Counter-offer: Make tents for the homeless out of landlord skins
Stat.
“What does that mean anyway?”
“I don’t know, but that’s not the point.”
What about food? ;)
Live inside the rich.
For a paper products distribution center, you’d think they’d have some sprinklers in there lol
Read in an internet comment, so take with a grain, but he apparently had a multistage plan. Started a small fire, fire dept came to deal with it, and company brass had them turn off fire suppression to limit unnecessary damage to product in other areas. It was then that they lit a bunch more fires, and by the time the figured it out, it was too late.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25499844
I was going to paraphrase the comment and then I decided to just directly quote it instead
It was the fuck aroundest of times
It was the find outest of times
Except 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
And require more workers who, after a certain amount of time underpaid, might very well be too indifferent to notice certain systems were down when another one of these suckholes goes up in flames. Dunno. Could be.
They 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.
suspect they’ll
automate
Assuming it wasn’t a company owned warehouse, the landlord will probably be making an argument that their disgruntled employee makes the fire their fault.
They announced they’re moving their entire operation out of CA, lmao.
Funny, if they weren’t already planning that, seems like an awfully knee jerk reaction based on a single incident.
Wow, its like… direct action works, when complaining loudly and formally doesn’t!
Whaaaat, that’s crazy lmao
They 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
If you’re in the warehouse building industry, them burning down can be very profitable…
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.
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.
Is that a lack of fire suppression equipment? Insurance won’t like that at all. 😃
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.
I’ll bet you that Walmart is selfinsured, and this absolutely hits them directly.
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 companies too exist to make money. If their customers generally went plus, the insurance company would go out of business.
That’s thinking of it way too much like an ideal one for one transaction. Insurance companies don’t based their profits on how much the stuff costs to replace directly, they make money based on the cost of payouts compared to premiums. If they can get enough clients to pay the premiums, they could pay 10x costs and it would make exactly 0 difference to their bottom lines.
It’s actually the reverse in many situations, insurance exists to help recoup costs in an emergency and if you have a policy that doesn’t pay enough to recover from a loss then you are underinsured, and the only way to ensure that is to buy a policy where you’re at least slightly over insured. That’s why homeowners insurance is based on replacement cost, not on the cost when you bought it.
Business insurance admittedly is different, but to be fully covered, you are also getting replacement costs for things like stale product, depreciated equipment (which depreciates differently for insurance purposes than for taxes and accounting) and things like building and infrastructure which are at replacement costs vs purchased prices.
Basically insurance companies are less concerned with having to make absolutely sure everyone gets as screwed as possible on every individual payout, than they are making sure they’re collecting premiums much faster than they are having to payout at all. Writing every policy so that no one ‘ends up with a plus’ is far less profitable than making sure they are selling policies that are useful. Of course they also want to pay out as little as possible, but that is not nearly as attainable as calculating the likelihood of risks and raising rates whenever possible.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the insurance industry is the underlying problem?
Oh, for sure that’s part of the problem, they definitely have their own issues, but they are more like a layer. Insurance itself isn’t a bad thing, but like basically ever industry they suffer from greed and loopholes too.
The 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.
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.
America needs to pivot from a Trickle Down Economy to Trickle Up Economy, or it’s going naturally pivot to Robin Hood Economics, and that often comes accompanied by revolution and guillotines. The wealthy won’t like that one bit.
Why would anyone in power not see that as a very clear choice?
Those in power are often there because of the donations of the wealthy and lobbyist groups. Without that money, they wouldn’t win their election campaigns. The wealthy are generally more comfortable with fascism than any kind of leftist politics, because leftist politics threaten their class interests - amassing maximal wealth and power - whereas fascism does not.
That is what i was implying, yes. Go eat some fucking salmon.
Oh, sorry, I’m autistic and sometimes I struggle to read tone and implications and things like that. Sorry for preaching to the converted <3
Go eat some fucking salmon.
Hahah! I like your style, but I’m actually a vegan bear! So I suppose I should go eat some bamboo shoots :p
It’s not you, they’re just being a wanker. Not your fault they’re a shit communicator.
Shit. sorry.
All good, no worries!
Does yhis client support notes? I feel like im likely to make that mistake again.
Not to start The Discourse, buy honey y/n?
Bonfire Lit
The beacons are lit! The working class calls for aid!
I’ve posted this in another area regarding this event, but I think it would be wise to post it here, too.
From Malcom X’s Ballot or the Bullet:
“Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job, you’re in bad shape.”
“You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion. But this government has failed us. The government itself has failed us. And the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us. And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves.”
“He made a chump out of you. He made a fool out of you. He made you think you were going somewhere, and you end up going nowhere…”
“So today our people are disillusioned. They become disenchanted. They become dissatisfied. And in their frustrations, they want action.”
“You, today, are in the hands of a government of segregationists, racists, white supremacists…”
“America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody. Oh, yes, they are. They have never had a bloodless revolution, or a non-violent revolution. That don’t happen even in Hollywood. You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy, and you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems. A revolution is bloody.”
“So it’s the ballot or the bullet. Today our people can see that we’re faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are a filibustering concerning your and my rights, that’s the government. Don’t say it’s Southern senators. This is the government. This is a government filibuster. It’s not a segregationist filibuster, it’s a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, that’s the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that’s the government. Any kind of pussyfooting, that’s the government. Any kind of act that’s designed to delay or deprive you in need right now of getting full rights, that’s the government that’s responsible. And anytime you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it’s guilty of today.”
“It’ll be the ballot or it’ll be the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death. And if you’re not ready to pay that price, don’t use the word freedom in your vocabulary.”
