4 ms·

Well it's a shell game, right? On the one hand here's this huge valuation and future profit. On the other hand, the workers get just a small fraction of that va

Well it's a shell game, right? On the one hand here's this huge valuation and future profit. On the other hand, the workers get just a small fraction of that value and still live in squalor. Is that where your billions come from? You comfortable with that? That's not how I run my company. You don't pay people less because you have them by the short and curlies of their own poverty. That is exploitive. You pay them a fair share of the value they're producing. The problem is that if corporations did this, if they stopped exploiting, if they paid a fair share, then those billions in valuation magically vanish. It's because the valuation was predicated on exploitation to begin with.

dauertewigkeit 2y ago
If you want to make an argument that employees are underpaid and don't capture enough of the wealth they generate, fine, I would agree with you. But this is not just true of Africans who are employed by Americans. This is almost the general case. I don't think invoking this debate in the context of lack of jobs in Africa, is useful. These are two completely different problems with different causes.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  It is an issue. They hire African workers because they can exploit them perhaps 3x or more than Western workers. For every unit of revenue they extract, they can pay the African workers 2/3 less let's say. Low cost of living means nothing when it also comes with low standard of living, caused by globalist exploitation in the first place. The globalist capitalists simply exploit the poverty of the final market to retain more of the revenue. They could try to exploit Western workers as mechanical Turks but their strategy would then fail. The strategy succeeds because the rate of exploitation of workers in impoverished countries - in terms of actual share of the real dollars produced - is much higher in the global South than the global West. Worse we're now all guilty and complicit, in using LLMs, and even in using open source llms train second hand on the unethically sourced llms. We will have to pay reparations. By making a false equivalence between the two worker classes, you potentially support the continued existence of the globalist hyper exploitation strategy, and prevent Justice for AI workers. You can speak out against it instead, act against companies who use it, and move towards understanding what reparations might entail. I think the exploitation of low-paid mechanical Turk style laborers is a real problem and we need to talk about it, rather than background it just because workers in the global West are exploited as well. True global worker solidarity means seeing this as a place where the iron is very hot and ready for striking. Finally, the scarcity of jobs in Africa is not a problem being seriously discussed here. It's being used as a red herring to justify exploitive investment.
telepathy 2y ago
You mismanage your company to signal virtue and you're proud of it? Crazy
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  Gaslighting actually decent business people on the internet is a very bad look for you. I'm not insane, I just have values and principles you don't understand. If I'm virtue signaling, then you're signaling you are an unreasoning a**. It's hard to imagine that you have anything constructive to contribute to a business conversation, when you see someone who acts out of ethics and assume they're acting performatively. That just means you don't believe ethics are real. That's a very dangerous attitude in a business person. Curious about the company that you own, what its business model is. I bet you're in crypto.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - telepathy 2y ago
    That's a lot of projection going on. It's deeply unethical to squander economic resources on your vanity. The elephant in the room is that your employees are not starving Africans who deserve charity far more. Your actions cause the death of starving children who would have otherwise been fed if you had not overpaid your rich employees so you can feel good about yourself. You're a bad person. And no I'm not in crypto. I've been saying it has no lawful utility so voluminously that mods have asked me to stop trolling crypto people. So we can establish your assumptions and fundamental intuition and instincts are very inaccurate. You have a broken compass and it has caused you to become disconnected from first principles of microeconomics. What is your company name and who are the unlucky shareholders you're victimizing? Last, I hope you can learn the difference between kindness and niceness. The former is legitimate while the latter is what you do - a manipulative social strategy, often employed by predators with subclinical psychopathology, to ingratiate yourself to others in leu of merit.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
gruez 2y ago
>Well it's a shell game, right? On the one hand here's this huge valuation and future profit. On the other hand, the workers get just a small fraction of that value and still live in squalor. I'm not seeing how this is a "shell game" in any meaningful sense. In contrast to the actual game[1], everyone knows and gets what they signed up for. There's no deception going on aside from a vague "but I thought corporations were supposed to give everyone a fair share (whatever that means) that idealists have". >You don't pay people less because you have them by the short and curlies of their own poverty. That is exploitive. You pay them a fair share of the value they're producing. What is a "fair share"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game

