#Outsource Legal Work

[pendulum-sonata]

So, it's been a while since I stopped being a video medical interpreter and I'm a translator now (basically only work with text now, and interpreters only do voice) but I'm still in touch with some of my former coworkers, and boy one of them hit me with a realization today:

Apparently so many medical staff and providers are under the impression that audio or video interpreters are not real people, that they're "virtual" or fake people, and with the AI boom, some of them think that they're AI programs??

Which actually goes a looong way to explain why some of them have downright awful behavior with them tbh (srsly it's so bad that I didn't care to be paid a bit less as a translator >.<)

So for anyone reading here who might work in field that requires them to deal with audio or video interpreters, please, please know this:

Those are NOT computer or virtual or fake people, those are real people working remotely to do the interpretation, there is a real person behind the voice and/or screen you're using to communicate, so please, don't treat them like a machine.

So, don't be mean, rude or condescending, if you're too tired or burned out in your job to be nice, being civil and respectful will do, and I'm certain, your experience with them will be a lot better if you can do that.

[roseband]

....u literally do not get to complain about being "overwhelmed" at work, and try to push work onto me

when you tried to design an entire line of baby onesies......breaking all brand guidelines, u need to follow brand guidelines as a fucking graphic designer......??? like that's graphic design 101?

like i fixed this once 4 months ago, dealt with licensing depts to fix it but never again, we have pdfs and .ai documents filled with guidelines.. which fonts...... which colors... what sizing and proportions allowed

nope, not dealing with someone else's mess

[accessoffshoring]

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[jessesemmensuk]

5 Things To Consider When Outsourcing Your Legal Work

In the current economic climate, organizations of all sizes are increasingly turning to outsourcing to manage their legal work. Outsourcing legal tasks can save time, money, and hassle.

[pencilium]

Maybe once their horridly long commercial leases are up and they've finally repaid the cost of the ridiculous office buildings they built, they'll finally give up the expense of maintaining a full office building in favour of renting out server space and a secure room for some filing cabinets.

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

A delivery service somehow misread one number in my postal code. Now they're trying to figure out why this very niche street name doesn't exist in a town 40 minutes from mine.

Yes, it's an international order. This never happens with national stuff, not even if it's hand-written by a doctor mid-seizure. Someone a sneeze across the border uses a non-standard sans-serif? Might as well have given an address in Narnia.

[teatime-at-4]

Update: I was Wrong (incorrect info in red)

FLYING BARK IS NOT GONE: about the trailer animation

PLEASE DO NOT SPREAD THE IDEA THAT FLYING BARK WAS REPLACED.

THIS IS FALSE.

Flying Bark made the decision to outsource additional animation, this includes things like trailers and promos- not the actual show. this decision was made because Flying Bark is also currently working on the upcoming animated ATLA movie, and they needed to lessen their workload. Flying Bark is still handling the animation of the actual episodes and specials, they just needed some breathing room and got that by giving some of the less important responsibilities- like promos and trailers- to someone else for the time being.

the animation isn't even bad, there's no need to act like this is the end of the world and start acting like everything will be changed forever. though I will give some of ya'll the benefit of the doubt and say you probably didn't know these details, but we shouldn't have jumped to conclusions anyway.

edit: there is a post saying that Wildbarin has a deal for two seasons + specials of LMK, this was a misread, the site this info was taken from was mentioning the already existing content for LMK on Amazon Kids+. the deal wildbrain was, again, for the additional animation. Please do not harass this blog if you see the post however.

edit 2: it has been alleged that Wildbrain has been given a 1-2 year deal for two seasons + a special per leaked "legal documents" from Flying Bark, and I may have been wrong in the above edit. this has yet to be confirmed, if it comes out as true then I will be removing this post, so far I have seen nothing but the misread website however. that being said if it is true, FLYING BARK IS STILL SET TO RETURN ONCE THAT DEAL IS FINISHED. but be warned, my word is not law, and I'm not infallible.

