to consider paying a living wage…
The trick is to keep doing it, making it too expensive for insurance to continue covering it, and denying the company insurance.
funny thing about insurance. they don’t like to pay. they really don’t like to pay when incidents are avoidable.
if this continues to happen, it will become a metric that liability companies will begin to track.
if employers are underpaying their staff, the insurance companies will increase the premiums since the management of the company is a high liability to underwrite. that or we’ll start to see underwriters drop contracts entirely because of the high risk low reward.
The company is out a whole bunch of product and is down a warehouse to store it. It’ll affect their distribution efforts negatively.
EDIT: Just read that the company is pulling out of California entirely. So rather than pay everyone decently, now every single employee of theirs in the state is out of work. I’m sure that’ll go over well.
If the company was paying this horribly, then maybe it was the better deal for them. Now they can collect unemployment that probably pays more than they did.
ah yes, the firekeeper
Walmart now?
Have there been more fire bombings?
No, this is the kimberly-clark fire, this is a reference to that older twitter meme.
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