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thespacesay · 1 year

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one thing I feel like people miss in the discussions around the ridiculously low pay rates allowed for certain groups of disabled individuals is that in order to effectively change that, we first need to tackle funding for programs that support the types of disabled individuals who receive these pays. while i'm speaking to my personal connections to this, those low pay rates typically are social programs. these programs create jobs that are applied for via social workers assigned to disabled individuals by the state, and not through job applications. they are notoriously underfunded, primarily run by companies or groups who want to be seen as progressive, and typically are shut down rather than given increased funding.

for example: a recent change in a local pay rate for disabled individuals made it so my downs syndrome brother got like... $7 every two weeks (low hours + low pay) instead of $3. cool! for people who need more hours and the money it gives them, that sounds great!

but the thing is, at least for all the programs I know of, these programs are typically designed with people like my brother as the primary goal: adult disabled indiviuals for whom the goal of work is not to have a job, not to make money, but to provide a consistent socialization system. my brother is financially supported by our family, and he's disabled in ways where financial wellbeing is beyond his cognitive abilities. almost no money is put into the programs beyond paying a program manager, and it's generally used as a public "look at us, being so nice to provide for disabled adults!" thing. when my brother's pay went up due to legal changes... the company decided to simply end the program rather than invest in paying more.

again, i'm fully for raising their wages. I think the absolutely pitiful amount of money they're paid for legitimate work is terrible, and i'm well aware that my brother works with others who need what finances they can get through these jobs. but there's more to this than just wages. there's campaigning for better social programs so that there's something for them to fall back on. there's looking into how your local programs for disabled individuals are run, and ensuring they have enough money and equipement to provide a safe working environment for their workers. there's understanding who is paying these wages, what their goals are, and holding them accountable to helping disabled people instead of using people like my brother on an endless stream of advertisements to show how socially progressive they are.

and i'm really not joking about those ads. god, I really, really wish I was. my brother is visibly disabled, adores public attention, and very friendly. he's in like... 3 programs and featured in newsletters or ads probably 3-5 times a year. those programs have also let him wander out the door and not noticed for over an hour, fired program managers for manufactured reasons after they request funding for small but meaningful changes, and... been the local police. guess which group is the only one that never shuts down from a lack of funding?

I honestly can't tell you how best to help disabled people in your area. my needs as a disabled person are vastly different than either of my brothers, and all of us have terrible problems with employment not providing for us in vastly different ways. but if you're just tacking on "disabled people deserve better wages" to a broader "people deserve a living wage" with no nuance, you have got to understand that you can be actively harming the very people you want to support.

#i don't know how best to phrase this all #but just. i'm upset for my brother because when this program shuts down he's losing access to his friends who live in group homes #and i'm upset for his friends who are in turn losing more of their already very limited access to places outside of their house #i'm frustrated in the so-called progressive groups that pushed for this and said nothing when it led to 3/5 of the major programs #for disabled adults in that area who cannot work 'standard' jobs to close #because there was no effort to hold the companies providing those programs accountable to not just... close. fire them. anything like that.#and god knows none of them and none of the families of this group of largely cognitively/physically disabled adults in our area #have any fucking money to hire lawyers to even see if there *is* a case that could be brought #and of course the remaining programs are a new one by a group that i don't trust at all with my brother's health and safety #and the even worse one: the fucking cops!#just... there's probably poorly phrased shit throughout this and i really hope people can provide some better ideas and shit #but this is a personal rant in response to seeing 'progressives' use disability as a cute platform and having a lack of detailed attention #to the ramifications of how they tried to 'help' them #i'm also struggling to try to define like... i'm disabled. i'm not who these conversations are about #these conversations are about a different group of disabled individuals than me #and in the area my brother lives in i'm passingly familiar with a lot of the group of disabled adults who utilize the social programs #these wage conversations typically refer to #and among them i don't think i know any who *can* self advocate about this #also the consistency with which this happens every like. 5 or so years is really terrible #in reference to calling these jobs programs: they are programs. we apply my brother to them via his state social worker

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strawberri-syrup · 1 year

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who put me in charge of designing a poster this is too much pressure

#real life companies donated to us and it is my job to design the poster!#by wednesday!#augh!#i will need to get input on color schemes #because i COULD do school colors #but those are lame as hell and really limit me #but i dont want to use a ton of different colors because im not the one printing these bad boy

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kittyregime · 1 year

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"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism"

Translation: I don't want to put any effort into my activism so I'm going to keep cosuming products I know were unethically sourced but it's okay because I just shout this meaningless mantra to absolve me of my sins