PLEASE REBLOG AND SHARE THIS REPOST TO OTHER SITES IF NEEDED

SPREAD THE WORD

PLEASE DO NOT HARASS ANYONE FROM LMK'S TEAMS OR WILDBRAINS'S OR ANY OTHER PERSON SPREADING NEWS ON THE SHOW

UPDATE:

thank you to @anxiescape for providing more information/confirmation directly from Flying Bark

(Tweet from a director at Flying Bark)

unfortunately Flying Bark does seem to be fully parting ways with LEGO Monkie Kid due to the inability to keep up with deadlines, likely contributing to the decision to sign off the license to Wildbrain as that would make a change from hand drawn animation to puppet 2d/3d animation.

please note that the voice teams and writing teams are remaining the same, only the animation team is being changed.

that being said looking at the trailer the main differences in the animation appears to be in the dept and lighting, things that can be easily fixed and likely are only off because the are unfinished. the animation we see in the trailer is likely not the final product, and I implore fans to remain patient and respectful with our new animation team.

(but again, please do not take my world for law, I am not immune to human error)

I apologize for helping further misinformation about lmk s5.

farewell Flying Bark, you'll be missed.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for being kind and civil with people who drive me insane?

So this is something that happens all the time and it's a pattern so to save your time, I'll only mention the one incident which that I got called out for several times, it's starting to make me think I might be TA.

I (34F) work in a grocery store. Maddy (???F) works in the security department and is in charge for looking through our grocery to ensure we didn't steal anything (our workplace is uncomfortably strict about this since many employees have stole in the past) She is very rude, I never liked her. She makes me so uncomfortable a lot because she yells all the time. At everyone. She never realized how offensive she is.

Anyway, sometimes I'd walk past her after my shift forgetting that I'm carrying grocery bags etc and she'd yell at me to get back there. It's always embarrassing because anyone who witnesses that would most likely assume I'm a shoplifter because of the way she's yelling. She yells about other stuff too mind you, don't think I always forget the fact I'm carrying grocery. They don't allow us to bring our bags inside and we have to keep them in our locker (according to her, I never heard this elsewhere). She yells at me if I try to take my purse with me if I'm in a hurry. She says it's ~the rules~ and we need to follow them but like, she the only security staff who's this strict about it. The others don't even bother to check our groceries because they trust we don't shoplift and it's actually stupid because we could still shoplift anyway and hide the items in our pockets and they don't perform a body check anyway (they used to in the past but were legally required to stop because of Covid).

How do I deal with her though? Every time she'd yell, I reply to her very calmly and attempt small talk to absorb her anger. For example, if she's angry about my grocery, I'd show them to her and ask stuff like "what is you favorite brand of milk/bread/egg etc etc"

She does engage but it never made her actually stop and think about her behaviors for a single second. I have always stopped to chat with her whenever I can and she always speaks calmly when I do, but returns to yelling when I "break the rules" as she says.

But here's the thing. My patience is limited. I'm like a battery, if you keep charging me, I'll eventually explode. I planned remaining civil with Maddy forever, but enough is enough and I accidentally lashed out. I lashed out on her ONCE only, I yelled much louder than she did, for 30 minutes, lecturing her about work etiquette. She was so surprised and taken aback. She told me "where did this all come from?" Like she didn't see it coming? She seriously mistook my patience and tolerance of her behaviors for friendliness. And that was the last time we talked, I reported her to HR the next day because I don't think she'll ever get the memo, and that's when I learned thst so many employees have complained about her already but they can't fire her because she an outsource and has strong connections in her company, management has already talked to her numerous times but she just doesn't listen, so don't call me TA for not communicating, it doesn't work with her.

My friend Gloria (28F) and many others including our manager (F30s) told me I should've not been chatting with her, I should just ignore her and disengage. They think the fact I'm talking kindly to her will just make her assume she isn't doing anything wrong and encourage her to keep behaving like that, and that she'd think I want to be friends??? None of that is my intention. I just want to be civil to her to indirectly get her to realize her behaviors weren't acceptable. I'm setting a good example for her, to learn from me how she should treat people and soften her heart.

