Tootfinder

Pro-Trump group wages campaign to purge "subversive" federal workers (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/pro-trump-group-wages-campaign-purge-subversive-federal-workers-2025-08-07/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250807/p49#a250807p49

You think ICE is going to “bring the jobs back?” Bullshit. They’re gearing up to sell imprisoned immigrants back to employers as slave prisoners who work for free. You think your wages are going up? You’re a sucker. Your wages are going down.
You think ICE is going to sell you imprisoned immigrants as cheap labor? Bullshit. They’re too beholden to the radical white supremacist extremists. Those people will •never• let those immigrants stay in the country. ICE is going to steal your labor force and you won’t get them back.
8/

In a new ad campaign, TelevisaUnivision says Google plans to move Univision from YouTube TV's basic bundle to a Spanish-language package that costs extra (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/09/televisaunivision-youtube-carriage-contract

Scoop: TelevisaUnivision wages war with YouTube
TelevisaUnivision says YouTube's efforts make Google look "evil."

North Korea sent me abroad to be a secret IT worker. My wages funded the regime
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15wk77zxngo

North Korea sent me abroad to be a secret IT worker. My wages funded the regime
In a rare interview, a former North Korean IT worker reveals the secret scheme raising funds for Kim Jong Un’s regime.

The wages of sin are high but you get your money's worth.

Voting Republican means voting for lower wages. I mean, why pay America's workers when you can enrich billionaires, amirite? 🙄
From: @…
https://www.

The Intellectualist (@the_intellectualist_official) on Threads
In 2025, 21 states—mostly Democrat-led—raised their minimum wage, while 20 Republican-led states kept the $7.25 federal rate. Washington leads at $16.66, followed by California ($16.50) and Connecticut ($15.69), highlighting sharp political and regional divides.

It is so weird to read this and realize that the #SutherlandInstitute is so wealthy and "conservative" that they'll never acknowledge the problem is late-stage capitalism and, of course, patriarchy.
We need to eliminate the tax incentives of investment properties to make housing more affordable. We need to increase wages and decrease wealth inequality. We need t…

Utah task force explores boosting well-being of men and boys
Why are American men struggling? What issues do American men and boys face? Utah studying mental health, work, education among men and boys

"Workers who are presented as "undocumented" will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. "

Concentration Camp Labor
Cannot Become Normal

My favourite politician who I have nearly had to call the cops to get them to leave me alone, had our ICO send them numerous legal demands re how she had my birthdate eg. and who I reported for numerous Covid breaches around the largely elderly population around my house is now in jail for 2.7 million fraud.
She stole wages from the uni and paid the bulk of it into her personal revolut.
Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

As Russia wages its full-scale war against Ukraine, one of its most important missile plants is quietly expanding -- bypassing international sanctions.
The Votkinsk Plant, also known as the Votkinskiy Plant,
— a strategic, state-owned facility serving Russia’s nuclear forces
— has hired thousands of new workers,
added new buildings,
and brought in advanced machinery to significantly increase its missile production.
Ukrainians have felt it firsthand.
Is…

Investigation: Russia expands strategic plant producing ICBMs — with China’s help
Key findings: * Despite international sanctions, Russia's strategic missile plant was able to import complex machinery to dramatically increase missile production. * The Kyiv Independent has identified the equipment supplied to the plant, as well as the supply chains, mostly from China. * We located the plant's new premises, built to house the new machinery. * We obtained a document confirming that the plant received an order to produce intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the U.S.

Treatment effects at the margin: Everyone is marginal
Haotian Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21583 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21583

Treatment effects at the margin: Everyone is marginal
This paper develops a framework for identifying treatment effects when a policy simultaneously alters both the incentive to participate and the outcome of interest -- such as hiring decisions and wages in response to employment subsidies; or working decisions and wages in response to job trainings. This framework was inspired by my PhD project on a Belgian reform that subsidised first-time hiring, inducing entry by marginal firms yet meanwhile changing the wages they pay. Standard methods addre…

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

"Youth bulges tend to be politically destabilizing, because a sudden increase of new worker entry into the labor force tends to depress their employment prospects and wages" [1]
- Abschlussjahr der Wendekinder 1990 6 Kita 10±2 Schule 9±3 Ausb. = 2015±5, Aufstieg dar AfD
"Elite overproduction, presence of more elites and elite aspirants than the society can provide positions for, is inherently destabilizing. […] [I]ntraelite competition drives up conspicuous c…

I have visited this small National Monument several times - it is very much worth a visit.
I fear that it, however, is near the top of FFOTUS' list of national monuments to dismantle.
Cesar Chavez National Monument
https://www.nps.gov/cech/index.htm

César E. Chávez National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)
Yes, we can!