#i don't even care if you buy from evil inc or whatever #i do it too #but stop acting like you can't do ANYTHING about because you can!#it doesn't matter how big a company like nestle is if you really wanted to and were willing to put in the effort #you could limit the amount of nestle-owned products you use #it'd be hard but THAT'S THE POINT #BOYCOTTING AND OTHER FORMS OF PROTESTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HARD #and the worst thing about this mantra is that the ppl who use it still feel the need to judge what others do with their money #put up or shut up #the cats meow

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ziracona · 2 years

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K after playing 5 DA games though I have to say Bethesda has a mountain of issues but BioWare fans got NO room to complain about tech support issues.

#like. yeah they fix Bethesda glitches by coding a hat shaped like a train & sometimes leave minor issues forever but DA2 has been out for #fucking ELEVEN .GODDAMN YEARS. and they /still/ have all saves corrupt if you play both major DLC the /second/ you go to the gallows and #never even tried to fix it!! if you EVER save with Sebastian or Isabela in your party and load the save your game corrupts so you have #eventually -1000 defense or attack speed and the game is fucking unplayable. they’ve NEVER even tried to fix it they just let game breaking #issues stand: they do jack shit for anyone who ain’t PC when it comes to porting saves at /all/. they really just said ‘fuck console players #‘ - Bethesda at least gets us eventual /limited/ modding rights if they can. plus for all the fair points about issues w Bethesda games and #their ethics - as others have pointed out both Skyrim /and/ FO4 handle complex politics WAY less centrist and more progressive and well than #Inquistion even /thought/ about doing. like don’t get me wrong this is not a ‘they’re great’ this is a ‘I don’t want to hear it from a #BioWare Stan’ you are not better your company is actually worse right now #NOTHING has made me want to beat a game company to death like playing DA on PlayStation. every time I have an issue and ask for help or look #for fixes I see 60 fans crying about the same thing and official BioWare tech support just responding ‘go fuck yourself 💙’

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dylawas-reblogs · 1 month

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Genuine question @ me: why can't you get it together (rant in tags)

#I almost canceled this post because I saw a cat while sitting in my car waiting to go into my internship #And for a moment everything was okay #anyway actual rant #I got a week off last week for reasons I don't entirely understand (It was the entire department)#And it really kind of reminded me how much I just. Don't like work. period #but i need to get out of this fucking house #And I can't do that without an income #nevermind without health insurance. cant even dream of that #Happy birthday to me by the way #turned 26 five days ago #anyway #i think at this point my problem lies on me just as much as it does society #cuz i had all of last week off and DIDN'T use it to job hunt or do portfolio stuff #and i so immensely regret that #but at the same time when i did look for fucking jobs id qualify for that aren't customer facing #there was basically shit from fuck #i need to see if i can just be somebody's youtube editor #or SOMETHING #because even in the office I'm starting to not enjoy being around other people every day #my coworkers are NOT bad people #but they ARE mormon #and i got a ''nudge'' last week to #idk how to explain what they asked of me #they asked me to get more ''hands on'' with the company social medias?#first of all we are a nonprofit that works with kids. my options are EXTREMELY limited #second no one interacts with our posts even when we ask #i got a couple pointers but its not necessarily stuff thats gonna magically boost our engagements #wow i ''ran out of tags'' okay tumblr #dylawa rants #dylawa rambles

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sophiamcdougall · 8 months

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I am never going to complain about Greek Duolingo again

I mean, I am. But still.

So, as some of you know, my family has been coming to this tiny Greek seaside village for several years. Just over a week ago I came out here with my mum, under the impression that early September, after the height of the summer heat, would be a good time to have a holiday. ANYWAY Storm Daniel had other ideas about that. Locally things are improving (I'm actually really pissed off about the disaster-porn tone of most English-language media coverage, but that's another post). The power is back on, there's running water most of the time, and though the latter is not drinkable, a truck from the government came and handled out free bottled water yesterday. But we are currently kind of stuck. Can't do tourist things. Can't go home. There aren't any local flights out until Saturday and the road to Thessaloniki is still closed.

So this evening, feeling kind of aimless and depressed, I go down to the nearest beach with a couple of binbags and start cleaning up in an effort to at least do something positive. I always try to do this at least once out here and obviously, after the storm, there's a lot more plastic and rubbish than usual.