I was called TA because they said I didn't have to be civil with her if I knew I might eventually lash out (but lashing out isn't something I planned??), and I should've just avoided her and set boundaries. Gloria told me it's an AH move to go out of my way to interact to someone I despise when ignoring them is an option and that makes me two faced and makes the people around me wonder if I truly like them or I'm basically tolerating them, but this wouldn't happen if I they weren't rude in the first place?

BTW a similar thing eventually happened with Gloria because her attitude sucked with me and I lashed out eventually because enough is enough, she said she should've known not to trust me because of how I treated Maddy and I shouldn't have befriended her if I "hated" her so much. AITA?

[everydayspamton]

How much longer do you think we have till chapter 3

I've been wanting to break something like this down all Deltarune-theory-style and this seems like the perfect opportunity! The release of chapter 3&4 also relates directly to this blog, so that's a plus.

In terms of development we're lucky that Toby Fox has been incredibly generous with sharing updates on where the game is, and whats left before launch.

Comparing the information we've been given in the last few newsletters to this timeline in the Summer 2024 newsletter, it's fairly easy to pinpoint where we are and what's left.

Public testing for the LTS update and game_change function has recently been completed!

As per the Autumn 2024 newsletter, the untested English PC version of chapter 4 has also been completed.

Chapter 3 has been translated to Japanese and the PC version has been bug tested.

Chapter 4 has just begun Japanese translation, and PC testing will begin when it is closer to completion (which according to Toby will take "some months" for the final pass of translation to be done)

The last bullet is a pretty accurate mark on where we are in the development. Somewhere on the "Console Ports, Japanese Version, and Other Stuff" part of Toby Fox's List.

We can also use the information from the Summer 2024 newsletter to know what's left on the To-Do list before launch.

Complete Japanese translation and PC bug testing for Chapter 4.

Create and bug test console ports (Nintendo Switch and PlayStation. Xbox is a maybe)*

Final Bug testing

Getting the game reviewed by rating boards.

Preparing soundtrack for release.

Creating marketing material and trailers in preparation for release.

"And more... ?" (I'm assuming this is just referencing the fact game development is unpredictable and anything could slow development, but who knows)

*⬆️It seems that it's not a big deal to make the console port, but instead bug testing will be. It also seems that they've begun work on console porting already, based on the autumn 2024 news letter ⬇️

SO...

Given the fact that we've never waited through all these end-of-development processes for a Toby Fox game it's hard to get an accurate time frame for it all. Although, Toby Fox has said Chapter 3&4 will definitely come out next year and I'm beyond ecstatic. I've yet to answer the question though... When do I think it's coming out?? I think we're getting Deltarune 3&4 around Q3 of 2025. (Q3 is just fancy talk for the months of July, August, and September). The main reason I think this is because Toby has put a "some months" time frame around completing the Japanese translation. PC testing for chapter 4 and Console testing for 3&4 is next, which will hopefully be relatively speedy given the fact they have outsourced a company to assist them. After that is a bunch of legal-console-game business stuff they have to get straight. I'm not predicting the end of next year because of how confident Toby Fox seems in releasing it in 2025, and because of the fact we don't have a trailer I don't think it's releasing in early 2025 either. But with the introduction of the frozen inu in the last newsletter, I think we're getting closer and closer to a real release date!

Toby has also been fond of releasing on special dates. Chapter 1 came out on Halloween of 2018. Chapter 2 was September 17th, 2021, which was the 6th anniversary of Undertale.

September 17th, 2025 will be the 10th anniversary of Undertale, and a date that fits well within the Q3 time frame I've predicted. If I were to put money on any date, it would be this one.

Let me know if any of y'all agree, disagree, or just have any thoughts about this... Or if posts like this are fun to read. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!!

Also... I like your gnarpy pfp

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

They told her she was just spending the night in Miami.

No warning. No lawyer. No time to pack. Just steel cuffs wrapped around her wrists, cinched tight across her chest, chained to a waist belt so snug she couldn’t breathe. A bus with no food, no water, no bathroom—just a puddle of piss soaking the floor. The guards told her to go ahead and urinate where she sat. She did.

