61–70 of 76 posts
About $800 for 300 inmates playing 12 hours each? That's about $0.25/hr for each of them. Is gold farming in these games really that unproductive? Who would do that voluntarily?
That said, there isn't a huge overlap between those places and cheap electricity, internet and computers.
But I guess China is one of them..
How about the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the US forced to work for pennies per hour? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl... If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Makes many millions in profit for the states and federal government, even some judges own stock. Ironically it's the only labor in the US that can compete with of…
Is anyone else tired of the fact that on the internet you can't say "Hey, look at this sucky thing in Random Country X" without having someone pipe up and say "Yeah, but what about this vaguely-similar thing in the USA? Huh? Huh?"
In China the corruption is actually illegal but hidden and therefore the abuses even worse because thy are undocumented and unprovable without great sacrifice to somehow prove what happened (and then they will still get away with it).
Forced prison labor is somehow perceived as "okay" in the USA because it's documented and in the light and some people can say "OH THE PRISONERS DESERVE IT, THEY SHOULD PAY US".
In China the same people say its not okay because it's not documented and the cannot feel good about why the people may be in prison (in the USA apparently all people in prison are very guilty of moral laws, regardless if the law is just or not, because there was possibly a "jury").
But the USA has political prisoners too - on the mild side for example, not paying your taxes - isn't that political after they have taken all your assets to pay the debt? Should Wesley Snipes be forced to work for 23 cents per hour now? What about if you are arrested at the DNC or RNC for protesting and the patriot act or similar is thrown at you and you have to serve in prison for year? Is it okay for that person to be forced to work for 23 cents per hour? Aren't they a political prisoner?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are the Chinese and American situations vaguely similar? Just because one involves computers and the other doesn't? If these counterexamples are not made up, what would it take for you to go from being tired to seriously revising your beliefs on the US system?
I think you two actually agree, the grandparent is saying he is tired of seeing that for many morally questionable practices happening in the world, there is sadly similar conduct sometimes happening in the US and he would rather this wasn't the case.
Meh. Worse ways to be tortured.
Of course, but incarceration is supposed to be the punishment itself, not extra abuse from the guards. The article does note "the inmates were kept playing until they could barely see things and missing the daily quota would result in physical punishment and abuse."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An online friendship of mine ended in part because of the other person's habit of pouncing on any excuse to bad-mouth the US and it's government and culture like it is The Evil Empire. So count me among the tired.
Meta-comment follows: Would you have replied if comment scores were displayed?
Meta answer: Though there are certainly times that I reply these days when I would have only upvoted if comment scores showed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.
So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!
This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.
I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?
Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know wh…
I'm confused, doesn't the thirteenth amendment specifically allow involuntary servitude for convicted prisoners? It's right there in the text!
I would've thought something like Mechanical Turk would be more valuable. Mining WoW gold sounds like something that could be fuuly automated. Why not have them do things that require human insight instead?
Blizzard (the company that owns & operates WoW) doesn't want people to automatically do gold mining, so they try to stop it. A lot of 'gold mining' is "move you character around, click on this pig 10 times to kill it, collect the little bit of money/goods it drops". In order to automate it well you'd have to solve a lot of computer vision problems. Probably cheaper to just use cheap labour.
Back in the "Burning Crusade" days I got an in game whisper (message) with an obvious spam for Chinese gold. I whipped out google and found a few phrases in Chinese and began chatting back, asking where they are from, how are they doing etc.
Sure enough after a couple of tries, they would reply and tell me they were from Wuhan, I believe. Next they invited me into their group, told me to come with them.
They were two Frost Mages and went into the "Underbog" dungeon and proceded to clear the first room with nothing but "Frost Nova", "Blizzard" and "Arcane Explosion" spells - so they kept an absolutely deadly group of 6 hostiles completely immobilized and killed them more or less slowly with "area of effect" spells. But ultimately it yielded them a better result than killing regular monsters would have.
It was absolutely hilarious to watch and help them and it is a very fond memory of an otherwise actually quite boring and repetitive, non-extraordinary game.
And my point being: with blizzard constantly working on making it harder for the gold farmers, they have to constantly come up with new tricks; with the introduction of the "diminishing returns" on root effects, this would not have worked anymore, for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they refuse, they are written up as uncooperative and it could affect privileges, parole, etc. Very interesting, I did not know about that aspect and in the back of my mind always wondered why do all these prisoners even work when it pays that little. Why not just do nothing? Somehow I thought it was because of boredom and just something to do, be a part of something, but I guess a system that punishes the slave…
You’ve got that slavery part right. Here is the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This led, for example, courts to conclude that prisoners have no right to be payed minimum wage. (I honestly don’t really know wh…
Whom is the work benefiting.
Given the continuing privatization of prisons as well as the apparently rampant level of corruption, I have my suspicions.
And how much does it compete with the normal labor market? Is it reducing employment or depressing wages? As more and more people in the U.S. are imprisoned, this question would seem to become more pertinent.
Now, if formerly "unemployable" people left prison with job skills, and someone was actually willing to hire them, perhaps we might even consider prison labor a form of "internship".
But, to my very limited knowledge, the statistics do not bear this out.
Pennies an hour are unlikely to add up to any substantial restitution.
And states seem to be going broke paying for their prisons -- directly or via contract.
Maybe someone else can cite some informative journalism or substantiated data with regard to these questions.
P.S. I'm somewhat uncomfortable commenting at all, from my position of limited knowledge and experience. But, damn it, imprisonment is a State activity, and therefore, like it or not, the responsibility of all the State's citizens (at least, in a representative government). So, it's our duty to try and make some sense of this. It's not simply "someone else's problem".
Is it merely a matter of "idle hands", and allowing select individuals to benefit from the side effects? (Or vise versa.)