A little thing with a big result

@mehcuda67 Thanks. I had forgotten about them. I used to get frequent email pitches from them but seldom look at that email acct any longer. Once I used to buy a lot of their e-books but wasn’t actually reading many of them. (Never did care for their fantasy or sci-fi bundles much.)
I see they are having a sale for a few more days on some O’Reilly books on programming; I’ll have to look closer at those and their current charity, Code for America.

@mehcuda67 @phendrick

Resident Evil Humble Bundle:

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/resident-evil-decades-horror?utm_campaign=07_0562&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=2022_residentevildecadeshorror_msrp&utm_term=2022_residentevildecadeshorror_game_bundle&fbclid=PAAabkvuL5lO5fR7YubVKFMjvtUiBQKp5TReQHwLKGubM6mfs8Iv6CVvuXpJM

@mehcuda67 @RiotDemon
Not my cup of un-decaffeinated tea, but hope you enjoy such!
(I’d rather slay computer bugs or math problems – and word games.)

@mike808 Jones is not eligible; my recollection of the rules has the participation requirement limited to 501©3 organizations, educational institutions, and a couple of other things he isn’t. OTOH, if Jones has a pile of AMZ shares, you’re potentially putting more money in his pocket than would happen with a charitable contribution - but that would mean he’s effectively going to laugh at the judge’s fines. In any event, he’s undoubtedly going to roll out the pity-wagon and fleece his flock for more than the damages, same as a certain other jerk.

@mike808 @werehatrack
Just one other jerk?
I seem to have seen lots of flock fleecers on the various cable channels, most with smiles a dentist would be proud of.

@mike808 @phendrick Oh, there are plenty, but the world-class unchallenged champ for five years running in the Political Grifter class (which Jones has a particularly public adoration for) is in a category all his own. He makes the Osteens look like dedicated philanthropists with a vow of poverty.

@phendrick @werehatrack Getting back to Amazon’s “charity”. Don’t believe prices aren’t higher for you. We seem to have forgotten that Amazon pioneered amd uses “dynamic” pricing. Meaning the price you see is likely tweaked by their AI to include your “donation” from Amazon that they take the tax break on and pass the entire cost of “purchasing” that tax credit onto you. So, yeah, those pennies add up. For Amazon.

@mike808 @werehatrack

Amazon […] uses “dynamic” pricing. Meaning the price you see is likely tweaked by their AI to include your “donation”

Yeah, I’ve even noticed their pricing varies during the day around changing demand. (Go figure. But doesn’t Meh & MorningSave and Side Deal do the same thing with their special “deals”?)

Every business tacks on any of their expenses (in any form) onto their selling prices, as much as they can realistically do.
I watch the prices and only buy there when I feel I’m getting as good a deal there as I could elsewhere. In fact, I tend to put a lot of items into my “Saved for later” list and watch price go up and down, then buy when down.
But, I have not noticed the price going up whenever I’ve switched a purchase from my regular acct over to the “smile” acct.

So, my point stands:
IF you are going to buy there, might as well use the “smile” feature. And if they get a tax break from a worthwhile donation from your buying something that’s at the cheapest price you can get at the time, So Be It.

@werehatrack Most of the time I use PayPal, there’s an option to donate $1 to Wikipedia. I click it a lot; I’m sure I’m actually donating more than if I made a one-time donation, and I hardly notice the dollar added to my total. I use Wikipedia a lot, so I’m happy to donate.

@Star2236 A good many of those are aliases for Kroger.

@Star2236 Thanks, I 'll check some of these out. We have several local Krogers and I’ve shopped several different Fry’s (though none local here) but not through e-commerce. As to Fry’s, I shopped the closed electronics stores, but I bet you are referring to the grocery chain that I have never seen a physical store of.
I have a feeling most of these won’t be relevant to my shopping here in Texas, though, but maybe others here can patronize them.

