DraconicSunRemember, living wages is less expensive than this!
https://piefed.social/c/memes/p/1975904/remember-living-wages-is-less-expensive-than-this
dnickExcept with insurance they probably made money. The trick is for it to happen often enough that insurance gets too expensive.
Well insurance only pays out on the value the retailer bought their inventory for, not the sticker price. Yeah they’re getting a lot of money but rebuilding inventory and a new warehouse is probably more money. And Insurance companies might start considering underpaid employees as an insurance liability.
And Insurance companies might start considering underpaid employees as an insurance liability.
That’d truly be righteous but I suspect they’ll start expecting more surveillance, security, and fire systems instead.
Which, although they don’t improve conditions for the workers, are also expensive
ottersuspect they’ll
automate
LucidlethargyThey turned the fire suppression system off once the firefighters arrived, reportedly. I hope the insurance company denies their claim. Seems like an act of God to me.
I dunno. I think that insurance will usually only cover Replacement Value, so if it cost them $20 per item and they sold it for $25, they could only claim $20. Then compounded with failure to meet contracts and updated cost of production (may cost $21 to make now) I doubt that they made money.
You’re right that the cost of insurance is where the real hurt will be - see ship insurance in the Strait
We’ll there are lots of kinds of insurance, a manufacturing and distribution company isn’t going to have the same insurance you buy as a homeowner. I would expect they are covered for whatever they calculated into their cost/risk contract?
That said, i maybe know enough to know most of what i don’t know, but far from inside into on the topic.
They are probably “self insured”
Certainly could be, and doubtful that they are fully insured against all contingencies… Possible they are underinsured against for intentionally, since they could conceivable think it’s low enough risk that it’s cheaper to allow a loss even as big as this to fall under operating losses for rare or occasional incidents like this.
Once a company is big enough even subjectively huge losses are simply a calculated risk. Do you pay a million dollars a year for 10 years to subsidize something that might cost 10 million dollars that only happens every 20 years, or do you bank on it not happening and write it off as a bad quarter if it happens?
Way more goes into those calculations than one might think, and if they’re self insured there’s just a budget item that takes a hit for this and someone gets chewed out it fired for being the one that gambled this way… While someone else loses a promotion if they signed off the other direction and paid for a million dollar policy they didn’t need.
Insurance is all mostly the same regardless of type. You aren’t going to find a company willing to take the counter party risk of you losing a claimed retail value of a product, especially a commodity. If it was collectables or bespoke crafts then it would likely be different.
Sounds like you’re more familiar with the industry than i am, but my understanding is that insurance policies are written based on what you want to cover and the value is reflected in the premiums. Companies often have an assumed product, returns and stale inventory loss calculated in. Possibly just recuping costs for ‘all’ inventory could be a plus for the bottom line, especially if there were anything like a rider for opportunity costs. The building itself could have been out of step on depreciation and now moved up with a more modern facility in planning.
May not be the same situation but plenty of business owners have considered it a windfall having insurance pay out on replacement costs for things they you weren’t utilizing and an opportunity to put up a bigger shop and roll the payouts into more modern supplies and equipment rather than gathering dust on sunk cost stuff they never would have gotten their money out of otherwise.
If you consider insurance payouts a windfall there’s probably fraud involved. Insurance generally doesn’t pay more than a thing is worth because of fraud. It’s a little more loose with things that can’t easily be valued, like art or a life.
Yes, but relatively often you can get underwater on the cost of stuff that is sitting there no longer making you money. If half your warehouse is full of stuff that isn’t moving or is outdated product, then recovering even the cost of making it can be a windfall. The amount of stuff a company has to write off, dispose of or clearance for pennies can make an insurance payout a win.
Things don’t always depreciate at their started number on paper, especially when using certain completely valid forms of accounting. Not saying this is certainly what is happening at an active warehouse, but there’s a whole lot more to it than thinking everything sitting there was absolutely going to sell at a good profit. Equipment and structures, for instance, often pay out at replacement value which can easily be more than you’d get for them at disposal rates.