Widely recognized as the most important Latino leader in the United States during the twentieth century, Cesar Chavez led farm workers and supporters in the establishment of the country's first permanent agricultural union. His leadership brought sustained international attention to the plight of U.S. farm workers, and secured for them higher wages and safer working conditions.

Here is a little more:
The minimum wage in BC in 1974 was $2.50/hr (the highest in Canada at the time).
That’s $15.75 in 2025 dollars.
The minimum wage in BC as of June 1 2025: $17.85/hr
So adjusted for inflation, University costs have risen 117% but the most common wages for students have only risen 13%.
It’s not hard to figure out why people, especially young people, are struggling.
Put another way:
In today's dollars Tuition has risen $81 every year since 1974.
Minimum wage has risen 4 cents per hour every year since 1974.
@Paulatics @josie_osborne
Source min wage: https://minwage-salairemin.service.canada.ca/en/since1965.html

Saw this at the train station. First thought was "how odd: a socialist message on a billboard". Then I saw the bottom right corner.

“The billionaire agenda,
the corruption we’re seeing,
is changing the way government is functioning.
It’s leading to real-time and impactful ramifications for regular people,”
said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen.
“The gutting of Medicaid,
all the firings we’ve seen of federal workers,
the ravaging of families through Ice raids.
It’s just all coming together to cause people to stand up and say,
‘we are the people of this c…

Don't have a bachelor's? Work the fields, boys...
'[I]t's an opening for people in the U.S. looking for work. I think that this is good news particularly for less-educated Americans who are likely to see a rise in wages," Camarota told the news outlet. "Maybe it'll even be helpful in dragging some of these noncollege-educated men who are working age back into the labor force.'
Study: 'Trump Effect' Sent 600K Immigrants From Labor Force | Newsmax.com
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/immigration-trump-labor-force/2025/06/19/id/1215651/

Collective action gets the goods, yet again.
It seems that the government didn't think Section 107 would hold up in court (at least not with this strike), and the Air Canada employees effectively called their bluff. This is exactly the kind of stand that needs to be taken to keep labor rights from being rolled further and further back.
(Also, I didn't realize just how tightly connected the government is with Air Canada)

Strike 'Ends Unpaid Work' As Union Reaches Deal With Air Canada – The Rover
Low wages and unpaid labour led to flight attendants using food banks, sleeping in cars.

So the tech bros love capitalism and also apparently think some combination of AI and robotics can (and should!) replace all jobs (bar their own OFC) to maximise profits. But if nobody earns any wages, how in this "wonderful" future capitalist world will anyone afford to buy all their products and services?
I mean, they see the flaw, right… right!?
P.S. Yes, I realise most of the people who read this will have already thought of this and I am largely "preaching to …

This guy makes me laugh!
#Capitalism #AntiCapitalism

Forecasting Labor Markets with LSTNet: A Multi-Scale Deep Learning Approach
Adam Nelson-Archer, Aleia Sen, Meena Al Hasani, Sofia Davila, Jessica Le, Omar Abbouchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01979

Forecasting Labor Markets with LSTNet: A Multi-Scale Deep Learning Approach
We present a deep learning approach for forecasting short-term employment changes and assessing long-term industry health using labor market data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our system leverages a Long- and Short-Term Time-series Network (LSTNet) to process multivariate time series data, including employment levels, wages, turnover rates, and job openings. The model outputs both 7-day employment forecasts and an interpretable Industry Employment Health Index (IEHI). Our approach o…

Trump wages all-out fight for control of Iran strike narrative (Barak Ravid/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/25/trump-iran-nuclear-intelligence-obliterated
http://www.memeorandum.com/250625/p140#a250625p140