Then they pushed her into Krome.

Krome, the Miami processing center where men with criminal records are supposed to be held—not immigrant women with no charges, no convictions, no voice. Krome, where she and 26 others were stuffed “like sardines in a jar,” forced to sleep on concrete, offered one three-minute shower in four days, and told by guards to pretend to have a seizure if they wanted medicine. One woman actually had a seizure. They came for her. The rest they ignored.

Three people are now dead in ICE custody. Three. In just over a month. Genry Ruiz-Guillen, 29, from Honduras, died January 23. Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, 45, from Ethiopia, died January 29. Maksym Chernyak, 44, from Ukraine, died February 20.

No convictions. No due process. No protection. Just death under fluorescent lights.

And while the bodies pile up, the architects of this system are laughing.

THE ARCHITECTS OF SUFFERING

Tom Homan—now officially Trump’s Border Czar—is no longer just shouting from Fox News panels. He’s in charge. And he’s promising “deportations every day,” vowing to expel millions. He’s pushing to build new detention camps on military bases and at Guantanamo Bay, to outsource incarceration to local jails, and to lower federal detention standards across the board. He wants to hand over human lives to any sheriff with a cage and a budget. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s a national purge.

Kristi Noem is no longer the governor of South Dakota. She’s been promoted to Secretary of Homeland Security, overseeing ICE, CBP, and FEMA. She’s already begun reshaping disaster policy and immigration enforcement with the cold efficiency of someone who never cared about the human cost. She’s toured detention centers abroad and proposed funneling more power and funding into the machine that’s already killing people. This is the woman now in charge of protecting the homeland—and she’s treating it like a battlefield.

And Stephen Miller—the alabaster goblin behind Trump’s first wave of xenophobic terror—is back inside the West Wing as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. He is not hiding. He is not softening. He is laying the groundwork for mass deportations, family separations, and the total militarization of immigration enforcement. Miller’s strategy is simple: flood the system, break it, and make cruelty look like order.

This isn’t mismanagement. This isn’t politics. This is state-sanctioned human suffering.

ICE has 46,269 people in custody—far above its legal bed count of 41,500. Congress just rewarded them with another $430 million. Detention centers are overflowing. Guards are whispering, “It shouldn’t be like this.” But they keep turning the key. They keep locking the doors.

Because this system wasn’t designed to rehabilitate. It wasn’t designed to deter. It was designed to break people.

And it’s working.

CORPORATE PROFITEERS OF THE GULAG

Akima Infrastructure Protection—remember that name. That’s the private contractor running Krome under a $685 million federal contract. Your tax dollars. Your country. Your name on the invoice. And Akima didn’t just ignore the reports of overcrowding, abuse, and death—they didn’t even respond. Because they don’t have to. In America’s immigration gulag system, accountability is optional, profits are mandatory.

Akima isn’t alone. The privatized detention racket is a booming business. The worse the conditions, the higher the margins. More detainees equals more beds, more guards, more federal payouts. These aren’t just prison contractors—they’re war profiteers in a domestic war against the poor, the brown, the undocumented, and the disposable.

And while three human beings die in government cages in thirty goddamn days, ICE puts out a statement saying they can’t verify the abuse without the women’s names. That’s like watching a house burn down and saying you can’t help unless the flames file a formal request.

What ICE really means is this: unless you hand us their names, we can’t retaliate.

FEAR, SILENCE, AND THE NEW AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

These women are afraid to speak because they know what happens to people who tell the truth in a system built to erase them. Their fear isn’t paranoia. It’s wisdom. Because in Trump’s America, the immigration system is no longer civil. It’s punitive, predatory, and lethal.

And while this slow-motion horror show unfolds behind steel bars and security checkpoints, the rest of the country scrolls past it—too tired, too numb, too wrapped in talking points to see what’s right in front of them:

The United States is running concentration camps again.