They announced they’re moving their entire operation out of CA, lmao.
sp3ctr4lThey probably didn’t make money. Insurance won’t cover the retail value of unsold product, just the cost to make it. The building owner can get replacement cost for the building, but still loses out on rent.
The insurance company will raise rates to compensate for the payment, but it’s probably enough to hurt them for a quarter too.
If it were profitable to burn down a warehouse, there’d be a whole industry around it
Maybe, or maybe sales have been shitty and instead of product sitting on the shelves this let’s them write stuff off and pocket cost of materials.
Just saying there’s more to it than what it would mean to you or i if we had all our eggs in one basket and had to count on an insurance payout to keep above water. It’s likely not a windfall for them, but i wouldn’t be surprised if one warehouse fire is much more than a line item in a meeting or two, or even good news for some department or other if they were overextended in stock or something. A second or third big loss like that, though, would probably be required before anyone important is motivated towards any kind of inspection based on the bottom line though.
phoenixariseIs that a lack of fire suppression equipment? Insurance won’t like that at all. 😃
RivalarrivalIf I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the insurance industry is the underlying problem?
Likely, but self insurance is a thing for a reason, if it was cheaper to insure than self insured they’d probably do that, but they have that risk wether it was arson or an accident and if one warehouse would actually hurt them, they wouldn’t be self insuring.
Any way you look at it, unless it hits them enough that they have to be concerned about the price of champagne they’re filling their swimming pools with, ‘one’ incident isn’t going to make them rethink their whole salary structure. At this rate it’s shifting from one budget line item to another, and they’ll probably just take it as an opportunity to invest in two warehouse to replace the one that went up.
Insurance will only pay out actual value (i.e. what it cost to produce those items). They’ll still miss out on all the potential profit from selling those goods.
They’ll miss it on some things for sure, but if there were sunk costs or put performing products, that money can be reinvested in better performing items. I’m sure I’m an active, perfectly running warehouse, having to replace every item just with an at cost payout would be annoying, but there’s also the possibility that the payout gets them out from under old stock they would otherwise have lost even their costs on.
Depends.
The warehouse operator will claim it on Insurance so they are not out of pocket.
Insurance will sue the person who started the fire and can never pay off the debt so the debt will be written off after a decade of near to no payments and get a healthy tax deduction for it.
The only person to loose out will be the workers who are now out of a job, the tax payer who receives less taxes paid due to the write off and the loss of sales tax.
I read that they turned off the fire suppression system to try to avoid damaging inventory while fire fighters tried to put out the fire.
Perhaps there’s a chance that the insurance company will try to use that to avoid paying off the claim.
Correction: The arsonist set some small fires, which triggered the sprinkler systems, which had firefighters come alone to turn it off and try to prevent water damage.
They then set about 4 bigger fires away from any prying eyes which spread so fast that the firefighters present declared it a lost cause and called for reinforcements.
Interesting. I wonder if the exact method may become common knowledge, helping force Walmart to consider paying a living wage…
drzoidbergThe trick is to keep doing it, making it too expensive for insurance to continue covering it, and denying the company insurance.
funny thing about insurance. they don’t like to pay. they really don’t like to pay when incidents are avoidable.
if this continues to happen, it will become a metric that liability companies will begin to track.
if employers are underpaying their staff, the insurance companies will increase the paid amount since the management of the company is a high liability to underwrite. that or we’ll start to see underwriters drop contracts entirely because of the high risk low reward.
It’d honestly be hilarious to watch the stand-off between massive insurance companies and massive retail conglomerates go down. Who will emerge victorious as the ultimate capitalist greed champion~! Lmao
SuiXi3DThe company is out a whole bunch of product and is down a warehouse to store it. It’ll affect their
distribution efforts negatively.
