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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Average in the US for a 2 bedroom is $1317 per statista.

    Triple that for a monthly income = $3951

    x12 for annual = $47,412

    /2080 for hourly full time = $22.79/hr

    A 1 bedroom (or 2br with a $200/mo UBI) at $1100ish brings the minimum to $19ish.

    A 2 bedroom but working 60hrs/week or using 50% of income on rent instead of 33% is around $15/hr.

    Just trying to play around with the numbers to see what a real political proposal might look like. Feels great to meme a declaration, people start disagreeing when you start putting numbers to it.



  • Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

    Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

    What happens if you refuse to work?

    I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

    We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

    It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

    …no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?


  • It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

    Which is just a lot of caveats.

    Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

    A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.











  • This is extremely common, the purpose is to prevent or at least identify racist hiring practices. How else are they supposed to know? They get an idea of who is applying, and an idea of who gets hired, and they can look at population statistics, and thus tell whether a disproportionate amount of certain minority groups are being rejected by a certain manager or the company as a whole.

    Or alternatively you can tell if a job posting disproportionately has applicants of a certain demographic, so maybe white men tend to be hired in that job but it’s because the applicant pool is 95% white men. That would show that it’s not necessarily the hiring managers with the issue but either the HR outreach or the job itself has requirements disproportionately held by white men, and you can decide if that means you need to change something or that’s just something you need to live with for this role.

    It’s allowed as long as it is only used for these purposes.





  • My first big corporate job had internal salary ranges posted for when you’re looking at a new job within the same company, and I had to reckon with this as a new employee. I’d see basically my job posted with my salary on the far low end of the possible range and when I discussed it with folks I learned that the posted median salary is the median for everybody in that job, including people with 10 years of experience etc. So even if I’m impressing as a kid fresh out of college, the median isn’t the right metric to judge myself against.