Not in secret. Not in shadows. In Miami. In Arizona. In Texas. With full congressional funding. With bipartisan indifference. With the open approval of a political movement that cheers cruelty like it’s patriotism.

And unless we name it, scream it, and rage against it, it’s only going to get worse.

Because this administration has made it clear: they don’t want to fix the system. They want to break more people. Faster. Cheaper. Louder.

And if that means more body bags? So be it. To them, that’s not a failure.

It’s the plan working exactly as intended.

WHAT THE HELL DO WE DO?

We stop pretending this is normal. We stop calling it a “broken system” and start calling it what it is: a weapon.

We hold the names. We name the dead. We say Genry. Serawit. Maksym. Not as footnotes, but as proof that silence is complicity.

We pressure Congress to defund ICE, to end private detention contracts, to shut down Krome and every facility like it. We demand independent investigations, criminal accountability, and media that covers these stories like lives are on the line—because they are.

We support immigrant-led organizations. We raise hell at town halls. We show up with signs, with lawsuits, with cameras, with righteous fury. We flood their offices. We write until our fingers bleed. We organize, we protest, we resist.

And if you’re in a position of power—if you’re a staffer, an attorney, a journalist, a human being with a platform—you use it. This is not a drill. This is not a moment to stay neutral.

The machine is killing people. The people running it are proud of that. And history will not forgive anyone who stood by and watched.

Raise your voice. Wreck their silence. And don’t stop until the cages are empty.

[Bill Adkins]

[fuck-customers]

*sips tea* I still have connections at the company that fired both me and my husband and made our lives living hell for all of 2024, and it's delightful.

They just had a bunch of employees quit en masse because they're moving a whole department from Austin, Texas to fucking Iowa. And not even Des Moines, either. Shockingly, not many people wanted to uproot their lives to live in *Iowa*.

On top of that, the manager who was under heat for the same issue that got my husband fired (basically it was him or her and the department head decided she was more valuable) has now been fired as well for making THE SAME MISTAKE.

And they still haven't found someone willing to do the work my husband was doing for the pay he was getting.

They just replaced me with more outsourcing so their customer service is going down the drain as well.

Aaaannnnddd on top of all that they just lost a legal battle and so they might not do bonuses this year. Oh, but all the execs are still getting paid. And the multimillion dollar office renovation that no one wants is still happening.

🫖☕ but that's none of my business

Posted by admin Rodney

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

To keep its customers healthy; and

To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

Dr Day knew she was slower than her peers. Cigna made sure of that, producing a "productivity dashboard" that scored doctors based on "handle time," which Cigna describes as the average time its doctors spend on different kinds of claims. But Dr Day and other Cigna sources say that this was a maximum, not an average – a way of disciplining doctors.

These were not long times. If a doctor asked Cigna not to discharge their patient from hospital care and a nurse denied that claim, the doctor reviewing that claim was supposed to spend not more than 4.5 minutes on their review. Other timelines were even more aggressive: many denials of prescription drugs were meant to be resolved in fewer than two minutes.

Cigna told Propublica and The Capitol Forum that its productivity scores weren't based on a simple calculation about whether its MD reviewers were hitting these brutal processing time targets, describing the scores as a proprietary mix of factors that reflected a nuanced view of care. But when Propublica and The Capitol Forum created a crude algorithm to generate scores by comparing a doctor's performance relative to the company's targets, they found the results fit very neatly into the actual scores that Cigna assigned to its docs:

The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

As Dr Day slipped lower on the productivity chart, her bosses pressured her bring her score up (Day recorded her phone calls and saved her emails, and the reporters verified them). Among other things, Dr Day's boss made it clear that her annual bonus and stock options were contingent on her making quota.

Cigna denies all of this. They smeared Dr Day as a "disgruntled former employee" (as though that has any bearing on the truthfulness of her account), and declined to explain the discrepancies between Dr Day's accusations and Cigna's bland denials.