EDIT: Just read that the company is pulling out of California entirely. So rather than pay everyone decently, now every single employee of theirs in the state is out of work. I’m sure that’ll go over well.
If the company was paying this horribly, then maybe it was the better deal for them. Now they can collect unemployment that probably pays more than they did.
Jesus Christ I’m tired of people not understanding what a write-off is.
It’s not a magic spell that makes things free. It’s a reduction in taxable income, not a tax bill. If your tax rate is 20 percent and you write off a $100 loss, your tax burden is reduced by $20, resulting in a net loss of $80.
It’s almost as daft as people thinking they’ll lose out by going into a higher tax bracket
starman2112The average American cannot comprehend the complexity of different portions of their income being taxed at different rates. I’ve met a guy who turned down a $0.50 raise because it would him just past the next tax bracket
Depends.
The warehouse operator will claim it on Insurance so they are not out of pocket.
Insurance will sue the person who started the fire and can never pay off the debt so the debt will be written off after a decade of near to no payments and get a healthy tax deduction for it.
The only person to loose out will be the workers who are now out of a job, the tax payer who receives less taxes paid due to the write off and the loss of sales tax.
bearboiblakeThe world needs to move towards socialism to respond to this moment, or fall into the grips of fascism.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?>Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop. > >Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining. > >The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed. > >So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups. > >To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked. > >That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?> While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed. > > Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism. > >The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
But the Soviet Union was really oppressive!> Yeah, the soviet union had a lot of problems, Stalin was a psycho. Let’s not do that, but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past. > >I’d encourage you to check out an anarchist FAQ to learn more - If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think. > > I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
No you can’t. Your country has spent more than the last 200 years glorifying and giving power to whatever sociopath was crazy enough to amass the most money at the expense of everything. You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with? If you truly believe the people you’ve willingly given the keys to will do nothing and watch the world screw they over, I’m sorry to say you’re more gullible than optimistic.
You really think this group of people is going to sit back without using their circle of influence to corrupt whatever flavour of socialism you come up with?
I’m sure they’ll try, but there’s more of us than there are of them, and we can fight them every step of the way. There are all sorts of ideas in anarchist theory of how we can mitigate these threats.
Are you saying we should just give up, and not try to build a better world, because we have no hope of defeating the ruling class? That’s just nihilism. May as well just give up and make the billionaires emperors if that’s what you truly believe.
Japan got “modernised” at the end of the Edo period, bringing about the abolition of classes and a forced transition to democracy. You would think that this resulted in commoners taking back the power, but all it really changed was daimyo adjacent people becoming politicians and samurais trading their sword for a CEO seat. No major shift in influence occurred, because social ties are immune to sudden changes in governance like this.
It’s all about who you know, and people with heaps of money know just the right people to corrupt whatever utopia you can come up with. The problem runs deeper than the system of governance, as we’ve forstered a system that strongly correlates power with sociopathic behaviour for too long to be able to just overturn it like that. I don’t want to say you should give up, but looking at things in perspective, I can’t responsibly say that’s a good plan either.
So we can learn from that, too. You’re 100% just saying “we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past”. Brother, capitalism is failing NOW. I can share examples of socialism succeeding.
That’s very intellectually dishonest of you to reduce my argument to “100% just saying ‘we shouldn’t do socialism because it has failed in the past.’” That’s what we call a strawman argument, and that’s not what I’m saying if you read what I wrote. What I’m saying is:
I’m not a nihilist, I’m providing an observation based on human behaviour and our current system. I’m not saying nothing can be done about it, but oh boy you’re going to need way more that socialism. You’ll need a grassroots, global (aka, almost every country on board with it) movement, involving a complete overhaul of the education and values system across at least 100 years (to give time for people from the old world to be replaced), and at the same time have the current people in power somehow relinquish all their advantages and sit back to look at it. People who’ve been educated to believe the world is their oyster and a zero-sum game, sit down and do nothing while they see others thrive.
… how am I the one who’s unreasonable?