@Star2236 @werehatrack

aliases for Kroger

Oh, OK. Had to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger#Chains
We’ve had Kroger in my area for at least 5 or 6 decades, but I hadn’t seen any of the others that are still a thing. (We did have Tom Thumb, SuperRX, …) when I was in Dallas years ago, but now they ain’t.

@phendrick @Star2236 @werehatrack Well, that was an educational Wiki. Thanks, all.

@OldCatLady @phendrick @werehatrack
Different parts of the country have different stores I think.

@Cerridwyn I really dislike their habit of sending useless crap and trying to guilt me into donating.

@Cerridwyn @Salanth Unfortunately, that’s a common tactic charities use. I have sheets of address labels from various charities. I guess enough people feel guilty and send them money that it’s worth it, but it seems like an expensive way to get donations.

@Limewater this message sponsored by Lime Farmers of America

@medz My username is actually a reference to a solution of calcium hydroxide.

@Limewater
/image lime-water

@medz You aren’t donating shit. But you still get to feel smug.
I don’t know who came up with Amazon Smile, but I hope they paid him a LOT of money. It really is an amazing advertising scheme.

@Limewater donating my time. Do you know how long it takes to type in those five or six extra characters?

@medz Those extra characters are a calculated decision on Amazon’s part. They could just always have your account point to smile, but they don’t.

@Limewater @medz Whenever Mrs Mike808’s side gig website links to an Amazon item we default to the smile site (the Amazon short URLs don’t work with smile, either) and we strip all the referral crap.

Just “smile.amazon.com/dp/<ASIN>”.

@Limewater Imagine how many employees could get off the taxpayer-funded Medicaid, SNAP, CHIPS, and other government subsidized benefits for employers if Walmart spent that 1.4 Billion on raising their employee wages to living wages and giving them enough hours to qualify for benefits. Add in the money they would save fighting workplace regulation and unionization (which is just a different form of regulation).

@mike808 Certainly. I think the evil characterization is a bit overstated, but I wasn’t intending my post to be a praise for Wal-Mart so much as a damnation of Amazon Smile.

@Limewater @mike808

Imagine how many employees could get off the taxpayer-funded Medicaid, SNAP, CHIPS, and other government subsidized benefits for employers if Walmart spent that 1.4 Billion on raising their employee wages to living wages and giving them enough hours to qualify for benefits.

Given that Walmart has 2.3 million employees I’m not sure that extra $10 a week would solve a whole lot of social ills. ($20 if half the 2.3 are paid well enough not to need it…)

@chienfou I guarantee it will benefit them more than the $0 they are getting now. Instead, that 1.4B is being directed by management to charities of their choosing. Like the self-serving Walton Art Foundation (to buy and display art in the executive suites, “on loan” of course, as TFG was busted for), or worse, donating to dark money PACs or anti-worker astroturfing “charities” for example, now that abominations like Citizens United are in place.

Because all charities management selected are providing equal benefits to those 2.3M workers, right?

I absolutely agree that the $1.4B should be split among the most underpaid workers (if we hypothetically assume the 1.4B is being redirected from “charities” for the sake of the discussion). There is no reason to insist upon equal distribution to recipients as the only way to value impact or value or effect of that distribution on those recipients. Raising the bar for the most impoverished as possible is the optimal distribution.

And since we don’t tell the wealthy what to do with their money (“trickle down”, anyone?), we have no justification for imposing restrictions on what the non-wealthy do with their money either.

@mike808
A ) I never said the extra 10 to 20 bucks wouldn’t benefit the workers. I merely said it was not gonna get them off SNAP etc. Which was your contention (unless I misread the quote above)
B ) I’m pretty sure at least 50% of WM employees are hourly workers. How would you base the distribution of that 1.4 B? People over a certain age get more? People with kids? More kids more money? People that work less hours (therefore earn less money) get more per hour??
C ) what happens to the local charities they (WM) are currently supporting (like little league, scouting, etc) which frequently help fund programs the employees benefit from?