This isn't new for Cigna. Last year, Propublica and Capitol Forum revealed the existence of an algorithmic claims denial system that allowed its doctors to bulk-deny claims in as little as 1.2 seconds:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

Cigna insisted that this was a mischaracterization, saying the system existed to speed up the approval of claims, despite the first-hand accounts of Cigna's own doctors and the doctors whose care recommendations were blocked by the system. One Cigna doctor used this system to "review" and deny 60,000 claims in one month.

Beyond serving as an indictment of the US for-profit health industry, and of Cigna's business practices, this is also a cautionary tale about the idea that critical AI applications can be resolved with "humans in the loop."

AI pitchmen claim that even unreliable AI can be fixed by adding a "human in the loop" that reviews the AI's judgments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

In this world, the AI is an assistant to the human. For example, a radiologist might have an AI double-check their assessments of chest X-rays, and revisit those X-rays where the AI's assessment didn't match their own. This robot-assisted-human configuration is called a "centaur."

In reality, "human in the loop" is almost always a reverse-centaur. If the hospital buys an AI, fires half its radiologists and orders the remainder to review the AI's superhuman assessments of chest X-rays, that's not an AI assisted radiologist, that's a radiologist-assisted AI. Accuracy goes down, but so do costs. That's the bet that AI investors are making.

Many AI applications turn out not to even be "AI" – they're just low-waged workers in an overseas call-center pretending to be an algorithm (some Indian techies joke that AI stands for "absent Indians"). That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

This Potemkin AI represents an intermediate step between outsourcing and AI. Over the past three decades, the growth of cheap telecommunications and logistics systems let corporations outsource customer service to low-waged offshore workers. The corporations used the excuse that these subcontractors were far from the firm and its customers to deny them any agency, giving them rigid scripts and procedures to follow.

This was a very usefully dysfunctional system. As a customer with a complaint, you would call the customer service line, wait for a long time on hold, spend an interminable time working through a proscribed claims-handling process with a rep who was prohibited from diverging from that process. That process nearly always ended with you being told that nothing could be done.

At that point, a large number of customers would have given up on getting a refund, exchange or credit. The money paid out to the few customers who were stubborn or angry enough to karen their way to a supervisor and get something out of the company amounted to pennies, relative to the sums the company reaped by ripping off the rest.

The Amazon Grab and Go workers were humans in robot suits, but these customer service reps were robots in human suits. The software told them what to say, and they said it, and all they were allowed to say was what appeared on their screens. They were reverse centaurs, serving as the human faces of the intransigent robots programmed by monopolists that were too big to care.

AI is the final stage of this progression: robots without the human suits. The AI turns its "human in the loop" into a "moral crumple zone," which Madeleine Clare Elish describes as "a component that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The Filipino nurses in the Cigna system are an avoidable expense. As Cigna's own dabbling in algorithmic claim-denial shows, they can be jettisoned in favor of a system that uses productivity dashboards and other bossware to push doctors to robosign hundreds or thousands of denials per day, on the pretense that these denials were "reviewed" by a licensed physician.

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/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Bruce Wayne is a founding member of the Justice League.

Alright, so everyone knows that the position is basically honorary, but the fact remains. In the wake of the Appellaxian Invasion, Wayne was the one to step in and pay to start the wheels turning on the legal processes necessary to formalize the nascent League. He was the one who put down the initial payment on the plot that would eventually become the Hall of Justice. A lot of his "contributions" were outsourced, true, but solving problems by throwing money at them still counts as solving them.

For his efforts, Wayne had the honor of being sworn in as a core Leaguer alongside the Big Seven. He, obviously, doesn't participate in field work, being a baseline human with no specialized training either athletically or academically. Instead, he acts as the league's primary civilian liaison, both on the national/international stage and for Gotham in particular.

You'd think that having such direct ties to the league would paint a target on his back, but in reality the effect is the opposite. Wayne Manor security has been upgraded multiple times with the League's help, and the few times that Wayne or someone close to him have has been kidnapped have been enough to warrant a direct response from one if not more Leaguers, who most Gotham Rogues just aren't cut out to go up against. As a result, he's just not worth the trouble for most crooks to go after. In the worst case scenario, he even has distress beacons that will let him contact Batman directly.