Edit:
OK, through the magic of using two browsers, I can now re-read your comments.
You’re right, I completely misunderstood your comment. I apologize for that. I was on my phone and not properly paying enough attention.
I actually completely agree with you. The issue is that we need to actually abolish all forms of unjustifiable hierarchy - as you perfectly put it, “as long as there are positions of power within your system, sociopaths will continue to seek and attain them, and the cycle will start anew.” This is, obviously, a very difficult task, which will undeniably require a great deal of effort. A “social revolution”, as I would put it - where not the ruling class are overthrown, but the entire vertical structure, where people are in positions of power over others.
This is actually the foundation stone of my entire political philosophy - which is anarchism. If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think.
The term “anarchy” actually comes from Greek, basically translating to “without rulers”, or “against hierarchy”.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism (and hierarchy) makes inevitable.
Original message follows:
I would really like to engage with you in good faith, but I’m struggling to keep up with this conversation because for some reason the comments aren’t loading, I can only reply to you through my inbox, and it’s really messing me up. Do you know what might be happening here? Kinda need to fix this to re-read our conversation, if I have been unreasonable then I will gladly apologize though. I want to be fair.
Intro to Anarchism-- Q & Anarchy Episode 0
Thank you for that, this echoes my sentiment.
About technical difficulties, I don’t really know. My lemmy app doesn’t seem to be having any problems, so it may be an client-related problem.
I’m using the Lemmy web app for my instance, basically it just shows up as if I have blocked you, but I haven’t - it just says “1 more reply” and loads forever when I click it. Do you see the same if you view it through my instance link?
I tried watching it from the browser and it showed correctly for me… 🤔 I don’t really know what the issue might be.
If I log out, I can actually see your replies, but not when I’m logged in… that’s really strange. I’ve double checked that I haven’t blocked you, I even tried blocking and unblocking you… really no idea what’s causing it.
OK, managed to re-read your messages using another browser, I wrote a reply to you in an edit to the first message where I explained my technical issues - here’s a link. Sorry about the mess!
Hey, thank you for re-reading and engaging with what I actually wrote.
The one interrogation that was not solved for me is that such a change requires a tremendous amount of energy and dedication across all society’s decision-makers, and I fail to see where that energy would be sourced from when almost any forces able to institute change benefits from the status quo.
I don’t disagree that there are better theoretical systems, I just fail to understand by what miracle they would ever be realised from the starting position we find ourselves in. It isn’t just about how many of us vs how many of them it is, unfortunately. The entire world’s understanding of power dynamics, trust in money and institutions would need to shift, and after that, there’s little guarantee the same people wouldn’t come on top again to corrupt it all.
I guess my question is: how do you guard any system from human corruption, other than just honour, promises, and gentleman’s agreement?
If you make yourself a ruler and give yourself the power to stop such corruption (which fundamentally needs to be more power than it takes to instigate it), you’re effectively becoming « the good dictator », and then how can you guarantee that this amount of power will not be used for bad by yourself, or any of the people that will come after you? When power concentrates this much, it only takes one bad person to get it.
What we need to do is basically have a movement to tell any politician that if they approve any military budget above 1b, we will not elect them next election. We need a movement of actually voting for sane people with sane policy. Everyone is all “crazy grandpa has a gun and hes trying to destroy everything”. Well, crazy grandpa just asked for 1.5 trillion dollars to buy more shit to mess more shit up. Don’t give him any money. If a crazy person walked up to you and said, “give me 1.5 trillion to mess everything up” no one would give them that money. Lets instead maybe invest in education? Healthcare? Social saftey nets?
The USSR was a dictatorship under a mask of communism and socialism. It was literally the opposite side of a coin, where mostly the top of a country had all the goods, while ordinary citizens were used as cheap working labor. Basically, the same thing what happens in the US, but with less freedom. It was never a true socialism/communism system in a first place.
Why would anyone in power not see that as a very clear choice?