@chienfou If we weren’t systemically and institutionally so pervasively and grossly underpaying workers, and only valuing contribution to society as “work”, the there wouldn’t need to be charities in the first place.

And for bonus points, little league and scouting are demonstrably biased to favor (and thus further entrench those same insitutional biases) white suburban families with the economic means to provide for and the free parenting time to support those liesure time activities for their kids.

So workers without kids or with kids with disabilities or are outside the age range served by those charities, or live in a city (no land for baseball fields), or participating itself imposes resource or economic costs on the parents (uniforms, equipment, transportation is a big one, after time off from work during events) that disadvantage a systemically underpaid workforce.

@chienfou I wasn’t saying half the workers should benefit, or that the benefit should be $10. I’m saying that if we’re splitting 1.4B, maybe spreading that to raise the lowest pay for the most workers to the most pay possible.

i.e. If spreading that 1.4B across 100K of the lowest 1% annualized take home pay of hourly paid workers (i.e. give them a raise) means a $2/hr raise for them, how much does that move the lowest 1% annualized take home pay of hourly workers?

Does spreading $1/hr raise across 500K workers do more?

Would you ask those 500K workers if they would give up $1/hr to give to “scouting” or “little league”, I don’t think you would have the unanimous agreement that corporate management unilaterally imposes on them with these sorts of “charity-washing” virtue-signalling actions when the real motivation is to use that money for anything other than paying taxes or their workers.

In effect, paying taxes is a charity, but one in which we all have a say in (at least with a functioning representative government, which is in question at this point) what those “charities” are - education for all, a military that protects all, a healthcare system that serves all (to ensure a uniformly healthy workforce, right?), an economic system that includes and provides for all (we had a revolution about not having a class-based society, remember), roads and infrastructure and national parks that benefit us all, and preparations for the ongoing and increasing climate effects we are experiencing to protect the world we enjoy today for our children and their children and their children - measured in millenniums, not decades or centennials.

@mike808
OK.

So workers without kids or with kids with disabilities or are outside the age range served by those charities, or live in a city (no land for baseball fields), or participating itself imposes resource or economic costs on the parents (uniforms, equipment, transportation is a big one, after time off from work during events) that disadvantage a systemically underpaid workforce.

I have read this sentence a dozen times, tried to break it down into smaller digestable bits, but have still not been able to ferret out the meaning. I can’t seem to find a verb in there that makes it coherent.

If you pay extra money to those with the “lowest annualized take home pay” I suspect you will be increasing the pay for the high school/college/seasonal workers disproportionately compared to the rest of the work force that depends on their WM job to pay rent, raise a family etc. That was the reason for point B ) above, which you didn’t address. Making that happen is not as easy as just giving it to the bottom end of the pay scale.

As for the demonstrably white suburban biased little league and scouting I would be glad to review those statisitics/studies if you can point them out to me. While both have their share of issues, they also both have programs aimed at outreach to underprivileged kids.

…the real motivation is to use that money for anything other than paying taxes or their workers.

Maybe they have changed the tax laws since I had a business, but if I remember correctly, charitable donations come off your gross income, and are not tax credits offsetting what you owe on a dollar for dollar basis. Likewise, paying the money out in payroll is an expense that comes off the gross. So other than the appearance of benevolence, there is no real advantage to them to donate the money vs pay it to the employees.

@chienfou Here’s some info on BSA’s diversity and inclusion track record:

The Boy Scouts didn’t fully integrate its Southern troops until 1974, a full 20 years after Brown v. the Board of Education required desegregation in schools. And even up until then, many Boy Scout troops in the South that did allow Black Scouts to join wouldn’t allow them to wear the uniform.