At some point I find this large, round bit of metal - some kind of machinery part, I think -- that's too big for the bag, so I take it to the bins on its own, leaving the rubbish bag on the beach. And when I come back for it, something among the stones beside it moves.

Specifically, it pulls its head sharply inside its shell

So, meanwhile I've been trying to learn some Greek with the help of Duolingo.

I currently have a 33-day streak and... I have questions. Shouldn't I be able to use the past or future tenses by now? Shouldn't I be able to say "x is like y"? I can't do those things. But one thing I absolutely can say all day long is έχω μια χελώνα : I have a turtle.

This is far from the limit of Duolingo Greek's turtle-related content. "An obsession with turtles" is my mother's characterisation. I can inform you that the turtle is not a bird, and, improbably, that the turtle is drinking milk. I can introduce you to a turtle in company with a horse and an elephant. As far as Duolingo is concerned, it really is turtles all the way down.

Now this, you may be able to see, is not a turtle. It has claws rather than flippers. It is a tortoise. I know there are wild tortoises in Greece: my aunt once rescued a pair of them shagging in the middle of the road -- but that was up in the mountains. I've even seen one myself, but it was also on a road and very dead.

I am 95% certain they don't belong on beaches. There's nothing for it to eat, except, unfortunately, a lot of plastic. Even if it gets off the beach it will immediately find itself on a road where it could get hit by a car. I'm pretty sure it must have been washed down by the floodwater and has been just sitting there, dazed, ever since.

Now obviously the first thing I want to do on encountering this unusual animal is to go and tell my mummy, so I do. The tortoise immediately brightens her day. She agrees that the tortoise is not happy on the beach and needs to be taken somewhere safe. it gets surprisingly wriggly when picked up so we put it in a carrier bag with some grapes and cucumber and go looking for somewhere to rehome it.

We find a path leading up between the houses towards a likely-looking field, but before we get very far a dog in a yard goes berserk and a man's head pops over a fence and demands to know what we're doing. He does this in English, as evidently we're just that obviously tourists.

"I found a tortoise on the beach!" I explain. "We want to find somewhere to put it."

"A what," he asks.

"It's like a, you know," I begin and then to my astonishment I find myself saying... "μια χελώνα"

"Oh! A turtle!" he says.

"But from the land. δεν είναι χελώνα", [it is not a turtle,] I say, as I am worried he will tell me to put it back near the sea where I found it. As it turns out it actually IS a χελώνα, Greek does not distinguish between turtles and tortoises, but I don't know that; I can't even name the days of the week or identify any colours other than pink yet, give me a break.

The man's entire demeanour changes and thaws. He does not worry about my turtle-that-is-not-a-turtle conundrum. He knows where οι χελώνες come from and where η χελώνα μας belongs. He leads us through a gate into a courtyard area.

"[somethingsomething] μια χελώνα," he explains to the assembled onlookers, of whom there are, suddenly, a surprising number.

"ΜΙΑ ΧΕΛΩΝΑ!!!" crows the throng of delighted small children, who are, suddenly, everywhere.

"μια χελώνα!" I agree, accepting that at least for current purposes, that is what it is.

"Μπορούμε να δούμε τη χελώνα σας; [can we see your turtle?]" asks an adorable little girl, shyly, and I understand??

The children fucking love looking at the χελώνα and showing it to them is kind of magical?

I finally put the tortoise down on the grass of this wild area off to the side of the courtyard, and marvel aloud that it is weird that I barely know any Greek except how to say μια χελώνα.

"I think she will soon run off," a kind lady called Aspasia assures me, seeing I remain slightly anxious about its fate. "I don't know why I'm saying 'she'. I suppose because χελώνα is feminine in Greek."

"Yes! I know that!" I exclaim, thrilled.

"Well done!" she says. And also she asks if we are OK for drinking water after the storm and if we need any help with anything and is just generally incredibly lovely and now we know more of the neighbours!

So "μια χελώνα" has just become, by a long way, my most-used and most understood and all-around most conversationally successful phrase in Greek. So I guess I have to admit I was wrong to doubt Duolingo's wisdom: it is correct to be obsessed with turtles. And I concede that prior to learning how to count to ten or to distinguish right from left, the simple ability to yell the word TURTLE over and over again is, it turns out, a crucial element of the responsible traveller's social skills.

(I am pretty fluent in Italian and turtles haven't come up in conversation even once?)

#story time

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States

The vast majority of America's debt collection targets $500-2,000 credit card debts. It is a filthy business, operated by lawless firms who hire unskilled workers drawn from the same economic background as their targets, who routinely and grotesquely flout the law, but only when it comes to the people with the least ability to pay.