Those are a last resort, though. It's an open secret that, despite hailing from the same city, Bruce Wayne and Batman can't stand each other. The two of them won't even be caught in the same room if they can help it.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

I think I'm stupid but, why do liberal countries support anti-imigrant fascist policies? Aren't capitalists want to grab all the cheap labour they can? To keep profits going? I know it's part of divide and conquer strategy, but why is it now more aggressive than before?

Because the countries where the poor are immigrating from are typically countries with lower wages and fewer workplace regulations, as well as the fact that illegal immigrants can often be paid less and treated worse than legal immigrants. Outsourcing jobs while exploiting illegal immigrants maximizes profit by keeping wages at a minimum.

It is often argued by anti-immigrant types who position themselves as "pro-worker" that more immigrants means more competition for jobs and thus lower wages. While it is true that an increase in labor supply without a corresponding increase in labor demand would result in lower wages, the fact is that an increase in population leads to an increase in the demand for goods and thus to a corresponding increase in the demand for labor. The only situation in which you get an increase in the supply for labor without an increase in the demand for labor is when workers move from one particular job market to another (e.g. the growth of the gig economy creating increased competition for certain professions by undercutting traditional employers.)

Now the question must be asked, why is it that a worker in an imperialist country earns so much more than a worker in an imperialized country? It is because the imperialist country engages in imperialism against the imperialized countries that its workers can earn so much more, the so-called "superprofits" of imperialism being concentrated in imperialist nations. If workers in imperialized nations were simply allowed to pack up and move en masse to the imperial core, there would be a massive currency collapse that would then indeed result in lower wages, among other effects. The effects would also be the same if the imperialized nations were to improve wages and working conditions. So while an increase in immigration does not necessarily lead to decreased average wages ceteris paribus, ultimately the profitability of enterprise in the imperial core is firmly dependent on the maintenance of an immigration barrier between the global North and the global South, as well as the maintenance of neoliberal economic policies throughout the global South.

Ironically, were there no imperialism and exploitation of the global South in the first place, the influx of immigration into the global North would slow down immensely. Most people don't want to leave their home countries. They are being forced to because of material conditions imposed on their countries by the global North.

[7frogsspeaks]

Getting up on my soapbox for a minute but artists who outsource all of their labor to an overseas factory do not belong at makers markets. You did not make that, you just designed it. In all likelihood someone you've never met who's getting paid $2 an hour in working conditions you almost certainly haven't verified made that.

If you can't tell me with absolute confidence that you've checked the labor standards of the factory that makes the stuff you sell I am not touching it. I don't care if you made the art printed on it, you're no better than Walmart at that point. Do better.

This is not to say that it's possible to have a 100% ethical supply chain because, in our current world, it's usually not (unless you're out there mining ore and spinning fiber from scratch). But if you are not physically involved in making the products you sell you don't get to call yourself a "maker". You're a designer, and if you work with a manufacturer you have a duty to make sure the people working for you are being treated and compensated properly.

ETA: Did you know that in the US it's a legal requirement for all imported products to have the country of origin conspicuously displayed on the packaging? You know where I've never once seen it? The tags on an independent artist's enamel pins, acrylic keychains, lanyards, etc. Obscuring the origin of your products so customers who don't know any better think you made everything yourself is fraud. Stop it.

[theconcealedweapon]

"Leftists just want everything to be free."

Leftists are always telling people to pay full price at their friends' businesses instead of expecting a discount.

Leftists are always telling people to tip their servers and delivery drivers.

Leftists are always telling people to pay artists instead of expecting them to accept "exposure".

Meanwhile, capitalists are the ones who want to profit off of their employees' labor while paying them less than a living wage. Capitalists are the ones who frown upon employees wanting to know how much they'll be paid. Capitalists are the ones who outsource their labor to other countries because it's legal to pay them less. Capitalists are the ones hiring unpaid interns. Capitalists are the ones expecting employees to work off the clock. Capitalists are the ones relying on prison labor.

Capitalists are the ones who expect everything to be free.