Boy Scouts didn’t fully integrate until after the Civil Rights Act passed – a few Southern Boy Scout councils held out until the 1970s – but the organization made way for the first black troop in 1911. Those scouts were still met with racism, though: The organization defined black scouts as “Special Troops” based on their race and considered them less-than, according to the African American Registry, an education nonprofit.
Some of the scouting program’s discriminatory policies remained in place until the last decade.

According to Miller-McCune’s Tom Jacobs, “[p]articipation peaked in 1973 with 4.8 million scouts and has since plunged 42 percent, to 2.8 million.” In the same timeframe, the population of America has risen by about 100 million. A number of causes have been attributed to declining membership, including scout masters’ struggle to properly teach outdoors skills to children with less and less exposure to nature and exclusionary, spirituality-based recruitment criteria (the organization bars atheists, agnostics, gays, and girls).

Some detailed breakdowns of the recruitment challenges BSA faces from its own study: https://filestore.scouting.org/filestore/media/210-311.pdf

Interesting tidbit from that is that baseball (little league reference) only gets an 11% slice of boys sports activities. Football is #1 with 25%.

@chienfou

“lowest annualized take home pay” I suspect you will be increasing the pay for the high school/college/seasonal workers disproportionately compared to the rest of the work force that depends on their WM job to pay rent, raise a family etc.

I used “lowest annualized take home pay” as rough take on something maybe better than raw hourly wage. In your example, how would one separate HS/college/seasonal workers from “the rest of the work force” and how would you know which “depends on their WM job to pay rent, raise a family, etc.” and which employees don’t? I’m open to tweaking the “formula”. The goal remains - maximize the impact to workers over cherry picking charities that demonstrably don’t address those core issues - not paying employees sustainable living wages by artificially creating a scarcity of them.

There are folks that are PT at WM because WM won’t give them FT hours just to deny them benefits, and instead offer workshops in how to get on taxpayer-funded programs to provide them. WM routinely uses 911 and police services as an alternative to providing their own security because those are taxpayer funded services. Why do you think they need dedicated police parking spots right in the front of the store?

Amazon is right there with WM, and the wage theft is likely even worse given almost all of Amazon’s “work” is not on public display like it is in a WM.

@chienfou @mike808
Both of the friends I have who work for Amazon in a distribution center report that the wages are fine, what sucks is the working conditions. They get decent benefits, they get a decent hourly, but the rest of it is where the problem is. Workplace conditions were a bigger reason for the formation of unions in the first place than merely bargaining for better wages. Eventually, once the hazards and abusive things had been dealt with, wages became the main thing that the union addressed. That’s why most people have the impression that unions are only about money. Originally, they were not.

@chienfou @mike808
When big companies donate money to charities, they do it for public relations reasons almost every time. Actually contributing to the public good is not their goal. They want to appear to be better corporate citizens than they ever have any intent of actually being.

@chienfou @werehatrack

They want to appear to be better corporate citizens than they ever have any intent of actually being.

This.

As for working conditions, that’s "partly* inherent in the work Amazon does. And Amazon has made huge investments and progress in automating the shit out of everything it can to make the work that’s left as minimal as possible.

I would posit that Amazon isn’t paying enough, because that’s the primary way employers have to compensate for any working condition. It’s the universal fungible “good” that can be translated into anything, and exchanged. i.e. there is a price at which the work is balanced with pay directly, or indirectly, as intangible benefits purchased with money the workers don’t receive as “pay”.

The unions serve to simplify and centralize negotiations between workers and employers, and employers have found that they negotiate better terms in their favor when they treat workers like prey, and pick off the weaker, vulnerable workers one at a time, and who are more likely not to be highly trained negotiators, while companies can hire highly trained experts - we call them the “HR” department.

So when you are treated as prey by employers in employment contract negotiations, collective bargaining is a natural response, just as forming a mass herd serves prey animals in nature.

Tying cultural identity to traits like “individualism” and demonizing community as “communism” or “socialism” also serves the corporatist agenda.