America has fairly robust laws to protect debtors from sleazy debt-collection practices, notably the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which has been on the books since 1978. The FDCPA puts strict limits on the conduct of debt collectors, and offers real remedies to debtors when they are abused.

But for FDPCA provisions to be honored, they must be understood. The people who collect these debts are almost entirely untrained. The people they collected the debts from are likewise in the dark. The only specialized expertise debt-collection firms concern themselves with are a series of gotcha tricks and semi-automated legal shenanigans that let them take money they don't deserve from people who can't afford to pay it.

There's no better person to explain this dynamic than Patrick McKenzie, a finance and technology expert whose Bits About Money newsletter is absolutely essential reading. No one breaks down the internal operations of the finance sector like McKenzie. His latest edition, "Credit card debt collection," is a fantastic read:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/

McKenzie describes how a debt collector who mistook him for a different PJ McKenzie and tried to shake him down for a couple hundred bucks, and how this launched him into a life as a volunteer advocate for debtors who were less equipped to defend themselves from collectors than he was.

McKenzie's conclusion is that "paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States." If you stand on your rights (which requires that you know your rights), then you will quickly discover that debt collectors don't have – and can't get – the documentation needed to collect on whatever debts they think you owe (even if you really owe them).

The credit card companies are fully aware of this, and bank (literally) on the fact that "the vast majority of consumers, including those with the socioeconomic wherewithal to walk away from their debts, feel themselves morally bound and pay as agreed."

If you find yourself on the business end of a debt collector's harassment campaign, you can generally make it end simply by "carefully sending a series of letters invoking [your] rights under the FDCPA." The debt collector who receives these letters will have bought your debt at five cents on the dollar, and will simply write it off.

By contrast, the mere act of paying anything marks you out as substantially more likely to pay than nearly everyone else on their hit-list. Paying anything doesn't trigger forbearance, it invites a flood of harassing calls and letters, because you've demonstrated that you can be coerced into paying.

But while learning FDCPA rules isn't overly difficult, it's also beyond the wherewithal of the most distressed debtors (and people falsely accused of being debtors). McKenzie recounts that many of the people he helped were living under chaotic circumstances that put seemingly simple things "like writing letters and counting to 30 days" beyond their needs.

This means that the people best able to defend themselves against illegal shakedowns are less likely to be targeted. Instead, debt collectors husband their resources so they can use them "to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit."

Here's how this debt market works. If you become delinquent in meeting your credit card payments ("delinquent" has a flexible meaning that varies with each issuer), then your debt will be sold to a collector. It is packaged in part of a large spreadsheet – a CSV file – and likely sold to one of 10 large firms that control 75% of the industry.

The "mom and pops" who have the other quarter of the industry might also get your debt, but it's more likely that they'll buy it as a kind of tailings from one of the big guys, who package up the debts they couldn't collect on and sell them at even deeper discounts.

The people who make the calls are often barely better off than the people they're calling. They're minimally trained and required to work at a breakneck pace. Employee turnover is 75-100% annually: imagine the worst call center job in the world, and then make it worse, and make "success" into a moral injury, and you've got the debt-collector rank-and-file.

To improve the yield on this awful process, debt collection companies start by purging these spreadsheets of likely duds: dead people, people with very low credit-scores, and people who appear on a list of debtors who know their rights and are likely to stand on them (that's right, merely insisting on your rights can ensure that the entire debt-collection industry leaves you alone, forever).

The FDPCA gives you rights: for example, you have the right to verify the debt and see the contract you signed when you took it on. The debt collector who calls you almost certainly does not have that contract and can't get it. Your original lender might, but they stopped caring about your debt the minute they sold it to a debt-collector. Their own IT systems are baling-wire-and-spit Rube Goldberg machines that glue together the wheezing computers of all the companies they've bought over the last 25 years. Retrieving your paperwork is a nontrivial task, and the lender doesn't have any reason to perform it.

Debt collectors are bottom feeders. They are buying delinquent debts at 5 cents on the dollar and hoping to recover 8 percent of them; at 7 percent, they're losing money. They aren't "large, nationally scaled, hypercompetent operators" – they're shoestring operations that can only be viable if they hire unskilled workers and fail to train them.

They are subject to automatic damages for illegal behavior, but they still break the law all the time. As McKenzie writes, a debt collector will "commit three federal torts in a few minutes of talking to a debtor then follow up with a confirmation of the same in writing." A statement like "if you don’t pay me I will sue you and then Immigration will take notice of that and yank your green card" makes the requisite three violations: a false threat of legal action, a false statement of affiliation with a federal agency, and "a false alleged consequence for debt nonpayment not provided for in law."