dauertewigkeit 2y ago

If you want to make an argument that employees are underpaid and don't capture enough of the wealth they generate, fine, I would agree with you. But this is not just true of Africans who are employed by Americans. This is almost the general case. I don't think invoking this debate in the context of lack of jobs in Africa, is useful. These are two completely different problems with different causes.

barfbagginus 2y ago
It is an issue. They hire African workers because they can exploit them perhaps 3x or more than Western workers. For every unit of revenue they extract, they can pay the African workers 2/3 less let's say. Low cost of living means nothing when it also comes with low standard of living, caused by globalist exploitation in the first place. The globalist capitalists simply exploit the poverty of the final market to retain more of the revenue. They could try to exploit Western workers as mechanical Turks but their strategy would then fail. The strategy succeeds because the rate of exploitation of workers in impoverished countries - in terms of actual share of the real dollars produced - is much higher in the global South than the global West. Worse we're now all guilty and complicit, in using LLMs, and even in using open source llms train second hand on the unethically sourced llms. We will have to pay reparations. By making a false equivalence between the two worker classes, you potentially support the continued existence of the globalist hyper exploitation strategy, and prevent Justice for AI workers. You can speak out against it instead, act against companies who use it, and move towards understanding what reparations might entail. I think the exploitation of low-paid mechanical Turk style laborers is a real problem and we need to talk about it, rather than background it just because workers in the global West are exploited as well. True global worker solidarity means seeing this as a place where the iron is very hot and ready for striking. Finally, the scarcity of jobs in Africa is not a problem being seriously discussed here. It's being used as a red herring to justify exploitive investment.

telepathy 2y ago

You mismanage your company to signal virtue and you're proud of it? Crazy

barfbagginus 2y ago
Gaslighting actually decent business people on the internet is a very bad look for you. I'm not insane, I just have values and principles you don't understand. If I'm virtue signaling, then you're signaling you are an unreasoning a**. It's hard to imagine that you have anything constructive to contribute to a business conversation, when you see someone who acts out of ethics and assume they're acting performatively. That just means you don't believe ethics are real. That's a very dangerous attitude in a business person. Curious about the company that you own, what its business model is. I bet you're in crypto.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- telepathy 2y ago
  That's a lot of projection going on. It's deeply unethical to squander economic resources on your vanity. The elephant in the room is that your employees are not starving Africans who deserve charity far more. Your actions cause the death of starving children who would have otherwise been fed if you had not overpaid your rich employees so you can feel good about yourself. You're a bad person. And no I'm not in crypto. I've been saying it has no lawful utility so voluminously that mods have asked me to stop trolling crypto people. So we can establish your assumptions and fundamental intuition and instincts are very inaccurate. You have a broken compass and it has caused you to become disconnected from first principles of microeconomics. What is your company name and who are the unlucky shareholders you're victimizing? Last, I hope you can learn the difference between kindness and niceness. The former is legitimate while the latter is what you do - a manipulative social strategy, often employed by predators with subclinical psychopathology, to ingratiate yourself to others in leu of merit.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago

gruez 2y ago

>Well it's a shell game, right? On the one hand here's this huge valuation and future profit. On the other hand, the workers get just a small fraction of that value and still live in squalor. I'm not seeing how this is a "shell game" in any meaningful sense. In contrast to the actual game[1], everyone knows and gets what they signed up for. There's no deception going on aside from a vague "but I thought corporations were supposed to give everyone a fair share (whatever that means) that idealists have". >You don't pay people less because you have them by the short and curlies of their own poverty. That is exploitive. You pay them a fair share of the value they're producing. What is a "fair share"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game