The Netherlands is having it's third complete shutdown of all passenger trains tomorrow in the entire country.
The strikes are caused by the employees wages having a big gap with inflation. The NS management doesn't want to pay this gap. The government will not help.
I'm sure there is some huge car project somewhere in the Netherlands that could be killed to invest in better train service. But it will not be.
I dread because I don't have a lot of hope that th…

Pay Clauses in Public Procurement: The Wage Impact of Collective Bargaining Compliance Laws in Germany
Vinzenz Pyka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01458 https:…

Pay Clauses in Public Procurement: The Wage Impact of Collective Bargaining Compliance Laws in Germany
Using administrative data from Germany, this study provides first evidence on the wage effects of collective bargaining compliance laws. These laws require establishments receiving public contracts to pay wages set by a representative collective agreement, even if they are not formally bound by one. Leveraging variation in the timing of law implementation across federal states, and focusing on the public transport sector -- where regulation is uniform and demand is driven solely by state-level …

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with
boos and jeers for supporting Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.
The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County,
where Iowans urged Hinson to
“stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.
“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “F…

“Stop Lying”: Voters Erupt at GOP Lawmaker’s Shocking Claim on Economy
Iowa State Representative Ashley Hinson’s comments were met with boos and jeers.

Avoid #Krogers until they agree to pay their workers.
#UnionStrong
https://masto.nyc/@GetMisch/1146944853

On Sunday, July 20, 2025, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez delivered the keynote speech at the national convention of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (NOLSW), UAW Local 2320.
“I am here to report back to you from the front lines of struggle, without hesitation or hyperbole,
that we are at risk of losing everything,”
Alvarez told the crowd of union members.
“And so I am here not to extol the virtues of your union or the value of unions in …

What good is a union in Hell?
“Brothers, sisters, siblings, we stand here now on the precipice of oblivion… This isn't just about fighting for better wages and working conditions… This is about who is willing to fight for life itself?”

Artificial Intelligence in Team Dynamics: Who Gets Replaced and Why?
Xienan Cheng, Mustafa Dogan, Pinar Yildirim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12337 https://

Artificial Intelligence in Team Dynamics: Who Gets Replaced and Why?
This study investigates the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in organizations. We ask: (1) How should a principal optimally deploy limited AI resources to replace workers in a team? (2) In a sequential workflow, which workers face the highest risk of AI replacement? (3) How does substitution with AI affect both the replaced and non-replaced workers' wages? We develop a sequential team production model in which a principal can use peer monitoring -- where each worker observes the…

In this book, Theoharis introduces us to the people leading the movement to end poverty, including:
multiracial groups of homeless people rising up from the streets and seizing empty, federally-owned homes;
mothers on welfare shutting down entire city blocks and going toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful people in the country;
farmworkers busting modern-day slave rings and winning living wages from multinational fast-food companies; and
coal miners, veterans,…

Hi, it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 
If we do not assert ourselves and enshrine our rights
— and demand healthcare, and education, and dignity
— the alternative is barbarism,
which is what we are contending with now.
If we do not win unions, healthcare, wages, and ending endless war,
then we will condemn ourselves to barbarism.
𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝗽. 𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝘆𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲.
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯, 𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 …

Donate to AOC.
Alexandria is fighting for progressive policies that can help create social, racial, and economic justice for all. That's why she's taking $0 from corporations and lobbyists and is relying on the grassroots to power her campaign.

Urban Dengue and Spatial Dependence: A SAR Model Incorporating Favela Data in Recife, Brazil
Marc\'ilio Ferreira dos Santos, Andreza dos Santos Rodrigues de Melo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11896

Urban Dengue and Spatial Dependence: A SAR Model Incorporating Favela Data in Recife, Brazil
In this study, we used a dataset of approximately 96,000 reported dengue cases from 2015 to 2024 in Recife, the capital of northeastern Brazil, all geocoded by neighborhood. The dataset was enriched with sociodemographic data from the national census (population density, average residents per household), the proportion of slum areas per neighborhood, a dummy variable for high-income neighborhoods (above 7.5 minimum wages), seasonal information (rainy/dry), and water indicators derived from NDWI…