In this speech, he does say we Americans have a unique opportunity to do things non-violently. We did not get unions by being peaceful. We did not get labor rights by being nice.
I want a peaceful way. I truly do. But options are running out quickly. This is not an encouragement of terror or violence. I, like many other want other ways. But as we can see, we cannot control everyone. Some are in situations that feed the violent mind extra portions of greed’s injustice. This breeds a vengeful, hateful spirit that even the most noble and moral of humans cannot withstand.
If our world, country, and local leaders continue not to act swiftly and quickly, this will continue, not because you or I will act, spread hate, or encourage this, but because those who are starving for justice will act out. They don’t need to browse these halls of discussion to be radicalized. The ultra-rich and our dystopian nation will do that for them.
Choose wisely, work together, and eliminate injustice by any (hopefully peaceful) means necessary.
The rich forgot that before worker’s rights existed, greedy capitalists who owned factories and treated their workers horribly during the industrial revolutions would either find their factories or their homes burnt down, and themselves beaten to death in front of their own families.
Unions and worker’s rights were the compromise to avoid this from happening. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and the rich clearly didn’t.
I do worry that they are expecting it in some way. The few “smart” ones. The ones that are not flagrant with their funds and likes. The ones that don’t donate but hold hatred in their hearts. I worry about those. I wonder if they will slip out of the grasp of justice because they decided to hide in their money bushes and stay quiet.
But yes, the fools that we see in the news for sure have forgotten.
This is an absolutely hilarious way to hear about this news.
Right? For a minute, I was like “Wait… I don’t get the joke. Is- is this just a general public announcement?”
what walmart was firebombed?
None — it’s a Kimberly-Clark distribution warehouse. Their products include Kleenex, Cottonelle, Scott, Kotex, and Huggies
Are they a paper products monopoly?
I’m not sure if I’d call them a monopoly, but they are a multibillion dollar company directly in competition with Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Clorox, etc
Oligopoly.
Not a Walmart, but a Kimberly-Clark warehouse as others mentioned. This is more making fun of an old tweet of a liberal essentially saying “leftists will say voting doesn’t work and to instead firebomb a walmart and then they don’t firebomb a walmart”, and this meme was about the irony of something symbolically similar happening. And uh, there’s been four warehouse fires this week counting this one.
It was the big Kimberly-Clark warehouse in LA, but firebombing a Walmart is a good idea, too, as long as the people can get out. I’m not concerned with the lives of Sociopathic Oligarchs, but I don’t want workers to be hurt.
I am become death, destroyer of wally-worlds.
How many warehouses is it now? 7?
Is it really? I haven’t seen it
I’m not sure, honestly. Social media and news media seem to be telling different stories, unsurprisingly.
Initially around 20 people were inside
All survived unharmed
Physically
Edit - would be so mad if my mom worked there that shift, ‘tis upsetting b/c I immediately put myself in those kinds of shoes ya know? Even if paying workers is necessary for survival too
Initially
This implies more people entered later. 😱
I see it used akin to “started with”.
like, how many rewards points do I get at my favorite store? Well initially it was 10 points to a dollar until they got cheap and reduced it to five.
(For example) :)
Or, how’d my diet go?: great b/c initially I weighed 1000lbs but now weigh 100lbs
Guy worked for a third-party distributor, so he didn’t destroy his boss’s warehouse
Anyone know how big the 3P distributor is? Is Kimberly-Clark OK financially and were they following best practices? Ideally you would make sure everyone you pay was treating their people properly including timely compensation, right? You’d have a supplier code of conduct demanding it and a system in place to verify…
Also wonder if the head of the Kimberly warehouse was aware of their subcontractor was making life so hard for their people and whether they put them on a leash. A takeaway here for a business person, don’t let clowns put you at risk, no matter how tempting it is to sign away trying offload your liabilities and optimize your headcount spend.
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.
Jesus Christ I’m tired of people not understanding what a write-off is.
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.
You can’t just make massive losses go away with a write-off.
It’s almost as daft as people thinking they’ll lose out by going into a higher tax bracket
The 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
The messaging value is infinite, nonetheless.
The trick is to keep doing it, making it too expensive for insurance to continue covering it, and denying the company insurance.
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 to turn it off and try to prevent water damage.
They then set about 4 bigger fires away from any prying eyes with the sprinklers turned completely off, 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…
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 premiums 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
The 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.
Exactly, people act like the ones who consider paying a living wage too much skin off their nose won’t flinch if suddenly a massive distribution center in a large city’s profit vanishes overnight. That’s lots and lots of impact to the bottom line lol
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.
It’s not like the CEO will have to pay for this…
No, but the people of LA will end up paying for it with higher product prices while they recover the supply chain.
This was in Ontario (in Cali), not LA. And either way, I think they’d be fine with higher prices on toilet paper if it means everyone gets paid a living wage.
They will be paying higher prices and the wages will be the same.
No one wants to hear you trying to shut revolutionary action down before it even begins. Stay in your lane. Workers in the late 19th and early 20th century did this all the time every time the boss got too greedy, if not going to their house and beating them to death in front of their family. Worker’s rights only exist because that is the alternative.
I get it. But it didn’t matter anyways, USD is so debt loaded Americans will have to get to a lower quality of life that they can afford. America will go the same route as every other world reserve country before it. Huge political divide followed by civil war/war. The left will take down every billionaire in an attempt to take the wealth only to realize it doesn’t exist because it was all in stocks and after the economy collapse and CEOs being replaced destroyed the prices of the stocks so we will be left with worthless stocks and debt. The great reset will not be pretty.
Burning down a factory is only the start in this road. This is history, and the same result happens every time
Oops, replied to wrong comment 🤦🏻♀️
And respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