If you know this, you can likely end the process right there. If you don't, buckle in. The one area that debt collectors invest heavily in is the automation that allows them to engage in high-intensity harassment. They use "predictive dialers" to make multiple calls at once, only connecting the collector to the calls that pick up. They will call you repeatedly. They'll call your family, something they're legally prohibited from doing except to get your contact info, but they'll do it anyway, betting that you'll scrape up $250 to keep them from harassing your mother.

These dialing systems are far better organized than any of the company's record keeping about what you owe. A company may sell your debt on and fail to keep track of it, with the effect that multiple collectors will call you about the same debt, and even paying off one of them will not stop the other.

Talking to these people is a bad idea, because the one area where collectors get sophisticated training is in emptying your bank account. If you consent to a "payment plan," they will use your account and routing info to start whacking your bank account, and your bank will let them do it, because the one part of your conversation they reliably record is this payment plan rigamarole. Sending a check won't help – they'll use the account info on the front of your check to undertake "demand debits" from your account, and backstop it with that recorded call.

Any agreement on your part to get on a payment plan transforms the old, low-value debt you incurred with your credit card into a brand new, high value debt that you owe to the bill collector. There's a good chance they'll sell this debt to another collector and take the lump sum – and then the new collector will commence a fresh round of harassment.

McKenzie says you should never talk to a debt collector. Make them put everything in writing. They are almost certain to lie to you and violate your rights, and a written record will help you prove it later. What's more, debt collection agencies just don't have the capacity or competence to engage in written correspondence. Tell them to put it in writing and there's a good chance they'll just give up and move on, hunting softer targets.

One other thing debt collectors due is robo-sue their targets, bulk-filing boilerplate suits against debtors, real and imaginary. If you don't show up for court (which is what usually happens), they'll get a default judgment, and with it, the legal right to raid your bank account and your paycheck. That, in turn, is an asset that, once again, the debt collector can sell to an even scummier bottom-feeder, pocketing a lump sum.

McKenzie doesn't know what will fix this. But Michael Hudson, a renowned scholar of the debt practices of antiquity, has some ideas. Hudson has written eloquently and persuasively about the longstanding practice of jubilee, in which all debts were periodically wiped clean (say, whenever a new king took the throne, or once per generation):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Hudson's core maxim is that "debt's that can't be paid won't be paid." The productive economy will have need for credit to secure the inputs to their processes. Farmers need to borrow every year for labor, seed and fertilizer. If all goes according to plan, the producer pays off the lender after the production is done and the goods are sold.

But even the most competent producer will eventually find themselves unable to pay. The best-prepared farmer can't save every harvest from blight, hailstorms or fire. When the producer can't pay the creditor, they go a little deeper into debt. That debt accumulates, getting worse with interest and with each bad beat.

Run this process long enough and the entire productive economy will be captive to lenders, who will be able to direct production for follies and fripperies. Farmers stop producing the food the people need so they can devote their land to ornamental flowers for creditors' tables. Left to themselves, credit markets produce hereditary castes of lenders and debtors, with lenders exercising ever-more power over debtors.

This is socially destabilizing; you can feel it in McKenzie's eloquent, barely controlled rage at the hopeless structural knot that produces the abusive and predatory debt industry. Hudson's claim is that the rulers of antiquity knew this – and that we forgot it. Jubilee was key to producing long term political stability. Take away Jubilee and civilizations collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Debts that can't be paid won't be paid. Debt collectors know this. It's irrefutable. The point of debt markets isn't to ensure that debts are discharged – it's to ensure that every penny the hereditary debtor class has is transferred to the creditor class, at the hands of their fellow debtors.

In her 2021 Paris Review article "America's Dead Souls," Molly McGhee gives a haunting, wrenching account of the debts her parents incurred and the harassment they endured:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

After I published on it, many readers wrote in disbelief, insisting that the debt collection practices McGhee described were illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

And they are illegal. But debt collection is a trade founded on lawlessness, and its core competence is to identify and target people who can't invoke the law in their own defense.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” today (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

#pluralistic #jubilee #debts that cant be paid wont be paid #Patrick McKenzie #patio11 #bits about money #debt #debt collection #do not pay #bottom feeders #Fair Debt Collection Practices Act #fdcpa #finance #armbreakers

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