91–100 of 117 posts
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And when we talk about slavery it's usually in the sense of racialized, bondage-from-birth slavery rather than penal labor. The two are very different, and using the word 'slavery' to refer to both conflates meaning and disguises the important differences between the two.
I think the term you may be looking for is "Noncentral Fallacy" http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
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Prisons are hugely profitable (see the video elsewhere of the Louisiana sheriff) and the prison industrial complex throws off so much cash that its lobbying effort is one of the largest in California (and is why we still have, for example, the three strikes law)
sorry I was referring to GP's comment about cheap labor, not the profitability of prison itself. Are private companies generating significant profit off of cheap prison labor ? Am I buying something from a walmart shelve made from prison labor ?
Yep.
A quick google search with that very question finds lots of entries, many of course with an axe to grind. The Economist is rather dispassionate on the subject though: https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-...
But if you interact with the government, go to McDonalds, etc you're using prison labor. Whole Foods too (http://theweek.com/articles/630907/corporate-america-secret-...)
I said "yep" because I figured you were asking a general question; in the specific case Walmart's position is that they don't use prison labor (but plenty of web sites will tell you it's not true. Here's Huffpo: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/walmart-prison-labo...).
This link is pretty good but requires a bit more epistemological digging: https://www.cagedbirdmagazine.com/single-post/2017/03/28/50-...
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Yes, making a criminal - who has committed a crime, been convicted and sentenced to jail time - do work is not equivalent - morally or otherwise - to racialized slavery.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut th…
I highly recommend you listen to that entire interview to understand why it's important. He said it while he was a campaign strategist for Reagan and was talking about historical campaign strategies of the 50s and 60s.
As an engineer, I always get frustrated when it seems like a lot of our customers are more concerned with the perception of the existence of something, rather than its actual existence. I'm continuing to learn (UX not withstanding) that just because you solve a problem, it doesn't mean the user believes the problem is solved. As a black engineer, I've often thought that if there were data, science, math, and straight…
> Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways. I've thought about this, too - using data to work toward solutions to problems that plague our society. I'm constantly haunted by the belief that there is a set of solutions "out there" but am bedeviled by my own inability to accumulate, homogenize, and aggregate t…
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Prisons are hugely profitable (see the video elsewhere of the Louisiana sheriff) and the prison industrial complex throws off so much cash that its lobbying effort is one of the largest in California (and is why we still have, for example, the three strikes law)
sorry I was referring to GP's comment about cheap labor, not the profitability of prison itself. Are private companies generating significant profit off of cheap prison labor ? Am I buying something from a walmart shelve made from prison labor ?
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A few generations of really focused, quality education would help a lot more. Until then, I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.
How would education bring back jobs to rural America?
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It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, and they're being incarcerated explicitly for cheap labor. There are major issues with regards to race in America, but real life is more nuanced than "it's happening because racism."
> It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, Nobody is saying "only" black people are being incarcerated. They're saying that incarceration is used as a tool to perpetuate many of the same outcomes as slavery. Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race. > they're being incarcerated explicitly for ch…
This assumes that incarceration rates should be equal for all races, which probably shouldn't be the case. There's a correlation between low socioeconomic status and incarceration. Black Americans tend to have a lower socioeconomic status. Murder rates are also much higher among blacks than other races in America.
> Prisoners are, by design, excluded from minimum wage laws.
Right. Prisoners are being exploited, but that's not why they're being imprisoned. They're being imprisoned because of drugs, violence, and thievery/burglary for the most part.
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> It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, Nobody is saying "only" black people are being incarcerated. They're saying that incarceration is used as a tool to perpetuate many of the same outcomes as slavery. Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race. > they're being incarcerated explicitly for ch…
>if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race. Yet the theory breaks down once you look at a breakdown of race, gender, and SES.
There's plenty of research debunking this claim, which is a myth generally propagated by groups with explicit white supremacist agendas.
Ive always taken an unpopular view about slavery. "We never quit doing slavery." It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty. I would…
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines by posting generic commentary about the voting on your posts, how unpopular your opinions are, and whatnot? It's pontificatory, tedious, and off topic.
Also, if you're going to post on an ideologically inflammatory topic like slavery or race, make sure your comment is substantive enough not to be flamebait. An example of how to do this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543652. Your comment fell on the flamebait side. We don't need yet another flamewar! We need thoughtful discussion.
Worse, when you start posting comments that go Atwater, Erlichman, and Flint (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543975), you're just going full generic, which is what makes flamewars burn hottest and be most tedious. Please don't.
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That's part of it. The other part is transit. Cars are bad; I don't really want to ever own one again and I definitely don't want to have to drive one every day if I do. So anywhere I'd want to move would need to either be super walkable or have transit. And small cities usually, IME, aren't the first and don't have the second. I live in a 50K-population city adjoining Boston, so they exist, I just don't know how wel…
Regardless of where I live, I don't feel the need to leave my "home" every day. Not to say I don't go outside, but I don't need to commute somewhere (I own some acreage and I spent plenty of time on outside on it). I live a few miles from pavement, so I definitely need a car to go anywhere. But I don't need to go anywhere on a normal day. I go to the nearest city about 3-4 times per month. I do take advantage of UPS…